Zachary Rawlins - The Academy

Alice slapped Chris on the cheek lightly, and then released him. Chris rubbed his cheek, looking up at his sad reflection in the brass. The muscles of his fingers bent strangely, flexing at the first joint, the fingernails extruding to become something more like talons; five centimeters long and razor sharp, yellow as old bone.

“What’s at the top, then?”

Chris’s words were only a bit slurred through the fangs that poked out behind his upper lip.

“For you?” Alice asked, opening the other bag and extracting an automatic shotgun. “Opportunity.”

When the elevator chime dinged on the thirty-fourth floor, the assembled security personnel were smart enough not to wait for it to open. As soon as the alarms had gone off downstairs, they’d been issued heavy weaponry and given the okay to use it, and truth be told, a number of them were eager to. It wasn’t like they were mercenaries, after all, so the opportunities to use the AR-15s outside the annual trip to the company range for recertification were few and far between.

The actual mercenaries had seen more than enough automatic gunfire for a lifetime, and were a prudent distance back down the black marble hall, in cover or watching through rifle scopes.

There were half a dozen guards clustered around the elevator bank, and they each put the better part of a twenty-four round clip into the thin metal doors, the door mechanism whining and the grinding to a halt, partially opened. After a moment’s hesitation, the guards emptied their remaining rounds into the smoky interior of the elevator.

They were smart enough to reload. They were smart enough to wait until the smoke cleared. But from where Chris was standing, it looked like they didn’t notice the small pile of oiled cloth and foully smoking plastic that Alice had made him light in the front corner of the elevator, just to the side of the entrance.

They certainly didn’t notice the shaped Octol charge that Alice had left, attached to the far wall of the elevator with a suction cup, in an innocuous plastic case resembling a light fixture. Chris had been doubtful when he’d seen it, both about the effectiveness of such a small charge and about the dubious housing.

As it turned out, he was wrong on both counts.

The security guards filed cautiously into the elevator, one at a time, two inside, the rest clustered around the doors. Several meters down the hall, concealed behind a bulky reception desk, Chris watched Alice muffle a giggle.

The explosion was impossibly loud, even from a distance, and Chris had to fight the urge to cover his ears. It was like a wall, coming out of the elevator, concentrated into a column of flame and debris and concussive force, tearing apart the men, the furniture, and much of the elevator banks itself. The doors were torn off and hurled across the hallway, sending one of the partially concealed mercenaries scurrying backwards for better cover.

Chris gave him time to scream. Why not?

He stepped through the man as he tried to turn his gun in Chris’s direction, a look of confusion and fear on his face, his hand whipping out and across the man’s throat almost as afterthought. The man fell to his feet, clutching his throat as it came apart, the wound across his trachea opening like a deep red mouth. Chris could hear the man gurgle and hiss as he dove for the next two soldiers, his arms spread wide, moving impossibly fast, his feet barely even touching the floor.

He hit the first one running, driving him into the wall behind him with his shoulder, and then tearing at his throat with talons on his left hand, stepping neatly to the side to avoid the spray from his severed jugular. He felt the shells from the HP-5 tear through his abdomen, each burning a hot channel through the flesh, agonizing even through his diminished nervous system, and ignored them. He knocked the gun out of the man’s hands with a swipe, and then grabbed him by the neck and squeezed until he felt his spine crack. Next to him, Alice emptied her shotgun into the other two soldiers, turning them into mincemeat before they could turn and shoot.

Chris inspected the ruins of his jacket with an air of resignation.

“They aren’t trying too hard,” he observed, wiping at the blood splattered on his shirt with a piece torn from one of the mercenary’s uniforms. “Why do you think that is?”

Alice pumped fresh shells into the still warm gun, ejected the spent fat red cartridges with an expression of almost feral glee.

“Only one reason I can think of,” she said, glancing down at the mangled bodies with a craftsman’s pride at a job well done. “They want us to get wherever it is we are going.”

“Doesn’t that worry you?”

“I’m an Auditor, Chris,” Alice said, hoisting the gun up to rest across her shoulders, behind her neck. “Cooperation always worries me.”

They followed the main hallway, an expanse of patterned blue carpet stretching out for much of the length of the floor, sprouting adjoining offices, glass-fronted meeting rooms and any number of rooms filled with shoulder-height cubicles, each with an identical workstation, all showing an identical screen saver. Chris shuddered a bit, looking at it. He’d never been able to understand how humans could tolerate working in such places year after year, in such cramped conditions. Vampires are horrified by monotony as a general principle.

Alice glanced down at the ruin of her Kevlar coat, mangled by the earlier explosions and a number of.223 rounds that had been pumped into it by one of the mercenaries, before she’d gunned him down. She shrugged out of the heavy coat and let it fall to the ground beside her before continuing on, her pace unhurried and her body language casual and loose. She wore a black tank-top with spaghetti straps, dense tattoo work stretching from the center of her back to cover both shoulders; the cabalistic tree of life in black ink, the furthest boughs curling around the pronounced line of her collar bone, Hebrew script interwoven in the design. It made Chris remember several cold weeks spent in Prague, almost thirty years before, when the ink had still been a fresh, vivid black, the skin still red and swollen where it had been abraded. He remembered what the little room they shared had felt like, what her hair had felt like when he ran his hand through it, her terrible fits of obscene laughter.

Alice had been dangerous then, dangerous and alluring. Chris had found her fascinating in a way that he never had with a human, Operator or no. She was no less lovely now, he thought, and perhaps even more dangerous. But still, something about the fragility of her inked shoulder blades, the way her hair always refused to stay tied back, even the sheer lunacy of her impossibly white smile — all of this, somehow, saddened him more than it frightened him. As he hurried after her, Chris felt the knife he’d been given as a tremendous burden, a mill stone around his neck, pulling him under water that he found increasingly cold. His fingers tightened around the knuckled and slick metal of the hilt painfully.

He glanced around, at the thin walls and the acoustic tiling along the ceiling, and then cleared his throat, loudly, twice.

She’d turned her back to him, he realized. Whether because she knew already (and she must know, he was certain) or because she’d forgotten, she’d turned her back to him. Perhaps the baring of her back had been a display for his benefit? Perhaps, he thought, perhaps Alice remembered more than she’d let on…

He sighed and pulled the knife from his pocket.

The Weir that he drove it into seemed surprised. Chris couldn’t blame him. Even as he batted away the pieces of splintered plywood that flew at him from where the beast had broken through the partitioning, a snarling half-ton of corded muscle and elongated canines, Chris had trouble believing that he was the agency behind what was happening, watching himself push the blade up through the creature’s jaw, piercing through the mouth and into the skull, as if someone else were doing it.