Rachel Caine: Fall of Night

She almost missed it. Her fingers slipped off the grip, and she fumbled it, but retrieved it with one last, desperate effort that pulled muscles in her side as his weight continued to roll her forward. She used physics in her favour this time, wrapped her legs around him, and used their momentum to whip him hard around, slamming him into the hard gravel on his back as she rolled up on top of him.

She had the gun, and she aimed it right at his head.

He dropped his hands at his sides, signalling surrender. He looked young, and very scared, all of a sudden.

Claire didn’t have it in her to shoot him, but she hit him with the gun, hard enough to leave him curled up and moaning.

Then she ran for the farmhouse, where all hell was still breaking loose. And all the way there, the fear sank in deeper and deeper.

What if I just killed us all?

What got us loose was an old wrestling trick, but hey, there’s a reason those guys keep making money. First, pick a fight – a loud one, loud enough to attract the attention of the guards. Next, have a fight, the more real, the better. (And trust me, Eve can throw a punch when she feels like it. Girl knows how to power out from the shoulder.)

Last, score yourself a bloody head wound, self-inflicted and minor, to sell the show as you flop down defeated, beaten and – in this case – preferably looking really dead. Have your friends sell it with lots of distress and screams for help while getting their hands very bloody. Eve was maybe a little too over the top, but Pete sold the whole package – he looked grim, scared, and smeared blood around like I’d sprung an arterial leak and was pumping out the last pint.

In all probability, our new friends didn’t really care, but like all employees, they would be expected to explain inventory breakage, and nobody wanted to have to say that they’d let me bleed out on the floor without some kind of due diligence.

They opened the door, came in, and I passed Pete the rusty piece of metal I’d used to cut my head open as he bent over me, hands pressed to my neck. ‘Come on, man, hurry up, he’s losing too much blood!’ he said to the two guards who entered. One came toward me, holstering his gun. The other stood at the door and kept his weapon out and ready.

Pete stood up and backed off to make room for the guard, who touched down one knee next to me. Eve was screaming and crying, and kept saying that she couldn’t find a pulse, which was nicely distracting. Pete kept backing up, and put his bloody hands over his face as he did; his shoulders shook with what looked like genuine tears. I was impressed. The guy had a future career on the stage. It looked so much like real grief, and there was so much chaos going on around my limp body, that the guard who was at the door missed how close Pete was getting until it was too late.

Pete whirled around, grabbed the man’s gun arm and shoved it up as he jammed a knee up into a region that made me wince. That guard doubled over. Eve, at the same time, lunged across my body at the guard checking me out, and I came alive to wrestle him down as she pulled his gun free and rose to point it at him.

The other guard’s gun went off as he and Pete struggled, but Pete put him down hard with a blow from that rusty piece of metal, and scooped up the weapon. ‘Get her!’ he yelled, and pointed at Liz as he threw himself to one side of the doorway. I scrambled up, grabbed Liz, tossed her over my shoulder, and was immediately thrown off balance as she started to struggle.

Dammit, this was not the time for the girl to be waking up. ‘We need out of this room!’ I said to Eve, who nodded and joined Pete at the door. She tapped him on the shoulder to let him know she was behind him, and he moved fast, out of the room and firing. Turned out that he was firing deliberately high, because when I followed him and Eve out, the guards were down behind overturned steel tables. There was a lot of confused shouting going on.

We ran the gauntlet before they could get organised, because there wasn’t much else we could do. Eve broke off and ran to Michael’s cage, which I wouldn’t have let her do if I’d had any kind of choice in the matter, but she was thinking ahead; she’d lifted the keys from the guard we’d tackled, and as Pete kept the others’ heads down, she fumbled through the selection and found the one that turned the lock.

Michael wasn’t nearly as debilitated as he looked. He uncoiled himself from the ball he’d been in, crawled out, and lunged at Eve.

For a scary second, I was afraid she’d just signed her death warrant, but it was just a hug, not a full-on attack; his fangs stayed in, and the energy of rising to his feet seemed to be just about all he had, because he sagged against her almost immediately, and she had to drag/carry him toward the door. I caught a glimpse of his face over her shoulder – my boy Mikey was back . Not well, not by half, but that was him, looking at me through those blue eyes.

You go, bro.

It all took about ten seconds, but it seemed like half an hour to make it to the far side of the room; the guards started firing back at us within half that time, and Pete stopped aiming over their heads and started punching neat holes into the steel tables they were hiding behind. That kept them down. I almost went over backward as Liz started kicking and writhing; she was taller than Claire, and strong, and panicked. I let her slide off as we reached the far doorway, and she nearly collapsed as she tried to take her weight on both feet. When she tried to break free of me, I yanked her closer. ‘I’m Claire’s boyfriend!’ I yelled at her. I guess the blood dripping all over my face didn’t make me look any more trustworthy, because she didn’t seem reassured. ‘Go!’ I shoved her ahead of me, and she stumbled on barely functioning legs to the closed steel door.

It didn’t open.

‘Eve!’ I yelled, and gestured for the gun she was firing. She tossed it to me and lunged for the door, trying keys with frantic haste. The semi-auto pistols that Pete and I were firing each carried fifteen shots, but Pete was already down at least nine, and Eve had popped off four. It wouldn’t last long if we were trying to intimidate a room full of guys with bullets and the hard-core training to use them.

None of Eve’s keys worked. She grimly started over, trying them again, and I used four more of our bullet inventory. I hoped I wasn’t hitting anybody, but at that moment, I wasn’t really opposed to it, either.

Michael came through for us. He moved Eve out of the way, grabbed hold of the handle, and yanked, hard. It broke off, and he pushed the hardware through on the other side, reached in, and pulled back the tongue on the lock. Then he half collapsed again, and Eve had to drag him out by the arms into the hallway.

We weren’t out of the fire, but at least we were off the frying pan, and I know Pete breathed a sigh of relief as we escaped out. Michael yelled something I didn’t catch, and then he got to his feet and charged forward – by vampire standards, it was more of a lumbering stumble than a charge, because he wasn’t moving any faster than the rest of us. But he took down a guy aiming at Eve, tackled him to the floor, and his vampire instincts finally kicked in. I heard the low-in-the-throat snarl, saw the flash of fangs coming down, and I felt a sudden answering burn inside. It came from my arm first; I’d almost forgotten the bite I’d gotten there before I left Morganville, but this reminded me, hard enough to make me stagger and catch myself against the wall. The pain crawled up to my shoulder, and spread like fire over the network of my bones, and I didn’t know what the hell was happening to me. I sagged, coughing, and heard Pete demanding to know if I’d been hit. I shook my head.