“Oh man,” Shane breathed. He wasn’t fond of this place, either.
“Buck up,” Eve said. “At least you didn’t get locked in a freezer here like next month’s entrée. I did.”
Myrnin, blue-white in the flashlight beams, looked offended. “Young lady, I put you there for safekeeping. If I had meant to eat you, I would have.”
“That’s comforting,” Eve said. And then, under her breath, “Not.”
“This way.” Myrnin put out his hand to shield his eyes from their flashlights, and picked his way around a pile of tottering, empty beer cans left by adventurous high schoolers, a stained, torn mattress, and some empty crates. “Someone’s been here.”
“No kidding?”
“I mean, recently,” he said. “Not humans. Vampires. Many of them.” He sounded a little puzzled. “Not my creatures, either. They all died, you know. The ones I turned.”
Back in his crazy (crazier?) days, Myrnin had experimented on some hapless victims, trying to turn them into vampires but failing as his illness took hold. The results hadn’t been pretty—more like zombies than vampires, and not focused on anything but killing. Claire wondered how they’d died, and decided she really didn’t want to know. Myrnin was a scientist. He was used to putting down lab animals at the end of a test.
“Are these vampires hanging around now?” Shane asked. He had a stake in his left hand, and a silver-coated knife in the other—a steak knife he’d used a car battery and a fish tank full of chemicals to electroplate. Stinky, but cheap and effective. “Because a heads-up would be nice.”
“No, they’re gone.” Myrnin continued to hesitate, though. “I wonder. . . .”
“Wonder later. Move now,” Eve said. She sounded nervous, and she kept shining the light around erratically, reacting to every rustle in the dark. There were a lot of those. Rats, birds, bats—the place was full of wildlife. Claire kept her own light trained on the path ahead of her, making sure she didn’t trip or cut herself on rusty juts of metal as Myrnin led the way. Shane’s warmth behind her felt good. So did the weight of the Super Soaker in her arms.
Myrnin threw open a metal door with a snap, shattering the lock and scattering links of the big chain that had secured it all over the pitted concrete outside. “There,” he said, and pointed as they gathered around him. The clouds thinned a little, allowing some diffuse moonlight to paint the ground with cool blue and silver, and a mile or so away sat a concrete block of a building, and a tall, skeletal metal tower. Big white letters on the tower said KV V; one of the Vs was long gone, and the other was tilting drunkenly to one side, not far from dropping off entirely to join its missing mate. The place looked deserted. Wind rattled over the flat landscape, whipping up dust and scattering trash, and made an eerie whistling sound through the metal of the tower.
“I don’t see Michael’s car.”
“One way to be sure,” Myrnin said. “Let’s go.”
The closer they came, the creepier the place was. Claire wasn’t a fan of blighted industrial buildings, and Morganville was full of them—the half-destroyed hospital, German’s Tire Plant, even the old City Hall had its decaying side.
This one looked so . . . grim. It was just a cinder block building, not very large, and the one window in front had been long ago broken out and boarded over. Someone had spray-painted KEEP OUT on the bricks, and part of it was heavily decorated in multicolored swirls of graffiti. Beer cans, cigarette butts, empty plastic bags—the usual stuff.
“I don’t see a way in,” Eve whispered.
“Why are you whispering?” Myrnin whispered back. “Vampires can hear us, anyway.”
“Is there a vampire in there?” Claire asked.
“I’m not psychic. I have no idea.”
“You could tell in the tire plant!”
He tapped his nose. “Five senses. Not six. It’s not so easy to sniff them out standing outside the building.” He gently moved the business end of her Super Soaker away from himself. “Please. I bathed already, and I’d rather not do it in the vampire equivalent of pepper spray.”
“Sorry.”
They made their way around the side of the building, closer to the tower, and there they found Michael’s dark sedan sitting in the shadows.
Empty.
“Michael?” Eve called. “Michael!”
“Hush,” Myrnin said sharply, and flashed supernatu rally fast across the open space to grab the knob of a door Claire could barely see. It sagged open, and he disappeared inside.
“Wait!” Claire blurted, and darted after him. She switched on the flashlight as soon as she reached the door, but all it showed her was an empty hallway, with peeling paint and a floor covered in mud from some old flood. “Myrnin, where are you?”
No answer. She yelped when Shane’s hand closed over her shoulder; then she pulled in a breath and nodded. Eve crowded in behind them.
Down the hallway was a dead end, with more hallways stretching left and right. The fading paint had some kind of mural on it, something West Texas-y with cows and cowboys, and the letters KVVV in big block capitals.
The whole place smelled like mold and dead animals. “This way,” Myrnin’s voice said quietly, and with a hum, electricity turned on in the hall. Some of the bulbs burned out with harsh, sizzling snaps, leaving parts of the space in darkness.
Claire followed the hall to the end, which took a right turn into a small studio with some kind of engineering board. The equipment looked ancient, but clean; somebody had been here—presumably Kim—and had taken care to put everything in working order. Microphones, a chair, a backdrop, lighting . . . everything in the studio needed for filming, including a small digital video camera on a tripod.
On the other side of the room was a complicated editing console, which had a bank of monitors set up. They obviously weren’t original to the setup—decades more modern than the soundboard—and Claire identified different components that had been Frankensteined into the system.
These included an array of fat black terabyte drives, all portable.
Michael was sitting at the console. “Michael!” Eve blurted, and threw herself on him; he stood up to catch her in his arms, and hugged her close. “You incredible jerk!”
He kissed her hair. “Yeah, I know.”
She smacked his arm. “Really. You are a jerk!”
“I get that.” He pushed her off a little, to look at her. “You’re okay?”
“No thanks to you. You had to go running off in the middle of the night and not even say boo . . .”
“I should have known you guys wouldn’t stay put.”
“Where’s Detective Hess?” Claire asked. “I thought you were meeting him here.”
“Yeah, I did.”
“Where did he go?”
“I’ll tell you that in a minute.” Michael seemed preoccupied, as if he were trying to figure out how to tell them something they weren’t going to like at all. “This is Kim’s data vault. At least, most of it. Claire, that’s a router, right? I think this is her receiving station for the signals.”
“She’s using the tower to amplify the signals,” Claire said. “Did you find—?” She didn’t want to get more specific than that. Michael shook his head, and her heart fell. “What about the other ones?”
“She’s been a busy girl,” Michael said. “There are video files there from City Hall, Common Grounds, spots all over town. It will take hours, maybe weeks, to look at everything, but she’s done a rough cut.” He hit some controls, then pointed at the central monitor. “This is the raw file.”
After some old-fashioned leader signals, there was a shot of the Morganville town limits sign, creaking in the wind . . . and then, in special effects, the word Vampires appeared in bloody streaks right below the sign.