“How did the run go?” she asked.
Flak grimaced. “We had some minor frag-ups,” he said. “Pretty standard really.”
“Did you convince Carlos to stop beating Corinna?” Flak gave a harsh laugh. “You could say that. Carlos won’t be beating anyone anymore. For the rest of forever.”
“Oh.” was all Rachel could say. She had no sympathy for Carlos, and if anyone deserved to die, he was her number one candidate.
“Why?” Flak asked. “You got another job for us?” He started to smile, but it faded the moment he saw the look on her face.
Rachel felt the laugh bubble up in her throat and it came out dry and brittle, the laughter of someone who’s seen too much and gone quietly insane. The sound of it scared her.
Flak’s expression didn’t change, but his voice took on a hard tone Rachel had never heard in it before. “Why don’t you tell me about it?”
Rachel laughed again, trying to bold back the tide of emotion running through her. “What do you know about vampires, Flak?”
Flak’s eyebrow arched, but he didn’t laugh at her, and for that Rachel was grateful. “Not as much as some people, but more than you might think. Why do you ask?”
Rachel took a deep breath as Flak reached his mammoth paw into the desk drawer and pulled out a bottle of Petron tequila and two shot glasses. “You look like you could use one.” He poured the drinks, and handed one to her.
Without a word, they slammed the liquor at the same time. Rachel let the smooth, bitter liquor slide down her throat like a tiny bit of molten lava. It was real tequila, not the synth stuff, and started a small warm glow as it hit her stomach.
Flak smiled as he took the glass from her. “Better?”
She nodded. “You remember my man, Warren?”
Flak’s small eyes narrowed. “He do something to you?”
Rachel laughed again, and was relieved to hear it come out sounding normal. “No. No, I think something’s happened to him.”
“Go on.”
Rachel pulled a smoke from her small purse, and before it I was even to her lips, Flak had magically produced a small golden lighter.
She took a deep drag. “I got off work tonight and headed over to his place. We always get together on Wednesdays. Just before I got there, I met this guy. He told me Warren was gone, and that the people who had taken him away were going to do horrible things to him if we didn’t get some help.”
Flak leaned forward. “You know this guy?”
Rachel shook her head. “No. He said his name was DeVreece, or de Vriss, something like that.”
Flak rocked back on the desk. “Martin de Vries?”
Rachel started. “You know him?”
Flak shook his head, and let out along breath that sounded like a balloon being slowly deflated. “Know him? No. I know of him, though, provided this slag really is de Vries. The guy’s a fragging legend.”
Rachel’s voice turned bitter. “He’s a fragging vampire.”
Flak chuckled. “I’ve heard that. But what he’s famous for is hunting other vampires.”
Rachel took another drag from her cigarette. “Well, this de Vries says he knows where Warren is, and can get to him, but can’t pull him out without help. When I told him I knew some people, he said that was one of the reasons he was telling me any of this.”
Flak nodded thoughtfully, and reached out to lay one of his huge hands on Rachel’s shoulder. “Where’s this de Vries now?”
“He’s still at Warren’s place. He said he’d wait there for your answer.”
Suddenly, there was a pounding on the door, and Lucus’ voice yelling, “Flak? We got a situation here!”
Flak moved so fast that to Rachel, he suddenly blurred out of sight. The door banged open, and the sounds of shouting invaded the office.
Rachel leapt to her feet and ran out of the office, through the kitchen and into the bar, just in time to see Flak, over by the shower area, pulling the naked customer out of the hot tub by his hair.
Flak dragged the dripping man grimly toward the door, while Devon, also naked and trailing splatterings of neon body paints behind her, followed after the two, pausing every couple of steps to kick the customer as hard as she could. With every kick, the man let out a short, high-pitched scream.
As he passed Rachel, Flak yelled, “I get off in an hour. I’ll talk to some people and meet you at Warren’s in an hour and a half.”
Rachel turned, catching the fierce light in Flak’s eyes. “You know where it is?”
Flak smiled. “Don’t worry. I’ll find it.”
Then he was gone, still dragging the man toward the front door.
Rachel used the ensuing confusion to slip quietly out the back.
9
I’ve been monitoring some closed-door proceedings here at UniOmni. and there is a certain research scientist who night be of interest. He fits our profile, and his expertise is unparalleled. I think we may have struck orichalcum.
–
Email transmission, J. B. Darl, Communications Support Team, Universal Omnitech, New York City, to blind account. London, England, 19 September 2051
Dr. Oslo Wake walked through the decon unit on level 7, beta wing. The decon area had been shut down ever since he and Pakow had converted beta into the stasis floor.
Passing row after row of long, rectangular canisters, Wake checked the status of each vampire stockpiled there. It had been Pakow’s idea to store the vampires when they weren’t needed. It was a brilliant idea and easy to implement. Depriving vampires of air put them into a coma state, shutting down their physiological functions. That meant all he and Pakow had to do was keep them comatose, which let them house as many as two hundred at virtually no cost.
As Wake checked their status, he also double-checked the datajacks inserted into each unit. When Pakow had suggested the stasis chambers, a light had come on in Wake’s mind. In the early days of the Terminus Experiment, he’d been plagued with the problem of how to keep independent and very powerful creatures from taking matters into their own hands once they’d served their purpose as test subjects. Several of those first vampires had managed to escape their holding cells, and had to be killed.
Now, Wake had each subject implanted with both a datajack and a chipjack before undertaking any other procedure. The chip Wake had decided to use was strictly psychotropic in nature, and guaranteed that the compound’s experimental vampires looked on Wake and Pakow with a kind of blind love and adoration. They would do anything either man commanded. The datajack simplified how the vampires would be controlled. Depending on what tasks the comatose vampires were required to do upon waking, the datajack allowed Wake to instantly download instructions to scores of them without any effort.
The plan had worked perfectly.
Wake paused for a moment, feeling the exhaustion deep in the backs of his legs and in his shoulders. He concentrated for a moment, willing his muscles to relax. As he did, his mind drifted to the path he’d taken in the last six years. He turned his head to the left and the right, looking down the line of long canisters, and he let a small smile touch his lips. They should have known, he thought. Those fools at UniOmni should have known nothing could stop me. that every obstacle only sharpened my resolve. They should have realized they couldn’t deny me my destiny.
Wake’s tall frame was wrapped in the second skin of his envirohazard suit, and he refitted his face mask. The suit was merely a precaution, because without the special chemical bath, the contaminants in the room couldn’t find purchase on the human form. Still, better safe than sorry.