Psalm of Vampires: Chapter Seventeen
Village Vampires
It took me a couple of times before I got it right. The first time I ended up in Albania, where I had long ago met a ravishing vagabond vampire named Lumturi. When I tried again, I ended up in Germany, where I had met him again. Lumturi on my mind.
I didn’t bother with a third try. I said to Philip from my chair at Dr. Chua’s lab, “I think I need to go back to the café to do this.”
Dr. Chua looked amused. “This is becoming very interesting,” he said. I wondered if he would be so stoic if I rampaged through his lab biting everyone in sight. Probably, I thought. I could imagine him saying, “Well, that was quite efficient.”
I exchanged personal phone numbers with Dr. Chua, bid him farewell, and took the MRT with Philip back to the café.
“Someone is sitting in our seats,” I said when we arrived through the doors of the café.
Philip laughed. “They are not our seats.”
“For our immediate purposes they are. For now, you’re my guide. How do we get them to leave?”
“It has to be those seats?” he asked.
“I don’t know. I think so. Maybe. I dunno. I’m too new at this to really know what I’m doing.”
“I don’t know what to say,” said Philip. “We can’t cause a lot of commotion. Singapore police don’t like excitement.”
“Philip, the reason I need to know about this invisibility gene is that we think there is a group of vampires using it with the intent of causing a mass killing.”
“Like an extinction event!” he said excitedly. “Wait, we? There’s more of you? Of course there are. How many? Dozens? Hundreds? Millions?”
“We are fighting extinction ourselves,” I said. “There are few of us left in the world.”
“Oh, so not an extinction event. The bad guys just want to kill a bunch of… “
“Us, I think. Vampires. Think of it as a civil war. They’ll be happy to include a lot of humans as collateral damage, though. Honestly, we don’t know what the hell is going on, except that they’ve started their attacks.”
“Here?”
“No, Atlanta, where I currently live.”
“Atlanta. Good baseball town. They haven’t killed any baseball players, have they?” Philip asked with furrowed, worried eyebrows.
“Not that I’m aware of,” I said. “Look. It’s important we have those seats. I’m not sure I can get back without them. Like I said, this is all new to me.”
Philip nodded solemnly. Getting him to be completely serious was about as hard as trying to stretch steel like a rubber band, so this was progress. “Do you have any money?” he asked.
I hadn’t thought of that. “I can get some out of an ATM.”
“They’re university students,” he said. “They will need money.” I smiled, nodded, and we dashed off to an ATM located against a wall on the opposite side of the café to retrieve some cash. Then we walked toward the seat I needed and stood behind the students sitting there. The four of them, two young women and two young men, were oblivious to us as they tickled their phones and chattered.
“Excuse me,” Philip said in English. They must not have heard him. They continued talking amongst themselves. Philip cleared his throat, then spoke louder.
After a couple more tries, one of the women looked behind and said, “Huh.” But when she looked at me, she had an unmistakable moment of recognition. “Hey!” she said to the others. “Look, one of those vampire streamer guys!” The rest of them nodded and smiled and yelled out a few things that I didn’t quite understand.
It didn’t take long for other tables around them to join the fun. A thousand questions were thrown my way at once. “What are you doing here? Is an attack imminent? Is Hollywood here? The CIA? American special forces?” None of them were at all serious.
I used my boom voice. “Silence!” The entire café burst into applause as phones extended out of the arms of seated café patrons like a host of meerkats.
I used my boom voice times three. That shut them up. “I need this seat,” I said to the woman who had said, “Huh.”
Philip said, “We will pay you one hundred American dollars.”
The woman folded her arms and said, “Singapore dollars or no deal.”
I could tell she was playing, but since the ATM gave me Singapore currency, it didn’t matter. I had no idea why Philip said we’d pay in American dollars. He was an odd cat.
I stripped off five Singapore twenties and handed them to her. She smiled, stood up, nodded to me, and extended her hand. “My name is Lucy Lee,” she said. Then she stood on her toes and whispered, “I’d give this money back to you to hear you play that violin again.” She smiled and offered her seat.
I sat down, and, surprisingly quickly, returned to the chaos at Jerrold Mountain. I wondered what all those kids in the café would think of my disappearance into thin air.
I didn’t need to wonder about one of them. Lucy Lee was with me, holding on to me like she had been caught in a tornado. As my brain emerged from a fog, I barely noticed her hugging me. Her voice bounced with her butt. “Woah,” she said, letting go of me as we both sat hard on the ground as if someone had kicked out the seats from under us. Which, in a sense, is exactly what happened.
We were sitting on the ground outside the tent. I was nearly as perplexed as Lucy. “What are you doing here?” I asked. The weird thing was, I remembered everything. I remembered Lucy. I remembered Dr. Chua. I remembered the brothers. It was that crazy.
“I know, right?” she asked. “What the hell am I doing here?”
“And why were you hugging me?” I asked.
“Just thanking you for the hundred. I can buy a book now.”
“A book? Just a damn book?”
“Do you have any idea how much college textbooks cost?”
This time my friends streamed out less anxiously. “This is like chasing water bubbles,” said Owens. “Who the hell is that?”
“A new water bubble. Owens, meet Lucy. Lucy, meet Captain Owens.”
“Stop calling me that,” said Owens.
“He’s pissy,” said Lucy. She extended her hand, and Owens helped her up.
“You, stay down,” he said to me after she got to her feet. So, of course, I leaped to my feet. “Fuck’s sake,” he said.
“Jade?” said Daphne. She wrapped her arms around me and let go. “God, it’s all so quick. What happened? Who’s she?”
“Where am I?” asked Lucy.
“Jerrold Mountain,” said Vance. “I’m the mayor.” He wasn’t, but nobody pushed back.
She shook Vance’s hand, too. She was very friendly for someone who had just traveled ten thousand miles in about one half a second without knowing it.
Moreland wasn’t trying to make a new acquaintance. She was leaning down and peering at Lucy like she was studying a new type of plant. “What have we here, Jade?”
“My name is Lucy,” said Jerrold Mountain’s new tourist.
“Yeah, yeah, I know. I heard,” said Moreland.
“I remember more this time,” I said.
“Intent makes all the difference,” said Moreland.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“You planned this excursion. Before you didn’t plan it, it just happened.”
“Oh.”
“That’s just a guess. What do you remember?” she asked.
“I recorded a conversation with somebody.” I played it. Lucy Lee listened intently.
“You met him!” said Daphne excitedly after the recording ended.
“I don’t remember much but yeah, I guess so. I remember his bodyguard. He didn’t wear a T-shirt under his dress shirt, and he had a cobra tattoo on his forearm,” I said. I was remembering things, but imperfectly.
“That wasn’t his bodyguard, genius,” said Moreland. She showed me an Instagram photo of Dr. Chua in shorts and a tank top in a gym. He was preparing for a Tae Kwon Do black belt competition, according to the text under the photo. The man next to him in the picture was about one-quarter Chua’s size.
“Oh, yeah,” I said. “Now I remember.”
A loud explosion rumbled in the distance.
“What was that?” asked Lucy.
“There’s a war going on,” said Charly.
I wondered what Lucy was thinking while observing all these tall blue people standing around her. She said, “In America? There’s a war in America? Am I in America? What’s going on?” She rubbed her eyes, probably because she thought she was dreaming.
“Jade. Why is she here? How is she here?” asked Moreland.
“I dunno,” I said. “One minute I was sitting at the table, squinching my eyes, trying to get back here, and suddenly, I was here, but she was too, holding on to me for dear life.”
“Why was she holding on to you?” asked Daphne. I won’t say that I detected jealousy in her voice, but I thought it was notable that she was the one to ask. Lucy Lee was very pretty in her short, black, ruffled skirt and striped knee socks. Her hair was cut in a magnificent pink, blue, and black bob.
“Ask her,” I said.
“He gave me a hundred bucks,” said Lucy.
This time, Daphne sounded irritated. She even crossed her arms. “For what?” she asked, maybe thinking the worst.
“For giving up my seat at the kopitiam,” answered Lucy.
“The what?” asked Charly.
“It’s like a coffee house with food,” I said.
“And now you’re here,” said Charly.
“That’s some weird shit,” said Owens.
“How do we get her back?” asked Vance.
“We don’t have time to get her back,” I said, looking at a growing discharge of white and black smoke in the distance.
“I have a test tomorrow,” Lucy said.
“Please don’t tell me it’s an organic chemistry test,” I said, happy at the renewing memory.
“How did you know?” she asked.
“Lucky guess,” I answered. “You probably know my friend’s brother, Bennie.”
“Who are you people?” asked Lucy, finally caving into the reality of her situation.
Wurdulac corpses still dotted the landscape. “We’re the good guys,” said Owens. “And they’re not.” He pointed to the closest one. Its head was off to one side.
“Gross,” said Lucy. She looked at Daphne, probably because she was the only human in the small gathering. “So, this is all real? It’s not some weird cosplay shit?”
Daphne nodded.
“Everyone thinks it’s just all a VR thing for LoL, with fancy buffs and all that,” said Lucy. “Wow. So, you, like, kissed a vampire. And everybody thought it was just a dude in a kick-ass skin.”
“Something like that,” said Daphne.
“People are going to be sooooo disappointed,” said Lucy. “We were all expecting a huge new LoL release.” She looked sad.
“It’s got nothing to do with League of Legends,” I said. “Sorry.”
“We don’t have time for this,” said Vance, looking at his phone. Van was holding his elbow. “Gary says the attack seems to be over for now. We can sneak back to town during the window.”
“Coffee shop Gary or Gas station Gary?” asked Van.
“Coffee shop,” said Vance.
When he said that, we could hear the familiar shrieking that had accompanied the Wurdulac attack on the RV park. A long curling line of Wurdulac was twisting high into the sky in the distance, flying away from both the park and the city.
“Now what are they doing?” asked a breathless Raygun, running to us from a nearby tent.
“There’s a lot of them,” said Charly. It looked like hundreds. “What are conditions in town?”
Vance looked at his phone. He scrolled through messages before saying, “They seem to have targeted humans.”
He looked at Moreland, who said, “Their sense of smell is really good. It would be easy for them to target humans. How many did they get?”
“Unknown,” said Vance. “The assault only lasted about twenty minutes.”
“There’s hundreds of them, it looks like. And plenty of time to do a lot of damage,” said Charly.
“We don’t have time to dick around with magic tricks to move people,” said Owens. “We need to pile into cars and get back into town.”
“I agree,” I said.
“What about her?” asked Daphne, looking at Lucy Lee.
“The humans stay here,” I said. “Moreland?”
“Yeah. We’ll leave behind enough protection for them.”
Moreland was too good at killing Wurdulacs to leave behind. But we needed her to protect the humans. We also needed her to help us in town. I told her that.
“Well thanks for the compliment, lover boy, but I can’t be in two places at once as far as I know.” I guess she also thought Lucy and I had a thing, even though I had known Lucy for no more than a minute or so.
“Just leave Team Fang here,” said Daphne, referring to Moreland’s newly turned vampires. “There’s no reason to send them to town. They have nothing at stake there. ‘Sides, they’ve got some experience now fighting these things.”
“I can stay here, too,” said Charly.
So that became the plan.
I rode with Owens, Vance, and Van, and the town vampires drove in their vehicles. Moreland occupied the first car behind us. Our convoy consisted of about thirty cars. I was surprised to see that many vampires in one small town.
The string of vehicles curled along the two-lane highway from the outskirts of town toward the small downtown of Jerrold Mountain.
“Why is it called Jerrold Mountain?” I asked Vance as Owens’ Lincoln reported every bump in the road with a clatter. “It’s more a valley between two mountains.”
“That slope there. That’s the first foothill, so to speak, of Jerrold Mountain,” Van said. “A good golfer could reach it by getting out of the car and teeing up here. On the other side, that’s the start of Happ Mountain. I guess they could have named the town Happ Mountain, instead, but it is farther. You’d have to tee up a couple of times to drive a ball there. The weird thing is that the summit of Happ Mountain is closer, as it emerges more steeply from its foothills and rises more quickly than Jerrold.”
I wanted to ask Owens to give me a brief oral history about how he knew Vance and Van, but we didn’t have time for a long story. It wasn’t going to be a long enough drive. But the question had been gnawing at me since our visit to the medical examiner’s office. I decided to take a shorter route to my inquiry. “Owens,” I said. “How did you not know about the other vampires in town if you’re pals with Vance here? For a vampire hunter, it seems like a big miss.”
I looked behind to review Vance’s expression since I knew what Owens’ would be. I wasn’t in the mood for another eyeroll. Vance offered a knowing smile. “The captain and I know each other from one of his excursions to London,” said Vance. “It was what, ten years ago we met, Owens?”
“Almost to the day, I think,” said Owens. “I didn’t know Vance was in this town until I saw him lying on the gurney. Didn’t even recognize him then. You looked like shit,” said Owens.
“Yeah, well, I’m gonna look a lot worse in two weeks,” said Vance.
“Why were you in London?” I asked Owens.
“Why else?” he pointed his finger at me as if shooting a gun, and said through a whisper, “Pow.”
“I was supposed to be on the receiving end of that,” said Vance. “But I charmed my way into a decades-long friendship.”
“Decade. One decade. And charmed your way my ass. You got lucky. My bullet missed you.”
“You were a lousy shot in those days,” said Vance. “His bullet blew away a Longtooth behind me, who managed to stab me with a hypodermic needle and render me paralyzed.”
“Longtooth story short,” said Owens as the old Lincoln approached the town’s first stoplight, “It was then that I discovered the Longtooth clan’s willingness to play with DNA to alter the game.”
“Wait,” I said. “Stop the car. You knew they were into genetics?”
“In the captain’s defense, he had no idea who he was dealing with. He wouldn’t have known any Longtooth by name. Anyway, we thought it was a try and fail and forget kind of thing,” said Vance. “The injection is why I look a touch older than you, Atticus. And most other vampires.”
“A touch?” laughed Owens. What a card.
“Good God, Owens, don’t you ever let up?” I asked. “Go on, Vance.”
“He injected me with something that was supposed to alter my DNA. I don’t know much. It was supposed to make me age instantly. Well, it kind of worked. First, it paralyzed me for a week, then it caused a slow but sure degenerative process in my cells. I’m almost human in that regard, now. As is my lovely wife, Van. If the upyr hadn’t gotten us, old age would have.” Van put her hand in his.
“Why would a Longtooth do that?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” said Vance.
“I think they were hoping to infect the system of every remaining vampire on earth that wasn’t in the Longtooth clan,” said Owens. “I won’t lie. I didn’t even consider doing anything to try to stop it. But a bunch of Longtooth died somehow during the whole process. Me and Vance, we thought they learned their lesson that way.”
“Asshat here was going to shoot me, anyway, till he saw I couldn’t move. Damned if compassion didn’t overtake the good captain,” said Vance.
“I thought you said it was your charm that led to your friendship,” I said to Vance.
“I lied. Owens actually has a heart.”
“Well,” I replied, “Biologically speaking, the Wurdulac and Longtooth also have hearts. I wouldn’t give Owens too much credit.”
“Normally, when you’re going to shoot somebody, they react,” said Owens, who was no longer parrying every insult. “Not Vance. I thought, okay, maybe he’s got ice in his veins, but still, not even a finger twitching. Long story short again. I got him outta there, and it all became a meeting of the minds.”
“Sort of like what happened to you and me,” I said.
“No nothing like that,” said Owens. “You’re still… ah, never mind. Fuck it. Yeah, like that. No offense, but if I had known Vance was around these parts, I ain’t never coming into that creepy library of yours for a chat.”
“I think you would have,” I said.
“Nope. ‘Sides, Vance can give me all the intel you can, and then some.”
“You two are more alike than you know,” said Vance. “You’d make a good buddy cop movie.”
“Fuck we would,” said Owens.
“Pull into that,” I said, pointing to a smoldering gas station. I texted the others on a private Telegram channel Raygun had set up and told them to keep driving into town. The Lincoln pulled to the shoulder of the road because there were two fire trucks at the gas station, which no longer existed aside from a sign announcing the latest gas prices and two blackened stumps where gas pumps should have been. Whatever the brand was, its sign was gone, torn off from above the gas pricing signage. “This must be the smoke we saw earlier.”
“Vance? You were right. Buddy cop. This guy’s a natural.” Owens’ sarcasm could eventually be as good as Moreland’s if he could live another couple thousand years. When I looked from the side of the road, the gas station’s storefront was obliterated. Sheets of torn metal and broken glass were all that remained. One side of the building was still intact, but its white brick was painted with charcoal-colored streaks.
“Gary Faisal runs this place,” said Vance, as he opened the car door. I followed him out, but Owens stayed put. Behind one of the fire trucks was a county sheriff police car. Vance picked up his pace and headed for a deputy talking to a firefighter.
“Vance,” said the deputy. “Gary, he’s, ummm, well, I don’t know what he is. I can’t describe what happened. I gotta say, Vance, the townsfolk aren’t going to be happy. It seems only humans were targeted. I know you’re good people, but you shouldn’t go into town right about now.” The deputy looked at me with a scowl.
The deputy was wearing a Kevlar vest and a police cap. He had taken the earbuds out of his ears, but I can hear better than most dogs and his earbuds were a cacophony of muffled, tense voices. He pressed a button on his vest radio and said, “Copy that,” after someone told him of another death in town.
“They attacked us, too,” said Vance. “At the RV park. Killed two of us, Jenkins. We’re in this together.”
“I don’t doubt you, but others will. For now, I’d lay low,” said the deputy.
“They’ll be back,” said Vance. “I love this town. If some jerk wants to try to kill me while I’m fighting for him, so be it.” He turned around and headed for the Lincoln. The deputy didn’t know that anyone putting Vance down would be doing him a favor. Blood plague deaths were gruesome.
I remained, looking at the deputy while he sized me up. “I don’t love this town,” I said, “But I’ll give it everything I got anyway.” The deputy nodded once as I turned around to follow Vance to the car.
“Vance!” yelled the deputy. Vance turned around. “Just be careful is all I’m saying.” Vance nodded and got back into Owens’ car.
After we settled into the car, the Lincoln merged into the convoy. “We need to find Longtooth,” I said.
“Yeah, I love getting the back of my hand tenderized,” said Owens, looking at the bandage still wrapped around his hand. “Anyway, he could be anywhere by now. Especially if he can pull a Moreland and travel in the blink of an eye.”
“I don’t think he can,” I said.
“He’s here,” said Vance. “I can smell him. He’s directing traffic.” Vance looked up at a distant ribbon of Wurdulacs circling the peak of Jerrold Mountain.
“You can smell other vampires?” I asked.
“Sense him. I can feel his presence here,” said Vance, correcting himself.
I wished I had stayed on the mountain. “Daphne,” I whispered under my breath.
“Man,” Owens said. I hadn’t said her name as quietly as I thought. “You got it bad.” Owens was leaning toward the windshield to look out. “They’re just circling, man,” he said. “Wait. I think they’re coming our way now.” The ribbon seemed to be moving in our direction. As they approached, Owens said, “Man, they are fast.”
The Wurdulacs were flying in single-file formation. They were heading straight for the convoy, but now the convoy was near enough other structure such as fencing that we could get out of the car and set our guns on bipods if we wanted to. Many of the village vampires did just that. Others drove into a parking lot of an industrial building with a sign that read, “Jerrold Rubber Products, Inc.”
“Follow them,” said Vance while looking and reacting to his phone. “They know what they’re doing.” Owens didn’t have much of a choice even though many cars were peeling off the middle of the convoy, so he silently entered the parking lot with the rest of the cars. The two-lane road was surrounded on each side by rising embankments full of scrub. Owens could have tried to pass the other vehicles on the left, but that risked getting creamed head-on by a local timber or nitrogen truck.
The yellow corrugated metal industrial building was covered by curved, pre-formed roofing. Large oak trees, leaning over like they were trying to break free from smaller trees giving chase, overlooked the building at the end of the parking lot. There had originally been just one vehicle in the lot, parked next to the building entrance. It was a massive white Ram pickup truck with wheels taller than a Prius.
Village vampires were jumping out of their cars and pouring into the building. Someone at the entrance urged them closer. When we got inside, it felt like someone stuck a piece of burning rubber up to my nose. The smell was foul. Dozens of vampires were lined up along tall tables on each side of an aisle leading from the large doorway as if they had done this routine a hundred times. The vampires in the convoy joined them as a crunching, groaning noise of straining metal bellowed overhead. It was the sound of the roof opening. Owens and I stood at one of the many tables, so we set up our Bergara rifles on bipods because that’s what everyone else was doing. Vance shrugged as he and Van did the same on an identical table next to us. We could hear the Wurdulac swarm screeching overhead.
“Seems like a death trap to me, Owens,” I said.
“Not like that convoy was,” he said, taking aim at the sky exposed by the open roof with his gun.
Vance yelled to him. “Not there.” He pointed to the large doorway. “There.” Everyone else was aiming their guns at the doorway. Nobody was aiming for the sky, even though the Wurdulac swarm was heading directly for the new opening in the roof. At someone’s urging, Moreland, who was at the very front of the doorway with her scimitar, ran to the center of the large industrial room to a gap in the tables, then looked up.
The best way to describe what happened next is to ask you to imagine a huge decanter of Wurdulacs pouring headfirst into the open roof of the building. My first thought was to wonder what whoever was responsible for this fiasco was thinking, but it wasn’t quite like you might imagine it.
When the Wurdulacs began to fly into the building, a noise that sounded like the world’s largest taser ripped through the room. Bolts of electricity scattered from one end of the roof to the other. Wurdulacs dropped to the floor, stunned but alive. Moreland raced to them, severing heads like she was slicing cucumbers. I marveled at her strength while she hacked one, then another, as if they were arriving to her on an assembly line. It usually took me three tries to chop off a Wurdulac head.
The bizarre thing was that the Wurdulacs kept coming. Intelligent creatures would have stopped flying through the roof’s opening under these circumstances, but it was almost like they were being lured in by the electricity. Their awful screams and wretched jeers filled the air as Moreland chopped off the heads of her paralyzed foes. She was joined by two village vampires with axes, who did the same, with less precision and efficiency as Moreland, but good enough.
While some Wurdulacs were getting slaughtered on the floor of the building, dozens more were pushing their way through the front entrance. Many were getting picked off by Bergara rifles and other .308 caliber weapons, but many were breaking through. Some of the vampires in the room appeared to be using other weapons, a few of them with high-capacity magazines, but those were having no effect on the beasts.
Even with the successful electric trap that had been made, and even with the attrition caused by vampires armed with Bergara rifles, the Wurdulac were overwhelming the defenses with sheer numbers. They were impervious to their own corpses falling among them as they charged ahead. They continued to blindly attack with no awareness of the concept of fallen comrades.
Soon enough, they were upon us. They lunged at vampires defending their positions, tearing them to shreds with their massive talons as easily as you’d rip apart wet paper. They leaned on one foot and swiped with the other or used the enormous claws on the ends of their fingers to slash their prey. One hovered over Owens, its large beak-like mouth grinning in a toothy display of menace that chilled even me as its right arm reared back to slash Owen’s head. Instead of trying to shoot it, I covered Owens with my body.
We found ourselves cowering in a dark, quiet room that ranked of unpolished age, where the only sound was a twelve-foot grandfather clock steadily repeating the march of time.
“Where the hell are we?” Owens asked when I released him from my grasp. He must have assumed I’d know the place since I was the one who brought us there. But I didn’t recognize the room. I was unable to guess how we got there. It looked like a living room of an old Victorian house. The walls were trimmed throughout with wainscoting, the ceiling with cornice molding, and the wooden floor covered by a large red oriental rug. Classic Victorian décor. The windows were even covered with heavy velvet curtains. There was a large wingback chair and a massive lithograph of a British general in tight white pants and a long red coat leaning on a walking stick while proudly surveying a battle scene.
We walked around a bit. Owens’ shoes made the requisite heavy sound you’d expect on an old wooden floor. I was in my bare feet, so I wasn’t creating the same raucous. I looked out the window and noticed a neighborhood with widely spaced Victorian and Edwardian homes, all of which were surrounded by tall, thick, heavy metal fencing.
When I opened the door, I thought I heard Owens utter one of his expletives, then a sound of anguished pain, then his shoes clattering along the wooden floor. I turned around to see Longtooth dragging him out of the large living area into a darkened hallway, nearly singing in a laugh, “Ha, ha, ha!”
“Owens!” I screamed, following his kicking feet as he was dragged into the darkness.
“Fuck this,” I said, and I did something I didn’t think was possible. I can’t even tell you how I thought of it. I found myself not chasing Longtooth and Owens, but instead on top of Longtooth like I was a child riding a dad’s shoulders. We both tumbled to the floor, but I had somehow been alert enough between the time I vanished and reappeared on top of Longtooth to pull my karambit out of its sheath and wield it against Longtooth.
I sliced at his neck with what should have been perfect precision, but it wasn’t perfect, so he slid away, cursing wildly at me as he tried to stanch a geyser of blood from his neck. I ran toward him with my knife, desperate to sever his head from the rest of his body, but he disappeared into the structure of the hallway as if the wall was consuming him, leaving, for a moment, only the impression of his face within the wall like a bas relief before disappearing completely.
Owens was on the floor, bleeding profusely from his neck, his eyes rolling to the back of his head. I didn’t have the first clue what to do, so I just did the first thing that came to mind. I took my phone out of my pocket and texted, “Where are you?”
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