The Irispire Portal Page 15

  "Help yourself," I say.

  "Right. Well, this will come in handy," says Kyle.

  Kyle comes up, with an AK-47, and he belts one of my silvered katanas around his waist, should the fight come to close quarters.

  The tension in the place is palpable — three of us in the middle, bad guys all around. The two unarmed ogres behind us bang on the floor with their fists like gorillas, sending chunks of marble flying. The vamps are snarling with open maws, like big felines. Their vampiric eyes glow an eerie yellow, and sharp claws extend from their fingers. My blade is held out in front of me in a short guard. Thaddeus is watching us from above. And I am willing to bet every creature in the room is thinking, 'Who is going to make the first move?'

  RAT-TAT-TAT-TAT-TAT!

  Well, that answers it. Leave it to Lev to be trigger happy. He unleashes a five round burst from his AR-15. Kyle joins the party, and I hear his AK fire next. The stinging smell of gunpowder fills the room. The fight is on, and chaos follows.

  Behind me, two loud and quick womps echo as two ogres shoot off their pulse cannons. I kneel and am amazed at the mobility in my legs. Thank you, Kyle. The pulse blasts hit somewhere to my right, and chunks of the wall burst from the impact.

  The two vampires on the western wall in front of me, run up and launch themselves from Thaddeus' desk. While beautiful when they're trying to seduce you, they look feral when they're trying to kill you with teeth and claws. Base, animal, demonic instincts take over, accompanied by magnified strength and speed. They're dangerous creatures.

  I lunge forward from my kneeling position and deliver a rising cut with The Destroying Angel to the male vamp. It parries my attack — dodging, and swiping it away with a clawed hand.

  The other vampire — the beautiful blond — punches me in the face, right on the chin. The punch snaps my head to the side, jostling my brain. But there's one advantage to repeatedly suffering trauma, and recovering quickly from it. It trains the body to withstand similar trauma later on. It toughens you up. And after five hundred years of getting punched, kicked, and smacked around, I can certainly take a punch.

  I use the momentum of the lady vamp's punch to spin my body and deliver a spinning back heel kick. I miss, and the lady vamp claws my back. Then the male vamp kicks me in the gut, and something grabs the back of my head and slams my face into the ground.

  The male vamp turns me over and goes to bite my neck. I head-butt its nose and throw it off. The lady vamp then jumps on me and lands in a straddling position. I drop The Destroying Angel, unsheathe the silvered dagger from my vertical shoulder sheath, and stab it right through its left quadriceps. It roars when the silver blade sinks into its flesh. It scrambles off. Then in one smooth motion, I pick up my sword, spring up, and lop its head off with Azrael's true edge. I timed it perfectly, and I applied the right amount of force to cut through the muscles and bones in the neck. I've got instincts too, and when it comes to handling a blade, muscle memory is my best friend.

  I relish in the victory for about half a second before I feel a crunch in my lower back, and am flung halfway across the room. My face crashes against a marble wall, cheekbones, and teeth smacking hard against the stone.

  My ears are ringing, and the thunderous echoes of gunfire in the room isn’t helping. I've got double vision. All I see are flashes of muzzle flame. I shake the cobwebs off. An ogre and the male vamp are coming at me.

  I roll out of the way as the ogre barrels towards me. It misses me and bashes into the wall, causing it to concave. The male vamp then grabs hold of me, picks me up, and throws me down onto Thaddeus' heavy desk. I go right through it, breaking it in half. My back is messed up.

  I can't move. Nanobots inside me rush to my lower back, but I know they're not going to be able to fix me. Something is wrong. My lumbar vertebrae are mush. I can't feel anything below my hip. The male vampire stands over me and smiles. It licks its lips. Its yellow eyes fill with lascivious glee.

  Then something solid, long, and heavy lands on my chest. I know by the weight that it's my Mossberg-500 twelve-gauge. The look in the vamp's eyes switches to one of terror. It makes a split decision to bite down, but I fire a round at its head and blow it right off before he can get to me.

  I roll to my side and unload five rounds into the ogre that knocked me into the wall. Pump-shoot-pump-shoot...I fire all five rounds in a second and a half. I blow a hole right through the ogre's guts and send yellowy brown ooze flying everywhere.

  Kyle kneels beside me with a concerned look on his face.

  "How's Lev?" I ask him. "Is he okay?"

  "He is doing fine for now," Kyle answers.

  I turn my head to look at Lev, but I can only move my body enough so that I get an upside down view of him. He's taking on two ogres. One of the ogres has a pulse cannon, and the other doesn't. The armed ogre shoots its pulse cannon at Lev, sending a purple ball of electricity across the room. The pulse blast hits Lev but flashes as it impacts a thin film of blue shield aura. Then the unarmed ogre kicks Lev, smashing him into a wall, but the shield spell crystal protects him from both the kick and the wall. Lev gathers himself and comes back firing.

  "Damn, I coulda used one of those," I say to Kyle.

  Kyle smiles back and asks, "How are you doing, friend?"

  "Bad," I say. "I can't feel my legs."

  From the right comes a snarl. We look to the direction of the sound. A vampire lady, in mid-pounce, is looking to land on us. Kyle aims his AK and fires.

  Silver bullets hit the vamp and take it off its trajectory. Some of the bullets hit its beautiful face, breaking off pieces of facial bones. It lands a few feet away from us, and Kyle unsheathes his katana. Then, as the lady vamp charges, Kyle spins, and slices the vamp's once beautiful head clean off.

  Kyle goes back down to tend to me, gathering Field energy into a bright yellow crystal. He lays a hand on me, and I get feeling back in my legs. Then he shuts off his heal spell, and gasps for air.

  Oh no. Kyle's gassing out again.

  The shield crystal on the small of Lev's back is flickering out. Kyle and I both nod at each other. No words needed. We've known each other for three centuries. We know what we have to do.

  Kyle gathers his strength and starts shooting his AK at the unarmed ogre coming for Lev.

  I get up and make a mad dash for the ogre armed with the pulse cannon. The ogre pumps the weapon to charge it and quickly fires. A purple ball of buzzing electricity comes at me. I do a baseball slide, and the energy blast sails over my body, blowing half of Thaddeus' desk to smithereens.

  I stand up and run across the room again. The ogre pumps and shoots. This time I jump out of the way and hit the dirt. Then I get up, run, and launch myself off of the decomposing body of an ogre on the floor. The ogre follows my trajectory in the air with the muzzle of its pulse cannon. But before it can pump and shoot again I come down on the top of its huge head, the point of The Destroying Angel pierces the top of its skull with my two hundred some pounds behind it. The blade bisects the inside of its gaping mouth and comes out under its jaw. It falls to the ground in front of me on one knee, and the life goes out of its blood red eyes. Beneath it, a puddle of yellowy brown ooze sizzles and smokes. Then I turn to my friends. Lev, and Kyle together, took out the last remaining ogre.

  The room stinks. The smell of these dying manufactured ogres is atrocious. Whatever gave them ogre-like properties is dissolving into the ooze consistent with all physical manifestations of Field energies. But I know once it's gone, only dead human bodies will be left. It pains me to know I killed the living. I want to kneel and pray for forgiveness.

  When a vampire decomposes, it goes through the same process a normal human body goes through. The bloating, draining of blood, rotting organs, all that good stuff. But the longer the vampire has been on Earth, the longer the demonic spirit has been keeping the body alive. So technically the human host would be dead if it didn't receive any spiritual aid. Once the spirit leaves, the body is free to
decompose. The longer the vampire lived, the faster it decays when the spirit leaves.

  So that's where we are: in a rectangular room filled with rotting organs and ooze that smells like methane and acid. From up top comes the echoing sounds of a slow clap.

  "Impressive," Thaddeus says.

  I flick the ogre gunk off of The Destroying Angel. For a second, I'm amazed at how natural it feels in my hand. Then I walk back towards my twelve-gauge and load it with six shells full of small silver shots.

  I pump the fore-end of my shotgun, sling it over my shoulder, and look up at Thaddeus.

  "Is that all you got?" I ask him.

  Thaddeus breathes out a chuckle. "What do you think?" he says.

  I hear scurrying from above. I look up at the coffered ceiling. The panels are all decorated with paintings except for the middle one. The middle panel is black. This panel slides open. As soon as it does, bright purple lights from the nightclub above shine in, and booming bass enters the room. Then twenty, thirty, hundreds of vampires come out of the hole like ants, using their claws to crawl along the walls.

  "Uh, Lev..."

  But before I can say anything else, Lev runs past me with a yelp. He rushes for the open double doors that lead to the antechamber with Thaddeus’ collectibles on display. I pick up our bag full of weapons and bolt.

  Twenty-Four

  I look behind me before I leave Thaddeus' office. The vampire horde is flowing out of the room's ceiling and covering the walls like a well-dressed, and feral swarm. Kyle, Lev, and I bar the door with couches, various pillars, and stick a metal lamp post across the double doors' handles. The horde behind the door pushes, almost breaking through. Vampire arms burst through the thick wood, clawing at the air. We run across the room to the door that opens to a hallway and run to the kitchen.

  The kitchen is a crimson mess. Mutilated bodies are everywhere. Lev and Kyle are running ahead of me. I almost slip on some blood, my feet squeaking on the floor, but I manage to grab hold of a passing service bot to keep my balance.

  We leave the kitchen area and enter into the carnage of Club Rapture's lower levels. Out of the frying pan, and into the fire. Vampires are eating the flesh, and drinking the blood of Club Rapture's patrons. Screams of agony and horror are all around us. There are bodies everywhere. People are running for their lives, getting tackled, and mauled by vampiric beasts. Off in the distance, growls, and roars of ogres bellow out as they climb the tall trees of the indoor rainforest of Tower Two. People are thrown off of floors and platforms, bouncing off replicas of cliff-sides, and outcropping of rock.

  I look to my left as a vampire leaps at me; it's demonic maw open wide. I turn my Mossberg to the vamp and pull the trigger. The vamp's head explodes while the rest of it falls lifeless to the ground and decomposes.

  The vamp rots away slower than the vamps we killed in Thaddeus' office, which means this one was younger. The demonic corruption hadn't fully taken over. It's someone I would have tried to save, once upon a time, when it was my job to do so. Back when I was the Bearer. But now, after Kyle and I broke The Omega Treaties, all rules have gone out the window. What we have left is this mess. This is the kind of chaos my mom used to deal with. Demons and demon-kind are free to inflict harm upon the living. They've been waiting for this, and I gave them the means to take the world by force.

  Flames spit from our guns as we pepper and destroy these vile creatures with silvered bullets. Lev blows the head off of one at point blank range, while it's down on the ground trying to take a bite out of a terrified woman underneath it. The dead vamp turns quickly from flesh to dried bone ash in a matter of seconds. It was an old one. Lev helps the woman up, and tells her to stick with us, reassuring her that we're going to make it out of this. On the way to one of the descending rope bridges, we rescue twenty more people from bloodthirsty vampires. Lev, Kyle, and I funnel them onto a rope bridge, before we, ourselves, get on. We are nearly halfway across the bridge when we realize our mistake.

  We're sitting ducks. The other end of the bridge, the platform below us, is overrun by succubi and incubi, and we’re headed right for it. While behind us, the vamps from the upper platforms are doing the same, and we're the suckers in the middle. The people are screaming, trying to scramble back, only to find death barring their retreat.

  "Kyle!" I yell, trying to keep my head above the panicking crowd. "You and Lev take care of the front! I'll take the rear!"

  "We need more ammo!" Kyle yells back.

  I grab a bunch of shotgun shells from the duffel bag, stuffing what I can in my pockets. Kyle squeezes through the panicking crowd, and I give him the bag with the remaining guns and ammo.

  Kyle then moves to the front of the line, talks to Lev, and they both advance two panels ahead of the twenty people we gathered. They open fire on the vamps in front of us, and I direct the people to move to the front to join Lev and Kyle.

  I lily-pad from panel to panel, towards the vampires who are crawling down behind us. I fire round after round from my shotgun, blasting vamps in twos and threes off the bridge, hoping to give Lev and Kyle enough time to get these people off on the lower floor.

  Once I’ve spent my shells, I reach into my pocket for more. The oncoming vamps give me enough time to load three shells before I pump and fire again. After firing all three rounds, I am nearly overrun. I stop lily-padding and ride the next panel so that it pulls me slightly out of the vampires' reach. I sling my shotgun over my right shoulder and unsheathe The Destroying Angel.

  I kick a vamp in the stomach, staggering it, and giving me enough time to decapitate it with a horizontal cut to the neck. The vampire's head falls and disintegrates as it rolls towards a pair of polished, black, Bolvaints. I look up from the shoes to a pair of perfectly creased black pants, then to the brown belt with the Asmodeus belt buckle, and finally up to the red silk shirt with the top three buttons unfastened. Thaddeus is standing there like a badass with his vampire horde behind him, snapping their teeth at me.

  I look behind me. Kyle and Lev did a good job, and have led the survivors we gathered off the bridge. They are fighting their way through a casino platform, trying to get to the next rope bridge that would take them down. Kyle throws up an arcane shield now and again to deflect incoming attacks.

  I look back at Thaddeus. I'm holding my ground letting the panel I am standing on carry me downward. There is a panel between Thaddeus and me, and the horde behind him is waiting for the chance to rip my face off. Then Thaddeus puts a hand on the rope railings and the rope bridge powers down with a humming womp. The panels retreat to their resting positions, and the mechanism stops whirring with electromagnetic energy.

  "This is my building, Mr. Mara. It's my home. I have complete control."

  He presses a button on his Asmodeus belt buckle. The eyes of Asmodeus light up a bright red and projects a holographic display of a control panel in front of him. He presses a few buttons in rapid sequence. Once he finishes, there is a loud echo of all the bridges in the building powering down. The electromagnetic hum of hundreds of rope bridges falls silent, making the screams more pronounced.

  "So this is what you've been waiting for, huh?" I say. "Hell on Earth?"

  "I merely recognize when tides are shifting," Thaddeus says. "Haven't you always wondered why I always end up on the winning side of history?"

  "Have I wondered about it? Nah. It's pretty common among milquetoasts with wavering loyalties to switch teams when the going gets tough. But that kind of shit catches up to them. And I swear before I die I am going to see it catch up to you. Your ass whooping has been a long time coming."

  Thaddeus gives me a tilted grin. Then he snaps his fingers. Reality warps and stretches behind him. My stomach churns, and I grip The Destroying Angel tight, getting in a window guard, readying myself for whatever spell he's cooking up. From the looks of it, it's a pretty big spell. But then I realize he's not the one casting it. The twenty-some vamps surrounding him all launch themselves into the air. They a
re now hovering above the bridge Thaddeus, and I are standing on. Reality warps and pulses around their hands and feet.

  I look at the carnage around us. Thaddeus built this place, and now he has no problem destroying it. This building will be written off in his mind as collateral damage, as long as he takes me down along with it. Once beautiful, the place now looks like the medieval notion of hellfire, torment, rage, and agony. The smell of flesh, sweat, blood, smoke, and fire saturates the entire building. People are being torn apart and killed by the possessed. Sodom and Gomora. My mother's stories have come true, and I have a front row seat. Flames are spreading treetop-to-treetop. Faces of the helpless, those that have given up, dead eyes looking empty as they are violated, all flash in my mind like a montage of despair.

  I want to help them all. I wish holding this sword meant something. If I was my mother, I know what I would do. I would lay it all to waste. Anger fills me with every cry for help I hear. I look at Thaddeus' smug, smiling face. I want to run this sword right through his heart and watch him disintegrate into nothing.

  "Ah, I love that look," Thaddeus says to me. "Impotent rage. This truly is an historic occasion. I can feel your anger seething, building. Surrender to me. There may be a place for you in my court in the days to come. Marchosias has promised me a kingdom, and perhaps she will allow me to keep the new Bearer after she's finished with her. She's pretty. I do hope that Marchosias leaves enough of her intact for me. There's not much fun in fucking the soulless."

  I let out a raging scream as I charge. Flying vampires swoop down to meet me before I get to their boss. I cut one with a descending blow splitting its head. Then I roll on the ground to avoid another vamp's kick. Another vampire dives right at me looking to tackle me, but I roll away again, stand up and slice that vampire's guts open with a rising blow using the true edge of my blade. Now I'm in it. I let over four hundred years of fighting instinct take over.

  My stamina is still there. Slow twitch muscles contract first, enabling long endurance, but I know exactly when to activate my fast-twitch muscles for explosive movements. You don't train for centuries without learning how to move your body, conserve energy, and hit hard when it counts. I don't even have to think about it as I fight my way from vamp to vamp. Some of them die and decompose, the others I keep at bay.