Chapter 27: Tsk, Tsk... What Do Those Vampire Elders Even Eat
Dark skies. Sleet on the streets. The kind of night made for exactly this sort of thing.
Bitter wind drove the freezing rain sideways across the city. The few people still outside were moving fast, heads down, wanting to be somewhere else.
In Umbrella's underground garage, the vehicle lights blazed across a line of transport carriers that had been modified and repainted. Where the Umbrella markings would have been, each vehicle now carried the logo of the FBI.
The personnel in front of those vehicles were dressed to match. They stood in formation with the stillness of people who had been told to look like federal agents and had decided to commit to it.
Their loadout for tonight was not standard. Live ammunition had been replaced throughout with high-concentration tranquilizer rounds, the firearms themselves swapped for modified dart delivery systems. Tranquilizer guns produced less noise, which suited the operation. They were also considerably more effective against the target category than regular bullets, which were almost useless.
For close-range defense, each team member had been equipped with a high-powered UV lamp on their chest rig. Matthew's reasoning on this was straightforward: every person on these teams was his personnel, and losing any of them would cost him sleep. The vampires were a different plan entirely. Capturing more or fewer of them was roughly equivalent from his perspective. If one of them didn't make it through the night, that was fine.
The briefing officer addressed the assembled teams.
"All units, be advised. Tonight's targets share characteristics with the vampires of folklore. Exercise extreme caution during apprehension. Director Lawrence has personally funded high-powered UV equipment for every team member as a defensive option. Use it if you need to."
"This operation carries real risk. Your primary objective at all times is to come back in one piece. If a situation goes wrong, you are authorized to withdraw immediately."
"Is that understood?"
"Understood!" The response came back sharp and in unison.
"Then move out."
The teams loaded into the vehicles. One by one, the black carriers rolled out of the underground exit and pushed into the sleet and dark.
My name is Jones. I'm a vampire.
I wasn't always. Before this, I was an ordinary person like anyone else.
Today is day five thousand, four hundred and seventy-five.
In that time I've killed one thousand, one hundred and fifty-one humans.
In the beginning I found the idea of drinking blood repulsive. I refused. I actually believed, for a while, that I could be a vampire who simply didn't do that particular part of it.
That belief lasted until the hunger did what hunger does over a long enough stretch of time.
I started hunting. And the first time I did, I understood immediately why I had been so desperate to avoid it. The blood was extraordinary. The revulsion I'd felt before was nothing but ignorance.
By now, hunting is routine.
My method is simple. I offer something people with poor judgment want, and I collect what I came for when they're past caring.
Tonight felt slightly different, though. Something in the air around me wasn't right.
Under a street lamp, Jones walked arm in arm with a heavyset middle-aged man, both of them damp from the sleet. She had led him a considerable distance from the residential areas. That was standard. You didn't hunt close to where people noticed things.
"Are we almost there?" The man looked at her with the specific expression of someone whose better judgment had completely vacated the premises. "I've been patient long enough."
Jones gave him a sideways look. "Five more minutes. Good things are worth waiting for."
As she said it, her eyes moved to his neck. The fat there sat in soft folds above his collar.
People said fat was bad. Jones had no patience for that opinion.
High blood pressure, high cholesterol, elevated blood sugar. One good bite and it was like the richest thing you'd ever tasted bursting all at once, fat and sweetness together, impossibly full-flavored.
Those vampire elders with their careful, selective feeding habits had no idea what they were missing. All their restrained, principled choices, hunting only the lean and the clean. They ate like they were on a diet. They'd never experienced anything like this.
She almost closed her eyes thinking about it.
The two of them arrived at a walled property that had the look of somewhere nobody had bothered to maintain in a long time. Dead leaves across the courtyard. Shutters pulled closed and latched. The general atmosphere of somewhere that had been empty for months.
This was her base.
"Why did you stop?" The man had been too preoccupied with his own anticipation to notice anything wrong, and he wasn't noticing now. He looked at Jones, who had gone completely still outside the gate.
Jones didn't answer him. She crouched slightly and breathed in the air of the courtyard.
Something.
"Do you smell that?" she said.
"Smell what?" He lifted his arm and sniffed his own armpit with the expression of a man doing a routine check. "...Heh. Sorry about that. Might have forgotten the deodorant this morning."
Jones looked at him sidelong.
That wasn't what she'd smelled. What she'd smelled had nothing to do with him. But the specific quality of whatever he'd just introduced into the conversation was something she elected not to engage with.
She pulled her keys from her pocket and moved to the lock.
The key went in.
Her hand stopped.
The door was already open.
Something was wrong.
The thought had barely finished forming when a hand came through the door and took it off its hinges entirely.
The same hand closed around her face and lifted her off the ground.
The Tyrant stepped through the doorframe, taking most of the doorframe with it as it came. It moved with the particular quality of something built for a function and currently executing that function. Its skin was the color of a wall that had never seen light. The pressure it put into the air around it was the kind that registered in the body before the mind caught up.
Behind Jones, the middle-aged man stared at it.
Whatever enthusiasm he had arrived with had made a unilateral decision to withdraw. He stood completely still for approximately one second, which was all the time his legs required to override the rest of him.
He ran.
For a man of his particular shape, he covered ground with a speed that was genuinely surprising. He was gone around the corner before the Tyrant had finished stepping through the wall.
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