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“Freeze! Federal Agents!”
The sound of the front door downstairs exploding off its hinges and flying across the hall was even louder than Annabelle would have expected. It was followed an instant later by the sound of running feet. Lots of feet.
Carver, up ahead with his hand still poised on the handle of the bedroom door, turned towards the noise.
“That doesn’t sound good,” said Annabelle.
The yelling was coming steadily closer, up the rickety stairs. “Federal Agents! Drop your weapons and stay where you are! Any failure to comply will be met with…”
Carver gave an amused sneer. “Cute. They think we need weapons.”
The first figure came around the bend at the top of the stairs; a black-clad sci-fi stormtrooper with helmet, gasmask and a deadly-looking carbine festooned with widgets and greeblies. He saw Annabelle in the same instant she saw him. By the time he had raised the gun barrel to shoot, she was already almost on him.
She started halfway along the landing, boots flying feather-footed across the filthy floorboards even as bullets crackled past her, sending splinters and sawdust flying through the air. She let her speed and momentum carry her up onto the wall, running horizontally for an instant, swerving the hail of lead and then flying down from somewhere near the ceiling, hitting the SWAT guy and taking him flying with her, all the way down to the next bend in the stairs. She heard a feral snarl escape her own lips as she landed on top of him. His helmet hit the wall hard enough to crack the plaster.
She stood over him, pulling the gun from his limp hands and flinging it over her shoulder. She was not sure what was worse; that she had hurt somebody so badly, or that she had felt so good doing it. Her blood was singing as she tried to see whether he was still alive. She could feel the red thirst welling up inside her, making her dead stomach growl. For an instant, she was sure she had killed him already, but then she saw a twitch, a hesitant movement.
Finish him, she heard, as clearly as if it had been a real voice in her ear; for a second, she thought it was Carver. It sounded so much like him. Go on, baby doll; treat yourself. After all that work you deserve a stiff drink.
She did not have time to decide either way. Another stormtrooper had almost reached her from down below. She moved like lightning, too fast for mortal eyes to follow, grabbing the muzzle of the gun in front of its attached flashlight as it came around the corner and disarming this enemy too before swinging her other fist into their face. She hoped that was plastic she felt breaking under her knuckles as both lenses of the gasmask cracked and the second figure fell in a crumpled heap beside the first.
“Glad to see you’re having so much fun down there,” Carver called from the top of the stairs, “but we really need to leave!”
“Coming!” She turned and bounded back up the stairs in less than a second. As she reached the landing, she could hear more voices behind her:
“Agents down! Agents down! Fuckin’ blanks got Spencer and Mankiewicz!”
“All right, we’re going out through the back window,” Carver decided, already making his way towards it, “over the fence. Figure it’s about a mile across country to where we left the car. So, a couple minutes for us.”
“At least we’ve got an escape route,” Annabelle observed as she started to follow him, trying to accentuate the positive.
“Aren’t you glad now we took the time to case the joint before we came in?”
From the stairs, she could hear what sounded like bodies being dragged away and then the sound of retreating boots. “Are they leaving too?”
“I wouldn’t bank on that, baby doll.” Carver actually looked concerned for a second. “If they’re getting out of here, it’s only so they can…”
There was another sound from downstairs, the sound of something made of metal clanking and clattering across the hall. A voice called out a warning, although not, she assumed, for them:
“Fire in the hole!”
“What the…?”
Annabelle’s voice was blotted out by a deafening whump, and then an even louder whoosh. She felt heat on her back as the whole landing brightened; Carver’s face glowed orange-yellow with reflected light, his lips moving soundlessly.
When she could hear again, the first thing she heard was: “Oh shit.”
She made the mistake of glancing over her shoulder, seeing the fountain of flames pour up the stairs, licking across the walls, crawling along the ceiling. The spot where she had been standing a second ago was already a white-hot furnace. She stared into the flames, hypnotised. She did not think she had felt this scared since the day the Maharaja burned.
Run, said the other voice. Run! Fucking run!
“Run!” That time, it really was Carver.
They ran. Carver barrelled towards the window at the far end of the passage, visibly bracing himself to carry on straight through it. Annabelle followed, literally a step ahead of the crackling, roaring inferno. She could barely see where he was leading her; the air was already black with smoke.
The old house creaked and groaned around them. She heard the crash of falling debris, shaking the whole building. It was wood frame and clapboard, built long before anybody had heard of safety codes. It was literally disintegrating as it burned. She was halfway to the window, Carver already smashing through it, when the floor just split and fell away beneath her feet.
She felt herself start to plummet, suddenly weightless, grabbing desperately at the hot wooden boards even as she fell through them. Her fingers closed on the broken end of a joist, wrenching her arm as she managed to stop her fall for a moment. And then the timber cracked and bent. She bounced on the end of it, dangling, terrified, amid fumes and sparks. The fear was too big; it crowded out all her other thoughts. All she could do was hang there, frozen, looking down at the dull red glow she could see below her, somewhere behind the curtains of smoke and ash. More timbers fell around her, trailing bright flames.
And then, with another resounding crack, her handhold gave way completely and she fell again.
Only for an instant this time.
She felt a hand close around hers, locking fingers, wrenching her arm once more as she came jerking to a halt.
“Hold on!” Carver looked down at her, wild-eyed, from the jagged edge of the hole she had fallen through. He was lying on his front, his extended arm taut as it bore her weight.
Annabelle felt her skin slip and slide across his, her fingers starting to pull themselves one by one from his grip. “I can’t. Fuck. I’m slipping.”
“Oh no, you’re not getting out of this partnership that easily.” He braced himself, making the boards crack and splinter even more than they had, and slowly raised his arm, lifting her bodily out of the flames. “Come on then,” he grunted when her head was above the level of the floor, “grab onto something and climb the fuck out. I’m doing all the work here.”
She did as he said, grasping wood that burned her fingers and crumbled even as she gripped it, scrambling out of the hole and back onto the shaky floor.
“Now, where was I…?” Carver rushed back to the window, clambering through the shattered frame, this time with Annabelle hard on his heels.
They dropped down into the flame-lit yard behind the house. The second they hit the ground, more shooting started; repeated flat, dull cracks punctuating the rushing, roaring sounds from the burning building.
“Two guys at the back fence,” Carver whispered as they both dropped low. “I’ll take the one on the left. You got the other one?”
“Got him.”
They charged, crossing the yard in a flash. Annabelle hit the fence running, vaulting over it in a single smooth movement and dropping on the black-armoured agent before he could react. This fight, too, was over in one punch.
“Nice work.” Carver finished bouncing the head of his own opponent off the concrete fencepost and resumed running. She did not see any other option but to follow, leaving the two unconscious – she hoped – figures where they fell. She took one backward glance at the house as they crossed the dark field behind it, watching its windows popping one by one in showers of broken glass. She felt another thrill of fear as one of its walls slowly sagged and collapsed inwards, exposing its glowing interior. A tower of flames mushroomed into the night sky, screaming and sighing like a thousand damned souls.
The car was where they had left it, a nondescript Ford with mud artfully splashed on its licence plates. Carver wrenched the driver’s door open while Annabelle slid across the hood like on one of those old cop shows before climbing in beside him. By the time they reached the main highway, a convoy of fire trucks was already speeding in the direction of the house, sirens blaring. Carver drove nonchalantly past them and continued in the opposite direction, keeping well within the speed limit.
He did not speak again until he had pulled into an abandoned rest stop a few miles further on and parked the car, turning off its engine and lights.
“Well, that could have gone a lot better.”
“Were those guys Second Inquisition?” Annabelle asked.
“They certainly weren’t the Boy Scouts of America. They were cannon-fodder; the canaries the real FIRSTLIGHT fucks use to flush out people like us.” Carver pounded his hands against the wheel, clearly furious but trying his hardest to preserve his cool exterior. “I should have my head examined trusting fucking Jimmy. The little rat bastard set us up.”
“Why would he do that?”
“Why wouldn’t he? It has to be him. He was the one who gave us the address. And evidently not only us.”
Annabelle conceded the point. “I guess with him going around calling himself Jimmy the Weasel, we can’t say we weren’t warned.”
Carver let out a bitter laugh. “Yeah, his nickname is a little on the nose now that I think about it.”
Annabelle laughed too. They both laughed, for what seemed like an hour. It was that, she supposed, or think about the fact that they’d just blindly walked into an obvious trap and nearly died. The interior of the car stank of smoke. More accurately, they both stank of smoke. The irrational terror she had felt at the sight of the flames was fading now, but every so often she thought about hanging over the fire and felt another stab of fear. It was that that finally allowed her to stop laughing and consider what to do next.
“We need to get out of Indiana,” she decided. “Probably Illinois too. Before the SI – the real SI – start searching for us.”
“No shit, Sherlock.” Carver turned the key and set the engine growling once more. “First though, we’re driving back to Gary.”
“And why the fuck would we do that?”
“Why else? To kill the fucking shit out of Jimmy and everyone he knows. We’re gonna get medieval on their asses.”
“Won’t he be expecting that?”
“Probably.” Carver shrugged. “But in my line of work, all you’ve got is your reputation. And I can’t afford my reputation to be that of the guy who got taken for a schmuck by Jimmy the fucking Weasel. I’d never be able to look Jack in the face again.”
“Oh, so by your reputation you mean your pride?” Annabelle clarified, slyly. “Right. Brujah bragging rights. Can’t have them all talking about you behind your leather jacket.”
“No…” Carver slowly replied. “My reputation.”
“Hmm-mm.” Annabelle nodded exaggeratedly. “Sure.”
“Get out of my fucking car.”
“Come on, let’s find somewhere we can crash for the day,” she suggested. “It’s like 3 a.m. already. We can decide tonight whether we’re going to go back to Gary or GTFO.”
Carver made a disgusted sound that would have been a sigh if he was breathing, and slid the car unobtrusively back out onto the highway. “Okay, then.”
“Somewhere over the state line.”
“Sheesh.” Carver shook his head. “You take a baby Anarch along on one road trip and suddenly they think they’re Jeremy goddamn MacNeil. Except he always thought he was too pure to give orders. Preferred just to drop hints from time to time.”
“I don’t.”
“I noticed.” Carver gave another nasty little laugh. “Shit, I’ve created a monster.”
They drove in silence for a few minutes, passing beneath overpasses and road signs indicating that they were heading south, away from Gary and Chicago, into the rusted heart of America. Somewhere to the north-east, she could see a column of smoke hanging over the roadside trees, glowing slightly paler than the surrounding night sky. It must have been the house. A cop car went flying towards it, again blasting its siren and flashing its lights, but Carver ignored it, and the cops returned the courtesy.
“Thanks, by the way,” Annabelle said after another little while. “You saved my ass back there.”
“Don’t mention it.”
“I just…froze,” she confessed. “I was so scared.”
“Kindred call it Rotschreck,” he told her. “Which is screwed-up pidgin German for “red terror,” or something. Fire’s one of the few things that can kill us easily, so we have an instinctive aversion to it. Which can be a little tricky for people of our proclivities, until they get used to it. Although I bet none of your coterie mates ever took the time to explain that to you.”
“No, I’ve felt it before.” Damn. Now he’d made her think about the coterie, about the way she’d parted company from them. And yet still she felt the unprompted urge to defend them from his jibes. “Tonight, though, it was… There wasn’t a lot of warning.”
“Yeah, I want to know just what the hell they put in that crazy firebomb,” Carter murmured, keeping his eyes on the road. “So I can make some for myself.”
“Of course you do.” She rested her head against the window, reading the passing signs. There was a motel up ahead, she saw. Carver had shown her the proper way to sun-proof a motel room their second night on the road, and more importantly how to do it without the owners or cleaners noticing even after you’d moved on. Another thing that had been lacking in her education. She thought they still had enough duct tape, aluminum foil and black spray paint in the trunk.
She remembered the feel of his hand as the flames crackled around her, cold fingers tangled up with hers, as solid as a vice. Strangely reassuring, considering whose fingers they were.
“Thanks anyway, vampire dad,” she said. “You didn’t have to come back for me.”
“And go after Jimmy the Weasel and his crew all by myself?” He made even himself laugh with this reply, and tried again to suppress it in favour of the cool punk attitude, without a lot of success. “Seriously, I thought I might need backup again before this trip’s over.”
“And that’s the only reason?” she wondered, sceptically.
“Only reason. One thing you’ve got to remember, baby doll; I’m not good people. I haven’t got your back. I’m telling you this as a survival tip, you understand.”
“Hmm-mm…” She nodded again.
“Will you stop doing that?”
“Ssuuurre…”
“I swear, I am going to abandon you by the fucking roadside if you keep this up. I’ve actually managed to hitchhike from Chicago to LA as Kindred, but it isn’t something I’d recommend to anybody. And stop calling me “vampire dad.” It’s…”
“I will when you stop calling me “baby doll.””
“Well, that isn’t going to happen.”
“Well, all right, then.”
The car continued to travel steadily and unobtrusively along the highway, leaving the burning house far behind, disappearing into the darkness before the dawn.
END?