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He turned to the others, and saw strange looks on their faces, probably similar to his own. They grimaced and lifted their limbs carefully, testing out the suit, and pretty much all of them looked freaked out, if not completely terrified.

Nick didn’t blame them.

The radiation would take a lot longer to kill him, but Nick had zero doubt itwouldkill him, if he got enough exposure. His survival instincts were pinging off the charts, just standing outside the vehicle.

He switched on his headset inside the suit.

“We need to move,” he said, his voice measured. “Everyone okay?”

No one answered him exactly, but he saw nods, some of them a little too adamant to be wholly convincing. Nick kept his voice as calm as possible.

“Follow me,” he said. “We’ll get as far as we can until we hit the halfway mark. If it looks unlikely, or even questionable, that we’ll make it all the way through, we’ll come back. Everyone understand?”

That time, he got murmured yeses through the speaker in his suit.

He felt himself calm down marginally.

He turned to Jordan. “You take up the rear, man. All right? You and I aren’t exactly immune to this, but we’re stronger than any of them. Okay?”

Jordan looked at him. His crystal eyes were still shocking, even to Nick, who still expected to see the man’s previous brown-colored irises. Jordan used to have eyes with some enhancement from organic lenses, but as part of his vampire transformation, those had been forced out of his head by his reconstituted vampire flesh.

Nick was glad he hadn’t been around to see that.

All of Jordan’s bionic-type enhancements had been purged from his body by the venom of his sire and his new vampire blood.

Now Jordan’s cracked-crystal eyes held a tinge of scarlet again, but Nick doubted it was because the other vampire was hungry. Pure survival instinct shone there; the suit and the toxic air were likely bringing up a form of aggression driven by fear for his life.

Nick could relate.

If he’d been a younger vampire himself, his eyes would probably be doing the same thing. As it was, he clamped as much control over his mind, instincts, and emotions as he could. Like it or not, he was responsible for these people.

He had to get them through this intact.

One way or another.

Nick began walking up the rocky slope towards the opening in the mountain.

It felt excruciatingly slow.

He took each step carefully, though, and talked the others through doing the same. They couldn’t afford to have anyone trip and fall down. The science team had been adamant that the most shielded part of their suits, by far, was the soles of the boots. They were heavily reinforced due to their need to be directly on the radiation-infused ground.

So Nick walked steadily but slowly, and not only by vampire standards.

He made his way, step by step, to the place where two massive slabs of rock leaned against one another, leaving a narrow, triangular-shaped opening that Nick had to bend down to pass through.

He didn’t stop when he reached it, but immediately stooped and bent his head.

He turned his body partly sideways to keep from touching the rock on either side.

The rock itself seemed to nearly glow.

“Don’t touch anything,” he warned the others. “Keep every part of yourselves off the rock if you can. Go slow if you need to. And everyone help everyone in front of them. Warn them, if you see them about to touch the rocks.”

No one answered him aloud that time, but he knew they heard him.

Nick slid the rest of the way through the opening then, and found himself in the dark.

The inside of the cave felt bigger than the opening, thankfully.