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In the meantime, all he could do was wipe it away.

He reminded himself he’d survived worse.

Well, he waspretty surehe’d survived worse.

He had memories from the war, memories he now felt slightly more confident were real, after his discussion with Brick the night before. Some of those memories were more blurry than others, but he had a distinct, clear recollection of being blown nearly to pieces by a organic scatter bomb that hit right into a squadron he’d led.

This was bad, but not “regrow an arm and two legs” bad.

This might be the worse he’d experienced in decades, but it wasn’t “sit in a pile of your own shredded entrails and regrow most of your vampire flesh while being hand-fed by other vampires” bad. He still had most of his face.

He still had his teeth, his legs, and most of his arms and hands.

More importantly, he could move.

While they hurt like hell, his injuries, apart from the one on his head, didn’t even bleed that much. Nick knew he looked fucking horrible, and his one hand wasn’t working right, and he wasn’t moving anywhere near as fast as he should be, but he wasn’t in danger of “meeting the true death,” as Brick always melodramatically called it.

Still, he wasn’t a machine.

He’d need to feed soon, if he wanted to heal.

It would be exponentially better if he could sew himself up.

Most of all, he had to be careful not to get so weak he passed out.

Even apart from what hunted him specifically, the Cauldron wasn’t a safe place to fall unconscious, not even for a vampire.

He pushed his limbs faster at the thought.

He still moved without a clear destination in mind, his priority being only to get there as quickly and as silently as he could. He felt thankful for the old cars piled up around where he’d landed. Most of them were from the time that cars still had a lot of iron. It would block the drones from finding him visually, at least.

Temporarily, at least.

Of course, they might bring dogs.

Genetically-enhanced dogs, trained to sniff out vampire blood.

Nick would be a blinking neon sign to those fucking things right now.

The thought got him moving even faster.

His mind began to blur as time passed. He moved mechanically, pressing on and on, until he reached the very edge of the long graveyard of cars. Only then did he hesitate, not sure he wanted to go out into the open, to lose the only protection he’d found since he landed here.

He could glimpse and hear drones now.

He couldn’t entirely pull them apart, not well enough to count them, but he knew there were more than three.

The sky could be full of them, for all he knew.

Nick might be visible the instant he left the protection of the iron hulks.

He hung at that edge, indecisive, and then, without entirely making the decision, at least not consciously, he crawled under the last vehicle in the row, which happened to be a massive truck, what had been an eighteen-wheeler. It was now propped up on cement blocks that had sunk a few inches into the earth.

Dandelions and vines grew up the sides of the truck’s metal container.

The pavement had ended over a hundred yards behind him.

Nick crawled on his belly in the dirt, wincing and biting his tongue against the pain, until he found himself under the truck’s cab.