Page 16 of Almost Midnight (Vampire Detective Midnight #8)

CHAPTER 16

THE WALL

Nick didn’t land gracefully on his feet on the other side of the Cauldron wall, like a vampire usually would, even on such a long jump.

Nick didn’t even clear the damned wall.

The shot must have knocked him off-course, or possibly slowed his propulsion in some other way. Whatever it did, Nick hit into the top of the wall with most of his body, and his clothes caught viciously on the coils of razor-wire, jerking him to a stop and slashing at his face, hands, jacket, and side.

He (luckily?) had enough momentum behind his leap to tumble over to the other side, cutting into himself even more the entire way, until he hung from the razor wire for a very long-feeling second. Then, the sheer weight of his bizarrely-heavy vampire body, along with the stubbornness of gravity, yanked him free.

He fell straight down onto the rusted-out hulk of a car.

He didn’t even get the cushion of the tires; the car was jacked up on blocks.

He was lucky again, he supposed, that he didn’t crash through the car’s roof and slash his body up even more on the jagged metal, which already had a hole rusted through the center from water damage. Because of the razor wire, Nick fell straight down, and didn’t clear the distance to the main body of the car.

He made a Nick-sized dent in the thing’s trunk, instead.

It still hurt like fuck.

It hurt so badly, Nick couldn’t move at all for a few seconds, even knowing the agents and whoever they’d called for backup were likely already on their way to the Cauldron’s entrance. Since that entrance was only maybe a hundred yards away from the rusted-out car, Nick didn’t have much time.

He definitely didn’t have time to lie there and feel like shit.

The understanding reached him right around the time he managed to roll off the car’s trunk and onto the dirt.

He let out a pained oof.

He blinked once. Twice.

He stared up at the star-filled sky, knowing it wasn’t real.

Even so, he saw himself on the beach briefly, naked that time.

He was wet and his lips tasted like salt.

A sleek, definitely-not-homemade surfboard stuck in the sand next to him on a long stretch of empty beach in the dark. Dalejem walked down to him from a higher sand dune, laughing as he threw a towel at him, a towel way too soft to be homemade, and told Nick he was an idiot for surfing out there alone, and at an hour Jem wouldn’t even know if he’d been eaten by sharks, or if he’d been swept all the way out to sea.

They were in San Francisco.

It had to be San Francisco that time.

Didn’t it?

Voices nearby made Nick flinch violently.

He blinked, and refocused on the view of the starry dome.

Fuck, how long had he been lying there?

His eyes stung from blood.

His side felt like it was on fire, and when he looked down, he realized that’s where he’d been hit by the plasma bolt. The thing put an actual hole in him––one that left burn marks in his jacket and on his marble-white skin, and had exploded out a baseball-sized chunk of his vampire flesh, tearing through muscle and slamming into bone.

Vampire bones were like diamond, so it hadn’t managed to break that.

Still, he could tell the projectile was still inside him, and it hurt like hell, which told him it had likely been coated in acid––a swell little trick the H.R.A. liked to pull when they were specifically gunning for members of Nick’s tribe.

It was too late to stop the process now.

Nick would have to wait it out, let the shit eat through a little more of him.

As the acid weakened, his body would fight back, and eventually be able to expel what remained of the bullet and begin to heal. He knew a wound like that probably meant weeks, not days, before he’d be back to one hundred percent, and that it would continue to hurt until the bullet was completely gone, and probably for a good while after.

If he’d been hit in the heart, which is what the fucker had likely been aiming for, Nick would be dead. Same with a direct shot to the head, or to the throat, if it managed to decapitate him. As it was, it’d been too damned close.

Nick lifted his ghost-white hands up to look at them, and saw that one had a thick gash over the wrist and the back of his hand. His arm on the other side had a wide, ragged gash down the center, probably from the razor wire.

Jesus. That had been his ident-tat arm.

He wondered if he even had his implant still.

It looked like the meaty center of that arm had been gouged out by the steel teeth of the razor-wire nearly down to the bone. If he’d been human, it would have fractured the bone, too, if not broken it to splinters from the impact alone.

That one wound would have killed a human.

As it was, his ident tattoo and barcode were definitely toast. He’d need to check for the implant itself once he got somewhere safe, but there was a damned good chance that was gone, too. He couldn’t fuck around with it now. He’d have to assume it was still there, still inside the torn up flesh somewhere, and act accordingly.

Nick felt another horrifically bad cut on the same side of his face.

He decided inventory time was over.

He pulled himself up to a crouch without straightening and grimaced when it folded his body in a way that made the plasma rifle shot hurt even more.

He couldn’t let himself adjust to that, either.

He slid along the back of the car, jaw clenched against the pain, then behind another car parked to the left of the one he’d landed on.

He made it to the next car in the row the same way.

He moved behind the next car, an even older sedan, something that wouldn’t have been out of place on an old cop show from the 1980s. After that, Nick got behind the burnt-out husk of a pickup truck, which barely had a recognizable shell left.

He made it to a delivery van next, which provided his first real cover, then a mini-van, a tiny city car, a limousine, then a row of six or seven more pickups.

He knew where he was.

He used to drive through the Cauldron almost daily, taking the center drive, sometimes both ways, but at least in one direction, to or from his home in Washington Heights. It was the fastest way to reach the vampire ghetto from downtown and vice versa.

He’d tell himself that’s why he did it, to save time.

And that was true, as far as it went––the road through the Cauldron wasn’t just faster, it was exponentially faster than any other route open to Nick––but he strongly suspected he’d often gone that way because he was bored.

He’d meet roadblocks, get shot at, sometimes even get in drag races with locals, who would come out in their own vehicles to try and steal Nick’s.

As a result, Nick had a high degree of familiarity with the parts of the Cauldron near the main road, and especially the parts nearest to the North and South Gates.

Here, by the North Gate, a near-mile of junked cars began on the east side of the Devil’s Cauldron, not far from the set of three locks that opened and closed to authorized traffic. The North Gate eventually led out to 113th Street, which marked the lowest edge of Washington Heights. Some of these cars had likely be left here by refugees right after the war.

The scrapyard then grew over time as more and more of the old vehicles failed.

Many of these antiques had been manufactured more than a century ago. Missing and used-up parts could maybe be 3D-printed, but it was easier and more economical, even for people living inside the Cauldron, to simply steal a car from the other side of the wall.

Now they left cars outside the walls when they were finished with them, after stripping them for parts, of course. Sometimes they dissolved them in acid or other corrosives.

But the original, ancient junkyard remained, like a memorial to times past.

Or a graveyard, perhaps.

Nick continued to move stiffly and slowly through the piled-up corpses of ancient cars. He listened intently as he went, and could still make out the voices he’d heard when he first opened his eyes. He picked out the individual timbres and accents of the two H.R.A. fucks who’d been shooting at him outside.

He heard a few other voices with them now, as well.

He couldn’t tell if they were hybrid or human. They smelled human, but they might be wearing pheromones like the first two.

Nick definitely wasn’t going to venture out far enough to find out, or even get a good look at any of them.

He didn’t hear Morley.

He didn’t hear Charlie, either.

Not that he expected to.

Still, he hoped like hell they weren’t in the back of a windowless van on the other side of that wall. He hoped they hadn’t done anything crazy or stupid, but had taken Charlie straight to the hospital after those H.R.A. clowns shot her in the leg with a harpoon.

He hoped the hybrids wouldn’t try to prosecute Morley for telling Nick to run.

Morley was smart enough to say he hadn’t believed they were law enforcement and that Nick had been subjected to death threats and attempted kidnappings before (and that’s a fucking understatement, Nick’s mind muttered in annoyance).

The H.R.A. likely wouldn’t believe him. They might decide to give him a hard time even if they did believe him, just to make a point, or even throw him in a cell if they were feeling particularly vindictive.

Acharya would probably try to protect him.

Nick couldn’t count on that, but he hoped it was true.

He still didn’t even know what this was about, not precisely.

But he couldn’t think about that yet.

Whoever these fuckers were, they were serious.

Nick counted at least six agents out on the main road that cut through the center of the militarized zone. They’d likely have more outside the wall.

If this was H.R.A., and Nick definitely thought it was, they’d be setting up a perimeter to keep him inside the Cauldron by now. According to protocol, if their search went more than nine hours, they’d extend that perimeter to the entire Protected Area. They’d push alerts to all train stations, airports, metros, access roads, shipping ports, and even to all walk-in entrances and exits to the dome, since Nick was known to venture outside to surf.

He chanced a look out at that road only once.

At the time, he was crouched behind the back end of one of those ancient pick-up trucks, a tall one on bent rims and rotted wheels that had once been painted bright gold. He kept his arm that used to have his ID implant and tat behind the steel tailgate.

He saw flashlights flickering back and forth among the rusted out cars, but they weren’t moving as fast as he was.

They were still close to the gate.

They hadn’t even reached his blood trail yet.

They would soon.

They must have seen roughly where he fell.

Nick suspected they were remaining close to the gate more to keep him inside until they could get enough back-up around the Cauldron to feel safe leaving it.

Once that happened, which could only be minutes away, it wouldn’t take them long to start following his trail for real. The blood, the dent, would make it obvious where he’d landed. Nick had a lot more to worry about from their back-up, however, which meant a lot more people, including on the South Gate, and, more worryingly, including drones.

Nick had to get the fuck away from the part of the wall and the car where he fell, that was priority number one. His long-term prospects beyond that were a lot hazier.

He had no idea where to go.

He didn’t know anyone inside the Cauldron, certainly no one who might hide him.

He continued to make his way along the wall, but now he was thinking seriously about what options he truly had. He could burrow in somewhere, just hide. It wouldn’t solve his problem for long, but it would buy him time. If he found the right place, he could bandage up the worst of his cuts, maybe even feed.

Those two things would at least keep himself from passing out.

He also needed to deal with his arm.

He needed to know if the implant was still on him, and if it was, he needed to remedy that. At the thought, he started feeling over the gash with the fingers of his other hand. He grimaced in agony as he did, but never stopped moving south along the wall.

Nick remembered his headset then, and ripped it out of his ear.

He hesitated only for a split second, lost in a suspended instant of regret, of worry about how he’d get in touch with Wynter or anyone else, then he chucked the thing as far as he could, back in the rough direction of where he’d first landed.

He didn’t see where it fell.

He started moving faster, still grimacing in pain, mostly from the hole in his side from the plasma rifle, and the cut along the side of his throat and face. He didn’t want to know how fucking bad he looked. He knew it was bad.

His fingers never found the implant.

With his headset gone, he had no way to scan for it, but he was pretty sure it was gone. It could be on the other side of the wall, for all he knew.

He glanced down at his mutilated arm and remembered the long scratches from his fight the night before, the ones he’d worried so much about Wynter seeing. The thought was laughable now, given what he’d done to himself in the past hour.

If he was human, he’d be dead. The relatively small cut on his wrist likely would have killed him, much less what he’d done to his implant arm and his throat. Either one of those injuries would have killed him in minutes.

Together, they would have killed him in seconds.

Then again, he would have already died when he fell off the wall.

Lucky for him, he wasn’t human.

As it was, he probably looked like a horror movie monster right now, with his face cut from his temple to his jaw and down his throat, his mutilated arm and hand, the hole in his side, and another long slice from the razor wire down his thigh, past his knee, to his calf. His face didn’t swell like a human’s would have, but he struggled to see past the blood that ran from under his hairline and into his left eye.

He knew the blood would stop eventually.

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

He reminded himself he’d survived worse.

Well, he was pretty sure he’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.

He was now maybe twenty feet from the Cauldron wall.

He looked out over the field to the left of where he hid.

Bizarrely, he found he recognized it.

It was the last thing he thought before he passed out cold.