Heaven Will Fall (Gravitium Book 1), page 16
The gun kicked in his hand. She didn’t see a muzzle flash as two more mercs fell over, blood gushing from through-and-through wounds.
This seemed like his wheelhouse. Weres and fangs unsettled him. Humans weren’t much of a match for an adjudicator, no matter how well-trained. Sometimes she was surprised by how young Anselm looked. However, the biggest shock came when that youth faded into a mask. He relaxed and did what he was probably best at.
Couldn’t be that many senior adjudicators his age. If he was the only one, he was something special.
At least, she assumed that. She liked to think of herself as something special, too.
Speaking of special. That screech vampires released when they were in the mood for killing split the air. Although she knew who it belonged to, it sent a chill down her spine. The other vamps weren’t in a position to take on anything vicious like her friend from the bar. He’d recovered from the poisoning after a day, and he descended on the mercs before they reacted. Throats were ripped out, but he didn’t feed on any of them.
He was there to kill. He moved through the humans as if they stood still, his hands and teeth tearing through them.
Anselm stopped shooting, but he kept the dead merc between him and the vamp. The fight didn’t last long. The mercs only managed a couple of shots before he was on them, and each had a second to react before they were killed. The vamp wasn’t left unscathed. However, there’d be plenty of blood for him to feed on and heal for what came next.
After the fight was over, the adjudicator rolled from his cover. She spotted a few dents in his armor as he caught his breath. The vamp did the same, although his process involved sucking the blood of the mercs he’d left alive.
They didn’t live long. He drained them of their last drops before standing and wiping his mouth with a kerchief he’d pulled from his jacket.
He stopped mid-step when he realized Anselm’s weapon was pointed at his chest.
“All that slurping will have been wasted on the deadwood I plug you with if you don’t explain what the fuck you’re doing here.” Anselm’s voice was as calm as ever. Maybe that was what gave the vamp pause after it had walked through a dozen armed, well-trained mercs. One injured human shouldn’t have been an issue, but he stopped anyway.
It wasn’t like he owed the adjudicator.
“Watch your hands with that weapon.” The vampire continued cleaning his mouth. He’d been messy with his meal. “You’ll hurt yourself.”
“Hurt you a hell of a lot more before I’m done. Vamps and mercs are down. Time for us to have a chat.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
He didn’t feel as confident as he sounded. With the adrenaline filtering from his system, the aches and pains of a full day of fighting monsters and humans rained down on him. He wasn’t sure he could pull the trigger, but his training held. His grip on the pistol was firm without a hint of a tremor. His expression was as dead as he could make it. He fought back a yawn.
The vampire paused and considered him. Anselm wondered what it was like to see the world that way, with humans moving in slow motion around them. It was a terrifying prospect. Yet the fang had likely heard stories about what adjudicators could do. He watched for a flinch, any sign he could take the troublesome human the same way he had the others.
Anselm prayed he could hold his form while the vampire scrutinized. The slightest hint of weakness would trigger his predator instinct, and he would pounce. Whether Anselm could twitch his forefinger faster than a well-fed fang could pounce would be put to the test.
The bluff held. The vamp smirked and shook his head. “I’m glad to find you both alive. I can see how you survived this long, but neither of you will survive much longer without my help.”
“Did Aldonado send you?” Clare scowled at Anselm. “Put the gun away. You think we can afford to have any more enemies?”
He held back a sigh. She was in charge of the operation. If she wanted to trust this vamp, he would have to follow her lead. He lowered his weapon and flicked the safety on. He didn’t have the energy to do much else.
“He’s in bad shape.” The vamp spoke in an odd, lilting accent. Certainly not a local. “Yes, the Elder sent me to find you. I didn’t know you had a bodyguard, but it was assumed. I was told to bring you back to New Houston and do harm to those who wished it on you or to those who would stop you from reaching your destination in Summerland.”
“I’m not going anywhere without him.”
“You know they’ll send another. Probably a less prickly one.”
“Don’t care. Where I go, he goes. I trust him. Anything else?” Clare crouched next to Anselm and deftly pushed his coat aside to inspect the damage. “You’re a fucking menace to yourself. You know that, Horst?”
He smirked and grunted when she pressed his ribs. They had to be broken by now. “I’m a massive pain in the ass. No reason why that shouldn’t apply to me as well as everyone else.”
Clare nodded and got out the first-aid kit. “You’re his progeny, right?” she asked the vamp.
“I am of Aldonado’s get, yes. My father was insistent you be brought back safely. If that includes this one, something can be arranged.”
The vamp crouched as well but froze when he almost impaled himself on the knife Anselm produced out of nowhere.
“Sorry.” Anselm retracted the weapon into his sleeve. “Force of habit. I have a lot of prejudices Clare is trying to educate out of me.”
“Play nice.” Clare pressed his ribs as a warning, eliciting a grunt from Anselm and a smirk from the vamp.
“I’m Roderick.” The vamp curiously inspected her usage of the bot’s scanner. “My friends call me Rody. Information came to us that others sought to do you harm and stop you from reaching the sky cities.”
“How the hell would the vampires know about that?” Clare frowned like she didn’t believe it.
“I’m young. I haven’t been read into the situation.” Rody rubbed his chin. A nervous tic, maybe. “I’ve only been a vampire for a year, and my father doesn’t trust me with the details. Only to get the job done.”
“I guess that’s why he didn’t come and do it himself.” Anselm breathed easier once the pain meds were injected. “Why would an elder vamp bother getting involved if he could send you?”
“Aldonado is aware of the situation. I am sure he would intercede the moment it was clear I did not have things well in hand.”
There was a hint of pride in his voice when he declared it. No reason for it, except maybe this was the first mission he’d been trusted with. Likely the first time he’d been left to work solo.
The fact he was allowed to work independently a day after he’d been coaxed into poisoning himself was probably due to his relationship with Clare. If they’d sent a random vampire to help them, it would’ve been killed with the rest.
The vampire straightened and frowned at them. “You can’t keep going like this. You need rest before we continue on.” He scanned the horizon. “I will protect you while you sleep.”
Anselm stiffened. Claire felt his reaction and held up a calming hand. “He’s right, and he’ll keep us safe,” she told him. “You’re a wreck. So am I. We need a real break.”
He wanted to argue, but his body screamed at him to take the advice. Neither of them would last much longer.
They found a spot off the side of the road. He watched Clare stretch out in the sand and held out until her breathing evened before he all but passed out beside her.
Anselm woke in the darkness. His senses kicked back in immediately as the important information arranged itself in his mind. Where he was. Who he was with. What they were doing.
The vampire, Rody, stood several feet away, watching impassively. He said nothing. Anselm blinked a few times and moved to wake Clare, but she was already stirring.
“We should get moving,” he told her softly.
She yawned and sat up. “Already?”
It had been several hours, at least. The edges of the horizon had started to lighten. He couldn’t believe he’d fallen asleep with a vampire standing guard, but they were both somehow still alive. A miracle no one in the sky city would ever believe.
Both he and Clare shook off the sleepiness quickly and were on their feet in minutes, ready to keep going.
Clare looked at the vampire. “Thank you,” she told him. She didn’t have to elaborate on what she’d thanked him for. “Also, not to be a downer or anything, but I don’t see any vehicle for you, and the sun’s coming up soon. You need to find a place to hunker down. Here’s my proposal. We help you find a spot to nest down for the day, but we need to keep moving. I’ll set you up with a device that will warn you if someone finds you, and you can use it to contact us on the move when you’re ready to move again.”
“Not to point out the obvious, but you blew up the only vehicles we had at our disposal.” Anselm stretched his aching spine. “If we’re going to find a place for Rody here to hole up for the day, we need to move it.”
He understood the tactical decision that went into blowing the vehicles up. People who wanted them dead were using them as cover, and a means to carry them off. She couldn’t allow that. It seemed his arrival on the ground spelled bad news for any vehicle he set foot in. It was time to change that shit.
“There are no safe places in the area.” Rody rubbed his chin. “The only houses within walking distance will be infested with feral mongrels. I’ll need to construct my own shelter. You can help me if you like.”
Clare shrugged. “Sure. What can we do?”
“Pull a car wreck over to that side of the road.”
Anselm wondered how they’d manage to do that until he remembered Clare had a myriad of tricks up her sleeve. Also in her pack, her pant legs, and her coat, but the where didn’t matter. She seemed willing to help the vamp, which meant he had to go along with it.
“Why does he get to call them mongrels, but I get a tongue-lashing if I refer to them as fangs?” Anselm asked.
“You’re not the only one with prejudices.” Clare placed a couple of devices at the bottom of the car and connected her batteries to them. Charging coils whined from inside, and the car was carefully lifted off the ground. If he hadn’t seen her setting it up, he might have thought she knew how to build a gravitium engine. Instead, she appeared to be engaging a rudimentary maglev lift. The fact that she could do it from scratch was beyond impressive.
More effort was required on their part to move the vehicle off the road. The vamp should have handled the heavy lifting. He could lift the whole damn thing with one hand, but instead, he’d chosen to dig a hole in the ground.
A substantial hole. He pushed hard and made it look like nothing more than disturbed earth from a car having been blown off the road and into the sand. He’d made a cozy hole for himself.
“This won’t be all that dignified, but I’d rather not be caught out in the open when the sun comes up.” Rody nodded and patted the spot where he wanted the car. “Not much I can do to keep the ground from looking disturbed. I hope people will only see the car on top and not bother looking beneath.”
“It’s survival,” Anselm muttered as he pushed the car. “Dignity shouldn’t interfere with the decision.”
Rody smirked and pointed at the ground for Clare to let the car down. The whirring stopped. What had once been a vehicle slumped to the dirt. It didn’t look like much, but he supposed it would help the vamp stay out of the sunlight.
Clare left him with the device that would function as both comm and alert. He didn’t know what help they could be to a vampire, but Clare had offered. She made the survival calls while they were on the ground.
After the hole was covered, they were done. They’d gotten lucky for a few hours, but they couldn’t stay here in the open in broad daylight. They had to get back to New Houston. He had intel on the various safehouses that had been made available for them to use, but it would take them a day’s march to get there.
What he wouldn’t do for a caff-injection. People talked about how they caused heart attacks, but he didn’t know if he could take another day on the trudge. They shared a quick meal of insta-bread and a caffeinated beverage before they walked on.
“I’m wondering if all this was worth it.”
He turned to Clare and saw that she’d stopped a few steps behind him. She leaned on her knees and breathed deeply, trying to keep herself upright.
“That’d be your call.” He approached her before taking her arm to help her walk. “I need to stick around until you decide it’s not. After that, I’ll have to go hunt for someone else who can fix our problem.”
“You won’t find anyone else who can fix the problem they’re dealing with up there.”
Anselm patted her shoulder. “In that case, it looks like I’m stuck down here for a while. They might cancel the mission and leave me here to rot. Guess I could find a job, a means of making a living.”
“You think they’d leave you behind because you couldn’t finish a job they sent you on?”
Anselm shrugged. “They’ve done a lot worse for a lot less. So they say, anyway. The rumor mill churns about those who pissed the wrong people off and found themselves on the foul end of a pair of jaguars. I was never sure if they meant the tanks or the animals. Neither sounds comforting.”
“Jaguars.” Clare chuckled and shook her head. “You know, they had a couple of those on the ground around here. The animal, not the tank. A fucking slumlord had them imported for his mansion down on the Blocks. Thought they would make a great party piece.”
“That sounds like a recipe for disaster.”
“It was. One day when he refused to chain them up, the cats ate two of his children, a mistress, and one of his business partners. The blow to his reputation was so severe that he ended up in a ditch three blocks away from his home with a belly full of motor oil and missing a selection of body parts, which told the cops he’d been tortured.”
Anselm smirked. “I’m guessing they never found the perpetrators.”
She shrugged. “He wasn’t a popular man. Plenty of enemies, all ready to pounce the moment he showed a sign of weakness.”
He supposed the barbaric reaction could be expected from people on the ground. Folks who dealt with fangs and furries daily didn’t raise an eyebrow when someone was tortured. Meanwhile, up in Summerland, a white-collar criminal was found to have torn the fingernails off the pleasure workers he’d employed, and news reports on the matter played for weeks.
The weirdest part was the pleasure workers had agreed to the torture. Signed documents and everything. They hadn’t pressed charges, but someone in their pleasure house recorded the whole thing and tried to blackmail him. It was enough to end his political career. He’d been forced to resign before the next election and sent to Angelica to retire in disgrace.
While Anselm had failed to reach a conviction in the matter, his ability to suss out the blackmailer got him a promotion to the seniors. If he made it to the top again, he hoped he would be promoted to chief adjudicator, which would let him work on his own with a small contingent of regular law enforcement, overseeing the major crimes of a district. He would be given blanket authority and jurisdiction over any investigation he wanted to launch on any matter he chose.
Small dreams, but one he knew he could use to make a difference. Maybe not as grand as what Clare was in for, but enough to make him feel his life was worthwhile. She had her family and saving whole cities from being wrecked. He had hunting down corrupt officials and helping her survive long enough to achieve greatness.
She wouldn’t understand this moment, this mission, was as high as his life would ever be in the massive equations that held humanity together after the Curtain fell. He was only a pawn, a soldier following orders.
She would never get that. He wasn’t sure he understood it himself.
Anselm shook his head and raised a hand to his face. The sun had come up a few hours ago, and the world burned again.
“We need to rest.” Clare patted his shoulder. “You’re about to collapse, and I don’t think we can take another full day in this heat.”
“Do you think there’s any alternative?”
“Yeah.” She nudged him and pointed ahead.
He’d missed something. In his exhaustion, she’d been talking, and he’d spaced out. Anselm blinked a few times and saw what she’d pointed at. A small campsite off the road, set up in the half-circle formed by a broken-down semi and two trailers attached to it.
“We should assume those feral vamps got to everything around here, but our new best friend Rody cleared out a substantial number of them. Besides, it’s early morning, and they would’ve gone to sleep by now. I say we risk it.”
Anselm nodded slowly. She made sense. Her brain was less fuzzy than his. He drew his weapon to make sure it was set to deadwood. That would kill humans as easily as vamps. Easier. Though it was expensive as hell to load up with. Most adjudicators didn’t carry the ammo. It wasn’t like they had to deal with vamps.
A quick sensor check told him no vamps were in the area. He wondered what had happened to the semi’s driver, but he was too tired to think about that.
“We should probably set up a watch for the day.” Anselm slipped the pack from his back and found a shady spot beneath the rig. “Don’t want anyone to creep up on us.”
“Agreed.” Clare settled next to him and plugged their coats into one of her batteries.
Anselm almost sighed at the cool refreshment of his jacket’s thermal regulator. He hadn’t noticed it was almost out of juice.
“I’ll take the first watch,” he whispered and leaned back. “I can stay up for a few more hours at least, thanks to that nap.”
“Sure.”
“Only a few hours. Then I’ll wake you.”
Clare leaned against his shoulder. “You do that.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Clare didn’t need much sleep. Never had. Despite the long day and night, she felt better after four hours. People didn’t understand how she could get so much work done in a day. They didn’t realize she only slept for a few hours a night.
