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.The jet of flame reached halfway across the space, and the assembled vampires were pummeled by a heavy, hot shockwave full of shrapnel and debris.For a moment Two wondered if they were going to be incinerated, but the heat began to dissipate, the flames dying down and receding into the hall.Two found herself looking for Tori, but the entire front of the room was filled with black smoke, and it was impossible to see whether the other woman had survived.Then a silhouette appeared, and in another moment Tori burst out from the smoke, coughing and stumbling toward them.“Fire extinguishers!” she gasped, and pointed toward a yellow metal cabinet near one of the garage doors.“Get fire extinguishers! The hallway’s burning up!”Chapter 25AftermathVanessa’s ears were ringing, and for what seemed a lengthy period of time, she was unable to do anything more than ponder just how inaccurate that turn of phrase was.The noise wasn’t anything like a ringing.It was a piercing, high-pitched shriek that seemed to drive through her skull and into her brain.The noise made it hard to think, and so she tried instead to focus on the other sensations her body was providing.Her eyes were closed, and she didn’t feel quite ready to open them, but she could tell that she was lying face down on a hard surface.There was grit pressing against her cheek and her lungs were burning again, like they had in the days immediately following the attack on the cathedral.As an experiment, she tried wiggling her toes.Those still worked, so she moved on to her fingers and felt them move as well.That pleased her; non-functioning digits were never a great sign.Now if she could only get the not-ringing-but-shrieking in her ears to stop.She felt someone touch her back, and then words were making their way through the shrieking noise, muffled and indistinct, like a conversation half heard through thick glass.After a few moments more, the sounds began to come together.“Captain, wake up!”I’m not the Captain, Vanessa thought.You want the indestructible chick with the bad attitude.Then she remembered that she was a captain now.She had been made one just before Charles had died.When had that been? She could remember the funeral service, but not whether it had been weeks ago, or months.Everything seemed very confused.The voice spoke again, still urgent, and this time the words seemed to be coming from someplace much closer.“OK, Captain.I guess I’m dragging you.”She felt someone rolling her over from belly to back and then felt hands under her armpits.The grit on the floor that had been pressing into her face now began to slip down the back of her pants, the sensation far from comfortable.It was this, as much as anything else, that finally forced Vanessa to open her eyes.They took a moment to focus, but then she saw that she was being hauled backward by a young man – he looked familiar – whose hair was twisted into wild, disheveled tangles.His face was covered in scorch marks.“Don’t I know you?” she asked, or thought she asked, but the words must not have come out right because when the man looked down at her, it was with an expression of pure confusion.“What, Captain?”“I know you,” Vanessa tried again, this time a statement, because now she was sure.The pieces of her mind seemed to be slipping back into place in great chunks, now, and in a moment more she was able to summon his name up from the black depths of her memory.“Jackson,” she said, and then, “Private, what the hell is going on? What are you doing?”“I’m dragging you down the fucking hall to keep you from being swarmed by fucking vampires,” Jackson growled between gasps of exertion.“Ma’am.”“What are you talking …” she began, and then she remembered all of it, the images coming to her so suddenly that they seemed almost to replace her vision.The barricades, yes; she had been preparing to toss the grenade and then lead the rush into the smoke when all of a sudden a tremendous ball of fire had come rolling toward them.“Private, let me go.Let me go right now!”Vanessa could feel her strength returning, and with it her sense of self.The otherworldly confusion was dissipating, taking with it the shrieking sound in her ears, and she was tired of feeling chunks of concrete trying to shove their way down the crack of her ass.“They’re going to be here any minute!” Jackson said.“Yes, and we’ll move a lot faster if we’re both on our fucking feet, so let me go.That’s an order, Private!”“All right.Yes, ma’am,” Jackson said, and he took his hands away from her armpits.Vanessa raised her right arm and Jackson took her hand, hauling her to her feet.Once there, she swayed and fell sideways into him.Jackson caught her as best he could, and Vanessa could feel his hand cupping her right breast.For a moment, she had an absurd flashback to the time in her fifteenth year when she and a fellow cadet had spent perhaps twenty furious, sweaty minutes together in a broom closet before being discovered by a Sergeant who’d made them run laps for the next three hours.She regained her balance laughing.“Not the best time to cop a feel, Private,” she said.“That is the single last thing on my mind right now,” Jackson told her, removing his hand.Vanessa nodded.“How long was I out?”“Not long,” Jackson said.“A big chunk of something must’ve hit you in the back of the head, because your whole neck and back are covered in blood.I crawled over to you once it seemed like the flames had died down.”“Where are the bats?”“Coming.Some guys from the Medic’s room can still fight.They pushed forward and engaged, but the barricade’s blown to shit and now all three elevators are open again.Bats are just pouring out of them.Our guys won’t hold the line long, and I had to get you out of there.”Vanessa ran her hands over her face, trying to collect her thoughts.“Shit, I lost the grenade.I … what happened to the others?”“Most of them are dead,” Jackson said, his expression grim.“A couple more might just be unconscious.Anyone who was still awake is fighting.”“Did you see Carrie?”“Ma’am, I don’t even know who that is.”“God damn it.” Vanessa looked back toward the elevators, but the smoke was now much worse than before.She couldn’t see anything.“Jackson, this is bad.We can’t hold this level, now, and they won’t be able to hold the staircase either.The bats are going to hit level two.I have to get down to the Emperor’s quarters.”“What about the others?” Jackson asked.“They’ll either fall back or get overrun.Trust me, they’ll figure that out on their own.”“Captain, I don’t … what do I do?”“Get to the Command Center before the bats do.We’ll be regrouping there and will need all hands to hold the fort.My job … listen I don’t have time to tell you why, but I have to get to the Emperor.I don’t have a choice.”Vanessa heard someone scream not far away, the kind of sound that she knew meant another body had been added to the count.She hoped it was a vampire, feared it was one of her soldiers, and understood that she would never know the truth.She could hear running footsteps moving toward them.If they belonged to the enemy, Vanessa didn’t want to be caught out in the open.She clapped Jackson on the shoulder and said, “Time to fall back.Let’s go, Private.”* * *She parted ways with Jackson at the entrance to the Emperor’s quarters, a single, unassuming steel door that opened into a hallway unlike any other in their headquarters.Lined with exquisitely-worked teak and mahogany panels – themselves carved and split into intricate designs that reflected the Children’s Incan origins – it also boasted a stunning amount of inlay work, crafted from gold and turquoise and mother of pearl
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