Author's Preface
"Rich, where are you?!" Tom's voice barked through the comms.
Richard drove his blade cleanly through the throat of the third leech. The creature detonated into a cloud of hot, blinding ash.
He spun to shield Penny, who was still sitting dazed on the stone floor, staring blankly into the darkness.
"Penny! Penny!" Richard shouted.
She didn't respond.
Fucking hell, he thought, grabbing the webbing of her vest and hauling her to her feet.
Above them, ear-splitting screeches mingled with thunderous shotgun blasts, the noise reverberating through the cramped space.
"Tom, I'm below you!" Richard roared into his mic, parrying a gaunt arm that lunged out of the gloom. "Ah! Back, you bastards!"
"Rich... BANG! ...I'm coming down! BANG! ...Is Penny...?"
"Alive, but stunned!" Richard yelled over the chaos.
He sidestepped another set of claws and slashed across the stalker's torso.
"Penny, get up! Move!"
Penny blinked twice. The dull ache in her chest was finally beginning to subside.
Where was she? What was that noise? What the hell-
Then reality snapped back like a stretched rubber band.
Richard. Tom. Vampires. Fucking vampires.
She'd been standing there completely motionless, blinking vacantly while Richard fought for both their lives right in front of her. Shaking her head to clear the fog, she forced herself to move. Her survival instincts finally kicked in.
She reached down to her tactical vest, pulled out a UV grenade and tore the pin out with her teeth.
"Richard, get down!"
Richard threw himself sideways onto the damp flagstones just as the small metallic sphere sailed past his head. It emitted a frantic sequence of warning beeps before detonating with an ear-splitting whine.
An instant later, a blinding sphere of purple ultraviolet light erupted across the crypt.
The radiation scorched through the darkness, incinerating the surrounding leeches. They barely had time to screech before their bodies collapsed in flashes of heat, leaving clouds of drifting ash and scraps of scorched clothing to flutter through the haze.
The victory was short-lived.
A sudden crash echoed from the broken ceiling. Tom dropped heavily onto the crypt floor beside them, sweat, blood and grime streaking his pale face. His chest heaved as he clutched his empty shotgun.
He stared at the lingering purple glow, then at the smoking piles of ash, and finally at Richard hauling himself off the floor.
"Oh," Tom wheezed, wiping a smear of blood from his nose. "And here I thought you two needed help."
"We do," Richard said as more screeches echoed from above. "We need an out."
All three looked up towards the broken ceiling.
"Well, we can't go up," Tom said.
"No shit." Richard scanned the crypt, searching for another way out. In the far corner, a narrow passage disappeared into the gloom.
"Fuck's sake." He gestured towards it. "Right, UVs on."
"On," Penny confirmed.
"On," Tom echoed.
Richard switched on his own UV light, mounted beneath the barrel of his new RR45. The purple beam cut through the darkness, illuminating the narrow passage ahead.
He checked his watch.
4:45 a.m. Seventy-five minutes until sunrise.
"Okay," he said, raising his weapon. "Let's move."
---
They made their way down the passageway without speaking, the purple glow of their UV lights sliding over the ancient stonework.
"How long have we been in here?" Tom asked.
Richard checked his watch, its green display looking strangely out of place in the gloom.
" 4:59 a.m. Fifteen minutes."
"We should've come out by now, shouldn't we?" Penny asked.
"Yeah," Richard replied. "I mean, I know some early nineteenth-century monasteries had hidden routes in and out."
"Why would they?" Penny asked.
Richard kept his eyes on the passage ahead.
"Slavery still played a huge role in society back then, and not everyone agreed with it. Some religious communities helped people escape, using hidden passages and tunnels to move them without being spotted. I mean, who'd suspect a church of helping people break the law?"
"Not only that, it was a good way to sneak booze into the monasteries without raising suspicion," Tom added.
Richard glanced back at him. "You reckon the monks built secret tunnels to smuggle booze?"
Tom shrugged. "I reckon if you give a man a robe and tell him he can't drink, he'll find a way around it."
"Monks brewed their own beer, you idiot."
"Yeah, but did they brew enough?"
Richard couldn't help the small, breathless snort that escaped his nose, even as his boots splashed through the stale sludge covering the flags.
"You're an absolute idiot, Tom," Richard muttered under his breath, keeping the muzzle of his RR45 pointed steadily into the deep darkness ahead.
"I'm a realist, Rich," Tom whispered back, though his eyes darted nervously to the archways passing over their heads. "And right now, I'd take a pint of stale monk ale over a hive of hungry leeches any day."
"Focus," Richard said, his tone sharpening as the air grew distinctly colder.
The narrow stone corridor opened up slightly, the damp walls giving way to roughly carved brickwork. The purple glow of their shoulder-mounted UV lamps flickered across ancient wooden barrels rotting away in alcoves and rusted iron chains dangling from the ceiling.
Penny stepped closer to Richard's side, her sidearm held in a white-knuckled two-handed grip.
"So where does this tunnel actually go, Rich? If it's an escape route, it has to lead off the priory grounds, right?"
"In theory," Richard said, pausing at a fork in the passage. "Should run beneath Main Avenue and dump out near the old dock drainage culverts. If we can reach the culverts, we're five minutes from the Dodge."
He looked down at his watch again. 5:01 AM.
fifty-nine minutes until sunrise.
---
"There's something back here guys" Tom's voice.csme from behind Penny. They stopped to listen, there was nothing no snarls no grunts just wind making it way down the tunnel.
"My imagination gett-" then came a loud unmistakable splach from one of the puddles of water that had formed on the floor.
"Shit"
They sprinted out of the tunnel mouth, bursting through the shattered iron gates of a subterranean mortuary vault and into the biting cold of the open churchyard.
Spread out above them, framed by gargoyles and dead oak trees, the eastern sky was finally turning from pitch black to a pale, bruised violet. Thirty-five minutes to dawn.
"Shit!" Richard hissed.
They slammed together back-to-back in the center of the overgrown graveyard as shadows detached themselves from behind leaning headstones, crumbling arches, and the high stone walls surrounding them.
"Wait till they get close," Richard warned, his breath pluming in the freeze. "Penny, save your ammo as much as you can."
Penny gave a tight nod. She drew her own silver blade with her left hand, her knuckles white around her sidearm in her right.
Then the air seemed to drop another ten degrees.
From the shadow of a colossal, broken mausoleum, a large, grotesque vampire emerged. Its towering frame was horribly mangled and impossibly gaunt-its skin stretched so tight across its torso that every single blackened rib jutted out like a row of snapped bone needles. Yellowed claws scraped along the stone as it glided forward, its jaw unhinging to reveal rows of needle-thin fangs.
"Ah, food," the large, grotesque vampire snarled, its voice like grinding slate. "The Keeper has done well."
"Keeper?" Tom let out a dry, manic laugh. "We're so fucked."
Richard flicked a glance down at his watch: 5:25 AM.
Just thirty-five more minutes until the sun crested the horizon. But the snarls echoing from the dark around them made it abundantly clear the hive had no intention of waiting.
They surged forward simultaneously, catching Tom completely off guard. A gaunt fledgling slammed into his chest before he could raise his barrel, sending his shotgun flying across the wet grass to clatter against a tombstone yards away.
"Tom!" Richard shouted.
Richard brought up his RR45 and unloaded. Three quick, deafening reports shattered the cold air, each custom 7.7mm silver round striking home. Three vampires detonated in mid-air, spraying scalding ash across the leaning gravestones.
Before Richard could clear his sightlines, a massive, ice-cold hand clamped around his throat.
The Master Vampire hoisted him off his feet as if he weighed nothing. Richard thrashed, raising his silver blade, but the Master smashed his wrist aside and slammed him violently onto the rain-slick flags.
The breath exploded from Richard's lungs with a loud, desperate oomph, his vision flashing white as his head cracked against the stone.
A few feet away, Penny stood her ground. She raised her sidearm and fired twice, dropping two fledglings in rapid succession. But a third leech ducked under her aim, diving low and slamming straight into her midsection.
The force of the hit threw her backward over the lip of an open stonework stairway leading down into an ancient sunken vault.
"Rich!" Penny shrieked as her footing vanished.
She tumbled head over heels down the steep, mossy stone steps, locked in a chaotic roll with three screeching vampires right on top of her.
---
Tom spun, diving downward onto his belly in a frantic bid to dodge the oncoming leech. He hit the wet earth with a thick, muddy squelch, instantly trying to scramble away across the slick grass, but a split second later a heavy foot slammed down between his shoulder blades.
"Ahh!" Tom screamed as sharp, claw-like talons bit deep into his flesh, pinning him to the earth.
Richard forced his groggy head up off the flagstones just in time to see Tom pinned flat against the mud, helpless under the fledgling's weight.
Tearing his eyes away, Richard looked back up at the looming, gaunt silhouette of the Master Vampire stepping over him. With no time left to hesitate, Richard reached down to his tactical belt, unclipped his final UV grenade, and yanked the pin with a fierce jerk of his wrist.
The small metallic sphere immediately began to emit a rising, high-pitched tone as its detonation sequence primed.
"Tom! Eyes!" Richard bellowed over the screeching wind.
With everything he had left, Richard hurled the canister straight up into the dark canopy above. A fraction of a second before the device blew, he slammed his arm over his eyes and pressed his face into the wet stone.The grenade detonated.
---
A blinding sphere of violet light erupted above the graveyard, bathing the dead trees and crumbling mausoleums in an unnatural glow.
The vampires screamed.
The fledgling pinning Tom jerked violently as its flesh began to blister and blacken. Its claws tore free from Tom's back, and it staggered sideways, thrashing wildly before collapsing into a heap of smoking ash.
Tom rolled onto his side, clutching his chest and dragging in a desperate lungful of air.
"Fucking hell!" he gasped.
Richard barely heard him.
The Master Vampire had recoiled, one enormous arm raised across its face. Smoke curled from its exposed flesh, and the stench of burning meat filled the freezing air.
But it hadn't turned to ash.
Slowly, horribly, it lowered its arm.
Two yellow eyes fixed on Richard.
"Oh, you clever little bastard," it rasped.
The grenade's purple glow faded, plunging the graveyard back into darkness.
Richard scrambled backwards, blinking furiously as he tried to clear the spots dancing across his vision. His hand swept across the wet grass, searching desperately for his fallen sword.
"Where the fuck is it?" he muttered.
A few yards away, Tom staggered to his feet, one hand pressed against his injured back. He could barely see a bloody thing. Purple afterimages swam across his vision as he stumbled towards the tombstone where his shotgun had landed.
His boot struck something metallic.
He looked down, squinting.
A sword.
"Rich!" he shouted, bending to snatch it up.
The Master Vampire turned towards the sound.
Tom didn't wait to see what it would do. He hurled the sword towards Richard with all the strength he could muster.
"Catch!"
Richard heard the shout and threw himself sideways, one hand shooting out through the gloom.
His fingers closed around the hilt.
"Got it!"
"Good!" Tom yelled, turning back towards the tombstone. "Now, where the fuck's my shotgun?"
The Master advanced, its claws scraping against the stone.
Richard dragged himself upright, gripping the sword tightly. His vision was still blurred, his lungs ached, and every movement sent fresh pain through his battered body.
The Master smiled, revealing rows of needle-sharp teeth.
"Now," it growled, "I'm going to enjoy this."
"Get in line," Richard snarled, raising his blade.
Behind him, Tom continued fumbling through the wet grass, searching for his shotgun while the graveyard filled with the sound of approaching shrieks.They circled each other slowly, like two predators sizing each other up.
"The Keeper was right," the Master Vampire rasped.
Richard kept his blade raised, watching the creature's every movement. "About what?"
"You look just like him."
"Who?"
"He had no name. Only a title."
"Oh, yeah?" Richard replied, continuing the uneasy dance. "And what was this title?"
The Master Vampire threw back its head and laughed, a horrible, rasping sound that echoed between the gravestones.
"Doesn't matter. You'll be dead soon enough."
Richard shrugged.
"Fair enough."
Then he lunged.
Behind him, Tom's fingers finally closed around the butt of his shotgun. He hauled it from the wet grass and swung around towards Richard and the towering vampire, trying to make sense of the two figures circling in the gloom.
"Eh?"
A sudden movement caught his eye.
Another vampire launched itself from a nearby alcove, claws extended, heading straight for him.
Tom barely had time to bring the shotgun up.
BANG!
The silver shell struck the creature square in the chest. Its body burst apart in a violent cloud of ash before it even hit the ground.
"Fucking hell!" Tom yelled, pumping the shotgun. "Can't you lot queue up?"
---
The Master didn't flinch.
As Richard lunged, the thing slipped sideways with fluid, terrifying speed. Its gaunt, bone-ridged shoulder slammed straight into Richard's ribs with the force of a battering ram, throwing him off balance. Before he could recover, the Master swept its long, skeletal leg in a brutal arc, hooking Richard's ankle and sending him crashing face-first into the freezing mud.
"Rich!" Tom roared.
Tom turned from his pile of ash just in time to see the towering monster raise a massive, heavy boot right over Richard's spine.
Without thinking, Tom jammed a fresh silver shell into the breech and racked the slide with a deafening, mechanical clack-clack. He brought the barrel up, taking half a second to index dead center on the Master's back.
BOOM!
The heavy twelve-gauge slug hit the Master right between its shoulder blades. The blast didn't tear it apart a creature that massive and ancient didn't go down easy but the sheer kinetic force of the silver payload blew a smoking hole through its skin and sent the giant staggering forward, a guttural, unnatural roar ripping from its throat.
Richard dragged himself up through the sludge, spitting out blood and black grit. His vision swam, but his knuckles stayed white around the hilt of his sword.
"You missed the heart, Tom!" Richard spat, dragging a sleeve over his mouth as his ears rang violently.
"I was aiming for its bloody spine!" Tom yelled back, pumping the shotgun to clear the spent shell.
Behind him, three more fledglings vaulted over the low stone wall, their claws scraping against the wet granite of the headstones.
"And we've got company!" Tom barked, flicking his sightline between the incoming wave and the Master rising from the mud. "Get up, Rich! Get the fuck up!"
---
They stood side by side watching the amassing vampire hoard, three on one side three on the other, with the mammoth size of the Master in the middle.
"You know... this isn't as fun as it used to be" Tom joked clutching his side. "Either it's loosing it's appeal or, I'm getting fucking old"
Richard noticed the thick crimson stain quickly spreading across Tom's tee
"You're bleeding, Tom," Richard said.
"I know."
"Don't do anything stupid."
"Too late for that. I've followed you for half my life into shit like this, so the next step isn't stupid. It's tactical."
Tom suddenly charged.
"Tom!" Richard shouted, caught completely off guard.
The vampires hesitated. Even the Master seemed momentarily thrown as Tom barreled straight toward it, a heavy blade clutched white-knuckled in his fist.
He closed the distance before any of them could react.
Tom drove the blade deep into the creature's flank, then twisted viciously, tearing a ragged gouge of flesh free. The Master roared, staggering sideways as thick, black blood spilled across its exposed ribs.
For one brief, glorious second, Tom had the bastard.
Then the Master struck.
Tom went sailing backward, crashing past Richard with such terrifying force that his body seemed to fold under the momentum. He hit the soaked turf with a sickening crunch and landed flat on his back.
"Tom!"
Richard barely had time to turn.
Tom lay sprawled across the wet grass, his body twitching as his lungs fought for air. His shotgun lay uselessly several feet away in the mud.
The Master staggered, one clawed hand pressed tight against the gaping ruin in its side. Its face twisted in raw, black fury. The damage was severe; for the first time since the bloodbath began, the thing looked genuinely hurt.
Then its hollow gaze settled on Richard.
The creature straightened slowly, scraps of ruined flesh dangling from its flank. Its pitch-black eyes fixed on him with a look that felt disturbingly like recognition.
"I will see you again," it rasped, its voice scraping like iron on stone.
It tilted its head, studying Richard as though peering right through him at someone long dead.
"Vahm-peer Loh-vets."
Richard tightened his bleeding grip on his sword.
"What the fuck does that mean?"
The Master smiled, exposing a jagged row of yellowed, blood-stained teeth.
Then it turned and vanished into the darkness.
---
His watch beeped.
Richard looked down at the blood-caked screen. 5:49 a.m.
Ten minutes. That was all he'd needed. Just ten minutes.
"Rich!" Penny's voice crackled through his earpiece.
"Pen?"
"Yeah."
"Where are you?"
He didn't break eye contact with the six leeches perched in the stone arches above.
"Below... ow... I don't think-"
"Pen? Penny, hold on!"
Her voice dissolved into static.
"Penny!"
Above him, claws scraped against stone as the creatures readied their strike. Richard tightened his grip on his blood-slick blade, his knuckles white.
"Don't you fucking dare die on me," he growled.
Ten, minutes later, the sun broke over the graveyard wall, flooding the courtyard with brilliant, unforgiving light. The vampires shrieked as one. Smoke hissed off their flesh as they scrambled frantically back into the shade.
They didn't make it.
Sunlight caught them among the leaning headstones. Skin blistered, black char spread across gaunt torsos, and their screams cut short as they disintegrated into drifting ash.
Richard stood frozen, sword hanging at his side.
Ten minutes.
But the sun was up now, and he didn't give the burning monsters a second look.
"Penny!" he yelled, whirling toward the sunken stairs.
Silence.
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