“About half and half. Some had limbs like bears while others looked human. Save for a few bodies for the egg-heads, we burned all the corpses. The ones we didn’t burn still had to be restrained with steel because they didn’t always stay dead.”
“Adding to the zombie motif of this attack.”
Again, the man shook his head. “Nope. Crazier than that. That same night, a man showed up at our post. Started spouting off this nonsense about vampires.”
Rather than speak, the anchor just raised an eyebrow.
“Yeah, I had that expression as well. Then he started a fire in his hand. A gigantic ball of flame the size of my head. He just held it there, casually. I could
“Experimental technology?”
“Not like anything I’ve heard of. No, he wore a sharp, well-fitting suit. The only thing he carried was a thick book. It was honest-to-God magic.”
“Magic?” Unlike her comment about zombies, the disbelief was clear in her tone now.
“Some others saw it as well, but I don’t expect them to come forward. Scary stuff. He claimed he was special forces needing to extract a VIP stuck within the city, though no one I talked to could verify his identity.”
“You don’t believe he was a special forces?”
“Could be. Could be that no one I talked to had the clearance to know. Or the clearance to tell me. Either way, his papers checked out initially. So we let him in. Our orders were to keep things from escaping, mind you, not entering.”
“Did you allow him out of the city once he secured this VIP?”
“Never saw him again. Don’t know if he made it. Though there was a disturbance the next night in which no less than fifteen trained soldiers insisted that they were under attack by about three hundred of the vampires, only for the vampires to vanish into thin air. No body parts, no blood or gore.”
“That would have been the fourth night,” the anchor said. “That just leaves the fifth night?”
“I don’t have much to say about that. It was just a blindingly white light. Flooded over the outpost to the point where no one could see anything. When it faded, the city was gone. I learned more from the recordings that have been playing on various news stations. Our own cameras were too close and only display a white screen.”
As he said that, one of the clearer clips played. It showed the smoke rising from the city from afar. Clouds overhead literally parted to allow a bright white beam of light engulf the city. The time stamp on the video then skipped to the end, roughly thirty minutes later.
The only thing left was a crater.
Wayne shuddered. Roughly twenty-four hours. That was all the spare time he had had, just missing utter annihilation.
The Elysium Order was scary. Scary enough that he was almost considering dropping his current project.
As the television snapped back to the interview, Wayne shut it off. The anchor was just thanking Hicks–
Looking around the hotel room, Wayne frowned. Zoe slept on in the adjacent bed, but there was no sign of either of the vampires. The bathroom door was open and the light was off, so they weren’t in there.
Wayne noticed the notepad propped up against the side of the room’s telephone as he got out of bed.
The three lines were punctuated with an imprint of lips. Serena had put on lipstick just to kiss the paper. She had to have. At no other point had Wayne noticed lipstick on her.
Wayne shook the thought out of his mind. It didn’t matter either way. She could have her games. He was beyond content in ignoring them.
What did matter was that they had gone out. The Elysium Order would surely be scouring neighboring cities for any vampires that managed to escape their wrath.
At that moment, Wayne made a decision. They couldn’t stay in Detroit any longer. The moment the girls returned, he would head out, find a large van that could have its windows blacked out, and they would drive. They would drive as long as they needed.
Clear to the other side of the country if they had to.
Hello, thanks for reading.
Book six will continue as scheduled. No intermissions or interludes. Tune in next time for 006.001.
I hope you enjoyed our brief interlude to Lansing. I definitely enjoyed writing it. It was fun to take a break from the events surrounding Brakket and Hell. Wayne is actually one of my favorite characters despite his relative lack of prominence compared to the other main characters.
