the abandoned mall, he ran over something—someone—he didn’t know.
“Shit, shit, shit,” he repeated.
Keeping his foot on the gas, his eyes shot to the rearview. No one was behind him, but would that change? How had the Brotherhood known to be there?
More tires leaving rubber on the road as he slammed on the brakes and wrenched the wheel to go around by the front of the stores. Another car—low-slung and fast—came at him, and they almost crashed. Both of them instinctively made the right decision, however, swerving in opposite directions—and then he was clear and so was the other driver.
The descent down the hill was the fastest he imagined the POS sedan had gone since it had left its assembly line, and he glanced down at the Fore-lesser manual on the passenger seat. But like that would give him another two hundred horses under the hood? Or explain how things had gone down so disastrously? He had called the gathering of lessers through the mental connection the book had told him he had with his subordinates. He had intended to get the slayers together and organized. Find out how many of them there were. Figure out what the resources were.
And then give his command.
As he got to the bottom of the rise, he didn’t know where he was going. Paranoia made him wonder if there was some kind of tracer on the car, but like a random Ford Taurus that he’d found at the side of the street downtown would have a GPS tracker on it? Tied to the Brothers? Impossible.
He went right just because he went right. And as he punched the accelerator and the anemic engine wheezed, a second car came toward him. As they passed, he looked up again into the rearview. That car took a left to ascend the hill.
More slayers to their “death,” such as it was.
Not at all how this was supposed to go. But at least, the further away he got, the more his adrenaline eased up and allowed him to think with better clarity. He had been the second to arrive. And then the other trucks and sedans and two motorcycles had rolled up on the parking area in front of the groundskeeping building. Men had gotten out of the vehicles, dismounted the Honda crotch rockets, and come over to him with expectation on their faces.
No, not men. Not anymore.
They had been reborn into the undead. A servant class that bled stink and had limited free will. An army cobbled together to kill vampires, led by an evil entity who was fucking insane.
Tonight was supposed to have been all of them coming together, meeting for the first time in person in most cases, a ragtag congregation of has-beens, never-was’s, and street-smart psychotics with anger issues. Mr. F, not a born leader, had tried to prepare some kind of speech beforehand, but what he’d come up with had been all platitudes, low on inspiration—and he had never gotten to it. Just as he had been about to address his soldiers, such as they were, a hail of bullets had fired up inside the building. Everybody had taken cover, and within moments after that—thirty seconds at the most—warning alarms had started screaming in his head, in his veins. And that was when the shadows had emerged from the tree line. Six of them. Seven of them.
The Black Dagger Brotherhood. And some of their fighters.
He had known exactly who they were.
More shooting at that point, not inside the groundskeeping building, but outside, in the parking lot, bullets ricocheting off of the quarter panels of cars and the hoods and bumpers of trucks. Mr. F had thrown himself flat on the ground, right behind the rear tires of this car he’d stolen. Shitting his pants, covering his head, he had panicked and shut down, his brain going on an ill-timed vacation.
So he had seen the explosion go off in slow motion. One of those flashy motorcycles had been parked by the right corner of the building, like its owner was precious about the bi-wheeled coffin dropper and worried some idiot would open a car door into its tailpipe or something. A stray bullet, one of dozens, found the gas tank. Or maybe it was more than one.
And it shouldn’t have exploded. Mr. F had seen the MythBusters episode when he’d been in one of his rehabs. But clearly there was something special in what the Brotherhood was shooting.
BOOM!
The force of the combustion had recalibrated the verticality on