Alex Van Helsing The Triumph of Death - By Jason Henderson Page 0,3

steward, who was bent over pulling plastic-wrapped sandwiches out of a cooler in the galley. He got nothing off the steward.

Alex rose from his seat and brushed past Hansen, stepping into the aisle. “Excuse me.”

“Want me to pause it?” Hansen asked.

Standing in the aisle next to the emergency exit, Alex didn’t answer. Maybe he was crazy, but he touched the wide gray cockpit door and felt the thin plastic bend slightly under his fingertips. If he understood the static in his brain at all—and really, he could not claim to understand it much—he could surely sense something evil through a plastic door.

He felt nothing.

Alex turned back and shrugged at Hansen as he reached the bulkhead seats.

“You okay?” Hansen asked, looking only a little concerned.

“Fine. Sorry. I think the steward is getting sandwiches.”

As Alex sat, Hansen got up and reached for his go package. “You know, I want a granola bar anyway.”

“Get me one, too.” Alex turned back to the screen. “Let’s see the next vamp—”

The cockpit door suddenly burst open and fell into shards.

A blurred, dark image ripped through the air, tearing into Hansen as it collided with him, sending the huge agent spinning end over end down the cabin. Alex saw Hansen’s legs hit a set of seats in the back and the man cartwheeled with his own weight, finally crashing into the rear bulkhead.

The blur in the cabin slowed and became what Alex already knew it was—a vampire, though not one that Alex had met. The vampire’s muscles strained against the borrowed Polidorium pilot’s uniform he wore, and Alex saw dingy gray hair under the vampire’s pilot cap as he whipped his head up and down the cabin, surveying his opponents.

Alex looked back at the cockpit and saw the mistake he’d made. The bent pieces of the door still stuck in its frame were about two inches thick and made of steel, with a thin plastic layer on top. When the door had opened once before, he had felt something briefly, some whiff of evil flowing from the cockpit. But otherwise the door was too thick to sense anything through, even when he touched it.

Alex could see another vampire, human-looking except for the alabaster skin and eyes that seemed to sparkle black, still sitting inside the cockpit at the controls of the plane.

“Get it under control!” came a roar from the cockpit.

Adrenaline rushed through Alex’s body, tingling in his fingers, and he felt the edge of panic. He was on a plane with vampires, and—and then the questions began.

The tingling in your chest is a temptation to lose control. Don’t listen to it. Ask the questions. What’s going on?

The pilot vampire now emerged from the cockpit and ran to the back, and Alex heard a scream as the steward, who was already stammering into a radio, suddenly went quiet.

Vampires, Alex thought.

What do you have?

Alex looked at Hansen’s go package, hanging where the agent had left it. For a moment he stole a glance back at the crumpled form of Hansen. In the go package, there would be all kinds of small weapons—a stake or two, some glass holy water grenades, and probably a gun. The gun would be useless on the plane, thought Alex, and anyway he had never used one. His own package—in the overhead compartment—never had a gun. But it would have something else good for close quarters, and he hoped Hansen’s package would as well.

Alex jumped for the go package and grabbed it, crouching against the bulkhead. In an instant he was scrounging through the bag and found what he was looking for—an eighteen-inch, narrow, crossbow-like weapon, completely encased in heavy composite plastic and loaded with a cartridge of silver-threaded hawthorn wood bolts. A Polibow.

Alex heard a gasp farther back, in the galley, and looked beyond Hansen’s body. The vampire dressed as the pilot had not killed the steward after all—he was hauling him forward, his arm wrapped around the steward’s neck and shoulders.

“You!” the vampire in the pilot uniform called, pointing at Alex. The steward came under his own power, his legs moving rapidly to keep up with the muscular vampire.

Alex didn’t waste any time with the Polibow. He reached in and grabbed a glass grenade, feeling the slosh of holy water inside, and threw it. The glass ball landed perfectly, with a heavy crunch, smacking the vampire on the head. It knocked his cap off as water flew in tinkles of glass, making the vampire’s flesh sizzle. The vampire bared his teeth, but