“This is the last of them,” Megan declared, her voice raw. Around fifteen cattle milled around waiting for the elevator to take them to the lobby.
“Good. I can set the clock to go off in ten minutes.”
“Do it, but we’re on our own. I’ve sent most of our people down with the cattle.” Her breath froze. “I hear shots below. I hope you’re wearing a vest, Morales.”
“Hell, I’m wearing ten-year-old underwear,” he said with a forced a laugh. “If that won’t give me luck then I don’t know what will.”
Desperate leeches forcibly shook and kicked the hard-to-awaken vampire residents, even resorting to setting fire to their arms with lighters until conscious.
Those who could crawl down the glass panels and the concrete walls did, looking like slugs. Flyers went straight for the rustlers.
The longer the cattle thieves stayed in the hotel, the more cretins crawled out of the woodwork.
Infuriated vampires eager to stop the cattle rustlers hollered in their toughest voices.
“You think you can steal from us?” one of them shouted, pissed at being burnt and forced from bed.
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“Don’t you know that you can’t go against the new order?
Rapid fire bounced around the hotel, poking holes in tarred glass walls.
Morales didn’t see the human gecko on the post directly above him and screamed like a girl when wrestled to the floor. Claude, the accountant, tried to pry the lizard-like foe from his friend, but the slime hurled him against the elevator door. Pushing the cattle out of the way, Megan aimed at the creature pinning on Morales’ chest. Before she could pull the trigger, a flying vampire with dried drool marks on the side of his mouth wrenched the gun away from her.
“Morales!” Megan squeaked as the vampire backhanded her.
The elevator dinged, and the doors opened.
“Anyone call for pizza?” a deep, throaty voice asked.
“Poe?” both Megan and Morales recited incredulously at the same time.
“Yup. Come to crash your party,” Poe said with a smile that fizzled as a halfdead rammed at her with his speed. Sidestepping the creature, Poe happily planted a booted foot on his back and put a bullet in his skull.
She followed with a left-handed chest shot to the undead that sat on Morales. Without missing a beat, Poe aimed for the flying beast that tackled Megan and shattered its face with the gun in her right hand.
“Hey, Poe,” Megan said weakly, rubbing her face.
After staring at each other for what seemed like the length of a Kurosawa epic, the Titian-haired woman broke eye contact. She reached in the elevator and pulled the stop button.
Behind Megan was an exodus of wobbly-kneed cattle that needed to be crammed in the elevator. Some 282
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had soiled themselves from all the shooting. “Hey, Megan.”
“Ladies, a suggestion. Talk later. We got eight minutes to clear outta here,” urged Morales. “So hussle!”
Sniper fire missed Morales by a thread.
“Holy pantalones! I almost lost my left hemisphere.”
“Give me your rifle,” Poe asked the temporary doctor and bomb maker. Morales slid the weapon across the floor. From behind a beam, Poe cocked the rifle in readiness and waited. “Do me a favor, Morales.
Stand up real quick then duck back down again.”
“With no helmet?” Morales protested, his sense of humor unsnuffed. “Alright, but you better not let them ding me. I have some underwear shopping to do after all this excitement.” A second after bobbing his head up, gunfire from two separate directions shattered the glass elevator walls.
“Got you now, misters.” Poe fired into the shadowy balcony two floors above them. She fired another two shots on the ninth floor balcony. The bodies of two snipers plummeted onto the lobby pond, the only indication that she’d hit them.
“That’s my Poe!” howled Morales, clapping her on the back.
Poe jumped into the waiting elevator with the cowering cattle and her friends. They squatted low in case more snipers lurked. Morales was the first to step foot from the elevator when it reached the lower lobby to check if the area was secure. He motioned for Megan and Poe to ease the cattle out.
Bodies decorated the lobby area. Some were Trench’s toked up leeches and vampires who had died in muddled confusion. Many of the dead, however, were rustlers.
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“Hurry! Get these people outta here!” Morales yelled. Two humans wearing overalls marched in to lend a hand. “Claude, keep the wires moving. We’re almost there.”
Busy coaxing an ornery blood cow who refused to budge, Poe failed to see a group of groggy vampires leaving