the gold they’d pilfered off of skeletons and nearby loft units.
According to Goss, who had scoped the brownstone building for a week, six leeches patrolled the blood farm. After climbing the last rung, Poe hid as best she could on the ledge and waited for the signal.
Daytime raids were seldom in the favor of the one sneaking around, but it was either leeches during the daytime hours or vampires at night. She preferred to deal with her own kind.
She peeked inside a broken window and adjusted her eyes to the dim room within. Rows of mostly empty cots lined the walls. About half-dozen gaunt souls with unhealthy greenish hue slumped vacuously on thread-worn chairs. They were indifferent to others laying on stained beds connected to dextrose hoses, transferring their blood into plastic containers. One corpulent leech was busy crumbling dried marijuana leaves onto a torn page from the Book of Mormon, letting his partner do all the work. Every single finger was chocked with obnoxious diamond-encrusted horseshoe rings.
A particularly emaciated old man with a whoosh of thinning white hair sat pathetically on a bloodstained cot. He was having trouble inserting a needle in his vein, especially since a rock star-thin leech, high on glue, was screaming, “Old man, stick it in, or I will!”
The outburst only made the poor man shake even more, puncturing bruised flesh and bone rather than mangled veins. From the looks of him, they hadn’t given him his yearly stupor bite. Maybe he was too old.
Gritting her teeth hard, Poe protested under her breath, “The man should be sunning himself in Florida 31
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instead of giving his last blood reserve to seedy vampires.”
She had a fondness for older people, after all. She had seen Cocoon when she was twelve and couldn’t look back. The blood cattle reminded her of her own sweet grandparents. To see the elderly in such dismal conditions made her furious.
“Touch him and I’ll blow your head off,” Poe threatened in a whisper, screwing the silencer into the nozzle of her Walther PPK. She hadn’t salivated over killing a human quite like this before.
A flick of the wrist brought out a four-inch Faka knife from her sleeve. She deftly placed the spine of the knife between her right thumb and index finger in a pinch grip and kept her wrist stiff.
Poe thought of herself as disgustingly useless with lots of hang-ups and phobias but hardly any skills to boast of. However, there was one odd expertise she didn’t mind having. Whatever weapon she wielded seemed to find its mark.
“Dang, child,” said Sister Ann, who had been greatly confounded during a weapon rundown eight years ago. “You’ve got yourself a dead aim, and my Tennessean tutelage had piddly to do with it. I’ve questioned God daily since we found you why he left such an innocent lamb in a den of fiends. Now I know he didn’t leave you entirely without a skill.”
A scream reverberated from the floor below, momentarily obstructing the ranting of both the skinny leech with sparkling studs in his ears and the pathetic apologies of the old man. Chubby Toker paused, mid-lick of sealing his spliff. His white tongue and swampy teeth indicated that the man had given up brushing long ago.
With a deep breath, Poe snapped her left wrist and simultaneously fired the gun with her right. The blade 32
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trekked on with force, burying itself in the fat leech’s neck while the bullet caught the emaciated leech in the temple. Before he even clutched his neck, the thin man toppled onto the whimpering cattle while his partner fell, face down, onto his crumbled loco weed.
“Sometimes it’s hella great to be ambidextrous,”
she said under her breath.
Poe unsheathed a second gun and climbed in. She put the slim end of her gun to her lips, silencing the stunned human cattle as she ambled toward the door.
“Fuck,” she muttered with annoyance. She hadn’t seen the third leech sleeping on one of the cots and clutching an open canister of rubber cement until the old cattle pointed at him with a shaky finger.
Poe placed one of her guns on the floor and drew a six-inch jagged knife from her belt – the one she referred to as Rambo’s Own that was given to her by Sister Ann as a birthday present. Without flinching, she yanked the unconscious glue sniffer by his oily hair and sliced his neck from ear to ear until his gold chains slid one by one