were left alone to produce a regular supply of meat and fresh produce for the city cattle. The price of autonomy was to side with the Council if ever the new order was threatened.
The stalwart Council had also bused a delegation of ancient guards who looked intractable and impossible to hurt. The eternally extended yellow teeth and the line of inky drool on the side of the mouth were fearsome enough to scare off potential enemies.
But even more alarming than the Ancients’ yellow walrus teeth were another round of infant vampires crawling out of every grate and vent to add to the carnage. They worked like a circus act, tossing each other at the nearest halfdead, human, and vampire like psychotic apes. At least they didn’t discriminate.
Poe followed Sainvire with her eyes, willing him to be unharmed. She watched him slash a vampire from shoulder to hip and skewer a particularly nasty 334
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baby with his other hand. Three babies dropped on him at once and tried to gouge out his eyes, making him easy prey for lurking ex-LAPD officers bearing bulletproof vests, tazers, and guns.
A few feet from Sainvire was Joseph, gleefully kicking and stabbing vampires with garlic oil-soaked stakes. From the look of things, Joseph had bullet holes on his shoulder and stomach area that hadn’t yet fused.
He wasn’t as quick a healer as Sainvire. But he was still grinning. Nothing, it seemed, could keep the vampire from showing his pearly whites.
“Mom. Look after that loco grinner. He reminds me of my brother,” Poe prayed as her nose rested on a windowpane, fogging it up. “And look after Sainvire.
He has good intentions.”
You’re needed on the roof, a voice impatiently said.
The cattle who’d woken up impatiently awaited the diesel locomotive to pull out of the station, away from the fighting. Poe pried herself from the window and the human cow she had squeezed between. The only thing she heard from them were sighs of relief.
“What am I, stupid?” she told the voice.
“You know,” she addressed the cattle. “It’s okay for you to tell me off Scarface- style for parking on your body.” It occurred to her then that she could be the only person alive to think Pacino horribly overacted in the film.
Poe walked the length of the train a step at a time, searching for Megan and Morales. She sidled against anxious cattle scrambling for seats and vampire guards yelling orders to keep the aisles clear. The little girl sitting between female cattle waved at her as she passed by. She survived the fall back there!
“You okay?” Poe asked awkwardly, having never dealt with a child in a while.
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The girl in potato sack with large wary eyes and a dirty face nodded but did not speak. Poe smiled shyly and continued with her search for a familiar face. She found them in the third car standing in a queue to use the toilet. Poe’s eyes blinked rapidly. Megan and Morales whispered briskly with Perla and Maple. The older women were armed for war.
Instinctively Poe tightened her grip on a Calico 9mm one of the white bandana guards had handed her on Megan’s order. The funny looking piece, not much longer than a standard issue gun, held up to 100
rounds. Except for the hard recoil action, the gun was perfectly workable.
“Poe! Glad to see you safe,” said Perla, rocking G.I. Joe pajamas and a protective vest. She was the first to approach Poe and give her a big hug. Maple followed. It was so unreal, especially amidst the cattle cries and the combat outside.
“I think you’ve just jinxed me,” Poe coughed.
“Now I know I’m gonna eat it for sure.”
A noticeably uneasy Morales peeked out the window to watch the battle and briefly waved at her.
“Seriously, what’s the plan? The train’s barely moving,” Poe asked, pondering what warranted all the hugging.
Apropos, the train lurched forward, throwing Poe halfway down the aisle and banging her left funny bone on the metal seat bars. Before she could get her bearings, the train pitched backward and hurled her toward the toilet. She screamed, “No!”
As the train pulled at a snail pace away from the platform, gunshots sprayed the train. Enemy dead clung to the side of the trains like barnacles. Sainvire’s chaperones appeared, spraying holy water on the windows and waving lethal sabers slicked with garlic oil at the vampire foes trying to break in. Some scraped 336
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the vamp barnacle away with bullets and clubs hanging from broken