and something metallic and fresh assaulted her nostrils.
She made an effort not to be sick as she stepped on bullet-sized rat shit that blanketed the ground. She shivered at the thought that she had actually considered hiding out in this rat-infested part of town. I would’ve woken up a skeleton.
The cavalcade of giant rodents led her deeper into warehouse row. The weight of the ammunition in her pack combined with her muscle aches and intense dislike of rats heightened her already tense nerves.
Someone screamed, smacking fear into Poe. Taking a deep gulp of air, she ran toward the shouting without heeding the rat tail, snout, and bodies she squished.
“Please let the screaming come from rats getting stepped on,” she prayed to her patron saints, Bruce, Ali, and Xena.
An assembly of rats was sniffing around a rusty blue warehouse. They appeared angry for being shut out of the fun inside. When she got close enough she heard the sounds of objects or possibly bodies getting hurled against metal walls.
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“Please, don’t do this,” a woman’s raspy voice begged from inside, her crying pitiful. Please let Sainvire and Joseph be safe, prayed Poe.
The sliding metal door wouldn’t budge. It was locked from within. Desperate for a way in, Poe ran around the compound in search of a window. She wasted no time climbing a rickety pile of scrap metal and moldy wood beams to reach a tiny window twelve feet off the ground. Twice she nearly toppled from the unstable mound of debris but stabilized herself by holding onto corrugated grooves of the warehouse walls for support. She didn’t lose a second shattering the opaque glass with the butt of her Kalashnikov until it was shard-free enough to crawl through.
Poe fell onto a pile of crates, not caring if her legs broke. She rolled to the ground and prepared to join the fight.
The weak light inside the warehouse made Poe pause until her eyes warmed up to the dimness. When they finally adjusted, she saw corpses with their eyes wide open, crumpled on the sticky floor littered with Scrabble tiles, playing cards, and Monopoly money.
“Poe!” a woman hoarsely said with relief.
“Samantha?” Poe asked, confused. The nurse she’d slugged for patching up her dog sat on the lap of an extremely ancient vampire with brown walrus teeth.
His nicotine-stained hand was worming its way to Sam’s crotch.
Three other vamps just as old smoking Cubano cigars and holding up cards turned their creaky heads her way. An undead in a burgundy tuxedo was sucking dry the neck of his win. With a burp that made his fellow rat packs chuckle, he flung the drained body against the steel walls. Crooked fangs dripping, the dead turned his attention to Poe with a smug look on his face. “And what do we have here?”
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Samantha, quivering, was completely naked with the exception of a pair of yellow Chuck Taylor Converse shoes. Poe noticed similarly unclad cattle and humans standing behind each poker player. “What the heck is going on?” she asked. “What kind of meeting is this?”
“Ah, another fresh vein,” a rather rotund dead commented. He looked as though he’d just inhaled twenty Wimpy burgers. “This is our lucky year. There ought to be more vampire wars. We’ll have more exciting morsels to ante.”
“Ante? You’re using humans as gambling chips?”
Poe asked with incredulity.
The whole table chortled.
“It’s not funny, fuckers!”
“Please, the language,” the more waifish of the four protested. “This is a gentleman’s game designed to distract from the boredom of living forever. And you dare bother us?”
Poe bit her lower lip in contemplation. She answered, “Yeah. I guess I’m here to eke something out.”
From her wrist, she slid a throwing knife slick with garlic oil between her fingers. In the bat of an eyelid, she hurled the four-inch Bo-Kri into the air. It squared the skinny vamp in the left eyeball. The shit really hit the fan then.
“Samantha, duck!” Poe yelled, letting the Kalashnikov dangle to her side. She summoned all hopes of accuracy to avoid striking cattle or the woman. The moment the blonde in her mid-thirties dove for the crap-encrusted floor, Poe took her first shot at the psycho-perv, catching him dead center in the heart.
“Get down, cattle!” she screamed, frustrated that two of the Ancients had time to scramble free because 230
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she hadn’t taken the shot . I could kill those bovine piss-shots myself!
Poe tossed Samantha her extra gun and went in search of the two remaining vampires in the