"He must be in there," I said, gagging on every other word as I was forced to breathe in the rancid stench.
Elyssa squeaked and went rigid. Her hand tightened on my wrist so hard I expected to hear the bones crunch. I followed her gaze. Bodies littered the floor. Flies buzzed around the corpses. They appeared black and oily to my blue-tinged night vision which made the gruesome scene all the worse. My heartbeat sped up. My face felt hot from fear and outrage at the slaughter this represented. Even with the decay, I could tell some of the bodies were those of teenagers and the elderly. Many appeared to be dressed in rags, possibly homeless when they were alive.
"They're all dead," I said in a hoarse whisper.
A grunt echoed. One of the bodies jerked upright and turned our way, its sunken eye cavities staring blindly in our direction. I almost crapped myself. The sound of shuffling bodies echoed in the chamber and I realized that had been the scraping noise I'd heard earlier. More corpses jerked upright, their heads swiveling toward me.
Elyssa's grip tightened another notch. "Not quite." She stared at me in alarm. "Are you still masking your heartbeat?"
"I think I let that slip when I saw the dead bodies."
"Oh, God." Elyssa spun back the way we'd entered. "We've got to get out of here. We've got to run. Now!" Her voice was a whisper, but the alarm in it supercharged my growing fear.
The animated corpses jerked like broken puppets to their feet all the while making horrible gurgling and wheezing noises that could only emanate from rotting vocal cords.
We spun and raced back through the maze.
"Zombies?" I said as we navigated the winding path.
"Vamplings," Elyssa said. "These idiot vampires have been trying to turn humans into vampires but they're too young or they don't know how."
"But they look dead."
"They're mostly dead, all right. The human side of those people died when the turning failed, leaving the monster side completely in charge. Now they're just empty mindless shells that crave blood. Think zombie meets vampire and that's a vampling. From the looks of them, they haven't been fed in weeks."
I tried desperately to cover up my thudding heart, unable to scrape together enough presence of mind to do so. Angry shouts echoed from ahead. Several people were arguing about something. No, not just people. Vampires. They were coming this way. We screeched to a halt.
Elyssa's eyes widened with panic. Mine felt like they were bugging out of my head.
"Maybe we should just fight the dead ones," I said. "They look rotten enough to punch through."
"You don't understand," Elyssa said. "With the human side of them gone, they have no sense of self-preservation or self-limiting beliefs. The worst part is, they're relentless. They'll never stop coming unless they're a pile of bloody gore." She scanned our surroundings. "We've got to hide until the vampires go back upstairs."
"Someone intentionally blew out the keypad," said a female voice from up ahead. "Maximus said if anyone came down here for a sip of the good stuff, he'd gut them and suspend our privileges for a month."
"Why do we have to be on guard duty, Felicia?" a male voice whined. "It's new moon."
"Shut up, Mortimer," said the female, presumably Felicia. "You'll get the vamplings riled up."
"Good lord, they stink something fierce," Mortimer said. "We need to talk to Maximus about some Lysol."
"Shut up, Mortimer," said another male.
Another guy piled on. "Mortimer, you're a whiny little bitch."
Elyssa stopped me and held up six fingers. My heart raced even faster. I thought back to the fight in the alley. The vampires hadn't been as strong as I was on their own, but they were strong together. We looked for a hiding place, a niche, anything. A guttural scream gurgled through the chamber. I turned to see the vamplings shambling toward us at a horrific clip, their eyes focused on the only thing in existence that mattered to them: food.
Elyssa pulled her swords. I followed suit.
The vampires raced around the corner and skidded to a stop. Glowing red embers burned in their eye sockets as they stared at us, then at the vamplings coming up behind us.
"We've got warm-bloods," shouted the largest of the vampires.
"Call Maximus, Mortimer," said Felicia, aka, the geek chick.
The young boy, the very same one who'd helped kidnap my father, nodded. "I'm on it." He raced back toward the stairs.
Felicia flashed a wicked smile. "Give yourselves up and we'll call the vamplings off."
I pulled out the walkie-talkie and clicked the button in the emergency pattern I'd arranged with Stacey. I heard static, but that was it. We were too deep for the signal to get out.
The first vampling, formerly a young man with a backwards ball cap on, reached Elyssa. She spun and hacked. Its head rolled off but the body didn't fall. I swept my rapier across its legs. The sword wasn't sharp enough to slice the bone, but the sheer brute force in my swing crunched through them. The body flopped with the sickening noise of maggot-riddled flesh smacking a sidewalk.
The quickest of the creatures came for us. We hacked at arms and legs, but I could tell it wouldn't be enough. There were too many of them. The path behind us where the vampires stood narrowed, making it impossible to skirt around them. The path widened and split around several coffins in the center, joining again on the other side before turning sharply and back toward the wide-open area with the tombs. Right now, the path was jammed with rotting vamplings.
"This is better than a movie," said the large vampire. "I want some action."
"Just shut up and let the vamplings do the work," Felicia said.
Elyssa was a whirlwind of silvery swords, making chop-suey of anything near her. The image of a shadowy figure, a flash of silver raced through my mind. Had Elyssa been the one to kill the moggy that night? Was she my mysterious savior?
I didn't have time to think about it. One of the rotted creatures, dressed in a filthy yellow dress, came from my side. It opened rotted jaws wide to reveal a maw filled with jagged teeth and blackened fangs. Maggots writhed in one of the empty eye sockets and in the green pocked-marked flesh.
I ducked as the creature lunged. It crashed into a vampling that had circled around one of the coffins in the center. I lunged upward, dropping my sword so I could push them away from me. They sailed through the air in either direction, making splatting noises when they hit the walls, some ten feet away. I grabbed the sword in time to hack through another one. The sword blurred in a Z pattern, dissecting the vampling into harmless chunks. I tried to ignore the clothes, the eyes, anything that humanized these walking corpses so I wouldn't think about who they'd been before the vampires had turned them into these god-awful things. I didn't have the luxury of guilt.
They are not alive. They are not alive.
This was worse than cleaning out grease traps times a zillion.
Elyssa screamed. One of the creatures had leapt onto her back, locking its legs around her midsection. It sank its fangs into her right shoulder where it joined with the neck. Another went for her throat. The sword in her right hand clattered uselessly to the floor.
"No!" I shouted. I rammed one creature with my shoulder. It plowed into the vamplings behind it, knocking them down. I dropped the sword and grabbed the one on Elyssa's back by the head, tearing its fangs from her. The rotten flesh felt slimy and disgusting under my fingers. I jerked hard, ripping the head off and flung it with all my might at the nearest attacker. The projectile head crushed its chest, causing it to keel over backwards.
Elyssa staggered. Her black shirt went dark where blood soaked it. She lost her grip on her other sword. I jammed my sword into the sheath on my back, or rather, tried to and missed. It clattered to the floor. I ignored it and picked up Elyssa. The vampires stared hungrily at us, smelling the blood in the air. The vamplings gurgled with desire. The only place to go was further back into the crypt. I dodged around the coffins in the center, threading my way past several vamplings, thanking Coach Wise for all the football practice, and churned my legs as fast as I could. Gurgling howls of rage and hunger followed behind.
My hearing picked up the moist sounds of staggering vamplings giving chase. Unless the crypt had a back exit, there was no way to escape. I saw the lit tomb ahead and sprinted for it. A bolt and thick padlock held the door shut. At full strength I might be able to break it. But I was exhausted from the fight and slowed with every step.
I looked inside and saw the limp form of my dad chained to the wall. Guilt welled in my throat, and I prayed he wasn't dead. Crusted blood stained his neck. Someone whimpered. I looked behind him and saw a half-naked girl, filthy and frightened out of her wits. A single chain attached her ankle to the wall. Blood stained the metal cuff where it had chafed her ankle raw.
"Help me," she said. "Please, God, you have to let me out of here."
I stared at her. "What the hell?"
Elyssa groaned. Her head lolled. I looked back at Dad and the girl again and cursed in frustration.
"I'll come back," I told the girl.
"Don't go!"
I shook my head. "You'll be safer in here, believe me."
"Please come back," she screeched as I ran deeper into the crypt.
Guilt punched me in the stomach but I had no choice. They'd be safe, locked away in that stone building. Trapped, but safe. I had to recuperate. I had to make sure Elyssa was okay.
It soon became obvious that the crypt had been carved from a natural cavern. It widened to about fifty yards across with stalagmites jutting from the floor and making footing treacherous. The sounds of dripping water echoed ahead. I skidded to a stop at the edge of an underground lake. Stalactites hung from the cave roof, some coming so low as to almost touch the water. Beyond the lake was nothing but gray. I strained my eyes, thinking perhaps I couldn't see across the water. Then I realized I was staring at the back of the cave. We'd reached the end. I wondered if the vamplings could swim and quickly realized it wouldn't matter. They probably didn't need to breathe, so they'd just wade in after us and pull us under.