Despite badly needing a vacation after barely scraping by the last time around, and being thoroughly beat up by a roving gang of swinging werewolves, Bret Snow has been given yet another contract: this time, he’s supposed to take on a nest of vampires. But these aren’t the vampires he’s quite expecting: most of the ways to defeat them from lore seem not to work, they’re very fast, and… some of them are a well-educated geeks and nerds. But the scariest one is the mysterious boss of the vampires, an unspeaking monstrosity that seems immune to even the strongest weapons. This leads Bret to seek help in any direction he can find it.
But it doesn’t stop there, because it never does, and in this — the highest stakes Bret has faced so far — he comes face to face with the puppetmaster who is pulling all the strings: a deranged mad scientist he just can’t seem to shake off.
Chapter 1 – Nerdpyres
There’s nothing that ruins a day at the movies like the sudden yet inevitable appearance of a flock of vampires. It seems that the saying “when it rains, it pours” also applies to hordes of monsters: after fighting our way through an alien-induced zombie horde, a zombie-worshiping cult, and werewolves, it only made sense that something would hit us the moment the general public relaxed for a half second. My name is Bret Snow, and my job is to kill these things so the government can focus on covering them up.
It seems the vampires got the idea in their heads that I might be hunting them, so when my lady-friends and I hit the recently re-opened mall for a movie and a chance to spend some of our hard-earned government contract, the punks descended in force. We came out of the theater, over sized popcorn still in hand, to a semi-circle of… nerds. But with fangs.
“You have to be kidding me,” Andi said.
She’s been with me since the very beginning, right after the outbreak of zombies started. Blond, blue-eyed, and built for the role of leading lady, she and I understood one another on a different level than the rest of my recruits. There is an advantage to having spent so much time on the run before we got our bearings and started fighting back. Her disbelief stemmed from the gathering of losers before us, each sneering with their vampire-fangs showing.
It sort of makes sense, though, for there to be nerds who are also vampires. My original day job was programming, and I ran into a lot of these types who might as well have been vampires without the sex appeal. Before us today stood a dozen guys running the entire list of nerd tropes from start to end: the buck-tooth guy with glasses and suspenders, his fangs only slightly longer than his rabbit teeth; the can’t decide if he’s punk, nerd, or goth with dyed red hair and a knit beanie; the fat guy with a lazy eye and a penchant for online misogyny. Okay, I guessed that last part. But you get the drift. It was like the line-up for a fighting game, if the fights were a turn-based slap tournament and the prize was soda and puffy cheese snacks.
“I think the pen and paper convention is down closer to the piano store, guys,” Callie said. Callie also joined up fairly early: shorter and younger than Andi, with dyed black hair, she’d become something of a logistics person in the outfit.
“We hear you’re all looking for us,” one of them said. He actually had a cape on, which I guess made him their leader.
“I was actually looking for a trash can,” I said. I held up my popcorn container. “Did you happen to see one on your way in?”
Under normal circumstances getting caught out in the open on a day off by the monster I was hired to hunt would scare me. But I just couldn’t take these guys seriously. It was a miracle they managed to get another former-person to bite them and turn them into a vampire to start with. Nothing about this group seemed intimidating, and that might have been my first mistake of the day. My second was tossing the popcorn at the caped vampire-nerd, business side his way so the popcorn itself reached him before the paper bag did. His annoyed face switched to a flinch before it occurred to him that even as a mortal, popcorn was harmless.
The next thing I knew he was on top of me and I was on the ground. That son-of-a-bitch was fast, faster than anything I’d dealt with before. I don’t think he knew what to do after knocking me over, as for a long moment he simply sat on my chest and glared down at me, as though he wasn’t expecting to be in that situation. Because of that hesitation he didn’t get a chance to use his brief advantage. Andi did a perfect, artful, beautiful spinning heel kick that connected with his temple and sent him sprawling backward. It also caused all hell to break loose as the other eleven guys moved in to jump us, just as fast as their boss.
Nothing inspires fear quite like being pummeled by a small army of fists you can’t even see coming. Every single one of them wanted to kick my ass in particular, and for a brief moment that’s exactly what was happening. But somehow in the shuffle one of them managed to hit another, who retaliated, and the retribution didn’t stop there. Bruised and bloodier than I’d like to admit, Callie and Andi helped pull me away from the blurry pile of fighting nerd vampires. They moved too fast to see exactly what was happening but their pained shrieks told me it wasn’t fun for any of them.
“We should get the hell out of here,” Andi said.
“They’re getting away you fools!” Cape yelled. But it was lost on his feuding buddies as memories of bad dice rolls and stolen last pizza slices were avenged on the semi-sticky movie theater carpet.
“Go,” I said, ushering the women toward the back hall. “I’ve got an idea.”
“What?” Andi grabbed my wrist. “Come with us, Bret.”
“Shh, I got this, trust me.”
As she ran down the back hall toward the exit, I turned to Cape and stood my ground, puffing up my shoulders and sneering at him. He leaped over the crowd to attack me, and that’s when my fighting advantage took over. Speed would never be an advantage for me, but understanding his mindset would be. Cape hadn’t been in many real fights, if any, and even if he had, I’d had alien technology download a metric fuck-ton of fighting moves into my brain on more than one occasion. My advantage would be knowing where he would be before his speed kicked in.
“HADOKEN!” I yelled, bringing my fist up to where I anticipated Cape to put his jaw.
The combination of my foresight and his incredible speed brought my fist against his chin with incredible force that I didn’t anticipate properly. For a brief moment I felt like my fist tried to stop a runaway freight train and then my nerves really got the message across as pain shot through my body like a jolt of electricity. My eyes watered and I realized that at least half the bones in my arm and hand were now broken in a very serious way. It had the added bonus of not doing any damage at all to my opponent, who stood over me as I fell back gripping my right hand and blubbering.
“Idiot,” he said.
I wanted to agree, but the pain was too severe.
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