The corridor was packed with vamps, but only two fell in—the ones who had been trying to batter down the door, presumably. And got heavy extinguishers shoved into their stomachs for their trouble. “Hold these,” I told them, while Radu shoved them viciously toward the hall. They staggered backward and I pulled the peashooter. Which made a hell of a bigger bang with Magnum bullets in it.
Especially since I’d aimed for the extinguishers.
The cylinders exploded like white bombs, more spectacularly than I could have hoped for. Instantly, the entire corridor disappeared under the dense cloud of icy vapor, thick as a blizzard and bitterly cold. It boiled up everywhere, freezing the sweat in my hair and the rivulets coursing down my back, and frosting my eyelashes. But not before I glimpsed another bunch of vamps jumping down the elevator shaft.
It looks like the necromancer has lost his sense of humor, I thought.
And then somebody took my hand and jerked me in the opposite direction.
I knew we were moving lightning quick—Radu had grabbed Ray and me and he wasn’t wasting any time. But it suddenly didn’t feel that way. I’d had this happen occasionally in battle, when time seemed to invert itself, and the crazier everything got, the slower it seemed to go. I felt the ice crystals in my half-frozen hair hit my cheek softly as I turned my head. Saw a bunch of dark figures erupt out of the mist right behind us. Felt bullets tear through the air, so close one brushed the tiny hairs on my temple, a smooth, slick caress.
And then we hit the ramp and things sped up again.
I twisted out of Radu’s grip. “Go! Go!” And pushed him and Ray toward the swirl of color I couldn’t see because the corridor bent maybe ten yards behind me. And then I was slamming into position behind the wall.
Three vamps followed us around the corner, outpacing the rest by a large margin, like they just appeared out of thin air. My first bullets exploded the first one’s head before Radu and Ray could get away, spattering them with a fine spray of mist, blood and snow. And thankfully it was one of ours, because nobody started disintegrating. Then I took out the second, slammed the third’s chin back with the barrel while I reloaded, and then blew half his chest away in the blast.
It didn’t kill him, but it slowed him down enough that I was able to get a knife across his throat, sending the head lolling uselessly about on the neck. And him stumbling blindly back around the corner. And into three of his friends.
That would have been enough to make a human slow down or possibly rethink his approach altogether, but zombies don’t think. They only obey, like the ones in the elevator shaft had. And the necromancer was pissed.
But I didn’t have time to think about how screwed we were. I didn’t have time to think about anything except loading and firing, so fast my fingers were a blur, so fast I could barely aim. So fast that, despite the distance, some shots went wild, hitting shoulders or torsos or legs instead of heads. Which slowed them down but didn’t stop them because zombies.
And the necromancer wasn’t stupid; he was keeping the ones with guns in the back so I couldn’t steal any off the bodies. Not that I had the ammo for them if I did. A few shots and they’d be as worthless to me as rocks.
But there was one advantage, because it looked like Radu had been right. The necromancer couldn’t control more than two or three at a time on anything other than autopilot. At least, those were the numbers that kept rushing my position, using vampire speed against me, while the others just kept coming, pushing steadily forward, getting into position to be of use to the master.
And they were doing a damn good job of it.
In less than a minute, I had to fall back to the first bend in the ramp, shooting another rush as I went, which hit the fairly steep incline and rolled down toward me, one of them still moving and trying to attack even as I pulled back, tripping over spent shells and trying to reload while walking backward. I somehow made it without falling on my ass, but it didn’t help much. Because the ramp was shorter than the corridor, and every step they took meant that the next rush was faster.
The main group was going to be here any second, and that would be it, but I couldn’t worry about it now. All I could keep doing was loading and firing. And trying to breathe through a fog of gunpowder and CO2 and bloody mist, and trying to hear past shots echoing off the walls and the ringing in my ears, and trying to reload a gun that had grown so hot it was burning my fingers because the barrel wasn’t meant to take this kind of pressure.
And then, suddenly, that wasn’t a problem anymore.
I’d just shot two vamps through the head with one bullet, which had stopped that particular rush. But that piece of luck seemed to have bottomed out my supply. Because a vamp I hadn’t seen came out of nowhere and grabbed the gun, moving in a blur I didn’t understand until I looked up—
And shit.
One of Marlowe’s senior masters, one I’d nicknamed Frick because he and his partner, Frack, had never bothered to introduce themselves, must have been sent along with the newbies. Because he tore the gun from my hands in a blinding motion and then I guess he slammed me in the head with it. All I knew was that I hit the wall, pain flashing through my skull. And for a second, all I could see was the corridor whirling around me—
And an image of Frick turning my own gun on me.
I dove for the nearest cover—another zombie—even knowing I wouldn’t make it. Or that if I did, it wouldn’t
matter. Because a Magnum shell could tear through a couple of bodies, maybe more, especially at point-blank range, which is what this was—
Until the gun blew up in his face.
There was a blinding flash of light and a crack so loud that it even tore through the ringing in my ears, so loud that for a minute there I thought it had been a bullet. But the bullet had ended up lodged in the overheated, overstressed barrel, which it had solved by splitting it right down the middle.
Flaming fragments flew out everywhere, like a small bomb, setting the nearby vamps aflame. Frick was hit the worst, with what would have been flash burns on a human setting his whole arm alight. But he was a master, so he just kept coming, ripping the vamp I was using as a shield to pieces even as the flames spread up his torso and engulfed his head, those dead, burning eyes still staring into mine, while the maniac controlling them laughed and laughed—
And then someone was grabbing me around the waist—from behind—and time did the slo-mo thing again. Only I could hardly tell the difference, because it was Radu who had grabbed me, and he wasn’t wasting time. Frick lunged for us both, Radu jerked me violently backward, and something blue and shimmery reached out and caught us like a fist.
And then we were gone.
Chapter Twenty-eight