Killing Dracula

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by [[[AnActualCrow]]]
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I remember my first time seeing the vampyre. I was running security for a meeting in Beijing's shared Foundation/GOC building. Some negotiation regarding anomalous metals. It was an inch taller than me and wore a suit too thin and fitting to hide any sort of armor. It only gave me half a glance as it stepped through the door. Even in the sweltering heat, it wore maroon gloves. Smiling softly, letting the tension in that room slide off it, the beast looked less and less human and more like an image, like a human in a perfume ad or a sculpture made of marble. It had the appearance of flesh without it's psychology -- a sense of unshakability that any creature that falls ill and loses sleep and must not be abandoned cannot possess. In its eyes, every person in that room was merely decoration, a rock one kicks down the street as they walk. That beast was born to be an Overseer, if it was ever born at all.

It's commonly believed that the vampyre takes the form of a human or a bat. This, while plausible, is ultimately misleading. The vampyre takes the form of whatever creature it drinks, such that it may better blend in with the population of its prey. We think about vampyres that feast on people because they are the most threatening to us. Our target -- the Overseer -- was once such a creature. Youthful, powerful, it leveraged its position to feed on an immaculate selection of humans.

It must be longing for that now, damned thing. We've been stalking it for months, cutting off every lifeline, upending every hideout. God willing, this is the last one.

I'm eating fish with the other Nightwalkers. Grilled salmon. Verne cooks them near to perfection and Austen keeps making bad jokes that I'm starting to think came out of a book. "What's a vampyre's least favorite fish? //Gar//-lic! Why did the vampyre get hit by a car? It didn't use the //cross//-walk!" I can't tell if they're starting to grow on me or driving me mad. Shelley thinks they're a nice change of pace. She's too nice like that. If they were a change of pace, they'd be about anything else. But if I told her that, she'd say I'm too bitter.

I move the food around my plate with a knife, partitioning it so that every forkful is exactly the same. We'd expected the Foundation to stand their ground. Instead, the vampyre has faced us alone, retreating further and further into this quiet corner of the Earth. Now, our intelligence says the beast is in a small, one-story house out here in Sicily. We don't know anything else. Any drone that could deep-scan the place for subterranean floors would be flying too low to go unnoticed. We're assuming there is a subterranean section: unknown size, unknown depth, unknown layout. No external security, which could mean just about anything.

Surely, we're being led into a trap. And yet -- I find myself staring at a frame of footage from Verne's visor. It was taken three or four weeks ago, back in Kazakhstan. A lot of the frame is covered by the muzzle flash on Verne's gun, but you can see the beast on the left side, the flash reflected in its eyes.

It's scared. It has a goat's skull and a pig's snout, but that expression can't be anything but fear.

----

Dawn. A quick breakfast of fried eggs on toast and everyone is getting ready. Night vision, thermals, flashbangs, first-aid, door ram, plates and plates and redundant plates of armor. It never shoots back, but we wear them as if it will. I don't know how effective armor is against the things the beast //does// use against us. All I know is that we're alive and Dickens, Kafka, Joyce, Melville, and Borges aren't. We can't rely on killing it with gunfire, so we pack submachine guns. Light, fast, loaded with incendiary rounds. Austen has the vampyre killer. It's slung over her back, a single nylon strap escaping the grey tarp covering the device.

I pray before we leave, mostly to the five we've lost. I've been becoming more agnostic lately.

We approach the house without incident. The curtains are drawn and the door is locked. It shudders with each strike of the ram, breaking open on the third. Flashbang. Silence. We file in. There are a couple cushioned chairs. A modest kitchen, a round table with a chunk of quartz. There's dust in the air, but things have clearly been swept. It's hard to imagine the beast tidying up, reading a book, hanging that forest painting on the wall.

"Look out for booby traps" Austen says. She opens the door and there's a staircase going down. //The subterranean//. We prop the door open with a chair in case it tries to shut us in.

The walls underground look just like the ones in the kitchen, closed blinds replaced with weak, bare light bulbs. We descend single-file, walking sideways down stairs that are too tall, too narrow, too thin. I'm first. As we approach the bottom step, I can see something on the floor wading in its own soft shadows. A metal ball, evenly holed and studded.

"Is that a 184-clone?" Shelley asks. We all stop. [[[SCP-184]]] had always been too dangerous to be useful. The Foundation admitted so themselves. "They should have been destroyed after the Kyoto Conference. I ran intelligence to //make sure// they were destroyed."

"Well, clearly..." Verne and I say. But she's right. They should have been destroyed. The Foundation had shared their attempts to neuter the anomaly's effects, like turning a virus into a vaccine. Every duplicate still made labyrinths that grew as one tried to escape them or impassable indoor expanses or furniture that exploded and caught fire and broke down into toxic gas as it oxidized. It would have revolutionized facility construction if only they could get it under control.

"So they did get it right." Verne says.

"No. Every inside source we have says they didn't. They also say the last clone was destroyed two years ago." Shelley says. We thought we were so clever propping open that door. When we leave, if we leave, how many more rooms will be between that door and the outside world?

"So then we're all trapped? Us and Overseer Two." Austen says what we've been thinking. For a moment, the only sound is a light bulb humming below us.

"We don't know yet if our intelligence is correct." I say, "What we do know is that the vampyre is down here and it's probably not skulking around somewhere we can't survive. We stay cautious -- we stay focused -- and we will make it out." I try to sound confident, the way one does when they know someone is watching over them. I've been becoming more agnostic lately. I keep going down the steps. The team follows.

I'm at the bottom step. The sole of my boot touches the floor just before my whole body is swept off it. One claw covers my visor. The other forces me around the corner, away from the team. Away from the light. I can't get a shot in while I'm being knocked to the ground. Gunfire covers the radio chatter in my ears. My night vision is calibrating. Still calibrating. The beast comes into picture as it bites down on my shoulder. I scream. The silhouettes of my team turn the corner, Austen reaching for the vampire killer on her back. Shelley and Verne fire, but the beast's fangs only leave my shoulder when Austen's hand reaches into the device. Shelley and Verne fire. For a sweet moment, we might be able to kill it here. But the beast turns, bolting away in a spray of burning bullets.

Dust and smoke mingle in the air. Austen is the last one to lose the tension in her shoulders, the vampire killer eager in her arms. I can't see the skin beneath her gloves, but I know her trigger hand is pruned like she spent too long in a hot tub

The team fans around me. First-aid. "Was that the Overseer?" Those fangs went deep. Leave the gun. All I can do is throw flashbangs left-handed. What the hell blood was he drinking? Austen has the vampyre killer under her arm, ready to fire on anything that so much as taps her shoulder. How could I have been distracted?

A rat scurries in the next room and three guns point at it. We start moving, clearing room after room after room. Wine cellar to bathroom to garage to attic, every room has the appearance of a real, lived-in space without any sort of cohesion. Windows open to the backs of bookshelves. The cups on a kitchen shelf are all full of water. There's a bedroom with a toaster on the nightstand. My shoulder burns, and I wonder if the beast drank away part of me.

The deeper we go, the less air is circulating, the more we can smell the rot. We keep findings packets of ground meat, torn open and devoured raw. Verne, the group pescetarian, looks away when we find a refrigerated room full of dead pigs, bleeding into buckets on the floor.

A burst of gunfire. The beast slams Verne into a painting. Glass shards bounce off his helmet and he dives to the floor. We shoot, splitting shards on the beast's cloak into smaller pieces. It bears its teeth at Verne, feels the fire digging into its hide. It drops to all fours. Its bolts away, its cloak and loose, snarling mass both tattered.

We continue down another path, a hallway with windows that expose nothing but insulation and wiring. We file into a dining room lit only by blacklight. The beast hits Verne again. Glass cups spray across the floor as it pounces. Fangs bared, wounds exposed. I throw my flashbang at it. The grenade explodes between the beast's jaw and its shoulder. Austen doesn't hesitate readying the vampyre killer. Its already yelping, scrambling over Verne's body. Even after it's run off, I can smell burning underneath the rot.

Eventually, Verne gets up.

"We should turn around." When we're all okay, maybe we'll come back with a bomb and collapse that damn staircase. Until then, we're playing on the beast's terms.

Verne has a limp, but at least he isn't bleeding. We walk back slowly for him, retracing our steps through uncanny rooms. Our visors are supposed to help us navigate back, but their geolocation doesn't work within the impossible geometry. The space is changing. The bedroom with the toaster has been expanded from a twin to a California king. A bathroom with a single toilet and small shower now also has a bathtub. We can hear running and panting, but we never see its source.

I think back to that bottom step and the room with the cloned anomaly. How many new rooms will be between it and the outside world? What if the staircase is just a path to a new maze?

We're going the right way until we enter a room we've never seen before. It's some kind of basement, long and wide with a short ceiling. There's old paint on the walls and the two mismatched couches joined together in a corner. There's a pool table with no balls or pockets and a dartboard with dozens of darts stuck into it. There's an old TV and half a dozen exits.

"Which way're we thinking?" Shelley asks. My shoulder is throbbing, rubbing against the grime in my torn clothing. I take a deep breath, but it's still throbbing faster, faster, faster. The pulses aren't matching my heart rate. The pulses aren't matching my heart.

The beast barrels into Shelley, refusing to stop when she shoots it. It's face is burnt and cut, it's cloak falling off in chunks as it claws the gun out of her hand. It feels like watching Borges die again. Like watching those claws dig into his chest.

I want to save Shelley -- jump on top of the beast and yank its crusty horsehair with my one good arm, but that would mean diving into the line of fire. Instead I stand and watch it try and get a claw under her helmet. It's trying to pull off her neck cover.

I don't have another flashbang. No one had any left to give to me. I stand and watch.

Austen drops her gun mid-spray. A runaway bullet hits the ceiling as the weapon falls to the floor. She swings the vampyre killer around her body. She's got it under her armpit. The beast knows, turning towards her with all manner of fangs bared. She reaches under the tarp and it leaps. Leaps like a creature scared it'll die for all the things it's done. Leaps like we can kill it.

But we aren't killing it. Austen's eyes meet mine as her head hits the ground. Her hand falls out of the vampyre killer. I run over, dive over, try and shove a hand onto the device. Austen is trying to protect her face. Kafka's face had been filleted when we found him, every drop of blood licked clean. Next time we found it, the vampyre had his smile.

I'm down on the ground, scrambling around for the device. There's too much weight on my bleeding shoulder, but my other arm goes under the tarp. Going and going until my elbow has almost disappeared. The beast swipes at Austen a final time. It's mouth opens. Melville's arm had shattered in its jaws.

The only thing I can hear is my own breathing. I grab a handle deep in the machine and turn it, but I can't find the leverage to yank the cord. Shelley runs to me, ribs clutched, gasping. Grasping that single nylon strap. She yanks the whole device. I hold on for our lives.

It activates.

I can't hear my breathing. Everything is blue. Then sky blue. Then Carolina blue. Blues so precise you lose track of what they're coloring. And then--

I inhale. There's no dust in the air. There's no dust on the floor or the walls or our clothes. I touch my forehead and there's no sweat. The scabs on Verne's chin are perfectly open, too-fresh skin breathing in the immaculate air. Shelley's eyebrows are gone.

"Poe?" Shelley nudges me with her boot, makes sure I can still move. I look at her. I look at everyone. We are bruised and bleeding and beaten. But beyond us, there is only the hum of a light bulb and the loose smell of saltpeter.

Dracula is dead.
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[[=image morningcabin.png]]

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> **Filename:** dawn.png
> **Name:** Flying at dawn
> **Author:** [https://openverse.org/image/collection?source=flickr&creator=Infomastern Infomastern]
> **License:** CC BY-SA 2.0
> **Source Link:** https://openverse.org/image/b785bd6e-1b8d-4239-9e2d-97983ddf1b04?q=dawn
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> **Filename:** morningcabin.png
> **Name:** Una casetta a Partanna
> **Author:** [https://openverse.org/image/collection?source=flickr&creator=Davide+Restivo Davide Restivo]
> **License:** CC BY-SA 2.0
> **Source Link:** https://openverse.org/image/981b958b-dfbd-4c76-b20f-77f87ab220d0?q=rural+sicily
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Killing Dracula

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