Chapter Thirty-Five
Four-twenty-seven trembled uncontrollably as he was led through the retirement sheds. He’d heard of them, but until now had never witnessed the sight for himself. He found himself wishing that his mechanical eyes could short out. The grip on his elbow got tighter and he glanced at his handler.
“Relax. You’re not retired yet,” said Riley. “The professor just wants you to realise how important it is that you don’t screw up. We need the targets found and if you find a trail and then lose it…” he waved a hand around the room, “then this will be your new home.”
The tracker whimpered as Riley secured him to a wall by chains at throat and wrist. “Got anything you want to say?”
Four-twenty-seven nodded rapidly.
“So, speak.”
“I won’t let you down, sir. I promise I’ll find them. I’ll do my best, sir.”
Riley smiled at him. “I know you will, but remember, if you don’t…” He slapped the tracker’s cheek and then turned on his heel and strode out of the room. The damn place gave him the creeps, and he wondered at the sense in keeping the tracker in there when he should be having some downtime in his pod.
His own steps were as reluctant as Four-twenty-seven’s as he approached the area where Mark had been sent. Maggie wanted him to oversee the feeding of them. Riley was all too aware of his destination if he didn’t find the fugitives. His fate would be as bad as the tracker’s.
*~*~*~*
The techs had frozen the tracker’s eyelids open so he didn’t even have the luxury of blinking to shut out the images. He watched with horror as the medical staff went about their daily business. Rows upon rows of vampires were strapped down, their abdomens slit open and pinned back, so the internal organs were clearly visible.
He’d been shackled near a pair of new retirees and for a brief moment their screams rent the air, until the surgeon’s knives whipped out their larynxes. To prevent them from continually opening their mouths in now silent screams, the medics roughly sutured their lips together. Their artificial eyes had been removed, leaving blank sockets, next to their remaining natural eyes. Soon they were like all the others. Rigid with pain as their organs were removed and transplanted in an almost continuous cycle.
*~*~*~*
Oh, sweet Jesus!
Riley had seen some unpleasant sights in his time with the Initiative, but the seeing Lilah ramming her thick black cock into Mark’s asshole was enough to make the bile rise in his throat. He glanced up at the closed circuit camera high on the wall to the right of him and knew that Maggie Walsh would be watching.
His eyes strayed back to the cell. Mark was tied to the wall in a similar fashion to how he’d just left the tracker, only he was held facing it. Lilah’s breasts pressed against Mark’s back as she thrust in and out, in and out. The cell was soundproof but Riley swore he could hear Mark’s grunts of pain as the assault caused his flesh to tear.
When Lilah threw her head back as she screamed her release, her tawny hair swirled about her shoulders. She’d been a fine looking woman before the techs had worked on her. Now she seemed ruled by the sex drive of the lower half of her body – revelling in the revulsion she engendered. She caught Riley’s presence out of the corner of her eye and turned towards him, her thick sated cock swaying as she walked to the front of the cell. Nodding towards the intercom button, she grinned.
Riley ignored her wish to speak and instead put his attention on his former colleague. Blood and semen leaked slowly down the back of his thighs and the only thing holding the man up was the shackles. Riley wondered if he was dead. As if she’d heard his thoughts, Lilah returned to her cellmate and unfastened his bindings. Mark slumped to the floor, but then wriggled feebly as he tried to move further away from his tormentor. Grabbing him by his hair, Lilah dragged him to the front of the cell and threw him down so that he was lying on his back, before she stared boldly at Riley.
He held her gaze for maybe a minute and then when she glanced down, he let his eyes follow and he gagged as he saw what had been done to Mark. The man had been castrated, and recently judging by the line of sutures still present.
Oh, fuck! If I don’t find those bastards I’m dead – worse than dead.
Mark hadn’t exactly been a friend to Riley, but they’d started at the Initiative at the same time; Riley volunteering from the Marines and Mark from the Air Force. Riley hadn’t worked in such close proximity to the vampires in the early days and he’d preferred it that way. He didn’t like the way they displayed almost human emotions at times.
The radio on his belt squawked into life and made Riley jump half a foot off the floor, much to Lilah’s amusement.
“Riley!” Maggie Walsh’s voice crackled out of the handset. “Get them fed and come to my office immediately!”
Unable to keep from casting a nervous glance at the camera, he nodded as he spoke, knowing that she was watching.
“Yes, Ma’am.”
With a shudder, he walked along the line, pressing the buttons that opened the hatch that enabled the occupants to reach the feeding bowls. All of the cells inhabitants scurried to their meals with the exception of one – Mark. Noticing that the man still lay where Lilah had left him, Riley pressed the intercom.
“Get your food, Mark. You know what’ll happen if you don’t feed.”
“Kill me. Please God, just kill me.”
Riley snatched his finger from the button and strode away, knowing that the more that Mark begged to be killed, the longer he’d be played with.
Has the place always been like this?
As he made his way to Maggie’s office, Riley cast his mind back over the early days of his employment within the Initiative. Back then it had been all about the eradication of demons, and then the technology had been developed to enable them to put the vampires to good use. And make no mistake, trackers and hunters were efficient tools. But he’d liked it best when he’d just captured the bastards and handed them over. Since Mark’s demise, his position had changed, and now he handled the top tracker in the facility, only this time the tracker wasn’t finding a lost person. It was tracking the former slayer, her brood and the renegade tracker that was Seventeen.
He’d hauled Seventeen’s ass back to the facility when it had managed to escape and remembered how he’d finally found it in a hay barn. He’d recommended retirement then, but for some reason Maggie had got a bee in her bonnet about it and they’d just worked on the vampire instead.
Maggie’s voice barked out the command to enter, after Riley rapped on the door. His balls constricted when he met her stare. The woman was clearly unhinged. He’d suspected it when he’d first seen the humans that she’d worked on, but now he had no doubt about her sanity at all.
Running wasn’t an option. All employees were fitted with tracking devices. All he could hope for was to capture the escapees and keep in her good books. No one left the Initiative. When you signed up, you signed up for life.
“I want you to get the helicopters in the air and scan for magical activity. Those bastards must be warded, and if they are our sensors should pick it up.”
“But,” said Riley cautiously, “we don’t know where to begin looking. It’s like trying to find a needle in a haystack.”
“Don’t give me excuses!” Maggie slammed her hands on the desk. “I want results! Do whatever it takes!”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“When I get my hands on them, I’ll make them wish they’d never been born! The boy can be operated on to become like Gunn. His brother can be turned and set to work as a tracker and as for the mother of these spawn…perhaps she’ll enjoy the lower half of her younger son! I need my life’s work to continue!”
Riley struggled to keep his breathing even. The woman was completely out of her head, but more dangerous because of it, not less so. Recapturing the tracker he could understand, but her behaviour towards the humans just wasn’t right.
“Go get some sleep and report to the transporters in six hours.”
“Transporters?” Riley frowned. Why did he need more than one when the bulk of the searching was going to be done by air?
“I’m giving you the use of half a dozen trackers who can work in the daytime.”
“Daytime? Is that even possible?”
“Will you stop repeating what I say?” Maggie rose from behind the desk and stalked towards Riley. “The coating isn’t very effective – it only lasts for a few hours and the way it reacts with their skin means they can’t heal, so when one is used up, stake it and use another. Bring the last one back here though; we need to do more research.”
Feeling queasier by the second, Riley nodded. He walked to his quarters but he knew that sleep would be impossible to find.
Since when do I feel sympathy for them? The voice in his head supplied the answer. Since you saw what happened to Mark. That will be you inside those cells soon.
“Oh, fuck.”
*~*~*~*
Riley stared at the trackers as they were loaded into the transporters. Alpha, Beta, Gamma and Delta rode in the second vehicle, while Epsilon and Zeta rode with him and Four-twenty-seven. Their appearance was enough to give even demons nightmares. The coating scarred their features so badly that it looked like their faces had melted. The nose of one had been completely eaten away, another couple had lost fingers, and Riley found himself very relieved that they were wearing jumpsuits and so any further damage was mercifully unseen. Four-twenty-seven had reacted so badly that Riley had clicked on the pleasure sensor three times before the tracker relaxed and stopped staring at them.
It seemed pointless to be driving around the country in what could be totally the wrong direction, but that’s the way Maggie wanted it and Riley was just happy to be out of her way.
The comms in his ear kept him in contact with the techs in the helicopters who were working a grid using the hotel the Carmichaels had escaped from as the starting point. The witch had yanked them out one at a time and with teleportation taking slightly longer the further the distance covered, the techs guessed that the fugitives were likely to be between fifty and a hundred miles away.
Lulled by the muted voices in his ear, and the movement of the vehicle, Riley allowed his eyes to close and dozed fitfully as the driver kept them on the move.
*~*~*~*
“What are you doing, Aunt Willow?” asked Craig, walking up behind the witch as she sat at the kitchen table.
“I’m redoing the wards. I need to freshen them every couple of days.” She turned to smile at him. “Could you pass me that pestle and mortar, please?”
“Sure.” He picked it up, his nose wrinkling at the unpleasant stench the bluish liquid in it gave out. “So…can anyone learn this stuff? Or has it got to be a woman?”
Remembering the magics that Giles had used years before, Willow chuckled softly. “No, it doesn’t have to be a woman, and yes, anyone can learn basic spells, but it’s a little more complicated than that for the bigger things.”
“Like teleportation?”
“Exactly. I can’t really put it into words,” said Willow as she poured some yellow seeds into the mortar and began to grind them into the liquid. “Teleportation isn’t something you can learn. I guess it’s a gift for embracing the magic.” She shrugged. “See, I can’t explain it. It just happens – one day you have no clue how to do it and abracadabra the next you can.”
“Awesome,” murmured Craig, eyes wide. “So what was it like, the first time you did it?”
“Terrifying! I did it by accident. I was sitting on a bus wishing that I was at home and then in the blink of an eye I was.”
“Uh…so what’s so bad about that?”
A thick grey oil was added to the mix and she stirred it as she grinned at Craig. “Well, I was home, but because I didn’t have co-ordinates or concentrate on exactly where I wanted to be, I ended up on the roof.”
“No way!”
“Yes, way!” Willow began to laugh once more. “That’s not the end of it. I began to slide down the roof and so in a bit of a panic I pictured a room in my head and I ended up in my bathroom with one foot down the toilet.”
Craig burst out laughing.
“It wasn’t funny! I ruined my favourite shoes and I’ve never left the toilet lid up since.”
She stood up, and looked at him seriously. “I’m ready to go with these wards, now.”
“Okay,” Craig said, nodding his head. “I’ll get out of your way.”
She grabbed the boy she thought of as a nephew and crushed him to her, only letting him go when he squirmed in her grasp.
Smiling weakly at her, he smoothed down his shirt. “So…I’ll see you later, I guess.”
“You will.”
Willow stared at the bowl for a while before picking it up and carrying it to the front door. Up to now, she had warded it only internally, but as the threat from the Initiative got greater with each passing day, she had decided to do them externally. For all intents and purposes the house would simply disappear from sight.
She glanced to the heavens, as always offering a little prayer to the Goddess to help her in her task, and then began reciting the spell.
*~*~*~*
“We’ve got something!” The yelled words had Riley sitting erect in his seat, heart pounding.
“What have you found?” Headquarters asked calmly.
“A peak of magical energy. It’s sixty-two point three miles away from the hotel.”
“That could be it,” Riley cut in to the transmission. “Send me co-ordinates now. Airborne? Which chopper’s the closest? See if you can get a visual.”
“That would be me, sir, Unit Three,” another voice crackled in Riley’s earpiece.
“How long will it take for us to get there?” Riley said to the driver of the transport. He’d get one of the other helicopters to pick them up if it would take too long.
“Approximately twenty minutes, sir.”
“Make it fifteen and you’ll get a bonus in your pay.”
“Will do my best, sir!”
Four-twenty-seven turned to Riley and eagerly waited instructions.
“Sorry, pal. It’s still light outside. I’ll have to take one of the others.”
The tracker slumped in his seat and wondered if not taking part in the capture would have the same consequences as failing.
Riley swivelled his seat around until it faced Zeta’s. He activated the tracker’s eyes, as the coated ones were routinely kept blind until needed. Their eyelids fell victim to the coating and so it was the only way to keep them rested.
Zeta’s mouth opened in a groan as his eyes activated and Riley grimaced at the scarred tongue it revealed.
“Can you speak?”
The tracker worked his jaw and swallowed a couple of times, before he said, “Yes, sir.”
Riley guessed that the lisp was due to the injury to his tongue.
“Good. Now concentrate. These are the scents I need you to track.”
Zeta took the scraps of cloth that had been impregnated with the target’s scent, and sniffed carefully at each one. When he was sure that he had them locked in, he handed the cloth back and began to tremble. The reward for a going on a hunt made the pain he suffered in the sun bearable. The reward was the only pleasurable thing in his existence and so he worked hard to make sure he achieved it.
*~*~*~*
Craig wandered outside for the first time in what felt like weeks. He’d been going stir-crazy in the house and thanked God that Willow had seen fit to extend the wards to include the grounds. He squinted up at the sky, shielding his eyes with his arm as a helicopter flew overhead. Raising a hand in a mock salute, Craig grinned at the thought that whoever it was up there, they could see neither him nor the house.
Willow had told him where the boundaries of the wards were, and he had patrolled them. The house looked blurry and indistinct even to him when he was at the outer reaches of the garden. He took a deep breath and turned to go back inside.
*~*~*~*
The car made it there in fourteen minutes. The driver, assured of his bonus, pulled up on the north side of their destination. Riley gave Four-twenty-seven a slight shock as a reprimand for growling as Zeta climbed out of the transporter.
“I know you want to hunt, but you’d burn up in a couple of strides.”
Zeta whimpered because he knew that although he wouldn’t combust, that the hunt would be painful. He’d been coated again, since a finger had turned to ash on the last training session, but the coating itself had claimed a toe, so he wasn’t sure which was the lesser of the two evils. A successful hunt brought the sweet injection of strong opiate drugs, and for a few blissful hours he’d be pain free.
Riley was surprised at just how fast Zeta was. The vampire covered the ground with long strides, heading for a clearing in the wooded landscape. To his astonishment, the vampire disappeared, only coming back into view when Riley passed the same spot. They were inside the warded zone.
A man of around twenty stared at them open mouthed before darting for the house, that Riley could now see.
“Don’t let him escape!” Riley urged Zeta, and the tracker hurled itself at the target, bringing him down with a thud that knocked the air out of the human.
Riley added his weight to the wildly thrashing captive and as he straddled the man’s legs, he announced over the comms, “One target acquired. Repeat one target acquired.”
A zap from a stun gun stilled the man’s struggles, and Riley fisted his hand in his hair, pulling the captive’s head up.
“Which one are you? Craig, I suppose, since you’re not on wheels.”
“I’ll kill you, you bastard,” Craig managed to croak, his limbs still refusing to obey him.
“Get him in the transporter,” Riley told Zeta. “We’ll get the others out and take the house.”
The tracker grabbed Craig’s ankle and dragged him towards the transporter, with Riley walking ahead. Zeta grinned, at the thought of his reward.
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Beta and banner by the amazing dawnofme
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