-2-
I was amazed at how far and how fast I was able to make it, but of course shoving off from an excellent starter position doesn't not help. I was almost parallel to the ground and for a second it felt like I was flying, more like superman than Beatrice's version of flying, but damn it felt so awesome. I felt like a complete badass... at least until Beatrice quite easily stepped aside from the missile that was me and literally punched me right out of the air and directly into the ground.
"Bad Bob!" She snarled as she punched me down. Jaime staggered backward away from Beatrice and I thought just for a second that she was going to actually make a run for it. Stupid me.
I was no longer feeling badass, more concerned about the fact it was now difficult to breathe since Beatrice's punch had either caved in my chest or she had caught me right in the solar plexus.
I tried to stagger up, to move, do something, but Beatrice was already jumping on top of me with that manic look in her eye that she was going to fucking kick my ass. I'd forgotten just how fast Beatrice was, but even as she rained a flurry of blows down on me, blows that came at a speed that would cave in an ordinary person's skull, somehow my self-preservation instincts were now screaming at me and taking over operation of the body. To simplify: I found myself blocking every single one of Beatrice's blows. Well almost every single one. When I realized what I was doing, around the same time Beatrice realized, I could only stare at my hands in total awe. Beatrice, as confused as she was, was a creature of opportunity and popped me one, right in the nose and I felt something shatter even as blood spewed from my face.
"Damn. You went and got yourself an upgrade Bob, and you didn't even tell me."
Beatrice froze as Jaime shoved the barrel of the gun against the side of her head.
"Hit him again and I'll blow your fucking brains out."
Beatrice rolled her eyes and turned, one hand coming up to grab the gun--
Except Jaime was much faster than Beatrice or I had ever anticipated. Jaime pulled back the gun and turned as Beatrice reached, so fast she was just a blur to anyone watching. Jaime was just as fast and moved to match Beatrice as she swung and blocked and then-
BLAM! The gun blew a hole through Beatrice's hand as she grabbed the barrel in the wrong way.
Beatrice gasped and pulled her hand away, looking incredibly at her hand. Things like this just didn't happen to Beatrice, ever, especially not from someone like Jaime.
Jaime held onto the gun with both hands, a wild look in her eyes and I knew the adrenaline was hitting her hard right now along with a healthy dose of disbelief, awe and significant quantities of what-the-fuckedness. The shakes would hit her in a moment, but right now, she was riding high on the adrenaline and the fact that she had gotten the best of Beatrice.
"Try that again. Please."
I pulled myself to my feet, a little annoyed for all of the wrong reasons.
"Hear that sound? That's the sound of my thunder being stolen. Holy shit Jaime!"
Beatrice eyed Jaime deviously and then tried on a charming grin that was ruined by the eyepatch and the hand that was dripping blood onto the ground.
"Bob, you and I need to talk. Like right fucking now," Beatrice said, keeping her eye on Jaime.
"You're not taking him anywhere. You can talk right here."
Beatrice leaned her head to the road where twelve vampires were approaching cautiously, possibly because of Jaime's gun. None of them appeared to be armed.
"Sweetheart, you misunderstand. I wasn't asking."
Beatrice blurred. I felt her grab me around the waist and suddenly Jaime was receding rapidly into the distance as Beatrice carried me away into the woods. And as we all about flew away, the vampires ran at Jaime, ready to tear her to pieces.
Trees whipped by us as a fast pace, me vainly grabbing and missing any tree that I could possibly find. We only went about two hundred yards before Beatrice dumped me to the ground and swore in some foreign language, holding her hand up as she worked herself into a rage. Apparently even for a vampire like Beatrice there are limits to how far she could travel while carrying someone.
I bounced up to my feet and Beatrice knocked me back onto my ass with her injured hand. I gasped, coughing up blood this time, while Beatrice danced around in pain.
"CHINGA LA MADRE!" She swore and brought her hand up to her face, looking at me through the hole in her hand. "You see what you make me do to you Bobbykins?"
I caught my breath, my only thought to get back to Jaime before she got fucked up too much. I wondered for a moment if she had stood to fight or if she had tried to run after us into the trees and uncertainty of the dark trees.
"They're going to kill her!"
"Good!" Beatrice said. "She deserves it! Did you see what she did to me?" Beatrice poked a finger through the jagged hole in her hand and wiggled it. The squish of flesh and crunch of broken bones was almost too much to bear. I almost threw up just from hearing it, and clutched my own hand in response. I made a move to go around Beatrice and she stopped me with a look.
"I wouldn't worry about her too much. She's fast! What have you been feeding that girl?" Beatrice smiled then and warmed up. "How are you Bob? I've missed you lover."
"I'm... still alive," I said suspiciously. "Why am I still alive? You said that you were going to kill me."
"Yeah, but I heard that you were dead, so I figured you needed more time. I came to check in on you and kick your ass a teeny, tiny bit so you know I wasn't going soft on you. Sorry about your driver. I got caught up in the moment."
Goddamit, Paolo. I hadn't even given him a second thought beyond him being dead. I hoped it was the whole being in mortal danger that had made me so careless, but i was beginning to suspect that a certain amount of desensitivity was already occurring with me. Just like with Jaime, but on a much larger scale.
"Jaime's a lot cuter now that she's not covered in blood. We should have a threesome sometime." Beatrice held up her fingers in a V and waggled her tongue obscenely at me. "I bet she doesn't even shave."
"Yeah, no. That's not happening."
I broke away from Beatrice and started to walk back towards where we had left Jaime, somewhere beyond the trees. For a second I thought Beatrice was going to try to stop me, but she's apparently decided to torture me in different ways. I was more worried about Jaime than I was about pissing off Beatrice; she was no doubt getting the shit kicked out of her by Beatrice's vampire troupe--
All of a sudden it hit me where I had recognized Blondie from. He had been there in the garage when Beatrice had turned Jaime into a vampire. He was one of the new vampires Beatrice had been creating; no wonder he had looked so new and unpolished.
"How come we never just talk anymore Bobbykins?"
I looked lover my shoulder and Beatrice was following, examining the wound in her hand and flexing the fingers. She was probably enjoying the pain, enjoying every sharp scream from her abused nerve endings.
"We never talk Beatrice! Our relationship is built on fucking, obsession and you not killing me. It's not exactly what I'd call long viable in the long term, at least not for me."
A blur and Beatrice was suddenly in front of me, walking backward through the dark woods. In the distance I could hear men and women yelling and screaming, the sounds of an asskicking, and that just made me break into a run; Beatrice kept pace with me, pushing herself off the ground to hover several inches in the air, carried backward by her own continuing momentum.
Show-off, I thought and broke through the tree cover to witness the warzone.
Imagine one of the bloodiest episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and you wouldn't even come close to the level of devastation that had occurred in the few minutes that Beatrice and I had been gone. See, the thing about violence is this: it's fast, it's savage and it's undignified, especially when you're fighting for your life. The thing that only occurred to me as I watched the blood-covered love of my life savagely beat in the head of a vampire with a thick branch she had found somewhere, blood and brain spraying with every blow, was that she fought like this life was her last and she was damned if anyone was going to take it from her.
There was a scene that would only be described as chaotic violence or even as simply as "a trail of broken bodies" leading from the side of the highway and up the hill toward the trees.
Apparently Jaime had made a break for it, chasing after me and Beatrice before the horde had caught up with her. The easy beat-down they had been expecting had apparently not gone according to plan. Beatrice's vampires easily had at least a week to a month since they had been turned, and that should have given them some advantage over Jaime, at least by standard vampire logic. It had taken me months to even develop any serious powers like enhanced speed and strength, plus the fact that I was painfully ignorant about what I was even capable of. I assumed that Beatrice's troupe had at least been given rudimentary training by either herself or the couple other older vampires she kept around on occasion. Jaime hadn't had any of that and should have been at a serious disadvantage, and everyone there was fully aware of that.
Jaime should have been dead or beaten unconscious a long time ago.
Instead there was a trail of beaten and broken vampires starting from when they had first attacked her. Two vampires lay writhing in the dirt, one of them trying to hold his guts in with one hand from where Jaime had shot him multiple times in the the stomach; the other flopped around trying to catch a breath, the hole in his chest from an exploded heart occasionally squirting blood. A funny thing happens when a gun is pushed against your chest cavity directly above your heart and the trigger is pulled. The bullet will pulverise everything in it's way in a catastrophic manner, the shockwaves and force causing the heart to explode forcefully, just from the gun being that close. Not exactly the best way to go, if you know what I mean. I don't know if Beatrice's idiot squad thought that they were invulnerable or bulletproof for some reason, but they seemed to have forgotten instantly how to be human and to fear catastrophic damage, the kind that Jaime seemed only too willing to dispense as she herself avoided getting her own ass killed.
That's got to be the only explanation for why they had been willing to rush at Jaime like they had, giving her the old bumsrush, and it might have been a tactic that would have worked against someone who was only human.
She had been mobbed and a fight had ensued, that had left one of the vampires hobbling and cursing as Jaime had somehow managed to shoot him in the ankle, blowing the bone to shit and leaving the foot hanging by a chunk of flesh. That vampire had fallen cursing and was still screaming in the ditch as the battle had moved on, Jaime trying to escape. She might have been faster and stronger than them, but only by a fraction and this was the first real fight of her life.
Two vampires lay prone in the field, a few feet away from each other and a broken wooden fence that I hadn't seen earlier, each one impaled with about a foot of splintered and weathered wood; the fence had been ripped to shreds to make the handy weapons. One of the vampires seemed to be pinned to the ground by the wood, and seemed terrified by the very concept that he had actually been hurt this badly; the other simply wasn't moving, bleeding out onto the grass in the night.
This is where Beatrice and I had returned, with Jaime bludgeoning the hell out of yet another vampire who was now unrecognizable, not that I could have pointed him out in a crowd anyway. To tell you the truth, it was hard enough to recognize Jaime herself. The remaining eight vampires were moving in on her, a mixture of terror and vengeance on their faces. Jaime had been hurt in one of the scuffles and her hair was wet with blood, either hers or someone else's, and there were several long cuts and scratches across her face and arms; her shirt had been torn in three places and her torso was red with blood; her knuckles were torn and bloody, and her face was vengeance.
Blondie was there to grab her hand as she pulled it back to deliver one more blow on the limp body in her hand. Blondie was fast, but Jaime was faster and on an adrenaline high. She didn't even pause; she let go of the vampire she was bludgeoning and turned her attention and her rage onto Blondie. In one fluid motion, she allowed herself to be turned, and stepped close to Blondie, bringing her already bloody hand up to poke him savagely in the eye. Blondie let go of her arm as he screamed, and she brought that arm down, club still in hand, on the head of an onrushing vampire; that vampire went down in a spray of blood with a sickening thud. Jaime brought the club around in an upward swing and Blondie stopped screaming.
"Oh my Goddess," Beatrice said. "Your ex-girlfriend is a berserker."
The five remaining vampires hung back a little, trying to coordinate their attack, but they'd never done something like this before. No doubt they had talked about how they would kick so much ass in a fight or bragged about their very rare fights which had somehow expanded into them fighting all the time, but unless they were plain sociopaths, they had mostly been exaggerating. Most people, even including your standard ruffian have been in fights maybe once or twice in their lives. Okay, fine: some ruffians have been in at least 10 fights over the course of their lives, but the rest of the time, they're usually beating up on people and those definitely do not count as fights when it's them and their boys beating up some drunk in a bar for fun. What I'm trying to say is that even the most active fighter has usually never encountered a professional fighter or had to work in a group to take down a dangerous opponent. All of that bragging was useless in the face of Jaime, who had actually done a two year tour in the Armed Forces, and prior to that had completed six years of first karate and had moved on to Krav Maga after getting a crush on an Israeli soldier whose name I still didn't know.
What? Don't look at me like that. I'm not making it up you know. I wasn't kidding about the whole "not becoming a martial arts expert just because you turn into a vampire" bit. Besides, most people proficient in fighting techniques hardly go around advertising it unless they're actively looking for a fight and/or a bullet in the head from some other asshole who's sick of listening to their shit.
"Maybe you'd better call them off?" I suggested, more than half-hoping that I wouldn't have to join in and possibly fight Beatrice herself.
"You kidding?" Beatrice said. "I wish I'd brought popcorn!"
Two of the five lunged at Jaime, both of them showing some fighting skill as they advanced. Jaime charged in fearlessly, turning and blocking and shrugging off the a punch that connected with the side of her head, punching as hard as she could, and giving as hard as she got in a dance of violence and pain. There was really no other word to describe it and once you see it for yourself, you completely understand the utter grace and devastation that their movements brought. It was over quickly, Jaime fighting with a fury that the other men couldn't match, even with a third man running forward as Jaime broke the arm of one man, and jumped backward into the next man, driving him to the ground, before spinning up into the air and landing on his chest with both knees. The third man was met by a club to the face as Jaime reached out and lazily flicked her wrist-- and the man went down like a ton of bricks, either unconscious or pretending that he was.
Jaime climbed to her feet and punched the vampire with the broken arm. She locked eyes with the two remaining vampires and now she was panting, exhausted, but ready to fight some more.
"Let's get this over with you bastards," she growled, and that was it. The two vampires exchanged a look and took off running back towards the road.
"Oh come on!" Beatrice yelled, practically throwing a tantrum, and Jaime snapped around to look at us, ready to fight. "Get back here and fight you pussies!"
If she'd had popcorn she would have been throwing it after the retreating vampires.
Jaime sized her up and shook her head. She sank to the ground, visibly exhausted.
"Bob, you're going to have to kick her ass. I'm out." Jaime proceeded to collapse onto the ground, spreading herself out.
"Can I just point out that you make an amazing vampire? Louise would be so proud--"
Jaime's arm popped up, giving me the middle finger. "Fuck you Bob."
I turned to the bemused Beatrice and prepared myself for a fight. I put up my fists, prepared to get my ass kicked, but not without a fight. Beatrice scoffed at me.
"What the fuck are you doing?"
"I'm fighting you? We're going to fight aren't we?"
Beatrice actually looked touched. She reached out to rub my cheek. "Oh Bob, you're just the sweetest. You know I'd have to murder you both, but I appreciate the thought." She looked out over the warzone in the field her mood shifting to serious. "You'd better get out of here before the cops show up. I have to get these guys patched up so I can kick their asses again. I'll catch up with you soon enough."
I hesitated for a second, then I got grabbed Jaime from the ground and got the hell out of there.
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WRITER'S NOTE: Comment, share, it and vote!
I'm taking part in Nanowrimo this year so let's see how much I can churn out. I can;t promise a chapter every day, so let's just see how well I do by the end of next week. These daily goals of 2500 words SHOULD present a new chapter every two days, but that's just words, no editing and sometimes I've written some pure nonsense that I had to go back and fix in the normal run of things. I've been trying to do some basic editing with this novel so I'm gonna have to choose: speed or quality/making sense. Damn you NanoWrimo!
Question of the day: Why do you think Jaime is so fast already when it took Bob a whole year to gain any proper powers? Theories are welcome! Comment, bitch at me, but vote and share!