Chapter 29 - "Crazy" Is, I Believe, The Medical Term
After being badly injured and losing his left eye, Grievous finally managed to fight off his attacker. Swearing under his breath, he stumbled out of the catacombs and toward the entrance to their secret lair. He knew that Nightmare would confront Sinistrah and the human brat, and knowing her and her inability to keep something to herself for long, she'd tell them all their plans if Sinistrah even asked what she was planning on doing with them.
He reached the cave that led down to the lair without incident. He'd hardly entered it, however, when he was attacked by a horde of bats. Well, "attacked" wasn't quite the right word; they rushed past him and knocked him over, giving him a few nasty scratches in the process, but they continued on their way.
~~~~
"Damn you!" Nightmare shrieked, clutching her wrist. "Do you think that will stop me?"
"I destroyed the remote, so yes, I think it will stop you," Abihira said coolly.
David groaned silently. His sister obviously knew nothing of Nightmare (unsurprising, since to the best of his knowledge they'd never met before Abi started working for Terror). The encounters he'd had with her, however, especially their first meeting, taught him that Nightmare might be utterly insane, but she wasn't stupid. She wouldn't have made only one remote control to command her army. She made a habit of hiding weapons - sometimes literally - up her sleeve, so she might have a dozen remotes nearby.
Nightmare removed the ruby necklace she'd been wearing and held it out toward her macabre army. They immediately came to life and started moving toward David and Dani.
"Now what will you do?" Nightmare taunted.
Abi jumped down and landed next to David. "Can they be killed?"
"She says they can't."
"Then we will have to find a way of killing them that she overlooked."
David wasn't exactly reassured. Nightmare and Grievous - and possibly a few other people - had been working together on this. Nightmare seemed to have been in command, but Grievous had probably helped her and pointed out things she might have overlooked.
"First, let's get out of their reach."
He grabbed Dani's hand and jumped onto the life-support machine overhead, pulling her up with him. Abi followed.
"Where's Nightmare?" the assassin said, looking around. Sure enough, Nightmare was nowhere to be seen. "Oh, never mind. We've got to think of some way to kill these things."
It was Dani who came up with the best idea. "They're sort of like robots, aren't they?"
"Yes, Nightmare already told us that," David said, rather sharply.
"So they can be deactivated, can't they?"
It was so obvious. So simple. So maddening that a human, and a human child at that, should be able to reach a conclusion that two adult vampires couldn't.
"Nightmare said she implanted the electric circuits in their heads. It looks like we'll just have to destroy their heads," David said.
"We have a problem," Abi said suddenly. She was apparently reloading her gun while keeping a wary eye on the zombies, who were now standing beneath them and reaching up, trying to grab them. "This gun only holds two cartridges of five bullets each. I used one bullet shooting Nightmare, so I have only nine left. Even if every shot was a direct hit, which is most unlikely when we don't know where in their heads the circuits are located, that would only kill nine of them."
"Didn't you bring more ammunition?" David was incredulous. She was an assassin, after all! Making a mistake like that could be fatal to her!
"I didn't think I would need it. I came to Rome to get away from Terror until she calmed down after Nightmare's betrayal. I never expected to need a weapon, and I certainly never expected anything like this. I only brought this gun in case I needed it for some reason." She saw the look on her brother's face and blushed. "I know, I was a moron not to be more prepared. But on my way in here, I saw a room filled with guns and knives and all sorts of weapons."
The zombie fell to the ground, devoid of whatever life it had had.
"It works," Dani said, stating the obvious. She didn't sound overly happy about that fact.
David looked at her, surprised. "You could sound a bit more enthusiastic about it."
"I suppose so." She still looked miserable, though.
David shot another of the zombies that was getting a bit too close for comfort and went over to her, leaving his sister to deal with the zombies that were advancing up the narrow passage that led to Nightmare's armoury, as the room Abi had seen turned out to be. It was far too narrow for more than two of them to come up at a time, so the assassin should be able to deal with them on her own for a few moments.
Dani was sitting on the ground near the door to the armoury, staring at the ground and looking thoroughly depressed.
"What's wrong?" he asked, sitting down next to her.
"Nothing..." she muttered.
"Something's wrong, or you wouldn't look like you were attending your own funeral. So, what is it?"
"Those things." She pointed in the general direction of Nightmare's "army". "They were human once, so killing them... well, it... it seems like murder!"
David groaned silently. Leave it to a human to come up with such an example of muddled thinking. "You said it yourself; they're robots. They were never truly human to begin with, either. Half of them are corpses reanimated by electric circuits that aren't able to think or feel, and the other half are a mixture of slightly-alive -"
"Have you taken leave of your senses?!" Abi yelled, scandalised. "If you're going to stand back and let me do all the work, I'm leaving and you can get out of this mess on your own!"
Her brother got up and picked up the gun, which he'd set on the floor, when something completely unexpected happened. One minute, two zombies were advanced toward Abi and she was about to fire at the first one. The next, both of them fell to the floor, decapitated.
Dani screamed, and David didn't blame her. Abi blanched (quite a feat for someone who was naturally as pale as he was). David threw his gun down. He was shaking badly and might have accidentally pulled the trigger.
"Well? Are you going to just stand there and stare?" someone demanded from behind them.
All three turned on the latest arrival.
"VLADISLAUS ALEXANDRU DRACULA!" Abi looked like she was about to commit murder. "What the hell do you think you're doing? For that matter, what are you even doing in Italy?"
"I followed you," Dracula said calmly, as if there was nothing out of the ordinary about any of this. "Now, do you mind if we continue this conversation somewhere else? Because it sounds like more of those things are coming."
Abi gave him a glare that could freeze Venus, a glare that painful experience had taught David meant trouble, but Dracula didn't seem to care. David had met his cousin (several times removed) twice before, and from what he'd seen and heard of him then and now, he was inclined to think he had no sense of self-preservation. No one in their right mind would ignore Abi when she was giving them that look.
"Your boyfriend?" David asked his sister in a whisper as they retreated up the passage before more of the zombies arrived.
"He is not my boyfriend!"
"Okay, okay, I was just wondering!" Come to think of it, that probably hadn't been the best thing he could have said, even though he meant it as a joke. He didn't know if his sister was over her hatred of any mention of romance around her (he hoped and prayed that she was, since she'd nearly throttled Julius when he joked about setting her up on a date with someone), but mentioning anything that might make her think of it was not a good idea.
"They've stopped following us," Dani said after a moment's silence.
It was true; there was no sign of the zombie army anywhere.
~~~~
Dani felt like she was living in a dream, or perhaps a nightmare (no pun intended). Even what she heard/understood of Abihira and Dracula's exchange of insults and sarcastic remarks didn't amuse her. Robot zombies that were really dead babies? Robots that were beheaded? Dracula?
Has the world gone mad or is it just me? she thought.
"Well, for people like Nightmare, "crazy" is, I believe, the medical term," David said quietly.
Dani flinched, but somehow his reading her mind didn't bother her as much as it once had.
"It's about time you people showed up! I've been waiting ages!"
Dani and David stopped and stared. The passage widened out into a cave that reminded Dani slightly of a church, minus pews, altars, windows and so on. Like the cave that contained the zombies, there were chains fastened to the walls with the boxes At the far end of the cave and near the roof, sitting on a throne carved out of rock, was Nightmare. She held what looked like a scythe.
"What took you so long? And where are your - ahem - friends?" As she said this, she grinned evilly, as if she knew something they didn't.
Abihira and Dracula had vanished, to Dani's alarm. David, however, showed no sign of being worried by this.
"The result of one of your tricks?"
"Right on the first guess." Nightmare jumped down, landed on a ledge beneath her "throne" and bowed with a smirk. "And now what do you think will happen?"
"You will ramble on and on endlessly about everything that comes into your head and expect me to listen." David sounded bored.
Dani looked from one to the other, confused. For two people who hated each other, they were acting almost like old friends who enjoyed making snide remarks at each other's expense.
"No. I will kill you."
"Oh, how terrifying. You're going to talk me to death."
That was a step too far. Even from a distance, it was clear to see that Nightmare's eyes narrowed and began to glow red. She raised her scythe and leapt at them. David shoved Dani out of the way, and the next thing the girl knew she was sprawled on the stone floor while the vampires fought.
~~~~
David narrowly avoided having his head cut off by Nightmare's scythe and fired at her with the gun he'd taken from her arsenal. He missed, and no wonder. She moved so fast it was hard to see her, let alone hit her. He could only aim at where she would probably be in a moment, and all the while he was afraid he might accidentally hit Dani.
Nightmare jumped from one chain to another, always making sure there was at least one between them and making it even harder to hit her. Not to be outwitted, David followed her example and jumped onto one of the life-support machines and fired. He didn't miss. The bullet hit her in the chest, right where her heart was.
Vampires were not immune to bullets, but they healed much faster than humans and so being shot was less serious for them than it was for a human. They could not, however, survive being shot in the heart or the head. And Nightmare, unable to be normal even in that, did. The bullet seemed to have no effect on her at all.
David stared. And then he realised the truth. There was something about this "Nightmare" that just wasn't right. Her eyes were glazed and always staring straight ahead, but never actually looking at anything. Her movements were unsteady and she didn't react to things a living person would have reacted to, like almost tripping over one of the chains.
She was a robot!
Just as he reached this conclusion, he realised that he had just made a very foolish mistake. He hadn't been paying attention to what the robot Nightmare was doing, and she was nowhere to be seen.
~~~~
Everything happened so fast that Dani hardly had time to realise what was happening. She was sure of two things, however. One: David and Nightmare were fighting. Two: Nightmare was about to kill David, and he hadn't noticed it yet. She was standing on a chain over his head and was in the process of raising her scythe to kill him with it.
Dani acted without thinking. She leapt to her feet, somehow climbed onto the "box" thing David was standing on and pushed him out of the way faster than she'd thought was humanly possible, and all before what she was doing had time to sink in.
There was a sharp pain in her side and the world around her suddenly became much clearer than it had ever been before. She saw the look of shock and horror on David's face, heard an angry scream from Nightmare, and saw, or thought she saw, someone standing at the entrance to the cave.
Who's that? she wondered. She tried to get a better look at them, but their face was indistinct and kept changing. One moment they were Terror, the next they were Jackson, then they became Lacey, her parents, Edward, and finally they changed so fast it was impossible to tell who they looked like, and it didn't matter anyway, and she was tired...
So tired...
Dani's eyes shut and the world around her faded.
~~~~
Vlad moved away from the cave entrance before David or Nightmare could see him. He wasn't sure what he should do. Part of him wanted to help, for Mina's - for her - sake, but another part told him in no uncertain terms that going anywhere near blood was just asking for a disaster, and what could he do to help that Cross couldn't, anyway?