Joanna Gunter had been a nurse’s assistant a few months ago before she wandered out into the parking lot at the hospital she’d worked at for almost a decade and found herself begging for her life. The crazy-haired man in the medical coat had only smiled at her, assuring her he didn’t want to kill her; he only wanted to offer her a job. A few days later, she’d awoken here, at the asylum, a completely different person by all accounts.
Hines was a nut job, that was for certain. And Asteria was a power-crazy bitch. Joanna would’ve just as soon escaped and gone back to her other life if she would’ve thought that possible. But the urge to drink human blood probably wouldn’t have mixed well with her duties at the hospital, so she had little choice but to do as Hines told her to.
Which meant attempting to turn these Guardians back into humans and then kill them. The idea of these creatures still fascinated her. She was new enough to this world that she still didn’t quite understand how any of it worked. But she knew it was kill or be killed, and if she didn’t do what she could to take these attackers out, they would end her, something she wasn’t exactly thrilled about.
There were at least a hundred Vampires at her disposal, and with the help of Asteria’s assistant, a good-looking but smarmy man with an icy stare name Bossley who was almost as creepy and uncaring as the queen herself, Joanna thought she could get the job done. She just didn’t know if there would be enough time to administer the red syringes before their door was knocked down, and she’d have to fight for her life. Or run away. Where she’d go, she wasn’t sure, but she wasn’t above it.
Bossley was directing the Vampires who would remove the Guardians from their cages once they passed out as Joanna flipped the switches that would allow the gas to fill their chambers. She looked at the switches carefully, trying to remember which rooms were occupied and which ones were vacant and finally decided to gas them all.
“Seriously?” Hines asked in her head. “I could’ve told you which ones they are! It’s two, three, five, seven, and eight!”
“Sorry,” she muttered and turned to see Bossley even knew because he had his ghouls positioned next to the walls under those numbers. There were no doors as of yet; those would appear with the flipping of other switches on a board Joanna didn’t quite understand.
It would take a few minutes for the kicking and scratching to stop. There were cameras inserted into each of the chambers, but she didn’t want to watch them pass out, despite Hines urging her to turn her head and look at the monitors. She listened instead. Once she was sure they were all out, she’d have to clear the cells before the Vampires went in or else they could temporarily pass out from the sedative as well, and she needed everyone operational because the attackers were across the moat and already moving into the upstairs.
“You need to hurry,” Hines urged her, and Joanna wondered who else’s head he was in. Gunfire sounded upstairs. She didn’t understand why this was more urgent than it had been the day before, but Hines seemed to think time was of the essence, so she finally turned her head to look at the monitor. The tiny woman in cell two was out while the bigger fellow all the way down in eight was still twitching. The others seemed to be losing consciousness as well.
With a sigh, Joanna studied the panel again and asked, “What do I do to clear the gas?”
“Those switches on the top left,” Hines said, and even though she couldn’t see him, she was sure he was grinding his teeth as he spoke. She reached over and flipped all of the switches, clearing the gas from all of the chambers.
“Ready, Bossley,” she said after she was certain the gas had dissipated. The shooting was getting closer, and she heard several shrieks. It didn’t sound as if her side was winning. She rushed over to get the syringes with the blue toppers as the Vampires carried the deadweight from the chambers to the beds.
“Start with the small woman,” Hines instructed her. “She should react the quickest.”
Joanna loaded five blue syringes and five red ones onto a cart and pushed it across the concrete floor. The room was large, wide enough for all ten beds, and by the time she got back to where the blonde woman was being strapped down, the rest of her patients looked ready to go as well.
She heard banging on the walls upstairs and assumed they’d gotten past the troops and were about to make their way down the stairs. They were trying to find the opening to the stairwell, and while Joanna had been assured it would be nearly impossible for them to find, she wasn’t holding her breath.
“Go!” Bossley ordered all of the remaining Vampires once the Guardians were secured to the beds. A small army of monsters ambled out of the surgical room, down the hall, but they could hardly make their way upstairs or else they’d give away the location, so they took up position in the hallway; Joanna could see them outside of the door before it slid back into place, concealing her whereabouts.
“We are running out of time,” Bossley urged her, swatting a hand across his gleaming forehead. “We should’ve started earlier.”
“I was waiting for Hines,” she reminded him.
“I didn’t think they’d get through the defenses so quickly. And… I didn’t think they’d find the stairwell so fast either.” Hines sounded frantic in her head. “Hurry up.”
Joanna didn’t see the point. Even if she could somehow manage to get all of the blue injections done, she wouldn’t be able to wait the appropriate amount of time and then inject the red. Even now, she could hear the sound of footsteps on the stairs and shots ringing out in the hallway. The Vampires were armed and fired back, but assuming those were all Guardians barreling down on them, it wouldn’t matter. She tried to remember if there was another way out of this room, but as far as she knew there was just the one door. And all of the chambers. She could get into one of those and bust through to the top floor, maybe get out that way.
“Do it!” Bossley urged.
With shaking fingers, Joanna took the cap off of the first syringe. The sound of shots getting closer outside of the door didn’t do much for her ability to find a vein, and at this point, she didn’t much care whether she got it in the right spot or not. The Guardian was unconscious, but she still winced as Joanna pushed down the plunger. There was a banging against the concrete wall. Frozen in fear, she turned and looked over her shoulder. It seemed like the panel was ebbing as something came crashing into it.
“For the love of hell fire, hurry it up!” Bossley screamed. He came charging at her, which was almost as bad as what was on the other side of that door. As quickly as she could go, Joanna grabbed the next syringe and moved on down the line, one after another, until all five Guardians had the blue chemical inserted somewhere in their arm, though she was pretty sure she hadn’t hit a single vein.
She looked up to realize Bossley was following behind her with the red syringes. “That’s not how it works!” she shouted.
“We haven’t got time to sit around and wait for them to become human again! This will have to do!”
In her head, she could hear Hines screaming obscenities as he saw his plan fall apart. The door buckled then, almost folding in half, and Joanna decided it was time for a little self-preservation. She ran to the closest cell and leaped up, crashing into the ceiling. It wouldn’t budge at first, and then she remembered there was a mechanism that kept the Guardians from being able to use it to get back out. She shot back across the room, flipped a switch on the panel, and then, as Bossley shouted at her, calling her a coward and every other name in the book, she ran back to the cell and leaped up, grabbing the lip of the floor above her and pulling herself up to the first floor of the building. A look around told her she was clear, so she took off for the closest door, praying if there was a god who listened to Vampires, he’d hear her cries.
