Paul’s team blasted through the Vampires on the bottom floor of the facility fairly easily. If Holland was doing anything to modify them, it wasn’t evident, and many of them were shot in the back as they were running away. There had been some encounters with tougher specimens upstairs, and Grant was bleeding from a deep gash in his shoulder, but no one else was injured, save from a few stray bullets that bounced off of Guardians’ chests and limbs, and it hadn’t taken Margie long to find the sliding concrete panel that covered the stairwell.
Removing it had taken a few minutes, but eventually, they’d powered through. The descent to the basement was much trickier. There were dozens and dozens of Vampires all along the path, many of them armed, and as the LIGHTS team made their way down, all sorts of monsters stood in their way, which took more time than Paul was willing to waste.
He’d left quite a few Guardians outside to make sure that anyone who tried to escape would meet a quick end, and he watched as a tall female Vampire with blonde hair was mowed down on the front lawn before she even got to the moat. He wondered if she had anything to do with what was going on behind that concrete wall in front of him. Since she was wearing a white lab coat, he thought she might.
Somehow, Margie managed to wind her way between assailants with just an errant kick or punch here and there, until she was in the hall behind the majority of them. The rest of the team fought their way through as she began to look for the door.
Paul did his best to follow but got tangled up with a few of the monsters. One in particular, a lanky guy with a hump on his back, took forever to go down. Paul pulled his silver knife and jabbed it into his chest several times before he let out a groan and burst into ash.
“This is not what I was expecting!” Jeb shouted from right behind him. “It’s like shooting fish in a barrel!”
“Yeah, but I’m feeling a little fishy myself right now!” Paul yelled back as the Vampires let go another barrage of gunfire aimed at the Guardians and Hunters still on the stairs. Jeb ducked behind Paul, and he made himself as wide as possible as there was a yelp of pain behind them. He turned to see Jill was hit in the leg. She stumbled, and one of the Guardians from Margie’s team swooped her up and rushed her back up the stairs, out of the fray. There were still several Guardians on the first floor, clearing rooms, but through his IAC, Paul could see they hadn’t found anything, so he thought the Hunter would be relatively safe up there.
Turning his attention back to the melee around him, Paul took careful aim at the Vampires who were still shooting at them and was able to take a couple out through carefully placed bullets. The silver seemed to be having the desired effect tonight, and he supposed it was because Holland was too far away to do much; either that or she was preoccupied. By the time he made his way to the place in the wall where Margie was using her shoulder to try to burst through, they were down to less than twenty Vampires, and the rest of his team was making quick work of them. Some of them were running off in other directions, perhaps trying to regroup. Others were engaged in hand to hand combat; only a few still had their firearms, and if they did, they weren’t firing them. Paul checked on Jeb and Derrick one more time, saw that they were with another Guardian, and turned his attention back to the door.
“It doesn’t slide?” he asked.
“Tried that.” Margie was short of breath and looked like her shoulder was bothering her, but she took another run at the panel and it bent in two, but it didn’t cave. Paul took a stab at it and managed to bend it further.
“It’s not just steel,” he said, taking a step back to look at it. “I thought they were concrete at first, but now I’m not sure what it is.”
“What it is is in the way!” Margie shouted, and this time she karate kicked it. Paul could plainly see her footprint right in the center, where the biggest dent was.
“Let me try something,” he said, wishing he had a real grenade, but he didn’t even have any of the fancy silver nitrate ones Christian had made left at his disposal. He pulled his Glock and said, “Cover your face,” and fired a straight line of shots through the center, where Margie had already made a crease. Whether it was the heat from the bullets or it had just gotten that weak in the center, he couldn’t say, but he could tell that it was even weaker now, and he warned Margie back with his hand and fired a few more shots before he gave her the okay to try kicking the door in once more.
Margie was able to break right through the center this time, and with a few more kicks in different places, they succeeded in knocking the door down.
Before Paul could even step inside the room, a tall, blond Vampire came shrieking at his face, fangs protruding. He fired a few shots before his clip emptied, but the monster didn’t slow. He barreled into Paul’s gut, pushing him into the wall on the opposite side of the hallway.
“Go!” Paul shouted to Margie and a few of the other Guardians who were standing next to the opening, looking at him with question marks on their faces. “I’ve got it.” If this was their last ditch effort, the Vampires were in big trouble. Paul pulled his silver knife from its sheath and raised his knee to catch the towering Vampire in the gut.
He groaned in pain but didn’t give up. “You mustn’t!” the creature screamed, his pale white skin and red-rimmed eyes nearly pressed to Paul’s face. “You mustn’t!”
Paul assumed he meant they mustn’t rescue the Guardians, or they mustn’t overrun the asylum, but either way, that wasn’t a point of contention. A glance over his shoulder saw very few Vampires still standing and his teammates making quick work of them. It wouldn’t be long until this one crumpled as well.
