We waited there in the dark as Hugo drove that armoured vehicle straight through that aluminium wall as we stood back and watched, and waited. A short volley of gunfire and several explosions later they burst through the opposite wall, trailing bodies and smoke. Oliver and I used the confusion as cover to sneak in through the original gaping hole that the tank had ripped in the metal wall.

There were bodies strewn along the path that the vehicle must have taken, and bits of vampire decorated the steel struts that lined the inside of the building, blown there by grenades that Fergus had helpfully launched from the top of the armoured car. Unfortunately, vampires being what they were, it seemed that most of them would live. They just wouldn't be much use to anyone in the next few hours.

We started in on the mass of blood feeders that stood gathered in the wreckage of that space. Oliver and I fought back to back, swirling and slicing at the press of bodies around us, ducking outstretched hands and bared teeth and the occasional knife wielded in clumsy hands. Occasionally a shot would ring out, and one of us would grunt at the impact of a bullet as it slammed into our body armour, or glanced off our helmets on its course through the seething throng around us. Oliver would then twist his body away slightly as I triangulated the origin of the bullet, and fired a magazine in that general direction. The shots became less frequent as we hacked our way towards the inner door on the opposite end of the warehouse, knowing instinctively that our target lay there, behind it.

We heard the revving of the monstrous engine of the armoured vehicle as it slewed through the gaping holes in the warehouse again, spraying bullets and grenades as it swerved along an erratic pathway. I saw Oliver grab a human male that had ventured too close to him, and bite his neck, supplementing the heavy dose of iron we'd taken earlier with a fountain of rich arterial blood. He grinned at me through the blood running down his face as the blood feeders suddenly lost interest in us, pouncing on the still twitching body and tearing into it.

And then, just like that, they stopped attacking us with so much conviction, and turned their attention to the humans fighting alongside them. As the beguiling smell of fresh blood saturated the hot air and screams rang out, the door that was our goal was thrust open, and a blood drinking vamp lunged through it, screeching. He froze, a look of dismay on his face, and collapsed like a puppet whose strings had been cut. Another crumpled in the same lifeless way a few feet from him, and another, and another. I watched out of the corner of my eye as a great wave of death swept through the blood drinking vampires on the far end of the warehouse near the inner door that was our target. They fell, one after the other in rapid succession, like a line of deranged dominoes. Eventually the ones nearest the wave broke ranks as best they could in the cramped melee as they realised the association between being where they were and imminent death. Within minutes panic spread through the space, and the vampires stopped fighting us, and started fighting each other in their desperation to get out.




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