who had fallen asleep at the front counter during his graveyard shift and then wondered why the cooler door was ajar when he woke up.
A late-night radio jock made a crack about vampires sucking, and barely made it a quarter mile from the studio after his shift before persons unknown opened up his body and removed all the blood, leaving him draped across a couple of newspaper boxes on a street corner. A popular blogger who riffed on the topic was found dangling upside down from his third-floor balcony.
Naturally, the blogosphere was melting down over speculation, half-truths, and conspiracy theories. Andy Gray’s data pack had made waves everywhere. His videos were posted to YouTube and distributed at file-sharing sites, and as fast as they were pulled down, someone else put them up. If someone was killing media personalities to quiet the chatter, it wasn’t working.
But that didn’t mean they didn’t have to be stopped. Operation Red-Blooded had access to the world’s best forensic science labs, and bits of trace evidence, hairs and fibers and some soil with a particular sort of mold mixed in, led Marina’s team to a row ofabandoned houses on the Lower East Side, just blocks from the river.
Marina had the NYPD close off the block at both ends at high noon, figuring the bloodsuckers would all be inside at that hour. Zachary Kleefeld had arranged things with the mayor and the NYPD brass, making sure they wouldn’t try to interfere no matter what they saw. She and her team drove to the site in a converted cargo van, its walls lined with high-tech weaponry. More of the same filled the containers beneath the bench seats. It wasn’t made for comfort but for utility, and could carry an eight-person team and enough gear to win a small war. They would go in carrying specially configured Barrett Arms M82A1s mounted with TRUUV lights and loaded with special .50 caliber phosphorous rounds designed and built in Red-Blooded’s armament labs, grenades, and long-bladed knives.
She sat in the back, wedged between Spider John, who she called that because of the spider web tattoo covering most of his body (all the spiders living on the web tattoo currently hidden by his black tactical clothing, but there were many), and R.T., a massive bald man with skin so dark it looked like a starless night sky. Spider John was the man who she believed had no interest in sex whatsoever, but who had directed those energies instead into all manner of mayhem. On R.T.’s other side was Monte, a rangy guy from east Texas whose criminal record Operation Red-Blooded was willing to overlook because his talents were so suited to the work.
He was the one who wouldn’t come out of the closet, and the one Marina had the highest hopes for.
On a bench across from them were Kat, the team’s other woman, a onetime Olympic powerlifting contender, and Tony O., an Army Ranger who had been recruited into the FBI, and from there into Red-Blooded service. Up front were Tony H., behind the wheel—his background was law enforcement, and he had spent years on L.A.’s SWAT team—and Jimbo, the out gay man, a veteran of two wars in the Persian Gulf and several years of mercenary work around them. Tony O. thought he had a future with Kat, and maybe he did as long as it didn’t interfere with his duty to Red-Blooded.
“… so I always did. From the time I was little,” Kat was saying. Marina had been trying to ease the tension, while keeping them focused on the mission, so she had asked the others when they had started believing in vampires. Kat’s had been an extreme case, brought on by watching the vampire movie
The Hunger
on TV when her parents thought she was asleep.
“My old man was a Master Sergeant in the United States Army,” Monte chimed in. His accent was Southern, but not the mellifluous sophisticated Southern that Marina found charming. More redneck than Kentucky colonel. He wasn’t stupid, but sometimes, she thought, he came off that way
A late-night radio jock made a crack about vampires sucking, and barely made it a quarter mile from the studio after his shift before persons unknown opened up his body and removed all the blood, leaving him draped across a couple of newspaper boxes on a street corner. A popular blogger who riffed on the topic was found dangling upside down from his third-floor balcony.
Naturally, the blogosphere was melting down over speculation, half-truths, and conspiracy theories. Andy Gray’s data pack had made waves everywhere. His videos were posted to YouTube and distributed at file-sharing sites, and as fast as they were pulled down, someone else put them up. If someone was killing media personalities to quiet the chatter, it wasn’t working.
But that didn’t mean they didn’t have to be stopped. Operation Red-Blooded had access to the world’s best forensic science labs, and bits of trace evidence, hairs and fibers and some soil with a particular sort of mold mixed in, led Marina’s team to a row ofabandoned houses on the Lower East Side, just blocks from the river.
Marina had the NYPD close off the block at both ends at high noon, figuring the bloodsuckers would all be inside at that hour. Zachary Kleefeld had arranged things with the mayor and the NYPD brass, making sure they wouldn’t try to interfere no matter what they saw. She and her team drove to the site in a converted cargo van, its walls lined with high-tech weaponry. More of the same filled the containers beneath the bench seats. It wasn’t made for comfort but for utility, and could carry an eight-person team and enough gear to win a small war. They would go in carrying specially configured Barrett Arms M82A1s mounted with TRUUV lights and loaded with special .50 caliber phosphorous rounds designed and built in Red-Blooded’s armament labs, grenades, and long-bladed knives.
She sat in the back, wedged between Spider John, who she called that because of the spider web tattoo covering most of his body (all the spiders living on the web tattoo currently hidden by his black tactical clothing, but there were many), and R.T., a massive bald man with skin so dark it looked like a starless night sky. Spider John was the man who she believed had no interest in sex whatsoever, but who had directed those energies instead into all manner of mayhem. On R.T.’s other side was Monte, a rangy guy from east Texas whose criminal record Operation Red-Blooded was willing to overlook because his talents were so suited to the work.
He was the one who wouldn’t come out of the closet, and the one Marina had the highest hopes for.
On a bench across from them were Kat, the team’s other woman, a onetime Olympic powerlifting contender, and Tony O., an Army Ranger who had been recruited into the FBI, and from there into Red-Blooded service. Up front were Tony H., behind the wheel—his background was law enforcement, and he had spent years on L.A.’s SWAT team—and Jimbo, the out gay man, a veteran of two wars in the Persian Gulf and several years of mercenary work around them. Tony O. thought he had a future with Kat, and maybe he did as long as it didn’t interfere with his duty to Red-Blooded.
“… so I always did. From the time I was little,” Kat was saying. Marina had been trying to ease the tension, while keeping them focused on the mission, so she had asked the others when they had started believing in vampires. Kat’s had been an extreme case, brought on by watching the vampire movie
The Hunger
on TV when her parents thought she was asleep.
“My old man was a Master Sergeant in the United States Army,” Monte chimed in. His accent was Southern, but not the mellifluous sophisticated Southern that Marina found charming. More redneck than Kentucky colonel. He wasn’t stupid, but sometimes, she thought, he came off that way
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