by Danny
Grimm had an axe. He liked his axe. It had served him well. And right now, he was running with the theory that a good decapitation was a solid solution to most any problem. He swung and connected. With a squelchy sort of sound, a head fell to the ground and landed half-submerged in mud. The body followed a split-second after.
"GRIMM! BEHIND YOU!" he heard a voice from behind yell. He spun around to find Edulcore Cicciotto pointing to a vampire that had tried to sneak up on him. Grimm ducked the vamp's first attempt at a punch, narrowly missing being struck by the powerful fist. He stood back up and head-butted the vamp right in the nose. The creature stumbled backward and landed in the waiting arms of the Raptor.
Edulcore ran a clawlike finger across the vamp's jugular, spilling blood. Just to be sure, he snapped its neck and threw the body to the ground.
"Nicely done," Grimm said.
"Can we be sure it's dead?"
"Hard to say..."
Grimm was slightly startled as he realized that a hail of bullets passed between him and Ed. He turned his head to find Dirk Bell with his machine gun raised.
Dirk ran in between Ed and Grimm, gun raised. Standing on the other side of his two teammates was one of the vamps. He pushed Ed aside and leapt at it. He came down on top of the thing and pressed the tip of the gun to its eye socket. The first round of gunfire to the chest hadn't quite finished the creature off. He hoped this would do the trick, or at least slow it down.
He pulled the trigger. The vampire's skull cavity filled with bullets. Its brain turned to soup. Its arms still flailed wildly about.
"The fuck?" Dirk said softly.
But what was disturbing him even more than the still-moving vampire was the very situation he found himself in. It was a hurricane. He was in the middle of a Caribbean Sea hurricane. He shouldn't even be able to stand up straight, let along wage a battle against the undead.
The pounding wind and rain should have make it impossible for the team to even be outside. He wondered exactly how the hell all this was happening.
On the third-floor balcony of the team's building, there sat Stefano of the PSI-Unit. The fifteen-year-old telekinetic hero was huddled in the corner, looking down at the battle below, the battle where the small band of metas was fighting the horde of vampires, and being greatly outnumbered. But still, they fought. Stefano didn't really know these metas. And he wasn't sure he entirely trusted them. But right now, they were fighting to save the lives of innocent civilians in the basement. He had to help them. He poured all his energy into creating a telekinetic bubble around the area of battle a few hundred feet around the front of the building.
He knew that, although some wind and rain got through his bubble, their strength was greatly reduced, and that would have to do.
He knew that if the full force of the hurricane broke through, the heroes didn't stand a chance. They'd be dead before they could get to safety.
He also knew that he couldn't keep this up for much longer. Already he felt his power waning, his body and mind growing weary. He wished someone was there to help him. He wished Daniela was there.
Dirk didn't know any of this. He had to be content wondering why the hurricane hadn't killed him, and kept on fighting. He was currently sitting on top of a dead vamp. At least, he hoped it was dead. It was the one he'd just turned into a bullet-ridden corpse.
"You're a pretty good shot, aren't you?" Dirk heard someone say. He turned to find Priest addressing him.
"Yeah..."
"Take this. Go to the first-floor balcony. Count to ten. Shoot me," Priest said, handing Dirk a gun.
"What?"
"It's an energy pulse. It will charge me up. It's set to eighty percent. It'll hurt like hell, but I'll be able to take out a bunch of these bastards. Go. Now."
"Right," Dirk said, and ran to the drainage pipe that led up the side of the building. He jumped at it and began to climb. Priest was smart, Dirk thought. An elevated position away from the enemy. A clear shot. No one jumping him while he tried to fire.
Grissom Montag wondered exactly why the hell Dirk was climbing up the side of the building. But he had little time for such concerns as he noticed one of the creatures running toward the drain pipe, obviously intending to cut Dirk off before he could reach his target.
By quite the stroke of luck, Dirk's weapon's bag slipped off his shoulder as he climbed and fell to the floor. Of course, Dirk didn't find this quite so lucky. Grissom dived for the bag and pulled out a small explosive. The vamp was right above him, clinging to the drain pipe, inches below Dirk. As it reached out to grab him, it felt a hand in his pants. Before any perverted thoughts could go through its brain, it looked down and noticed Grissom.
Grissom looked up at it. "Sod off," he said, and kicked the vamp in the chest, using the pipe to push himself up. The vamp fell backward, landing on two more of them. A third went to help it up.
Grissom dived in the other direction, covering his ears. He noticed pieces of vamp flesh falling to the floor around him. He smiled.
Chance watched the explosion rip four vampires apart. And he realized that he probably would have been caught in the blast, had he not slipped in the mud and gone falling down an embankment, out of the line of fire. "Lucky..." he said to himself.
"Well, the luck stops here!" a vampire yelled, jumping toward him. The creature threw a punch at Chance, who never got an opportunity to move out of the way. The punch connected, and Chance stood his ground, unfazed. The vampire, however, was thrown backward.
"A useful power," Ameristar said. "But do you need a hand here?"
"I'll be fine. Go watch the door," Chance replied.
Ameristar looked over at the door to the basement, where a couple of vampires were standing, banging at it and trying to get it unlocked. She sprinted toward it, slipping in the mud a couple of times but never losing sight of the goal. Diving at one of the creatures, she drove the stake deep into its chest. The other lunged at her, and she fell to the ground, slipping between its legs. It turned and leaned over her. It bent down to grab her neck, or what it could grab through her suit of armor, and she thrust another stake into its heart. Leaning back, she pushed it right in with her foot. It collapsed on top of her.
Blackwulf picked up the body, tossing it aside. He extended a hand, helping Ameristar up. "You are new here, yes?"
"Yes..." Ameristar replied.
"Well, if you are being here to help, you are being most welcome, comrade!"
She smiled. But gratitude turned to confusion as she realized that Blackwulf was picking up the bodies of the two vamps she had just staked and dragging them to a pile in the garden.
"What are you doing?" she said, following after him.
"Is sometimes being hard to tell when pales are really dead. So I am being piling them up and destroying them with Comrade Dirk's explosives, just to be sure. If they are in little pieces, they are not regenerating, hopefully," Blackwulf explained.
Ameristar thought this explanation sounded fair enough. Just as she thought this, she heard someone yell out, "TEN!"
She turned to the source of the yell and noticed someone on the first-floor balcony fire some sort of energy weapon at one of the metas.
Dirk shot the gun toward Priest, impressed at the weapon's obvious power. It struck Priest right in the middle of his back. The energy was quickly absorbed.
Priest's body mass grew until he dwarved the vamp in front of him. "Hello down there," he said as he wrapped a hand around the vampire's skull and squeezed.
Meanwhile, on the third floor balcony, Stefano was losing consciousness. He'd done all he could, but still he couldn't hold on. The storm would break through his shield, and all would be lost. His eyelids grew heavy. He was about to pass out.
Unnoticed by any of the combatants below, a doorway opened up in the sky above the battle. Out stepped Danny Hearn and M'xy, protected from the elements and held aloft by a force field of M'xy's will.
"We need to help them..."
"We can do that!"
"How is the storm not killing them?"
"I think it's telekinetic! I can feel it..."
Phil, perhaps. Or one of the PSI-Unit, Danny thought. "If the TK fails, the rain and wind will kill them..."
"I can stop the rain. I can stop the wind. I can stop the storm!"
"Wait. Remember what we talked about. If you change an entire weather pattern, what consequences will that have elsewhere? We can bend the rules. We can't break them."
"Bend?"
"Yeah."
At that moment, Stefano passed out. His telekinetic shield failed. The team was exposed to the full fury of the storm. Rain pelted them. The wind whipped up.
And they felt it. Everyone on the ground then thought they would die, when, suddenly, the rain bent. The wind bent. Right above the area of battle, and extending out for a few hundred feet, the rain and wind suddenly took a sharp turn from its normal downward direction and flew sideways, out into the evacuated, empty areas of the city.
"Bend!" M'xy yelled.
Danny smiled and shook his head. "Nicely done. Now let's get down there."