Drifter's Revenge

In the following weeks I was introduced to the terrifying arsenal the Brotherhood had at their disposal: sun grenades, powerful Tasers, a vast array of incendiary explosives... I also soon realized that they had found a way to detect the influence of a vampire over a human being and this, even long after the release. I never managed to understand how it worked. Their tactics were quite efficient as well; their preferred method of operation would be to trick the vampire into a trap and strike at its weakest moment as he or she was feeding. With complete disregard for the victim that they would consider already tainted or any innocent bystanders they wouldn't hesitate to bomb the monster. But this would work only with young or careless creatures. I was here to help them get to the oldest ones.

During my first missions I was closely monitored by a Penitent that would follow my every step outside the base, preventing me from trying to escape or contact the outside world.

This lasted for two years until one night as we were going after a deadly couple of targets that had been plaguing the Hong Kong area; my nanny got killed by the male vampire. After dispatching him and his bride, I got hold of a phone and quickly dialed Ivanka. I told her to prepare a way out for me. Right away, she downloaded a few computer viruses to the phone for me to introduce in the Brotherhood's network so she could monitor my situation and prepare an extraction. Hope had finally come back to my life.

7.

The Gibraltar airport was crowded with business men and bankers. It was the middle of the summer and I needed to find a place to hide from the deadly Andalusian sun. I followed a group of stewardess arrived from an early morning flight to their hotel and locked myself with one of them. She got herself excused from her next flight claiming a momentarily illness. I had her rent a car for me and to prevent the Brotherhood tracing her up to me, I refrained myself from using her as food. The sex was good though.

As the sun was setting I took the highway north towards France. By the morning I was in the middle of the Basque countryside. I holed up in a small hotel. The day went undisturbed and I spent the next night on the road. My meeting with Ivanka was still five days away so I decided to disappear in the Parisian night for a while.

A long time ago when I was still human and working with the Agency, I had befriended an eccentric and successful artist that lived in large penthouse in the middle of the XXth arrondissement. We had been lovers for a memorable week and because of that I had omitted to mention Sophie on any of my reports. Almost twenty years after I had met her for the last time I knocked on her door. It took her a while to recognize me but as soon as she did she invited me in and offered me a drink. Time hadn't been as harsh on her as I had feared. She was now in her early fifties but she didn't look a day over forty. Being back in her flat so many years after made me nostalgic of all I had lost and out of the blue I started crying. She held me in her arms for a long time. My mouth found its way to her neck and gently I drank some of her blood. Afterwards we made love in her bed and I fell asleep in her warm arms.

When I woke up early the next evening, the impending threat of the Brotherhood seemed so unreal and so far away, that I allowed myself to stay home with Sophie. She drank wine, I drank her and for hours we fucked. The morning early lights caught us in her living room and we ran to hide in her room. Another day passed and I felt happy.

The next night we went out. She took me to all the bars she loved. We met friends of hers; we sneaked a little fuck here and there, in the rest room of a discotheque or behind a parked van; she drank a lot and had some coke too, I indulged myself to a few drops of her intoxicated blood. Around three in the morning she took me to Pygalle to an exclusive Peep Show hidden behind a Kebab restaurant. There we had a private dance with one of the girls. She was of Malian descent and her black bubbly ass greeted my fangs with shivers of pleasure. Sophie took me back home and we fucked some more before the sun rose. Ivanka and Brotherhood seemed so petty in comparison with the delights of the past few days... But soon I would have to move on and get back in the real world.

On the fourth night, I told Sophie my story. She listened to my every word, fascinated by my tales of high adventure. After one final fuck she asked me the question I had been dreading since I had bit her the first time.

Would I agree to make her immortal?

I refused. My situation was far too dangerous for me to drag her into it. I could see that she was about to beg so I decided to control her and force her to forget about the last few days. I took a little more of her blood and left the penthouse. She would wake up late in the afternoon sore and hung over with no recollection on how she had gotten those strange twin wounds all over her body.

For the first time since I had arrived in Paris I turned on my phone. I had an email from Ivanka and one from the bleached haired girl. Ivanka's message told me that she suspected that the Brotherhood had traced her, that she was going underground and that she would contact me as soon as she could. The message was three days old. The bleached haired girl's message offered a meeting in Zurich. A picture was attached to the message. It was Ivanka, she was tied to a chair and she looked hurt. The message was two days old... I cursed myself.

8.

It took Ivanka three months to organize my escape. The security measures at the Brotherhood's compound were tight and their network was monitored by the best hackers money could buy. Luckily for me Ivanka wasn't for sale and she was worth it. Twice she managed to contact me while I was on mission. The first time to tell me that the Trojan viruses had done their work and that she was now able to access unnoticed the Brotherhood's network. The second time to tell me to get ready, that the extraction was just a few weeks away. She gave me a password.

And so three weeks later I was sent on a routine mission in Bangkok to prevent a young teenager that had been turned by mistake from burning down the city. Apparently the young male, after losing his creator had started turning all his relatives and was building for himself quite an army. It turned out that the young vampire was more brilliant than expected and most of my team was taken out in the very first minutes of the operation. I managed to take down most of the teenager's frenzied servant vampires and found myself in front of the youngster for the final duel. Two choppers were on their way with reinforcement when the young vampire told me the password. I hesitated for a second fearing for a trap set up by the Brotherhood but I managed to overcome the paranoia and followed him. Behind the house a small tuk tuk was waiting for me. The boy gave me a fresh set of clothes, a phone and wished me luck. I was free at last.

I left Bangkok and disappeared into the Indochina peninsula. A few weeks later, Ivanka contacted me. She told me to lay low for a while. She explained me that the two choppers never actually landed in the house, due to a technical problem one of them crashed into the other and the burning carcasses fell on the house making the identification of any of the bodies possible. For all intent and purposes I was now dead for the Brotherhood.

She also told me about the teenager. Looking through the Brotherhood's database she had found this old vegetarian Thai vampire. She had then searched Bangkok for a suitable candidate and had found this teenager with a vampire fetish. She had contacted him and had offered him the deal of his life. She would give him the resting place of the old vampire, she would give him the ways to turn himself into a vampire and accomplish his fantasy and in exchange she would need him to organize enough bloodshed to attract the attention of the Brotherhood. The teenager had accepted and my escape plan had been set in motion.

And so I laid low for a while. I kept on moving constantly, staying as far away from the Brotherhood as I could, avoiding at all costs any places that could have been linked to my past in a way or another...

But then an invitation arrived on one of my old email addresses. It was an address I hadn't used in a very long while so I replied to the email accepting the offer of the bleached haired girl to meet her at the Copacabana Hilton and have a nice time together for old time's sake.

9.

I knew it was a trap but once again I had to face my enemy, I couldn't continue running from the Brotherhood, so I prepared myself.

The meeting place was a large warehouse in the outskirts of Winterthur. The large hangar doors were closed when I arrived in the small rental car I had picked up from Zurich airport. I drove by spotting three men guarding the place. I parked the car a couple of streets away and hid into the shadows waiting for the car that had followed me since the airport. Less than thirty seconds later the large black SUV I had spotted stopped by my car. Two men got out. I recognized one of them as a member of the Brotherhood, a nasty sergeant with whom I had a couple of fights during my time with them. They were both heavily armed. I sneaked on the first one and snapped his neck. The sergeant didn't have the time to lift his submachine gun before one of my knives went through his neck.

I used the black SUV to ram the doors of the hangar and attract enemy fire. By the time the goons realized that the car was empty I had already managed to take out half of the thirty men that were waiting for me. The heavy firefight that followed allowed me to take out at least eight more. Feeling their luck turning, the Penitents decided to retreat only to fall into the trap I had set for them. As I exited the hangar I found Sophie standing above the last surviving opponent. Her nascent fangs were covered in blood; I felt I could have fucked her right there. She smiled at me. I grinned back.

The Penitent didn't survive much longer, just long enough to give us the location where they were supposed to drop me after capturing me. I left him to Sophie and went to get the rental back. I picked her up on my way back.

"Oh, Jack, this is so exciting; I love you so much," she told me.

I smiled at her and drove off towards the small chalet that the Penitent had indicated as the HQ of the Brotherhood for the region.

The small Chalet was a typical Swiss retreat in the Jura Mountains. It took us three hours to get there. The sun would be rising soon, so I decided to wait for the next evening to go and settle my account with the Brotherhood.

We stopped in the village below and found an isolated farm house to hide for the day. We went to sleep after commanding the farmer to do some reckon for us during the day. I woke up first feeling that something was wrong there was a third person in the room with us. I tried to move but my body refused to respond. The bleached haired girl turned on the light.

"Tsst, tsst, Jack you should really have known that the Brotherhood would monitor the surroundings of their main Swiss HQ..."

Father Pietro opened the door and entered followed by four doctors. Sophie and I were transported up to the chalet. The Brotherhood had built quite a large underground facility under the place. We were taken down to two cells and left to wait.

A few hours later Father Pietro came back.

"Jack, it is so good to see you alive and well, we have been so worried about you after the Bangkok incident."

He took out a needle and injected me with another dose of the drug.

"You must understand that considering the situation we won't be able to keep you on the payroll, I'm pretty sure you understand the trust issues we have now. But I must thank you; your little hacker friend revealed a couple of pretty wide gaps in our security and we're working on solving them right now as we speak."

He stopped for a while, smiling with benevolence. I didn't answer as there was nothing to say.

"The sun should be up in a few minutes," he started again, "so we're going to take you and your French friend outside. The delicious vampire with the very white hair has agreed to work for us from now on so you don't have to worry about our mission. Now Jack I will say good bye to you and go pray that your soul doesn't spend too much time in purgatory."

He turned around and waved at two of his guards to come and pick me up. Father Pietro never made it to the door. I severed his head from his shoulders in one powerful blow.

What Father Pietro hadn't foreseen is that Ivanka had managed to secure the formula of the drug in their servers and that we had paid an independent pharmaceutical research lab to synthetize an antidote. I had of course secured two samples of that antidote before engaging the Brotherhood.

The two Penitents in the hallway were next. I used the arm of one of them to beat the other to a pulp. I had managed to get where I wanted and the massacre could start. I opened Sophie's cell and smiled at my progeny. She smiled back. Room after room we took out all the members of the Brotherhood we could find. In less than twenty minutes the last one laid dead at our feet.

For once I was lucky, Ivanka was still alive. We found her in one of the rooms of the chalet strapped to a bed. Her clothes had been torn of and apparently the bleached haired girl had had some fun with her. I sat by her side pushing her hair out of her face. When she recognized me she smiled and titled her head to a side. I indulged her. Her blood was rich and she soon joined me and Sophie on the porch of the Chalet.

We didn't find the bleached haired girl; she had probably fled the base after the beginning of the massacre. Someday I would have to find her and get her to explain to me why she hated me so much. But for now, we had a little appointment in Rome. If we were to live free from the threat of the Brotherhood we had strike at its heart. Blood was going to flow in the halls of the Vatican.

With Ivanka and Sophie by my side I felt that there was nothing impossible for our little family to do, a family with many talents, a family of killers.