There was a voice.

                     There was light.

                  Then there was pain.

                  He remembered a face looking down at him. Kindly. With a small, pale beard, bright eyes full of concern, haggard bags hanging below them in dark patches. The face belonged to the speaker. His father. He was saying things, fading in and out of focus. Only pieces penetrated the pain and the haze and the flashes of electricity arcing behind him in a corona of energy and life.

                  Darkness followed and he remembered things that he could not have remembered. He knew that he could not have remembered the because he was different in each memory. Sometimes he was small. Sometimes he was big. Sometimes his flesh was pale and other times it was dark. Sometimes the memories brimmed with joy and children and families. Mostly they were memories of blood and violence. Final moments before being torn apart by monsters. Cunning blood drinkers, relentless flesh eaters, and savage beasts masquerading as people.

                  He knew of the monsters. The enemies. He knew how to kill them like he knew how to walk. The vampires were the worst. Take off the head. Stake the heart. Silver and garlic would boil their blood and burn their undying flesh. They were real, though many would deny their existence. That was by their design. They needed to be killed. He had been born—made—to kill them above all others. His father needed it of him. Demanded it. He would answer the call.

                  The chamber was dark. That did not hinder his eyes. He could see well enough to understand. Something had gone wrong.

                  He was bound to a table by chains and leather restraints. Wires and clamps attached to his skin and the bolts sticking out from various parts of him, securing his pieces together. The electricity had flowed through them and into him, galvanizing the muscles of the dead mean he’d been built from. Some part of his mind recognized that that should have been horrifying. It wasn’t. It simply was what it was. They were only parts. Tools. He would wield them.

                  The electric lights overhead had shattered. So had the machinery that had been used to build him, revealing dank stone walls. There were no windows. He recognized much of this place from various memories that weren’t really his. Or were they? Some memories seemed more…the man was his father. His brain…most of it…had belonged to his maker’s son. A son killed by the monsters. The vampires.

                  Were they the ones who had destroyed the laboratory? That thought shattered his cold serenity. In an instant his entire body burned with the anger of it, a pain that had nothing to do with the burns or staples or bolts across his patchworked body.

                  He sat up, tearing free of the restraints with a scream of protesting metal and snapping leather. They had been meant to hold him down. The expectation had been that he would be strong. Already he had surpassed his father’s expectations. The burn of pride joined the fires of anger, helping to condense them into something that could be focused and directed like a blowtorch.

                  He pulled himself up off the table and stood up. His bare feet encountered broken glass. He ignored the minor irritant of the lacerations and focused on his surroundings.

A chair had been overturned. A desk had been smashed clean in half. Papers splotched with blood scattered about the wreckage like fallen leaves. A glass cylinder, one that had been large enough to hold him, stood shattered in the corner. That would be the source of the glass then. That and the shattered lightbulbs strung overhead.

Everything reeked of old blood.

Only one part of the laboratory hadn’t been destroyed completely. A section of wall set with pegs upon which rested a collection of weapons. Many were made by his father. A few he recognized from the memories that weren’t his own. A sword, an axe, guns. Many guns. He took an automatic rifle his father had smithed from its resting place. Holding it brought a paradoxical myriad of memories. The weapon was at once familiar and not, too small for his enormous hands, too light. Yet he remembered shooting it. Remembered the elation of receiving it.

Not as a son. As one of the others. A different hunter. It had been assigned to him.

Firearms were the weapon of the enemy, their production tightly controlled. Once, he knew, everyone had known the secrets of their workings. They had been so common as to have serial numbers. Now the only ones who had them mass produced were the vampires and only a few among hunters knew the secrets of their making. One less now, without his father.

Gunfire sounded from close by. Many shots. Heavy caliber. Like his rifle. He didn’t flinch at the sound. Gunfire meant vampires. A quick perusal and he found a clip of ammunition. Sixteen shots. It would have to be enough. 

He took off at a light jog, broken glass biting his bare feet, fast enough to get where he was going but not so fast that he couldn’t take stock of his surroundings. The lab had only one exit that took him into a stone tunnel that smelled of algae. There were no lights here. Still he had no trouble seeing. His eyes had come from a human, but they were more than that now. He could ponder what that meant later.

The tunnel made a ninety degree turn and brought him into a stone chamber that had been converted into an improvised storehouse. It was full of wooden boxes and crates. Many of them were damaged, partially opened, and stained with blood. A group of people gathered at the door on the far side, taking it in turn to fire out into the hallway beyond.

There were five of them, armed with hatchets, swords, knives, and guns and wore a patchwork of improvised armor from whatever they’d been able to fashion it out of. Tires, scrap metal, heavy cloth and leather. Two wore Kevlar vests. Another wore a metal breastplate. All wore dark, featureless masks that concealed their faces and heads so that the vampires couldn’t identify them.

They were grimy, covered in dirt and blood and panting heavily. They’re exhaustion was palpable. They were trapped. One of them was laid out, bleeding from multiple gunshots.

Return gunfire came through the doorway, forcing him to step over to the side to avoid getting hit.          

The motion caught the attention of the pair at the back. A man and a woman, the former tall and lanky, the other simply small. She wore one of the Kevlar vests and her handgun seemed too large for her.

Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.

Their eyes went wide behind their masks. The woman raised her too-big handgun and shot him.

It stung.

He grunted and glared at her.

Her gun clicked empty or she probably would have kept shooting him.

The man beside her raised his own weapon, this one a rifle similar to his own, but stopped when he found himself held at gunpoint.

He swore, then glanced at the woman. “How’d you miss him?”

“I can’t sense him,” she said. “There’s nothing. It’s like he’s not even there.”

The others caught on that something was going on and turned around.

“Oh dammit,” one of them swore. “The naked guy’s not dead?”

Naked? He supposed he was. That hadn’t seemed especially important in the face of everything else. One of them made to turn their weapon on him, a big man wearing the battered old breastplate.

“Don’t,” he said to the man, who froze.

“It talks,” the woman who’d shot him said.

“It also shoots,” he said back.

“We’re fucked,” said the last of their group, another woman. Inky black hair spilled back from her mask about her shoulders. She wore leather and Kevlar and was strapped with weapons. He approved.

The hunters had instinctively split into two groups, dividing themselves to either side of the doorway. Gunfire continued to come through, but they were forced to ignore it in light of being held at gunpoint from behind where they had no cover.

Through the doorway he could make out what they’d been shooting at. Withered corpses shambled down the dark tunnel beyond, their claw-like hands held before them in a desperate desire to grab at whatever living flesh they could find and bring to their hungry mouths. Zombies.

They weren’t the standard, rotting shamblers either. Their pale flesh had been well preserved. Some still had frost clinging to them. They must have been kept in some kind of walk-in freezer until they were needed.

Someone had affixed their skulls with open-faced metal helmets, clearly riveting them to the skulls. The zombies could still see, still bring their infectious bite to bear, but a glancing headshot wouldn’t be enough. What was more, someone had affixed their chests with rigs, each housing a small turret-mounted machine pistol.

 The remote-fired automatic pistols wouldn’t be very accurate, which was probably why the hunters was still alive, but they didn’t need to. If they provided cover fire or wounded the zombie’s prey…it only took one bite to swell the ranks of the undead.

He strode forward, a sense of relief and purpose simultaneously washing over him. Here was his enemy. Here was his calling. He would do his father proud.

“I can’t believe I’m going to be killed by some asshole not wearing pants,” the dark-haired woman said.

“Don’t shoot me,” he ordered them and stepped into the doorway, setting to semi-auto.

Nine zombies.

Machine-pistol fire reverberated around him. His first shot missed, the gun, so familiar in his huge hands, felt smaller than it should have and it threw him off. He took a bullet to his other shoulder, then his hip. He grunted and adjusted his aim.

His next shot didn’t miss, catching the nearest zombie in the t-box, that zone right between the eyes and above the nose that guaranteed a pulped brain. The zombie collapsed. Its machine pistol took out the legs of the two behind it as it toppled. With their gunfire temporarily neutralized he focused on the zombies behind them.

Bang. Bang. Bang. Three shots. Two more dead. The third shot glanced off a helmet. Bang. Bang. Another two. The two that had their legs shot out from under than began to get back up. He shot them both in the head.

He found his rhythm and the rest dropped. One shot. One kill.

Nine zombies down for eleven bullets. He scowled. Five shots left. If both the zombies and their turrets were being remotely commanded then the vampire probably wouldn’t be far off. Five bullets wouldn’t be enough. Not when none of them were silver.

The vampires controlled that too tightly for it to be readily available to the hunters. 

A put-out sigh came from the other end of the hall, which split into a fork. A man stepped out from behind the corner, a long saber in one hand and a pistol in the other. On his forearm he had a device that was mostly screen. That had probably been how he’d been commanding the turrets.

He was a tall figure, pale with dark hair and red eyes. The difference between him and the hunters back in the warehouse could not have been more apparent. For one thing, he was clean and well put together. All of his equipment matched. His glossy black armor had been fitted and tailored to his lean physique and blended with his flowing coat, as much a fashion statement as a defensive measure.

The vampire eyed him up and down.

“Not going to lie,” it said. “I’ve seen some damn ugly things in this world, but you, my naked friend, take the bloody cake.”

It raised its gun and opened fire.

He was already moving. Ducking and rolling, grabbing hold of a downed zombie and holding it before him as a meat shield. Several bullets tore through it and struck him, but not with the same force they would have had otherwise. The vampire clicked empty, gave another sigh, and tossed the gun aside.

Idiot. The monster wasn’t taking this seriously. It should have reloaded.

The vampire flew forward in a blur, coat billowing behind it, bleeding shadows as it moved, darting around.

“You thought you were something special, hunter?” it asked, voice light and teasing. “Survived enough to collect those scars and now you think your invincible?”

He switched to full auto and emptied the clip. Whether or not his shots connected he couldn’t tell. If they had, it wouldn’t have made a difference. The vampire knew this and laughed. Good. Hitting it hadn’t been the point.

“What’s the matter? Struggling to keep up?” The attack came from behind.

He blocked the blade with the empty rifle, twisted, knocking it free, and grabbed the vampire by the forearms. The vampire lunged forward, trying to take his neck with its fangs, only to find itself stopped short. His grip on the undead’s arms held.

The vampire stared at the hold in shock.

“Get over yourself. You’re not that fast,” he said, and swung the vampire into the wall. The stone cracked. So did the vampire’s bones.

It shrieked. He didn’t let it go, instead yanking the arms down and swinging his elbow into the screaming undead’s face. Its skull flew back into he stone with a crunch. Blood spilled out of the cut skin.

Like most undead, there was only one real way to kill a vampire. A stake through the heart would paralyze it, force it to slowly wither and decay, but to truly slay one, you had to take the head. Preferably with the heart. He wasn’t about to release his hold to go take the vampire’s dropped blade, so he did the next best thing.

He elbowed it in the head, smashing it back into the stone wall again. Again. Again, twisting with all the force he could draw up from the ground, pivoting through his hips and shoulder. Over and over and over, until the undead’s skull cracked, then crunched, then finally tore free of its skin, spilling out in a collection blood, bone, and brains.

He kept going. 

Only when the skull was splinters and the bloody mush that had been its brains leaked all over the floor did he stop, flinging the vampire to the ground. It didn’t move. To be certain, he collected the things saber, not taking his eyes off of it, then severed what remained of the head at the neck. He ripped off the armor and drove the blade through the monster’s heart.   

The body withered, then crumbled in on itself. The thing hadn’t been very old.

Weapon dripping with gore, he returned his attention to the hunters in the warehouse. They’d come out, weapons ready, but none of them were pointed at him. Instead they stared, open-mouthed.

“I can’t sense him at all,” the small woman said again. “It’s like he’s undead.”

A psychic? Right. Protocol. A hunter team would have one team lead and one psychic in addition to their operatives. One so the team could function with autonomy from the Council, the other to keep them in communication. The minds of the undead could not be read, let alone controlled. Apparently, neither could his. Another thing to ponder later.

“Sydow made a super-zombie?” the lanky man asked. “Or a revenant?”

He didn’t have time to listen to them speculate about things that didn’t matter. There was work to be done. Still, he began with a question he already knew the answer to. “You are hunters?”

“Yes,” the man in the breastplate said.

“I was made to fight with you.” He gestured at the remains of the vampire, flicking droplets of blood from the blade in the process. “Where is my father?”

For a moment the hunters seemed confused, then understanding dawned. They shuffled uncomfortably. It was the one in the breastplate, the team lead, who answered, gesturing with his rifle at the slain vampire. “Leon, the vampire, killed him. He killed Bones too.”

He closed his eyes. Pain that had nothing to do with the fresh bullet wounds pulsed through him. He didn’t care about the hunter who’d gone by the code name Bones. His father was gone.

“What’s your name?” the small woman asked.

Everyone turned to look at her and she shied back, but caught herself and stood firm.

“Father called me Boris.” He’d laughed in the memory, like he’d thought it was a great joke. Boris turned his gaze back to the team lead. “He made me to kill vampires. Team lead, what are your instructions? Do we have our next target?”

The hunters looked uncomfortable. The dark-haired woman gave a bark of laughter. “Okay, great. We’ll let you hunt vampires with us, but there’s something you need first.”

She was prepared for his gazed and gestured at his lower half with a finger. “Pants.”