GI Joe: Heros and Terrorists Chapter 26: 04 18 2034 Twilight NEW, a g. i. joe fanfic

04/18/2034 - Twilight

04/18/2034: 0600h - The Rock - Briefing Room

Rapid Fire dropped down into the seat next to Falcon, "any idea what's going on around here?"

"Got me," he replied, "but its got the brass antsy as all hell. Even Steel seems to be crapping his pants about something."

"Great. I thought Courage looked jumpy when I passed him earlier. Though I'm not really sure what makes me more nervous, that, or the people assembled for this briefing."

Falcon was tempted to agree, the assemblage was worrisome: Med Alert, Stretcher and Triage were chatting in the corner, an unusual sight to see all three medics in one place; Airtight and Sci-fi were no doubt debating the latest in modern warfare techniques; Blowtorch, Dart, Sparta and Antenna were clustered around the front; Barricade, Widescope and Shockwave lounged near the far right wall and Tarurus, Red Dog and Slaughter were arm wrestling near the back, watched carefully by an unusually large group of greenshirts. But perhaps most disturbing of all, Snake Eyes was off alone near the far left wall. He never attended briefings, even those rare times he was seen on the bases. Usually he showed up, did something and disappeared. Overall, Falcon definitely had to agree with Rap., this was not exactly an encouraging sign.

The door at the back of the auditorium banged open, with a disturbing series of heavy weapons operators, Heavy Duty, Harpoon, Freight and Hardball barrelling through with Wild Bill on their heals.

"Well that doesn't exactly make me feel any better," Falcon commented, quickly calculating the magnitude of firepower that had just walked into the room, "and that doesn't help either." The last referred to the briefing officer. Usually it was up to Sharpe or Courage to give the briefing, depending on the theater of operations, occasional Lifeline would give it for smaller operations, and once Ledger had been pressed into service, but it was General Colton who was currently walking onto stage from the other door

Even Slaughter and Red Dog quietened at his appearance, the room deathly quiet after the shuffling of a few chairs. Colton wasted no time.

"As you've no doubt seen in the news for the last eleven or so months, across southern Europe there have been thousands of claims of so-called vampire sightings, around the same time that a rash in unidentified deaths began. Sounded ridiculous to everyone outside of Hollywood, and a handful of people at Interpol who decided to investigate. Turns out that the sightings became more numerous the closer they were to Venice. Interviews on the ground showed similar correlations in Northern Africa and Turkey, showing the same convergence in intensity. Someone decided to point a military grade satellite at the area around Venice for a few nights, and they saw something. An unidentified flying object - and the second any of you mention aliens I will personally shoot you - between eight and nine feet in length with an approximately equal wingspan. The shape and aerodynamics roughly match those of a bat, so a bunch of scientists went to investigate the area where it landed. They disappeared.

Interpol thought it best not to mention that and cause public panic, and sent a team after them. They disappeared. So the Italian military sent a military force after them, followed by one from the European Union, followed by a special forces team from the US military. That team at least managed to get a communication out. Our offices picked it up, as did anyone else monitoring the frequency they were using, but the message was garbled beyond interpretation. All communication was cut thereafter. That was just three days ago.

No one else wants to go near the island, and that's why we're sending you men in. Your going to take a scenic trip down to Poveglia Island. Whatever is happening there, you go in and fix it."

And with that, Colton left, quickly being replaced at the podium by Courage.

"All right men, most of you have probably never heard of Poveglia Island, and I woudn't blame you. Its five kilometers south of Venice, and just over half a kilometer west of Malamocco on the coastal due bar surrounding the lagoon. Questions at the end Airtight. Its not exactly a vacation spot. The island got its scary start when the Romans, being the kind, gentle souls they were, decided the best thing for society was to round up all the plague victims of the era, and stick them somewhere. During the Bubonic plague the island was reinstated and when the plague got worse, they lowered Poveglia's requirements to anybody with any sign of sickness at all. Then they decided that rather than letting the plague run its course, and risk any victim surviving or escaping,they decided that the best thing to do was throw them in a large pit atop the already-dead bodies and set them on fire. Most estimates put the death toll between 160,000 and 200,000 and charred bones still wash up on shore.

The island was home to a small community until it was abandoned around 1380, during the War of Chioggia between Venice and Genoa. A mental hospital was built on the island in 1922. Local lore suggests that one mental health doctor tortured and killed many of the patients, before being thrown to his death from a bell tower. Of course, the legend also states that he survived the fall, but was, ahem, strangled by a mist that came up from the ground. Of course, the island is now said to be haunted. If you see the headless horseman, please take a picture. Those are the ruins you see on the island. At the turn of the century, the island was used for vineyard farming, and closed to tourists. After a few incidents of vandalism, and a couple murders in 2018, the vineyards were abandoned and tourism is still not permitted

Real fun place. Most of the open pits were covered in the last couple centuries, but a few remain."

Courage pressed a button on the podium and a satellite image of the Bay of Venice appeared on the screen behind him with a red circle around Poveglia Island. The magnification increased, revealing the details of the island and its buildings. The Island was actually three smaller landmasses connected with bridges: an octagonal building sat at the southern point, either entirely covering a circular island, or built on stilts like Venice, a central, square-ish island on which a series of ancient stone buildings dominated the left half, and an third at the north end that arched along buffering the entire north coast of the central island. It was the third island which Courage focused on, "As you can see, there are a small series of freshly excavated pits here, almost exactly where they were in antiquity, in fact, you can see the old bones beneath some of the fresher corpses."

Courage directed his laser pointer at one of the pits, "here you can see the bodies of some of the special forces troopers. Their uniforms are still there, but their gear has all been removed. Satellites don't show it anywhere on the island, but we know it must be there somewhere as no boat has come or gone since they arrived."

Falcon felt a bit of bile rise as he took in the injuries suffered by the troopers and the police who could be seen beneath them. Many had had their throats slit, or been decapitated, but others had been completely eviscerated, lost limbs, or been castrated. Most had several injuries to different parts of their body, all looking like they were done with a simple, but very large, blade. That certainly explained why Snake Eyes and the three medics were there.

"What's more unnerving than the injuries your seeing," continued Courage, "is that there are ten people unaccounted for in the graves, two from each of the scientific group, interpol force, local and European militarys and special operations teams that went aground. Your secondary mission is to try and find them and get them off the island to safety. But most importantly you guys are going to be figuring out who or what is causing this. Now, I'm reticent to use the word 'vampire', but based on further satellite coverage, and some long-range photographs by the Italian military, we've got something roughly man-sized with wings.

The Experimental Weapons Division informs me it is possible to build a flight pack like our Stealth JUMP packs and attach working wings to give the impression of bat-like flight without noticeable exhaust plumes. We believe that's what we're dealing with, but we don't know. The records Mercer brought with him from Cobra indicate that similar packs, minus the wings, were in development somewhere in Asia, so we know that conflict with them is a possibility, especially given their recent activity in Rome. I realize this is a large strike force for a single mission, but because of the number of people who have died on the island, and because of the age and size of the complex, we feel that it is necessary. Any smaller force could be avoided and prevent a quick resolution. Suitcase?"

Somehow Falcon had missed the lawyer's entrance, but he now moved from the edge of the room to the center of the stage.

"Good afternoon. Because the Italian government has requested intervention from the UN, I do not require you to fill out the usual mission forms. You are there on official business and will have full support from the Italian military, and will refer to yourselves as UN Special Task Force One for all official correspondence outside of the team. As your usual cover, an equal number of members from UN Special Task Force Omega has been flown out from England this afternoon, and your arrival will be undetected. The usual precautions apply to prevent contact between your two forces. They will be housed in Venice until your extraction and then switch places with you for the extraction. Other than three members of the Italian military who report directly to the President, the exchange will work as usual.

All greenshirts who have not participated in previous missions must remain after this briefing for further instructions on how to proceed with your cover. Thank you."

"Thank you suitcase. Further details including maps of the islands, and what we know of the buildings will be given to you on your way out. Sure Fire will be in charge of the operation with Shockwave, Falcon and Slaughter each in charge of a smaller team. One medic will be assigned to each team at your discretion. Your team will also be joined by Rex as your science officer. He has been briefed separately and is already in Europe to give a lecture series allowing him to meet you in Venice before you begin your operation. Any questions?"

Airtight's hand went up first, "Sir, two questions. First, if this island is in the middle of Venice Bay and less than a half kilometer from an inhabited area, how is this a covert operation? Let alone when there are vineyards there? Secondly, and along the same lines, how could this person with the jet pack have lived there without anyone having noticed him even with the vineyards closed?"

"To answer your first question, all the drops on the island have been done on the far side when no other boats were in view. Your drop will be under the cover of darkness, and don't worry about being seen. The half kilometer is more than enough for you to go unnoticed by anyone who's not using binoculars, and most of the local residents have other things to worry about. As for how this person has been living there, I really have no idea. If you find out while your there let me know.

Anyone else? No? Good. Rapid Fire, Falcon, Lifeline wants to see you two in the med center. Dismissed"

Falcon glanced left at Rapid Fire who appeared equally confused and shrugged as he rose from his seat, "somethings up."

"No kidding, lets find out what's going on."

The two men made their way out of the room through the front door into the command hallways. The enlisted men didn't realize it, but a second set of corridors ran through several levels of The Rock through which officers could move to go about their business more quickly during emergencies. They had been built by the original owners to allow the CIA and Canada's CSIS to keep an eye on the NORAD operatives who were supposed to be housed in the base during the Cold War, but the base had never been used, and when the Joes had moved in, there was no way to modify the two systems into one without compromising the stability of much of the construction, so it had fallen into use as extra office space and storage. The armories were located in a similar stretch of corridor a few floors down.

A lift car was waiting down the hall, and Falcon hit the button for the twelfth level, "here's a question, why would Lifeline want to meet with us separately, rather than come in for the briefing? And why us and not his medical team?"

"That's been bugging me too. I have a feeling its something he doesn't want the non-coms to know, but the fact he's not letting Shock in on it is odd as well." Rapid Fire shrugged, "We'll see."

The lift door opened, and the two men headed into the large med bay. Off to the left the door to the kennel was closed, but through the glass they could see Link and Shipwreck fighting with Polly who was putting up quite a struggle.

"Fixed the soundproofing I see," Rapid Fire commented dryly. "Hey, Lifeline, you here?"

A hand jutted out and waved from one of the nearby bays, beckoning them over. Lifeline was leaning over a laptop perched on Mainframe's bedside.

"Hey Frame. Working in the hospital? I would have thought the doctor would order you some downtime to recuperate?"

"Trust me Falcon, when you see what I'm working on, you'll understand."

"Real spooky stuff then eh? But seriously, how are you?"

"Not too bad considering. At least I got out of Indonesia, there were a lot of good men who didn't."

Silence fell in the room. Indonesia had been one heck of an op gone wrong. Most of the team had wound up dead, and Mainframe had only barely made it out in a fireman's carry over Stalker's shoulder. Those two were the only ones who boarded the flight home. Fistfight, Arctic Blast, Camper, Gunslinger, Shockblast and Razor would all be missed; Duke, not so much. Still, it was a tragedy when anyone didn't make it home, no matter if you liked them or not. But there was no changing that now. Dead was dead.

"All right you two, I only have a few minutes," Lifeline broke the silence, "and this is rather important to you."

Gesturing for them to follow him, Lifeline led them down through the med bay and through a door neither recognized. "I've asked you here to show you two things. Well, when I told Courage to send you up, it was only one, but its two now. Firstly, I assume you've seen the satellite images of Poveglia? Good. Well, no doubt you saw the injuries to the corpses."

A small part of Falcon wondered how a doctor could be so cold when talking about a dead person.

"I was looking at them, trying to figure out what caused the injuries, and I couldn't place a weapon, so I decided to take some practice swings at some of the medical dummies my company produces. We generally ship them out to med schools, hospitals and the like as training pieces for surgeries and such. But because of their close resemblance to the physical characteristics of human anatomy, and their accuracy of response, they also provide a very useful simulator for wound damage. Now, the skin on them is a bit tougher than human skin, but we made it a bit thinner, so it kind of matches what you'd see in real life. Its better with the internal organ mock-ups.

On the wall here, you can see the injuries from our satellite shots, and here are a series of 8 dummies suffering various wounds. You'll notice the first seven don't match very well, but the eighth comes fairly close to the injuries sustained by the individual in the center of this pit. For the first five I tried standard weapons around the base: I took a bonesaw, and the like to the first, had Rock and Roll machine gun the second, had Inferno take a fire ax to the third, took combat knives to the fourth, and let Snake Eyes have a go at the fifth.

At this point, you'll notice a few similarities appear, but the blade strokes are wrong. I tried having Snake Eyes do it with his off hand on the sixth, and then tried something different with the seventh. I'd noticed on the fifth that the strokes were too long, and though they pointed in the right direction appeared to have started with the tip of the blade rather than the edge, so on number seven, I had Snake hold the blade in the reverse of the normal position, with the blade tip pointed downwards when his hand was held forward. As you can see, its getting closer. For try number eight, I got him to let me tie the blade to his forearm, with the tip pointed back behind his elbow and go at it again. As you can see, the wounds from number eight almost exactly match those on the body. There are some differences which I attribute to another weapon, different positioning of the attacker and victim and a much taller attacker.

So that means your dealing with someone who is quite tall. The wounds suggest in excess of eight feet, which I would have though was impossible, but appears to be the case based on the images captured of that person flying on the winged jet pack. Which brings me to my second commentary. Actually, its not mine, Carl was the first to notice it."

Lifeline continued talking as they returned to where Mainframe lay in bed, his leg still supported in a stirrup, "I'd left some of the footage of the person's flight playing on my computer when I went to deal with something else, and it caught Carl's eye as he was passing, and he picked up on something I didn't. The position of the flyer, and the aerodynamics of the flight don't match that of a jet pack user. Now, you probably know he was the medical consultant when the US finally developed the first military jet pack, so he knows the flight mechanics of the body better than anyone else. Now, I won't go into the details of it, but based on the jerking of the body, arm movements, and leg positioning during the flight, the man couldn't have been wearing a jetpack. His legs would have been scorched by propellant if he was using a chemically powered one, or blown down if he was using a scramjet version. Also, the repetitive jerking up and down of his body with each wing beat indicates that the wings are responsible for the flight. Since Mainframe was in anyway, I let him loose on the footage to see if the two of them could come up with something."

Falcon and Rapid Fire perched on chairs beside Mainframe's bed where they had a view of the laptop.

"Quite simply," explained Mainframe, "I took the images from the satellite capture of the flight and tried to model the shape of the person your looking at. I found a few things that were interesting. Firstly," he enlarged the point where the two wings joined in the middle of the person's back, "there is no space between these and the body to fit a jetpack. As you can see, they sit on a small bulge rising from the back only a few inches above the back. Now, given the wingspan, and modern science, its probably not impossible to have designed a backpack with wings that would allow for flight. I've never heard of anyone even coming close to getting something like that to work, but obviously its possible. What is unusual though is the motion with the wings. Watch the shoulders, you'll see that they drop down briefly before coming back up after each wing beat. Same with the hips. What's strange about that is that it indicates that the wings are not worn using conventional harneses. It seems almost as if they are attached directly to the spine, which is impossible."

"So what are you saying," Falcon found the words leaving his mouth before he could stop them, "this is actually a vampire? You've been here a bit too long Frame."

"No, I'm not saying that, I'm just saying your dealing with something very freaking weird."

"Lovely."

"Thanks Frame," Lifeline interrupted, "get some rest. Come along you two."

Lifeline ushered them towards the door, and once they were out of Mainframe's hearing, he halted them, "guys, I have no idea what your getting into, but a lot of very competent people died on that island, and there's something very, very weird about whoever this nutjob is. Keep your eyes open."

Falcon was almost out the door with Rapid Fire when Lifeline decided to add something else, "oh, and don't let this distract you, but all of the victims have massive bite marks on their necks."

04/18/2034: 1900h - Motor Launch - Approaching Poveglia Island

Falcon peered through a pair of binoculars towards Poveglia island trying to get a feel for the land before night fell and the strike team landed; there was only so much a person could glean from satellite images, and second-hand photographs. Dart appeared to agree, as he lay prone on top of the wheelhouse staring through what looked like an enlarged sniper scope at the distant island.

"You see anything," Falcon decided to verify his own lack of observations.

"Old buildings, trees, a couple bones on the beach. Nothing regarding our mission. Though there does appear to be a storm rolling in from the east."

Falcon nodded, he'd noticed the storm also, probably because of the wind whipping the breakers around them. At the edge of the bay, he'd already seen the barriers raise above the water level to prevent the rising sea levels from inundating the Lagoon. The pneumatic steal barriers could protect against up to a twenty foot rise in water levels without allowing any rise in the level in the lagoon. One worry that did play on Falcon's mind was that the storm would reduce visibility on the island to nearly zero, making a proper search almost impossible, meaning they would have to be on this tiny spit of land far longer than he would have liked. On the bright side, the weather also meant that anyone in Malamocco who happened to glance towards the island would be completely unable to see the island, let alone the Joes going about their business on it.

A few more minutes of bumping across the water, and the two boats drew into the small divide between the central island and the southern octagonal stone landing. Even this close, Falcon couldn't tell whether it was artificially constructed, or just covering a pre-existing island. But the stone ramparts rose five feet out of the water leading to a flat topped area that looked like it may once have been covered by a roof that had long since collapsed.

Freight jumped out of the second boat, and clambered up the side of the artificial pier, turning to stabilize the ladders from each boat and help the rest of the team up. Somehow, by the time Falcon made it up the ladder a handful of seconds later, Snake Eyes was already over by the bridge to the middle island peering up at the buildings there. Falcon shook his head and offered a hand to Sparta as she climbed the last couple rungs of the ladder.

Once the entire team was aground, the two boats pulled in their ladders and headed back out into the lagoon where they would wait until the team radioed for pickup. Rapid Fire took charge immediately. All right guys, we're going to split into three search teams, team one will come with me, and search the south buildings, team two will go with Falcon to search the north buildings, and team three will go with Slaughter to check the eastern side of the island. We'll meet at the bridge to the north island as soon as everyone's done. There aren't many places to hide here, we'll find this nutcase. Take him alive if you can, but our safety and those of the people we hope to rescue takes priority."

"Shockwave, Widescope, Airtight, Barricade, Stretcher, Harpoon, Freight and you six," Rapid Fire pointed to one group of greenshirts, "are team one with me. Dart, Rex, Sparta, Antenna, Med Alert, Sci-Fi and you seven are team two with Falcon. The rest of you are with Slaughter. Snake Eyes, I'm assuming your going to do your own thing anyway, so go, just stay in...where the hell did he go?"

04/18/2034: 1915h - North Island of Poveglia Island

Snake Eyes walked silently across the bridge linking to the northern island, noting that it was only a little over a hundred years old, making it the newest piece of construction by a good few centuries anywhere on the island. The first thing he'd decided to investigate were the bodies in the holes. Though the whole team was tasked with extraction and solving, his job was to figure out who was running this place and what they were doing. Most of the command staff believed it was one crazy individual, not the first one the team had had to deal with, but Hawk was fairly convinced that this had something to do with a Cobra bioweapons project that had been alluded to in the files that Mercer had brought with him. Apparently Lifeline had attempted to get more information from Chuckles about it, but all he'd managed to come up with was the name of the operation: Project Lunatrix. Locations and details were above his access level, whatever it was.

A quick glance around showed empty fields surrounding the pits with the bodies. A light tap by with a finger on the side of his visor overlayed the view with an infrared image. It came up just as blank as visual observation and Snake Eyes allowed himself to relax for a moment before he dropped in the central pit for a closer look at the bodies. Somewhat morbid walking around on centuries worth of dead bodies. Briefly Snake Eye's mind flashed back to one of his missions during the Chino-Korean War of the last decade when his small team had had to move through a recently abandoned battlefield in landed with his feet on either side of the torso of one of the US Special Forces team. Tens of thousands of recently dead had littered the ground, but most of them had still been recognizable. Here, beneath the fresh corpses were the decayed bones of plague victims that had been buried for centuries, the marks of burning still evident on many, and the stench of decay nauseous even with burned tissue of his nasal passages. An Arashikage breathing technique reduced the smell to merely unpleasant.

A quick search revealed that everything other than the simple uniform had been removed, just as with everyone else in the pit. Whoever this guy was, he now had one heck of an armory sitting somewhere on the island. Presuming of course that it was just one individual and not more than that. Tapping the top edge of the right side of his visor captured quick images of the faces of each victim. A flurry of taps on the keypad at his wrist and the image set fired off 20,000 feet overhead to where Ghostrider was circling to forward them to the PIT for positive identification. He backflipped out of the hole and repeated the procedure in each of the flanking pits. Those bodies also carried nothing in the way of identification or weaponry, though as Lifeline had indicated, each one had a large bite mark on the neck. On a couple, the bite had torn out the trachea which would have resulted in nearly instantaneous death, on others, it overlapped and had snapped the spine, while on the rest, it appeared purely superficial on the side of the neck.

Not being a doctor, Snake Eyes had to admit, he didn't understand the reason for the wounds, especially given the variety of other injuries suffered by the victims which would have been more than adequate to kill them, but what interested him more was the state of dessication around the wounds. A black green twinge affected the skin surrounding the wounds, but no blood stained the surrounding area, unlike every other wound on the bodies. Snake Eyes quickly snapped a few more images and sent them of before backflipping out of the pit and back onto level ground.

The immediate area was still empty, but a brief ripple of movement in a group of trees slightly to the north caught his attention. Nothing showed on an infrared scan, but something more than the wind had caused it.

04/18/2034: 1930h - East side of Poveglia Island

Blowtorch muttered to himself as he worked another branch out of the joint between his chest armor and torso. The rest of the team was a half dozen meters ahead, slowly spreading through the trees that covered most of the main island. The buildings themselves were practically burried in them, while the eastern edge of the island was completely covered with them. Finally, he managed to work his armor free from the clawing tree and hurried to catch up. Taurus and Red Dog were arguing quietly about something off to the left, but Triage was bent over something and Blowtorch joined him. The medic pointed silently at a depression in the ground; it was roughly the shape of a foot, but far larger than anything Blowtorch had ever seen, and with a very pointed toe. It definitely wasn't a foot print, but perhaps an indentation made by an unusual shoe.

Blowtorch was about to wave Slaughter over when something barrelled out of the bush knocking him over, Triage reacted instantly, throwing his back against a tree and firing off a shot from a pistol before Blowtorch had even hit the ground. The commotion quickly drew the attention of the rest of the team, the greenshirts converging blindly on the area, while Red Dog and Taurus tried to get a clean shot at the attacker. After a few seconds, the cause of the commotion was clear, a very large black dog had gripped onto the throat of one of the greenshirts and hauled him to the ground. The man was beating at the animal furiously with his hands, but despite the man's attempt and the blood poring from the wound Triage's bullet had inflicted the dog held on. The struggle ended as suddenly as it had began as the dog tore a gaping hole in the troopers's throat before succumbing to another pair of shots from Red Dog and Taurus who finally brought it down. Triage hurried over to the man's side, but he was already dead.

"He's gone Sir."

Slaughter sighed, "bag him, and you two," he indicated two other greenshirts, "find a place near the buildings and put him under some protection. We'll take him out with us."

The two troopers moved to help Triage with the body bag.

"Damn. Rapid Fire isn't going to be happy that I lost one of my men on this milk run."

"Sir," interrupted Taurus, "this is a cobra mutt. Night Adder's."

"That cooks it. We finish searching these woods, then we meet up with the other teams at the buildings. Something's up here."

Just then a scream sounded from the direction of the buildings.

04/18/2034: 1925h - Building 5, Poveglia Island

Falcon and his team walked cautiously through the door into the southern most building on Poveglia. It sat on a Southwest-Northeast angle, and was just under a hundred meters in length along that axis and slightly over ten meters in width, with a second story on the more northerly half terminating with the island's bell tower. Darkness was falling outside, and inside the building was practically pitch dark.

"Dart, you take Rex, Sparta and these three with you. Antenna, Med Alert and you four, come with me."

Part of Falcon felt guilty for not yet having learned the names of all the greenshirts who were, temporarily, under his command. He made a mental note to be more involved with them for the rest of the mission.

"Robinson," he hoped that actually was the man's name, "take point; we're going to check upstairs."

"Yes sir!"

Ah good, Falcon thought, that had been the right name, allowing himself a small look of satisfaction as they climbed the stairs. The smile disappeared as they reached the top. Three large black dogs lay in the hallway. Or rather, their bodies did, their heads having been removed and now lined up on the third shelf of an ancient bookcase beside a doorway to another room. The top two shelves were occupied by sixteen severed human heads. Behind him, someone retched, and Falcon couldn't really blame whoever it was as he fought to keep down his own bile. Each head wore an expression of terror, and dried blood stained the shelves and congealed in a pool on the floor.

"Well," Med Alert commented dryly, "I'd say they're dead. Want me to check for pulses sir?"

Falcon shot him a withering look, "see if you can't identify them. If not, command will still want the pictures. Devonowski," he pointed to the young woman who stood behind Med Alert, "give him any assistance he needs."

"Yes sir."

"The rest of you fan out and start checking rooms."

Sparta and Rex headed into the office next door, while the other three greenshirts headed down the hall, eventually disappearing three doors down.

"Sir, a word?" Antenna asked gesturing back into the stairwell.

Falcon followed, and raised an eyebrow once they were out of ear-shot of the rest of the team.

"I recognize one of those heads. Dr. Robert Nurse. He worked at...what?"

"Sorry," Falcon apologized trying to stop himself from from chuckling, "but I never thought I'd hear the name Doctor Nurse. That's just amusing."

"Sure. Anyway, he worked MIT as a geneticist. I know that because he was dating my cousin for a few months a couple years ago. He quit the campus suddenly about 20 months ago, moved out of the country, stopped answering e-mails; basically disappeared. She had no idea where he went."

"So, a missing geneticist turns up, minus his body, at an abandoned island, where we have rumors of a vampire. This day is getting better and better. Anything else?"

"On, nothing really important; his main project was artificial life."

Falcon turned and allowed his forehead to smack against the stonework of the wall, "great just great. Any other tidbits? Careful Med! We want those heads intact!"

The last followed a loud crashing sound from upstairs.

"No, that's abou-"

Antenna was cut off by a loud scream by Devonowski.

Both men were up the stairs, weapons drawn six seconds later, but that was too long. Med alert was lying on his side unconscious, his head bleeding profusely where it had smacked into the bookcase. Devonowski's body lay beside him, with a gaping wound slashed from waist to neck spilling organs and spurting blood. Behind her, five letters were written on the wall with her blood: LEAVE.

04/18/2034: 2000h - The Rock - Special Operations Command Center 3

Hawk paced the room behind the row of technicians, his frustration evident to everyone in the room, Lifeline was leaning over Datum's shoulder while Breaker and Uplink spoke quietly at another terminal.

"So, allow me to recap," Hawk snarled, "Two greenshirts are dead, Snake Eyes is missing, and Rapid Fire has no idea what's going on. That about it?"

Lifeline rolled his eyes, "you forgot that this is most likely a cobra installation."

Hawk cursed and resumed pacing.

"Oh would you calm down Clayton? Ghostrider can still keep the uplink with Snake open once he gets above ground again; we just have to wait for him to finish checking out whatever was in that underground cellar."

Hawk merely grumbled something unintelligible. The last thing they'd heard from Rapid Fire's team was the report of the dog and vampire attacks, after that the interference from the storm had started disrupting their satellite uplink, and their short-range radios didn't quite carry far enough to reach the nearest receptor the Joes could commandeer on land. What was worse was that in spite of the sea wall raised around the lagoon, the high winds were making it impossible for the local police boats to stay on the water around the island and relay messages. All that was left was the laser uplink between Snake Eyes' wrist communicator and Ghostrider's stealth jet, but Snake Eyes had disappeared about half an hour ago to investigate some underground building he'd found near the east coast of the northern island and hadn't reported in since. Hopefully everything was going well.

04/18/2034: 2000h - Underground Bunker; North Island of Poveglia Island

Everything was very far from fine. Snake Eyes had followed the movement he'd spotted earlier into a copse of trees on the north side of the island, eventually determining that it had been caused by a small radio dish that was swinging disjointedly in the wind from a single wire after having been ripped off it pole sometime in the past.

After twenty or so minutes, he had tracked the buried cable from the dish to a pipe inset in the ground beneath another group of trees on the east side of the island. A bit of prodding in the immediate area had revealed a closed trapdoor hidden beneath a bit of artificial turf. The trapdoor wasn't locked, instead having been torn off its hinges some time recently and simply set back on top of the hole. Beneath, the shaft opened into a hallway with a ceiling about three feet under the ground. Water sloshed around his ankles as Snake Eyes had dropped into the hole. A series of pumps along the hallway worked furiously to drain the hall, but the water seepage from the lagoon was slowly winning the battle. Dim light showed a few feet ahead from a larger cavern which Snake Eyes approached cautiously, one hand on his holstered gloc, the other ready to go for his katana.

The hallway opened up into a large chamber. At the far side, a large pool of water sloshed, or rather, a pool of water that was deeper than the water in the rest of the chamber. It looked like there was an underwater entrance out into the lagoon, and tied up to the wall were a pair of mini-subs, explaining how the island had been supplied without anyone noticing.

A flash of movement off to the right caught Snake Eyes' attention almost too late. He dropped and rolled to his right, becoming quickly soaked in the water covering the floor, but his movement had allowed him to avoid the downwards stroke of a giant blade. Coming to his feet, Snake eyes got his first look at his attacker; the thing stood about six feet from him and was dressed head to toe in red armor blotched with white and blue. His head was encased in a helmet that looked like the face of an insect, complete with small antenna sticking out of each side of his head, blue flashing orbs where his eyes should have been, and a large snout. In his hands was a massive weapon that was somewhere between a sword and an axe with a massive head slowly sloping down to the handle and a sharp edge running along the front and top edges. Based on the dent gouged in the floor where Snake Eyes had stood a moment before, it had to weight at least a couple dozen pounds, and yet this person was swinging it about his head as though it were a tennis racket.

The person charged, screaming unintelligibly with the axe swinging towards Snake Eyes' head. He dodged again, drawing his katana and delivering a sharp riposte to the attacker's back. Instead the tip of the blade skipped off the armored plates on the back, and seemed instead to simply enrage his opponent more. The blade scythed through the air, clanging loudly as it met the edge of the Katana. His opponent rolled away, readying for another overhand strike. Snake Eyes waited patiently until his opponent was in full motion charging for him, then quickly sidestepped to the left and hammered his blade towards the man's exposed neck beneath the back of his helmet. His opponent threw his shoulder up, blocking the strike and preventing his own decapitation.

Mentally, Snake Eyes cursed, this guy was almost as fast as the Hard Master had once been. Another swipe from his opponents blade carved the air a few inches in front of Snake Eyes, exposing a hole in his defences into which Snake Eyes charged, blade leveled ready to end the match in a single stroke. Instead the armored man brought his pointed boot up hard between Snake Eye's legs. Even with a back flip, the breath flew from his lungs, and Snake Eyes gasped with the pain; barely able to fall unceremoniously to the left as his opponent made to skewer him. He landed hard on his right hip, a sharp object digging into his flesh while the katana was knocked from his hand by the force of hitting the water surface. Another stroke of the axe would have taken his head off had he not moved when he did, but as he dodged away his hand pulled the obstruction from his right hip. As he came to his knee, he fired twice towards his opponent's chest; the obstruction that had dug into his hip was an experimental AA11 provided by the experimental weapons division back at the pit. It used a small battery to charge a solenoid that repulsed semi-magnetized armor piercing rounds out the barrel at high speeds for anti-armor, anti-personnel use. The lack of chemical repellent reduced the kickback until it was hardly noticeable more than a slight jolt as the solenoid activated, similarly, and completely eliminated the traditional crack of a firearm, making it a perfect weapon for covert operations.

The attacker appeared to jump backwards, the two shots having taken him off his feet; the axe splashed into the waves a few feet away from the body collapsing to the floor. Snake Eyes picked himself up and retrieved his Katana before walking over to the body to ensure it was dead. Reaching down, he grabbed hold of the bottom of the helmet, preparing to drive a knife into the subject's trachea, but stopped; the man was wheezing something with his dying breaths,

"Was...once...a...man. Was once a MAN!"

The last word was expressed with what little strength remained in the man's body before he went limp in Snake Eyes's hand.

04/18/2034: 2110h - Building 5, Poveglia Island

Med Alert leaned against the wall in one of the rooms off the second floor hallway. Other than superficial head wounds from where the vampire, Falcon paused to correct himself, the man who dressed like a vampire, had smashed the medic's head against the wall when he flew in the window. As nearly as they could figure, Devonowski had been bent down looking at the three dog's bodies with her back to the window when the man had climbed in and knocked Med Alert into the wall. She must have thought he'd tripped, and turned, only then realizing that they were not alone. By the time she had screamed, the man had already carved the gaping wound into her chest. What no one had figured out was how he had managed to write the word on the wall and get out the window in the few seconds it had taken the rest of the team to react. Sparta had just managed to get a glance of the feet of someone diving out the window as she came out of the room she was searching, and Falcon had arrived only a second later. That left the apparition only 5 seconds to have written those words, and no one could possibly move that fast. Could they?

Falcon shook his head. The island was getting to him and he wasn't thinking rationally. Probably the collection of heads, he reflected, he'd never been comfortable with dismemberment. Rapid Fire wasn't happy, both his and Slaughter's teams had also lost a greenshirt; Slaughter's to one of Night Adder's dogs that had still been lose on the island, and Rapid Fire's by a man falling into a pit filled with sharpened spikes as they hurried to back up Falcon's team after Devonowski's piercing scream. Again, no one was quite sure why there was a pit with spikes around, but they were and they'd cost them another member of the team. Slaughter's team had gone down to check the main floor while parts of Falcon's and Rapid Fire's searched the second. Antenna was trying to get a signal up on the bell tower, guarded by a greenshirt, Triage and Stretcher were bagging the severed heads, and Rex and Airtight were off fiddling with something in another room that Falcon figured he really didn't want to know about.

The sound of a door opening on the main floor carried up the stairs followed by a heavy tread of someone approaching. Sci-fi took position at the top of the stairs; the whole team was already inside, not counting Snake Eyes, and if it was him, they'd have never known he was coming. Preparing for the worst, Falcon leveled his shotgun down the stairs just as Snake Eyes came around the corner. The reason for the noise of his entrance was immediately evident. Over one shoulder he carried a man in huge red body armor, and in the other, he carried a giant axe, not his, obviously from the corpse.

"Well," Rapid Fire said, coming up behind Falcon, "looks like the island's mystery has already been solved. Why didn't we just send the ninja to start with?"

Snake Eyes unceremoniously dropped the body at the top of the stairs, and then shook his head. He typed a brief message on his wrist communicator then showed it to Rapid Fire. Falcon leaned over to get a look at it. It read: Not the vampire - there is another.

Falcon and Rapid Fire looked at one another.

"Lovely."

04/18/2034: 2130h - Clearing, Poveglia Island

Red Dog gave one final heave on the rope as he and Taurus hauled the body of Greenshirt Phillips out of the pit. Spikes still protruded from his body in several places where they remained embedded from his fall. Despite his history of violence, and the missions he'd undertaken in the middle east, the contortion and bleeding was still quite ghastly. Triage and Harpoon carefully removed the stakes and slid the body into a body bag.

"Is there any reason we're keeping the stakes Triage?" Slaughter asked.

"Autopsy."

"I think we all know how he died."

"I know, but the brass still requires the procedures be followed. Yes, its a pain in the ass, but what can you do," Triage shook his head.

"Alright. Harpoon, Rollinson, you guys take this back to the main building and report to Falcon. The rest of us will finish up here and put a proper cover on the pit so no one else gets themselves killed here."

"Got it," confirmed Harpoon, taking hold of the handles at the head of the body bag.

Watching them go, Red Dog observed the Greenshirts still around the pit looked terrified. He couldn't blame them. Turned out that most of them were on their first mission out of The Rock. And to have already lost three of their number to accidents wouldn't be sitting well with them. Admittedly, he was kinda weirded out also. Other than the mess in Indonesia, no single mission had cost the joes more than three troops in total, and to have three down in the first few hours on a tiny island was disturbing. At least none of Alpha Regiment, the Joes who had earned code names, were dead yet, he was pretty sure that that alone would have dissolved what little morale the greenshirts had left.

04/18/2034: 2140h - Outside Building 5, Poveglia Island

"Alright, put it down here," Harpoon ordered. Each man lowered his end of the body bag to the ground next to the two others they'd be taking out. Twenty years of military service stood behind Harpoon, and this ranked as the most nut-job mission he'd ever been on. At least Devonowski had bitten it taking on the enemy, but the other two were dead from freak accidents. It was incomprehensible.

"Well Rollinson, we'd better get ourselves inside before..."

Harpoon trailed off as he turned, his jaw dropping, "GET DOWN!"

Behind Rollinson stood eight feet of nightmare. Until about half a second ago, Harpoon had dismissed all the vampire reports as pure insanity, but he had just been proved wrong. The thing, for there was no better word for it, had massive grey wings tucked behind it, beneath which writhed an octet of green tentacles. It was sheathed from head to toe in crimson plating that looked like it was an outgrowth of the body, only his arms and fave visible. The arms bulged with muscles and veins, and from the forearms extruded massive blades of bone that broke through the skin. The right one was still soaked with blood, doubtless Devonowski's. The face wore an expression of utter malice and a grin that exposed serrated teeth that would have terrorized a shark.

Rollinson tried to get out of the way, but was too slow. A single stroke by the left arm decapitated the greenshirt while he was still fumbling to bring a rifle to bare.

Harpoon snatched a grenade off his belt. He knew he wouldn't survive a hand to hand encounter with the vampire, but he doubted even it could take a grenade. The grin was wiped from his face as the vampire caught the grenade in mid-air, and allowed it to explode in his hand. Blood trickled from a few small wounds in its hand, but the rest of its body was untouched.

It took only a split second for the thing to cross the intervening distance between them. Harpoon managed to duck the swipe of the arm blades, but gasped for air as the creature drove its knee into his stomach. For a minute Harpoon didn't understand why his stomach felt wet, then he remembered the bone spurs on the creature's kneecap. He opened his mouth to scream, but couldn't draw breath. Above him he could hear Sci-fi yelling from a window. Dimly he watched the laser trooper's shots as they deflected off the creature's wing as the creature took hold of him by the face and lifted him from the ground. Its nails dug holes into his face, but Harpoon was beyond pain now. Yet, when the creature dug its teath into his neck he managed to scream, but was abruptly cut short as his throat was torn out.

Harpoon wished he could have seen Jenny just one last time.

04/18/2034: 2230h - Main Floor, Main Building, Poveglia Island

Antenna sat over in the corner of the room, trying desperately to raise the Rock, Med Alert was tending to Blowtorch's wounds, and Freight was pacing around the room. Falcon sighed, thinking about the events of an hour ago. He had witnessed the vampire rip out Harpoon's throat as a snack, while deflecting the blasts from Sci-fi's laser rifles with his wings. Slaughter's team coming back from the clearing had managed to surprise it as they returned, and Blowtorch had let loose with his flamethrower; that was the first thing that seemed to get to the creature. It had let loose an ear-splitting shriek before charging towards Blowtorch. Foolishly two greenshirts had stepped in front and opened fire. It had quickly become a heroic last stand. The vampire had grabbed each by the throat, and took to the air, using the bonespurs from his knees to rake Blowtorch's front as ittook off. The greenshirts had hung on, but been thrown to the ground from several hundred feet up, shattering their bodies. Falcon was fairly sure that if he got off this island, their terrified screams as they fell would haunt him for the rest of his life.

And right now, it was looking like a heck of an if. Eight members of the team was already dead, one more greenshirt having committed suicide out of terror not ten minutes ago. Triage and Stretcher were currently body-bagging him on the main floor, to lie with his other fallen comrades. No one needed to know how he died.

Freight was about to make another pass of the room, but Falcon interrupted him with a hand to his shoulder, "you all right man?"

"I'm just not sure what I'm going to say to Jenny," Freight shook his head.

"I'm don't think I can help you. She may have lost one of her parents, but at least she still has you."

Immediately Falcon knew that wouldn't help.

"I still remember when Jose and I adopted her, she was such a happy little girl. This is going to break her heart," Freight shook his head, and then walked away.

Rapid Fire appeared at Falcon's shoulder, "this is why most units don't allow relatives, let alone couples, to serve."

"This isn't exactly most units," Falcon countered.

"True, but you'd think they'd at least have the brains not to send them on the same mission." Rapid Fire closed his eyes for a second, "that isn't really fair is it. There was no way we could have known this would happen."

Falcon didn't respond, he had nothing to say. The only member of the team who wasn't obviously disturbed by the day's events was Snake Eyes, and who knew what he was thinking.

04/18/2034: 2230h - Second Floor, Main Building, Poveglia Island

Snake Eyes was bothered by the days events. Not because of the deaths of his fellow joes, he'd seen far worse during a variety of covert operations before, during and after the Chino-Korean War, but rather because of how the opponent he had faced in the underground bunker had reminded him of his old friend Thomas. If he wasn't dead, Snake Eyes would have sworn that he had taught the man how to fight with a sword. In hindsight, all his trademarks were there: the aggressive style, close-set stance, overhead strikes that opened slight defensive holes...

Memories surfaced of their days training together in the quad outside the Hard Master's Dojo, in those days before the attack, the days before Snake Eye's second family had been taken from him. Tears welled in the corners of his eyes, and he blinked them away, quashing the memories. There was only the here and now. The past was past.

04/18/2034: 2300h - Main Floor, Main Building, Poveglia Island

"OK, so just what are we looking at Rex?" inquired Shockwave.

Falcon leaned over his shoulder staring at the laptop Rex was balancing on his knee.

"Quite simply," explained the scientist, "a whole new level of warfare. Obviously this person looks vaguely human, even with these armored plates all over his body, and there's a good reason for it, he is. Well, more accurately he was."

Confused as he was by this Falcon couldn't help notice the usually implacable Snake Eyes jerk backwards in surprise. What exactly had the man come across?

Rex was explaining, "once we drilled through the armor plates, which was no easy undertaking, we took a tissue sample and we came up with conflicting results. Airtight was the first to figure it out, and it made sense once Antenna told us what Dr. Nurse had done before winding up here on the island. There are two tissue types. Most of the body is a human being, from Mongolia if I'm not mistaken, the other is some combination of other species. The armor plates are similar in composition to the chitin of a cockroach, mixed with the shell of a turtle, and a half-dozen other species. Its not as strong as true armor plating, but it will stand up to most small-arms fire, and apparently Snake Eyes' katana. There's probably a lot more going on with the rest of it, but without proper facilities, that's the best I can give you."

"How can you pinpoint the body, er, sorry, the test subject is from Mongolia?" asked Rapid Fire, "I remember Steen and Greer made a huge splash in the media a few years ago with that study that showed negligible differences between the genomes of different racial groups."

"Quite right, they are pretty minimal. That said, males in Mongolia, and a lot of Asia are a bit different in one regard, their Y-chromosomes. Remember that a few thousand years ago almost all of Asia was ruled by Ghengis Kahn and his descendants. Well, they were quite... er... a prolific family. Their harem was huge and scattered throughout the empire and they had a lot of offspring, and because they were Kahn's offspring, they were favored for survival. To this day, about eight percent of the men in the area of the former Mongol Empire have this Y-chromosome. Or, probably his. But suffice to say, that its a farily distinct marker."

"And you recognized this in a couple hours?" Falcon asked with some incredulity.

Rex shrugged, "part of the topic of my Masters thesis."

"So, to summarize, we've got a Cobra run think tank, made up of some of the world's top scientists in genetics and artificial life, making supersoldiers by screwing with their genomes, with patients from somewhere in Asia. Oh, and there's still a fucking vampire out there that wants to kill us," Rapid Fire said in frustration.

Falcon couldn't help but notice how everyone was now referring to the thing as a vampire, he hadn't been convinced when he saw it, and now he was even less so.

"Well, I think the vampire is another one of their projects," Rex explained. "Given what they've managed here, it wouldn;t be beyond them to genetically engineer the component parts required for that."

"Lovely, so its a Cobra-run vampire that wants to kill us. Makes me feel so much better."

04/19/2034: 0300h - Second Floor, Main Building, Poveglia Island

Most of the team lay sleeping in a few rooms on the second floor, out of the blinding rain and waves that now lashed their island prison, but Blowtorch and Heavy Duty stood watch. At least officially they did, Snake Eyes was wide awake in a corner by the window, and a couple nervous greenshirts were playing poker in the corner. One of their friends had stepped out to relieve himself a few hours ago, and he hadn't come back. It was fairly clear he wouldn't be.

If they found him, the medics would be out of body bags once they dealt with him. Blowtorch leaned down into the stairwell to check that the flare there was still going; it was. The flares had been Dart's idea as it appeared that the only thing the vampire was afraid of was light, and thus far they had remained safe. At least for now.

04/19/2034: 0300h - Outside, Poveglia Island

Lights burned in the windows and doorways between him and his prey, but it didn't matter, they would be dead soon. For now he had his stores to feed from. They would die soon.

A final pull on the legs of the last victim showed that he was secured to the tree. A bloody grin of satisfaction came to the creature's lips and he strode off towards his subterranean abode.

04/19/2034: 0600h - Outside, Poveglia Island

Another rope dropped from the tree, and Snake Eyes scuttled over another few branches to move onto the next one. Widescope, had found the missing greenshirt shortly after dawn, or at least what had passed for dawn during this storm, suspended from a tree. Then again, to simply say that he'd been suspended from a tree didn't even come close to describing the horror of the sight; hell, even after everything he'd seen in Asia, he'd lost what little he'd managed to get in his stomach for breakfast. Other than the three medics, the rest of the team had remained inside, unwilling or unable to face the horror outside. At least the rain had washed the worst of the blood away.

Suspended from the tree was a message, Leave or die, written with the body of the greenshirt. His body, minus the head and arms, had been suspended with rope in the shape of an L, his intestines pulled out and twisted into the shapes of an e and an a, one arm crooked to form a v, mor intestines in the shape of an e, the OR carved into the flesh of his extracted lungs, the d made from the other arm with the liver clutched in the hand, the i formed with the man's torn out spine and severed head, and the final e made from, well, Snake Eyes wasn't entirely sure, but it looked like blood vessels of some sort. The entire ghastly array faced the door, and would no doubt have been dripping blood had it been a few hours earlier or had it not been raining as heavily as it was.

Another slice with the trench-knife cut down the final e, which was caught by Triage then passed off to Stretcher, who along with Med Alert were carefully removing the ropes before carefully laying them in the bodybag with their owner.

Snake Eyes landed in a crouch, his eyes surveying the surrounding territory, despite half a dozen fellow joes leaning out of upstairs windows, weapons at the ready. Things were getting out of hand quickly, and even his laser-link with Ghostrider was now lost. The team was now completely alone.

04/19/2034: 0630h - 40,000 Feet Over Greek Peninsula

Ghostrider stared out the cockpit at the stratotanker from which an umbilical extended and plugged into a slot off towards the starboard wing. He sighed. Just over three hours ago he'd had to break station in order to meet up with the stratotanker to keep aloft, if he'd waited until the tanker reached his position, he'd have had to ditch out; as it was, he'd had less than 1% fuel remaining when he'd docked. He stretched, roomy though the cockpit of the Phantom X-10 was, sitting in it for hours on end was not entirely comfortable. Much to his annoyance, the radio crackled with a voice from the tanker.

"Hey buddy!" erupted the cheerful voice of Ghostwing, the Joe team's other stealth pilot. "How are you? Colton just had me hop on over here to keep you in the air. We've got two newbies, Wingshot and North Wind, in the back working the tank to keep you in the air."

Sighing Ghostrider thumbed the transmit switch "I see Colton finally stole a stratotanker."

"Actually, Lifeline's at fault on this one again."

Raising an eyebrow Ghostrider asked, "Who'd he blackmail?"

"Iron Butt Auston, from the Pentagon."

"Huh." Ghostrider turned serious, "do Wingshot or North Wind know where they are?"

"No, they don't know where they are, or who we are. They just know how much fuel your using. They've been locked in the back since we took off."

"Good."

"Your overly paranoid my friend."

"I know."

"You also don't say much."

"I know."

"Your also kind of creepy."

"I know."

04/19/2034: 0830h - Main Building, Poveglia Island

In theory, Falcon reflected, the sun should have been up by now. Not that anyone would ever be able to tell through the pitch black sky. Rain lashed the island, and trees bent under the wind. The team had hauled the body bags into the building and lined them in a corridor to keep them out of the rain, and had clustered themselves in what had once been the office of the late Dr. Nurse, one of Cobra's prisoners or assistants on the island. It was unclear whether Nurse had been a willing participant in the scheme, or if he had been held against his will, but the difference was effectively irrelevant at this point, the man was dead and his work had helped develop what appeared to be some form of super-soldiers in the service of the Cobra organization.

Antenna was working to crack the encryption on the man's hard drive. The computer itself had been smashed beyond all recognition, doubtlessly by the vampire that still patrolled the island, but thankfully enough was intact for data retrieval.

"Any luck yet?" he asked, knowing it was about the dozenth time in the last five hours.

"Actually yes. I've cracked the basic external encryption. Now I just need to figure out his password."

"How long will that take?"

"Quite some time if I'm lucky, more likely I won't be able to do anything until I get it back to someone at the Cove or the Rock for more detailed methods. Its 21 alphanumerics, and the number of combinations of that is, well, ridiculous."

"Define ridiculous."

"A five with thirty-two zeros behind it. Roughly"

Falcon blinked twice, "I don't suppose there's any way to narrow that down?"

"Well, if I can pull the letters used, its just a matter of arranging them rather them correctly, rather than having to figure them out through guesswork."

"What does that narrow it down to?"

"Five with nineteen zeros behind it."

"I see." Falcon turned, "Ok, Blowtorch, Snake Eyes, Triage, Heavy Duty, Airtight, Sci-fi; you guys come with me, I want to take a look at some of the stuff down in the basement." As the others grabbed their gear, Falcon whispered to Rapid Fire, "are you sure you want to split the team up like this?"

"We don't really have much of a choice, we need to figure out what's going on around here, and that involves checking this computer and those labs in the basement. We can't leave Antenna here, and we can't just sit here till he cracks it, if he even can without better resources. I don't like it any more than you do, but I don't see any other option. Do you?"

"No," Falcon admitted grudgingly, "I don't."

"Then go. And try not to get killed."

Smiling humorlessly, Falcon rolled his eyes, "now there's some good advice."

"Best advice my daddy ever gave me."

"Oh shut up. Sir."

04/19/2034: 0845h - Main Building, Basement, Poveglia Island

Airtight ran a sensor from his pack over the massive vat, "there's more radiation coming off this thing than a dirty nuke. I would hazard that they were using this to introduce the random gene mutations Lifeline was commenting on seeing in those Viper bodies."

"So," Blowtorch asked, keeping a wary eye on the stairs behind the group, "this place is more than a mini Dr. Frankenstein lair? They kept troops here too?"

"Not necessarily, its fully possible that they just rotated the troops through for treatment and then sent them on their way, rather than keeping them here for a long time. Or they may have been using this for a similar purpose but something completely different. Unless Antenna can crack that computer, I've got no idea. This stuff's even weirder than the stuff that Clean Sweep uncovered in New Delhi. Any luck figuring the gear out Sci-fi?"

"Are you kidding?" came the response from behind a rack of computers, "this stuff was ripped apart by a boar-rat or something. Even if it WAS intact, this could be designed to deep fry bacon, or make artificial life, and I wouldn't be able to tell the difference."

"I think we've established the latter," sighed Airtight.

"Yeah, well, I still can't tell you HOW they're doing it."

Two sharp taps came from around the corner, signalling that Snake Eyes had found something.

"I'll check," Falcon said, turning to Airtight, "see if you can figure out what's giving off that radiation, and how long we can stand to be down here before we start glowing."

"Only thing that could give off this much is Polonium sir, and that worries me, there is no way they should have been able to obtain this much without someone noticing."

"Well, that's just great, now we've got them running around with random radioacti- YAAAH!"

Heavy Duty came running around the corner, followed by Triage, both of whom skidded to a stop upon seeing what had startled Falcon. Floating in the tank in front of them was a human-sized organism. It stood around seven feet tall and was covered head to foot, and tail, in green scales."

"What," sputtered Heavy Duty, "in the hell is that?"

Snake Eyes tapped the point of his katana against a small gold plate inset in the top edge of the tank, it read "Lobotomaxx".

"Anyone know what that means?" asked Falcon, having now regained his breath?

"Couldn't tell you," replied Triage, shaking his head. "Perhaps he had a maximum lobotomy?"

"What exactly are you guys looking - woah!" Airtight rushed from the corner to the edge of the tank, "this is freaking AWESOME! We've got a specimen here and we can look at what they were doing, I've got to get Rex down here! Snake! Are you sure your link is down? Clean Sweep would LOVE the biotech behind this thing!"

"Stop shouting," Falcon admonished. "I'm sure you'll have plenty of time to look at this...this thing, later."

04/19/2034: 0855h - Main Building, Poveglia Island

Rapid Fire watched Antenna run some probe along the fractured keyboard from Dr. Nurse's desk, and while he had no idea what it was doing, he sincerely hoped that it worked. Over to his left, Freight continued to pace, a rather difficult task in the crowded room. Clearly he needed something to distract him from his current obsession with what had happened to Harpoon. Reacing a snap decision, Rapid Fire strode over to where half the team was clustered.

"Shockwave, I want you to take Barricade, Widescope, Stretcher and Freight and do a circuit of the main floor. See if there's some way we can secure it so we at least have some building to work with. If we can turn this into our operations center we can then make an attempt on the other buildings to figure out what's going on here."

Shockwave simply nodded, and the others were no more informative. Morale was definitely down, but Rapid Fire knew he couldn't do anything about it. So he had to make sure everyone survived. Shaking his head at the senseless losses his team had suffered on this mission, he threaded his way over to Antenna, "anything yet?"

"Well, the wear on the keys is outside normal typing behaviours. But when I ran it against the patterns commonly used by geneticists most of the wear fell to within normally acceptable deviations. It left us with a few symbols significantly outside normal parameters, all showing approximately equal, or twice equal excess wear."

"English please."

"I figured out what letters are likely in the password. Now I just have to figure out the combination."

Red Dog roused himself from the far wall and started over, "I think I can help with that."

Raising an eyebrow, Antenna queried, "you've done decryption work before?"

"No, but I do the word scramble and crossword in a half a dozen papers daily."

"Well," Antenna looked as shocked as Rapid Fire felt, Red Dog was about the meanest, most ornery person anyone was likey to meet, so his hobbies came as a distinct surprise. "Have at it I guess."

"OK," Red Dog said, pulling a pencil and scrap of paper from a pocket, "what are the letters?"

"Two As, D, two Es, I, K, L, M, N, O, two Ps, two Rs, two Ss, T and V."

"All right," said Red Dog, based on the length, we're looking at a minimum of two words, if not three. Lets see what I can do with this."

04/19/2034: 0905h - Main Building, Poveglia Island

Widescope heaved another table on end in front of the window to the last room on the south side and sighed, "One more down boss."

"All right, good work, we're half done once we get this set up," replied Shockwave. Off to the side, Freight was stringing some twine pulled from Barricade's rope through a variety of glass and metal shards to form a sort of wind-chime to be hung over one of the legs. If the table shifted, they'd be able to hear the noise and respond. As an added precaution, Stretcher was rigging motion sensors right behind the table that were linked in to Antenna's laptop on the far side of the building. Essentially they were charged with turning this ancient building into a fortress, no matter how improbable that seemed. In fact, it was quite ridiculous, that vampire that was hunting them would probably be through the window and in the hall by the time Antenna was able to shout a warning to the rest of the Joes. And that assumed he came through the ground floor windows, who knew what secret passages were built into the place from the mental hospital that had stood here centuries ago, or even more so, how many had been added by Cobra during their occupation.

"Traps set," Barricade reported.

"All right. Now we do the other half."

The others grumbled but filed through the door. This was a situation that Shockwave had to admit he didn't know how to deal with; usually members of the urban assault force were among the most gung-ho of all the Joes, but today morale was incredibly down. Even Widescope, usually the cheerful wise-cracker of the team was subdued.

I wonder if Brahm Stoker ever envisioned something like this?

04/19/2034: 0910h - Main Building, Poveglia Island

Elsewhere in the building Snake Eyes paced. He and Heavy Duty had determined that the basement was secure, and none of thew walls were hollow, which suggested that there were no hidden passages down there. Now he was making the pretense of checking the work Shockwave and his team had done to block the windows. Really there was no need to, the guys knew what they were doing, even though Freight was looking quite distracted. Really, he just needed some time to himself to think. Something was definitely strange here. While Cobra had kidnapped and held hostage several of the most prominent geneticists in the world to do this, it should not have been this easy to create these artificial life forms.

A pause in the routine of pacing. Did I just say life forms? Man, I watch way to much sci-fi. He shook his head and continued to wear a track into the stone floor. Altering the genetics of the vipers who had been captured, he kind of understood. He had no idea how it worked, but based on other things that he read about coming out of science labs, it was at least within the realm of possibility. But he knew that viable genetic recombination was still out of reach of any official laboratory, and it was difficult to believe that Cobra had the funding and the knowledge to pull it off where respectable scientists could not.

And yet, he`d seen it with his own eyes not twenty minutes ago. It seemed utterly beyond belief, but the evidence was right there, literally staring him in the face. What didn`t make sense, despite hours of pondering after dueling the first abomination, was what possible use that Cobra could have for these monsters. Clearly they had plenty of real people ready to fight and die for their cause, or were willing to coerce those they didn`t have access too but whose skills they needed. While he wasn`t about to deride the abilities of these creations, they were obviously quite dangerous, it seemed somewhat excessive, both in terms of effort and expense. Logically it would just be cheaper to higher a large number of mercenaries and arm them well with black market weapons, and it would have the same effect. They could overwhelm any opposition, eventually the joes, en mass, rather than entrust a sensitive mission to a single individual who, with bad luck, or good planing by an opponent could be outmaneuvered, just as the...thing...that had attacked him in the boat dock.

There was something more at work going on here with whatever this project was, and Snake Eyes wanted to find out what it was, but by the looks of the place, unless Antenna got really lucky, they weren`t going to find anything out.

04/19/2034: 0915h - Main Building, Poveglia Island

"Got it."

Antenna raised an eyebrow, "Already? That was pretty quick."

"Actually that took me a lot longer than I thought," replied Red Dog. "Usually I can get them done faster than that, but the V threw me off, never thought it would be the first letter." He shrugged.

"I see. Well, lets give it a shot." He reached over and pulled his tablet towards him again, it was still connected to the hard drive extracted from Dr. Nurse's computer, and the log-in screen flashed to life. Antenna's fingers typed in the password that Red Dog had determined, VAMPIRESDONTSPARKLE. The screen blanked for a second and then flashed the word, LOADING.

Blowing out a breath he hadn't realized he was holding, Antenna chuckled, "now there's an interesting statement. Someone must have read those horrible books from twenty years ago."

"What books?" asked Red Dog.

"Night, or Eclipse or something. About sparkling, vegetarian vampires or some such shit."

"Yeah, well, this thing sure ain't no vegetarian. An' I'm pretty sure it don't sparkle neither."

"I noticed."

Antenna turned back to his screen and Red Dog stretched before moving off. A quick survey of the files indicated that most of them were either above Antenna's pay grade or so scientific as to be incomprehensible to him.

"Hey Rex, I think this is your show now."

The scientist looked somewhat put out to have to leave his position near the wall where he had been talking conspiratorially with Sparta, Antenna quite suspected the two had something going there, but came over without comment.

Antenna handed over the tablet, and stood back to watch as Rex skimmed through the files, stopping first on one titled "Project Lunartix."

04/19/2034: 0930h - Main Building, Poveglia Island

Shockwave stuck his head through the door into the main room where Rapid Fire was waiting, "all set up sir, but I'd like to borrow Blowtorch for a moment if he's back."

Rapid Fire looked up from where he was reading over Rex's shoulder, "he's still downstairs, but go ahead and grab him. Main floor is secure I take it?"

"As we're going to get without an airdrop of some more supplies," Shockwave admitted grudgingly. "I'm having my guys string some of our location flares along the hall at regular intervals so we can keep an eye on the other ares."

"Good idea."

"Thanks."

Shockwave retreated into the hall and Rapid Fire turned his attention back to the screen Rex was holding, "All right, give it to me again. In English this time."

Rex rolled his eyes but repeated the explanation he had been giving for the last five minutes. "As near as I can tell is that they were running two parallel projects at this facility, Project Lunartrix and Project Cobra Law. I think that Lunartrix was a sub-project of Cobra Law, but all Dr. Nurse had on his computer was general outlines. Whoever was in charge of the facility would have had more details, but unless we can find his computer, we're limited to conjecture.

Project Lunartrix's goal was to develop life forms of alien appearance and no self-control that could be released upon the world in such a way that it appeared to be an alien invasion. Airtight tells me that there is a sample of one type, code named Lobotomaxx, still in a tank in the basement. I'm not sure how many of each were made, but there were three different types under development here. The Cobra Law project was to develop snake-like life forms that were more powerful, and specifically built to combat the life forms developed by Project Lunartrix. As near as I can tell they were organized much differently, they had a single leader, code named Serpentor, an officer equivalent code-name Nemesis Enforcer, and foot soldiers code-named Cobra Law Guardsmen. I think that the thing Snake Eyes brought in a few hours ago was a Guardsmen, and that the vampire we're being run around by is a Nemesis Enforcer.

When I was reading this the first time, these goals seemed somewhat contradictory. Project Lunartrix seems to be the ultimate weapon of terror, so why have a system to stop it? After going through a few more files, I found out that the purpose of these two projects was, or issome form of publicity stunt. After three months of the products of Product Lunartrix running around, virtually unchallenged, the Cobra Law products would appear and combat Lunartrix, eventually winning as designed." Rex stopped.

"Ok, a few obvious questions leap to mind," said Rapid Fire. "Firstly, have you figured out what the other projects look like."

"I can," replied Rex, "but I'm going to need some of my own facilities. What I can tell you is that they wouldn't be as dangerous as the Nemesis Enforcer we're facing."

"You keep saying 'the Nemesis Enforcer', you mean there's more of them?"

"Got me. Could just be the one and the project failed, or they could have three hundred and this one was a fialure. No idea."

"Lovely. Any luck finding out who's in charge?"

"Everyone here seemed to be under a code name system. I pulled some e-mail logs to figure out what's going on. Dr. Nurse here was known as Dr. Question Mark, the symbol, not the words to his co-workers. The man in charge appears to be named Count Vlad the Cruel."

Beside Rapid Fire, Falcon rolled his eyes, "man, and I thought some of the Joes had weird names."

Rapid fire shot him a dirty look to be quiet, and asked his last question, "finally, any idea where they were going with this?"

"Buy public opinion, take charge, hostile takeover of governments, I don't really know. It doesn't seem to make sense."

"Mind if I weight in?" Rapid Fire was startled by the voice and turned around to see Sparta looking at him intently.

"Go for it," he shrugged.

"Its quite simple really," she said, "its a form of hearts and minds campaign. I assume that these things from project Lunatic, or whatever it is, are designed so conventional military will have difficulty taking them down. Well, if Cobra shows up with the Cobra Law things then they're the ones that everyone is going to turn to for safety since they're the only ones who can protect everyone. The public will beg their governments to allow Cobra Law forces to be stationed in their city, and then they'll be followed by other Cobra forces. How exactly they explain who they are could follow a few dozen different scripts, but then they've taken over. Its then a simple matter to batter the regular military out of existence since they're designed to beat the Lunatics anyway, and then Cobra can take control of several world governments in short order."

Rapid Fire really hoped that the horror he was feeling wasn't written across his face, but given the appearance of the rest of the Joes in the room, it was a common feeling. Lovely.

"OK, humor me," Falcon sighed. "How does Cobra explain where they got the army of genetic super-warriors from?"

"Oh, I don't know, there's a dozen or more possibilities. For example, they've already got the idea of aliens going. They could say that the Cobra Law creations were an ancient civilization that had been in hiding somewhere in the wilderness, say the Himalayas, for millennia. They had fought the 'aliens'", she made air-quotes around the word aliens, "in the distant past, and had kept an eye on humanity for years. And they'd continued to fight undercover aliens using special human allies, which would be Cobra. It explains how the two are connected, and allows Cobra to move in along with them."

"That sounds like the plot of a very bad Saturday morning cartoon my dear," Slaughter mocked.

"And the population is dumb enough to watch those," countered Sparta, inflicting the word those with scorn.

"I hate to admit it," interjected Triage, "but she's right. Put some of these things in the face of people without what we know, and the vast majority of the population will buy it in a heartbeat.

"Fine, fine, fine." Rapid Fire wanted to stop this discussion before it went any further. "We know what they're doing, the question is, how do we stop it?"

04/19/2034: 1000h - Main Building, Second Floor, Poveglia Island

Dart's head poked around the corner at the top of the stairs, quickly casting left and right. Devonowski's blood stain still marred the wall to his right, but otherwise things seemed quiet. Gesturing the all clear signal behind him, he stepped out into the foyer, his rifle poised at the ready.

"Really Dart," Slaughter growled as he pushed past, "you're a bit paranoid."

Taurus and three greenshirts followed, one carrying the last of the team's slow-burning flares, another a set of motion sensors to fortify the rooms on the second floor as Shockwave had done downstairs. With that level secure, and a basic idea of what had been going on on the island, Rapid Fire had decided to turn this building into a fortress from which the Joes could search the rest of the island and root out this Nemesis Enforcer vampire thing until they could re-establish communications or get reinforcements.

Dart wasn't nearly as confident in the idea. These Cobra Law things were designed to take down something else which was designed to be unbeatable by conventional military. Granted, this was only his first mission with the Joes, but he didn't know how on earth they could beat this thing, it seemed like its sole purpose was to destroy whatever stood in its way.

"Eh Dart," Tarus's rough eastern European accent cut into his misery, "lighten up. We're G.I. Fucking Joe, this overgrown bat doesn't have a hope."

Offering a weak smile, Dart watched Taurus turn and head down the hallway, spooky how that guy seemed like he could read minds half the time.

04/19/2034: 1000h - Main Building, Basement, Poveglia Island

Rex's head was buried in a rack of equipment containing stuff that even Airtight was having a hard time comprehending. Three greenshirts were downstairs with them providing backup. Much though Airtight appreciated Rapid Fire's concern, if Snake Eyes said the basement was safe, that was good enough for him. He was trying to run a diagnostic on the tank with the 'Lobotomaxx' specimen in it to determine what the Cobra operatives on the base had been using for growth media of the creatures. He hoped that knowing that would provide them with a bit of an edge against this Nemesis Enforcer, vampire, thing that was running rampant around the island.

As it was though, the media was nothing particularly awe inspiring; mostly water with a nutrient broth mixture that could be found in any tissue microbiology lab around the world. It raised the question of whether the specimens were actually grown from a single embryo or whether they were assembled piecemeal. The latter would possibly provide weaknesses that could be exploited, but would suggest a disturbing ability to override immune functions of the host. Of course, if the tissues were assembled separately, there might be no immune response, but that was something to worry about when they let Doc and Clean Sweep take a look at the thing when they got them back to the lab.

"Ok, you two," Airtight gestured to two of the greenshirts, "give me a hand with this." He had already laid out a tarp on the floor for the body. Even if he'd been inclined to use a body bag their supply was running short as it was, and he wasn't about to waste one on the science experiment here. Both of them seemed somewhat hesitant.

Airtight sighed, "would you two relax, its quite dead, and this stuff isn't going to hurt you, now help me get it out of the tank."

With reluctance they finally moved forward and helped ease the body out of the tank. Airtight stood on some equipment behind and hauled the body out by the shoulders and passed it down to the two men who struggled to lay it in the tarp. The third leg proved to be somewhat inconvenient as it was jointed in opposition to the other two, but eventually they managed to wrap the body in the tarp. For good measure Airtight stuck a vial of the growth media in the specimen's hand for later analysis.

The two greenshirts were trying to clean their gloves on various pieces of equipment. Airtight just rolled his eyes, and pulled a sterile towlet from his belt pouch to dry the worst of it off his hands before shoving it into a biohazard bag in another pouch to dispose of later. OK, so he was a bit of a hypocrite, he reflected, big deal.

"Anything useful Rex?"

"Well," came the muffled response from inside a bank of wires, "honesty no. I'd need another week, a few schematics, and a good read through those computer files Antenna stripped before I had a chance of figuring out how this works. Overall though, I'd hazard that they grew a bunch of different things together rather than from a single embryo."

A hand appeared between carpets of wiring, and Airtight helped the scientist to his feet, "what makes you say that?"

"A hunch mostly, there's nothing in the tank that directly specifies it, but there is a variable output electrical stimulator, as well as reserve tanks to release tropic attachment factors and a bunch of other stuff."

Airtight blinked twice digesting that. "Still doesn't scream separate entities combined to me, but I suppose it makes sense."

"As I said," shrugged Rex, "mostly a hunch. I'm going upstairs, I'm not getting more out of this now. You want a hand with the body?"

"No, we're good."

"Right then, see you upstairs." Rex turned and headed for the stairs. Behind him he could hear Airtight cajoling the greenshirts into lifting the tarp. At the top of the stairs he passed Dart and Shockwave, who were patrolling the corridors. They nodded at each other but didn't communicate further. No one was really in a talkative mood at the moment. He paused to stick his head into a room, "Hey Blowtorch, can I get you to char some ground?"

"Coming." Blowtorch was resting in full armor, which Rex was fairly certain was uncomfortable, but given the lack of proper sanitation facilities within the building, they had been reduced to using Blowtorch's flamethrower to clear a space outside the most northwesterly window whenever someone needed.

In the room, two greenshirts were standing by, Sconz and Katzenbogen by their name tags. They shouldered the wooden plate off the window and placed it to the side. Blowtorch leaned out and burnt flat a space of ground up to five meters outside the window.

"One rock, and burnt grass for you."

"Fit for a king," joked Rex. Much to his disappointment, no one picked up on the pun. Ah well.

Blowtorch and the two greenshirts made themselves scarce around the door. Blowtorch, decided he might as well get to know the remaining greenshirts since they might be all that stood between him and his own death, struck up a conversation with the two. In short order he determined that Sconz was a technology engineer with the brigade, and Katzenbogen was a heavy weapons specialist. They were interrupted by a scream from the other room.

Blowtorch stuck his head back around the door, trying to keep his gaze averted, "that's not funny Rex, we - holy shit!"

Rex was staggering back from the window, bloody stumps where his hands should have been, and a deep gash running up most of the front of his body. Climbing through the window was the shape of the vampire.

"Code red, CODE RED!" hollered Blowtorch pushing through the door and pulling his flamethrower in one motion. He triggered a full blast at the creature; normally he would have tried to avoid Rex, but the man was fairly clearly about to die anyway, so there wasn't really much point. The creature folded its wings in front of it, and pressed forward. It took a minute, but it slowly dawned on Blowtorch that the large rock that had lain on the ground outside the window hadn't been a rock, but had been the creature with its wings folded on top of it. Why hadn't he noticed that before? It should have been obvious... and the thing should be backing away from the flame shouldn't it? But it just kept coming towards Blowtorch, undeterred.

Beside him he could see Sconz and Katzenbogen dragging the still screaming Rex away from the fight into a corner of the room. Good men those two. "Back you, BACK!" he muttered in frustration, but rather than obeying the creature sprung forward towards him, its wings leaping open, one knocking the flamethrower from his hand. Before its automatic shutoff kicked in, it caught Sconz full on, dropping him to the ground. Blowtorch however, was a bit more worried about his own situation right now. The beast, now completely unhindered launched itself towards him and dug the two blades on its elbows into his shoulders. Blowtorch gasped, unable to draw breath to scream, and felt himself falling. Before he passed out he could see a couple flashes impact on the beast and drive it back a few steps. He was too far gone to realize what they were though.

Sci-fi had been catching a few valuable moments of shut eye when he'd heard Rex start to scream. Along with the rest of the Joes, he'd been sleeping in full kit, with his backpack resting next to him. He'd thrown it on and charged around the corner just as two greenshirts had disappeared into the room behind Blowtorch who was giving the vampire what-for with his flamethrower. Unfortunately, he hadn't been able to keep the thing back long enough, and was taken down just as Sci-fi was about to reach the door. But the vampire's focus on Blowtorch had taken its attention off the hallway, giving Sci-fi all the opening he needed. The laser rifle was still highly experimental, even after almost two decades dedicated work by various military agencies. It had a bad habit of shorting out at inopportune moments, but thankfully it decided to work today and the first three shots hit the creature in the face and chest.

For a moment, Sci-fi allwed himself to feel a bit of elation, but that was quickly dulled as the vampire, he still thought of it that way, no matter what Cobra called it, which was no doubt their intent in designing it in such a way. To all appearances, he'd barely scratched the thing. The two shots that had hit the chestplate had barely dented it, and the shot to the face had raised a red welt but been mostly absorbed by the helmeting there. He triggered another trio of shots, driving it back another few feet. Thanking his lucky stars that at least the impact had an effect, Sci-fi advanced over the body of Blowtorch, allowing Rapid Fire and Med Alert who had piled in behind him to retrieve the body of their fallen comrade.

More joes were assembling in the hall now, and a few hesitant shots flashed over his shoulders. Sci-fi hoped that those who were taking potshots through the doorway were good shots, because he had little interest in dying from friendly fire. Make that none at all. The vampire had been pushed almost to the window now, and Sci-fi triggered the shots that would push it out. NOW the rifle decided to cut out. Just my damn luck, he had time to reflect before the creature sprung forward, fast bugger, and smashed him across the chest with razor-tipped fingers. Sci-fi felt himself crash into a far wall, not entirely sure when he'd had time to cover the distance.

Strangely enough, he could breath, and he realized that his chest armor, designed to protect him if the rifle exploded when firing, had absorbed most of the damage from the swipe. Glancing down, he confirmed that he was only bleeding slightly. Though the fact that the talons had cleaved through two inches of reinforced Kevlar worried him more than a little.

In front of his eyes, a black shape flew through the door and set upon the creature. Shots from the doorway suddenly stopped. Oh sure, shoot when I'm standing there, but don't shoot when the Ninja's doing his job. Then again, he assumed that the vampire didn't stand a chance against Snake Eyes. On the first pass, he'd already found a small chink in the beast's armor and cut it lightly on the thigh. The Vampire snarled and turned its attention to Snake Eyes. Taurus was plastered against the door frame, and risked a couple shots while the two combatants were separated, but both were deflected almost casually by the swipe of the vampire's wing.

Snake Eyes lit into the thing again as soon as the shots tapered off, dropping a shoulder into the creature's chest. The vampire appeared to anticipate this and drove both its fists into Snake Eye's back trying to force his face down onto one of the blades protruding from his knees. But Snake Eyes had anticipated this, and had braced his sword with two hands a few inches below his stomach and managed so cut off the bone-spur with his fall. The vampire reeled backwards screaming at the top of Sci-fi's hearing range. The piercing call caused everyone in the room to flinch, and cover their ears. Sci-fi's eardrums felt like they were about to burst, but eventually the thing stopped and made a run as Snake Eyes. Even he had been disoriented by the auditory assault and gave ground.

He managed to parry a few strikes with his sword, but one of the beast's elbow-blades sawed down the length of the katana and along Snake Eye's arm, leaving a trail of blood. Spinning to avoid another strike Snake Eyes opened some distance between the two of them, but something fell from his wrist. Sci-fi realized it was his communication link. Well, that would be a problem. Assuming they survived of course.

"Out of the way," came a shout from the door, and Hardball came barrelling through. He triggered first one, then another grenade straight into the chest of the beast forcing it back. A third blew it out through the window. Three more followed, finally pushing it away. Joes piled either side of the window, weapons at the ready.

Med Alert, Triage and Stretcher charged in, but Sci-fi waved off Triage, pulling himself to his feet, directing him to go help those in worse shape.

This was not good.

04/19/2034: 1030h - The Rock - Special Operations Command Center 3

"How could you have lost contact with them?" Lifeline was yelling into the radio.

Uplink glanced over at Dial Tone, that was something he hadn't seen before, usually Lifeline bordered on laconic in a crisis. Dial just shrugged and mouthed better him than us, doubtless referring to poor Datum who sat just a few inches in front of where Lifeline was yelling into a boom microphone. Hawk wasn't in a whole lot better mood about things ever since Ghostrider had reported that he'd definitely lost the link to Snake Eyes and the guys on Poveglia. He'd missed exactly how Lifeline's conversation with Ghostrider had finished, but he gathered it hadn't been too well given the expression on the colonel's face.

"We've got to get them reinforcements Hawk. I'll get it set up."

"You'll be doing no such thing."

"What?" Lifeline's voice took on a dangerous tone, one made famous in his long-running arguments with the Russian government a few years ago.

Hawk's own voice matched it for pure ice, "you may be used to getting your way Edwin, but around here there's a chain of command."

"You can NOT be seriously suggesting that we leave our men in the field?"

"Our men Edwin? Remember your place."

At the back of the room, Uplink noticed General Flagg entering. Oh great.

"Whoever's 'men' they are, they shouldn't be left there to die! And that's exactly what will happen by the sounds of it if we don't get them some help soon!"

"I can't authorize anything of the sort. You don't think this makes me sick Edwin? I hate it, but there's nothing I can do!"

"There's damn well plenty we can do!"

"You are NOT in charge here, and you WILL be listening to what I tell you! You are officially relieved of duties related to this mission forthwith. You will have no further involvement in this through the organization. Do you understand me?"

Lifeline fumed for a moment, opened his mouth to reply, closed it again, then finally replied, "I understand perfectly sir."

"See that you do."

Lifeline stormed out of the room, passing close enough to Flagg that the general was obliged to step out of the way so as to not be knocked aside. The door whispered shut behind his retreating back, good thing he can't slam it, thought Uplink, and the room went quiet.

"Back to your work men," ordered Hawk, "the show's over."

Once the rest of the ops center was back to work, Flagg walked over to Hawk and leaned over in a conspiratorial whisper, "I assume you know the second that he's out of your sight, he's going to do whatever the hell he wants anyway."

"I'm counting on it," replied Hawk in an equally quiet voice.

"The Italian government will go nuts! You've got to stop him."

"Stop him from doing what?" Hawk asked innocently. "I just told him in no uncertain terms that we wouldn't be launching any official operation without the proper clearance. He's lucky he didn't get pulled for insubordination for that argument."

It took Flagg a moment to work through what Hawk had just said. "You know Hawk, sometimes your quite brilliant."

04/19/2034: 1040h - The Rock - Hanger

Crazylegs climbed wearily out of the back of the modified C130, and caught the parachute that Trooper Hernandez threw to him. He'd run the two greenshirts on the flight through eight training jumps through the Rocky Mountains all night, and was now dead tired. All he wanted was to hit the bunk in his room. Thank heavens Rex was out on a mission, he wouldn't have to worry about being neat today. He'd clean his quarters in ten hours. Make that twelve.

"Good work Hernandez, Calloon. You both test easily high enough to be put on paratrooper rotation. Now, get some rest."

The two thanked him and smiled wearily, looking as tired as he felt. He made a beeline for the door, with every intent to head downstairs for some shuteye. It was not to be.

Storming down the stairs from the ops center, was Lifeline. Crazylegs nodded, too tired, and with his hands too full to salute, and Lifeline came to a stop. Crud, that wasn't a good sign.

"Crazylegs," a ferile smile split Lifeline's lips, "just the person I wanted to see. Round up every para-qualified man on this base. Wheels up in twenty."

Crazylegs emitted an audible groan, "yes sir."

"and one of you greenshirts," Lifeline continued, paying no attention to Crazylegs anymore, "grab some food for those who haven't eaten. The other grab a couple field cots from stores, you three look like you could use some rest."

After Lifeline disappeared down the stairs, Hernandez spoke, "well, at least he noticed."

Two floors down Lifeline was still flying down the stairs, and almost knocked Skidmark flying, "sorry."

"Geez man, what's the rush?"

Already disappearing down to the next level, "saving lives, killing bad guys. You know, the usual."

Another six floors down, Lifeline huffed into the IT center. Shareware was the only person on duty and raised an eyebrow, "can I help you sir?"

"Get me Flint on the com. Then I need a link to The Pit, then one to The Cove, then one to our stratotanker."

Another pair of blinks, "I'm assuming this has something to do with whatever hush-hush operation is going on up in the ops center that no one can talk about?"

"Officially no."

"Of course not, I didn't think so. Links coming up, give me a couple minutes."

"You've got one."

"Geez, someone's in a bloody hurry."

"You'd better believe it."

04/19/2034: 1100h - Main Building, Poveglia Island

Rapid Fire ran a hand over his face; he hoped he didn't look as exhausted as he felt. They'd only been on this damn island a little over fifteen hours, and a quarter of his team was dead or wounded.

"All right," he said with a sigh, "give me the bad news."

Med Alert looked positively worn, and there was no doubt that he'd done more than his fair share, but there was nothing he could do. "Well, as you would expect sir, Rex passed on some time ago now. Sparta was with him, so at least he had that. Greenshirt Scott suffered second to third degree burns over ninety percent of his body, and will need massive reconstructive surgery if we get back to civilization." Rapid Fire couldn't help but notice the use of the word 'if'. "We've managed to stabilize him using the stores from our packs and some of the rainwater we're collecting on the second floor, but the longer we have to do this battlefield patch job, the worse his prognosis becomes. Right now, I'd give him about a thirty to forty percent chance of pulling through, going down about five percent an hour. The fact he's not dead now is frankly a medical marvel. Then there's Blowtorch. Overall, he's fine, but he's going to need surgery to repair his shoulders. Obviously, he's out of the fight for however long we're here. We've stopped the bleeding. That was it for our obvious injuries, but it doesn't actually stop there. We thought Sci-fi's scratches were fairly minor and he waived off initial medical treatment so we could deal with the more serious cases. Unfortunately, it appears that this vampire secretes a toxin from its claws. Triage and I were baffled, but Dart of all people recognized it as similar symptoms to the Poison Dart Frog, and we were able to make something that's got Sci-fi stabilized. He's unconscious though and will be until we get him to proper medical treatment. Its nasty stuff, what Dart's got in his system is only a stalling tactic, the toxin is still there and we don't have the drugs we need to combat it."

Rapid Fire couldn't help but groan, "So I take it he's out of it for the duration?"

"Again, yes. Additionally, the two greenshirts that were working with Airtight to move the specimen from the basement? Both of them succumbed to the same toxin shortly later. It was at a lower concentration on the specimen so it took longer to affect them and the symptoms are less severe, but they're both in no condition to fight, and I assume its coming to it. So they're out as well. Franzen and Josephson I believe. That does it for the physical injuries."

"Physical?"

"Yes sir, there's also the mental injuries the team is suffering. Most of the remaining Greenshirts, special ops training not withstanding, are terrified and are probably borderline. There's a few good ones, three specifically, with them who I think we can rely on, but the other six may or may not be any help. Then there's Airtight. He's blaming himself for not being more careful with the specimen. He tested the solution it was sitting in, but not the specimen itself, and its got two of our men out of it. I keep telling him there's nothing he could have done but he won't listen, he feels he should have known better. And obviously, Sparta's quite devastated by Rex's death. I think it would help if you spoke to the both of them."

"Yeah, I'll go. Not really sure what I can say given the situation though."

04/19/2034: 1101h - The Rock - Hanger

Flint settled himself into what would usually have been the loadmasters chair in the cockpit of the G.I. Joe Team's C-130 Hercules. The operation had been thrown together in something of a hurry, so the position hadn't been filled. The crew consisted simply of Skywalker and Barrel Roll taking the pilots stations with Barrel Roll doubling as the flight engineer, and Crazylegs doing double duty as jumpmaster for the paratroopers and navigator. Lifeline was wedged into the folding seat usually reserved for the flight engineer. One thing that was kind of bothering Flint was how Crazylegs was compulsively fiddling with his restraint harness. After a moment Crazylegs noticed his scrutiny.

"Something bothering you Flint?"

"Well, when the paratrooper's nervous, it doesn't really help."

"I do have good reason," Crazylegs shrugged as the engines started up.

"Prey tell."

"Well, the take off distance is just over a kilometer when fully loaded."

"Okay."

"And the runway here is just over 850 meters."

Flint turned in his chair, "Skywalker, please, please, tell me he's kidding."

"I'm afraid not," Skywalker said. On the wings, Flint could hear the engines revving, "this base was designed with jet fighters, helicopters, and smaller aircraft in mind during the Cold War. They never thought they'd have a full Herc trying to take off from it, so its a bit short of what we need."

Flint felt the blood drain from his face.

"On the bright side," added Barrel Roll, "there's a sheer cliff at the end of the runway, so our wings can catch the air after we run out of runway, so we have a few hundred meters where we can freefall before we reach flight speed. Kind of risky, but its worked so far."

"How risky?" Flint's voice was shaking.

"Oh, with a plane this size? About 1 in 3 people who try it will get themselves killed."

"And how many times have you guys done it?"

"Oh, we're beating the odds. We've managed it six times now," Skywalker grinned, "better hope for lucky number seven boys. Hold on to your arses."

Flint looked over at Crazylegs as the plane lurched into motion, "you really are joking right?"

"Not really. But that's why they rev the props ahead of time. Even though we're not moving, it adds the equivalent of a few dozen meters to the runway length. We're still short though." He shrugged. "So far they've always gotten it right."

04/19/2034: 1111h - Main Building, Poveglia Island

"Airtight, come on man," Rapid Fire begged again, "we need you for this, your the only person who can do this."

"Its bad enough we're getting guys killed by a bloody vampire, but now we've got two dead because of me."

"They aren't dead, they're just a bit sick. Trust me, they'll pull through once we get out of here."

"If we get out of here Rapid, if. At this rate, none of us will survive until tomorrow."

"Oh for gods sake, pull yourself together, do you think this attitude of yours helps anything?" Rapid Fire had had enough, and his temper got the better of him. "Fine, sit here and sulk. Who know, maybe a few shots from your weapon would have been what turned the tide the next time vampire boy decides to show up, but what does it matter, stay here, that way you won't be responsible for anything. But don't come screaming if it comes after you either."

Airtight attempted to sputter a response at Rapid Fire's retreating back, but couldn't manage anything until the officer was out of site.

"Damn."

04/19/2034: 1112h - The Rock - Special Operations Command Center 3

"General Hawk?" Dialtone asked.

"Hmm, yes?"

"I've got a very agitated Bombstrike trying to reach you."

"Patch her through."

"Yes sir, here you are."

Hawk raised a headset to his ear, "go ahead Bombstrike."

"Thank you sir. Er...I'm not really sure how to ask this, but our C-130H just took off without filing a flight plan. It wasn't on the schedule either. Skywalker told me to ask Lifeline, but apparently he's off base, so I thought I'd ask if you'd given clearance for it?"

"No Bombstrike, I had no idea that that plane was to take off. I'll deal with it though."

"Yes sir. Thank you sir." Bombstrike said and signed off.

Hawk handed the headset back to Dial Tone, "get me a link to Law at The Pit. Tell him to arrest Lifeline when he lands. I'll prepare the form."

"Yes sir. But sir?"

"Problem Dial Tone?"

"Just wondering, are we sure he'd land at The Pit?"

"Its right at the edge of the Hercules' range, so he'll have to refuel there. So yes."

"I see sir."

"Good man."

04/19/2034: 1120h - Hercules In-Flight

Flint allowed himself to breath normally again. Despite the somewhat terrorising drop at the end of the runway, Skywalker and Barrel Roll had wrestled the plane back into the sky and they were now gliding between mountains. He was fairly sure that Crazylegs was smirking, even though his back was turned. Lifeline had gone back to the main cabin to brief the rest of the jumpers about what was going on on Poveglia. The cabin crew had gotten the summary a few moments earlier.

Crazylegs was in charge, and hopefully would get the force down intact and quickly enough to help the Joes embattled there. Other than that, it was down to waiting. There was nothing they could do until they made their fuel stops at the Pit, and the stratotanker before they got over target for the drop. Flint was somewhat nervous, he'd only made two para-jumps with Crazylegs before, and wasn't actually qualified to make the jump. He was somewhat hesitant to remind Crazylegs as he wanted to be in on the mission, but he wondered if it would be worse to put his fellow Joes in danger.

"Er, Crazy..."

Crazylegs flashed a withering glare over his shoulder, "Its CrazyLEGS Flint."

"Sorry, I was just thinking, er, I only have two para-drops practice."

"That puts you two ahead of Lifeline. He's going to need a crash-course," a pause, "hopefully not literally."

"Oh, well then, I guess I'll be OK."

"You two baboons just better not screw up. Sir." The derision imparted with that third word was evident to all.

04/19/2034: 1200h - Main Building, Poveglia Island

Surefire glanced over at Falcon, "you think this is actually going to work?"

"I thought this was your plan."

"Well yes, but..."

"This isn't making me feel too good boss."

"I know."

The two lapsed into silence. The team was pretty much on the brink of a collective mental breakdown already, but being Joes, they were game to take whatever else this beast could throw at them and come out on the other side, or die trying. It was that last part that worried Falcon, but there was nothing to do about it now. The teams were set, the plan was prepared and they were going, come hell or high water. Or vampire.

Triage, Freight, Airtight and Barricade were staying back with the injured troopers, trying to keep them alive and protect them until an evac could be ordered. Slaughter was leading his renegades, Katzenbogen and Heavy Duty on left flank. Rapid Rife, Falcon, Dart, the rest of the urban assault troopers and four of the greenshirts were stationed on right flank. The remaining four greenshirts were going to go right up the center. Their group was going to draw the vampire, somehow Falcon still insisted on thinking of it that way rather than a 'Nemesis Enforcer', into the next building, thereby distracting it while the two flanking groups moved in for the kill, bracketing the creature with heavy weapons, and hopefully finally bringing it down. Well, it worked in theory anyway.

Behind them, Falcon heard a door creek. behind them was a figure in bright yellow and forest green.

"How can we help you airtight?" asked Rapid Fire in a tired voice.

"I'm an idiot."

"Yes, you are."

Falcon let the silence extend for a few seconds before stepping in, "you should get back to the fallback," referring to the room where the injured were being looked after that they'd spent the last few hours fortifying if they had no choice but to flee.

"No...I...I want to do something. To help. I can't let anyone else die because of me."

"No one has Airtight," Falcon said gently.

All he got in reply was a grunt.

"Alright," Rapid Fire hissed, resentment evident in his voice, "go with the greenshirts on the decoy maneuver, you can take charge, and you've got the best armor of any of us."

"And if it kills me you'll be rid of the moper. Got it sir."

"Airtight! That's not what I-"

"Save it. Sir." retorted Airtight.

"Fine mess this is turning into," muttered Rapid Fire at Airtight's retreating back.

04/19/2034: 1202h - Poveglia Island

Nemesis Enforcer, the 'vampire' that had been chasing the Joe team around the island stood under a copse of trees, sheltered from the sleeting rain. He stared across the open fields at the building where his prey were housed. He had counted forty-two individuals arrive on the island. He'd killed at least ten of them, and another half dozen had to be dying. That left only about 25 of them. The ones that all looked alike were nothing to him, they cracked like eggshells. The others were tougher, but no match for him. The only one that worried him was the dark man. He was a threat, but he would be easily enough countered after their last duel.

04/19/2034: 1210h - Poveglia Island

Greenshirt Allen Bardwait crossed his fingers as he watched the last seconds tick off on his watch. He knew he was probably going to die today. He was all right with going out in a hail of bullets from an enemy, or saving his fellow teammates from an explosive, but this was not the end he'd had in mind when he'd joined the military. One of the first things about joining an elite military unit was the high probability of getting killed on the job, and if someone couldn't handle that risk, they weren't welcome. Allen had never had a problem with that. He had no family, given up for adoption at birth, he'd bounced around foster homes for most of his formative years, eventually winding up in the service. No one would care whether he lived or died. Until now, he'd thought that was a good thing, now he just regretted that there would be no one to mourn him, no one to visit his grave, if he even ever got one after this.

The last seconds disappeared. As one, Airtight and his three fellow greenshirts sprang to life, pulling aside a window covering and making a dash for the next building. The intention was to make it look like they were moving stealthily to avoid detection, but to put on just enough of a show to draw the vampire after them. Not that that was all that difficult now that Airtight's bright yellow led the way. They'd drawn straws among the greenshirts to decide who would take this duty, knowing that anyone involved was extremely likely to never come back. Allen had of course gotten a short stick.

Off to the right, under a group of trees, Allen was pretty sure that he spotted the vampire, but he didn't call out, didn't make any gesture of acknowledgement, just ran with his group, hoping that it would look realistic. Behind him, he knew that the window they'd exited through would now be blocked again, cutting off any chance of return. It was make it or die. Well, likely and die also, but there was nothing to do about that. Just hope that the cavalry arrived soon enough to pull their asses out of the fire.

The grass brushed against his calves as he ran through, reminding him of a brief period he'd spent in Peru hunting drug dealers. He'd come close to death more times than he could have counted there, once being caught between the country's president and a power hungry general in a very one-sided gun battle in an abandoned village at the edge of the forest. The general had brought the might of the army against the president's secret service, a small group of rebels who had, until half an hour earlier, been trying to kill him, and a group of 10 United States Marines. Somehow they'd managed to survive, and get out alive. Allen himself had dropped grenades through two tank hatches to kill the crew, and taken out another five infantry. Though certain details of that mission were still mysterious, including why the second regiment on the south had never shown up and been found dead though no shots had ever been fired, he had just been happy to get out of that death trap.

He'd promised himself then that he would never return to South America, no matter the circumstances. But he'd made no such promise about Europe. In fact, he'd always wanted to see Venice. Not what he'd had in mind. Not at all.

He shook his head to clear it. There was no point to this line of thought, it had no bearing on his current situation other than to further depress and distract him from what he was supposed to be doing, and if anything was going to get him killed that would be it. Instead he looked at the rest of his five man team. Airtight led them about three meters ahead. To his left were Geffery Ross, and James Franklin and off to his right, ranging a bit far out on the flank was Julia Forman. She was a nice girl, very competent, and deadly with a rifle. Geff and James were dangerous in their own right, able to set up a crossfire even when they were back to back. Allen felt like the odd man out. His own three partners had been killed on their duty, while this team had lost only one of their members. He was simply filling a slot, not actually fitting in. If anyone could be seen as expendable, it was him.

No, he mentally kicked himself, he couldn't allow himself to think like that.

Ahead Airtight reached the door, Julia piled on the far side, and Allen charged shoulder first. The old wood cracked and the door gave way with ease. Practice allowed Allen to stay on his feet, rather than tumbling through the door as many others would have. For once, his time on Peru was a brief source of pride. But that evaporated quickly as his group began searching the empty building for hiding places they could use to hold the vampire in place until the other two fire teams arrived. Hopefully before they got themselves killed. Julia took the stairs for the first landing, Airtight headed into the nearest room, and Geff and James took places behind fallen masonry in either side of the hallway.

That meant that it fell to Allen to cover the back and prevent the vampire from escaping. Which meant he'd be the first to get gored. Of course.

Propping the door against the frame, Allen hid himself behind it, hoping that would at leas serve as a visual blind, if not any significant physical protection. Then he waited. Listening for any sound, glancing through a hole in the wood, waiting to see any movement. He passed the time by counting, but he only reached fifty-eight before he heard a heavy tread squishing through the wet grass outside, before a bruise-colored leg appeared in the doorway. Allen stopped breathing for a moment, hoping that it wouldn't sense where he was hidden. Apparently it didn't, instead taking a few more steps forward before Geff and James rose in perfect unison and began firing into the creature's chest. That would be the signal to the two fire teams in the main building to get their rears in gear and get over here. The hope was that the sound of the rifles would drown whatever noise they made on their approach, so the vampire would be unaware of the approaching danger until it was too late to save itself.

Julia's rifle barked from the top of the stairs, followed by the distinctive hiss of Airtight's gun, whatever it was. Allen could hear the bullets hitting their target, and risked a peak over the top of the door, knowing his head would soon be detached if he'd guessed wrong. But for a change he guessed right. The creature's wings were up to protect itself from fire thus blocking Allen from view. He was only supposed to open fire if the beast tried to leave, to hold it in position, but he could see a small opportunity. Beneath the wings, above the roots of the green tentacles on his lower back was an area not protected by armor, or chitin, or whatever it was. If he could get a shot in there, he might be able to disable the creature and mke things easier on the rest of the team.

He paused, weighing his options. Well, if he was going to die on this island, it might as well be in a blaze of glory. He quietly stood up from his hiding place, and stepped over the door. Because of the angle of fire from his compatriots, and the way the vampire was standing, he was protected from their ongoing barrage. As he began his approach, one stream of fire cut off. That would be Geff. He'd started with a half-cartridge so that he and James wouldn't run out of ammunition at the same time. One could keep up firing while the other reloaded. Just as that stream restarted another cut out, this time from upstairs. Julia's smaller magazine must have been emptied.

Thank heavens for stubborn monsters, Allen thought to himself for a second, it was standing its ground despite the damage being done to it. Then again, perhaps the damage wasn't being done to it, and that was why. Ah well. Here went nothing.

Mentally crossing his fingers, Allen took his Bayonet knife from his belt and shoved it into the small unprotected area in the middle of the creature's back. A split second passed where nothing happened, and then the creature screamed and reared back. Its right wing caught Allen across his entire side and threw him over towards Geff's position. His stream of fire ceased immediately.

The creature stood in the middle of the floor clawing at his back. As soon as Allen was on the floor, Geff resumed firing, and Allen quickly added his own rifle to the barrage. But it was the bayonet that was doing the damage. Emphasis on past tense. One of the creature's tentacles, previously simply tucked against the body beneath the wing, had unfurled to its full length and now reached around behind it to grasp the hilt of the knife and pull it out. Apparently it wasn't bad enough that the thing had arms with two massive swords built in, and a pair of bat wings, but it needed a set of tentacles that would do an octopus proud as well. It ignored everyone else in the building and turned its attention to Allen, glowering and snarling.

Allen had noted he could no longer hear the reports of his own gun, and now realized why as liquid dripped down the side of his collar from his ears. The creature's scream must have burst his eardrums, and that liquid was blood. Great. Just great.

And yet, still the vampire did not move. Instead the tentacle with the bayonet recoiled. Realizing that it had to be in preparation to throw the blade, Allen prepared himself, and as the tentacle began to whip forward, he rolled to the side, expecting the blade to land where he'd been sitting. Coming to a standing position he resumed firing, but risked a glance at the spot where he'd been lying. No blade. But Geff's stream of fire was gone. It took a few seconds to combine those two observations to realize what had just happened.

The creature's wings would protect it from the other three streams of fire from behind, but left it vulnerable to Allen and Geff. Geff was an immaterial inconvenience to it, while Allen was clearly its target, so it had simply removed the extraneous variable. Lovely. Allen began backing down, hoping to reach Geff's fallen rifle before he had to reload, but he was too late for that. The firing pin snapped.

As soon as the last bullet left the muzzle, the vampire charged towards him, teeth bared, arms reaching for him. Allen tried to brace himself, but there was no more stopping the thing than there was stopping an express train. He was bowled to the ground, and the creature barely flinched. It stood over glowering at him, and Allen knew that he was staring death in the face.

04/19/2034: 1212h - Poveglia Island - The Trap

Greenshirt James Franklin couldn't believe his eyes as the vampire threw Allen's bayonet unerringly into Geffery's neck. He uttered a scream of rage, even though he was deafened to his own voice. Blood was trickling from his ears where his eardrums had burst from the creature's shriek. The two fire teams should have been here by now, instead it seemed that they'd left the five of them to die in this building with the vampire while they escaped. That was just unforgivable.

Not that that would matter shortly if it was true. Allen had at least given him an opening; blood streamed from the wound in the creature's back where Allen had stuck it, providing a target that James wouldn't miss at this range. Taking careful aim, he fired a short burst. At least one of the bullets entered as the creature seemed to shudder, probably screaming again, before returning its attention to Allen who was cowering on the floor and trying to crawl away. Before he could get another burst off the creature's wings folded behind it, obscuring the hole and protecting it once more. Allen was done for if no one else arrived to help soon...

04/19/2034: 1212h - 30,000 feet overhead

Ghostrider pounded the console in frustration. Sometimes Snake Eyes could be maddeningly evasive. Most people would simply explain what was going on on the island, rather than being so damned vague. Ah well, it was still his job to bounce it off the satellite back to The Rock. Hopefully Hawk would finally send some reinforcements.

04/19/2034: 1213 - Poveglia Island - The Trap

This is it, this is it, I'm dead, I'm dead, Allen thought to himself. The vampire continued to stalk towards him, even though it looked like someone had hit it in the back a second ago. There was no way he was getting away from the thing, he was sure, as it raised its arms and prepared to bring its arm blades down on his head. Not really being in the mood to see his own death, Allen clamped his eyes shut, waiting for the searing pain that would end his life.

One second went by, then another, then another. He risked opening his eyes.

04/19/2034: 1212h - Poveglia Island - The Trap

As the first shots from the next building the team sprang into action. Sgt. Slaughter growled for them to "come on!" and they went. Henry Ragan was officially on his first offensive with the G.I. Joe unit. Normally, he reflected, this would have felt wonderful, to get to fight with the best the world had to offer, but right now, it just felt hollow. Over a dozen Joes were already dead, and if his team didn't run like the devil was chasing them, there would be more casualties in a few minutes. The group ran, grass and weeds trampling underfoot. Slaughter led the way, Mercer and Taurus just to his left with Red Dog and Heavy Duty off to his right. Antenna was hanging back with Henry, Darion and Reymond Jordan and David Katzenbogen. David was carrying his usual heavy rifle and portable rocket launcher, while Henry had appropriated the flamethrower that Blowtorch had carried before he was injured. The Jordan brothers simply carried their usual kit.

Henry could see the other assault team striking out from the opposite side of the building, forming the other end of the pincer movement. But it was the noise from the building ahead that gave him slight hope. Streams of fire could be heard, at least three, indicating that the Joes there were holding the creature at bay, at least for now. But then an ear-splitting cry split the air. Something had enraged the beast, perhaps one of the Joes had found a weakness. Hope stirred, and even though his ears were ringing from the noise, he could hear his fellow Joes' muffled cheers. The thing wasn't invincible after all.

Even though a stream of fire seemed to go dead as they approached, a small hope stirred him to greater speed, bringing him up just slightly behind Slaughter as the big sergeant crashed through the door.

One quick look around answered his question about what was going on, Allen was lying on the floor with the beast towering over him, and Geff, or was it James, he was never sure, was dead on the ground with a bayonet through his throat. Now how did that happen? But even more strange than the greenshirt having been killed by one of their own weapons was what Slaughter did next.

Hollering at the top of his lungs, "We all go home or nobody goes home!", he charged the beast and pounded it right in the stomach with his full weight. Foolhardy though that may seem, he actually managed to knock the beast back a handful of steps, and stave off the execution of poor Allen. For his part, it appeared he hadn't noticed the sergeant's heroism as he just kept lying there for a moment. The sergeant though, didn't waste any of his momentum, using it to slew around behind the vampire and clamp its arms in a vice. His head rubbed cheeks with the monstrosity, but with his legs wrapped around its waist and pinioning its upper arms above its head, it was temporarily immobilized.

Finally Allen seemed to realize what was going on and scrambled out of the way. Rapid Fire and the other assault team burst in through a far window and halted at the sight of the ongoing confrontation. Julia was hurrying down from the staircase to join the far team, and Airtight was right on her tail. James, or was it Geff, was still staring at the confrontation, immobile.

"Allen," Henry asked as the man approached, "are you alright?"

Allen shook his head, and Henry noticed the blood dripping from his ears. For an instant he was at a loss before the obvious answer hit him, the bat's screech. It had been almost unbearable outside, it must have deafened those inside, apparently literally in Allen's case. That was unfortunate, the guy was a bit of a loaner, but that didn't mean he deserved that.

Slaughter and the vampire were still wresting in the middle of the hall, but no one from either team was willing to risk a shot, lest they hit the wrong target. Henry was the most worried, a flame thrower seemed to hurt the creature, but it would bake the Sergeant to a crisp at the same time if he risked it.

As if in answer to his thoughts, Slaughter yelled "On the count of five boys, unleash hell! One...Two...Three..."

Slaughter never reached five. The vampire had managed to wriggle his elbows out of the sergeant's grasp so he was just holding onto his upper arms, and in a flash of movement, the arms reached back and grasped Slaughter by the back of the skull. His had was knocked off and he cried out in pain as the creature's claws raked into the flesh where his skull joined his neck. The sickening crack of vertebrae could be heard and the Sergeant's grip went slack.

With no more effort than Henry would expend hoisting a bag of groceries, the creature heaved the limp body of the sergeant off its back, over its shoulder and down the hallway. Henry jumped to one side, and he saw David jump in the other direction. But the body cannoned right into Tarus's chest, knocking the big Turk onto his back.

Distantly, Henry could hear Falcon yell, "light him up!"

Behind him, Heavy Duty opened fire at the creature, the rounds from his Gatling gun striking it in the chest. A few quick adjustments and his flamethrower added to the blast as David opened up with his assault rifle. Behind the creature, the members of Rapid Fire's strike force added their own weapons to the barrage, the weapons drowning the creature's howls of rage.

"Ok boys," Mercer ordered, stepping in for Slaughter, "you know the plan, back it up. Slowly! Slooowly." he admonished an over-anxious David.

At the other end of the hall, Rapid Fire's team would be doing the same, neatly pinioning the creature between the two forces, unable to move in either direction. Should it attempt to go out through the main door, Snake Eyes should have finished wiring it with a half-dozen claymore mines by now, and Julia would have done the same on the stairs while they were waiting for the creature. Thus far, everything was going according to plan.

The group reached the door through which they had entered moment earlier and paused there, waiting for the confirmation. It was a moment before Rapid Fire's voice came over the radio in Red Dog's hand, "ten seconds."

The Jordan brothers and Taurus exited first, carrying the bodies of Slaugther and Geff, (or was it James?) outside before the rest of the team brought the building down on the creature. Mentally ticking off the seconds, Henry reached two, waited a heartbeat, and then dove through the door. Though he couldn't see it, he knew that behind him David would be firing off a high-yield portable rocket and Red Dog would be hurling a satchel of explosives, matched by the other team.

The second remaining after the throw would give the two teams just enough time to get out of the building.

Henry stumbled as he lept out of the way, and a second later, something heavy landed on him. Or rather, someone heavy, given the German expletives that were coming out of David's mouth. Behind them a massive roar shook the air as the explosives detonated around the Vampire. Masonry from the ancient building was flung everywhere, and Henry was glad he was flat on his face, as at least two large pieces flew only inches overhead. It took a moment for the noise to die and the smoke to clear, but the building was down and destroyed, burying the remains of the creature that had been hounding them since they arrived. No one else was going to die today.

A hand appeared in front of Henry's face, and Red Dog helped him too his feet, "you were supposed to go sooner greeny," he said, but not unkindly.

"Two seconds is a long time, especially with the speed that thing moves. Well...moved."

Red Dog tried to smile, but failed as he glanced at Slaughter's body, "yeah, he was fast. " He paused, then continued, "it was starting to move towards us when I threw the charges. If you'd let up sooner, well...that probably wouln't have worked." Another pause. "Thank you."

"Just doing my job sir."

He felt a hand clamp onto his shoulder and Darion's voice bellowed inches from his ear, "yeah, real nice work Ice Cream!"

Red Dog raised an eyebrow, sounding weary, "Ice Cream?"

"Yeah," chimed in Reymond affecting a ghetto accent, "the boi's about a' 'ite as va'illa ice cream. Can' dance fo' notin' yo'."

Henry rolled his eyes, and punched him in the shoulder.

"Hey bro," chuckled Darion, "this Ice Cream Soldier's got a flamethrower. Better watch your mouth. Sides, he might not give you your KFC next week."

04/19/2034: 1440h - Hercules In-Flight

"Still an hour and a half out," Skywalker answered Lifeline's query. "We've got clearance to land at McGuire Field, and our Sky Patrol team will be waiting. But apparently Law needs to speak with you. Something about an urgent communication from The Rock."

Lifeline raised his eyebrows, "either I'm being court-marshled, or they've regained contact. Whatever happens, once the tank is full and everyone is on board, start her up and go. Even if I'm still there. Flint'll take charge if necessary."

Now it was Skwalker's turn to raise an eyebrow, "you sure sir?"

"I'm sure." He paused, "but for the sake of plausible deniability could you head back and let me talk with Barrel Roll for a minute. If you don't know the whole thing, you can't be at fault."

Skywalker laughed, "when did that stop us before?" But he followed orders and headed back to the main bay where the rest of the joes were checking chutes and rigging for the drop.

After a second, Lifeline took the pilots seat beside Barrel Roll, "we need to talk."

Barrel Roll, always effusively cheerful, asked, "Want me to toss Skywalker out the back while we're over the ocean?"

A corner of Lifeline's mouth twitched, "no, though there's a few people I might need that for." He turned serious again, "Its about your brother."

Barrel Roll's face hardened, "you found his body?"

"No."

"Then there's nothing to say about him," Barrel Roll said and turned to face out the window.

"We think he's alive."

It was a good thing that the plane was on auto-pilot, otherwise Barrel Roll's abrupt movement would have sent them in to a rather dangerous spiral.

"WHAT?"

"Quiet," Lifeline hissed. "As you know, the compiled intelligence report on Cobra, based on what we got from Chuckles, goes out in a couple days, but since I was compiling it, I got to take a look through it ahead of time. Two different versions are going out. One to Majors and abover, and another to everyone else. Based on information from Chuckles, we have reason to believe that your brother is now working with Cobra."

"That's impossible!" This time Barrel Roll kept his voice down, but disbelief and horror wared on his face.

"I'd like to think that, but the records we have from Cobra are rather detailed about the ambush he and his team got hit with. In fact, its significantly more detailed than the information we have. Though I'm not thrilled that a former Joe, no matter who he may be, could now be in their service, the description of one of their members known as 'Blackout' matches almost exactly with that of your brother from our file. That means that...Barrel Roll?" A look of concern crossed Lifeline's face as the co-pilot's head lowered into his hands.

"Its him."

"I'm sor-"

"Blackout. That was what everyone called him at the academy after he made a point of shooting out all the lights of the next building. Blindfolded."

Mentally kicking himself for not remembering that report, he should have made that connection himself, Lifeline did his best to diffuse the situation. "It could be coincidence, but I thought it would be best that you hear it from someone in case it is him and we run across him in combat."

"Thank you." Barrel Roll mumbled, "is there any way I could...could see the report?"

"I'm afraid that's quite impossible," Lifeline said, then picked up the briefcase he had brought, opening it to rifle through the contents. "Your rank isn't high enough to see the higher-tier file, and your not in the right department to access the original records. Oops." Lifeline bent over to pick up the files that had just spilled from the open bag. He grabbed them and put them back in their place. "You'll have to excuse me, I need to distribute these maps to the drop team," he said, waving one of the files.

Before he reached the door, Barrel Roll spoke up, "Er, Lifeline? You forgot one."

"I've got all of my stuff. I must have knocked that one off the console."

Barrel Roll stared in confusion for a second at the door as it closed, then looked down at the file. He was fairly certain there hadn't been anything on the console, and opened it to check. The pages inside showed a thick "DO NOT PHOTOCOPY" watermark, but were obviously copies. Barrel Roll smiled and started reading.

04/19/2034: 1600 - Poveglia Island - The Trap

Triage sighed, and straightened, "your hearin-". Shaking his head, he reached for the pad of paper and began writing, Your hearing should return in a few days. You'll need to get LL or Doc to look at it, but its not as bad as I thought.

Allen nodded, showing that he'd understood, then said in a voice louder than normal, "Thanks, I'm going to get some shut-eye."

Traige nodded and then closed his eyes as the greenshirt went off. It was an odd time of day for the team to be resting, but given that no one had gotten any sleep last night, and the storm was keeping the sky perfectly dark, Rapid Fire had decided that everyone could use three hours of rest now that the vampire was dead. After that they'd search the rest of the buildings. Triage was just patching up the injuries from the encounter and Med Alert was body-bagging the fatalities. Stretcher was on constant watch over Greg Sconz. His condition had stabilized for the time being, but stable and near dead wasn't exactly a good thing. Of course, there wasn't really much they could do about it...

Falcon approached, "that's the last of them then?"

"Yeah. I've patched together what's left of our little band."

A moment's silence followed, "well," Falcon said, his attempt to sound cheerful failing miserably, "at least we've seen the last of that thing."

Triage stood up, "I'm going to get some rest."

"You got it."

As he walked into the hallway, Triage felt bad for being short with Falcon, the whole mess wasn't his fault, it wasn't really anyone's fault, but it was utterly frustrating that things had gone so horrifically badly. Lost in thought, he stopped paying attention to where he was going, and after a minute, felt himself lose his footing as his feet caught on a backpack set right beside the building's main door. He crashed to the ground among a now unrolled tent and its frame.

"Who left this shit in the doorway?" he yelled.

04/19/2034: 1605 - Venice - Police Station

"But I'm telling you, it was an explosion. I spent three years in Korea, I KNOW an explosion when I see one."

The police officer on the other side of the table was unimpressed. Almost three hours ago a group of American tourists who had been wandering Venice in the storm had come charging into the station, insisting that they had seen an explosion on one of the islands in the storm. In the lightening storm. The desk clerk had put them in an interrogation room and it had fallen to Sergent Nico Bianco to talk to them about this. He was pretty certain they were all drunk, and had mistaken a lightening strike as an explosion. Typical ignorant American tourists.

Even if it was an explosion, he wasn't going to go out in this storm to check the islands in the bay. It was a waste of time, and besides, his coffee was getting cold.

"I'm sure it was sir. What were you doing at the time of the sighting?" he asked in a bored voice.

"We were just walking around. Damn place gets more rain than London!"

"I see sir, and had you ingested anything while you were walking around."

"Well, we'd had lunch at some place just before... But what does that have to do with the explosion?"

Ignoring the question Nico pressed on, "did you have anything to drink with your meal?"

"Well, yeah, a couple beers. Well, my wife and I did, not the kids obviously."

"Of course. How many beers?"

"Look man, I wasn't drunk!" The man was getting agitated again. Nico wasn't a small man by any means, but this tourist would have out-weighed him by several dozen kilograms. And his family would have collectively outweighed an elephant.

"Calm down sir," Nico said, in what he thought was a reasonable voice.

"I will NOT calm down until you listen to me!"

Nico sighed, got up and walked out of the room. The man was screaming after him, but he didn't listen. Americans. They're all the same.

"Francco," Nico addressed one of the young constables, "book them for public intoxication and disturbing the peace."

"But sir, they didn't disturb the peace. Did they?"

"They disturbed MY peace, that's enough."

"Yes sir."

Nico shook his head as the constable trotted off. He remembered the old days when a superior's word was enough to get things done and not engender a stream of unnecessary questions. Grabbing his tea, he walked to the front desk of the station.

"Anything new Maria?"

"We just got a call from the station on Malamocco, apparently several locals claim to have seen an explosion on Poveglia island."

"But there's nothing ON Poveglia. There hasn't been for years."

With a shrug, Maria replied, "that's what they claim."

"Well, tell Malamocco that if they're willing to believe such nonsense, to go look at it themselves."

"They would, but their boat got swamped in the storm. The chief is ordering you to look for them."

Nico cursed his luck. Even since Bennito had been promoted, he stepped all over everyone. No one else would tell someone to go out in this weather, there was nothing important on that island that couldn't wait until the storm had passed.

"Fine, I'll go look. Eventually!" Nico replied petulantly, then grabbed another donut from the box on the desk.

04/19/2034: 1630h - McGuire Field

Law watched the wheels of the C-130 kiss the pavement, the screech reaching his ears as the first layer of rubber vaporized on the tarmac. Beside him Order barked irritably.

"Down boy," he said with a smile, reaching down to pat the German Shepherd's head.

The two had been together on one military police force or another for almost seven years. Order the fourth was getting old, in fact, was already somewhat older than could have been expected, especially for a dog that was still working, but so was Law. He half-figured that when this Order retired, he'd just take a desk job with some administrative organization and get off his feet for the rest of his career. But other times he knew he'd never be comfortable if he wasn't on the front lines. The G.I. Joe organization offered him the choice to do either when the time came to make his decision. But that was still a few years off. Or so he hoped. Law had figured he was about the oldest guy on the force outside of some of the officers, and while most of the rest looked up to him and respected him for it, there was only so long he could keep doing this. Of course, ever since Brittany had left him, he hadn't really had anything else to do other than throw himself into work.

He shook his head. He'd never thought he'd be one to think about things 'back in the day.' Damn I'm getting old.

The Hercules came to a rolling stop a few dozen meters away. Already Countdown was driving the refueling truck up beside the transport, and Sky-Dive was hustling the Sky Patrol into action. Airwave and Altitude were hauling a large crate of heavy equipment, Static Line and Drop Zone were hauling the team's parachutes over their shoulders, Air-borne and Albatroz were carrying smaller packs and weapons, probably for some ground assault and Aguia Comando was...er...ah, there he was, just coming out of the outhouse.

The forward door cracked open and swung away as Freefall and Blast Man rolled up a set of stairs to the door. Lifeline and Skymate came out, followed by Crazylegs and Flint. Flint paused at the top of the stairs, said something to Lifeline and disappeared back inside. Freefall went to supervise the fuel loading, while Lifeline and Crazy Legs approached. Crazylegs was waylayed by Sky-Dive, but Lifeline continued.

"Law, what are you doing here? Shouldn't you be making sure that no one's causing trouble back at the pit?"

"Well, actually I'm here to arest you."

To his credit, Lifeline barely blinked, "are you now? Do you have the paperwork?"

"Well, there's something wrong with the fax machine out here, so Cannonball's gone back to The Pit to get a copy, Busy Signal's trying to get the Fax machine here working."

"Well, that is rather inconvenient. You can't really arrest a superior officer without the proper paperwork now can you?"

"No, not really. Its too bad though, I could arrest just about everyone else on the plane, but apparently Hawk's only interested in you."

"Its so nice to be popular," Lifeline mocked as he sat down on a crate. "So, Law, while I wait to be arrested, what have you been up to lately?"

"Smacking down uppity greenshirts, keeping the peace. The usual." Law took a seat beside Lifeline.

"Stalker giving you any more trouble?"

"Not since you got him transferred to The Pit. Once he got away from Snake Eyes, everything was all right."

"I don't understand why those two hate each other so much. I mean, sure Snake didn't come running back to the US after the War, but come on, the guy was in pretty bad shape, he needed some time to himself."

"Honestly?" Law replied, "I think Stalker's in worse shape. Sure, he came out of it all right physically, but the man's on the verge of a mental breakdown. First Aid gave him a psych evaluation shortly after he got here, and the guys got a whole whack of problems and insecurities."

With a sigh and roll of the eyes, Lifeline replied, "and that fits just how many of our special forces crew? Especially the ones who came out of the war?"

"Far too many. Far too many."

04/19/2034: 1640h - Venice Police Motor Launch

Nico Bianco glared out through the windscreen, listening to the rain drum on his poncho. Constable Giada Zito expertly piloted the motor-boat out of the canals of Venice and into open water. She seemed quite at home in the storm, unperturbed by the orders to go out to investigate something so utterly pointless in such inclement weather. He shook his head in disbelief. He'd tried to bring a thermos of coffee with him, but it had spilled almost immediately after he got on the launch. Now he stood miserably under the weather. You'd think that with the amount we make off tourists every year that we might be able to afford a covered launch he thought to himself.

Off to the south the small islands of the bay were obscured by the torrential rain. Lightening creased the sky at irregular intervals but revealed nothing. There was nothing to stare at but the dark thrashing waters before the boat, and so he brooded.

At the wheel Gaida rolled her eyes thinking about her sulking companion. It was clear to anyone that the man didn't belong in the police service, or any other respectable occupation for that matter. He had no ambition, no drive, and no desires other than for a fat, undeserved paycheck and regular trips to the coffee shop. Most other officers kept a trim figure from exercise and hard work, but Sgt. Bianco was a hog of a man, triple chinned and with a gut that proceeded him by a good foot and a half. Somehow he prevented it from spilling over the gun holster on his right hip, though she suspected the weapon was likely rusted in place from neglect.

She'd joined the force after being one of the luck few who grew up in Venice, looking to do good and clean up the city that was besieged by ill-mannered tourists. She'd thought for the first few days that she'd chosen correctly, but then Bianco had had returned from vacation and turned her life into a slow hell. Littering offense? Step over it, or kick it into the canal, it'll wash out to sea. Robbery? Bloody tourist got what he deserved. Vandalism? Fine the victim if they don't clean it up by tomorrow.

Anything that involved going after a real criminal was discarded. Unless it was a stationary business that could be fined through the mail, Nico Bianco ignored it. To shift his lard out to actually do something required a direct edict from the chief. And even he was largely ignored. Even tonight, people all over reporting having seen an explosion down on Poveglia, and it takes him two hours to get his rear in gear to even listen to them, and then another half hour, and a couple threats from the chief to get moving. It was just pathetic.

Nico let Gaida believe he couldn't see her roll her eyes; overly pretentious bitch. Just because she was new to the force and had the urge to go leaping after every dropped tissue like a dog in heat was no reason that everyone else had to follow here running around the streets of Venice every day. There was such a thing as being practical. In a city that saw as many thousand tourists per day as Venice did, it was impossible to track down the perpetrators of most of the crimes, unless they installed cameras on every street, every building and every water taxi. And that wasn't going to happen any time soon. She had to realize that that cost too much, was impractical, and would never be tolerated by - OOPH! The blasted woman kept going over these breakers on purpose, just to make him seasick. Everyone knew that he had a delicate stomach.

Gaida flinched as the boat crashed over another wave. She was doing her best to avoid the worst of them, but even the calm troughs were throwing the boat around fairly badly. Thankfully Poveglia had a small canal running through the center where she could tie up the boat to keep it from getting severely damaged. It might also allow her to debark in peace without Nico raging at here for her perceived faults. Perhaps she'd even be lucky enough to look elsewhere on the island and not have to deal with him.

Nothing would make Nico happier than reaching Poveglia Island. He didn't know anything about the island, but he knew that his first order of business would be to get the two of them to split up so that he could have some peace and quiet. He'd find the nearest grove of trees and wait it out until the storm lightened. She could do the heavy lifting on the island. In fact, perhaps he could find some old abandoned building there. Most of the islands in the bay had them, and he could search through them while she poked around outside. She was such a nature hound she probably wouldn't mind. Yeah, that was it. Nico congratulated himself on his brilliance.

Another few hard turns of the wheel avoided the onrushing wave, and Gaida finally regained control of the craft. Nico hadn't even seemed to notice how close they'd come to being swamped that time. Figured. But Poveglia was coming into sight now, meaning that they could land in short order and she could get away from him. Perhaps if she let him search the buildings she could do a check of the grounds and then leave him here until morning. Actually, that could work. She could pretend she found something and go back to 'report' it and get a larger crew out here to help her look. A more competent crew at that. The island wasn't large, but she wasn't keen about effectively having to search it herself; she knew Nico would be no help. Yeah. That was a good idea. The old swine probably wouldn't even notice.

04/19/2034: 1650h - McGuire Field

Lifeline laughed, "dude, the Stars aren't getting near the Stanley Cup this year."

"Hey, just because your Flames have made the finals three of the last four seasons, doesn't give you the right to gloat," Law replied, faking a glare.

"Yes it does."

Woof!

"See, even Order thinks your full of it."

"No fair using my dog against me. He doesn't understand the icing rules!"

"No one understands the new icing rules."

"I...er...you may have a point there."

"Hey boss, your all filled up!" hollered Countdown.

"Thanks Count! So, Law, I guess you can't arrest me before I leave."

"Damn New York traffic. Should have had Clutch drive it out rather than Cannonball. He'd have been here half an hour ago."

"Ah well, its been good talking to you. I'll see you when I get back. You can arrest me then."

"Hey, wai-" Law sighed, "oh never mind."

Lifeline was already half-way across the tarmac to the stairs to the C-130, and its props were already running. The rest of the paratrooper team had loaded up while they were waiting, Ripcord being the last one to climb aboard.

The stairs were pulled away and the door closed. The Herc turned and began to taxi down the runway.

"STOP THAT PLANE!" Busy Signal hollered, running out of the office.

"What?"

"I've got the orders Law, you can arrest him!"

Law stared at the page dangling in her hands, "I thought that the Fax machine wasn't working?"

"It wasn't, but I figured out what was wrong with it."

"And?"

"Some dog chewed the power cable. It kept shorting out." She glared down at Order.

"Well, there's not much I can do now," Law bemoaned, watching the Herc gather speed down the runway, "I'm not about to go and try to flag them down now."

Busy Signal glowered, "Fine, but you get to call Hawk and explain." She stormed off in a huff.

Law knelt down and scratched Order behind the ears, watching the Herc lift off from the runway.

"Good luck man," he whispered after the departing plane, "bring our boys home safely."

Arf!

-

04/19/2034: 1651h - Poveglia Island

Nico Bianco clambored labouously out of the Police Launch behind Giada Zito, cursing the weather, the waves, her, and the chief for sending him out in this weather. It was a complete waste of his time. Time better spent relaxing in the break room with his fellow officers.

"All right Zito, you cover the north island, I'll look around the buildings and see if someone decided to blow them up." He snorted. "Once you find the trees where lightening struck, come get me and we'll go back."

"Yes sir," Gaida replied, her voice artificially cheerful. Mentally she was rolling her eyes, all Nico was going to do was find a doorway and stand there while she did all the leg-work. Typical. AH well, at least she'd get some fresh air, and with any luck someone actually had blown up a building and was still around.

Nico hadn't even bothered to wait for the acknowledgement, and was already streaking towards the nearest doorway. In spite of herself, she sighed. After next week's review, she was going to request a transfer. To anywhere but here. Shaking her head, Gaida departed for the north island. She had tied the boat up along the north shore of the south island, technically the middle landmass if one counted the fortress built at the south end of the island, so she had to make her way up to the bridge and across before she would be able to start her search. Other than the howling wind the island was silent and empty. For a half second, she thought she caught a glimpse of someone or something dart between trees on her right. Dropping to one knee and taking aim at the now vacant location, she waited, but the movement' didn't repeat itself. Curiosity piqued by the sight, and a small part of her wanting to shelter under the trees, even if only for a minute, she cautiously approached the location where she had seen the shadow. A few brambles and bushes tried to trip her as she passed, but she was soon standing under a tick grove of trees, completely sheltered from the rain. It was even darker underneath the canopy, if that was possible, and completely empty.

The trees covered most of the edges of the island, clearly having been allowed to run rampant after the last inhabitants had left. A couple of dead ones stood off to her right, but they were completely enveloped by the surrounding forest, so that had occurred a long time ago. She cast around and then noticed a broken twig, and a few crushed leaves. She paused, noticing a few other things out of place, seeming to lead in a trail off to the northwest. Heeping her gun handy, and wishing she actually had some reliable backup on this island, she followed, slowly and cautiously. It took her ten minutes of careful skulking, but she reached the edges of the woods, and came upon five figures leaning over a pit. It looked like they were, no that couldn't be right, it looked like they were pulling corpses out of it. She waited, but that was indeed what they were doing. Even worse there were two more pits in the near distance.

Gaida couldn't fathom why they were putting the bodies in bags, after they had probably killed them, especially given the array o weaponry strapped to each of their backs. What was odd though is their leader seemed to be dressed in an orange suit, while the othe three all wore a dark green uniform. Something was definitely out of place here, but in spite of their overwhelming firepower, and clear mental derangement, Gaida felt herself step out from behind the tree, and heard herself bark "Venice police, hands in the air!"

The two in green uniforms pulling a body up from the hole didn't even turn, the other two greenies, a man with bandages on his ears, and a woman with a sniper rifle turned in the blink of an eye and had weapons trained on her. The guy in orange, turned his head, raised an eyebrow and replied with two words that made no sense.

"Snake Eyes."

"Wha-"

Gaidas' reply was cut off at the same time that a sword cut off the barrel of her gun. She gasped and stumbled backwards, but a man, completely clad in black with what looked like a knight's visor covering his eyes grabbed hold of her arm, not hard enough to hurt, but enough to immobolize her. Or so he thought. She immediately moved to trip and shoulder throw him, bringing him in front or her for a shield, where she could grab his own weaponry for use against his compatriots. But to her surprise, he managed to simply adjust his elbow and cause her to go flying past and land in a heap on the ground. Before she could get up, his sword was at her throat. She braced herself for the end, but all the masked man did was shake his hand and sheath his sword before disappearing back into the grove of trees without a word.

"You'll have to forgive old Snake Eyes," said the man in orange in English, "he's kinda quiet."

Something about this must have been funny as the four mercenaries, she was quite sure that's what they were, dressed in green all smirked at this remark.

"My name is Med Alert. I'm sorry to have to inconvenience you, but we are going to have to take you hostage."

"Don't bet on it," spat Gaida, also switching to English.

"Venice police you said? Alpha, Tango, Whiskey, Charlie, Charlie, Bravo, seven, twelve, whiskey."

She blinked twice before the meaning of the words sunk in. Each police force worldwide had a specific operations code that consisted of alpha numeric that would identify any individual with authority within or over the unit. Often these codes were subordinated to a country code, and that was what the man had just given. Not mercenaries then, Italian special ops, or more likely American given the man's accent. Still, she didn't say anything, waiting to see if it had just been a lucky guess.

The man waited, then turned to one of his partners, "James, that WAS the right code wasn't it?"

"That's what I heard in briefing," the man called James replied. The woman and the African-American nodded in agreement, the guy with bandages on his ears didn't appear to hear. Interesting, perhaps the reports of an explosion were true and he had been injured. That would also explain the bodies. However, it didn't really explain why there were three holes filled with bodies, an explosion would normally have torn its victims apart, especially one big enough to have been seen through this storm. Still, eventually she might get an answer.

The man in orange, Med Alert he'd called himself, sighed, then spoke again, "Miss, you can either come with us voluntarily, or we can do this the hard way. And trust me, you want to pick the former."

"You wouldn't hurt a police officer," she said defiantly, raising her chin and glaring down her nose.

The man's face hardened,"Miss, after the last twenty-four hours on this island from hell, I have no problems killing you, let alone hurting you. And what's more, my organization would provide me clemency for it. I'll happily body-bag you if it will prevent one more of my men from getting a scratch. Got it?"

The pure vehemence in his voice succeeded where many hardened criminal's threats had failed, she flinched.

"Miss," came a deep voice from behind her. She whirled, expecting the man clad in black, but instead she was looking into the face of a hulking African-American. While he had a jovial face, his rough voice scared here at some primal level.

"It would be in your own best interest to just listen to the man and come with us. I assure you, he's in about the best mood of all of us right now."

Much though she wanted to protest more, Gaida knew that she was well and truly trapped.

"Fine."

"Wise choice miss," said the large man, then promptly did something she hadn't ever expected, slapping a pair of handcuffs on her arms.

She promised herself that these men would pay, somehow, sometime soon.

-

04/19/2034: 1651h - Poveglia Island

Nico watched Gaida disappear over the bridge, and smiled, free and clear. Part of him debated taking the launch back to Venice and relaxing at home for the rest of the night, and just leave her here. She probably wouldn`t even notice, because she`d be too focused on her pointless search to even notice his absence. The only thing stopping him was that the damn woman had taken the keys for the ignition. Not that Nico didn`t know how to hotwire the boat, he`d done a stint as a repossession agent before moving to Venice all those years ago. Still, that might get him in trouble, and he needed the health coverage. His bills were starting to rack up, and he needed a liver transplant next month. Grumbling at his misfortune he began to hike towards the nearest building.

The island was deserted, just as he had expected, and the buildings were all dark. He didn`t notice the blood streaked on the grass beneath his feet, or the oddly broken branches of many of the nearby trees, or the spike-trap on the other side of a bush, still reeking from pieces of an unfortunate greenshirt. He had eyes only for the nearest bulding`s doorway which was fast approaching. Though he hadn`t sped much past a walking pace, he was practically out of breath. He cursed the air quality, even though pollution was now effectively a thing of the past, instead of his own lack of fitness.

The old door stood open, and though this was unusal he didn`t notice how sharply this contrasted with the far building where all the windows were boarded. Stepping in he headed for the stairs, completely ignorant of the wet footprints lining both hallways, and proceeding down a second staircase to the basement. He simply headed for the upper floor, hoping to find a bunk. He knew the old tales that the island had once been a mental hospital, and that it had been used briefly for retirement condominiums until a large number of residents had died under mysterious circumstances, so he presumed there would be at least one bed left over on the upper floor that he could use for a few hours to make it look like hed done a through investigation of the empty buildings.

He reached the upstairs and soon reached a room that did indeed have a bed. He was quite happy that it was an inside room, and lacked a window through which the rain could pass. Strangely the bed appeared to be more modern than he would have expected, something he did make note of, given that he owned the same version from IKEA, but the relevance of this observation escaped him as he tossed his coat on the floor and climbed in. He was promptly asleep two minutes later and didn`t hear the noise of a large Turkish man in the hallway.

-

04/19/2034: 1651h - Poveglia Island

A large pile of ancient masonry marked the location where once a five hundred year old building had stood. Its sides had been blown out by one of the largest explosions that had ever been seen in the Venice lagoon. Mixed in the rubble was various scientific equipment, beds, and abandoned clothing. Beneath the rubble lay a stairway leading to a hidden underground lab, but beside this access-way the rubble shifts. Not from any natural force.

Slowly masonry tumbles away from an area that slowly shifts upwards, more masonry, woodwork and rubble shifted, slowly sliding away from a body pushing up from underneath. As the detritus from the explosion cascaded down the sides, a menacing form was revealed. Bleeding, torn and broken, a beast clothed in battered red armor, a purple skin and expression promising vengeance.

The `vampire`, Nemesis Enforcer was not defeated. Not yet. And now, he wanted vengeance.

-

04/19/2034: 1730h - Poveglia Island - Underground Laboratories

Rapid Fire gave Gaida Zito another appraising look. The woman was becoming quite a nuisance around the place, even though they had no choice but to hold her until they had finished tearing the place apart for whatever they could find. She'd been screaming when they brought her in about seeing a vampire disappear around a distant tree. Of course, the team had done its best to dissuade her, despite their own trepidation at hearing the news, but Shockwave and Barricade had confirmed that the building they'd brought down on the creature was completely destroyed and there was no chance it had survived, let alone escaped.

Of course, that hadn't stopped the woman screaming until Taurus had interjected, "I do not like her mouth. Let us remove it yes?"

That had shut her up in quite a hurry, and also lightened the mood of the team. Sometimes the renegade's violent humour was exactly what was needed in situations like this. Of course, now that he was a few hallways away, Gaida had regained her courage and was screeching about mistreatment, making a report and a dozen other minor perceived ills. There was really little to complain about in his opinion, she'd been treated far better than any prisoner would have ever had the right to expect, and given all that the team had gone through over the last day, she was lucky that she was even still alive to enjoy their hospitality.

"Miss Zito," he finally snapped, "would you please shut up!"

"I will not, Rapid Fire," she replied, twisting his name into a curse, "this is unbelievable treatment, and if you really have the authority you claim, which I highly doubt I might add, you wouldn't be treating me like this."

"We have more authority than that. And allow me to assure you I'm on the bring of exercising it."

"Really?" she sneared, "then just do it."

Her haughty glare almost put him over the edge. He paused to think, he wasn't quite justified at this point, but if she kept pushing it, he had little doubt that his fellow Joes would complain if he put her down for 'interfearing with the war effort'. He shook his head again.

"Miss Zito," he replied, attempting to remain polite in spite of him self, "do you know what a Sanction One is?"

"Something that doesn't exist?"

Rapid Fire fought back a retort, "No, it means that if you hamper our operations, I'm authorized to put you in intensive care and fill out a couple forms. And your government wouldn't do a damn thing. Oh, and the medical bills would be your problem."

Technically that was a Sanction Two, but the comment and his vicious smile had the desired effect of making the woman blanch and go quiet. Sanction One was simply an enhanced interrogation, but what she didn't know would help him.

"Thank you Miss. I assure you, your time with us will be quite pleasant if you keep to yourself.

-

04/19/2034: 1735h - Poveglia Island - Underground Laboratories

Shockwave cursed as he whacked his head on a low-hanging piece of pipe, "you think they'd have designed this place a bit better wouldn't you?"

Barricade shrugged, "I'm no scientist, but I'm sure Clean Sweep would have issues with this place."

Widescope laughed, "Clean Sweep would have issues with Doc's lab."

"Sad but true," agreed Barricade, "remind me again who thought it was a good idea to hire him? I think Airtight, Flash and Haz-mat would be sufficient for our CBR needs."

Another shrug from Barricade, "well, command obviously didn't think so. Perhaps they know something more than we do."

"Probably do," agreed Shockwave, "I mean, just look at that Intel report we got on Cobra command. That organization's freaking massive, and they've got a lot of freaky doctors on staff. Hell, look at this place, how many scientists must they have had in here. If they hadn't already stripped all the useful stuff out of here, we'd probably need all four of them to go over it."

"Good thing its just bag and grab now," Widescope said, kicking a broken chair out of the way. "Hey now, what's this?"

"Let me see."

Widescope moved back to let Barricade take a look, "now what have you stumbled on my friend. Interesting, I wonder where that goes."

Underneath the chair was a trap door that apparently led down farther into some underground complex. Which was strange in and of itself as they were already beneath the islands water table. Around them, they could hear small pumps clattering to keep the complex dry.

"Go get Airtight and Antenna," Shockwave addressed Barricade, then turning to Widescope added, "better find Falcon or Rapid while we're at it. This could be gold."

The two Joes disappeared down the corridors, and Shockwave bent to investigate. Removing a flashlight from his back he opened the trap door and looked down. Predictably the room was dark, but the flashlight illuminated a steal ladder bolted into the carved rock. Idly wondering exactly how the Cobra organization had managed to dig all these tunnels, and the rock chippings clearly indicated that they were recent additions to the island, without anyone around having noticed the dumped rock, Shockwave swung a leg over the side and tested the third rung down. It held his weight.

For a half a second, he debated leaving his rifle and SMG on the floor, then thought better of it, slinging the rifle back on his shoulder and snapping his light onto the barrel of his SMG. He slowly descended into the dark room. The floor was only 15 rungs down, around the same number of feet. Keeping his back to a wall, Shockwave edged around the room, looking for a light switch. The wall appeared to be lined with computer servers, and they looked remarkably intact, this could just be what they needed to crack Cobra. Of course, without power, it would be difficult, but hopefully Antenna could do something with it.

04/19/2034: 1735h - Poveglia Island

Along the north edge of the island a small two-person submersible approached an underground cavern and after passing under a small curtain of rock, rose to the surface of an underground pool. The room was the same in which Snake Eyes had dueled with one of the Guardsmen of Project Cobra Law some hours ago. The surveillance camera i nthe room was the only one still working, and had caught the entire duel on tape. This had alerted Cobra high command that the operation couldn't be cleaned out as quietly as had originally been intended.

It had been dangerous to attempt to remove the remaining files and specimines with the renegade Nemesis Enforcer loose on the island, but they had been stripped methodically during his near nightly absences, with a single Guardsman guarding the underground docks to prevent discovery of the operation. But now that someone else was on the island, a new plan had been devised. Destroy the whole thing. To that end Kracken and Fiirefly had been dispatched to the island to prevent any further investigation. And if a few of the investigators there went with it, so be it. In fact, all the better.

Neither individual though knew what they were dealing with on the island. They knew that three boats had arrived earlier in the day, but had been unable to ascertain just how many operatives were on the island. They knew that there was one man dressed in black who carried a sword and was more than a match for one of their Guardsmen, so they were highly trained. They also knew that their mission was doubtless to rescue the other operatives that had attempted to investigate the island. The danger was that the renegade Nemesis Enforcer would no longer be sufficient to keep them at bay. This was evidenced by the fact that it hadn't left its haunt on the island to hunt elsewhere during the previous night, suggesting that prey still lived.

Firefly was justifiably nervous of any individuals that could survive a period of time near this creature. He'd been assigned to the first team that had been sent to kill the creature. He was also the only one from that group that had come back alive. All because the commander hadn't listened to his original suggestion to just blow the whole island. Firefly may have only been a contractor rather than a permanent member of the Cobra organization, but he knew damned well what he was doing. Any problem could be solved through the judicious application of high explosives or head shots. There was no reason that he should have been made to come back to this god forsaken island, and yet here he was. Ah well, a nice seven figure sum made the trip worthwhile. There was that new yacht to think of after all.

Kracken jumped out of the boat and landed on the dock, and tied the boat in place. FIrefly stretched before retrieving a satchel of C4 from the floor of the cabin. More explosives were jammed into the back of the submarine and would be strung throughout the subterranean laboratories dug by the Cobra organization just a few short months ago, but these were for the meddlers who had caused this operation. Firefly looked forward to adding to his body count. Hopefully this operation would have the ten he needed to top eighteen thousand. He smiled at the thought.

"Ready," stated Kracken in his usually gurgling voice.

Firefly just nodded. There was no need for a vocal response. There was really no need for Kracken to speak either, but it seemed that most people had some subconscious need to constantly waste time and effort exercising their vocal cords. Firefly preferred to speak through actions. Many said he simply lived to kill people in the most painful and gruesome way possible, but that wasn't true. Yes, he enjoyed killing, otherwise he wouldn't still be doing the job he was, but there was a reason he enjoyed it so. The world, if one looked around was beautiful and pristine, the only blight on it was the filth of humanity, and in his own way he was helping to fix that. Someone had made a movie around 2007 about the world after humans, he couldn't remember the title just now, but it had shown that even a few years after the disappearance of the human race, nature would reclaim what was rightfully hers. Firefly was just helping it along the way. Explosives worked quite nicely to reduce things to carbon that could be used immediately.

Of course, there was no harm in getting paid for it either. One had to live you know.

-

04/19/2034: 1740h - Poveglia Island - Underground Server Farm

"Jackpot!" Antenna grinned the second Shockwave showed him around the underground room. "This is exactly what we're looking for. If I can pull everything from here we can get a complete picture of this operation, and probably a good indication of what all of Cobra is up to. Great work you guys on finding this."

Barricade shrugged, silhouetted in the upper access hole, "it wasn't quite intentional."

"Do I look like I care? This is like Christmas!" exclaimed Antenna.

Falcon leaned over to Wide Scope, "strange idea of Christmas."

Wide Scope affected a Carlton the Doorman tone of voice, "it is my understanding sir that you are not allowed to comment on any of our religious beliefs."

Falcon snorted and socked him in the arm.

-

04/19/2034: 1730h - Poveglia Island

Nico Bianco watched out a window with interest at a group of soldiers moving from his building to the next. A conversation in the hallway outside his room had awoken and terrorized him. He'd originally thought that Gaida had brought the chief to the island and they were going to dress him down. Turned out to be a couple of soldiers, three men and a woman, talking about some terrorist organization that had used the island as a base of operations.

Clearly they were insane, and probably responsible for the explosion. There hadn't been any activity on this island for years, and they actually thought some science project had been run by terrorists here? It was comedic. If he could report this back to HQ he'd be a hero and he could retire. But this would be much easier if he could catch one of the looney-bin escapees. That couldn't be too hard.

-

04/19/2034: 1800h - Poveglia Island - Tunnels

Firefly glanced over his shoulder to make sure the wire was hanging straight as he affixed another C4 charge to the tunnel's wall. In front of him, Kracken stood guard, rifle almost casually pointed forward sweeping the area ahead. Whatever mental deficiencies the man suffered, he at least knew how to shoot stuff, and right now, that was all Firefly cared about. Satisfied with the charge, he began letting out cord as he approached the next spot twenty meters down the tunnel. So far, they'd been lucky enough to not encounter any of the military forces that had descended on the island, and he'd be more than pleased to keep it that way. They'd wind up dead either way, if he shot them, or if they were here when the island blew up, so it might as well be the second option which didn't involve risking his own neck.

The line snagged on a small rock protruding from the wall which Firefly pushed away irritably. As it was, it was taking far too long to string these things by himself. They should have brought a Nitro Viper along to help, it would have sped things up considerably, it wasn't like Cobra was short staffed or anything. Firefly shook his head, then paused.

"What?" he asked Kracken irritably.

"I didn't say notin," the man gurgled.

Firefly frowned and looked up the tunnel towards Kracken. The sound came again, but it was behind him. He turned cautiously around, and shone his flashlight down the hall. Ah shit. Striding towards him was the rogue Nemesis Enforcer. It looked like it had been shot, stabbed and blown up - several times - and yet it was still stalking towards him, likely intent on killing him. On one hand, Cobra Commander would probably pay him a bonus for reporting on the success of the Nemesis Enforcer in combat conditions, on the other, it would be really inconvenient if he died before he could deliver the message. Decisions decisions.

"RUN!" he hollered and sprinted after Kracken. He dropped the explosives behind him, and removed the triggering device from his belt. Blowing the explosives he'd already laid would prevent them from destroying the island, and destroy their submarine, but the military force here had to have brought their own, and Firefly was sure he could hotwire one to get off the island. So long as he stopped the creature pursuing them. Of course, there were a lot of ifs and assumptions in that plan, but there was no way he was risking his neck any further. He pressed the button and the explosives detonated all around the Nemesis Enforcer, encasing him in fire and bringing down a significant section of the island's rock on top of him. That should kill him.

-

04/19/2034: 1801h - Poveglia Island - Tunnels

A massive explosion sounded down one of the corridors from where Falcon and Rapid Fire stood.

"What the hell?" Falcon asked. "Who else is down here?"

"Damned if I know," replied Rapid Fire. "Weapons ready everyone."

The command was completely unnecessary, everyone had their weapons out already. Falcon and Rapid Fire approached the door leading to the hall where the noise had come from. Widescope and Shockwave took positions five feet back, assault rifles pointed forwards while the rest of the Joes piled behind machinery in the room. Everything was quiet for a moment, and then Falcon reached for the door. Before he touched the handle he heard shouting in the hallway, followed by the sound of gunfire. He looked at Rapid Fire who shrugged, and the wrenched the door open.

It was had to tell trough their masks, but he could have sworn that both Beachhead and Widescope's jaws dropped, and a moment later when he peaked around the door, he realized why. Running towards them in complete panic were a Cobra Diver and no one other than Firefly, the world's most notorious terrorist. But even more shocking was the sight behind them - a collapsed tunnel with smoke still pouring from where several tons of explosives must have gone off, and striding slowly towards them, the vampire.

Rapid Fire interrupted his thoughts, "didn't we drop a building on that bastard thing?"

"Looks like they did too," Widescope replied. "You want me to shoot them?"

"We can use the extra guns right now. Shoot them later. IN HERE!" he hollered down the hall to the two terrorists. "We'll cover you!"

Firefly glanced over his shoulder and seemed to shrug before running for the open door. Falcon began firing down the hall, and grabbed his last grenade from his pack and tossed it down towards the vampire. It felt very weird to be deliberately trying to not shoot the terrorists, but then again, nothing today had gone as he expected.

-

04/19/2034: 1801h - Poveglia Island - Surface

Nico Bianco was just making his way to the building where he had seen the crazy soldiers disappear when a massive explosion blossomed to the right. The shockwave threw him to the ground, even though it had occurred on the northern end of the island. He gaped in shock; the crazy tourist had been right. Mother Mary! That was unbelievable. He sprinted towards the explosion, not out of any fear from Gaida's life, but to make sure that their boat hadn't been damaged in the explosion. By the time he reached the canal, he was completely out of breath, but more than happy to see their launch intact. Without a second thought, he untied the rope and hit the throttle, making his way back to Venice as fast as possible.

-

04/19/2034: 1820h - Poveglia Island - Tunnels

"WE CAN'T HOLD IT!" hollered Shockwave, as the door he and Widescope were leaning against bounced inwards again. The vampire had chased them through the hallways and laboratories bored into the rock of the island; always breaking through whatever defensive line they had formed. Sparta had been decapitated two laboratories back when she'd stayed behind to rear-guard their evacuation, and Greenshirt Franklin had been electrocuted by a dangling wire moments later. They hadn't even had time to retrieve the bodies.

"Ten seconds, just ten seconds," replied Falcon, watching Firefly rig another trap in the room. "You think this will work?"

Firefly spared him a withering glance, "you've shot him, knifed him and blown him up. I hit him with a few dozen kilos of C4, and then we shot him some more. Do you really think something as simple as electrocuting him is actually going to work? The best we can hope for is for it to slow him down enough to get us off this damned rock."

"I hate to say it," Heavy Duty said, "but he's right."

Rapid Fire nodded, "all right. Bardwait, Jordan, get upstairs and help Airtight and Med Alert load the wounded on one of our boats. We'll join you as soon as we can."

Three greenshirts stood to leave, and Rapid Fire corrected himself, "sorry, just Raymond. Darion, we need your rifle here."

"Got it boss."

"Sir?" asked Raymond before he left, "what about...our dead?"

Rapid Fire chewed his lip for a second, but had mo choice, "leave them, we can't risk the time it will take to load them. We'll come back for them more prepared."

"Yes sir."

-

04/19/2034: 1835h - Hercules In-Flight

"We've got a message incoming!" Flint said, jerking upright in his chair. "From Antenna!"

"How'd he get a message through the interference?" Lifeline queried, standing up.

"Don't know. Its pretty choppy, I'm only getting parts of it: static...evacuating island with wound...static, I think he meant wounded...more static, dead behind, more static, vampire well armed and arm, static...armored I think...Firefly assisting...static...evacuating island. Avoid on pain of death. Its repeating on a loop."

"Skywalker, can you get us there any faster?"

"I'm already pushing us at top speed, it will be a good six hours until we make it there, even at this speed."

Lifeline shook his head, "Flint, can you get a message back to them?"

"I'm no com tech, but I'll try."

"Right, I'll go get Airwave, perhaps he'll have an idea."

-

04/19/2034: 1912h - Poveglia Island - Surface

Firefly had managed to jury-rig a series of explosives in a tight hallway just before the stairs. Though they hadn't hit the vampire with any of them, Shockwave had managed to barricade one door in the last laboratory long enough to hold him in place while they evacuated through the tunnel before bringing it down behind themselves. Rapid Fire was hedging a bet that the fallen rock would prevent the thing from following them long enough to get to the boats. If it didn't they were all screwed. Only Falcon and Shockwave had more than a single magazine of ammunition left in their possession. The rest of them had run dry during their escape. Thankfully they'd avoided losing any more of their number, but that was a certainty if this continued any longer.

"Everyone, make for the boats as fast as you can, leave whatever gear you have."

The clatter of weapons hitting the floor followed, as Joes dropped whatever they were carrying in preparation for a run.

"Falcon, take them down, go."

"Yes sir!"

But Falcon and the first wave of evacuees were barely out of the door the the main building then the ground in front of them exploded upwards as if punched by the first of Hades himself. Rising from the ground was a demon close enough to the description to send chills through every man and woman's heart.

Greenshirt Forman reacted fastest, scooping up her sniper rifle and fired her last three rounds into the beast's chest. It didn't even slow it down. The Joes were all scooping their weapons up and backing away. Every one of them probably knew this would be their last stand, Rapid Fire reflected, just as he knew he was staring death in the face. But in front of them all, the Venice police woman was frozen in place.

"Are you crazy?" Widescope yelled, "RUN!"

She turned, but her foot caught in the strap of a discarded pack, sending her tumbling to the ground. Seeing her fall, the creature sprang forward, mouth open and claws raised. Several Joes fired reflexively, but it didn't help, Gaida rolled over and screamed as the beast descended on her.

Then, time seemed to stop, the vampire shuddered to a stop over Gaida's body, and her screaming continued, then quietened. The Joes watched in horrified curiosity as she rolled the body off of her. Unnoticed behind them, Kracken plucked at Firefly's sleeve and the two disappeared into the night.

Gaida's chest was a mass of blood where the creature had skewered her with his claws, she wouldn't survive long enough to get to the boats, let alone a hospital, but she'd gone out fighting Rapid Fire saw.

The bag she'd tripped over belonged to Dart, and from it, she had pulled a single item which she had used to defend herself, and which now protruded from the creature's chest, approximately where its heart would have been: a single wooden tent stake.

With her dying breath, Gaida asked a single question, "why the hell, didn't you guys try that first?"