Chapter 11 – Demolition Party

September 28, 2004 = Tuesday

It didn't take long to find the gas station they mentioned. It had a chain link fence around the place, but the gate was unlocked. I opened the gate up, and walked in, finding the large, rusted out tank behind the building. The guy inside? Well, maybe losing my reflection wasn't so bad. He was hideous, and I mean beaten to death by the ugly tree and risen again as a Kindred. His head was rather bulbous, as if it had grown several large cysts, and the rest of his face was rather angular and sunken; like a starving cro-magnon man with those ridges over eyes and sunken cheeks.

"Tung? I presume," I said, stepping through the rusted out hole into the Kindred's living space.

"One and only," he said in a rather deep and gravelly voice. "No need to introduce yourself, Miss Flores. I know who you are. News travels down the Kindred grape vine like wildfire. And that courtroom spat between Lacroix and Rodriguez is a juicy morsel, with you in the middle. How interesting."

"Great, so you can get me into that warehouse?"

"I've been watching the place. The Sabbat has a bunch of lowlife humans working day and night to move stuff through there. There's some major staging going on since Simeon died."

"Just humans?"

"As far as I can tell. The humans seem to know the score from the way they've been talking. I think most of them have aspirations of joining the next graduating class of shovelheads. Losers."

"Shovelheads?" That was a new one.

"Typical Sabbat-style vampire. The Sabbat usually sire en masse, drop everyone into a hole and bury them. When they wake up, they are so frightened and scared they frenzy. Most don't survive long, so if you see one just put 'em down. You're doing them a favor. Half the time, they don't even get fully turned before they're turning more; results in a lot of thin bloods."

"So the humans know they're working for Kindred?"

"Yes. The Sabbat like everyone to know just who they're dealing with. So if you get in there and have to bust a few heads, don't feel bad. Think of it as 'upholding the Masquerade."

"So, got a car around here?" That must've been funny to him, because he started laughing really hard as he moved a mattress to reveal a trapdoor with one of those shiny metal ladders people buy to get up on top of their house to work.

"We Nosferatu don't have any use for cars. We use the sewers to get around. And before you fret your pretty little head. It's not like the slop you trudged through to get out to Ocean House. These lines are older, and no longer in use. You'll stay pretty, don't worry."

"Great," I said, as he began climbing down the metal ladder into the darkness. The darkness itself didn't bother me, so much as the smell and ruining another set of clothes. Oh well, guess the shirt wasn't going to last anyway with some more bullet holes in it. Least I wasn't going to ruin a third shirt in this fight. I followed him down, finding myself in a well-lit tunnel. He then began leading me down it, towards the warehouse, hopefully.

"So, ever met a Lasombra before?" I asked, more to just pass the time.

"Nope. We've kept the Sabbat out for years. It wasn't until recently they've even had the chance. We've been at war with the Kue-Jin for the better part of the last century."

""Kue-Jin?"

"That vampire you dusted for Knox, he was a Kue-Jin. A scout," Tung told me.

I remembered the laptop I had taken from the Kue-Jin's warehouse and pulled it from my bag. "Took this from the warehouse I killed the scout at. Has his reports to someone on it."

"Thanks for getting that laptop. It can reveal a lot of secrets for us."

"Glad to be of help. So can we all move that fast?"

"Don't I wish. Guess no one had told you about the different clans and what we can do."

"No, been meaning to ask someone. So what about the others? What other clans are in town."

"A lot of Kindred in Los Angeles are Brujah. They're a bunch of malcontents. They get pumped up by rousing the rabble they keep around them, like that's hard. Nothing breeds faster than contempt, and that's what the Brujah are all about. Jealousy and contempt.

"The Gangrel fancy themselves loners and drifters, running the countryside and barking at them moon. Gangrel can walk upright but choose not too.

"Malkavians are, interesting. Like Jeannette, there's something to them. Learning to sort the wisdom from the bullshit can be some work and not all of them are worth listening to, but they are all good fun if you ask me."

"Is Therese all good fun?"

"That was silly vampire politicking cupcake, no more. You get used to that kind of thing."

"Did you know she and Jeanette are the same person?"

"Uh," he started to say, struggling to find a way of digging himself out of the verbal hole he had made for himself, "I had my suspicions. What an interesting specimen, but a pain in my dead ass for sure."

"What about your clan, the Nosferatu," I asked, not wanting to pry but desperately needing information.

"The Nosferatu are damn good at what we do, no one even argues that. If you need to know, if you want it found, you come to us. We're indispensable. Not a bad place to be in the afterlife."

"Lucky you."

"The Nosferatu stick together and pool resources. We have more going on than anyone could guess at. Our web blankets the night.

"Then you have the Toreadors. I don't rub elbows with the pretty bloodsuckers much, but I've seen them work people like puppeteers and that's admirable. Now if they would get off their slimy asses and put their talent to some use besides feeding their egos.

"Next you have the Tremere. Mages, all of them. I don't have any reason to trust them. They're creepy and I think they like it that way. But to be honest, I don't hear much about the Tremere. There's a few in town, but all in all there's not that many of them.

"The last clan in the Camarilla are the Ventrue. They get a bad rap if you ask me. Everyone likes to take shots at the man in charge but when it comes to getting the job done the Ventrue know how to step up. They can take the heat.

"And now there's you. A Lasombra. A few Lasombra broke out of the Sabbat a while back and joined the Camarilla, but they were mostly hunted down by their own clan. A few survive, but mostly, they turn back to their clan. It's going to be interesting to see where you'll go. Or if you even survive."

We continued on in silence for awhile. Mostly because I wasn't interested in talking. My own clan would hunt me down? Just effing great. I wasn't even sure what all I could do, and those that knew how their shadow powers worked would come to kill me. Well, first they had to know I existed. That might take a few months. Hopefully.

Too soon we arrived at the end of the tunnel, and I was shaken out of my thoughts about dying a second time. We had reached some sort room, and Tung had stopped.

"Around the corner, duck through the tunnel, up through the floor to the door. It'll put you behind most of their security. Warehouse is on the other side of the train yard. Get inside, find the second floor offices at the center, then find a place to stash it. Get as close to the center as you can, that bomb you're carrying will ignite the ANFO and C4 they store under the center offices."

"Great, then run right?"

"Right back here," Tung said, leaning against a wall. "I'll be waiting."

I nodded to him, then turned the corner and started heading forward. It led to a sharp incline, where I had to duck to crawl through the last of the hole, coming out in a collapsed floor in a small room. I walked up the door, cracked it open to find myself looking at a Sabbat thug. A quick battle raged through my mind. To kill him, or sneak by him. Well, too much risk, and I was so outnumbered

I knelt down, and crept up behind him. It wasn't hard to figure out what he was doing. With his hands in front of him at the urinal, and a telltale steady stream as a dead giveaway, yeah, not hard at all. I hadn't had a chance to actually feed yet, so I slowly stood, waiting for him to finish. The moment he started to zip up, I yanked his head to the side and sank my teeth into his neck. The taste of his blood was sweet and I fed until after it had thinned out. With the thug now dead, I let him fall.

Walking out to the other door, I cracked it and checked it. There wasn't anyone in the room that I could tell, so I slowly walked into it. Without anyone around, I walked through the room and checked the far door. There was a door nearby, half blocked by a desk, with another thug at the far end. So I crept up behind him. He didn't even notice me as he puffed on his cigarette. I pulled out my knife, as he took a puff, then I stood and yanked his head back, burying the blade into his chest. The thug then fell, as my blade had found his heart and I dropped him. Yanking my knife out, I cleaned it on his hoodie before turning back to the room..

Moving back through the room, I checked the other door, finding it locked. I pulled my lockpicks, unlocked the door, then cracked it. All I could find was an elderly man in tattered clothes warming himself by a fire. I didn't know how a bum got this deep into a heavily secured area, except that he was some type of guard or wannabe. I inched out the door, knife in hand, and before he ever saw me, buried the blade in his back. He barely let out a gurgle before he collapsed and I cleaned the blood off on his own clothes.

I looked around the train yard, I guess finally seeing it for the first time up close. I'd seen these yards before, but never thought I'd be in one. Box cars were lined up on rusty tracks, some were hitched up, some weren't and had gaps between them. The box cars were mostly sealed, so I couldn't go through them, and most were so low, I didn't try to sneak under because that meant I'd get dirty.

I crept through the first row, turned the corner to find two guards talking to each other. Thinking fast, I turned the shadows loose on the one facing towards me, then dashed forward and buried my knifed in other before he could shout. My shadows over the other thug soon dissipated, showing me he had died in horror. Taking my knife and leaving the corpses behind, I continued on, finding one more guard walking away on his patrol. I left him, not wanting to chance him getting wise to my presence, and continued on. The two remaining rows of box cars had no guards around them, and I found myself looking at an old steam locomotive. A thug was leaned up against it, smoking a cigarette, and I pulled on the shadows again, thinking of the tentacle I had made against the Kue-Jin vampire, and created a six foot long tentacle that wrapped around and strangled him.

Looking at a nearby access ladder, I climbed it into the roof of the garage building, and started to crawl through the access to the warehouse itself. I came out on the beams that made up the warehouse roof. I looked down to see a bunch of people unpacking crates, revealing all kinds of weapons. Burt Gummer would be envious. I didn't recognize all the different kinds, but I knew several were strictly military, looking like M16 from all those war movies, and those big Rambo guns. They also had tubes I knew had to be Bazookas, and didn't that make me all warm and fuzzy.

Some crates they unpacked revealed gray bars with a center wrapping. These crates were taken into another room. I looked around, not wanting to drop in on all the humans with the heavy weaponry, and saw that there may be a path across the beams and around the cooling ducts by just staying above the bright lights. I started over the beams, picking my way carefully around every obstacle I encountered. On the other side, I found my way deeper into the warehouse, only to see more crates being unloaded. I didn't really know much about the Sabbat, but the guy that was running things now, this Andrei, was preparing for a full-out war.

I kept on going, but the beams stopped at a brick wall. With nowhere else to go, I was forced to stop and evaluate my position. The second floor offices were just twenty or thirty feet away, and I was over an empty catwalk. It was bright below, and I felt a twinge of anxiety about being in the light like that, but over by the door was a lot of shadow for me to hide in. I looked around, no one was paying any attention to the catwalk above them, so I dropped down to it and sprinted to the end and disappeared back into the shadow.

At the door, I paused a moment to watch for signs of anyone seeing me, but nobody had. I pulled my lockpicks and opened the door, entering just as the water tank gurgled. I quickly closed the door and hid behind a nearby desk, and remained there as I heard someone walk in. It wasn't until his footsteps left the room, that I dug the Astrolite out of my bag. I set the timer for as long as I could which was only three minutes, and left it under the desk. They wouldn't find it there unless they were looking.

With time wasting, I ran to the far door, already pulling the shadows around me as I ran. The next room had two guys in it. They looked at me in astonishment for a second, then pulled guns. I took the moment while they were stunned to slash the throat of one, the other actually managed to get the gun out of his pants before I got to him. I used my greater strength to shove him into the wall, knocking him senseless, then biting into his throat to slake my thirst.

With that one dead, I pulled the shadows over me, like a blanket, opened the door and sprinted down the steps to the rear exit. I was either really lucky, or my shadows concealed every last inch of me, because not one alarm was raised. I felt better in the shadows, and the guy leaned up against the corner of the building never got a chance to scream before my knife was buried in his back. Some security they had. I didn't even take the knife with me this time as I continued to sprint to safety.

I found myself in some kind of unloading area, a box trailer backed up to the warehouse. Nobody was in sight so I sprinted to the fence, back towards the building I came from. The chain link fence that ran between the two buildings was easily ripped apart. I was starting to like being Kindred, and continued my mad dash. I didn't see anyone, and soon I was rounding the last boxcar to the building.

I never actually heard the explosion. I felt it though. It picked me up and threw me into the building in front of me with all kinds of debris around me. I looked back to see that the warehouse was gone. Even the boxcars were reduced to piles of wood and metal.

A howl rang long and loud, and I saw a large white wolf bounding off the top of the boxcar to run right up to me. I was still stunned from the explosion, and slow to react. Thankfully, wolfie wasn't gunning for my throat, but stopped. He then kicked off his front paws to stand on his rear legs, then morphed into a trench-coat wearing Kindred. He was tall, a good six feet, with long dark hair and glasses. Except for the trench-coat, he kinda dressed like Indiana Jones.

"The warehouse," he drawled, "You're handiwork, I presume?"

"What the?" I started, startled by his shape-shifting. "Are you a werewolf?"

He snortled at that. "Not experienced much in the creatures of the night, are you? For future reference, you might keep in mind that werewolves aren't in the habit of introducing themselves."

Okay, that's what Bertram meant when he said Gangrel could walk upright but chose not too. They transformed into wolves. "Neat trick mister?" I prompted, hoping he was at least somewhat sociable.

"I see my reputation for once does not precede me. My name is Beckett. Sorry if I unnerved you."

"After dealing with the local Malkavian, that's going to take some doing."

"Tell me, Miss Flores, have you by chance seen or felt anything strange since your embrace?"

"Saw a ghost. She helped me free her from her murderous husband."

"Quite ordinary. I generally pay wraiths no mind. All but a few are willing to give up their secrets."

"Really haven't seen anything out of the ordinary. Though I have felt like there's something under my skin."

"That would be your Beast. Try to keep a tight lid on it, it can be quite unfortunate for you if it were to be let out for any reason."

"Found out the hard way about losing control, but thanks for the information," I told him. "So, that all that brings you out here? Couldn't have been easy getting past all the guards."

"Most of my contacts here report something unusual in the night air, like a sense of dread or pressure. I'm not a native to these parts, so I can't tell if it's irregular, and since you're still fresh, perhaps you're not attuned to it."

"Guess not," I said, as Beckett looked quickly around. I didn't see anything, but if he still had his wolf senses, he might smell a guy coming.

"Pleasure making your acquaintance, but there are rumblings for me to discredit. We shall, I'm certain, meet again. Or never again. Goodnight, young one, and be careful. You're likely being hunted by the Sabbat."

"Night, Beckett," I said, then watched as he morphed back into the wolf. With a howl, he leaped to the top of a nearby debris pile and disappeared in another bound. I didn't want waste any time making myself scarce. I went back inside the ruined building, finding the hole nearly blocked by rubble. I squeezed back through the hole, then used my Potence ability to tear the blocks around the tiny hole out, letting it all fall in. With the way blocked, the Sabbat wouldn't be hunting me that way.

Now, to meet Prince Lacroix and pay off this boon.