Dead On Arrival: Part Three

"How's life as a lackey?" Joe asked Gerard, punctuating his sentence with a kick aimed at Gerard's chin.

"I should ask you the same thing," Gerard leaned back to dodge it with ease. "You act as if you have much more freedom than I do." When he came back, he grabbed one of Joe's fists (aimed at his head) and attempted a high kick to Joe's head in return.

"I do!" Joe protested. He dodged Gerard's blow. "You won't leave Sorel's side 'cause you're scared. I've always had the option to leave Pete's side, since he became a vamp. I didn't though. That'd make me an ass." He kicked Gerard's torso.

Joe's foot barely scraped his side, and it didn't affect Gerard. "So you're scared too, of what other people would think of you thinking for yourself for once?" He tried a few quick blows at Joe, but Joe blocked or dodged them all.

"Stop playing mind games with me! I'm not going to not fight you today!" Joe elbowed him in the chest. Gerard cringed and stumbled back a bit. "Your mind games suck today anyway."

"Are we forgetting about me?" Amy asked, receiving no answer. "I don't like this. Pay attention to me."

"Ooh! I will!" Patrick waved his hand, feigning enthusiasm as he loaded up a crossbow.

"Yay!" Amy pulled up some shadows, and formed them into the shape of a creature. It had rounded ears, large fangs, four clawed paws, and a thrashing tail. "Rich people need exotic pets," she said with a smile as she sent her new shadow panther pouncing towards Patrick.

"HOLY CRAP!" Patrick fell on his back to dodge the panther's claws, and shot a crossbow bolt up into the huge creature, disrupting it. Amy waved, and the shadows reformed into a huge hand that grabbed Patrick around the chest and threw him about twenty feet. "PETEPETEPETE ow HELP!" he yelled as he bounced and rolled across the ground.

"What the hell is your problem?" Pete yelled, jumping towards Amy. "You seem plenty happy without your brother!"

"It's the principle of the thing!" Amy whined, sending a protrusion of shadow shaped like a ram's head directly into Pete's stomach. It knocked the wind out of him and dropped him to the ground. "You can't just go around killing people, you know!"

--

About seventy feet away, up a hill and behind a cluster of boulders, Shadows fiddled with his humongous, cumbersome weapon. The tip of a silver-inlaid titanium stake (also good against werewolves!) was sticking out of what looked like the barrel of the stake harpoon. "So many vampires. So little time. Gotta snag a couple for myself before they all kill each other. Wouldn't be fun that way."

--

"I get the feeling I should kill somebody else to keep things moving at a good pace," Sorel said to himself. But who? I could kill the one with the hat…

That would be hilarious. But a better time. It would be anti-climactic now… well, SOMETHING should happen!

"I wish I had a broom, so I could make somebody else sweep this up!!" Amy's voice interrupted his thoughts. He turned around until she came into his view, lifting up her lacy skirt as she stomped on a pile of vampiric ash formerly known as Tomo with one black leather boot.

"Wait! Wait, wait, wait!" Andy spun around three times, two rapiers in hand. "I was just with that Mikey guy. I swung at him a few times. Then he disappeared. Where is he?!"

"I'm sure he's not hiding anymore, you've just taken away any opportunity for him being stealthy." Pete commented with a bored look on his face.

"Hey!" Mikey called out from inside the RV.

"Hey get outta there!!" Joe shouted, running towards the RV and away from Gerard.

"GERARD! STOP HIM!" Sorel growled. He was about to bark another order, but Mikey called his name. When he turned to the RV, Mikey tossed him something. He looked at the item he caught. "What's this? Some weird type of booze?" He looked at the little glass bottle of clear liquid.

Mikey squinted from where he was leaning his entire skinny upper half out of one of the RV's windows. "I dunno! I just found it on the counter!"

Sorel took off the metal cap and sniffed it. He shrank back in horror. "Oh, ugh! This is terrible!" With a jolt, he remembered where he had smelled that before. Just to be sure, he glanced at Pete, who had a deer-in-headlights look on his face as he nervously stuck his hands in his hoodie pocket. A grin spread across his face.

--

Pete stared at Sorel, feeling his breath quicken a bit as Sorel shouted, "Ohhh! This is your little magical elixir! How precious!"

"What is that he's got?" Patrick whispered to Pete. It was actually barely a whisper; it was the loudest whisper he had ever heard.

"Nice try, smart ass, but I've been around longer than you have. Long enough to know that there might be a few consequences if I were to do this!" Sorel threw the little bottle against the side of the RV, where it burst, sending a wet splatter across that side of the RV.

Mikey smile-gasped in shock, then covered his mouth and snickered. He disappeared from view and popped out of the RV a second later.

"NO!" Pete shouted. He grabbed his head with both hands as his stomach turned. If the cure didn't work, I am so so so freaking screwed. Sooo screwed. Sooo screwed. He was panicked enough to consider going over and actually lapping up what was left of it right off the side of the RV, but he wasn't about to give Sorel the satisfaction.

He and everybody else were so busy with their thoughts that no one noticed that Amy was silently dashing over to Sorel, hands outstretched with shadows spiraling out. She was smirking; she had finally found another person to entertain her.

No one also noticed that Shadows had positioned his harpoon gun precisely on their rock. He did get their attention, though, when he shot it with a loud TWANG noise.

It was aimed at Sorel's chest. The noise attracted him in time that he made a telepathic shield at the last second.

The stake ricocheted with a crack and went flying up in the air. Spotting opportunity, and Amy, Sorel mentally maneuvered it and shot it diagonally downwards.

"Whaaa!" Amy screeched to a halt. The shadows disintegrated. Before she could even turn around, the stake pierced her chest. "NOOOOO!" she shrieked. In one last fit of anger when she was on the ground, she pounded her fist on the dust and lines of black energy went rippling and cracking through the ground.

Shadows noticed one such line coming towards him, or rather, to his side. It sped through the ground beside him and right under his oversized weapon. The weapon flew upwards and hit him in the head. He fell off the boulder he was sitting on, out cold.

Another line zigzagged across the ground before spearing a motorcycle. It carried the Harley into the air, sending smaller spikes through different parts of the cycle's frame. Finally, twenty feet in the air, the cycle's gas tank was pierced and it exploded.

The third tendril snaked along the ground, before curving back in on itself and knocking Pete's foot out from under him, nearly making him fall on his ass. It then dissipated with no further effect.

"Ouch," Patrick murmured.

"Cool!" Mikey said.

"My bike!" Gerard moaned.

"That was anticlimactic," Pete muttered, checking his shoe for damage.

"Whoaaa!" Andy pointed up in the air. He scrambled backwards.

Sorel had levitated his sword, as well as the four swords the bounty hunters had left behind. He nodded at Gerard and Mikey. "You two just keep to your own business and hurry up and kill those two! I'll take care of these two!"

Gerard and Mikey obediently turned around.

Sorel sent the swords flying back towards the ground.