The rolling hills of East Malithovia were picturesque, for lack of a less flattering word. The war might have cast the world in eternal darkness by scorching the skies, but in the fading twilight, one could almost imagine it never happened. The way the setting sun reflected off the clouds, the low rolling hills, and even the patchy scrub grasses combined in a way that made it look like one of those old paintings. Some of the hills actually had trees - mostly pine and some old-growth oak that was holding on somehow. A bit beyond them, a thicker grove of pines ran off into the distance, pines being one of the few trees to adapt to the lower sunlight environment humanity had imposed on them. Kaz was resting her chin on her hand, gazing out of the window and looking at it. It was easy to forget everything looking at that landscape. It was so peaceful. She could, for a moment, forget the war, Yevhen, and even the hell she knew was coming when the scout company found Bogdan the Butcher.
Kaz was brought out of her reveries when she saw a man waving. There must have been a town nearby, or maybe just a house, but she could see him with the telescopic lens on her Perth’s camera.
“I got a civilian half a kilometer to the west,” she reported, “He’s waving us over.”
“This close to the target? Could be a trap,” Lieutenant Kory replied, but her convoy slowed.
Reynolds decided for the group. “Could also be a chance for good intel. Stay alert and communicate with him at a distance.”
The Perths stayed back and Reynolds had the Mackays continue scouting as the infantry pulled up near the old man. Their maps showed the closest town, a tiny one, was a good 10 km away so it was a wonder that he’d got this far; there was nothing between here and there but scrublands. Kaz watched from her Perth as she saw him wildly gesturing at Kory’s HOG. Eventually, a soldier got out.
“Sir... I know people like this. Are you sure you don’t want me to talk to him?” Zora asked, though there was hesitation in her voice. Kaz felt for Zora; she clearly wanted to be helpful here, and her connection to her homeland was palpable.
“No. You’re too valuable if things go sideways. Plus, Sergeant Horbach can handle himself,” Reynolds replied. Zora stayed quiet at this, clearly torn between wanting to help and wanting to listen to her Captain.
Horbach was the same soldier who had translated at the roadstop ambush and had caught a bullet. Kaz had later learned that it had just winged him and hadn’t required more than a few stitches on his shoulder. It’d been a bit of a risk to send the sergeant out, but he was the best translator in his unit. During the trek, she’d looked him up out of curiosity; his full name was “Taras Horbach”. The guy had grown up in West Malithovia, but his family had fled to Arcadia when the schism war happened. He was apparently a dyed-in-the-wool religious fanatic and had a hate-boner for East Malithovia that was comparable to her own for Mithris. That made her worry about the exchange he was having.
“He says we’re in danger. Keeps talking about a ‘madman in the woods’,” Taras reported over the comms.
“That sounds like our guy,” the Captain said over the comms channel. “See what you can get from him.”
“Well, all I’m getting from him is incoherent babbling. The guy is frantic,” Sergeant Horbach grumbled.
“Tell him we’re here to kill the bad vampire man, and ask him if he knows where it is.” Reynolds was more than a little exasperated. They all were. It’d been a long day of traveling.
“Sir, he just pressed a cross into my hand and tossed some garlic at my feet. He’s insistent we leave. I don’t think he’s got any intel we can - ”
Sergeant Horbach never got the word “use” out; a pine tree - roots, branches and all - slammed into the old man he was talking to and rolled, clipping Horbach and kicking up dirt like a damn shell had just gone off.
“Contact! Contact!” Kory screamed.
“No shit!” Kaz shot back as her Perth roared to life, vents flaring and her radiator rumbling.
“Where did it come from?!” Reynolds yelled as his mech did the same.
“No idea, sir! We never detected anything!” the report from Lieutenant Jordan and his scouts came back.
Pine trees started sailing through the air; they weren’t hurled with any sort of precision or grace, just a barrage of trees and the occasional boulder. There must have been fifty in the air at once.
“Drones are down! We’ve lost one... no, three! We’re blind!” someone shouted.
“An ambush?!” Kaz asked, wondering if this was another Mithris thing, but she knew in her heart of hearts that this was their target. The HOG that had been carrying Horbach and Kory was sideswiped by a rolling piece of timber and rolled over, wheels still spinning. She almost wished the coffin had been on their vehicle...
“None of the sensors are picking up anything, sir!” Zora reported frantically.
“We need a lock! Jordan! Where the hell is he?!” Reynolds said. Kaz heard no panic in his voice, only urgency.
She couldn’t say the same for Jordan. “Sir... we’re estimating 2 km north based on the trajectory of the trees.” The scout lieutenant was half in shock and stammering but his intel proved useful. With those directions, Kaz was able to get a good look at the vampire with her telescopic lens, though he was obscured by the trees a little.
“I got him. Engaging!” Kaz said through clenched teeth as she took all her weapons off safety and got a firing solution from her computer.
When Bogdan the Butcher walked into a clearing she could see him clearly and he was somehow looking dead at her across all that distance. He was large as a bear and built like one too, with wild shaggy black hair, tanned skin, and a great unkempt beard that made him look all the more like a beast. He was smiling, showing fanged teeth, as he stared back at her from across the expanse of badlands. He had an entire tree hefted up over one shoulder and a great blunt and chipped axe in the other hand.
Fuck him.
Kaz let loose with a barrage that hammered his location. Missile strike after missile strike, 120mm shells impacting one after another, and then the bombards unleashed, along with everything else her mecha could throw at him. Her barrage was enough to sink a destroyer and she could see the trees at the edge of the blast radius being ripped back and forth like ragdolls by the airblasts, soil kicked up so high it was visible for kilometers around.
“Are they down?!” Lieutenant Jordan asked, an edge of fear still in his voice.
“I’m not getting anything on sensors!” Zora reported on comms, a twinge of her Malithovian accent returning in her agitation.
“I don’t care, keep firing. I want nothing but dust!” came Reynolds’ reply as he joined her barrage. On cue, Jordan’s team unleashed a missile salvo into the location on a wider spread from their Mackays.
Then... there was silence.
The sounds of the assault echoed in the great empty area. Nothing could survive a barrage like that. Kaz could see a mess of trees scattered about and carved paths of dirt in the plain they were on. There was smoke drifting on the prevailing wind, and she could hear her own heavy breathing from the intensity of the moment. Low fires burned from all the artillery they’d dropped on Bogdan, and the earth was so churned she could make out rock below.
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Then came Yevhen’s soul-to-soul communication with her. She had known what he was going to say, but it still angered her when he said it.
“Master... you and I know full well that won’t kill him...”
“Shut the fuck up, you don’t know what I know!”
Yevhen was right. Deep down in the pit Kaz called her heart, she knew, she feared, that it hadn’t been enough. Maybe it would have ripped apart a new fang, like that little shit Grigori, but if Bogdan was as tough as Yevhen said...
“Sir! I’m getting readings, It’s - ” Jordan cut out halfway through transmission. Only a moment after he cut out did Kaz’s brain, and her sensors, recognize what had happened. Something, something big, had blown out of the smoke and to the west. Whatever it was had impacted the scout squad and now they weren’t registering anything but -
A head slammed into the ground at the feet of the Perth. The great metallic lump rolled and splattered black oil across the ground until it stopped against her mech’s feet. It was the head of a Mackay, its chin gun bent at an odd angle by the force of Bogdan’s impact with it.
“Fuck! Jordan! Jordan!” Kaz yelled and slammed her fist into the cockpit controls. The whole scout squad erased in a blink of an eye?! What the hell was even the point if their best gear didn’t even count against fangs like this?! Why were they even here?!
Then it was in front of her. The Hellhound was potbellied and round with a heavy blocky skirt of armor but its arms were raw, muscular, desecrated, plaid flesh stitched together and covered in half-healed scars. How had this ugly lumpy thing, which matched her Perth in height, moved as suddenly as that? Where had it come from? They hadn’t detected it.
The fang’s voice was projected from his Hellhound. “You didn’t think I didn’t smell you, Yevhen?!” It was deep and baritone, accusing, and caustic. There was real hate in that voice, something she understood well. Even with Yevhen being a strix, a vampire in a hound could rip him apart. She was panicking.
The Butcher’s anger only mounted. “You think I didn’t feel you, Yevhen?!”
The lid on Yevhen’s coffin stayed shut on the HOG but she could feel him chuckling and somehow knew Bogdan could feel him too. Kaz wasn’t about to sit idle though. She kicked Perth’s bombards into high gear - ripping into the Hellhound at point-blank range. She knew it was dangerous, and even her own armor wouldn’t be enough to shelter her from the blowback but, fuck it - she was pissed.
Even a Hellhound wasn’t fast enough at that range, and one of the bombard’s rounds slammed into its chest and blew chunks off the armor before it could move.
“Take that, you undead fuck!” Kaz screamed herself hoarse, her voice cracking as she held down the trigger to continue to pour ship-sinking round after ship-sinking round into the hound.
She’d been lucky with the first shot, but the hound had moved with that ungodly speed and fluidity around the subsequent ones. She felt herself being lifted up off the ground and inverted.
Something as big as a Perth wasn’t meant to invert.
The crash when her mech landed on its head was like a car crash on steroids. All around Kaz, military-grade airbags deployed and the pilot’s suit stiffened and locked up to keep her from being hurled around. She felt like she was being smothered in mud and kissed by a brick all at once as her mech’s safety features fought to keep her alive. Then Kaz could see an unholy light peering into the cockpit and she smelt fried electronics, burning oil, and blood as the airbags deflated. She cut herself out of her harness with a boot knife and crawled towards the fading light of twilight she could see out of the hole the emergency system had blown in the cockpit.
She was out and on her feet a minute later. It was worse than she had expected; her Perth, the most expensive and well-armed class of mech Arcadia had, was scrapped. Even playing it back in her mind, she could only barely piece together what had happened. The best she could figure, the enemy Hellhound had evaded most of her rounds and slid up to her Perth and suplexed it. Her helmet was cracked and she felt rain leaking in through the crack in the visor. She heard a whip crack as two blurs met and bounced away in the last fading rays of sunlight.
Kaz could see the HOGs were overturned, the Captain’s Perth was in three pieces, and Yevhen’s coffin was scraps of kindling. What a fucking joke. This had been a suicide mission and they’d strolled in like they had a chance. The whip crack came again and again as Yevhen and Bogdan clashed over the plains; each time a gust of wind erupted from where they hit each other.
Yevhen was loose.
“You’re alive, my master... good.”
“Sure am, you vampiric leech,” she said out loud, not caring who heard her. The emergency systems of the Perth had saved her. If she’d only had those in her Sheila, she might not have been injured to the point she’d had to ask Yevhen for help in the first place.
“Bur-Suen and I are having some fun. I hope you don’t mind that I disregarded your order to ‘stay in my damn coffin’.”
She growled under her breath and took off her damaged helmet, spitting on the ground.
“That better be the last time you disregard an order.”
“Of course, my master.” She didn’t believe Yevhen for a goddamn second.
Then she looked up and saw something unexpected. The Hellhound, the one with the gross, exposed, fleshy arms, was standing limply next to her.
“The hell? Is Bogdan not using his Hellhound?”
A crack split the air and Bogdan’s axe was inches from Kaz’s neck, Yevhen’s arm blocking the strike. They hadn’t been there one instant and they were right there the next. The axe had bit into Yevhen’s arm but he just seemed excited. The two fangs were practically wrapped around her, with Yevhen behind her and the imposing fuck, Bogdan, way too close to Kaz. She could smell his rancid undead breath as he panted into her face.
“I don’t need a toy to beat Yevhen!” Bogdan growled in his deep baritone. “He’ll be lucky to tickle my nuts, even outside my hound!”
“You’d like that, wouldn’t you? I remember Thebes,” Yevhen shot back, grinning in feral ecstasy.
“When in Thebes, screw as the Thebians do,” Bogdan retorted with a snort. She couldn’t tell if they were flirting or fighting at this point. If they were flirting, it’d be a hate-fuck for sure.
Then they were gone, ripping up the plains again. Kaz couldn’t follow most of it but she caught flashes. Yevhen’s form didn’t stay rigid; it rippled, swirled, and shifted as he needed. It was like a liquid - as malleable as dreamstuff and just as fictitious. It never seemed to matter if Bogdan cut him, broke him, or grabbed him; Yevhen was just swirling dark shadowstuff, able to move as he pleased. Bogdan didn’t seem to be able to do that but he didn’t seem to care. He was hacking away at Yevhen with psychotic glee, spittle flying from his bearded mouth and his animalistic fangs on full display.
“We’re really screwed, aren’t we, Kaz.” It was Reynolds. He’d walked up next to her, his pilot helmet under his arms, and he was watching the same sight she was. He stated it as a matter of fact.
“Yeah...” she sighed, “we’re just not on the same level as fangs.” That was an understatement and was partially untrue. Zora followed her Captain, a few steps behind. “Maybe we could handle some of those lower ones like Grigori... but nothing like this. And they’re apparently not even at full power according to Yevhen. Drained, not even at their best.” Kaz blew out a deep breath. She fished about and found a joint. She didn’t smoke on the field, but if Yevhen lost here she’d be too dead to care anyway. “Want one? I got a spare,” she asked, offering it to the two. The Captain didn’t dignify that with a response and Zora just shook her head in embarrassment. To be able to be embarrassed at a time like that, Kaz envied her.
“We’re just ants in this war, Kaz. If the other global superpowers got involved, Mithris would be on its back in a matter of months, if not weeks. We’re out here begging for their foreign aid scraps and I can’t even pretend like we're doing something worthwhile,” Reynolds said in a rare moment of pessimism. She offered him the joint and he took it. After he took a puff he shrugged. “Hell, Kaz, both sides should just hire a few fangs and let them duke it out. Winner takes all.”
Kaz laughed and coughed a bit. “Yeah, I could see that. They should just keep us out of the loop. Less bodies that way. We’re pretty useless anyway.” She knew that was a grim realization and her acceptance of it destroyed her as a soldier. She’d trained so long, worked so hard, and in the end it didn’t even matter.
Just then Kaz heard something. It wasn’t the supersonic cracks of the two fangs ripping each other apart but a whistling. She knew that sound; it was...
“Damn it.” she grumbled and tackled Reynolds to the ground, the joint going flying.
Someone other than Arcadia had just shot a missile into the fight.
One of the first Fang Hunters was the Dutch Catholic preacher Dirk van den Berg, later known as “Dirk Van Helsing”. He legally changed his name after he claimed God asked him to do so. An eccentric figure, his investigative work into the nature of vampires was second to none and he is largely credited with establishing the field of Sanguinology (the academic study of vampires). His seminal theological work, “The Red Gospel”, is still regarded as the foundational textbook for all aspiring Sanguinologists. Written in pieces throughout his life, The Red Gospel was published posthumously during WWIII and studied extensively by all sides of the conflict. While the existence of fangs was known for centuries prior to WWIII, their sightings were so rare as to not leave much room for anything more than conjecture. Much of Dirk Van Helsing’s knowledge supposedly came from “angelic revelation” and some ascribe his work to this, most notably the religious groups known colloquially as the “Singers”. However, later biographers attribute much of his revelation to interviews with a vampire known only as “Lorenzo”.
Much speculation has been made about Dirk and Lorenzo’s actual relationship, as there is significant evidence that their relationship was more romantic, rather than simply transactional or academic. Despite Dirk being a leading proponent of gay rights in the Catholic church, he never openly commented on his relationship with Lorenzo, for theirs would have been a very forbidden love. This is not because of their same-sex attraction, but because of the church’s view on human-vampire relationships; a sort of “You shall not lie with a vampire as one lies with a man; it is an abomination" situation if you will.
-- “Dirk Van Helsing- A Life, A Love”
Chapter 3
By Jamie Steinberg
