“Weapons? What do you mean, weapons?” Thin, geeky in every sense of the word, he was the same age as Jack and me but looked five years younger. He did not look like a bloodsucking creature of the night. Not that I did, either. And we were up against a vampire assault squad.
“Jack’s in trouble, and he’s bringing it here. Do we have a chance?”
“No,” he said. “No, we don’t. We’re lame. We spend all our time holed up in our cave. We’re baby vampires! What are we supposed to do in a real vampire fight?”
“We’re smart people, surely we can come up with something!”
“Oh yeah? You’re the gamer geek, haven’t you picked up any tactics in your million hours of playing?”
That was a good question. I had to think about it. Hand on chin, I looked around. So you’re the shooter, this is Left 4 Dead and you’re cornered—what do you do?
“Actually… we’re pretty defensible here. We block up the windows—” The half windows by the ceilings all had blackout curtains over them already. But they were accessible as escape routes in case of fire. “Just nail some bars or spikes or something—we don’t have to block them, just keep anyone from crawling through. That leaves the front door, which should be plenty defensible. But we need weapons. Stakes, I guess. Do we have stakes?”
“Hold on a minute.” He disappeared back in his room. The sounds of cardboard boxes, of someone digging through a hoard of collectibles, drifted out.
In the meantime, still thinking about weapons, I called Rick.
“Is everything all right?” he asked, with a tone that suggested he very well knew it wasn’t.
“Um, I think we may have a little bit of a situation here. You know that reporter I mentioned, the one with a connection to Mercedes Cook? Well, she tried to recruit Jack, but Jack wouldn’t be recruited, and she’s got a squad of vampire henchmen after him. It’s looking like they’re on their way here.”
“It’s looking like it, is it?” Rick asked. “You need help?”
“I’m not so much asking for help as warning you. We think Carter’s really after you, and they tried to go through us, and, well. You know we’re not very good at the politics thing.”
“But do you need help?”
Aaron came out of his room just then with an armful of Nerf guns.
“Um. Probably. I need to go,” I said and hung up. “Aaron?” I tried to keep my voice as calm as Rick’s. We were immortal, as cool as rocks. “What do you plan to do with those?”
“I don’t know about you, but even with vampire strength I would suck in a hand-to-hand fight, right? So I want to keep my distance. I know these aren’t exactly machine guns, but maybe they’ll let us keep back.”
“Or maybe the bad guys’ll die laughing,” I said. He glared.
What we had was a broom closet. I had a vague memory of buying a broom and a mop when we first moved in, when I had assumed we’d have no trouble keeping the place clean. I might have used them at some point. They looked used. Well, they’d get used now. I broke the wooden handles over my knee—easier than I thought it would be, a surge of strength pouring through me, not feeling any pain at all in my leg.
Now we had four short spears with jagged ends, perfect for staking.
“Let’s make sure nobody uses these on us, right?” I said.
“I don’t suppose we have any Kevlar vests around,” Aaron said. “Would Kevlar work on wooden stakes?”
“No idea, but you might be on to something.”
What would have worked great would be some pot lids or cookie sheets or something like that. But we were vampires, we didn’t cook. We didn’t have a single cooking implement in the whole kitchen.
“We aren’t using this, right?” Aaron pointed at a cheap pressboard table in what would have been the dining nook if we ever actually ate dinner at a table. Right now, it was covered with action figures from the eighties.
“I guess?”
He carefully cleared away the action figures, setting them by the wall next to the lunchboxes. Then he tipped over the table and broke off the legs by stomping on them. That gave him four giant spiky pieces of wood that looked like they’d go straight through a vampire’s cold dead heart.
On the other side of the table, the pile of vintage lunch boxes sat there.
“You know,” I said. “The lids of those lunch boxes would make great chest protectors.”
I swore I saw a flash of vampiric anger storm in his eyes. In another minute he’d strike me down with Force lightning or something. “No. I got those as a lot and I can triple my outlay if I market them right. We are not touching those.”