Forced Retirement Read Online Free PDF Page A

them in the heart with dozens of little stakes moving thousands of feet per second."
    Jonah gaped at the writhing, bloody blonde on the alley floor. "That'd kill anybody."
    "But not everything that kills anybody is enough to kill someone like her ." Stanza turned and fired more rounds.
    The blonde lay still for a moment, then began to jerk and twitch spontaneously. Stanza placed a hand on Jonah's chest and eased him back a step.
    "Don't get too close," she said. "Here's where it gets ugly."
    You mean it hasn't already?
    As Jonah watched, the blonde spasmed repeatedly, then stopped. For a long moment, nothing moved or made a sound in the alley except the air conditioning unit in the back window of Halcyon.
    Then, suddenly, the hacked-up flesh of the vampire's chest began to squirm. Shreds of skin and bone flexed up from the place where her heart should have been. Something was pushing its way through from underneath.
    At first, as the thing emerged, Jonah thought it looked like a baby's head, bloody and covered with dark, downy hair.
    Then, it unfurled.
    The gruesome mass bloomed like a flower, poking through the chest wound and popping open. Its true form lay revealed, pulsing and glistening on the blonde's upper body.
    Twelve tentacles swayed and twined around a central bulb the size of a fist. The bulb's slimy pink flesh rippled with eyes and jagged-toothed mouths that snapped and gnashed and oozed.
    The tentacles were lined with suckers and fluttering cilia strung with slime. Oily black fur streaked the outer skin, barely concealing clusters of blisters and running sores.
    "They say you never forget your first look at a feratu ," said Stanza.
    Jonah was transfixed. The creature Stanza had called a feratu was like something out of a horror movie.
    "Now you know." Stanza replaced the ammo clip in her machine gun. "That's why it takes a stake through the heart to kill a vampire. Because that's where the feratu sits."
    As Jonah watched, the feratu flipped itself over and crawled across the blonde on its hairy tentacles. It left a trail of bloody slime in its wake.
    Stanza followed it with the barrel of her machine gun. "A vampire doesn't have a heart," she said. "The feratu eats it and takes its place. Pumps the blood, everything. Perfect setup for a creature that thrives on drinking blood."
    The feratu hopped off the blonde's head and scuttled toward Jonah. He backed away and glanced behind him, sizing up his escape route.
    "Two ways it can make you a vampire," said Stanza. "One, it infects your bloodstream with its babies through the bite of a host. Two..."
    Suddenly, the feratu scrambled forward with a burst of speed. Adrenaline surged through Jonah's body, and he started to run.
    That was when Stanza fired the machine gun. The feratu danced in a hail of ironwood-tipped bullets, exploding in a flash of flesh and fangs and fur and blood.
    When the thing had been blown to sufficiently tiny bits, Stanza released the trigger. "Two, it jumps on you, burrows in through your urinary tract, and eats its way to your heart."
    "Geez." Jonah was shaking. He tried to stop looking at the gruesome mess on the alley floor. "Ever hear the expression 'too much information?'"
    "More on the way, Jonah." Stanza gazed up at the rooftops on either side of the alley. "They're hunting you. In force. They need you."
    Jonah stared at her. "That's what the vampire said. 'We need you.'"
    "Sure you're not up for some travel?" said Stanza.
    "What makes you think I'll be any safer traveling than staying put?" said Jonah.
    "They know where to find you now." Stanza kicked at the shredded remains of the feratu . "Wouldn't a moving target be harder to hit?"
    Jonah frowned. "You're leaving when?"
    "Right now," said Stanza. "Trust me, they're already closing in on you."
    Jonah shook his head. "Mom and Dad's funeral is tomorrow."
    "Would they rather have you alive or undead? What do you think?" Stanza marched over and lifted the dead vampire's head by her bloody