Suckers - J.A. Konrath

Another Pire, of the naked male variety, straddled me and put me in a choke hold, which I
didn’t appreciate because a) I hate being choked and 2) his naked maleness was flapping in my
face.
I buried inhibition and played cherry picker, not actually pulling the fruit from the tree but
squeezing hard enough to feel pits. I tugged him aside, and then a blast shook the room and two
Pires flopped on top of me, victims of Vlad’s shotgun.
"Enough of this!" he thundered. "It ends now!"
I pulled the nearest corpse over my head as the shotgun boomed again, her back taking the
worst of it, but—son of a bitch—I still caught a few pellets. It sucked.
Pires were screaming now, running this way and that way, and I crawled through the chaos
and snuck past Vlad right into Crazy Knife Goon.
Which proved my theory that God did, indeed, want me dead.
The blade came down in a long, sweeping arc. I tried to twist to the side, and it shaved a
bacon-sized piece of skin off my biceps.
He raised the knife again, I wondered what hell would be like and if they gave you time off
for sucking up, and then his chest became instant Spaghetti-Os to coincide the another shotgun
blast from Vlad.
Crazy Knife Goon folded like a lawn chair, his knife falling from his hand and landing,
point-first, between my toes, where it stuck in the floor with a thwak.
Someone grabbed my ankle, but I had enough adrenaline in my system to kill a mastadon,
and I pulled free and sprinted down the hall and tried to remember if I should go left or right so I
went right and then another right and then I pulled open the door and there was Vlad with the
shotgun.
Apparently this house only had one goddamn room in it.
I ducked. He fired. The drywall lost. When he racked another cartridge in I managed to find
another door and even though I fully expected him to be behind this one as well I tugged it open
and slammed it shut behind me.
The room was pitch black, and I was breathing like a locomotive, but I swear I heard
feminine giggling.
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