We weren't out of the fire, but at least we were off the frying pan, and I know Pete breathed a sigh of relief as we escaped out. Michael yelled something I didn't catch, and then he got to his feet and charged forward - by vampire standards, it was more of a lumbering stumble than a charge, because he wasn't moving any faster than the rest of us. But he took down a guy aiming at Eve, tackled him to the floor, and his vampire instincts finally kicked in. I heard the low-in-the-throat snarl, saw the flash of fangs coming down, and I felt a sudden answering burn inside. It came from my arm first; I'd almost forgotten the bite I'd gotten there before I left Morganville, but this reminded me, hard enough to make me stagger and catch myself against the wall. The pain crawled up to my shoulder, and spread like fire over the network of my bones, and I didn't know what the hell was happening to me. I sagged, coughing, and heard Pete demanding to know if I'd been hit. I shook my head.
I wasn't wounded, but I felt sick, really sick, and I knew it was Michael going vamp that had triggered it. Something was wrong with me. Very wrong. It was as if I was reacting to him.
Liz was confused and scared, and she bolted forward, trying to get free of all of us crazy people; I couldn't say I blamed her. We weren't exactly the world's most credible rescue crew ever, what with all the blood, Michael burying his fangs in a guy's throat, Eve ignoring it to scoop up his fallen weapon, and me trying to puke against the wall.
She didn't make it far.
Dr Davis stepped out of the kitchen. He was holding a gun of his own, and he pointed it at Liz; she skidded, arms windmilling wildly as she tried to check her forward momentum. She didn't manage it, and crashed against him. He grabbed her, put an arm around her neck and hugged her to him as a human shield as Pete and Eve both focused their guns on him.
Michael finished with his dinner - I wish I could say that was a joke - and looked up at Davis, eyes glowing a shade of red that ought to exist only in horror movies. He licked his lips, but he didn't move from the crouch he was in. Somehow, that was more frightening.
And I was feeling something new now. Not better, exactly, but stronger. Faster. And with it, I felt a nearly uncontrollable need to rip Michael's head clean off his body. As if he was the only real enemy in the room.
I was pretty sure that last part was wrong.
I shook my head to try to clear it, and blood drops flew like sweat after a good workout. The cut in my head was still bleeding freely. I saw Michael sense it, felt him sense it, and something inside me grinned in anticipation, and roared for him to try it.
Michael didn't come at me, and somehow, I managed to stuff down that impulse to go at him. Liz, I reminded myself. The girl was clueless and in danger, and neither one of us needed the distraction right now of whatever weird thing was going on inside me.
'I'll kill her,' Dr Davis said, and backed up toward the door; he was dragging her with him. I realised that we were in a bottleneck, and his guys would come boiling out of the clean-room behind us any second; I backed up, grabbed the steel door and muscled it shut. No way to lock it now that Michael had busted us out, but at least it would slow them down. Not for long, though. I heard them sliding metal tables out of the way.
Eve stepped forward toward Dr Douche Bag, and she looked like an ice cold warrior princess, if warrior princesses came armed with semi-autos this season. 'Go ahead,' she said. 'As soon as you do, you're dead.'
He licked his lips, and I saw the doubt in his face. I didn't think Eve would pull the trigger in cold blood, but I wasn't really sure, either.
Neither was he. Stand-off. It couldn't last, because his reinforcements were coming at speed, and ours - well. We didn't actually have any that I knew about. Our only chance was to make it outside to the van, hope the car keys were on the ring Eve had appropriated, and drive like holy hell.
That also meant leaving Claire behind, though. And while I wouldn't shed much of a tear for the vampires with her, there was no way I was leaving this damned farm without my girl.
I didn't have to, as it turned out.
The front door opened behind Dr Douche Bag, and Claire stepped inside. She looked tired, stressed, roughed up, and anxious, and her eyes skimmed over us, cataloguing the situation and resting for a long second on mine. I couldn't tell what she was thinking or feeling, but my God, I loved her when she took one long step forward, pressed the gun in her hand into Dr Davis's back, and said, very calmly, 'Let her go.'
I would have probably added, you giant bag of dicks, but that worked just fine. Davis looked as surprised as Wile E. Coyote suspended over a canyon, and he dropped his weapon and let Liz go, fast. Liz lurched away a step or two, then came back and grabbed the gun, which she pointed right at the good doctor's face.
Yow. That did not look friendly. For a sick, breathless second, I really thought the girl was going to do it ... and then she backed off, shaking.
Davis sank down to a crouch, hands up, clearly full of surrender.
'Come on,' Claire said. 'Come on, we have to go. Right now!'
She didn't need to issue a formal invitation. We all bolted to follow her as she left. The farmhouse behind us was ringing with shouts, and I heard the steel door scrape open; we didn't have long before they had us in their crosshairs. To add more trouble, there were three guards coming out of the barn across the gravel yard.
They were dragging three limp vampires by their feet.
I don't know why, but that sight shocked me. Myrnin, Oliver, Jesse - not just vampire-pale, but blue-white. Dead white. My God, what had happened in there?
The guards yelled when they saw us, dropped their cargo, and went for their weapons. We made it to the shelter of the van before they were able to draw and fire, and I slid the door back to let Michael in first - he was already burning in the sunlight - and Eve, Pete and Liz piled in next.
Claire didn't get in. She put her back against the cold metal, breathing hard, and she seemed to feel as sick as I did. Seriously, my whole bloodstream was on fire, and if we hadn't been in a live-or-die situation, I probably would have been collapsing under the pain ... but for now, that had to go away. Better to burn than eat bullets.
'I killed them,' she told me. She sounded devastated. 'I thought - I thought I was saving them. But I think I just killed them.'
She was right. The three vampires lay in the sun, not moving. Oliver's skin had started to smoke a little, like mist coming off a lake. It wouldn't take long for him to blacken, and then to start to burn. The others would follow. Myrnin was old, Jesse might be even older, I wasn't sure. But in the end, they'd be ashes and bones.
It was going to kill her, knowing she was the cause of all this.
'Get in,' I told her. Eve had already scrambled into the driver's seat and was trying keys from the ring; one worked, and the engine caught. 'We have to go. Right now.'
And we tried. We really did. I got Claire into the van, piled in after, slid the door shut, and Eve gunned it in a tight, gravel-spewing circle to head for the exit.
Another van accelerated forward to block us in.
She backed up, yelled, 'Hang on,' and busted through the white rail fence next to the barn, bumping and churning through the dry furrows of a field and heading at an angle for the farm road that had led us here.
We didn't get far before the van - no off-roader - bogged down. The tyres spun dirt but couldn't find purchase, and as Eve rocked it back and forth, she just dug us in deeper.
Stuck.
We had a grand total of four guns, one half-empty, one almost gone, two nearly full. We had a vampire who was looking a little more himself, but still operating at about a quarter speed, at best.
We had me, who was shaking with the need to shoot his best friend and rip his dead body apart, for absolutely no logical reason that I could think of ... and it terrified me. It was as if I was possessed.
I looked at Claire, hoping that she had some miracle up her sleeve, some genius move that would get us out of this.
But Claire looked, in that moment, like a vulnerable eighteen-year-old girl, scared and numbed and overwhelmed, and I dragged her into my arms and held her because that seemed like the only thing I could do, hold her. Try, in that last desperate moment, to keep her safe. Because any second now, they were going to surround this van and riddle it with enough bullets to make us look like a drug cartel pinata. They had nothing to lose. We'd proved we weren't going to be useful to them, and Dr Anderson didn't need Claire any more if she'd just destroyed their vampire stock of lab rats.
And Michael would live through that. Sadly.
'I killed them,' she whispered to me. Her voice was shaking, and I felt hot tears wet against my skin. 'Oh God, Shane, I killed them ...'