Page 67 of Almost Midnight

Even so, he saw himself on the beach briefly, naked that time.

He was wet and his lips tasted like salt.

A sleek, definitely-not-homemade surfboard stuck in the sand next to him on a long stretch of empty beach in the dark. Dalejem walked down to him from a higher sand dune, laughing as he threw a towel at him, a towel way too soft to be homemade, and told Nick he was an idiot for surfing out there alone, and at an hour Jem wouldn’t even know if he’d been eaten by sharks, or if he’d been swept all the way out to sea.

They were in San Francisco.

It had to be San Francisco that time.

Didn’t it?

Voices nearby made Nick flinch violently.

He blinked, and refocused on the view of the starry dome.

Fuck, how long had he been lying there?

His eyes stung from blood.

His side felt like it was on fire, and when he looked down, he realized that’s where he’d been hit by the plasma bolt. The thing put an actual hole in him––one that left burn marks in his jacket and on his marble-white skin, and had exploded out a baseball-sized chunk of his vampire flesh, tearing through muscle and slamming into bone.

Vampire bones were like diamond, so it hadn’t managed to break that.

Still, he could tell the projectile was still inside him, and it hurt like hell, which told him it had likely been coated in acid––a swell little trick the H.R.A. liked to pull when they were specifically gunning for members of Nick’s tribe.

It was too late to stop the process now.

Nick would have to wait it out, let the shit eat through a little more of him.

As the acid weakened, his body would fight back, and eventually be able to expel what remained of the bullet and begin to heal. He knew a wound like that probably meant weeks, not days, before he’d be back to one hundred percent, and that it would continue to hurt until the bullet was completely gone, and probably for a good while after.

If he’d been hit in the heart, which is what the fucker had likely been aiming for, Nick would be dead. Same with a direct shot to the head, or to the throat, if it managed to decapitate him. As it was, it’d been too damned close.

Nick lifted his ghost-white hands up to look at them, and saw that one had a thick gash over the wrist and the back of his hand. His arm on the other side had a wide, ragged gash down the center, probably from the razor wire.

Jesus. That had been his ident-tat arm.

He wondered if he even had his implant still.

It looked like the meaty center of that arm had been gouged out by the steel teeth of the razor-wire nearly down to the bone. If he’d been human, it would have fractured the bone, too, if not broken it to splinters from the impact alone.

That one wound would have killed a human.

As it was, his ident tattoo and barcode were definitely toast. He’d need to check for the implant itself once he got somewhere safe, but there was a damned good chance that was gone, too. He couldn’t fuck around with it now. He’d have to assume it was still there, still inside the torn up flesh somewhere, and act accordingly.

Nick felt another horrifically bad cut on the same side of his face.

He decided inventory time was over.

He pulled himself up to a crouch without straightening and grimaced when it folded his body in a way that made the plasma rifle shot hurt even more.

He couldn’t let himself adjust to that, either.

He slid along the back of the car, jaw clenched against the pain, then behind another car parked to the left of the one he’d landed on.

He made it to the next car in the row the same way.

He moved behind the next car, an even older sedan, something that wouldn’t have been out of place on an old cop show from the 1980s. After that, Nick got behind the burnt-out husk of a pickup truck, which barely had a recognizable shell left.

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