Blood Bourbon

Heaven Knows...

"C'mon, I parked down the block a ways, cause this traffic is ridiculous, something is causing my spider sense to go haywire." Janek murmured by way of greeting as Daryl handed him the coffee the man had requested via text.

Slinging his briefcase strap over his shoulder, Daryl picked up his own cup and followed the man out of the shop and down the street, frowning at the sudden back up of vehicles on the street beside them. "That is odd."

"No accidents on either end, just barriers narrowing the lanes, causing half of downtown to come to a stand still." Janek nodded, his eyes roaming the streets, stalking ahead of Daryl, who knew better than to force the man to wait for him when something was putting Janek's hackles up.

"Is it just the traffic you don't like?" Daryl shifted closer to the man as the crowd of people walking around them got thicker, sighing when the coffee cup got knocked out of his hand and trampled in the crowd.

Janek tossed his own coffee in a garbage they passed, shaking his head and still searching the buildings, "no. I can't place it, but this is really fucking odd. You hear anything from the Scat?"

Daryl scowled, but shook his head. "You need to stop calling Ryker a scat."

"Ok lover boy." Janek smiled then, casting him a glance, before they both continued in silence.

Once the street began to open up, the sidewalk did too, allowing Daryl to walk with a healthy distance between him and Janek. Janek was looking down the street when Daryl noticed a kid standing on the edge of the sidewalk, looking out onto the road. The child's attention was focused on the opposite sidewalk, where another kid stood, impatiently waving her over.

He heard the popping sound of something like fireworks in the distance as Janek tensed and spun in that direction, freezing in place for a moment, his eyes wide.

"Jan..." He cursed and bolted forward as the young girl stepped out onto the road just as a car wheeled around the corner, racing right toward her.

Daryl managed to step into the roadway and toss the girl backwards, forcing Janek to catch her form as opposed to pulling Daryl back to safety, before he felt the car hit him. It sent him up into the air to land hard on the windscreen before he had any idea of what was going on. For a moment, everything paused as he struggled to breathe or get any sense into his head.

Pain in his leg blossomed as he felt his back crack through the glass, his head swimming as it bounced off the hard surface of the metal hood. Above him, he watched the sky turning purple and blue as the sun set, dark clouds drifting past as he struggled to make his mind catch up to what was happening.

He must have blacked out, though he didn't remember closing his eyes. There was just no other explanation to why things moved as quickly as they did after those brief moments. He thought he had only blinked, his eyes closing for a second but when he opened his eyes, he found himself surrounded by paramedics.

Daryl found himself dragged from the hood of the car and strapped onto a gurney, an oxygen mask strapped onto his face. Daryl tried to focus on the people working around him, identifying uniforms even as he felt panic surging in his chest.

Something was wrong.

He tried to move, only to find himself completely strapped down as he was hefted up into the back of what had to be an ambulance, though it looked different somehow. His brain wasn't working quick enough for him to understand what was going on.

Daryl couldn't figure out what was wrong, only that he shouldn't be where he was, even as he felt himself dragged into darkness, the taste of chemicals on his tongue.

*** 

Machine gun fire. 

Janek recognized the sound bouncing off the building and turned, reaching for the gun at his side that wasn't there. Why hadn't he decided to say fuck the rules today and just carry a weapon? People flinched, but no one seemed to really acknowledge the sound of a section support weapon opening up fire only a couple blocks away.

Janek cursed and turned towards Daryl, jerking in surprise as he saw the man sprinting for the road, only to step out in front of a car that was moving quickly, though it did slam on its brakes at the last minute and slide across the last few feet of pavement towards Daryl.

He found himself catching a kid in his arms, pulling the young girl close as the world slowed down to the smell of burning rubber and the sound of screeching tires. Daryl was sent up onto the windscreen, where his body was mostly cushioned by the safety glass that broke under its weight.

Putting the girl down on the sidewalk, Janek only managed two steps towards where Daryl was struggling to pull himself up off the car, when paramedics surrounded the car. With a curse, he saw a vehicle that didn't look quite like an ambulance and noticed that the paramedics all had weapons strapped to their backs.

"Hey! Asshol-" Janek had let his guard down, distracted as he was by the chaos of the moment and found himself grabbed from behind and dragged backwards by two sets of arms. They had iron grips on him, though he fought until he felt the crack of electricity charging through him, causing his body to go limp as he was tossed to the ground in an alleyway.

When he finally managed to clear his head and push himself up off his hands and knees, he found himself kneeling in front of two of those genetically mutated creepy ass fuckers the vampires called 'Hunters'. Two large men, smirking as they looked at him, one holding a taser-like gun and the other one holding a handgun.

"Nice try though." The one with the taser shrugged, before glancing at the other one.

Handgun holder smirked and walked up to Janek, levelling the gun at his forehead, raising a curious brow, "all that training, and you're still as useless as anyone else. You chose the wrong side."

"You ever find the brass magnet, kid?" Janek asked, launching forward when the intended confusion distracted both of them. His hands snapped up and he pushed the gun off line from his head, spinning it around hard enough that he heard fingers and a wrist break.

He unloaded it pointblank into the first one's chest, before wrenching it free and diving out of the way in time for the taser prongs to hit the dying body of the guy who's gun he just stole.

"You're going to fucking pay for that." The Hunter was fast but not used to someone having a one up on them, taking time to process the fact that he just electrocuted his dying partner, before dropping the weapon and reaching for his own gun.

Janek wanted information but he wanted to live more, emptying the remaining sixteen round clip into the bastard's chest, before shifting forward and pulling weapons and clips off their dying bodies, "fuck you. And fuck your test tube mutant scientist brood...Where are they taking him."

But both of the Hunters were already dead and there was enough yelling out on the street to tell him that they would soon have friends looking for them. Janek glanced to the mouth of the alley as he shoved the handgun in the back of his pants and slung the assault rifle on his back, turning and sprinting down to the back of the alley, making quick work of the wall, tossing his cell phone into a gutter and continuing to run.