The second 'fiction issue' isn't as good as the first, 2.93 as compared to 3.17. He looked more like some kind of albino bear. He looked a lot less human with his shirt off. White skin, hairless, poreless, writhed over the submerged lumps of his vertebrae. Underneath it his torso was one rippling mass of muscle. Lares laughed out loud and tore off his red sweater. I bet they felt pretty safe under all that junk. So the SWAT guys had crucifixes hot-glued all over them, everything they could get, from big carved wood Roman Catholic models with gruesome Jesuses hanging down to dime-store nickel-plated crosses like you would find on a charm bracelet. We all knew what we were getting into, he told me we’d all seen plenty of movies before. Their commanding officer had insisted I give them a chance to modify their kit.
They wore full helmets and riot armor but it wasn’t standard issue. "The SWAT team arrived at the corner before he did, sliding out of an armored van, four agents carrying MP5s.
She brushed away the debris and found a tiny pink point on the vampire’s skin where she’d stabbed him." Its point splayed out, twisted and broken. The stake shivered all the way up its length, driving long splinters into the meat of her hand. It might as well have been stone she attacked. With all of her strength she brought it down, sharp end first, right into the vampire’s rib cage, right into that white skin like carved marble. She took it up in both hands, lifted it over her head to stab directly downwards.
It even had a day-glo orange ribbon tied to its flat end like a pennon on a lance. She lifted one, a square-cut, mud-stained length of unfinished wood maybe six feet long and an inch and a half thick. A pile of palings had been left in the pit, the kind of wooden poles surveyors use to mark out where a new highway will go. She looked to her side, to the boxes of tools, and found what she wanted. Bullets were pretty much useless-even if she emptied her clip into his chest she knew she couldn’t be assured of hitting the heart dead on. She knew that unless the vampire’s heart was destroyed it would get up again. "Caxton remembered Arkeley’s report, had all but memorized it.