Novella: Blood of the Damned - Shadows Over Riga: The Nosferatu Experiment by Andre Michael Pietroschek - HTML preview

Chapter 5: The Breach ce d

The explosion of the windows was not a metaphor. Glass shattered te ffi inward with deliberate force, multiple impacts from multiple directions,

as if coordinated. Elina, sitting in the library reading a text about Latvian iO history that Daina had placed strategically nearby, heard the sound first ea

as a cracking, then as a roar, then as something her brain registered as gunfire.

People screamed. Movement erupted from stillness. The afternoon light Cr ob that had been pouring through the windows was suddenly fragmented

by the absence of glass, by dust rising from furniture impact, by the M terrible clarity of violence made real. Elina moved on pure instinct. She did not think. She ran toward the rear of the library, toward the kitchen corridor, the body executing movements she had not consciously planned. The scream of the woman named Katija came from the dining room. The sharp percussion of gunfire came from multiple entry points.

Someone was shouting in Russian. Someone else in Latvian. Someone

was ordering the attackers to find them, to separate them, to bring them to the front.

The keeper stood in the doorway. Daina. She was completely still, th completely unsurprised. She looked at the chaos of the breached mansion with the expression of someone watching a scheduled event

unfold precisely as planned. And in that moment, Elina understood with wi absolute clarity: Daina had done this. Daina had orchestrated this. The breach was not happening to them. It was orchestrated.

She did not process this fully. She only moved forward, through the ce d

kitchen, past the terrified cook who was trying to hide in the pantry, ffi te toward the service exit. The door was heavy, old wood, and for a moment, it resisted her pull. Then it opened onto the courtyard beyond.

The grounds were beautiful in the afternoon light. Gardens. Pathways. iO ea

The forest edge was perhaps two hundred meters distant. Elina ran toward it.

Behind her: more gunfire. A man, one of the guests, she thought, Cr ob shouting a name. The sound of the mansion's interior being destroyed

or methodically searched. Footsteps on the gravel courtyard. M She reached the forest edge and did not hesitate. The trees received her like a mouth closing. Within seconds, the mansion was obscured. The chaos of the breach was replaced by the different chaos of forest branches, undergrowth, and the sudden darkness of terrain away from direct sunlight.

Elina ran. She did not know how long. Time became abstract. The forest

was not like in video games; there were clearings, tangles, areas of dense growth, and areas of rocky terrain. Her consciousness fragmented into separate systems: one part calculating direction, one part managing her body's degradation, one part processing the shock of

what had happened. th

The invitation had been a trap. The gathering had been designed to bring wi them together, to assemble them, to make them vulnerable. The breach was not random violence. It was orchestrated. It was planned.

And somewhere in her genetics, in the inherited knowledge she carried d ce

in her cells, she had known this. Some part of her had recognized the ffi danger and had run anyway, drawn by something deeper than te conscious choice. Drawn by the bloodline's own momentum.

By the time evening began to fall, she had encountered other survivors. iO ea

Not directly-she heard them moving through the forest at a distance. She heard someone crying. She heard footsteps that might have been

another runner. She heard the sounds of pursuit. Cr ob She did not attempt to make contact. Survival instinct suggested that

solitude was safer. But isolation in a hunted state was its own trauma, M and by nightfall she was moving toward sounds, toward the possibility of other human presence.

She found Lukas in a clearing near what might have been an old cottage foundation. He was injured, blood down one side of his face from a head wound, but conscious and alert. His eyes, when he recognized her as another survivor, showed relief so profound it bordered on breaking.

"How many?" he asked.

"I don't know. I got out early. I didn't see" She couldn't finish the sentence. She didn't see who died. Who stayed. Who was burned, shot,

or caught? th

They moved together through the night, not speaking much, conserving wi energy. By morning, they encountered Dārta, the translator from Riga, moving through the same forest section, equally disoriented and

equally alive. ce d

By the second day, they had found Magdalena and Thomas. By the ffi evening of the second day, they were aware of at least two other te survivor groups moving through the forest. The count was nineteen at that point. Seventeen were confirmed dead or missing, likely dead.

Many of the deaths had been sudden and horrific. Katija had been shot ea iO in the dining room, her body left where it fell. Two men had been caught in the courtyard and eliminated methodically. Others had simply vanished from the chaos, either escaped, captured, or killed.

Eleven dead. Nine survivors, scattered across the landscape, all moving Cr ob toward Riga.

All were moving toward the mansion, though none of them consciously M knew why.