Episode 16 (4/13/01)

A growing audience of humans (including a couple very grateful for the return of their daughter whom Silverbullet inadvertantly had saved) was forming in the distance and being held back by werewolves who were also keeping their distance from Silverbullet. They heard and smelled what happened outside the arena earlier, so to them, it didn't matter if six vampire officers near the arena entrance were continually spraying her with ice-cold exhaust from the Sin City Arena's supply of fire extinguishers. Trapped in solid form or not, she was still silver.

This was something Fritz found out the hard way. Where Silverbullet had bitten him (the very spot Rancor rendered tender from a punishment the night before) was now bleeding profusely, and using this to the hilt, she focused as many kinds of holds and moves she could think of and fit in a few seconds on Fritz's wounded arm. A combination of chops to the hurt forearm (while twisting said arm) and intermitten striking finger blows into the wound itself left Fritz with no choice but to eventually drop to his knees.

At this point, the six vampires surrounding Silverbullet with fire extinguishers stopped spraying. Even they were intimidated by Fritz's freakish girth, and to see him broken stunned the lot of them. Not Captain Rancor, however. When the lieutenant nearest to him stopped spraying the freezing exhaust, he slapped the junior officer and snatched away the fire extinguisher all in the same motion. But when Rancor went to aim the extinguisher at her, Silverbullet was already in mid-lunge toward his position. Because he took a child hostage, Silverbullet wanted to get at least one good kick in his direction and did so -- except she only accidentally knocked the fire extinguisher out of the captain's hands. At which point, Captain Rancor used the spare moment to metamorph himself into a black bat. The bat then dove toward Silverbullet's head and began to bite. The six vampire junior officers (including the one Rancor had disciplined by ripping out his fangs) followed suit, and all descended on Silverbullet like a swarming horde of biblical locusts -- only there wasn't anything holy about them...

Ordinary bullets (they're usually not made of silver) feel like either pinches or bee stings to werewolves -- depending on range, velocity, etc. But given their supernatural natures, they had nothing to fear from them. And then the Bloody Crypts came along. It seemed that the gangs of Sin City (the "Bloods" and the "Crypts," respectively) had united to become one gang -- hence their new, amalgamated name -- in response to their common enemy: the white supremacist vampire and werewolf invasion. The Bloody Crypts had watched enough horror movies in their youth (as if the average age among them wasn't 16) to know they needed silver bullets to truly kill and not just sting (and dangerously infuriate) the 7-foot, 500-pound wolfmen lumbering through their gang territory with utter impunity. So as of late, they had been casually taking full advantage of the Y2K glitch humanity obviously hadn't been given a chance to recover from and roaming the streets looking for silver. Any silver.

The Bloody Crypts were rummaging through an abandoned pawn shop near enough to the Sin City Arena parking lot to first hear and then (when curiousity got the best of them) see Rose DeVega's car playing "bumper cars" with two wounded werewolves. Rose jerked the car about as much as she could, but still couldn't get any farther than a few feet away from the wolven couple Silverbullet had lacerated earlier before running right into them all over again. If Silverbullet hadn't hurt the two lycanthropes already, they'd have been well enough to rip Rose's sedan open and her from it by this point. But the front window had just been shattered, and since Rose had to stay near the wheel to steer away whenever the increasingly rare opportunity presented itself, it would be only a matter of time.

Seeing this, and an opportunity to vent angst over the loss of their turf on the Wolf Pack (who appeared to be less than full fighting strength, even from afar), the Bloody Crypts ran down the small hill separating the pawn shop they were ransacking from the parking lot where Rose was being attacked while crying out, "Represent!" There were seven of them, and as they ran, their tied-together red and blue bandanas -- which once differentiated the youth into enemy camps -- flowed behind them like flags, or even capes, in the wind.

Since the wounds Silverbullet left the werewolves with hadn't healed yet, neither of the two trying to force Rose DeVega from her car had the will to stand the stinging from the barrage of semiautomatic gunfire they were suddenly feeling. However, the Bloody Crypts opened fire without any regard to Rose or her car. And fortunately she somehow sensed that with all the damage the wolfmen did, surely their attack must've left something exposed. An open fuel line, perhaps? Anything that might set the car afire or cause it to explode upon impact with, say, gunfire? Fortunate because just as the two werewolves headed in opposite directions in flight from their pain, Rose ran from her smoking, steaming car seconds before it overheated and finally erupted into a fiery mushroom cloud.

TO BE CONTINUED