“Captain!” Khalid called out after him. “The ’Lesses are in bloodlust mode. They’ll tear anyone who goes in there apart.”
“Much though I appreciate the concern, sergeant,” Redlaw replied, holding his crucifix up above his shoulder for Khalid to see, “I have this to protect me. And failing that, I have this.” With his other hand he waved his Cindermaker. “What the Good Lord doesn’t provide, gunpowder and the laws of physics will.”
The steel arch surmounting the entranceway bore the SRA’s name and the SHADE logo along with the legend “Working For A Safer Community For All.” Over this someone had spray-painted the words:
Undead Zone
And under, in loopy tag lettering that dripped like blood:
Theres a Sucka Born Every Minute
The gates stood wide open. No reason for the BovPlas Logistics drivers to have bothered closing them. Had this been a routine run, the truck would have made its delivery and been back out, ten minutes flat. Nobody was likely to saunter in through the entrance in the interim. At least, nobody with any sense.
As Redlaw passed through, he made a quick mental inventory of his weapons. Ash-wood stakes—six. Allium sativum extract smoke bombs—two.
Aqua sancta
grenades—five. All clipped to the standard-issue field deployment vest he wore under his overcoat. Plus, of course, his Cindermaker, for which he was carrying an extra twenty-one rounds in three magazines.
His crucifix was better than any of these, his ultimate deterrent.
Or so he had always used to think.
He trod a street littered with trash and detritus. Sunless were anything but proud about the state of their accommodation; badly boarded-up windows, sagging roofs, holes in floorboards, filth lying everywhere, none of it bothered them. The copious vermin the squalor attracted—rats, foxes, pigeons—didn’t bother them either. In fact, vermin were welcome in an SRA. Handy free range snacks.
A trio of Sunless emerged from the shadows of an overgrown front garden—youths in trainers and hooded tops, sentries whose job it was to see off intruders. Redlaw clocked their presence and kept on walking. They took up position alongside him, matching their pace to his, murmuring taunts in their native language (Romanian, if he didn’t miss his guess). Framed by the hoods, scarlet eyes and sharp white teeth glinted.
The three kept their distance, though. The unholstered Cindermaker and Redlaw’s evident lack of fear saw to that.
He headed on towards the noise. It was the kind of racket that could drive an ordinary person to the edge of sanity, a bedlam of inhuman voices wailing sounds that were almost but not quite words. It was shot through with fury, and indignation, and above all a dreadful, aching hunger. A jail full of starving prisoners, slowly losing their minds, might well set up a cacophony like this.
“The Lord is my shepherd,” Redlaw intoned under his breath. “I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures...”
He entered a square, still with his three-strong escort. This would have been a highly desirable address once, large old houses on all sides and a small rectangular park in the middle. The houses’ façades were now leprous with pitted plasterwork and peeled paint, while the park was bald earth dotted with the odd clump of grass and a few neglected, wilting trees and shrubs.
Here stood the BovPlas Logistics refrigerated truck. Like the square, it was in a sorry state. Its tyres were burst. Its radiator grille had been torn off and the engine eviscerated. Its rear doors hung askew, and the cattle blood it had been transporting for the Sunless to distribute among themselves, several hundred plastic pouches of the stuff, was everywhere. Pavements were slick with it. Walls dripped with it. The pouches themselves lay scattered about, deflated, shredded, like so many dead jellyfish washed up by some crimson tide.
Of the two drivers, Redlaw could see no immediate sign, but the truck’s cab had been broken into, which did not bode well. BovPlas Logistics armoured its fleet. Every vehicle came fitted with heavy-duty dual-layer plexiglass and a tungsten-and-ceramic composite shell. Tough, but nothing that would hold up to a horde of frenzied Sunless.
And “frenzied” was the only word for it. Vampires thronged the square, scores of them, a mob, surging here and there with looks on their faces that ranged from baleful to deranged. Some were fighting among themselves, engaged in a tug of war over the last few blood pouches still intact. Others were vandalising the already dilapidated houses, ripping off roof slates and kicking in gables and fascia boards, or denuding the trees of the scant branches they had left. Redlaw thought of zoo animals, maddened by captivity, wantonly destroying their cages. Their massed banshee cries reverberated in his ears, deafening.
The sensible option would have been to retreat. The trio of Sunless behind him were an obstacle to that, but not one that couldn’t be overcome.
Instead, Redlaw raised his Cindermaker and fired into the air.
Once.
Again.
A third time.
That got everyone’s attention. The rioting subsided. Heads turned his way. Shortly, Redlaw was the focus of countless crimson, blood-gorged gazes. Vampires began moving towards him. They crawled down from the houses. They crept along the road, some of them on all fours. They clustered and closed around him in a large circle, like the pupil of an eye contracting. He was surrounded by pallid, contorted faces and gnarled, clawlike hands. Noses sniffed greedily at the odour he exuded, the raw thick throb of
life
. The creatures’ own stench was unfathomably foul—partly decomposed flesh mixed with fresh blood.
Redlaw stood erect, refusing to be intimidated.
“I shall say this only once,” he announced, loud. “You will disperse. This kind of conduct will not be tolerated. Leave the square immediately and in an orderly manner. Return to your homes.”
Nobody obeyed. The circle tightened, narrowing the gap between Redlaw and the throng of Sunless around him.
“You will also,” Redlaw said, “surrender the drivers of that vehicle to me. Whether they are alive or dead, I want them now.”
Sniggers and cackles.
Redlaw aimed his Cindermaker at a random vampire and cocked the hammer.
“You,” he said to the creature, a female. “Do you want to die—again? It won’t be instantaneous, either. No head shot or heart shot. A flesh wound.” He pointed the gun at her leg. “Fraxinus round, ash wood carbonised to steel hardness. Fragmenting on impact. Toxic splinters slowly poisoning you. Your body crumbling away bit by bit. It could take hours. Days, even. And nothing you can do about it. A vile way to go. Is that what you’d like?”
The Sunless woman cringed and backed away.
Another vampire, feeling bold, said, “We are many, you are one. We will feast on you, Night Brigade man. We will drink your veins dry, and when that is done we will break you open and crack your bones and suck out the marrow.”
There was a smattering of agreement among the crowd.
“Sounds delicious,” Redlaw said. “And no doubt that might happen. But not before I dust a dozen of you, maybe more. So which of you are prepared to sacrifice yourselves so that the rest can have a piece of me? Come on. Who’s up first? Any volunteers?”
He swivelled the gun round. “You?”
He swivelled again. “You?”
And again. “How about you? One of you’s got to make the first move. Who’s it going to be?”
The Sunless stayed put. Several of them bowed their heads, looking at the ground. Others shuffled their feet. Mouths which had opened wide to expose rows of fangs now closed.
“Exactly.” Redlaw gave a quick, satisfied nod. “So, to reiterate. Disperse. Now. And give me the two drivers.”
For a few seconds nobody moved. Then the Sunless began, almost sheepishly, to leave. The circle broke apart, the crowd drifting away, casting the odd sullen look back at Redlaw, the odd resentful glare.
Redlaw grabbed one of the departing vampires by the arm.
“Not so fast.”
The man was a squat, shabby little individual, hunched and pinched, wearing an aged leather blouson jacket splotched with unnameable stains and peeling in flakes along the seams. The spark of bloodlust was still in his eyes, but dwindling.
“Maybe you can tell me where those two men are.”
“They were dragged off,” the Sunless said.
“That much I could work out for myself. Where to? Did you see?”
“I think... I do not know... Possibly to...”
“To...?”
The man was about to reply when all at once a transparent sphere the size of a tennis ball came spiralling through the air and detonated in the midst of the departing crowd. Vaporised liquid burst in a mist, and every Sunless it touched recoiled in distress. There was the sizzle of burning skin, an outbreak of screams and shouts. Another three spheres followed the first, all with identical results. The crowd panicked. Suddenly there were vampires bolting in every direction, stampeding.
Into the square charged SHADE officers, led by Sergeant Khalid. He barked orders, and more
aqua sancta
grenades flew. Allium sativum smoke bombs were lobbed too; clouds of pungent yellow garlic gas erupted, billowing outwards. Sunless ran from them, spluttering and choking.
“Go! Go!” yelled Khalid. “Fan out! I want the place cleared. I don’t want to see a single ’Less within a hundred yards of this spot. Flush them out, shoot or stake any stragglers.”
Redlaw stormed towards Khalid through the chaos, dragging with him the man he’d been interrogating.
“Sergeant! What the hell are you doing? What is the meaning of all this?”
“No need to thank me, captain,” Khalid replied. “Just saving your skin, that’s all.”
“I had everything under control. They were calm. They were leaving.”
“Didn’t look that way to me. And you’re the one who said we should go in. So that’s what we’ve done.”
“I’m trying to retrieve the truck drivers, or at least their bodies. You’ve just made that ten times more difficult. It’s a good thing I’ve got this fellow here to—”
At that moment Redlaw felt a tug. He looked round to find that, instead of a vampire, all he was holding onto was the tatty blouson jacket. The man had wormed out of his grasp and was haring off across the square, in his shirtsleeves, as fast as his stubby little legs could carry him.
“Sir,” said Khalid, a hint of a smile peeping through his beard.
“We’re going to have words about this later, you and I,” Redlaw said, jabbing a finger at the sergeant.
Then, tossing the jacket aside, he raced off after the Sunless.
Garlic smoke stung his eyes, and he skidded on discarded blood pouches. Frantic vampires blundered into his path and had to be skirted around or shoved aside.
Redlaw forged on regardless, intent on his quarry, determined not to lose sight of him. The fellow had seemed to have some idea where the truck drivers had been taken. It was a slender lead but it was better than nothing.
For all his stumpiness, the creature could certainly shift. He had the preternatural strength and speed common to his kind, and Redlaw, going flat out, could only just keep up. The vampire had stamina, too. Five minutes into the pursuit, Redlaw’s lungs were heaving and he was starting to flag, whereas his quarry was still bounding along like an Olympic athlete, pace undiminished.
“Stop,” Redlaw called out raggedly. “I just want to talk. I’m not going to hurt you.”
The Sunless only ran faster.
The chase took Redlaw deep into the Hackney SRA, deeper than he’d gone before or had ever wished to go. Relatively genteel surroundings gave way to a 1970s-built planned community, an agglomeration of blocks of flats connected to one another by overpasses and walkways. The flats rose in shelving tiers, beetle-browed and hulking, like the superstructures of semi-submerged warships.
The vampire continued to increase the distance between him and Redlaw. Every instinct Redlaw had—not to mention the blaze in his lungs and the ache in his leg muscles—told him to abandon the pursuit. He’d ventured far too far into Sunless territory. He wasn’t even sure he knew the way back out. He was on his own, and the blocks of flats offered potential hiding places by the hundred. His quarry could go to earth here and he would never find him.
Dogged persistence, however, was one of Redlaw’s great virtues. Or great failings. He could never decide which.
The Sunless man plunged into a thicket of buddleia, brambles and nettles, and Redlaw followed unhesitatingly. He emerged the other side, scratched and stung, to find himself in a children’s recreation ground. Part of it was skate ramps and bowls, the rest rusty play apparatus—a collapsing climbing frame, a swing set without swings, a roundabout that had come off its axis. Pads of velvety moss bulged from the seams between paving slabs and the cracks in concrete, like some kind of gluey lymph being squeezed out from beneath.
The man, predictably, was nowhere to be seen.
If Redlaw had been the swearing type, he would have sworn.
He paused to catch his breath, bent double, fists planted on thighs. Well the wrong side of his half-century. Old, old man. His knees would be a nightmare tomorrow. Why did he do this to himself? What was he trying to prove?