She took a deep breath and began to talk. ‘So, a few months back, I was part of the police team investigating the Ripper murders in London. You remember them?’
The wave of serial killings known as the Ripper murders had been one of the first warning signs of the impending werewolf threat. Liz wondered now whether the police might have been able to nip the werewolf outbreak in the bud if they’d somehow been more effective at that critical phase. Perhaps if she herself had taken reports about Mr Canning, the killer headmaster of the local school, more seriously then the outcome might have been different. But she had done her best at the time. She could hardly blame herself.
‘Of course,’ said Jones, nodding. ‘It was all over the news.’
‘Dean and I almost caught one of the killers red-handed one night. He was literally in the middle of devouring his victim when we found him.’ She remembered how the man had squatted over his victim’s body like a ghoul, sipping blood straight out of his heart. ‘We chased him across Clapham Common but he managed to escape by jumping over a ten-foot wall. I grabbed hold of him briefly but he scratched me on the arm.’
Jones listened, attentive.
‘So afterwards I started to have headaches, aches and pains, a fever. I thought I’d caught the flu. Eventually I collapsed and spent several days unconscious, being looked after by my father. Except I wasn’t simply unconscious. According to Kevin, I stopped breathing at one point. He couldn’t find a pulse. I literally died.’ She paused, not able to look at him.
‘You died?’ prompted Llewelyn.
‘That’s what Kevin says. But you know, my father’s not the world’s greatest nurse.’ She laughed nervously, but Jones didn’t join her. ‘Anyway, after a while I came back to life again – you could say I rose from the dead – but when I woke up I was different. The sun hurt my eyes and burnt my skin. I developed a taste for offal, red meat, blood sausages, that kind of thing.’
‘Tasty,’ said Jones. ‘I don’t mind a plate of steak and kidney pie myself.’
‘And then I started killing people.’
She turned her gaze to the corporal, who returned it calmly with his grey-blue eyes. She had tried to deny the truth to herself for so long, it felt good to confess it at last, to get everything out in the open. And even though she barely knew Llewelyn, somehow she felt she could trust him completely.
‘At first I didn’t understand what had happened to me. I knew that I wasn’t a werewolf. I didn’t change into a wolf under the full moon. I didn’t get hairy, or anything like that. But something was different. I wasn’t fully human anymore. Mihai, the Romanian boy who lives with me, seems to understand. He calls me a nosferatu. It’s the Romanian word for devil. The other word he uses is vampir.’
‘A vampire?’ said Jones. ‘I once had a girlfriend who was a bit of a goth. She used to dress up in black and paint her lips crimson. I reckon she’d be jealous. So is this why you wear dark glasses all the time?’
She nodded.
‘And this change, when you go a bit nuts, it happens to you every full moon?’
‘That seems to be how it works. Last night was the third time.’ She didn’t mention the fact that she’d felt the bloodlust on other occasions too, and that once or twice her fangs had even appeared during broad daylight.
‘That goth girl I knew got a bit edgy once a month,’ remarked Jones, ‘but nothing like this.’ His eyes crinkled and Liz could see faint amusement playing on his face. ‘Should I carry some garlic around to protect myself from you, then?’
‘Garlic doesn’t work. Neither do crosses or holy symbols. I’ve tried them. And I don’t sleep in a coffin either. You shouldn’t believe everything you see on TV.’
The line of vehicles had started moving forward as the sentries waved them through the checkpoint. Kevin tooted his horn for her to return to the car. But before she could move, Jones grabbed her arm.
His voice turned serious again. ‘I may not believe everything I see on TV, but I do believe what I see with my own eyes. Last night, I saw you grow sharp teeth. I saw you move faster than anyone could possibly move. I watched you run through a raging fire unscathed. And I saw you slaughter about a dozen werewolves and drink their blood.’ He folded his arms across his broad chest.
‘So, what? Are you going to shoot me now?’ Her eyes shifted to the SA80 assault rifle he carried wherever he went.
‘I haven’t decided yet. No need to be hasty. But I’ll tell you the truth. My men aren’t happy, especially the Dogman. They want you dead.’
‘And what do you want?’
He grinned at her again. ‘What I want right now, Liz, is a cooked breakfast and a nice, hot bath.’
Chapter Three
Stoke Park, Buckinghamshire, waning moon
Daylight was already beginning to creep in through the east-facing windows of Stoke Park, but Doctor Helen Eastgate had not slept. A pink flush filled the sky, but Helen dreaded looking at it. The bright, cheerful sunrise seemed altogether at odds with the events she had witnessed overnight.
A city destroyed. And not just any city, but a great world city, perhaps the greatest. London, England. As a young woman, she had travelled from the other side of the globe to make it her home. Now it was gone, and she would never again see its winding medieval lanes and neoclassical facades, its Georgian terraces, grand Victorian railway stations and modern glass skyscrapers. She knew too that she would never return to her old home in Australia, never see her parents or her little sister or her old school friends. She ought to be in tears, and yet she was still too shocked to cry.
She wondered if the rose-tinted clouds drifting gently across the sky could be entirely natural, or whether they harboured a deadly cargo of radioactive fallout. The clouds looked innocent enough, but were they just a little too bright, too vivid? Helen was a molecular geneticist, not a nuclear scientist, and had no knowledge of such matters, but she felt a sudden urge to pull the blinds closed and shut out those brilliant colours. Her fear was primal and irrational, the same response anyone must have to a calamity so huge it could not be grasped by the human mind.
Her thoughts and feelings were numb, and she wasn’t sure what she was doing here in this office, except that Chanita Allen, the leader of the emergency camp, and perhaps also now Helen’s closest friend, had asked her to sit with her as she received reports from a long retinue of military commanders, emergency workers and medical specialists.
Unlike Helen, whose train of thought kept wandering aimlessly, unable to focus on the immediate problem, Chanita was listening calmly, asking questions, and making notes. She appeared entirely unruffled, as if she had been training for this event all her adult life, almost as if she relished the magnitude of the disaster facing them. Even though the catastrophe had nearly claimed her own life, Chanita showed no signs of fright, just of determination and, as ever, her hallmark compassion. The milky whites of her eyes seemed to glow like the rising sun as she listened carefully to her advisers.
One of the army officers, Lieutenant Colonel Sharman, a red-headed man with a thick moustache, was briefing her on the national security situation. ‘It’s very difficult to be certain of anything at present, ma’am, but as far as we can tell, Britain is now completely cut off from the rest of the world. The destruction of London and other cities has caused total administrative collapse. We still have no official word from the government, assuming that any kind of organized central control still exists. All of the communication networks are down, the military and police command structure is gone, and it’s just people on the ground making their own decisions. I think it’s fair to say that there has been a complete breakdown of law and order, not to mention security.’
Chanita’s warm Caribbean voice flowed as smooth as honey across the reports of chaos. ‘Why are the communications down?’
‘It’s one of the effects of the EMP, the electromagnetic pulse,’ explained Colonel Sharman. ‘Thermonuclear explosions of the magnitude we saw yesterday produce a
large burst of electromagnetic radiation. A high altitude detonation can generate a destructive effect across a very wide area. Given what we know about last night’s attacks, we should work on the assumption that the entire country has been affected.’
‘Affected in what way?’
‘An EMP generates extreme voltages in any exposed electrical system. The larger the system, the more vulnerable it is. Comms networks and power grids are particularly prone to its effects. Our experts say that transformers and pylons in the electricity distribution network will probably have burned out across most of England. Without power, cell phone towers stop working. Telecom lines go down too.’
‘And how long will it take before they can be repaired?’
‘A long time. If the transformers burn out, fires can spread to electricity substations and power plants, so even if the power lines could be repaired it might take years to rebuild all the necessary infrastructure. It would be a huge engineering project even under normal circumstances. Now, with no government and the dangerous security situation, I don’t think we can count on the electricity supply coming back in the foreseeable future.’
Chanita seemed undaunted by his answer. ‘Then our choice is simple. We will have to learn to live without it.’
Helen had a question she wanted to ask. It didn’t seem an important one, all things considered, but her intellectual curiosity always needed to be satisfied. ‘Colonel Sharman, our Land Rover wasn’t affected by the EMP last night. We were driving very close to the blast, and yet none of the electronics in the vehicle failed. Why was that?’
The lieutenant colonel turned to address her. ‘Our tech guys tell us that the metal frame of a vehicle acts as something called a Faraday cage, protecting it from the electromagnetic field. Plus, smaller electrical devices aren’t as vulnerable as large networks like the power grid. A lot of our onsite equipment should still be operational if we can find a way to power it.’
Helen nodded. ‘So radios should still work? Can we get news from the outside world that way?’
‘Yes, ma’am, but there’s very little news being broadcast right now. Most stations are off the air, and nobody really seems to know what’s happening.’
‘Thank you, Colonel,’ said Chanita. ‘What can you tell us about the security situation on the ground?’
The officer’s face, already stern, turned grim. ‘In a word, dangerous. Werewolves are running wild out there. We’ve received reports of armed groups of insurgents too. When the system began to collapse, prisons were abandoned and the prisoners released. There are a lot of dangerous people roaming freely, and we have no way of telling who’s who.’
‘But you can use dogs to sniff out werewolves?’ said Helen.
‘Yes, ma’am. But murderers and rapists, they’re not so easy to detect.’
‘We cannot refuse entry to survivors because of the risk that they may be criminals,’ said Chanita. ‘As long as people need our help, we must allow them to come to the camp. We will deal with security within the fence as needed. I trust I can delegate that task to you, Colonel?’
‘Yes, ma’am.’
‘Then that will be all, Colonel Sharman. Thank you for your report.’
The colonel saluted and left the office, just as if he had been dismissed by a senior army officer, not a former hospital nurse. Helen was amazed that the military were willing to accept Chanita as their commander. She had been placed in her position by Colonel Griffin, the officer in overall charge of the evacuation camps, but there was more to it than that. Chanita exuded a natural authority, a fluency of command. Helen had witnessed that quality before, in her meetings with the Prime Minister. She wondered what had happened to the PM, and whether she had survived the nuclear attack. Colonel Sharman had said that the government had fallen, but it was obvious that all news was extremely uncertain. Helen hoped that the woman she had come to regard as a friend was somewhere safe.
A thought occurred to her, then. Who, but the Prime Minister herself would have had the authority to order the nuclear strike? But surely … no, she couldn’t believe that the PM would ever have done such a thing. She refused to believe it.
An aid worker from one of the humanitarian groups operating at the camp began briefing Chanita next. Unsurprisingly, his news was just as bleak. His demeanour was downbeat, almost defeated. He sounded like he had already given up. ‘The camp is filled well beyond its capacity,’ he told Chanita. ‘It was only ever intended as a staging post for evacuees from London before moving them on to other parts of the country. Now there’s nowhere for people to go. We have no option other than to accommodate them here. But how can we?’
‘What do you see as the greatest priorities?’ Chanita asked him, her voice level and calm.
‘Everything. We have no electricity, no heating, insufficient food. Without electrical power, the water pumps can’t work, so we have no drinking water and no sanitation. It’s just hopeless.’ He threw up his arms in despair.
Chanita turned to the man’s assistant, a young woman standing at his side. ‘How can we solve these problems?’
The young woman seemed nervous, unsure what to say, perhaps not certain if she should even say anything, standing next to her boss.
Chanita’s soft accent cajoled a response. ‘Please, speak your mind. Nothing is off limits in this room. I need to hear all ideas and suggestions.’
‘Ma’am,’ began the woman, with a sideways glance at her superior, ‘we can overcome these problems if we use the tools available. The electricity lines are down, but we have generators, and plenty of diesel to power them. We have solar panels too, and propane heaters to heat the buildings. We can pump clean water from the lake if we rig up a pipeline.’
‘Excellent,’ said Chanita. ‘I would like you to begin the necessary work immediately.’
‘Me, ma’am? I don’t really have the authority.’
‘Neither did I until a few weeks ago,’ said Chanita. ‘But it was given to me by Colonel Griffin. And now I give you the authority you need. You are in charge of the operation, and you will have whatever resources you require.’
The woman nodded, seeming to grow in confidence at Chanita’s words. ‘Yes, ma’am. I’ll start right away.’ She shot a look of pity at her former boss, whose shoulders had slumped and was already shuffling away.
Another soldier knocked and entered then, and for the first time that morning, Helen thought she saw a hint of apprehension creep across Chanita’s features. She looked to the new arrival anxiously. ‘Captain Rafferty? You have news?’
The captain saluted. ‘Ma’am, you asked me to make enquiries about Colonel Griffin.’
‘Yes?’ said Chanita.
‘I cannot confirm his whereabouts. Except that … ,’
‘Do not hold anything back from me, Captain.’
Helen studied her friend’s face closely. She knew that Chanita and Colonel Griffin enjoyed a much closer relationship than their professional dealings required. Chanita had never confided in her, but her feelings for Griffin were obvious.
‘The Colonel’s helicopter took off from the southern camp immediately before the attack yesterday evening,’ said Captain Rafferty. ‘His intention was to return here.’
‘Here? To the western camp?’
‘Yes ma’am. But he never arrived. His flight plan would have taken him directly across London. There have been no reports from him or his pilot since the nuclear attack.’
Chanita’s expression had turned sombre, and suddenly revealed the exhaustion that Helen had already been feeling for hours. ‘I see. Thank you, Captain Rafferty.’ She held up her hands to stop her next adviser in their tracks. ‘Enough,’ she said wearily. ‘I will sleep now.’
Chapter Four
Norbury Park, Surrey, waning moon
Colonel Michael Griffin woke to pale daylight and the sound of birdsong. The quick high-pitched chirping of a wren, the staccato song of a chaffinch, the low haunting calls of woodpigeons. A cool wind brushed
his face, and when he opened his eyes he saw tree canopies above. He was lying on his back in a forest clearing. He had no idea how he had come to be there.
For a moment he felt disorientated, out of place. He was reminded of his boyhood spent in the English countryside, long days playing alone, surrounded by nature. He lay still, listening to the sounds and looking up at the sky. Heavy clouds drifted overhead. The light wind stirred the bare branches of the oaks and quietly rustled the dead brown leaves of beeches. A strange grey dust was falling, like dry and dirty rain, and the sky held an other-worldly yellow tinge that boded ill.
Then memory hit him. His helicopter, a battlefield AW159 Wildcat, had crashed in the night, not long after taking off from the southern evacuation camp at Gatwick Airport. He’d been on an urgent mission, returning to the western camp at Stoke Park in Buckinghamshire. After receiving a secure transmission informing him of the Prime Minister’s death, he’d been consumed by just one thought – Chanita. Her sweet melodic voice, her smooth dark skin, her long black hair. He had to get back to her and make sure she was safe. He must not leave her at this critical moment.
He had boarded the helicopter at dusk, climbing into its cockpit as its engines whined into life and its rotors began to spin. The journey should not have taken long. The distance from Gatwick to Stoke Park was just forty miles as the crow flew, and the Wildcat flew much faster than any crow. It was a twin-turbine military aircraft capable of speeds approaching 200 mph. His pilot and co-pilot were experienced, combat-tested veterans. But the journey had been brought to an abrupt and unexpected halt.
He remembered the sudden loss of power as the EMP from the explosions struck. The engines cutting out. The cockpit lights blinking off. The red glare through the windows. The helicopter had been skirting London and was right on the edge of the blast zone, close enough for the EMP to knock out their power. He had watched as the nuclear explosions engulfed the city, spreading a carpet of fire and destruction as far as the eye could see. He had known immediately what they were. No conventional weapon was capable of such terrible and vast destruction.
Lycanthropic (Book 4): Moon Rise [The Age of the Werewolf] Page 2