A small but significant segment of the population had taken advantage of the collapse to prey on the weak. In the first few weeks after the outbreak, hunting parties had roamed the countryside shooting everything in sight, living or living dead. Several camp members had related harrowing stories about their own encounters with these groups, or what they had seen done to others. They related stories of families who had survived the outbreak only to be robbed by gangs, then murdered or shot and left for dead. Of one gang that had captured outsiders and tied them to posts surrounding their perimeter to serve as a human early warning system for approaching rotters. Of other gangs that had commandeered the women and let the men go on their way. Three of the girls in her unit had joined up with such parties, trading sex for safety until they could escape and set out on their own. One of her girls, Josephine, had been the plaything of a roving rape gang from upstate New York, having been debased nightly by each member of the gang until rotters eventually overran it outside of Manchester. Josephine had survived the attack and wandered the countryside until picked up by one of Paul’s raiding parties near Newington, nearly catatonic and unable to remember how she had gotten there. With a little time and a lot of kindness, Josephine had come out of her shock and became one of Natalie’s girls.
Her girls, Natalie thought derisively. It sounded so fucking sexist, but the term aptly applied. Out of all those who had found refuge at camp, slightly less than half were women. Very few, either male or female, had brought along any skills that would benefit the group’s survival. For better or worse, Paul had erred on the side of survival over egalitarianism. Anyone with military or law enforcement experience had been drafted into raiding parties. Those without such experience had been confined to camp and assigned to more mundane chores such as farming, the motor pool, the mess hall, planting, and the like.
Natalie had been among the latter until she grew tired of sitting around on her ass contributing nothing. After one raid to Kittery, Robson had returned with a cache of World War II-era Mauser rifles. None of the men in the raiding party had wanted them since they already were equipped with more powerful assault rifles and shotguns. So Natalie had convinced Paul to let her have the weapons and train those who stayed behind so they could defend the compound in an emergency. She had set up a training schedule of an hour a day. Everyone had attended at first, but after a week attendance had declined as most people felt relatively confident in their ability to handle a rifle. By the end of the second week, the only ones who had continued to show up were fourteen of the women in the camp.
Natalie never knew for certain why these women stayed with the training. She had always assumed it was because it had given them a sense of empowerment after being at the mercy of a collapsed society for so long, or maybe because of the camaraderie. Or maybe they had just been bored and were looking for something to keep them preoccupied. For whatever reason, the fifteen of them trained every afternoon for almost two hours. Emily, who had hunted prior to the outbreak, had led the training. Only a few of the girls had ever shot a weapon before, and their levels of skill varied. Over time they had become more than just proficient with the Mausers, with most of the girls being able to hit their mark at fifty yards at least two-thirds of the time. Along with the newfound skills had come an increased confidence in their abilities and themselves. All of which had paid off two months ago.
It had happened shortly after the raiding party had returned from a morning run to Wells. Someone had forgotten to secure the main gate, and a pack of sixteen rotters had stumbled onto the entrance and easily pushed their way into the outer compound. Thankfully, Natalie and the girls had been training at the time. They had rushed into the outer compound, formed a line abreast in front of the gated tunnel, and systematically took down each one. It had taken just over a minute to eliminate the threat, and not a single rotter got closer than twenty yards to the tunnel, but that single incident had solidified the girls’ place in the camp hierarchy.
After that incident, Paul had made Natalie head of camp security. Because she and the girls were now responsible for protecting the compound, they were excused from all other duties, a sweet deal considering they now did little more than take care of stray rotters that wandered too close to the compound or occasionally accompanied the raiding party on supply runs. All of the girls still helped out around the camp, though, to prevent themselves from going stir crazy. The new-found prestige gave them a sense of self-worth and importance. It made them feel in control of their lives again. For many, it gave them a reason to go on living.
At first they had a few detractors who had made fun of the girls, calling them Nat’s Brats behind their backs. That teasing had ended when Robson finally chose the name by which everyone now referred to them. During a pre-brief for one of his raids, he had used it when asking Natalie if the girls could provide armed back-up. Natalie and the girls loved it because they knew he had meant the name as a sign of respect.
The Angels of Death.
Swinging her legs back onto the wall, Natalie continued her rounds along the perimeter. The more their prestige grew, the greater became the uneasiness that nagged at her. She tried to ignore it, writing off the feeling as her own natural pessimism bubbling to the surface, but deep down she knew there was more to it than that. Natalie would never downplay the Angels’ success. Her Angels had kept the camp safe from the few rotters that wandered too close for comfort. Even when they accompanied the raiding party, they never encountered more than thirty or forty at a time. Not the kind of odds from which legends are made.
That was the problem. The Angels had become legendary at camp for no good reason, in her opinion. Fighting off the living dead at three-to-one odds was not extraordinary. It created false expectations among the others. Worse still, some of the Angels had begun to believe the hype, which threatened to make them over confident and sloppy. Natalie trained them relentlessly, but still she would occasionally overhear some of her girls talk about how they were invincible.
This feeling of impending doom had gotten much stronger since Paul announced that the raiding party would head into Portsmouth to pick up an important group of survivors. Although the rational part of her brain tried to convince her that these feelings were just paranoia, her woman’s intuition warned her to listen. Something told her these survivors were bad news for the camp, for her, and for her girls. If only she knew why.
Arriving back at the gated tunnel, Natalie used the inside ladder to climb down off of the wall. Wiping her hands together to brush off the dirt, she made her way to the blockhouse for breakfast.
Chapter Five
The knock on the container door echoed through the room’s confines, jarring Elena awake. She stirred and sat up on her cot, wondering if she had only imagined it. A moment later a second knock confirmed that someone was outside.
“Miss Elena, are you in there?” The question was accompanied by a third knock, slightly louder.
“I can’t open the door. It’s daylight.”
“I understand, Miss Elena. Paul sent me to tell you that Dr. Compton and the others have arrived.”
“Thank you. Please tell Paul I’ll join them after sunset.”
“Of course, Miss Elena.”
Elena settled back onto the cot and stared up at the ceiling. She wished she could have been there to greet Compton, but the raiding party’s late return had prevented that. Now Compton would have an entire day with Paul to tell his version of how the vampires had stolen the R Virus and used it to destroy civilization, a version that in all probability would undermine, if not completely shatter, the fragile accommodation between her and Paul. She feared how the coven would be treated once night arrived. A part of her expected the humans to burst into the containers sometime during the day and drag every member of the coven into the sunlight.
Elena sighed. She would not blame the humans if they did.
Elena found it ironic how events had played out. She had never supported stealing the R Virus an
d releasing it against mankind, even when the idea was being bantered about by some of the more extreme covens. Her objections had not been based on any emotional bond to the species she once belonged to, nor were they derived from any sentimentality to what a zombie outbreak might do to the humans. Her objections had been entirely cynical and selfish. She had considered humans as a source of nourishment, and worried that the living dead might wipe out the covens’ food supply, much like Mad Cow Disease culled out entire herds of cattle. Back then, Elena had viewed humans with the same emotional detachment as a rancher has for his livestock.
If she had the courage and the strength of her convictions, maybe she could have prevented this apocalypse when the Vampire Council, the supreme decision-making body of the vampires, had met sixteen months ago in Prague to debate stealing and releasing the R Virus. As master of the New York City coven, the largest in the United States and the fifth largest in the world, her opinion usually carried considerable weight on the Council. On that day, however, the dissenters had been outnumbered eight to two. The only other voice protesting such insanity had come from Hu Yi, the master of the Beijing coven, who fully understood what such an outbreak could do to a country with a billion and a half people. Unfortunately, the older covens from Rumania, Moscow, and London had carried the day, their centuries-long struggle to stave off human hunters swaying the masters from Tokyo, Manila, Mexico City, Cairo, and Abidjan. Had they known what the results would be, maybe they would have listened to her and Hu Yi.
What no one on the Council had foreseen was that the zombies needed to sustain their reanimation through the nutrients found in living tissue, and to the living dead the flesh and organs of vampires was just as nourishing as humans. Because the covens had to find refuge from the sunlight, they had found themselves in imminent danger as zombie outbreaks erupted in the world’s major cities. A few covens had been smart enough to move by night, staying ahead of the outbreak, but that merely delayed the inevitable. Most of the covens had been trapped indoors when the zombies swarmed over them. Within weeks of the initial outbreak, vampires had nearly become extinct.
Because of New York City’s massive population, the infection had spread rapidly. Only one of the three scouts she had sent out that first night to survey the carnage returned, the single terrified vampire describing how he watched the city be overrun by zombies. Elena had prepared the coven to evacuate at nightfall and seek refuge in the country. She had planned various escape routes and safe havens to hole up in during daylight, ran through her mind all the contingencies they might encounter, and felt confident she had counted for every possibility. Except for the possibility that the zombies would find them first. On the morning before their departure, a dozen rotters had stumbled across the coven and attacked, excited by the prospects of food. Half the coven had been wiped out within minutes. The survivors had escaped to the sewers, only to find their underground world also infested with the living dead. Even worse, they now faced their recently-butchered comrades reanimated as super zombies, with all the speed and agility of a swarmer and the strength and voracious appetite of a vampire. The sewers had turned into a charnel house.
Only sixteen vampires had escaped New York City. Once outside the city limits, five of her coven had disappeared into the night, no longer trusting her judgment or respecting her authority. Elena hoped they had found safe refuge somewhere, but doubted that they still existed. The remaining members were slowly whittled away during the next few months. Once the largest in the States, her coven now numbered only four vampires besides herself. As far as she knew, all the other covens had been wiped out and every vampire destroyed, including the members of the Council who had initiated the holocaust.
Elena would have laughed at the irony, except she no longer found humor in anything.
Of all the coven members, she trusted Dravko most. After herself, he was the second oldest, having been turned in the 14th century when vampires took advantage of the Black Death to ravage their way across Europe, hiding their feeding under the guise of the pandemic. Whereas most vampires do not go more than a few hundred years before hunters tracked them down, Dravko possessed a natural instinct for survival, and lived long enough to hone his skills for hunting, fighting, and evasion until he grew to be a powerful and fearful vampire in his own right. Elena had discovered him in 1689 as a rogue prowling the countryside on the outskirts of Budapest, living off the local gypsy tribes, and had welcomed him into the fold. Dravko rewarded her generosity with unfettered loyalty, and soon became the coven keeper and her right hand man.
Tibor’s loyalty was also secure, albeit to Dravko, who sired him back in 1812. When Napoleon had marched on Moscow, Elena’s coven followed close behind, assured that the most violent war to date would allow the best opportunities for feeding. Dravko had stumbled across Tibor hidden in a grove of trees, bleeding out from a gunshot wound to the stomach and left for dead by the retreating Russian army. Dravko had offered him a chance of salvation and immortality, and the opportunity for revenge, which Tibor readily accepted. Tibor came into his own right as a vampire during Napoleon’s winter retreat from Moscow when scores of French soldiers succumbed to his bloodlust. By the time they reached Poland, he had become the fiercest fighter in Elena’s coven.
Less reliable was Sultanic. Elena had found him in London in 1888 after he had butchered five prostitutes in the East End, giving rise to the Jack the Ripper legend. She spent weeks tracking him down before his slaughtering brought the weight of the city’s police down on the coven. Her and Dravko had captured Sultanic shortly after the mutilation of Mary Kelly and moved him to the country. Common sense had dictated that Elena should have disposed of Sultanic to prevent any future killing sprees, but something stayed her hand. Maybe she connected with Sultanic’s Polish heritage. Maybe she understood that he directed his rage at prostitutes because he had been sired by a vampire posing as a street whore. Or maybe she empathized with the confusion of the newly-turned trying to find his way in a strange world. In any case, she had taken Sultanic under her guidance and tutored him in the ways of the vampire. In return for giving him a second chance, Sultanic devoted himself to Elena, loyally sticking with her through good times and bad. It did not get much worse than this.
Elena had a similar situation with Tatyana, the youngest member of the coven, both in physical and vampiric age. A nineteen-year-old student from St. Petersburg, Russia, Tatyana had emigrated to America to start a better life for herself. Instead, like so many other naïve and vulnerable girls before her, she got sucked into a culture of physical and psychological abuse, first being forcibly addicted to meth, and then sent out to turn tricks to pay for her habit. One of those tricks happened to be Sultanic. Taken with her beauty, he had sired Tatyana rather than feed off her, bringing her into the coven.
Tatyana had encountered extraordinary difficulties adjusting to her siring. Most vampires underwent incredible hardship transitioning to their new lives, often taking decades to become comfortable with their vampiric form, enhanced strength, sense of immortality, and loss of inhibitions. For Tatyana, this displacement had been intensified by the abuse she had endured. Her adjustment from human to vampire, strained enough to begin with, had been crippled by her hatred and distrust of others as well as her own sense of self loathing. Tatyana drew inward. She rarely explored her vampiric side. She preferred the company of humans over her own kind, and one human in particular. Normally such regression could be compensated for over time; however, these were far from normal times.
Elena knew that fact better than anyone. She wondered what the Vampire Council would say, if any of them were still alive, about her alliance with the humans. Even the surviving members of her coven had opposed the idea when she first proposed it. They had acquiesced only when Dravko spoke out in support of the alliance. She knew Dravko considered the idea insane, and had agreed to it only out of loyalty to her. Truth be known, Elena had not liked the idea of trusting their lives to the humans, but she had
been left with few choices. She had been amazed that the coven had endured as long as it had, living off of stray animals and wildlife, and holing up by day in any building where they could find refuge. Too many times they had to clear a building of zombies in order to occupy it for the night, and in the process lost Christophe, her lover, as well as Svetlana and Toshii. Elena knew their luck would soon run out, which left an approach to the humans as the only viable option to ensure their survival.
Elena never knew why Paul accepted the offer. She had spent those first few days lying awake all day, waiting for the humans to break into their containers and drag the coven out into the sunlight, exacting revenge for what vampires had brought onto mankind. Thankfully that never happened. The threat of death, however, always hung just beneath the surface. She chalked up their continued existence to the humans having the same loyalty to Paul as the coven did to her. Just as she knew her coven’s loyalty was growing tenuous, and could be shattered by the slightest incident, she assumed the humans’ loyalty to the alliance to be just as shaky. Elena feared Compton’s arrival could be the catalyst that broke the bond.
Elena stared intently at the ceiling, guessing where the sun would be in the morning sky. It would be another seven hours before the sun set again, and she dared not imagine how much discord Compton could sow in that time.
Not since the first weeks of the outbreak had Elena felt so uncertain about the coven’s future.
Chapter Six
Dravko spread out on the bottom bunk, desperately trying to fall asleep. He could not doze off, partly because of the adrenalin rush of the raid, and partly because he always felt uncomfortable in the steel container the vampires used as their emergency quarters when they returned to camp after sunrise. It had nothing to do with their safety, for the container was the ideal haven. The outer layers were covered with steel plates welded onto the outer frame to ensure sunlight could not filter in, and the only door was secured from the inside with four heavy-duty slide bolts. He felt uneasy having to rely on their hosts to ensure their survival.
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