City Of The Damned: Expanded Edition

by Stephen Knight

  “Is that it?” Claudia asked.

  Julia got up and looked at her. “I want you to stay here, Claudia. Don’t talk to anyone, don’t do anything until I get back. Do you understand?”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “I’m not sure yet. But you know something, and we need to figure out what that is.” Julia walked to the conference room door and pulled it open. She looked back over her shoulder.

  “Stay here, Claud. Don’t try and leave.”

  “I won’t,” Claudia promised. The door closed, and Claudia sat in her chair and pulled the coffee mug toward her. It was much cooler now, and what little warmth it emanated did nothing to heat her hands.

  A chilling thought surfaced in her mind. Julia McGuiness was single-minded, and Mark Acheson was even more so. If they thought they knew where Chiho was, how far would they go to get that nugget of information? Might her own teammates turn against her? Claudia examined the premise as dispassionately as she could. On the surface, it sounded ridiculous. Although she didn’t necessarily like all the individuals she worked with, they were all generally good people. But she understood the stakes were now unusually high. Not only had Containment Team 6 been compromised, the vampires were up to something big. Wasn’t that the most important thing? Discovering what the vamps were up to, where they were, and killing them before they could carry out whatever dark plan they had in mind?

  They might torture me.

  Feeling colder than ever, Claudia leaned back in her chair and hugged herself. The fear she had felt for Chiho was being replaced by fear for herself… from her own teammates.

  ***

  After days of sleeplessness, Jonathan Shafer had finally passed out in the lonely master bedroom. When he stretched out on the bed, he had told himself it was just to rest—sleep felt very, very far away. The linens still smelled like his wife, which led to another bout of fruitless weeping. Without realizing it, the sobs had ushered in the dark line of dreamless sleep, and he crossed into it. His body had forced him to do it to escape the pain… if only for a short time.

  Two hours before the sun rose, Shafer was tugged back to wakefulness by the same body that had sought refuge from the pain. As if emerging from a great depth, he emerged back into the waking world. At first, he didn’t know where he was. Then it returned to him, all of it, impacting him like an emotional freight train. He put his hands to his face and sobbed again in the dark house, his misery continuing unabated now that he was conscious.

  Something stirred beside him, and Shafer shouted involuntarily. He flailed about for the nightstand, found the lamp, and switched it on. His wife lay on the bed, her skin as white as marble and just as cold. She wore the old red T-shirt that had been his years ago, the one she used to sleep in. She was filthy and smelled like she had crawled out of a crypt. She smiled at him, and in the lamplight glinted long, pointed fangs. He looked away from them and into her silver-in-black eyes… eyes that offered peace and respite from all he’d been going through.

  “Darling,” she said. Shafer glanced deeper into her eyes, and his pain disappeared completely.

  ***

  Like a deep sea diver slowly heading to the ocean surface, Chiho Hara drifted toward consciousness. As her faculties coalesced and she became increasingly aware of her surroundings, a small segment of her mind relished the warm blackness of the fugue state she’d been in for who knew how long. This part of her, more animal than human, feared what might await her on the other side of awareness. It fought to drag her back into the foggy nothingness, but it lost out to her innate desire to be aware. Had it a voice, this small portion of her psyche would have screamed in mortal terror.

  Even fully conscious, Chiho kept her eyes closed and remained motionless. She was on what felt like a mattress, spread-eagled on her back. The air was chilly as it flowed lazily over her, and she realized that her clothing was gone. She wondered what reason the vampires had for that, then wondered further why she was still alive.

  Information.

  The coming hours would not be pleasant.

  She focused her mind on the room that lay on the other side of her closed eyelids. She listened for any sign that she was not alone. A susurration of clothing across skin, the vague whisper of an inhaled breath, the creak of a floorboard, or perhaps the murmur of bare feet gliding across carpet. She heard none of those things, and was not surprised. After all, a vampire needed to ingest air only when it wished to speak, and it could stand motionless for hours at a time while waiting to ambush their prey. Vampires could have been clustered around her in a circle five deep, and she would have no idea.

  But smell was another matter. All vampires gave off a particular musty odor. From some, the scent was almost undetectable, while from others it could be as ripe as a decomposing rat. She could smell one of the former. She was not alone, and Chiho had to struggle to control her breathing and her heart rate. She’d heard that vampires could actually hear, maybe even see the blood racing through their quarry—

  “You can’t play possum with us, Chiho.”

  Chiho’s heart suddenly raced against her will. She recognized the voice. It belonged to Helena Rubenstein. The bed creaked slightly and the faint musty smell intensified as Helena sat down on the bed next to her. Chiho clenched her teeth together as ice-cold fingertips skated down her belly and over the sweep of her bare hip. She gasped involuntarily when she felt twin needle points graze her almost hairless pubic mound.

  “Hmm… do I smell Acheson in here somewhere?” Helena giggled. “I really never understood what the two of you see in each other, Chiho. Really, your body is almost as hard as his!”

  The fingertips glided up the center of her belly, leisurely tracing a path between her breasts, up her neck, to the right side of her jaw. Chiho steeled herself against what she knew she would feel next: fangs sinking into an artery.

  Instead, she felt a cold, wet worm crawl across her lips in sickening undulations: Helena’s Undead tongue. The scent was rancid. Chiho wrenched her head away from it and almost vomited. She tried to roll over but found her wrists and ankles were bound to the bed frame. There was no escape for her. Helena laughed with an almost manic glee as Chiho frantically rubbed her lips against the flesh of her shoulder.

  “Enough of this, Helena.” A large hand snatched Chiho’s jaw suddenly, a hand as cold as marble and strong enough to shatter bone with ease. Chiho gasped at the power of the grip.

  “You know me, Miss Hara?” the new voice asked. It was a hearty baritone, lightly accented. “Even though we’ve never met face to face, I think you have some inkling as to who I am, yes?”

  Chiho kept her eyes closed. “I know of you, Osric,” she said, her voice small.

  “Then you know of my power. You know I’m old enough to have seen legends born and die of old age. When your people were still trying to learn the ways of steel, I’d already lived two lifetimes. You know these things?”

  “I’ve heard of them.”

  “Then open your eyes… or you’ll feel my power firsthand, and it will not be pleasant.”

  Chiho released a quivering sigh and did as she was told.

  Osric leaned over her, his pale skin gleaming in the wan light of a single nightstand lamp. His eyes were luminous, entrancing, and, at the moment, not completely threatening. Chiho avoided looking at them directly. She examined his angular cheekbones, the firm set of his heavy jaw, the sweep of his regal forehead. His dark hair was combed back from his face, the darkness split by an explosion of gray at his widow’s peak. Beneath the strands of hair, Chiho saw something that resembled a faint scar.

  Osric smiled thinly and released her. He straightened and touched the gray hair with his fingertips. His nails were well-tended.

  “A gift from a group of Franciscan monks in Italy several hundred years ago,” he told her. “One of them tried to cleave open my skull with a sword of silver. It almost worked.”

  Chiho turned away from him. Helena crouched on the opposit
e side of the bed, looking nothing like the woman Chiho had once known. The calm serenity she’d carried with her in life was gone now, swept aside by the ravages of something worse than death. Helena grinned, revealing her fangs. Murderous things danced in her eyes. Chiho faced the ceiling.

  Osric made a disapproving noise and walked to the foot of the bed, hands clasped behind his back.”Nothing to say? No declarations, no threats, no pleas?”

  “Do you intend to allow me to live?” Chiho asked.

  “An interesting question.” Osric seemed to consider that for a long moment. “Will I allow you to live? As what? A pet? An oddity? As livestock, to birth more food for us?” The tall vampire chuckled and returned to the side of the bed, gazing down at Chiho with those horrible/beautiful eyes. Chiho kept her gaze rooted on the ceiling.

  Osric reached down and stroked the sweep of Chiho’s cheekbone with one cold, lifeless finger. “I assure you that you’ll… continue. By this time tomorrow, you’ll be well on your way to becoming one of us. Lifeless by your present standards, but immortal, forever immune to the passage of time.”

  Chiho squeezed her eyes shut. She fought the urge to weep.

  Helena touched one of her hands. “There, there, dear Chiho,” she cooed, the sound of her voice as welcome as a mouthful of ashes. “Don’t be afraid… it’s wonderful, really! The things we can see, the things we can do!”

  Gods save me, Chiho implored. She felt hot tears seep from beneath her eyelids and was ashamed at the display of weakness. But the final truth was too much for her to bear: She would walk the earth as one of the Undead, feeding on those she had struggled to protect for so long.

  “It’s not her time yet, Helena. We’ll leave her,” Osric said. “For now.”

  “As you wish, my Master,” Helena said sweetly. She touched Chiho’s hand one last time, and then the two vampires left the room, closing the door behind them.

  Chiho wept. There was nothing else she could do.

  13

  It took over an hour for the LAPD to release the team, even though several calls had been made from Washington instructing them to do just that. The cops were totally out of their depth, and when they began discovering the decapitated corpses in the hospital, several of them wanted to hold Acheson and the others until they could properly explain themselves. It wasn’t until the district chief of the FBI and the L.A. County district attorney arrived that the LAPD relented. Outgunned, they had no choice.

  Jerry Licht picked up Acheson and the others in a van the team used as a general transport vehicle. It took longer than usual to get back to the Plant, not by virtue of the traffic—at this hour, most of Los Angeles was asleep—but because of the circuitous surveillance detection measures Licht took to ensure they weren’t being tailed. By the time they arrived, dawn was just over an hour away.

  Acheson tracked down Julia McGuiness. She was in her office, going over unprocessed data that had been pulled from the various traps set up in the communication nets of other federal and local law enforcement agencies. She didn’t look as fatigued as she doubtless felt, Acheson observed. In fact, she looked as if she was fresh from a restful night’s sleep. He didn’t know how she did it.

  She smiled when she saw him. “Glad you’re back with us.”

  Acheson shrugged. “The LAPD feels differently. You’re my new XO, Jules.”

  She nodded somberly. “Understood.”

  “Any leads on Chiho’s whereabouts?” Acheson asked.

  “No. Claudia wasn’t able to give us much help. There was a master vamp there, Mark. It did something to her.”

  “Any idea what?”

  “Not yet. I have her sequestered in the conference room for the moment. We should keep her out of the operational loop until we can figure out what’s going on between her and the vamps.” Julia drummed her fingers on the desk for a moment. “It’s obvious the dreams she was complaining about earlier were influenced by Osric. He’s had his mental hooks in her for a while. No telling how mature the process was, but it’s likely he was able to develop it enough to establish the relationship between her and Chiho.”

  And between Chiho and myself? Acheson wondered. He figured it would be a mistake to assume Osric would fixate on him personally. Simply taking out their leader wouldn’t be sufficient to shut down Containment Team 6. But now both the chain of command and operational manpower were threatened.

  “He’s fucked us up royally,” Acheson said.

  Julia tapped the reports in front of her. “I was going through transcripts of intercepted LAPD communications hoping to find something that might lead us to Chiho. The police are still looking. They have the utilities people opening up manholes, hoping to find the vamp that got away. But there’s a lot more to it. Check this out.”

  Julia handed Acheson a folder. Acheson opened it and scanned the pages inside quickly. He looked up at her, his brow furrowed.

  “They took infants?”

  Julia nodded. “From three different hospitals. There must’ve been twenty-five to thirty vamps out there. So far, the death count stands at eight, mostly hospital staff and one cop who was at one of the hospitals waiting to transport an injured prisoner. This was a coordinated attack against the hospitals. Like you said, we just walked into it.”

  Acheson closed the file and rubbed his chin. “I can’t believe this was a coincidence. Not after they took Chiho. That was a planned move, not something ad hoc.”

  “Then how did they get inside our decision cycle? I’ve done a physical security review, and as far as I can tell, we haven’t been compromised.”

  “Sharon,” Acheson said with a sigh.

  “Maybe. We’ve known about the psychic bond between vamps and fanged humans. But I don’t think any of us knew it could be so strong, so soon. After all, Sharon hadn’t been showing many signs of Turning.”

  “How is she now?”

  Julia dropped her eyes to the desktop and rolled her pen between her fingertips. “She’s going to Turn. Whatever happened in the hospital, they were able to do something to her. Kerr’s working against it, but he told me was the viral replication is aggressive. She may Turn as early as tomorrow night.”

  Acheson slumped in his chair. He rubbed his eyes, more to prevent Julia from seeing the emotion on his face than anything else.

  Damn it, Sharon. I’m so sorry.

  “The children will be used as part of a ritual.”

  Acheson straightened up. Ellenshaw stood in the office doorway, one hand in the pocket of his gray utility trousers, the other on the doorframe. He glanced over at Julia for an instant before turning back to Acheson with neutral eyes.

  “A ritual of invocation, if not outright evocation,” Ellenshaw continued. “I suspect Osric has a strong connection with the underworld, that part of the vampire mythos that’s so unknown to us. I’d say Osric is acting as an agent now, for one of the underworld masters.”

  “Invocation or evocation,” Acheson repeated. “What’s the difference?”

  “Invocation is more like a plea for help,” Julia answered. “Evocation is… well, a ceremony to conjure something forth.”

  Acheson leaned back in his chair. “Robert, you actually believe that Osric is going to dial 911 on the occult hotline and get a boost from Satan?”

  “I have no idea. I’m merely explaining why I think he took the children. Infants make notoriously bad additions to a clan. It seems they can never be trained to a standard above that of an animal. In all my years, I’ve never come across a turned infant. After feeding, the vamps almost always pop off the head and dispose of it.”

  “Okay.” Acheson looked at Ellenshaw again. “Are there really forces in the underworld that Osric could call upon?”

  Ellenshaw considered this for a moment and shrugged. “No one knows. We’re dealing with vampires, so it’s possible. While Andrew Kerr believes vampirism has its roots in virology, I happen to think it’s born from pure evil. And if there’s an evil strong enough to animate a corp
se that has had the blood drained from it and turn it into something that’s mostly invulnerable to our weapons, something that uses us as its primary food source, then yes, I believe there are things even worse than a master vampire. Not be here in the physical world, but they’re there, Mark. Below the surface, out of sight, but definitely there.”

  Acheson looked at Julia.

  “I agree with Robert,” she said. “The game’s gotten a lot bigger in the past six hours.”

  Acheson rubbed his temples. “Outstanding.”

  “Is there any trace of Chiho?” Ellenshaw asked.

  Julia shook her head. Acheson stared at the floor.

  “That’s… incredibly unfortunate,” Ellenshaw said. “Do we have anything to go on? Anything at all?”

  “We’re working on it, Robert,” Acheson said.

  Ellenshaw sighed. “Mark, I’m sorry to be so pedantic, but you should contact Washington as soon as you can.”

  “I’ve already sent the director all the information we have,” Julia said. “He is waiting to hear from you, though.”

  Acheson rose to his feet. “I need to talk with Sharon first.” He turned to leave, but Ellenshaw raised a hand.

  “What you need to do is report to Fiedler. Let me talk with Sharon.”

  Acheson blinked. “You?”

  Ellenshaw nodded. “I’m not as emotionally vulnerable as you are. I think I can have a more productive conversation with her at the moment.”

  Acheson’s eyes narrowed. “Ellenshaw, I don’t need you to come in here and—”

  “Yes, you do!” Ellenshaw said, his voice clipped and strong. “It was bad tactics to take Sharon along in the first place! Now you’ve lost Hara, and another one of your team is combat ineffective. How far do you think you can get, winging it like this? Get a hold of yourself, Mark. Your people need you to be a leader right now, not a man who can’t see beyond his own emotional crisis!”

  Acheson stepped forward, hands balled into fists at his sides. Ellenshaw faced him squarely. Even though Acheson towered over him and could pulverize him with a single blow, the older man didn’t back down. That alone forced Acheson to rein in his anger, enabling him to lock away the pain of losing both Sharon and Chiho. Ellenshaw was absolutely right.