Hayley sat down opposite Rowena and dropped the razor on the tabletop.
‘Don’t worry, I’m not going to hurt you,’ Hayley said. ‘Who are these guys? Why were they bothering you?’ As Rowena began her explanation, Caitlin joined them.
Rowena explained that she had been working as a drug mule. It was a job that suited her a lot: the money was good enough that she didn’t have to do it more than once every three or four months, and she loved Thailand. Unfortunately, when she’d arrived at Manchester airport that afternoon, she’d noticed that the hairs she’d threaded through the zips on her luggage had been broken. Somebody had opened it in transit, and she had thought it best not to lay claim to the five kilos of heroin she’d brought back with her. Instead, she’d grabbed the first similar looking bag she’d seen, and fled. It wasn’t until she’d got back into the city that she’d realised that she’d have been better off letting the police pick her up and then dropping a dime on her employer. Jacky (known as ‘Jack Shit’ to most, though not to his face) was going to be very annoyed at losing his investment, and was certain to take it out on her. He’d put a friend of Rowena’s into a wheelchair for the rest of her life under similar circumstances. Sure enough, Rowena had found that her flat was being watched, and had split.
She’d ended up in this café. It had been 12 hours since she’d last eaten, in a different time zone. She’d come here in search of a bacon sandwich and a cup of tea, and had intended to leave town afterwards. Then her past had caught up with her.
Caitlin laughed when Rowena admitted that she’d done martial arts classes, but she could never have done what Hayley had done. Hayley asked if she’d like to give it a try. Rowena paused, feeling Hayley’s eyes slithering over her face, then smiled back and nodded.
That was the start of a relationship that had grown from initial attraction into lust and then consummation as Hayley had initiated Rowena into the vampiric way of life.
As Rowena writhed and shuddered in pain, she wondered if Hayley would come to her rescue again …
Leonard didn’t think he had enough haemostats for what he had in mind, but was quite willing to improvise. He pressed a pair of drawing pins through the layers of flayed tissue he’d peeled off the vampire’s bones, to hold them in place. Then he removed the haemostats, ready to lay bare the rest of her arm. He was sure that this wouldn’t kill her, and the flow of blood had already dried up, but he wanted to see if the vampire’s aggressive tendency to heal would be able to compensate for her flesh and skin being parted from her bones. He was sure it wouldn’t. He had an inkling that once her soft tissues were divorced from their framework, they’d fuse into a useless lump. Similar experiments on human beings had suggested as much, but the surgeons had been inept, and the patients had bled to death before healing. That wouldn’t be a problem in this case.
Once he’d finished peeling her arm, Leonard decided to continue his conversation with the vampire. Now that Jay and Robert were out of the way, he’d be able to discuss things a bit more freely than he had with somebody looking over his shoulder. By the time the conversation was over, he should have a good idea how to go about killing her. From the look on her face, she might consider that an appealing notion at the moment.
‘Let’s talk,’ Leonard said, looking up from her ruined arm to her face. ‘You have two options at the moment. One is that you cooperate and I give you a nice stiff shot of morphine. The other is that I separate out a few nerve trunks from the mess I’ve made of your arm, and see how long it takes them to dissolve in acid. It’s your decision. Are you going to tell me what I want to know?’
The vampire nodded. Leonard went to his fridge for a needle and some opiates. The girl’s eyes stopped twitching a moment or two after he sank the syringe into her good arm. Leonard gave it a full minute before removing the gag.
‘It still hurts,’ she said.
‘I can give you another shot if you’re helpful enough,’ Leonard said.
‘What do you want to know?’
‘Let’s start by discussing how you were changed into whatever you are now. That’s the crux of the matter, isn’t it?’
‘It’d be easier to do this tomorrow,’ Robert said.
‘They’ll all be in there during daylight,’ Jay said. ‘Their car isn’t there, so at least a couple of them are out, playing.’ He paused for a second, obviously considering something. ‘On the other hand, maybe this doesn’t look good.’
Robert looked around. ‘No kidding,’ he said. It was a smallish industrial estate. Maybe a dozen concrete warehouses crowded together inside a chainlink fence. The sort of places small companies rent to assemble PCs or repair stereo components. It looked like most of them were disused.
Jay sighed. He’d had a rough couple of days and didn’t need the attitude display. ‘I meant,’ he said, ‘their car isn’t here. I hope that they haven’t abandoned the place and split town completely yet.’
‘Big maroon Saab convertible?’ Robert said. Jay grunted an affirmative. ‘Down there,’ Robert indicated. The Saab was leaving the other end of the road that led from the estate to the dual carriageway.
‘Two or three of them,’ Jared said. ‘That’s good. There’s only another two or three left to deal with, then.’
‘Spiffing,’ Robert said. He didn’t particularly want to deal with any of them.
‘With any luck they’re looking for someone to bleed rather than just picking stuff up from their gaff. I’ll park outside the gates, so we can get going in a hurry.’
That suited Robert fine.
‘You sure these shotguns are going to work?’ Jay asked. ‘The damn things look antiquated.’
‘They are antiques,’ Robert replied, with more than a little edge to his voice. ‘Over-and-under Purdy ten-gauges from the ’30s. A mate of mine found them when he was doing over a country house, and turned them over to me. If you can manage to hit what you’re shooting at, you’ll either kill or cripple it. Hit somebody in the toe with one of those things and you’ll take off most of their leg below the knee.’
‘You put a hole you could see through in one of Leonard’s new toys, and that didn’t slow her down any.’
‘Solid bullets make a small entrance wound and a big exit wound,’ Robert said, wearily. ‘Buckshot will cause a lot more damage over a much wider area, and at close range it’s almost impossible to miss.’
‘Fine, I hope you’re right.’ Jay got out of the car and collected the shotgun from the back seat. ‘I still think a pump gun with more bullets in it would have been a better idea, though.’
‘If you can’t drop these vicious bitches with that thing, you’d never have the time to shoot more than a couple of rounds from a pump gun. Anyway, I like these. They’re nice objects.’
‘Maybe we won’t need to use them,’ Jared said.
Robert wondered why he was going along with this.
The key code that Leonard had extracted from the vampire worked fine. The lock clicked open after Jay punched the last digit into the pad, and the door opened to a gentle push.
The interior of the warehouse wasn’t really what the exterior suggested. Jared wasn’t sure whether it had already been prepared in readiness or whether most of the furniture there had been retrieved from the house in Faulchion Close. There was a blank area inside the door, and thereafter the floor was covered with plush carpets and expensive looking rugs. Not even the ugly, yellowish light from the fluorescent tubes overhead spoiled the impression. It was probably one big space, but ranks of bookcases, wardrobes and all kinds of other shit piled into mounds broke the space up enough that it wasn’t obvious what lay further in from the door. The furniture wasn’t designed for open plan rooms with ceilings this high, so the effect was rather odd. Somewhere, a Radiohead record was playing at high volume, bouncing tinny echoes off the walls and ceiling, so it seemed likely that
somebody was home.
‘We should take some of this stuff with us,’ Robert said, looking admiringly at one of the new Macintosh Powerbooks plugged into the area by the door’s only visible phone jack. It had been a very expensive piece of kit when it came out and was still worth a lot now. The fact that it was sitting on a cargo pallet with a beanbag in front of it rather than on a desk didn’t spoil the effect. It shared the pallet with a lava lamp and a laser printer. Robert didn’t look quite as impressed by those.
‘We find Chelsea first,’ Jay said, ‘then you can browse.’
‘Assuming that we’re still alive,’ Robert added sourly.
‘We should probably get going,’ Jay said. ‘There might have been an alarm on that door.’
Robert nodded and shifted his grip on his shotgun, holding it firmly pointed at the floor with one hand until something appeared to shoot at. Jay handled his own gun a lot more gingerly as he headed off into the warehouse. Both flinched at a peal of high, girlish laughter, then gathered up their nerve and continued.
Chelsea wasn’t too hard to find: a prone form was visible lying curled up on a rug between a brace of futons at right angles to each other. A chest of drawers stood at their head, supporting a ghetto blaster with its light blinking merrily. The ghetto blaster was a bit of a letdown: Robert had always assumed that disco bunnies would own a pair of turntables and listen only to rare 12-inch white labels.
Jay covered the ground so fast that Robert wondered if he wasn’t turning into a vampire himself. He was concerned to know where the people who’d been listening to the ghetto blaster were, as it didn’t look like Chelsea had deejaying privileges.
Jay lowered his gun and rolled Chelsea over. She took a ragged breath, then started crying as her eyes focused on him. Her wrists and ankles were tied together, and one of her hands was tightly wrapped in masking tape. Her face was covered in bruises, with one of her eyes swollen shut, and it looked like somebody had been burning her with the curling iron that lay next to the boombox.
‘Oh, thank God,’ she said. ‘How did you find me?’
‘The friend you left behind when you made your exit gave us the address,’ Jay said. He picked up a straight razor that somebody had left lying next to the curling iron on top of the chest of drawers and started in on the ropes. ‘Where are the others?’
‘I don’t know. Can you get this crap off my hand, please?’
Chelsea screamed as the masking tape was peeled off, and Jay didn’t think it was because it was taking hair with it. The hand revealed underneath was very badly messed up, its fingers bent at odd angles and its palm arched oddly.
‘They were trying to cripple me,’ Chelsea said. ‘Breaking the bones then binding them up so they’d fuse together instead of healing properly.’
‘Maybe you can get it reset,’ Jay said.
‘I hope so,’ Chelsea said. ‘At least Coral hasn’t started in on my legs yet.’
‘Can she walk?’ Robert asked.
Chelsea tried to stand up, leaning heavily on her good hand. It didn’t look like she could manage that. Jay stepped forwards, picking up his gun and slipping his free hand around her waist. She draped her arm around his shoulders.
‘Cool,’ Robert said. ‘Can we go now?’
‘I thought you wanted to clean the place out?’
‘We can come back during daylight,’ Robert said.
‘The car’s outside, sweetie,’ Jay said. ‘Think you can make it that far?’
‘I hope so,’ Chelsea said. ‘Wait a minute, though.’
She paused to gather herself, then kicked the chest of drawers hard enough to send the items it was supporting flying. Some of them bounced, but the boombox shattered. Thom Yorke’s keening cut off mid yowl, along with the mix of bad jazz and worse electronica he was moaning along to.
‘I’ve been listening to that shit for hours,’ she explained. ‘Rachael knows how much I hate them.’
The three remaining vampires were waiting in front of the door. Jared was sure that he’d been cut by all three, while he’d been chained up at Faulchion Close. It was obvious who was in charge: she stood in front of the other two with her arms folded over her Dolce and Gabbana’d chest. She looked younger than one of her sidekicks; but then Chelsea didn’t seem to have gained any weight or acquired any laugh lines over the previous five years.
‘You must be a glutton for punishment,’ she said to Jay. ‘Was he a masochist when you went out with him, Chelsea?’
The noise Robert’s gun made going off took everybody by surprise. The nine hadn’t been anything like as loud. The head vampire’s shoulder all but disintegrated into a violet mist. Jay doubted that she was dead, but she still collapsed. He gathered himself up enough to shoot, dropping Chelsea in order to brace the gun firmly as one of the others rushed at him.
Jay fired more or less at random, but he got lucky. The vampire’s face, pretty in a slightly pinched, mean way, vanished as he pulled the trigger. She still slammed into him with enough force to knock him over, but she’d been transformed into dead weight during the course of her leap. He struggled to push her off without dropping his gun or firing off its remaining shell. Her frizzy blonde hair was stiff with violet blood, and the shotgun blast seemed to have excavated most of her skull. Jay could see glints of yellow through the pulpy ruin in the back of her head. He assumed that they were bone. Most of her face and her brain was all over his shirt. His wrist hurt, and he could feel a bruise forming where the shotgun’s stock had been pressed into the crook of his arm.
Robert dropped to one knee as the remaining vampire hurtled towards him, but having fired once, he couldn’t shoot as quickly a second time. The vampire pushed the gun’s long barrels to one side, then smiled coldly and yanked hard on them. Robert managed to loosen his grip before the gun took his trigger finger with it.
The vampire smiled nastily, then rammed the gun’s butt hard into his throat. Robert collapsed, gasping. She twirled its length one-handed, as though it was a cheerleader’s baton, then shoved the barrel into his abdomen and fired off the remaining shell. Robert had a moment of unendurable agony before his central nervous system shut down and he went into shock. From his viewpoint, it stretched out into eternity, but from the perspective of those watching, it only took a couple of seconds for Robert’s world to go out for good.
Jay struggled to his feet and shot at Robert’s killer. This time, he didn’t get lucky, and missed her by a mile. He heard something ceramic shatter off to one side as she fled into the depths of the warehouse. Jay dropped the shotgun and bent over Robert. The nine was stuck into his belt. Jay tugged it loose and walked over to the vampire that Robert had winged. She was pushing herself up on one arm, her other shoulder no longer existing. Her breath hissed and wheezed like Darth Vader after an evening abusing solvents. It sounded like Robert’s shot had collapsed one of her lungs. Anyone else would have gone into shock the second the shot had punched a lump that size out of them, and died a short time later.
‘Bastard,’ she said. Her voice was strangled by a lack of wind. Small wonder that she hadn’t managed to flee yet. For all Jay knew, Robert may well have already killed her. His experiences at Faulchion Close flitted through Jay’s head, and he decided to hurry her along. The decision didn’t make him feel all that good about himself, but he decided to stick with it.
‘I should not be dying like this,’ the vampire queen wheezed.
‘Life is full of disappointments,’ Jay replied.
Her skull didn’t explode as thoroughly as her colleague’s had, but with the pistol’s muzzle pressed to her forehead, one bullet was adequate to blow out the back of her skull. Jay let the handgun jerk in his hand a couple more times before he released his grip on the trigger.
Jay turned to see Chelsea with her face buried in the gaping hole in Robert’s gut. ‘Christ’s sake,
Chelsea,’ he said. Chelsea pulled her face out of the hole. Covered in blood and pulped intestines, it didn’t look any better. Jay was glad he was past feeling sick by now.
‘I need this,’ Chelsea said. ‘I’ve been starved for two days now.’
‘Could you get his jacket off before you go any further?’ Jay asked. ‘He has more shells in there.’
‘You’re going after Michelle?’
‘It’s better than her coming after us, isn’t it? I get the impression your friends are the sort who bear grudges.’
Chelsea’s laugh was tinged with more than a hint of hysteria. ‘You could say that,’ she managed to choke out. She unzipped Robert’s jacket and tossed a handful of fat, waxy cylinders onto the floor. Jay cracked his gun’s breech open.
‘If I reload the other, too, would you be able to fire it one-handed?’
‘The way I feel now? No. Maybe after I’ve drained Robert, Coral and Sophie.’
‘Fine.’ Jay reloaded the shotgun and snapped it shut. ‘Are there any more guns in here?’
‘No. Coral hated them. She was worried that somebody might make a power play if they were tooled up. It’s a lot easier to hurt us with a gun than it is without.’
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