Dan began to turn the heavy iron key.
Slowly.
Quietly.
Wincing as he eased the ancient tumblers to the unlocked position.
Finally, after what felt like an eternity to Herb, Dan began to twist the handle.
And the door flew open, smashing him aside like a ragdoll.
He crashed across the table they had moved moments earlier, slamming into a cabinet. Going down hard, and disappearing from sight.
The vampire came in without hesitation, and Herb turned and fled blindly, throwing himself behind a counter.
The world became chaos.
The creature shrieking; the hideous noise echoing off the tiled walls, reverberating and multiplying until it seemed endless.
Glass breaking.
Lights winking out.
The sound of flesh tearing.
A strangled yelp.
Herb flipped onto his back as the room plunged into near-total darkness, and fired several rounds from the pistols wildly, aiming at nothing and everything in his terror.
One of the guns clicked.
Empty, Herb thought, and he tossed the weapon aside and put the barrel of the other against his temple, gasping at the searing heat of the metal on his skin.
It had been a desperate plan. Trying to trick a vampire like it was a child. Desperate…and doomed. Herb’s command of what remained of the Order had lasted a matter of hours, and he had led them directly into disaster, making every wrong decision it was possible to make. All were dead, save for handful, and the man he had sworn he was going to save was instead going to die. Again.
I’m no leader, he thought, and his finger curled around the trigger.
He squeezed his eyes shut.
No hero.
*
Shreds of light bled through from the outside world, squirming around the edges of the shuttered windows, bouncing off chrome surfaces.
Half-illuminating the abomination as it moved with appalling purpose.
The creature charged into the centre of the room, raking its talons through the gut of one of Herb’s followers. Jay, Dan thought, oddly detached from the unfolding horror. I remembered his name, after all.
The vampire leapt away from Jay’s still-standing corpse as gunfire ricocheted through the kitchen: a deafening thunder that made Dan’s ears ring. Muzzle flashes that threw bright, fleeting light on Jay as he began to fall, spilling something heavy and liquid from the gaping hole torn across his abdomen.
And it began.
As familiar anxiety at first; fear which hit him like an oncoming train, before twisting into something darker and less familiar.
With a roar, Dan hauled himself to his feet, striding forward and batting a gun from Herb’s hand as he placed it against his own temple.
“Eyes shut,” he snarled, his mouth delivering the command his brain hadn’t been aware of, and he leapt for the knife rack, his fingers closing around a cold steel handle.
A cleaver.
Of course. That made sense.
Because the nightmare which had begun on the Oceanus wasn’t over. He was still there, in the thick of it, thrashing; trying to break free of the madness. Locked inside a mind that was slowly crumbling to pieces as it tried to withstand the insanity of the world.
He turned, and saw the vampire attached to the ceiling like a dreadful, enormous insect, untroubled by gravity. It held another of Herb’s followers by the neck, his feet dangling at least four feet above the ground, and before Dan could move a muscle, the monster sliced through the man’s throat like ripe fruit. His body fell, an obscene torrent of dark blood pumping from the space where his head had been moments earlier.
The abomination snorted out something that might have been a laugh as it tossed the cleric’s head aside.
And drilled its eyes into Dan.
He felt a sickening sensation erupt in his mind; a terrible sort of pulling, as if the creature had hooked invisible claws into his brain and was trying to wrench it from his skull. As Dan watched, transfixed, the creature’s eyes seemed to glow, becoming strangely hypnotic, and the awful pulling in his head grew stronger, until Dan felt sure that his skull was about to explode.
The vampire dropped down onto the tiled floor.
Took a step toward him.
Click.
*
Herb watched it happen as an orbiting satellite might observe the destruction of the planet: detached and distant; separated from the insanity somehow. He couldn’t persuade his muscles to move, couldn’t even draw a breath into lungs that burned with the desire to power a scream.
Dan Bellamy wasn’t special at all.
The vampire stalked toward him casually, and Dan just…stood there. Staring at it; a huge cleaver dangling from limp fingers, his jaw slack; his eyes wide.
It has taken his mind, Herb thought in dull terror. Edgar was wrong. I was wrong. And now we’re all going to die.
Click.
Click.
The vampire took another couple of steps forward on those hideous, angular legs.
And it stopped.
For a moment, Herb gaped, bewildered, as the vampire and Dan stared into each other’s eyes.
And then Dan screamed.
Lifted the cleaver high above his head.
And charged.
*
His timing was off.
The creature whipped to the right as he swung the cleaver, and the blade landed only a glancing blow on the monster’s neck. He switched his grip on the handle, and swung again; a sweeping backhand that a tennis pro would have admired, and a bestial roar erupted from his lungs as the blade carved itself a home in the side of the vampire’s hateful head, lodging so deep in the thing’s cheek that when the vampire began to fall, it was impossible for him to maintain his grip on the weapon.
Shattering pain erupted in Dan’s belly.
He stared down, blinking stupidly.
Tried to process the sight of the three wicked talons buried in his stomach, and the awful tearing sensation as the creature’s weight dragged the hideous weapons away from his flesh.
A spatter of blood hit the tiles.
My blood.
So much—
And then Dan, too, began to fall.
The darkness took him before he landed.
*
Herb watched in a daze as both Dan and the vampire crashed to the floor. The room looked more like an abattoir now than a kitchen; bodies and blood and death piled in every corner.
The remaining three clerics—Lawrence, Scott and Adrian—stared at the twitching monster in horrified fascination, watching as it reached up a hand with a snort, gripping the handle of the cleaver that had split its skull almost in two, and tried to pull the blade out.
It screamed, and thick, black blood oozed from the wound like treacle.
It took Herb a moment to realise that the creature wasn’t dying, or if it was, it was doing so slowly.
That moment was long enough.
Adrian picked up a large carving knife from a counter and took a step toward the convulsing abomination, his face twisted in terror as he stared down at it.
“No!” Herb screamed. “Don’t look at it!”
Too late.
Adrian lifted the wicked blade high.
Drove the business end into the side of his own head.
Herb looked away in despair as the cleric dropped to the floor, and the vampire began to roll toward the rear of the kitchen, still clutching at the steel that had penetrated its skull. It scrambled out of sight behind the island in the centre of the room, melting into the thick shadows.
“Get Bellamy!” he hollered, loud enough to shake Lawrence and Scott from their stupor, and he sprinted across the slick tiles to Dan’s inert body.
You can’t die. You can’t.
There was no time to check Dan’s injuries; to determine whether it was safe to move him. It certainly wasn’t safe not to.
Herb grabbed a handful of
Dan’s thick sweater, trying not to notice how heavy and sticky with the man’s blood it was, and began to heave, his feet slipping. Despite his slim frame, Bellamy was dead weight, and Herb made little headway until Lawrence appeared in front of him and grabbed the unconscious man’s ankles.
Somewhere in the shadows to the rear of the kitchen, the injured vampire shrieked. In the metal-and-tile kitchen, the noise was impossibly loud, otherworldly.
It might have been a sound born of pain.
Might have been determination or murderous desire or rage.
Herb didn’t want to find out.
“We have to go,” he roared.
18
When Conny reached Euston Station’s main hall, her jaw dropped.
The hall was filling up with police officers: a dizzying vortex of uniforms representing a myriad of units and boroughs. She couldn’t guess at exactly how many of her colleagues there were gathering below the departure boards, but it had to be north of two hundred.
This is a lot bigger than some guy going nuts with a length of rebar.
Yet it wasn’t just the sheer number of police present that made her skin prickle: the atmosphere in the room itself was rotten with tension. As she moved away from the escalators, toward the bulk of the gathering force, Conny caught the eye of several officers and shot them a quizzical glance. Each time she received only an abrupt head shake in return. By the look of the confused expressions on the faces Conny saw, no one had much more of a clue about why they were there than she did.
Remy’s chain hung slackly in her left hand. The dog should have been alert in the presence of so many police officers—curious at the very least—but Remy simply hovered at Conny’s side, staring back at the escalator that led down toward the distant crime scene. His behaviour was unnatural, almost like he had been struck by some sudden illness. She couldn’t remember ever seeing the dog so subdued.
Conny began to move toward the crowd and scanned the room, hoping to spot either somebody that she knew, or the Chief Superintendent that the Inspector heading to the platform had mentioned, but it was her ears that grabbed her attention, not her eyes.
A nearby constable, who looked like he’d only been on the job a year at most, muttered ominously that his brother worked out of Scotland Yard, and had told him that the army had been called in.
Someone else said they had heard of incidents in other cities.
“It started in Morden,” Conny heard another voice whispering quietly. “The guy with the knife, you heard about that?”
Conny frowned. The spree killing at the South London supermarket a couple of hours earlier was a big deal, of course, and she was certain that the tragedy would dominate the national headlines for days to come, but she wasn’t sure why that incident would prompt the Metropolitan Police to send such a large group of officers to the London Underground. Morden was the very last stop on the Northern Line, way out in zone six. Far away from Euston.
“He was the start. I heard there have been other incidents. And the news is talking about a cruise ship being attacked. Blown up. It’s terrorists...”
A cruise ship? Conny hadn’t heard anything over the radio about it.
She glanced up. Above the departure boards, a large television screen displayed the latest news. There was no volume, but there was indeed a stone-faced newscaster sitting in front of a picture of a huge cruise ship. Along the bottom of the screen, a headline read Tragedy in the Atlantic.
What the hell would that have to do with this?
A murmur rippled through a group of officers standing to her left, catching her attention, and when she tore her gaze away from the TV screen, she finally spotted some senior uniforms in the distance. Before she could move toward them, Conny saw the group exchanging troubled glances and quickly exiting the hall. They stood outside in the rain, talking animatedly in hushed tones. Lots of gesticulating.
The tension in the hall jacked up a notch.
Far to her right, Conny heard a loud bark and searched through the bodies, finally catching sight of the dog. His name was Jackson, and Conny knew his handler, Robert Nelson. Several weeks earlier, Nelson had asked Conny if she would like to go to dinner, and she had rejected him more bluntly than she had intended. He seemed like a nice guy, but he had terrible timing.
A conversation between them would be awkward. Conny sighed. Dogs were so much easier than people. She made a mental note to keep it brief, and she pushed through the crowd with Remy trotting along behind her, apparently happy to be on the move once more.
Robert looked like he was having trouble keeping Jackson calm. The dog was a German Shepherd, just like Remy, but noticeably smaller. Jackson’s specialty was his nose: he was one of the best sniffers on the Force.
Robert looked up as Conny approached, and his face crumbled into a weak grin.
“Uh, hi, Cornelia. How are you?”
“Robert,” she nodded. “Do you know what’s going on?”
His smile faded. “Probably no more than you, but whatever it is, it’s big. And this isn’t the only station involved. All available officers, right?”
Conny stared at him, baffled, and he frowned.
“You didn’t hear it on the radio?”
“I was…busy.”
“Well, you didn’t miss much. All I know is that people have been going missing on the—”
A loud murmur passed through the crowd, cutting him off, and Conny turned to see the senior officers striding back into the room wearing stricken expressions. A man with a beard, who was wearing what Conny thought was a Chief Superintendent’s uniform, gestured to somebody that she couldn’t see.
A moment later, the murmuring of the crowd became a loud chatter.
Someone was handing out firearms, pulling them from a secure crate and distributing them to men and women who looked equal-parts horrified and excited at the prospect of arming themselves.
And all Conny could do was stare.
Heckler and Koch G36. Assault rifle. Thirty-round magazines. Five-point-Five-Six Calibre. Able to switch between semi- and full-automatic. A work of art.
MP5SF. Submachine gun. Capable of firing seven-fucking-hundred silenced nine-mil rounds per minute. Single, burst or continuous fire. The MP5 was a stubby, hissing snake of a weapon, and Conny thought it was perhaps the most beautiful thing she had ever seen.
Some of the firearms were held casually, with the easy grip of familiarity. Others were clutched in hands that shook, just a little. Guns were not routine for British police, not even in the country’s capital city. There would be plenty of anxious men and women there, Conny thought, facing the prospect of their first firefight.
Including me.
Many of the more senior police officers in the main hall took an assault rifle, and being surrounded by all that firepower made her feel dizzy with longing.
She blinked in surprise when a man wearing a Lieutenant’s uniform stepped directly in front of her and pressed a Glock 17 into her palm.
She stared at it, open-mouthed.
Moulded polymer casing. Seventeen nine-millimetre parabolic rounds. Under-barrel tac-light.
It was heavy; solid.
So beautiful.
The gun fit into Conny’s palm like it had been custom-made for her.
“Have you been trained with automatic weapons?”
Conny shook her head slowly, her eyes distant; focused only on the Glock. She had developed a parent-troubling love of guns and weaponry at around the time that girls were supposed to be dreaming of owning ponies, and had fired automatic weapons on ranges on several occasions, but had never carried a firearm in the line of duty. Once, carrying that sort of firepower regularly had been her ultimate goal, but that was before she had been partnered with Remy, and had seen what a thinking weapon was capable of.
And now, here she was, being handed a pistol in the middle of a real-life situation that she had no grasp of whatsoever.
Damn, though, the gun did feel powerful. Into
xicating.
“Constable. Constable?”
Conny blinked and looked at the Lieutenant.
“You stay at the rear, you understand? The ideal scenario here is you handing that weapon back to me fully loaded.”
She nodded.
The Lieutenant dropped his gaze to Remy.
“He a sniffer?”
“Crowd control, Sir.”
“Hmm. Well, that might prove just as useful.”
He began to move away.
“Sir,” Conny said, blurting out the word before she had even realised she was about to speak. “What’s happening?”
The Lieutenant arched an eyebrow and glanced back at her. She saw impatience in his eyes, and something else, too. Uncertainty, maybe.
“You didn’t hear on the radio?”
Conny shook her head.
“We were dealing with a violent—”
The Lieutenant interrupted her with an irritated gesture. He nodded toward the front of the hall, and the group of senior officers gathering beneath the departure boards.
“Eyes front,” he said. “Briefing any second, now.”
He turned away before Conny nodded, and slipped into the crowd, searching for any other unarmed officers.
Moments later, a voice called out.
“Quiet!”
The excited chatter which had filled the hall as the weapons were being handed out died away immediately.
Conny moved forward and lifted to her tiptoes, peering over the heads of those in front of her. A bearded man of around forty-five with a grave expression held his left hand aloft. It was the man she had seen moments earlier giving the order to pass out the guns.
“Chief Superintendent Porter,” the bearded man said. “Some of you know me. For the rest of you, I’m sorry we’re meeting under these circumstances.” He took a deep breath. “In the last hour, deaths have been reported at a number of Underground stations. Maintenance staff, working in the tunnels, have not returned from their shifts. At present, there are at least sixteen people unaccounted for. Three of the missing members of staff did return, and none of them have lived longer than a couple of minutes. All have committed suicide, usually after attempting—and in a couple of cases succeeding—to take the lives of others first.”
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