by William Hill
There was a soft thump behind her, and she felt her dad’s arms tense. She twisted, looked across the room, and bit her lip, hard enough that she tasted blood in her mouth. Otherwise she would have surely screamed again.
Standing in front of her bedroom window was a middle-aged man. He was wearing a pair of tattered blue jeans, so full of holes it seemed that they were holding together through sheer force of will alone. The rest of him was naked, although very little of his skin could be seen. His emaciated body was covered in tattoos, long loops and whorls of blue-black ink that stretched up and down both of his arms, across his narrow chest and concave stomach. Words she didn’t recognize mingled with pictures of screaming faces, skeletal wings, and patterns so intricate they made her head swim. Hair hung from his head in black greasy locks that rested on his chest. His face was inhuman, with blazing red eyes that stared at her from sunken sockets.
The man opened his mouth and let out a deafening screech; Kate saw bright white fangs protruding from below his upper lip, and fear flooded into her as a series of answering screeches floated through the window on the cold evening air.
Like animals calling to each other, Pete thought. My God, what is this?
He pushed his trembling daughter behind him and faced the creature. “What do you want?” he asked, shocked at how small and weak his voice sounded. “We have no money here.”
The thing by the window twisted its head left and right, its mouth curled into a grin of pure delight, as if Pete had told the most delicious joke.
“I want you,” it answered. “I want to make you bleed.” It smiled again, then walked toward them.
“Kate, go!” shouted Pete, reaching back over his shoulder and yanking the bedroom door open, never taking his eyes off the thing that was slowly approaching, a look of terrible calm on its nightmare face.
“No, Dad,” she screamed.
“Now!” he bellowed. “Don’t argue with me!”
Kate let out a scream of pure terror and fled through the door. Pete heard her rattle down the stairs and throw open the front door.
At least she’s safe, he thought. The thing was less than a three feet away from him, its arms out before it, a look of inevitability on its face. Pete ducked under the arms, noting as he did so in the slow-motion attention to detail that comes with panic, that the fingernails on the thing’s hands were thick yellow talons. He spun around the open door and made for the landing.
One of the thin, ink-covered arms looped through the opening and slammed across his throat, pulling him back against the wood of the door, cutting off his air supply. Pete Randall dipped at the waist, then drove himself backward with all the breath he had left. The door swung in a sharp semicircle on its hinge, and he heard a satisfying crunch as the thing was driven hard into the bedroom wall. The arm around his throat came loose, and he shoved it away.
He stepped forward into the bedroom, one hand on his neck, and kicked the door closed. The thing slid down the wall, leaving a thick smear of blood behind. Pete looked down at it.
The metal doorknob had pierced the thing below its ribcage, and blood was running from the wound in dark rivers. The white fangs had been driven through the thing’s bottom lip by the impact, and crimson streamed down its chin and neck. Its eyes were closed.
Pete looked at it, breathing heavy, the pain in his throat worsening by the second. He reached for the door, ready to follow his daughter down the stairs and out of the house, when the thing laughed. It was a terrible noise, full of pain and cruelty. The red eyes opened and regarded Pete calmly.
“Stay and play,” it said, the fangs sliding out of its lip. “There’s nowhere for you to go. I’ll make it quick.” It spit a thick wad of blood onto the carpet. “Can’t say the same for the girl, mind you,” it said, then winked at Pete, who kicked the thing in the face as hard as he could. He heard its nose snap, heard it scream in pain, and then he was moving, out of the bedroom and down the stairs, through the open front door.
Kate was nowhere to be seen.
Nononononono.
Panic rose through his stomach and settled into his chest.
“Kate!” he yelled. “Where are you? Kate!”
He ran down their narrow road toward the Marsdens’ house.
She’ll have gone for a phone, he told himself. She’ll have gone to the neighbors. Please let her be at the neighbors.
He kicked open the gate and ran up the short driveway toward the house. He had reached the three wooden steps that led up to the front door when something fell to the ground in front of him with a horrible crunching thud, and something warm sprayed across his face and chest. Pete shrieked, throwing his hands up to his face and wiping the liquid from his skin. He looked down at the ground in front of him, and Mrs. Marsden stared back up at him from wide, lifeless eyes. There were two ragged holes in her throat, and the white dressing gown she was wearing looked like it had been dipped in blood.
He heard a triumphant screech and looked up. Staring down at him from the attic window was a woman’s face, the lower half smeared with red, the crimson eyes wide and devoid of humanity. The face jerked back from the window, and he heard footsteps inside the house.
Pete Randall fled. He turned and ran back the way he had come, now hearing for the first time the sounds of violence and pain that were drifting from every part of the island, a terrible cacophony of screeches, breaking glass and screams.
So many screams.
He reached the gate at a flat sprint, and when his daughter stepped out in front of him, he threw himself to his right, crashing hard onto the pavement. He would have run straight over her if he hadn’t.
“Dad!” she screamed, and then she was crouched next to him, asking him if he was all right. He sat up, ignoring the grinding pain in his right arm where he had landed on it, and hugged her so tightly she could barely breathe.
“Where did you go?” he sobbed. “I couldn’t find you.”
“I went to the Coopers’,” she gasped, crushed against her father’s chest. “I went to the Coopers’. There’s no one there. There’s blood. .. so much blood.”
Pete let go of her and stood up, unsteadily. He was about to ask her if she was all right when the door to the Marsdens’ house slammed open, and the woman he had seen in the attic window howled at them. There was an answering call, terribly close, and Kate looked around and saw the thing that had come into her bedroom walking down the road toward them, blood covering its face and neck. She scrambled to her feet, then her father took her hand, and they ran down the hill toward the center of the village.
Floating fifty feet above the top of the hill on which the village was built, Alexandru surveyed the carnage beneath him. Maybe half the villagers were already dead, and those who had survived the initial attack were fleeing toward the dock and the boats that would carry them off the island. He supposed a few of them would make it, and that was fine. They would add weight to the message he was sending.
He spun gently in the cold air and looked across the hill that formed the middle of the island, at the ancient stone building standing above the cliffs against which the North Sea crashed in plumes of white spray.
Tonight’s work has barely begun, he thought, and permitted himself a small smile. He pulled a silver phone from his pocket, and keyed a number.
“Brother,” he said, when the call was answered. “You may proceed.”
In the village streets below, panic gripped the surviving islanders. They ran for their lives along the narrow roads, heading for the small dock that served the island’s fishing fleet, stumbling in the gathering dark, staring wildly in every direction, screaming the names of husbands and wives, parents and children.
Pete Randall sprinted down the hill toward the concrete dock, hurdling the bodies that were lying in the narrow road, forcing himself not to look at them. Every one of the island’s one hundred and sixty inhabitants knew each other, and he knew that he was running around and over the lifeless corpses of his friends and neighbors. Kate
ran beside him. Her face was pale, but her eyes were bright, and Pete felt a rush of love for his daughter.
How did she get so strong? he marveled. I won the bloody lottery with her.
Men and women were streaming out of the houses, some screaming, others weeping and sobbing, running and stumbling down the hill. Dark shapes moved among them, floating across the cobblestones, lifting them shrieking off their feet as they ran. Blood pattered to the ground in a soft crimson rain.
On the dock John Tremain, the island’s biggest fisherman, had reached his boat. The Lady Diana occupied the largest berth at the end of the horseshoe-shaped dock, and acrid blue smoke was pluming out of her weather-beaten funnel as the big diesel engines roared into life.
“Hurry!” Tremain yelled from the deck. He was holding the mooring ropes in his gnarled hands, ready to cast off. “I’m not waiting! Move!”
The desperate, panicked group of islanders ran toward him.
Pete and Kate were the first on to the slippery concrete of the dock. On the ground in front of them lay the twisted body of a teenage girl, and Kate slowed as they approached the corpse. Pete grabbed her wrist and hauled her forward.
“Keep moving!” he yelled. “Get to the boat!”
“It’s Julie!” Kate cried. “We can’t leave her here.”
Kate’s best friend, realized Pete. Oh God.
Kate yanked her hand out of his and skidded to a halt next to the girl’s body. Pete swore, turned back to grab his daughter, but was forced backward as the fleeing, terrified survivors cannoned into him, blindly running for the boat. He screamed and punched and kicked as hands gripped him, but the flow of people was relentless, and he was driven back along the dock.
Through the crowd, he saw his daughter kneel down next to the corpse, reach out and gently touch the girl’s face. He screamed her name, helplessly, as he was dragged over the boat’s rail, but Kate didn’t even seem to hear him.
There was a thud, and a dark shape landed on the dock, between Kate and the running crowd. She leapt to her feet, the paralyzing shock of seeing her friend’s body broken. She looked for her father and saw him being hauled onto the Lady Diana, kicking and screaming her name. In front of her was the terrible thing from her bedroom, its skeletal body drenched in blood. It flashed her a hideous lustful smile, and without hesitation, she turned and ran back toward the village.
Pete saw Kate sprint away up the dock and disappear into the darkness, and he threw his head back and howled, a scream of utter desperation. He fought with renewed strength against the hands that held him, but it was too late.
John Tremain threw the mooring ropes into the water and ran up the steps to the small cabin above the deck. He threw the Lady Diana into gear, and the big propellers churned water as the boat slowly, terribly slowly, began to move away from the island.
Pete Randall threw himself at the stern rail as the Lady Diana picked up speed and the dock disappeared into the darkness.
“Kate!” he screamed. “Kate!”
But there was no answer.
His daughter was gone.
37
AT THE ROOF OF THE WORLD
SPC Central Command
Kola Peninsula, Russia
Thirty-five minutes ago
Valeri Rusmanov thanked his brother, then closed his cell phone.
His heavy boots crunched snow beneath his feet as he crested the hill, and paused. The freezing night air was still. There was a gentle lapping from the Murmansk fjord to his left, the black water visible through a spider web of cracks in the thick, dirty-gray ice. An icebreaker slowly ground its way up the middle of the fjord, clearing a dark strip of open water, belching diesel smoke from its funnels.
Directly ahead of him, perhaps five miles away, was the closed city of Polyarny. The gray industrial town was dominated by the tall cranes and sodium arc lights of Russian Shipyard Number 10, the top-secret submarine base. During the Cold War, Soviet Typhoons and Akulas had slipped out from Polyarny and disappeared under the Arctic ice, hidden from the watchful eyes of the American satellites.
In the distance, to the southeast, Valeri could make out the dull yellow glow of Murmansk, the home port of the Russian Northern Fleet. The administrative center of the Kola Peninsula was not officially a closed city, but the FSB station in the city was the third largest in Russia, and the whole region was littered with checkpoints and armed patrols.
This huge, barren swathe of Arctic wilderness was the heartland of the classified Russian military community. But the horseshoe of white buildings that filled the small peninsula below him, and what lay beneath them, were worth the risk.
The SPC base was arranged around a long runway that ran parallel to the ridge of cliffs to the north. The gray tarmac was clear, the snow that had covered it piled in long banks on either side. To the south, a long line of ancient firs hid the base entirely from the narrow road that wound toward Polyarny. A tall electrified fence ran through the trees, a small guard post and heavy metal gate at the center the only clue to passing civilians that anything lay beyond the thick forest. A squat white building sat at the eastern end of the runway. Valeri knew that beneath the frozen ground the base was a single enormous bunker, guarded by the elite SPC soldiers, and home to the scientists, analysts and intelligence officers who served the Supernatural Protection Commissariat.
Snow thudded against his black greatcoat, dampening the wool and settling around his ankles as he watched the silent base. He whispered two words and a large number of dark shapes dropped from the sky behind him, landing softly in the snow. “Do you all know what I require from you?” he asked, without turning round.
There was a general murmur of assent, and then a single low voice said, “Yes, Master.”
Valeri’s eyes flickered shut, and a grimace spread across his face.
It was Talia’s voice. The beautiful young Ukrainian girl had been with him for a year, since he had turned her in a moment of lonely weakness, a moment that he had come to deeply regret. The girl followed him everywhere, her blank, pretty eyes staring at him with open devotion, her soft, pleading voice asking if there was anything he needed, anything she could do for him.
He supposed she loved him, or believed that she did, but she was wasting her time. Valeri had only ever loved one woman, and she had been gone for more than half a century.
“Very well,” he said. “It’s time.”
He stepped lightly into the night air, his greatcoat billowing out behind him. Below him the base was quiet, the lights casting pale yellow semi-circles on the snow.
Valeri swept down the hill toward it, his army of followers behind him, a wide, silent shadow full of death.
In the SPC control room a heat bloom appeared on the surveillance screen of Private Len Yurov. The signature was like nothing he had seen before, a wide band of dark red flowing across the blue-white topography of the tundra, so he called the Duty Officer, General Yuri Petrov, over to look at his screen. The General, a thick-set man in his early sixties, who had spent the majority of his illustrious career with the Spetsnaz, the elite special forces unit that had been controlled by the KGB, and later the FSB, strode over to Yurov’s console and looked at the monitor. His eyes widened, and he called instantly for the general alarm to be sounded.
But it was already too late.
At the perimeter of the SPC base, crunching through the drifts of snow that had gathered at the foot of the electrified fence that ran high above their heads, Sergeant Pavel Luzhny was engaged in a heated discussion with his partner, Private Vladimir Radchenko, about the result of the previous night’s basketball game. Luzhny, a die-hard CSKA Moscow supporter, was lamenting the performance of his team’s point guard, a young man who the Sergeant had wasted no time in pointing out had Chechen blood on his mother’s side. The hapless player had missed three of the final four free throws in the previous night’s game, and his team had slumped to a 112-110 loss against Triumph Lyubertsy. Luzhny, a native Muscovite, was not taki
ng the defeat at all well. He had moved on to listing the tactical errors made by the team’s coach when the alarm wailed across the freezing night. He instantly grabbed his radio from its loop on his belt, keyed a series of numbers, and held it to his ear, looking down at the base as he did so. An automatic voice in his ear told him that the base had been moved to red alert, so he slid his other hand to his waist and freed the SIG Sauer pistol that hung there.
“Training exercise,” he said, turning back to Radchenko. “I’ll bet my-”
Radchenko wasn’t there.
Luzhny turned in a full circle, looking for his partner. There was no sign of him. Radchenko’s footsteps were clearly visible in the deep snow, two lines marching in parallel to Luzhny’s own. Then they stopped. There were no tracks in any direction, just a final pair of footprints, then nothing.
“What the hell?” muttered Luzhny.
Then he was airborne, as something grabbed him beneath his armpits and jerked him violently upwards. His trigger finger convulsed, and he fired the pistol empty, the bullets thudding into the rapidly receding ground. Luzhny didn’t scream, until he felt fingers crawl across his throat and dig for purchase. Then the fingers, which were tipped with nails that felt like razor blades, pulled his throat out, and he could no longer have screamed, even if he had wanted to.
The external microphones in the control room picked up the pistol shots, and Petrov tapped a series of keys on the console in front of him. The huge wall-screen that dominated the room separated into eight sections, each one showing a silent black and white view from the perimeter cameras. As the men in the control room watched, a black shape flitted across one of the cameras, then its picture disappeared into a hissing mass of white noise. Moments later, a second screen fizzed out, then a third, then a fourth.
“Send the general alert,” said Petrov, his eyes never leaving the screen. “Call for immediate assistance.”
“But sir-”
“That’s a direct order, Private. Do it right now. And summon the guard regiment. There isn’t much time.”