‘Annalise? What are you doing here?’ He stayed on top of her, pinning her, enjoying the warmth of her body: enjoying the power of having her under his control.
‘I don’t know – I couldn’t resist coming here. It was like I was being …’
‘Summoned?’ Sam asked her knowingly.
‘Yes, summoned.’
‘Do you feel different?’
‘I … yes. I feel stronger. Hungrier. What’s happening?’
Sam said, ‘Can you see me?’
‘Of course I can see you. What sort of a stupid question is that? Why aren’t you wearing any clothes?’
‘It’s dark as sin in here, Annalise. You shouldn’t be able to see anything.’ Sam watched her face as realisation dawned.
‘I hadn’t … I’ve been confused …’ Her words trailed away. ‘What’s going on?’
‘I don’t know. I was bitten, and now I am a god.’
‘You bit me. In the hotel room. On the thigh.’
Sam heard Tabby’s breathing change, and he laughed out loud. He’d hit her, kidnapped her, brought her to this hellhole, and she still found it in herself to be outraged that he had slept with another woman. ‘Come with me,’ he said to Annalise. He stood up and went back to Tabby. Effortlessly, he threw his wife over a shoulder.
‘Who’s that?’ Annalise asked.
‘She is my wife. Now she’s the Master’s meat.’ Annalise followed him through the abandoned station to the birthing pits. Amongst the cries and screams of the abducted women, there were now growls and roars, and the noise of snapping bone and rending flesh. The big room was thick with the smell of blood and ruptured bowels, of misery and despair. Sam revelled in it. He walked to an empty pit and threw Tabby into it. She landed heavily, and a moan of pain and terror escaped from behind her gag.
‘What now?’ Annalise asked.
‘We have to lock ourselves in tonight. But first, I’m going to fuck you here, where that simpering whore I married can hear us.’
Annalise began unbuttoning her shirt. ‘Okay,’ she said with a nasty smile.
The night vision goggles gave the derelict building a weird green glow. Mark observed silently as Autumn pushed the girl over the lip of the hole. He watched dispassionately for a couple of minutes, and then made his careful way out of the station.
Once he was back beneath the night sky, he took deep gulps of air to try and clear the filth from his nose. Walking quickly back to his car, he slipped the goggles from his face and massaged his temples with his free hand. Mark was shaken. He had watched Autumn take his hostage inside and had slipped in after him silently, using a pair of AN/PVS-14 goggles – the US Army’s preferred monocular night vision device – to see with. The goggles came from the specialist kit in the Corvette; he had the two Browning pistols with him too. Though he didn’t know what effect they might have on Autumn, he reasoned that a bullet in the brainpan was likely to slow most things down. Hell, he had thought he might shoot Autumn a couple of times just for good measure.
Sneaking in and rescuing Tabitha had seemed like a good idea. After seeing the other creatures that infested this place, he had changed his mind.
There was a thump from somewhere above him, and a concussive blast of air nearly knocked him to the ground. He looked up into the night and had a brief vision of something large moving off to the south. He pulled his goggles back to his face but by the time he had them set, whatever it was had vanished. A small plane flying very low perhaps? Somehow, he doubted it.
Shrugging, Mark reached into the glove compartment and got his phone. He leaned against the side of the car and dialled a number. While it rang, he looked at his watch. It was nearly four. The sun would be rising in four hours. The call connected.
‘Sergei?’
‘Mr. Jones.’
‘I’ve found the girl. She’s at an abandoned building in Manchester City Centre. Do you have the coordinates for all the places I have been tonight?’
‘Yes Sir.’
‘Good. I want you to go to the address Autumn went to earlier. There’s a young man there. I want you to pick him up and take him back to my house. I will meet you there.’
‘What about the girl, Sir?’
He thought about the pit and the two things fucking beside it. ‘It’s bad, Sergei. We’ve got a lot of work to do when the sun comes up.’
Sunday
The news channel concentrated solely on the north-west. Mark watched glumly as the headline banner rolled past slowly at the bottom of the screen. The anchor was speaking excitedly about three murders. A young man had been found dismembered yesterday afternoon. A dead body had been found in the Hilton Hotel in the early evening. Another murder victim had turned up in a field in Yorkshire this morning.
The Hilton Hotel victim had not yet been identified. The young man was a shop assistant, and the latest victim was some two-bit magician known mainly for his general incompetence. All three had been killed violently, just like the psychic, and the press were eagerly pushing a vampire killer angle.
Mark thought differently. He knew Autumn had killed the man in the hotel. He also knew that he could not have made it to Yorkshire in time for the third death, because Mark had been watching him. That meant there was another killer. Jason walked into the room.
‘I got what you asked for, Mr. Jones. I had to call in some favours …’
‘Thank you,’ Mark said coldly, cutting the big man off. Jason handed him the police reports regarding the recent spate of killings, and he flicked through them quickly. The injuries to the victims were horrific. They had all been partially cannibalised. The lead police officer – somebody called Hildemare – was baffled. Mark threw the papers down on his desk and frowned. ‘Where is Sergei?’
‘In the kitchen with Rowan.’
‘Ah yes, Rowan. What do you think of him?’
‘He’s a Royal Marine Commando. I think he’ll be useful. Sergei likes him.’
‘How is he?’
‘Restless – he wants to go after his sister. You should talk to him. Tell him the plan.’
Mark glanced out of the kitchen window. The first rays of dawn were slowly punching their way through a grey blanket of cloud that had been thickening over the last hour or so. A fine drizzle was misting down from the sky. The world outside was grey and bleak, and the sky held the cold. ‘I think I’ll do that,’ he said.
The shotgun blast tore through the howling. Cam pumped the breach and nearly dropped the flashlight. Why on earth hadn’t they had any that could clip onto the barrel of his gun? Like in the movies? It seemed like a bit of an oversight now. He jumped over the thing that had managed to duck past Grímnir’s chainsaw. The noise was not scaring the Twisted anymore. They kept coming in threes and fours, lurching out of doorways or from around blind corners in the darkness, with their crazed faces a contorted smear of snarling teeth and maggoty rot.
Cam thought it was very fortunate that they were mindless – if they had organised and attacked in force, the small group would have been in dire straits. As it was, they were making progress against the hordes. Grímnir was a rock up front. The Twisted broke against him, the chainsaw ripping them to pieces.
On more than one occasion, Cam had been forced to kick away a grasping hand still attached to the top part of a sundered zombie. They didn’t die unless they were decapitated, but Dow and Grímnir were concentrating on speed, not thoroughness, so crawling body parts had to be ignored. A carpet of moaning, crippled zombies lay strewn out behind them.
‘How far?’ Dow called from the rear. ‘More will be coming!’ The Twisted were fast, and every now and again Dow was forced to turn and fight them off. Cam would stop and aim the shotgun, but it was never needed – Dow was lethal. His gauntlets were a web of destruction in the electric light.
Fucking flashlight! It was difficult to fire a shotgun when you had to juggle a big tube, but somehow Cam was managing. There was no way he was losing the light down here.
‘Just
around the next corner,’ Grímnir shouted back. ‘It is a dead end, so none of the Twisted should be there ahead of us.’
‘What?’ Cam and Dow yelled at the same time. ‘What dead end?’ Cam added, but it was too late. They were committed. They ran on, around a tight corner, through a dusty room, and then through a raw, narrow doorway that had been hacked out of the rock.
Cam stopped dead in the roughly hewn portal and blinked. Dow ran into him from behind. ‘What’s the matter?’ Dow shouted in his ear. Cam gestured wordlessly, and Dow looked over his shoulder. ‘Oh my,’ he said quietly.
The opening they were stood in was set into the wall of a gargantuan vertical shaft. The ceiling – if there was one – was lost in a murk of hazy darkness. The air was as thick and humid as a muggy summer’s day, and tendrils of cloud reached here and there, muddying the vast space above them. A golden light glowed far below. Looking down into the light gave Cam a brief but overwhelming sense of vertigo, like floating midway up an inverted well with sky below and dark depths above. Somewhere a long way down, there must be a big hole in the side of The Tower, letting some of the dawn’s light in. Above him, beyond the clouds, it faded into the gloom.
The shaft was around five-hundred feet across. A fat droplet of ice-cold water fell down the back of Cam’s neck, making him jump. He cursed and glanced up. The black walls looked like they had been carved from one gigantic piece of obsidian. Rivulets of water ran in drips and dribbles down the glassy surface, weaving their way towards the buried light and causing a soft rustling whisper that echoed hauntingly.
The shaft above and below was criss-crossed with brittle boughs of rock that spanned the vertiginous drop. Above, fifteen or twenty of these fragile, thread-thin crossings disappeared into a misty gloaming. Below, they were framed by the light and Cam could see that some of them had been shattered. He imagined that he was looking down into the neglected and splintered remains of a deity’s infinite Kerplunk set.
Cam had the awful feeling that he might end up playing the part of the marble. Ahead of him, the floor tapered into a narrow spindle of rock that arced out to span the bore. Only two feet wide, it had no rail or balustrade. The black stone was polished and slippery with dew. In places, great gashes cut its width down to less than a foot. Cam poked a tentative foot out onto the awful delicate bridge. It groaned.
‘I’m not going across that!’ Cam stated resolutely.
‘We’ve got to,’ Dow shouted over his shoulder. ‘They’re right behind us.’ Grímnir was already halfway across, jogging along as if it were the most natural thing in the world. Seeing such a big man move with such speed across such a narrow strip made Cam feel nauseous. The thought of going over it himself made him gag.
‘I’m not doing it.’
‘We’ve no time for this,’ Dow snapped.
‘Do I look like a fucking tightrope walker?’ he asked. ‘I’ve never even been to the circus!’
‘Just get moving,’ Dow growled. ‘I can see them!’
The howling was loud now, and Cam grudgingly conceded that maybe the bridge wasn’t that bad an idea after all. ‘I’ll be best mates with Joey the Dog Faced boy next,’ he grumbled as he edged forwards, his hands held out for balance.
There was an animalistic scream from behind him, and he looked back. A couple of ORCs had reached the bridge; Dow was fighting them off ferociously. One fell from the edge, and Cam watched as its body slammed sickeningly against a black wall far below.
‘Oh shit,’ he said. Dow crept backwards, his gauntlets flashing out. Cam dropped the flashlight – he couldn’t keep hold of it and maintain his balance when the shotgun kicked. The light disappeared into the brighter depths of the shaft.
Another group of Twisted rushed onto the bridge. They shambled forwards in a precarious single file. The front one grasped wildly for Dow. Its face had completely rotted off, leaving nothing but a skull with sharp yellow teeth and a pair of unblinking black eyes. A worm flicked its tail languidly from its nasal cavity. Its hairline was a green and black obscenity: a ragged line of fleshy scraps, like a blanket that had been ripped apart, thread and weave dangling awry over the scarred bone of its skull. Incongruously, a luxurious black mane fell from ruined scalp to broken shoulders. The noise of the mob was getting louder. The bulk of the Twisted were not far behind. Cam set his feet as steady as he could, as Dow backed towards him.
‘Push them back – push them back, and then for God’s sake duck!’ Dow looked over his shoulder, saw Cam, saw the levelled shotgun, and nodded. He surged forwards and his foot slipped on the treacherous rock. Cam held his breath, certain that Dow was going to fall. Then the Elf recovered and put everything he had into a left hook. The Death’s Head zombie ducked and then slipped. It fell flat on its stomach, grabbed the stonework, and clung on. Dow’s gauntlet drove the creature behind it from the bridge, and it screeched as it tumbled into oblivion. Dow ducked.
Cam pulled the trigger. The three Twisted that were still stood up exploded in a cloud of congealed blood and grey guts. The awful mass of spinning refuse tumbled towards the light. The recoil was a bitch; Cam flailed wildly to catch his balance, and eventually settled his heels on the narrow bridge. His ears rang. Dow aimed a kick at the Death’s Head zombie, but it scampered nimbly on all fours back to the edge of the bridge. It stood and stared at them. The crazed howling of the hoard came from the door behind it. Edging forwards, Cam put his hand on Dow’s shoulder and then they moved backwards slowly together.
The Death’s Head zombie turned and disappeared back the way they had all come. Moments later, a surging mass of the Twisted spilled mindlessly out onto the bridge. In the end, it was their sheer numbers that saved Cam and Dow. It was ridiculous, really. If the Twisted had come steadily, one at a time, no doubt they would have overwhelmed the two Elves. Instead, overcome by feral hunger, the ORCs charged out all at once; a torrent of shoving monsters. Almost all of them fell immediately, jostled over the edge by those behind, pushing and clawing at each other as they slipped into the abyss. A steady stream plummeted down the great bore, and every single one howled. Hundreds of the Twisted tumbled to oblivion.
Some managed to keep their feet, and they scampered agile and snarling towards Dow and Cam. Cam lost track of the number of times they had to stop and brace themselves for an attack. Dow’s lashing gauntlets pummelled zombies and they were pitched, crushed and broken, into the void.
By the time they reached the far side, Cam was gasping for breath and sweating heavily. They pressed themselves into the relative safety of a small alcove that contained a door. Cam leant forwards and kissed a cold, black wall. ‘I think I’ve shit myself,’ he announced to nobody in particular. A meaty hand slapped him on the shoulder and he winced.
‘That was well done, Camhlaidh Ó Gríobhtha, well done indeed,’ Grímnir told him.
‘Thank you,’ Dow added sincerely. ‘Your shot saved my life.’
‘Come off it,’ Cam said. ‘If you’d fallen, I’d have been next. And I never would have made it across without you.’
‘Nevertheless, thank you.’ Dow turned to Grímnir. ‘More of them will manage to cross soon. Where next?’
Wordlessly, Grímnir pointed to the door. It was massive and appeared to be made of the same stone as the shaft. ‘This is the home of the Tattooist,’ he said.
‘How do we get in?’ Cam asked.
Grímnir looked at him as if he were stupid. ‘We knock.’
Swirling clouds moved in a slow whirlpool above Sam’s head. The blacks and greys of the drifting behemoths were edged with deep lilac light. Reds and oranges were mixed into the vortex: streaks of colour stirred into the sky like strawberry sauce into frozen yoghurt. The desert beneath it was bleak, the coarse sand made ochre in the half-light. The occasional dead-looking cactus or a random cairn of stones did little to break up the flat wilderness. The horizons were lost in grey, hazy mist.
Sam stood in the eldritch landscape and wondered what he was doing here. With a star
t, he saw that he was naked. The last thing he remembered was falling asleep next to Annalise’s naked, sweating body in a small room in Mayfield Station. He turned on his heel and stared around the unfamiliar desert in consternation. Then the pain started.
It came from his spine, flaring out to grip the muscles of his chest and neck. It crawled insidiously down into his abdominals, causing them to spasm. Sam collapsed to his knees, folded over at the waist, a scream frozen and silent on his lips. It hit his arms next, then his legs, cramping them in agonising waves. Sweat broke out on his body: cold stinging sweat that fell to the gritty ground in thick, ugly droplets. Where they landed, tiny black blossoms flowered.
For a moment the pain subsided, retreating to the small of his back where it had originated. Sam raised his head and screamed in torment. With eyes opened wide, he saw the wolf staring back at him, so close he could have reached out and touched it. Yellow eyes bored into his, its lips were peeled back in a snarl, the stiff fur on the back of its neck raised and bristling.
The wolf was black. Silver streaks rose from its front paws and wrapped around its shoulders. They merged, forming a widow’s peak which ran between its eyes and down the centre of its broad muzzle. Long, wicked canines dipped from the top jaw to the lower lip. He had seen this before. Somewhere, in darkness … he had dreamt it after he started on the prophylaxis, back when he was still with Tabby and the world had been a much more complicated place. Friday night.
A low growl rippled through the air between them, and Sam realised with a jolt that it was coming from him. The wolf tensed slightly. Sam was concentrating on those massive teeth when the pain came crashing back with a vengeance, twice as fast, twice as painful, tearing through him and paralysing him. His arms jerked outwards spasmodically just as the wolf leapt.
Hard teeth fastened on his throat. He had felt this before, too, on a cold road in the pouring rain. The wolf tore ferociously at the flesh of his neck. Sam could do nothing but stare up. He felt a merging …
Immortals' Requiem Page 21