by James Fahy
I stared at Gio incredulously.
“You don’t know where it is? Thirty years of searching, uncovering the facts one by one, but you haven’t been able to find where the old world’s military scientists hid your precious clan master’s corpse?”
The vampire stared back at me, his pale face tinted red by the generator lights above.
“Even when you turned Rutheridge into your ghoul,” I said, “you couldn’t get the location out of him. Sure, he worked at this lab for five years, but even he didn’t know where he was other than somewhere in Norfolk.”
I couldn’t help but laugh at the all-powerful clan master.
“Norfolk is a big place,” Jessica piped up, “like looking for a needle in a haystack.”
“Or to be more specific,” Helena chimed in, “a secret, very well-hidden government base in a vast swathe of countryside practically overrun these days with the Pale. Too dangerous for even us five hardy souls to make a daytrip of, you see.”
Gio raised his hands to silence the two.
“The decrypted files give the location of the base,” he said. “It’s encoded into the final log entry. Norfolk military base, location 452. A simple designation. Thanks to your Cabal friend’s tireless work unlocking the files for me, it took me but moments working through the Minister in the atrium just now to locate the exact coordinates which the files give.”
Realisation dawned.
“And that’s where the long tall freak-show comes in,” I said, looking over at the Bonewalker, which regarded all of us in its blank yet somehow deeply threatening way.
“You can’t get to the body. You’d be torn apart by the Pale if you tried an excursion from New Oxford to Norfolk. So you’re making it bring the body to you. You’re bringing Tassoni’s corpse here.”
Gio smirked at me, and walked over to the Bonewalker. The gaunt, evil bedsheet-wearing bastard leaned down as the vampire muttered GPS coordinates into what may or may not have been its ear.
The Bonewalker straightened up. It stood thoughtfully for a moment and then vanished, fading from our view in layered stages, just as it had when it had abandoned me and Allesandro outside Carfax. The last thing I saw was its expressionless mask, hanging ghost-like in the air. Then it was gone.
“If you bring Tassoni back, it will be the end of everything,” I snapped at the vampires. “Is everyone except me fucking high here?”
“That’s the idea sweetheart,” Helena said. “The world is gone already. Surely you can see that? The fire has gone out and all of us, we’re just huddling pathetically around the embers.”
“Tassoni will rise with your death,” Gio declared, the fervent light of the true believer in his eyes. “You deserve to die. You cannot argue that. You’re practically a sister to the ghouls, just as my dear stupid delicious Oscar is their brother, while this man – my personal ghoul, the great and mighty Cabal Minister – has the blood of millions on his hands.”
He prowled towards me, circling me like a predator on the savannah.
“Our only crime was to have our clan leader – strong, proud, powerful – ripped away from us by your kind and tortured for years so that you could make monsters which would kill us all.”
He practically spat on the floor.
“And still you think we are bad guys.”
“We’d all rather be dead than have to mainline into your pathetic new world order,” Jessica sneered. “Do you honestly think that after living for hundreds of years, any of us want to whore ourselves out at clubs for the entertainment of you people? You are our food!”
I thought of Allesandro. He certainly seemed to want to integrate. He seemed to like our new world. I thought of the people I cared about: bumbling Griff and excitable Lucy, carving out little lives for themselves, even in a world rather more savage than it once had been. There was still light and warmth. It wasn’t all cold ashes in the fire. The vampires were wrong.
“I still don’t understand why the Bonewalker is helping you,” I said. “What’s in it for that thing?”
Gio rolled his eyes.
“Nothing’s in it for the blasted thing. I won the damn Bonewalker,” he said, exasperated. “Two years ago, in an online auction.”
I stared at him, my mouth dropped.
Okay … What?
“You really know so little about the entities you purport to study, don’t you, Doctor?” Gio said with wonder. “There’s a very lucrative slave market in our alternate society. Bonewalkers are not demons, nor are they are entities from another plane of existence. They are Djinn. Surely you’ve heard of them? The ‘grant three wishes kind’. Well, that’s not specifically how they work, but Bonewalkers are slaves, property. They change hands, from master to master, until they have earned their freedom.”
He saw the look of surprise on my face and laughed.
“Did you really think the charmless Marlin Scott managed to convince a troop of Bonewalkers to help fortify the cities of the world? No, of course not. He bought them, heart and soul. The Cabal uses Bonewalkers to cast wards on certain buildings they own: the Liver here in Oxford, the Shard over in York. They own the Bonewalkers. Your masters have slaves just like the rest of us. The Bonewalkers’ talents in manipulating space are unparalleled but once they are bound to a master, they obey his whims.”
“There’s a downside, though,” I said. “There has to be. No creature could evolve to give that much power to someone else without taking some for itself.”
Jessica cackled.
“It depends on your long-term view,” she smirked. “Once a Bonewalker has earned its freedom, once the bond of contract is released through whatever mute internal code of honour guides them, they come for their former masters and take them away.”
“No one knows where,” Gio said. “Neither the freed Bonewalker nor the one who sold their soul by buying them is ever seen again.”
He was stood where the Bonewalker had been, staring at the empty space.
“That’s not an issue for us, of course. We don’t plan on living long once Tassoni is back. No one will. He will use the Pale to end humanity and we will follow you into the darkness. Better that than this. Better vengeance than submission. Perhaps in the end, there will be nothing but Bonewalkers left in this world, wandering silently like ghosts. Perhaps then … they will take off their masks.”
I made a mental note. If I got out of this alive, I was going to start two new branches of important para-research. Firstly, how to identify a bloody ghoul on sight. Secondly, actually find some cold, hard facts on the Bonewalkers.
There was a shudder, a vibration in the air, and the subject of our speculation reappeared in the exact centre of the pentagram. At the Bonewalker’s feet lay a shrouded body. Its wrapping looked filmy and plastic as though it had been vacuum-sealed, like a chrysalis filled with meat – raw and bloody.
The remains of Tassoni, freshly imported from Sub Level Thirteen of the long-defunct Norfolk military base.
The remains looked small, sad, and very dead. But as they appeared like a silent magic trick in the middle of the chamber, a change came in the atmosphere; a deep pressure, a discomfort before the storm. The presence of the other vampires, even powerful Gio, was nothing in comparison to this.
Waves of energy seemed to roll invisibly from the mummified corpse at the Bonewalker’s feet. The air became electric with anger, suffering, and a deep and persistent low level rage.
If vampires could haunt their own corpses, this guy was a serious poltergeist.
I glanced over at the slack-jawed Minister, the former Doctor Rutheridge, who had unwittingly created the Pale so long ago with my father and the others. He had known on some level all those years ago, when he had stolen onto Level Thirteen and seen the corpse, that this was evil.
He had gone back to the base later; it must have been him. He had killed Tassoni, tried to finish things, and now here he was faced with the vampire again. I wondered if there was any small spark of consciousness re
maining in the ghoul, anything of my father’s old boss that hadn’t already been driven mad at the torture of Trevelyan, Coleman and Oscar, which was aware of what was now happening before it.
The Black Sacrament gathered reverently around the body of their clan master. Gio looked as though he were ready to weep. He looked up at the Bonewalker.
“We have provided what you need,” he said to it. “The offerings are here. The oldest magic is yours to command and you are mine to command. Bring him back to us!”
Across the chamber, one of the unnamed male vampire twins pulled Oscar effortlessly to his feet. The one standing directly behind me placed his arm around my neck. I saw the flash of a blade, which he now held to my throat.
They were going to kill us – me and Oscar. We were the last offerings. The sins repaid.
I wouldn’t even live to see the big finale, the destruction of the world. It was like walking out just before the end of a movie.
I thought of Servant Harrison, Mattie and Cloves, dead and sprawled in the atrium upstairs. I wondered where my vampire was now. Somewhere in the city, planning his next takeover bid?
“Master Tassoni,” Gio said, stepping back from the corpse as the Bonewalker removed its hands from its long sleeves and raised its arms. “We bring these offerings. You whose teeth have torn into mankind for five hundred years, you who were taken, defiled and disgraced by the human cattle, your fangs torn out by them. We bring you theirs and urge you to return. Follow the path opened by the Bonewalker.”
“Live for us,” Jessica intoned, staring lovingly at the bones.
The vampire at my neck pushed the blade hard against my skin.
“Kill for us,” Helena said, gripping Gio’s hand tightly. “We of the Black Sacrament would gladly die for you.”
“Good to know,” a voice said behind me.
The vampires whirled, surprised. I flicked my eyes to the left, toward the door where we had entered the old Development Lab.
Standing in the doorway, both holding the same guns Gio’s hired killers had carried, were Griff and Allesandro. I stared at them for a moment. Their being here was so unreal I thought it was a fevered hallucination brought on by my imminent death.
Allesandro fired. The vampire holding me was hit square in the head, inches from my own. I heard the bullets fly by, inches from the back of my head, and I swear I felt the heat of the blast. My captor was thrown off his feet as though he had been hit by a car. I went down with him, pulled by his weight as we collapsed in a tangle of limbs.
He might not be dead but a gunshot wound to the head was at least going to disorient the undead bastard. I thrashed and kicked, throwing his flailing arms off me as I rolled away from him. Above me, I heard more frantic reports of gunfire and then a furious animal scream of rage from Gio, like nothing I’d ever heard before.
Scrambling to my feet, I saw that Jessica was down, as was the vampire who had been holding Oscar. Gio had moved across the room with inhuman speed, a blur of motion, and Allesandro emptied the rest of his magazine into his master, bringing him crashing to a heap at his feet.
“Get out!” he yelled to me.
I didn’t need any more encouragement.
Griff was still firing into the room, seemingly at random. The noise amplified and echoed in the acoustics of the chamber, the bright muzzle flashes filling the red room in strobes of lightening. I was on my feet and running toward him, towards the door.
He looked so surreal. Had he ever even fired a gun before? His face was a grimace as he tried to keep the jumping gun under control. Helena ran for Griff, her blonde hair flying out behind her, her face a scream of pure rage. Whether by accident or design, his arc of bullets rose up and crossed her face, taking out her eyes and sending her flying backwards. She landed on her back within the pentagram, staring blindly upwards. She twitched for a moment then lay still.
The bullets must have embedded in her brain, I thought. Heal that, you smiling bitch.
“How?” Gio roared from his heap at Allesandro’s feet, staring in horror at his fallen comrade.
The front of his clothes were torn and tattered from gunfire, the white skin visible underneath glazed with blood, but I knew he would already be healing.
“How did you get in here, you little fucking traitor? The guards!”
Allesandro brought the butt of the gun down onto Gio’s face with all his force, sending the older vampire back to the floor.
“Those? They were only human,” he said.
As I reached Griff, he held something out to me. It was a handful of long, thick test tubes, sealed with syringes like darts on the end, and filled with milky fluid.
“Brought you your meds,” he grinned.
There were three of them. I grabbed the syringes from him. My face must have been pure confusion.
“Rejected strains,” he yelled over the gunfire. “Highly exothermic reaction.”
He was shooting at the vampire who had held me at knifepoint again. He had started to get to his feet, the left hand side of his face a bloody pulp.
I saw from the corner of my vision that across the chamber Gio had reached up from the floor and grabbed Allesandro’s leg. With a mighty heave, he threw the vampire off balance and leapt on top of him as he fell, like a furious lion. Allesandro went down under him in a flurry of blows.
In the midst of the chaos I saw the Bonewalker, still standing sedately in the centre of the chamber, its arms outstretched, as indifferent to the hail of bullets around it as it had been to the Pale in the pit.
The vampire twin with the blade, moving faster than Griff or I could react, was suddenly in front of me, leaping up from a crouch. He still held the knife. I could see bone fragments jutting out through the torn muscles where Allesandro’s bullets had shaved off his face. At least you could tell him apart from his brother now, I thought.
As he reared up for me, I raised one of the dart syringes and drove it like a stake down into his good eye. The vampire grabbed for me and fell in agony to his knees. I watched the milky fluid disappear from the glass chamber into its body as the pressurised seal of the dart flushed the serum into its skull.
He opened his mouth to scream, suddenly spasming, and I jerked out of his grip, jumping back and dragging Griff with me just in time.
The vampire seemed to swell like an over-inflated tyre for a moment, its skin bloating and purpling as it let forth a horrific gargle. Another beat and then it exploded like a water balloon, showering us in bits of wet vampire like red rain. It was more impressive than a rat – faster too.
Jessica, who was back on her feet, stared in disbelief at Helena’s blind, fallen body and the dripping remains of the twin. Her eyes found us as I dragged Griff towards the doorway.
“The bullets won’t stop them,” I yelled, as Griff’s gun suddenly clicked on empty. “All it does is slow them down, we have to go!”
“You’re going nowhere,” a voice said roughly behind Griff as he was dragged off his feet.
The other vampire twin, the one who had been holding Oscar, had come around behind us. He lifted Griff effortlessly off the floor from behind, looking like he were performing the Heimlich manoeuvre, and then buried his face in Griff’s throat and bit, tearing into him. Griff gagged and dropped his gun, his limbs flailing and kicking uselessly.
I threw myself at the two of them, wrapping my arms around Griff. The vampire seemed to think I was trying to pull my assistant free and I heard a rough dark laugh escape him, amused by my futility. He stopped laughing, however, when he realised I was just trying to get a decent angle on him.
I slammed the second syringe into his thigh as hard as I could.
Shocked, the vampire jerked away from me, twirling Griff through the air like a ballroom dancer. His face came up from my assistant’s torn neck, suddenly horrified. I scrabbled backwards, trying to put some distance between us before he exploded.
An exemplary exothermic reaction, I would later think. At the time, all I did was sh
ield my face from butchered vampire chunks flying through the air and watch Griff as he was thrown by the blast across the room. He skittered along the floor and came to rest against the wall, winded and grabbing for his neck, drenched from head to foot in vampire juice – but most importantly, alive.
Allesandro’s hand gripped my arm from out of nowhere and hauled me to my feet. I hadn’t even realised he was close to me.
“Move,” he said. “We have to go!”
“But Griff!”
I tried to shake him off. I looked back to see Oscar also, still a crumpled heap. I couldn’t leave them here.
“They don’t want Griff, they want you! They can’t complete the ritual without you.”
Allesandro thrust me towards the door, following close behind.
I heard Gio screaming obscenities behind us. Allesandro has left him bloody on the floor, but Gio was older and stronger, and would not stay down for long.
We ran.
The corridor which I had been marched down earlier now seemed nightmarishly long as we raced back down it, heading towards the elevator.
“How … how are you here?” I managed, still winded from the exploding knife-happy goon and struggling to keep up with the vampire. “And Griff? What the fuck? I told you not to follow us!”
“I know,” he glanced down at me. “I didn’t listen.”
He hauled me through the doorway and into the long corridor beyond it. The red lights flicked by us as we ran, as though the air was misted with blood.
“I made a bit of a mess upstairs,” he said. “I didn’t know where you were, so I went to your lab. Lucy let me in. Even deactivated the ultraviolet corridor for me. Your team had no idea what had happened upstairs but I could follow your scent. Your boy wanted to come too. We took a couple of guns from the humans in the lobby.”
“You killed them?” I asked. “Gio’s Hired guns?”
“They were only human, it wasn’t difficult. It’s the ones behind us that are the problem.”
The elevator was in sight. I glanced back over my shoulder.
They were after us. Jessica, like a Greek fury, was tearing along the corridor, her face contorted with rage. We had ruined their resurrection. Their great leader lay decomposing at the feet of the Bonewalker. I had the very certain notion that if Jessica got hold of me, she would tear my head clean off, carry it back to the chamber, and shake my teeth out onto the floor like loose change.