by Kim Newman
DK ganbare, go go go!
He’d called himself a kaiju because monsterhood was his destiny.
The curved bodywork of the Obscene Machine was velvet black, like an opera cloak. With scarlet underlighting, so it seemed to glide on shining blood.
He knew the name he would take next.
Dorifuto Dorakuraya. Drift Dracula.
The red mist on the windscreen had gone sticky. It would not be shifted by water or wipers. No matter. He didn’t need eyes to drive any more than he needed headlamps. The ’dillo was built to plough through or over anyone or anything that didn’t get out of its way.
After midnight, the squad would need to get out of the Bund. Fast.
That was why Golgotha recruited him.
Putting DK in the Armourdillo was like getting Picasso to paint the fence. But Picasso would have done a great job on the fence.
Something thumped the side window.
DK turned to look.
A face – no, not a face but something face-shaped – was pressed to the glass.
From the slicked-back hair, he recognised Dr Akiba.
The eyes, nose and cheeks were gone but a translucent skin pancake had formed over chewed meat. The new hide thickened. Pink became white. The mouth was sealed as if by wax.
The doctor was still alive but no longer warm.
Jutting from his neck was a pistol-syringe, depressed all the way.
Akiba had injected himself with vampire blood. Turned!
Yōkai let him be now. He was one of them.
He thumped the window again, jarring half-inch thick bulletproof glass. He wouldn’t know his own new strength.
Akiba’s HazMat suit and tux were ripped. Wounds on his chest were changing – not healing, but reconfiguring as fanged, pulsing mouths. Pustules in tangles of flesh turned into small eyes. Spiracles breathed in and out.
The next blow put a crack in the glass.
DK pressed the starter and threw the ’dillo into reverse.
Behind the vehicle was the open space of the Plaza. He could pick up enough speed to throw Akiba off the hood, then come back and grind him under. If the new-born vampire’s heart were crushed, the problem was solved.
Akiba clung.
Barbed nailpoints lodged in the crack in the window glass.
The ’dillo turned – even in this dinosaur, DK was a master – and the pest flapped like a flag.
Akiba yowled through many new mouths, muscle twists serving as rudimentary vocal cords. Fangs scraped the window.
DK could just have shot the doctor. A signature gun clipped to the dashboard was keyed to his fingerprints.
But he hadn’t wanted to take off his glove.
The window broke and Akiba crawled into the cab.
His mottled no-face loomed close.
DK felt the zone beyond in the turn, as the Armourdillo’s eighteen wheels misaligned and – with a shriek – the vehicle began to roll, jack-knifing in its mid-section. The concertina linkage of compartments wrenched but did not tear.
The numbers made sense and he was wired into the zone… then, that was broken too. Nothing added up. He was shut out forever.
Akiba’s no-face was complete. A pale blank.
No expression. No speeches.
The doctor pulled his shredded frill-fronted shirt apart. Ridiculously, his bow tie remained perfectly tied. He had rat-mouths instead of nipples.
With a spasm, Akiba spat out half a dozen fangs – little barbed enamel bullets.
The volley riddled DK’s torso. He tasted and smelled his own blood. And gas, seeping into the cab.
Other yōkai – with the faces of sick birds or frogs, and stringy clumps of human hair – crawled through after Dr Akiba, thirsty for a share of the kill.
Was this what losing felt like?
No, not losing. Dying.
HAROLD TAKAHAMA
‘...Binitarianism, Bokononism, Buddhism, Cao Dai, Christianity…’ Without being told to, Lefty unmuted and continued the droning recital.
Hal reckoned his hand’s crackle was louder, attracting whatever was crashing – with lethal intent – towards them.
He had learned to detect nuance in that characterless mechanical voice.
Lefty was jealous.
Ever since Floor 44, the hand had been Hal’s sole confidante, mentor and lifeline. It told him what it wanted to – without fear of contradiction.
Now, up here on Floor 93, Hal had Nezumi – who didn’t electrocute him every three minutes. She was way savvier than the average thirteen-year-old.
She was probs a little old lady inside. Older than his grandparents. Old enough to have been put in a camp by FDR. Or Winston Churchill, if she learned her accent in Jolly England.
He was glad he hadn’t quizzed the hand about Jun Zero’s relationships. He wasn’t sure Lefty would have been truthful.
He trusted rumours passed on by Nezumi over hard facts from the machine.
She was like that. Trustworthy.
Which Jun Zero wasn’t, obviously. If by some dark miracle Hal Takahama hooked up with a fox like Sonja Blaue, the rogue vampire hunter would ditch him for being clingy and a doormat – not for being a heartless bastard who skipped town with a cocktail waitress and left her to explain the piles of elder ashes and the decapitated corpse in the Dr Lazarus costume to Atlanta PD.
That was a very specific imagined filling-in of the anecdote.
Verily, he owed Sonja Blaue a grovelling apology! He should probably get that out before asking her to autograph her poster.
Had he ever seen her eyes? She’d told Crawdaddy only her lovers and people she was about to kill saw her eyes.
Hey, he was in both categories!
Now he trusted Nezumi not to kill him, he hoped she could keep him alive.
She walked back through Christina’s past. She was swift, alert.
Her katana was sharp enough to sing like a razor-edged wind-chime.
He followed the vampire to the artist’s studio and picked up the suicide revolver. He checked the cylinder. One empty chamber. Five bullets left.
The gun felt right in his hand – heavier than the plastic pistols he and his cousin used to play Miami Vice (he was always Tubbs, and got fatally shot so Crockett could cry nooooo! until the crabby neighbour complained about the sound effects), less terrifying than the automatic Dad put in his hand that time he thought it appropriate to give an eleven-year-old instructions on how to shoot a home invading viper in the heart. Dad, a second amendment fiend, did not repeat the lesson once Mom found out his idea of father-son bonding might run to a body count.
Jun Zero, of course, was weapons proficient.
Shooting targets painted with nosferatu rat-faces with Sonja Blaue!
Six months undercover at an elite murder-bastard training base in Nuristan.
Of course he was master of gun fu!
‘If that’s been lying there since Strickland shot himself it might be more dangerous to you than whoever you point it at.’
‘But it hasn’t,’ he said. ‘These rooms are exactly as they were when Christina Light left them, not as they would be if neglected. The clutter is preserved, not accumulated.’
Nezumi turned and looked at him with something between admiration and suspicion.
‘What? Surprised? I’ve always been smart.’
She bowed a little in apology.
She was shamed to underestimate someone. He figured people did that to her, and she strove to be better.
He felt a warm sympathy rush for the earnest old lady/little girl. He wanted to tell her not to beat herself up about it, but she moved on.
Nezumi didn’t pick the studio to stand her ground.
She stepped into Christina’s dressing room.
She had a reflection, which didn’t show her as he saw her. In the mirror, her face was white as ice and so were her exposed wrists and hands. Her hair was black.
She shook her head, indicating he should take no notice of that.
How did vampires ever get used to the mirror thing?
Seeing a semi-stranger looking back was bad enough but to see nothing or this cruel supposed reveal of a true self…?
‘You’re not like that,’ he told her. ‘Not cold.’
She shrugged as if to say it no longer bothered her (though it did) and they had more things to worry about (which they did).
The crashing stopped. Was it a distraction? A lure?
His hand came to life again, ‘… Dagonism, Digambara, Druidry, Druze, Eckanar…’
‘Lefty, shut up,’ said Nezumi.
Lefty clicked and whirred and schtummed.
How had Nezumi been granted user privileges?
Now Hal had to push down absurd, petty jealousy.
He couldn’t help steal a look at the mirror – not at Nezumi’s snowbird soul but at Jun Zero’s still-unfamiliar face. His hair wasn’t much better for the combing.
Earlier, Nezumi had looked through the glass at him.
Something else was looking at them both now.
Nezumi noticed Hal staring at the glass, and instantly understood why.
She wheeled around with measured grace, like a slow-motion movie, scything the full length of her katana in a circle until it pointed at the mirror.
The glass burst outwards with a fireball behind it.
Nezumi ducked under the explosion dragging him down with her. They rolled under the vanity table into discarded stockings and dust bunnies.
Jets of flame poured into the boudoir arcing above them.
The dresses laid out on the bed shrivelled to crispy corsets. The eiderdown caught fire.
He knew who was responsible.
Tsunako Shiki’s surviving goon. One fist of fire, the other of steel – if the left ’un don’t get you, the right one will.
RICHARD JEPERSON
Indisputably, a vampire using the name ‘Count Dracula’ made his London society debut in 1885 and inaugurated the Anni Draculae. Whether this was the same person as Vlad III of House Drăculești, Prince of Wallachia (c. 1430–????) was less certain.
That John Alucard – the current Dracula – was a Romanian nobody named Ion Popescu, turned only in 1945, was beside the point. Most people accepted that Alucard’s undead body was inhabited by the spirit of whoever had sat in Castle Dracula all those years, imagining a Vampire Ascendancy.
So far as Richard was concerned, none of it mattered. The King of the Cats had more names and titles than Heinz had varieties. The world had to deal with who he was now, not who he had been when warm.
Tonight, the world had to deal with Vlad’s brother.
The pretty one in the clan. Remembered for treachery – except in Anatolia, where a few diehards cited him as the Good Dracula.
Also a vampire.
Radu must have chased that dragon as he did everything else – because his brother got there first and made a bloody splash with it.
Richard watched Ejderhaoğlu Bey prowl the room.
His commands were obeyed, smartly. His crew were hired fangs. Slay for pay. They tuned out his speeches and kept eyes – and guns – on the hostages.
Radu grazed the buffet for snacks. Golden lads whimpered.
The Bey spoke randomly at quivering guests, then didn’t listen to stammered replies. Was his wicked plan all to scare up an audience?
By rights, plague ought to be raging throughout the Bund.
Nezumi had averted that.
She was a factor Radu hadn’t taken into account. Now she was loose.
The plot was going skew-whiff. Vlad the Impaler had contingency plans ready when a campaign went against him. Munitions dumps to be opened like piggy banks. Reinforcements primed to charge from hiding. Secret weapons and last-ditch defences. A thousand vampire horsemen in reserve. An orbital platform mounted with laser beams.
Radu the Handsome couldn’t adapt to events.
He had memorised an earlier draft and didn’t know whether to soldier on or toss the pages and improvise.
Richard would have preferred to face Vlad.
A chess-player who thinks he will win doesn’t upend the board and trample the pieces in a fit of pique.
Radu might well throw them all out of the Dragon’s Mouth to see who could fly.
Richard looked about the room.
Colonel Golgotha had showed up. He kept quiet. He’d have backup plans. An exfiltration scenario ready to go. His crew were get-the-job-done pros. Even Radu’s masked pallbearers were a cut above the average flathead.
The issue here wasn’t the posse – it was the Sheriff.
Radu was off course before Richard got to the party.
Not just because Aum Draht let him down. Or Nezumi was a Spaniard in his works.
Something majorly wasn’t going his way. He was ready to rhumba but the band weren’t playing his song.
Richard wasn’t sorry but was curious.
The most anyone had heard of Radu cel Frumos since the fifteenth century was during his dilettante driver phase, when he tried to compete with his brother’s famous need for speed. ‘The dead travel fast’ was a Dracula motto. Vlad – a boy soon tired of last year’s presents – progressed from chariots to trains to motor cars to aeroplanes. After each prang, Mr Toad found a new craze. As with everything – beginning with the throne of Wallachia – Radu stuck with auto racing longer than his brother but made less noise. He crashed fewer cars but didn’t win many races.
Cottonmouth awaited orders. She expected to be sent after Nezumi.
Radu didn’t detail her or confer with Golgotha. He needed troops in the ballroom.
Not all the crew were here. Mr Horror was absent, along with the little girl ghoul. They must be off executing other parts of the wicked plan.
Nezumi’s priority would be getting back here.
Her job was looking after him. He’d have preferred she watch out for herself.
The Diogenes Club had kept track of Radu.
The Bey backed wrong sides in several wars. Standard behaviour for playboy elders. He either had a mysteriously vast fortune or none at all. He was married to his brother’s one-time fiancée, Asa Vajda of Moldavia. She signed into the posher hotels of Europe under the name Countess Dracula and never settled her bills. Princess Asa saw little of her husband after the wedding supper. According to the gossip rags the Lovelies clucked over, Radu had an on-off understanding with Herbert von Krolock, the go-to indiscreet boyfriend for publicly not gay vampires from Baron von Meinster to Lester Shortlion.
Radu had brought too many guns to lose the room but the Princess’s guests were over the shock of being taken hostage and would not stay put much longer.
The cowed circle was breaking up. When Cottonmouth pulled Lady Oyotsu to the railings, others experimentally drifted. When they weren’t shot, more followed. They were wary, so far. No one made a break for the lifts or tried to follow Nezumi’s example and leap into the unknown. The smell of gunfire and death was too recent.
A deadly combination of stretched nerves and boredom would eventually prompt rash action. Some of these VIVs would fly out of the Dragon’s Mouth if they thought they’d get out of shooting range quick enough. Desperate escape attempts would start well before the Stockholm Syndrome kicked in. It would take a very long siege for anyone to warm up to Dracula’s Dipshit Brother.
Syrie snapped her fingers and used force of will to get the waiters back to work.
Drinks were guzzled.
Richard recognised celebrities, bankers, politicians. People used to buying their way out of fixes. Angel de la Guardia, a Neanderthal business mogul in a five-thousand-dollar suit, opened and closed a Filofax the size of a briefcase. He flashed wedges of currency and an array of credit cards, a fan dancer attracting attention to her assets but covering them up before the Lord Chamberlain noticed.
Richard doubted any of the minions were bribable.
And Radu wanted more than money.
De la Guardia gurned at Cottonmouth,
who smiled sweetly and tongued the stock of her machine pistol. The financier put his portable cash stash away. He thrust meaty, hairy-knuckled fists so deep in his pockets an Armani seam ripped. He was big enough to start a fight. Bullets would end it not to his liking. Cottonmouth blew him a kiss.
Who else might make trouble?
Anthony Peak was trying not to be noticed. He slipped into the crowd, maybe to filch a few trinkets. If anyone could find a way out of the ballroom, it’d be him. He was a known escape artist. This crew couldn’t make a better fist of imprisoning him than the best jailers in the world. He would go it alone, though.
Syrie should not be underestimated.
Or trusted, though Richard knew – from their blood link – she wasn’t Radu’s secret boss, girlfriend or sponsor. This wasn’t a Wings Over the World takeover bid.
One of the pigs was trying to pick a shackle lock with a cocktail stick.
It would not do to forget that the fattened donors were people. They wouldn’t be drunk or drugged. Golden had to be unadulterated by artificial sweeteners though blood-guzzling connoisseurs prized the quickening piquancy of natural fear or arousal. If it came to it, the lads had little to lose by rising up against Radu’s crew.
Georgia Rae Drumgo used to run drac on the streets of Baltimore but was now a VP in charge of development for John Alucard. She must have spoken out of turn when the guns came out. She’d been shot in the stomach and was furious about it. Had Radu made an example of her because of her Dracula association? Or was she just the gobby sort who wouldn’t be threatened without talking back? Tough enough to cough up a silver slug, she was sick with pain and red thirst. Argentine poisoning had taken hold in her insides.