by Mel Odom
“I want to save you,” the Templar said. “But I can’t.” She howled in pain and shook visibly. “You need to get out of here. I can’t control it much longer.” Heather took a step back.
“It’s inside me,” the Templar said. “Inside my mind.” Tears slid down her face. “I didn’t know. I swear I didn’t know. I thought I could control it.”
“Tell me,” Heather said desperately. “Tell me where the safe places are.”
“Get out of here.” A paroxysm shook through the Templar.
“There are safe places,” Heather said. “We’ve heard about them. The knights have them.”
The Templar stopped quivering, looked up, and smiled. “There are no safe places anymore, fools. Now you’ll pay the price for your stupid, pathetic hope.”
Heather managed to turn and run, but she didn’t take more than three steps before she felt the sword thrust between her shoulder blades. All sensation below her shoulders left her. Her legs crumpled and she fell to the ground in a kneeling position. Only the sword held her up.
Several inches of it stood out from her chest. She gazed at the weapon in disbelief. The knights—the Templar—were supposed to be good. Neil had told her they were helping everyone stranded in London, and that they were fighting the monsters.
Not true, Heather thought as she felt her body turn cold. Not all of them.
Pocket Star Books
A Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
1230 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10020
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2008 by Flagship Studios, Inc. Flagship Studios and Hellgate: London are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of Flagship Studios, Inc.
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Pocket Books Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020
POCKET STAR and colophon are registered trademarks of Simon & Schuster, Inc.
ISBN-13: 978-1-4165-5332-8
ISBN-10: 1-4165-5332-0
Visit us on the World Wide Web:
http://www.SimonSays.com
DEDICATION
For the University of Oklahoma gamers I’ve come to know this past year: Chris Borthick, Greg Hambric, Ben Wood, and Brian Burns.
And for my sons, Shiloh (who ventured into Hellgate: London in the game first) and Chandler (who’s my companion in City of Heroes).
Game on, people!
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thanks to Marco Palmieri of Pocket Books for keeping the demons at bay, and to Bill Roper and the fine game creators of Flagship Studios for bringing Hellgate: London to life and filling it with dead things!
HISTORIAN’S NOTE
This story begins fourteen years prior to the events depicted in the Hellgate: London video game.
PROLOGUE
LONDON, ENGLAND
SEPTEMBER 19
2024
P ropelled by bloodlust, the Stalker demons scampered across the rooftops of the tall buildings along Fleet Street. There were six of them, all experienced slayers with a thirst for killing. They flung themselves across the rooftops. Legs bunched as they gathered themselves at the edge of one building to throw themselves to the next without hesitation.
Bright, hard moonlight burned down through the gray smoke that filmed the black sky. It left dangerous patches of light that would have revealed them to their prey, and other demons that would have killed them just for sport.
It didn’t matter that a whole new world lay before them to conquer. The demons weren’t equals. Their world didn’t operate on principles of honor or diplomacy. Size and strength were the natural dividers among their kind. Creatures that were smaller or looked weaker became food or cruel diversion, and either was welcome at night when most of them were active.
Fear quivered through the demons as they regarded the light patches they had to navigate. It was just one of the tools in their survival arsenal that kept them alive night after night. Fear kept them alive and dangerous.
They paused on top of one of the buildings as the whirling gray smoke parted and left most of the rooftop exposed. Moonlight reflected in a silver sheen across the wet roof. The lead Stalker threw its ugly snout into the air and breathed deeply. The rain had turned to mist and made the air heavy.
The acrid scent of the smoke burned the demon’s nasal membranes. It was an experienced predator and was familiar with the smoke. It was a byproduct of the process called the Burn, which changed the target world into one similar to the demons’ homeworld.
This wasn’t the first world the pack leader had helped invade and decimate. It was long-lived compared to most of the others in its pack. Usually, they served as cannon fodder, though the demon had no concept of that. It was a flesh-and-blood machine bred to hunt and kill.
Tonight they had fed well and now hunted for sport.
Long-limbed and thin as greyhounds, the Stalkers had a vaguely human appearance but usually ran on all fours. The chitinous blades that stood out along their forearms and lower legs immediately marked them as different from anything human.
The blades were sharp enough to cleave flesh, and the Stalkers had a stylized fighting system that made use of those projections. Hard chitin covered their bodies and shielded them from danger as much as Kevlar armor. Their heads were small, and their faces were tight.
They lay in the shadows of the rooftop and waited for the gray haze to obscure them once again. When it did, they scampered to the edge of the building and peered down.
A few humans roved the street. When the Hellgate had first opened and the demons had been allowed into this world, the hunting had been easy and plentiful. Now times were harder.
Few humans remained in the city. The ones that had survived had learned to be wary and clever. Many had escaped in the early weeks of the invasion, but millions had died and the streets had run red with blood for weeks.
The pack leader of the Stalkers drew in another breath as the breeze changed. Humans occupied the streets below. They hunted at night now too, for food and water to live out in the shadowed holes they’d dug themselves into.
With another sniff of air, the pack leader singled out one of them, a small female huddled in the dark. In the demon’s vision, the female was a pulsing blur of orange and yellow contrasting with the purple-blue of the cool night. If the demon could have smiled, it would have. But it couldn’t. Instead, it quivered, but this time it was from the killing urge that thrilled through its body.
It slipped over the roof’s edge, dug its claws into the side of the building between the bricks, and moved slowly as it closed in for the kill.
Stay calm, Heather May told herself harshly as she remained within the safety of the shadowed alleyway just off Fleet Street. Stay calm. You’re going to find him. But it was hard to remain calm out on the streets of London these days. Too many bad things happened there. She’d seen them. You’re going to find him, and you’re going to get out of here.
Cautiously, she peered out into the street. Overturned cars scarred by flames littered the block. Nearly every window in every building was broken. Some of the building walls were shattered, either by the demons or the military units when they had tried to fight back. War, though brief, had broken out inside the city and so many of the areas Heather had grown up in lay in ruins.
Here and there, other scavengers—humans, dogs, and cats—lingered in the shadows in the hopes of finding food that was still good and hadn’t already been found.
Meals had gotten harder to come by. Every few days they had to change where they were staying.
Weeks had passed since the last time Heather had seen sunlight. There were fewer demons in the streets and skies during the daylight hours, but there was almost no chance of hiding. Night was always filled with possibilities.
Twenty years old, Heather was slender and only a few inches over five feet tall. At a hundred pounds, she wasn’t big enough to fight the demons. She’d survived the last four years in London by embracing her fear and letting it be her greatest strength. Her fear had never left her.
But it hadn’t been like that for Neil. Her younger brother had gotten braver over the last four years. Or more desperate or numb. Survivor’s guilt may have been driving him too. A woman Heather had talked to a month ago had suggested that when Heather went scavenging with her.
Neil was taller and bigger than her now, and he wasn’t happy about taking direction from her. Lately, he’d fallen in with a group of older boys who had taken it upon themselves to range farther for food and water.
His bravery, his foolish confidence, was going to get him killed. Less than an hour ago, Heather had woken and found him gone. She’d known immediately that he’d gone out with the other boys and young men. Though she’d tried to stay awake to keep an eye on him, she’d failed.
When they had first started living in the underground train stations and supply rooms after the invasion occurred, Neil had been twelve. Nightmares had haunted him every night. He had been at home when the demons broke into the flat and killed their parents. He’d barely escaped with his life, and then only because the horrific monsters had chosen to stay and kill the others in the building.
Heather had been at a friend’s parents’ flat when the news about the demon invasion had hit the television news channels. She’d been sleeping over with Claire, talking about boys and watching dumb romance movies they had both giggled over.
The sound of the military jets screaming through the night sky and the rumble of the tank treads over the street had filled London that night. But mostly what Heather remembered were the screams of the wounded and dying. In the beginning, those things had been nightly and daily occurrences. Now they still happened but there weren’t as many as before, primarily because there weren’t as many victims left in the city for the monsters to find.
She wore jeans that had once fit her like a second skin but now had to be held up with a belt because she had lost weight. Skaters’ elbow and knee pads provided extra protection. Protection was everything in her world now. She also learned to wear hiking boots and heavy leather gloves any time she was outside the Underground. Even down in the tube, debris created danger and obstacles. Without a chemist’s shop, doctor, or hospital to go to, a simple infection could be life-threatening.
Four years ago, when she had been at school, she would never have left the flat in such a state. She kept her dark hair hacked off as short as she was able—to keep it from her eyes and to prevent it from being easily grabbed. She’d since learned both of those things could get her killed in a heartbeat.
She also carried weapons these days, something she had never done. A long-bladed hunting knife rode in a scabbard on her right hip. She carried a weighted length of pipe in her right hand.
After a final quick breath to steady her nerves, Heather slid around the alley corner and started down the cracked sidewalk. It would be morning soon. She didn’t want to be caught out on the street in daylight.
She kept her eyes moving. That was a trick she had learned from a Special Air Services soldier who had stayed in one of the small group shelters where she’d kept Neil for a few weeks. That was back when large groups could exist for a while in relative safety. Those days were over.
During the soldier’s stay, he had trained anyone who would listen in survival skills. One of the main things Heather remembered was that the human eye wasn’t designed for nocturnal activity. In order to see things at night, humans had to keep their eyes moving and use peripheral vision to detect motion and shapes in the darkness.
She did that now. She also kept her ears pricked for the slightest change in sounds. Blood Angels, the female winged demons who controlled so much of the rooftops and airspace, sometimes mixed in with the gargoyles perched on buildings. Heather had trained herself to listen for the muffled subsonic flutter created by a Blood Angel’s swooping descent. It was usually the last thing anyone ever heard.
Her left hand trailed the line of shops beside her. She didn’t lose touch with the buildings. It wasn’t enough to merely watch and listen to her environment these days; she had to remain in physical contact with changes in space as well.
She thought perhaps her parents had brought her shopping in the area before the Hellgate opened by St. Paul’s. But she couldn’t remember for sure. It seemed as though she remembered a lot more pleasant times these days than had actually happened.
A man stepped out of the darkness ahead of her. He turned to face her and grinned.
“You out here by yourself, love?” the man asked.
Heather froze, one hand on the wall and the other tight around the weighted pipe.
Even looking at him with her peripheral vision, Heather barely made the man out against the darkness. He was scrawny. It was as if fat people had disappeared off the face of the earth after the demons had arrived. Whiskers dirtied his lean wolf’s jaws. A long duster covered him from neck to knees. Maybe the garment had always been black, or maybe it had gotten stained that way. He held his hands in his pockets.
There was a time, she told herself, when running into a man like him was the most fearful thing you had to worry about.
She didn’t fear him now. But she was wary of him. If he hurt her in any way, or incapacitated her, she wouldn’t be able to care of herself.
Or Neil.
“Did anyone ever tell you that it was rude not to speak to your elders when they spoke to you?” the man asked in a harsh tone.
“I’m not out here for conversation,” Heather replied. She kept her voice neutral and offered no insult or hint of fear.
“Then why are you out here, love?”
“I’m foraging. Same as you.”
“You should have someone watching your back. These are dangerous times.”
Not just because of the monsters, Heather thought.
There was talk in the shadows of groups of humans that had gone feral. People said they were cannibalistic, that they’d started out eating the flesh of dead people but had acquired a taste for it. These days they took their kills fresh.
“I can watch my own back.” Heather stepped toward the curb to go around the man.
“Then you’ve a fool for a partner, Doris,” the man said in a child’s sing-song voice.
Away from the wall now, Heather felt dizzy. She had noticed the effect several months ago and she thought she knew what it was. Agoraphobia was a fear of open places. Small animals—rodents, lizards, birds, and fish—all had the same inborn fear. All of them were used to being hunted. A long-ago science class she’d barely paid attention to had taught her that.
She shifted the weighted pipe to her left hand automatically. She had learned the hard way to never leave her weapon exposed to a potential enemy.
That habit saved her life.
The man reached for her and caught her arm. His long, thin fingers curved around her wrist. With a jerk, he pulled her to him.
“Well now, I guess you’ll have to learn better manners, Doris. These are hard times, they are. If you’re going to go along, you got to get along.”
His foul breath collided with her face. It smelled like death, like the inside of the morgue Heather had found a few years ago. With the power cut off, the refrigeration units had stalled. The bodies inside the stainless steel vaults had spoiled.
While looking for anything salvageable, Heather had pulled one of vaults open. Her torch beam had revealed the horror within. She could still never say whether the body was male or fe
male, only that it was covered with an infestation of maggots that writhed as they fed.
Even that could’ve been worse, she’d discovered. In some places, the dead lived again and sought only to feed on the flesh of a living.
The man touched her face with his free hand.
Heather’s skin crawled at his touch. With a lithe twist of her hips, she brought the weighted pipe around in an overhand blow. The man saw it coming in time to raise his arm, but it didn’t do any good. The weighted pipe snapped his arm like a twig.
The man screamed in pain and cradled his injured arm to his chest. He cursed at her between painful groans.
That was when Heather spotted the long forms of the monsters clinging to the wall of the alley. The lowest one was already at the second floor. Its lips pulled back and revealed double rows of serrated teeth.
Without hesitation, the monster leaped from the wall and landed on the man’s back. The sudden weight dropped the man to his knees. He never had a chance to run. The monster’s jaws open wider and latched onto the side of the man’s neck. He screamed again, but this time it was in fear, not pain or anger.
Bones snapped and crunched, and it was frightening that she knew that sound from experience. Blood ran down the front of the man’s duster.
Heather turned and fled. Even if the man had not tried to assault her, she wouldn’t have tried to help him. Individuals only fell into two different camps these days. She only helped those in one of them. Neil was in that camp, and the rest of the world—whatever remained of it—was in the other.
Several blocks later, Heather reached a tube station. Her breath came in ragged gasps. She dug a minitorch from her pocket and flicked it on as she plunged into the stairwell. She jumped the last few feet and landed hard enough that for a moment she thought she’d broken her ankle. She ignored the shooting pain and made sure her foot worked.
“Turn that bloody torch off, you silly cow,” someone said. “You’re going to draw the demons down on us.”