by King, Danny
“Everyone’s a food critic these days,” Angel glared, grabbing Private Stoker’s assault rifle and taking up a defensive position at the newly created hole in the window.
Downstairs they’d heard the shots and thought they were a prelude to a second assault. When it didn’t come Alice figured she would take the fight to the enemy, traded her assault rifle for a heavy duty M60 and headed for the door.
“Where’s she going?” Chen asked as he watched her leave.
Vanessa didn’t know but she knew to take cover all the same. Something was about to happen. And it wasn’t going to be something good.
Alice flung open the front door and stepped out into the night. She scanned the hillsides and saw distant movement in the trees. She couldn’t make out specifics, just silhouettes running amongst shadows, but she saw enough of them to turn on her heels.
“Eat this… you sons of bitches!” she beamed, squeezing the trigger to rake the treeline with a torrent of death.
Bingham and the others had seen Alice emerge. She’d moved pretty gingerly for a old lady so they’d not worried about her too much but now they were diving behind every trunk and hollow as Alice’s firestorm chewed up the forest around them.
“For God’s sake, nail that shooter somebody,” Bingham ordered, giving his entire unit the order to fire at will.
The valley lit up with muzzle flashes as fire was poured onto the farm. North and south, east and west: Alice scanned the hillsides and counted at least forty-five points of fire before she was knocked back to the front door by a hail of lead.
Chen and Vanessa smashed their guns through the glass and covered Alice’s retreat. She made it back to the farmhouse and ducked inside as the doorframe was blown apart around her.
Some people had no respect for their elders, she lamented sadly. Such was the way of the world.
Angel joined the impromptu fire fight, shooting from the top window and into the line of muzzle flashes several hundred yards away. She wasn’t the best of shots, none of them were, as the Coven did their killing up close and personal (as God intended), but if she could knock one or two hats off one or two heads it might give the enemy something to think about.
By contrast Boniface made no attempt to enter the fray. He merely retired to a quiet corner to sit out the battle, as was his want. Boniface was not a fan of war. He’d seen too much of it in his time. If he’d been human he might’ve been irrevocably scarred by now but Boniface had simply grown indifferent. It never seemed to end. The pitiful reasons changed from century to century but the wars themselves were almost indistinguishable from one another. Lots of killing, lots of destruction and lots of suffering, more often than not felt not by the people who’d started these things but those without the means to escape them. This was mankind’s real disease. And like so many of the worst diseases around, it was entirely self-inflicted.
But Boniface was alone in his objections. The others were quite happy to fight it out. Not least of all Angel who emptied an entire cartridge into the night without the foggiest idea who or what she was killing. If indeed she was even killing anyone. She might’ve just been shooting a bunch of cats’ eyes for all she knew. It would’ve made no difference to her.
Like Alice, Bingham counted the points of fire coming from the farmhouse and saw four so far. This was more than he had expected but not as many as he had feared.
One of the lights to his left exploded in a pall of smoke and sparks. Another cut out further along the hillside and Bingham watched as the firing points in the farmhouse shifted further west.
“Cut the lamps,” Bingham ordered. “They’re going after the lamps.”
The valley now plunged back into darkness to save the lamps from being shot out. Bingham would use them sparingly, only if the enemy attempted to make a break for it, and rely instead on their infrared gear from now on.
Alice kept going with the big gun, fanning the flames of the fight so that no one dared lay down their weapon.
“Alice? Alice?” Vanessa pleaded with her but Alice was just getting started.
“I’m busy,” she snapped, concentrating her fire on one particular muzzle flash after another until it stopped flashing in her sights.
Down in the basement, Henry had no gun of his own. They’d all been left upstairs and he’d missed the part of the meeting where they’d voted to re-enact World War Two. He settled for poking his head up out of the coal chute now and again to see how the match was going. A shower of brick dust from a near miss advised him to duck again and he noticed Sebastian’s expression as he brushed the grit from his shoulders.
“Glad you came?” Henry smiled.
Sebastian murmured an inaudible reply from behind his gag so Henry loosened it to allow him to talk.
“What was that?” he asked.
“I said oh yeah, vampires with machine guns; what’s not to love?”
A ricochet down the coal chute, off the floor and up Henry’s armpit underlined the point and made him wonder why people without an imperviousness to bullets would ever fire these things at one another.
Angel similarly took her second mauling of the evening, taking two to the head and one to the tits as she tumbled back against the same door she’d hit only minutes earlier.
“Fuck!” she swore jumping to her feet. “They got me again!”
“Yep,” replied Boniface impassively, as if she were trying on dresses for his consideration, not fighting for their lives.
“There are other guns you know,” Angel pointed out.
“I think you’re all making quite enough noise without me,” Boniface replied.
“Prick!” Angel snapped, but like sticks, stones and .45 calibre bullets, names could not harm Boniface.
*
Mr Larousse could hear the battle raging away on the other side of the forest and feared the worst. What had happened to Colonel Bingham’s plan to contain them until sunrise? Why were they shooting? What was going on?
“Colonel Bingham, come in. I repeat, what’s happening? Over. Talk to me,” Larousse demanded.
The radio finally crackled to life and Colonel Bingham voice tickled his ear, together with a lot of tinny gunfire.
“They’re trying out the weapons you gifted them, Father. Over.”
It was a dig. Larousse knew it was a dig but he chose to rise above it. He had more important things to think about anyway. They all did. He could not allow himself to be drawn into petty squabbles with the Colonel.
“Stop firing! Stop firing! You’re just wasting ammunition. You can’t kill them that way anyway,” Larousse told him.
“Maybe not, but they don’t like it up them either,” Colonel Bingham retorted, snatching up his own assault rifle and taking a bead on one of the lower window muzzle flashes.
Vanessa felt the Colonel’s bullets tear into her. She landed in a heap and winced at the searing pain. She hated getting shot. It was an occupational hazard and something that happened from time to time but she’d still never got used to it.
“You okay?” Chen asked her when he saw her grimacing in the pain.
“I’ll live,” she replied.
Chen smiled: “True enough,” before getting back to work.
The Thatcher’s ramshackled old farmhouse was coming apart at the seams under the ceaseless assault, with brick dust and plaster filling the air to highlight the bullet trails zipping in through the broken windows. Several large cracks now raced around the walls and across the ceiling as the building seemed to drop to its knees.
Vanessa ducked beneath the table as a large chunk of artex fell from the ceiling and smashed to pieces all around her. Much more of this and they’d be returning fire from a pile of rubble.
Alice made it back into the farmhouse, ducking inside the house just as the doorframe behind her exploded to matchwood. The splinters sprayed in all directions to pepper her skin but she barely winced. She’d taken six bullets already and hadn’t even lowered her gun. The .45 rounds she’d soaked u
p were nothing compared to the varicose veins she’d had to endure these last eight centuries.
Alice swung the machinegun out of the door and pulled the trigger again. There was something reassuring about how much the big dog kicked when it barked. More bullets came tearing back in reply but Alice didn’t let up, not until the last of her ammo belt had raced through the gun to leave her standing in a pile of spent shells.
Alice chucked the gun and picked up an SMG. She was about to continue her one-woman assault when Vanessa called out to her to stop.
“Hold it. Wait a minute. Alice wait!”
Alice did as she was told, although it took all of her restraint to stop. But when she had, she heard what Vanessa had already heard.
Silence.
“They’ve stopped shooting,” Angel said, holding her fire in the window at the top of the stairs.
Boniface brushed the dust from his jacket sleeve and let out a sigh of relief. “Thank God. I’m not sure my suit could’ve taken much more of that.”
“You’re not much fun in a fight, you know,” Angel sneered. Boniface didn’t care. He was bulletproof, both metaphorically and literally. His chance would come and when it did he would be ready. Until then he was on a permanent fag break.
Colonel Bingham had told his men to cease fire twenty seconds earlier. He’d lost three more men in the ensuing gun battle for no discernible gains. Larousse was right about one thing; they couldn’t kill their targets with conventional weapons but hopefully they’d stung them enough to dissuade them from venturing out again.
“All we need to do is keep them there for the rest of the night. Just keep them contained. And the sun will do the rest in the morning.”
18 hoped the Colonel was right. He felt as though he were caught between a rock and a hard place with the vampires on one side and the fanatical Mr Larousse on the other. He and his comrades were the middle men in the deal – here for the money but hanging on for their lives.
“Chin up 18, they must almost be out of ammo by now,” the Colonel said.
“Them too?” 18 replied. “Thank fuck for that, I thought it was just me.”
18 set down his smoking weapon and picked up his thermal image detector. Far below, in the doors and windows of the distant farmhouse, 18 picked out at least four guns glowing red on the display.
“There’s four of them,” he confirmed.
“No 18, there’s a minimum of four of them,” the Colonel Bingham corrected him. “Let’s not keep making that same mistake, yeah?”
Bingham was right to be on his guard. Neither Boniface nor Henry had fired a shot all night and were therefore invisible to 18’s heat detector. But while it was Boniface’s apathy that was keeping him cloaked, Henry reasons for not engaging in the previous killing contest were somewhat more complicated. He retained a sense of morality, empathy even, for humans that the others found hard to understand. He had his needs and he wanted to live for as long as he could – if you called this living – but he wouldn’t do so at any price.
He’d been a man of principles in his previous incarnation as an ordinary daylight dweller. And he saw no reason for that to change just because he had been forced to linger in the shadows.
Sebastian felt something wet on his chest and looked down to see his torso covered in blood.
“Oh shit! Oh shit, I’ve been shot!” he yelped, both horrified and a little impressed at himself for not even feeling it. God he was hard, wasn’t he?
Henry looked down to see Sebastian rocking back in his chair at the sight of his own blood stained chest.
“What’s the matter?” Henry asked, all matter-of-fact, as if Sebastian could have few grounds for complaint.
“What d’you think, you great fucking Helen Keller! I’ve been shot. Get us an ambulance, quick!” Sebastian said, half-panicking half-insulting without even trying.
“Relax, it’s my blood,” Henry reassured him. “You’re fine.”
Sebastian stopped struggling but felt no less easy. “Your blood?” he said with an grimace.
“Yeah look,” Henry confirmed, showing him a gash in the side of his neck where he’d taken a ricochet to the jugular. Messy but, in Henry’s case, non-fatal.
Sebastian began recoiling even more and demanded that Henry untied him.
“Please, just help me! Help me!” he implored, knocking into Mr Thatcher one way and then the mop and bucket the other as he fought to shake himself free from his sticky shirt.
“What’s is it now?” Henry asked with neither compassion nor exasperation. Sebastian was merely a curiosity to him, to be tolerated out of courtesy.
“Well if it’s your blood, mate, who knows what you’ve got,” Sebastian outlined, imagining all sorts of micro monsters crawling all over his skin.
Henry didn’t understand. As a night-feeder blood didn’t trigger the same reaction in him as it did in modern men. There were no disposable rubber gloves in his world. Gore was good. Blood was life.
“What I’ve got?” Henry asked.
“Yeah no offence, chief, but it must go with the territory.”
The penny finally dropped and Henry realised what Sebastian was getting at. The dreaded lurgy. The disease that had no cure. The ultimate curse.
“Sebastian, if I’ve got anything, it’ll be Foot-and-Mouth-Disease, nothing more.”
“Huh?” Sebastian huhhed.
Henry decided to come clean. His own kind might’ve looked down on him for his practices but he felt no shame in admitting the truth to Sebastian. “I’m not a human feeder. I only take from animals.”
Sebastian was much confused. Not an uncommon state of affairs for him but this situation was different. Henry was unusual for a vampire.
“But I thought…” Sebastian started to say, only for Henry to cut him off.
“As most people do. But we don’t all feed on humans. And I choose not to.”
Mr and Mrs Thatcher glanced at each other in the darkness. They weren’t sure what this meant in terms of their chances but surely this could only be a good thing. After all, if you had to be trussed up like a turkey in your own basement, who would you rather stood over you with the carving knife? Bernard Matthews or Linda McCartney?
But Sebastian failed to see the angle and asked why not.
Henry plucked a cigarette from his top pocket, wiped the blood from it and took a long lingering drag after lighting up. “Because I used to be one,” he explained, before exhaling from half a dozen new blowholes, courtesy of the Colonel.
CHAPTER 13
“How many do you see?” Henry asked when he returned from the cellar.
Vanessa was crouching low at the kitchen window and scanning the horizon through her assault rifle’s telescopic sights. It was difficult to discern much through the sights. They were fitted with night vision technology but then again so was Vanessa so the effect was somewhat disorientating, like looking through a child’s kaleidoscope only with a super-bright torch sticking down the other end. “Enough,” she concluded, lowing the rifle and rubbing her eye.
“Enough for what?” Chen felt the need to ask.
“Enough to stop us leaving before dawn,” Vanessa clarified.
Chen thought on that for a bit then asked the obvious question. “What then?”
“Then, my dear boy, we won’t be leaving at all,” Alice told him, only too aware of the consequences of being trapped by daylight.
This was a vampire’s worst nightmare. Being discovered by day. At night they could fight, they could move and they could kill. But by daylight all they could do was take cover and try to stay in the deepest darkest shadow. Even reflected light – the light that bounced off floors, ceilings and walls – could sear them like a hot lamp. But direct sunlight was the worst. It would burn them like a flame, boil their blood and ignite them in a flash so that they burnt to cinders. It was the worst and most agonising of deaths for a vampire and every member of the Coven rightly feared it. Even above death itself.
There
was an old legend about a French vampire from the Middle Ages who’d had three daughters, each of whom carried his blood in their veins. They’d hunted across a vast territory, taking only from the sick and lame in the hope that their presence might be tolerated and for several centuries they were. But then one day the Marquis de Rouen’s daughter fell ill. So distraught was the Marquis that he let it be known that he would do anything to save his daughter, even if that meant selling his soul to the Devil. The chief vampire heard of the Marquis’s plight and offered him a deal: they would grant his daughter the gift of eternal life if he would pardon them for their past crimes and promise never to hunt them again. It was deal like no other and it offered the vampires the one thing they’d always dreamt of – acceptance.
The Marquis agreed all too quickly and thus the chief vampire mixed his blood with the stricken girl’s and within an hour she was walking, talking and laughing again after being all but dead. It was as if the Lord himself had delivered her from the grave. The vampires had made good on their word and now the Marquis made good on his, issuing a proclamation stating that the vampires were now under his protection: no man nor woman could harm them on pain of death. From this moment forwards they were safe.
The Marquis even came up with the novel idea of killing two birds with one stone by driving a cartload of condemned prisoners to their once secret keep at the end of every month so that the general population might be spared their nightly hungers. It was a fantastic deal and good for both sides.
Unfortunately it could not – and did not – last.
Once reborn, the Marquis’s daughter was not content to feast on murderers and vagabonds as the father vampire and his daughters were. She had a more refined palette and preferred the richer bouquet of the province’s aristocrats. The Marquis tried to curb his daughter’s appetites but when the Mayor of Chartres’s son was found dead in his bed he realised his efforts had been in vain. She could no longer be reasoned with because – as the Marquis saw it – she was no longer his daughter, but a foul creature of unspeakable evil.