‘Well, nothing attacked us on the way here so it seems reasonable. You think they dug up toward the sound of the trains?’
‘Probably. What bothers me more is what they were doing down here in the first place.’ She took a shotgun like the one Mike used from its place over her shoulder. ‘All right, we don’t know exactly where they are, but they probably won’t have come too far. If we find them and they don’t spot us, it’s incendiary grenades. If they do… Well, shoot the fuckers. They go down about the same as vampires.’
‘So blow them apart?’
‘Blow them apart, yeah.’
They had gone barely a hundred feet when Mike spotted something in the water, jammed up against a length of wood which had managed to get washed down. He bent and pulled it free. ‘Uh… shit. Another hand. I think we’re going the right way. Do we bag it?’
‘Put it on the walkway. If we have time, we’ll pick it up on the way back. Someone’s family might get to bury part of him.’
A quarter of a mile further on, they found some sort of overflow pipe heading off to the west and Dione stopped. There was basically a wall of concrete set higher than the walkway with an opening above it. If the main sewer filled up high enough, water and waste would flow off down the side passage, presumably relieving some of the stress. Turning to Mike, Dione placed a finger over where her mouth would be and waved him back down the tunnel a little. When they were far enough away, she spoke in a low voice.
‘They’ve got more sensitive noses than I have. If I were them, I’d want to be out of the main sewer. I figure that side branch could even be dry unless there’s a storm surge.’
Mike nodded. ‘Yeah. Bet it still stinks, but it might be better than in here.’
‘Okay, we go back. You hoist me up and I’ll take a look over the wall.’
‘Yeah, but… Hold on a second…’ Mike produced the navigation unit and checked their position, then scanned over its small screen to the intersection. Then he slid the display over a short way and stopped. ‘There. There’s some sort of trap or something about… hundred and twenty feet down. More space and maybe even some dry areas even if the tunnel has liquid in it. I’m betting they’re in there.’
‘Okay. It sounds good, and I hope so because we’ll have a fair way to track back. And, in my defence, when I learned tactics, they didn’t have gadgets like this.’
‘Uh-huh.’
There was no sign of the ghouls directly over the wall. Dione helped Mike up beside her and he was pleased to note that the tunnel on the far side was dry, and also at a higher level than the main sewer. Getting back would be easier. Dione stopped twenty feet down the tunnel and pulled her mask off. Her nose wrinkled, but Mike got the impression it was not from the general smell. She gave him a nod and pulled her mask back on. Then she pulled a metal canister from her belt: a white phosphorous grenade.
They made it to within thirty feet of the widened chamber where they suspected the ghouls were nesting before they got definitive proof. Mike came to a stop as he saw something moving, but he was not sure what it was until it suddenly reared up, climbing up into the tunnel.
Once, Mike guessed, it had been a human, a man. Now it was something out of a zombie horror movie, one of the ones where Milla Jovovich kicked butt using various random superpowers maybe: a virus was responsible for these things too. Its skin was grey, mottled by decaying fats beneath it, and its limbs were thin, but the muscles stood out strongly, denuded of any spare flesh. It moved, it seemed, on all fours, but as it spotted the two figures in the tunnel ahead of it, it reared up, standing on two legs and letting out a scream of rage. Sharp teeth, full rows of them instead of vampiric fangs, glinted in the light from Mike’s and Dione’s flashlights.
Mike lifted his shotgun as the thing charged at them. Dione pulled the pin on her grenade and threw it just as Mike fired. The heavy slug punched through the ghoul’s back and then exploded. Dark blood splashed over concrete, but the thing was still moving, still trying to get to its next meal. Mike fired again, twice, and the creature’s torso was torn apart by the twin explosions, and this time it stopped moving.
By now, however, another of the ghouls was climbing what had to be a ladder at the end of the tunnel and clawed hands were scrabbling on the concrete beside it. Dione tossed a second grenade after the first and lifted her shotgun. Mike fired at the head of one of the ghouls as it started to rise over the edge, but missed. It was Dione’s first round which dissolved the creature’s skull into fragments, and a second explosion almost drowned out that detonation as her first grenade went off. There were howls from the ghouls as burning fragments of phosphor hit them, and then thick white smoke began to fill the chamber.
The ghoul scrabbling its way up managed to get there. White smoke was pouring from three burning holes in its skin, but it seemed not to care. It took a step forward and then both Mike and Dione hit it in the chest and it was blown apart by the twin detonations.
‘I’m out,’ Mike said, reaching for more ammo.
‘Throw your grenades in first,’ Dione said. ‘I’ve got this covered.’ Her suggestion was punctuated by the detonation of her second grenade and there were more howls from the pit ahead of them.
Mike pulled a canister from his belt and yanked the pin. ‘What next?’ he asked as he threw. ‘We can’t see them through the smoke and there is another way out on the other side of the chamber.’
‘We let the grenades do their stuff anyway. We do not want to be in there with them. We’ll go in when the smoke’s cleared and track down the outlet pipe.’ A ghoul poked its head up over the edge and out of the smoke and Dione took aim, blowing its head off, literally, before it could gain its footing. ‘Assuming they don’t all just come at us one at a time to get shot.’
Mike threw his second grenade. ‘I need to put in more time at the range. I’d never have made that shot.’
‘I do have a couple of centuries’ more practice than you.’
‘I guess when you put it like that…’
They waited, crouched down as Mike’s grenades exploded and the smoke thickened. In the narrow confines of the tunnel system, the smoke took several minutes to disperse and left a haze in the air even afterward. Mike was very glad of his mask. Then, shotguns ready, they moved in to find out what was left of the ghouls.
‘Seven of them,’ Mike said as he surveyed the carnage. Those that had not made it over the edge into the inlet tunnel had died as the phosphor fragments burned into their bodies.
Dione looked around and started for the outlet pipe. ‘One or two may have made it out this side. We’ll take a look.’ She had to duck a little to walk in the tunnel, but she did not have to walk very far. Maybe fifteen feet in, there was another fallen ghoul. ‘And no sign of anything going further,’ Dione said. ‘See how its claws have left scratches in the muck? No sign of more beyond here.’
‘It must’ve staggered out before the burns got to it,’ Mike said. ‘I’m no tracker, but there are a lot of scratches and they look kind of random.’
‘You may not be a tracker, but you are a good detective. Yes, I’d say it was going on through grim determination.’ Her eyes scanned over the still-smoking corpse. ‘Even for a ghoul, that must have hurt like Hell.’
‘Not feeling sympathetic toward them now, are we?’
‘Oh… probably never. And when we’ve hauled these out for analysis and disposal, I’ll feel less. Get that magic map out and see whether we’d be faster taking them out this way or back the way we came.’
Mike grinned. ‘Magic map it is.’
Suffolk County, NY.
‘The maid found them this morning about nine,’ the man in the East Hampton Town PD uniform said. Dione and Mike were looking over the bedroom of a large house in the Hamptons where the body of a man seemed to have been nailed to the wall. His head was lying on the blood-soaked carpet near his feet. ‘Don’t know if you want to talk to her. We took her into town to get medical treatment. Shock.’
> ‘Unsurprising,’ Dione commented. ‘I don’t think we’ll need to interview her. Thank you for calling us in, chief.’
The chief of police gave a shrug. ‘We’ve an arrangement about this kind of weird stuff, and it also happens that this guy sort of matches that advisory you sent out. His partner’s a blonde. Little older than your age range though, which is why we hadn’t checked up on them before now.’
‘We’ll take this one if you’re happy to hand it over. Either way, we’d like to take the autopsies. Our specialist has a few techniques up his sleeve even the MEs in New York don’t have.’
‘To me, this looks like a home invasion. That kind of case can stick on your books for a long time. I’m fine with handing it off to you guys, but if you do nail someone for it, let us know.’
‘Have you had anything else like this in the area?’ Mike asked.
‘Not recently. What gets me about this one is that whoever did it got in without tripping any alarms. Place is wired up like Fort Knox and nothing went off. We’ve fingerprinted everything we could find. I’ll get any results sent over to your lab.’
‘Thank you, chief,’ Dione said and the man wandered away. He looked like he would be treating his own shock with alcohol later and Dione could not blame him. ‘He,’ Dione said to Mike, pointing at the body on the wall, ‘was Andrew Quarry and he was a valentine.’ She looked around at the rest of the room briefly. ‘If we don’t get out of here soon, we may have a Concilium member popping in to see how we’re doing.’
‘Should I get Juliana?’
‘Uh-huh. Just warn her about what’s in the lounge. I know she was a nurse, but…’
‘Yeah…’ Mike turned and headed out through the house. That meant passing what was in the lounge: the body of Sandra Wallow. Someone, probably more than one someone, had spent some considerable time making sure Sandra’s death was not a nice one.
Juliana was waiting in the van, clad in a blue boiler suit with ‘FORENSICS’ printed across the back and with an NYPD baseball cap pulled down over her eyes. She looked a little nervous as Mike walked over to get her. ‘You know I’ve had hardly any training in evidence collection,’ she said.
‘Local crime scene people have handled most of that,’ Mike said. ‘You just need to take a few pictures, and we’ll tell you what to take, and help bag the bodies.’
‘I wish Doctor Winthrop was here.’
‘He’s busy with… other stuff.’
‘I know…’
‘Okay, grab two body bags and let’s get going. Uh… this might be unsettling.’
Juliana’s eyebrows went up a little. ‘Seriously? I’m going into a house where two people were murdered and you think I haven’t figured that out?’
‘The woman wasn’t just murdered. It, uh, looks like they took some time over killing her.’
‘Oh. Oh!’ Juliana stepped out of the van, biting her lips shut. Then she pulled in a deep breath and straightened her back. ‘Well, it might not be the right reasons, but she was the human, right?’ Mike nodded. ‘So from what Mary told me, she gets the men who did this an automatic death sentence. The man they might get away with, but not her.’
‘Yeah,’ Mike agreed. ‘I can’t think of a way they can wriggle out of what they did to her. When Dione finds them, she’ll end them.’
Mike was waiting for Juliana to get the body bags when a man in a white polo-neck sweater and carefully pressed slacks walked up. Having Juliana nearby dampened Mike’s ability to detect other vampires a little, but the strikingly blue eyes suggested carpathian, along with the confident manner in which the blonde man walked over to a police van. Of course, a lot of people who lived in the Hamptons probably had a confident manner about them.
‘Excuse me,’ the man said, ‘but are you people here with Detective Hunter? You’re SCU?’
‘Yes, sir,’ Mike replied. Behind him, Juliana emerged, looking curious. ‘This is an active crime scene and I’ll have to ask you–’
The man drew in a breath through his nose and smiled. ‘Ah yes.’ His eyes fixed on Juliana. ‘You’re the carpathian filia they just took on. Juliana?’
Juliana frowned, but she said, ‘Yes, sir.’
‘Excellent. You seem to be settling in. My name is George Nailer’ – he noted the shift in Mike’s posture – ‘and I see that Dione has mentioned my name.’
‘In passing, sir,’ Mike said. ‘Juliana, Mister Nailer is a Conciliarum.’
‘Oh!’ Juliana said, eyes widening. She bobbed a little curtsey. ‘Pleased to meet you, sir.’
Nailer grinned. ‘The courtesy is appreciated, my dear, but not necessary. I assume, young man, that you are Michael Williams? Would you be so kind as to ask Dione to join me here? I have enough sway locally to get past the outer cordon, but entering the building would, I think, be unseemly.’
‘Of course,’ Mike said. Juliana was all too keen to follow him into the house, even if she stalled for a second at the sight of the body sprawled on the lounge carpet. ‘Give me a second to get Di, then I’ll come help you with her.’
‘Sure,’ Juliana said. ‘It’ll take me a second to be ready.’
Mike went on to find Dione looking around the bedroom, checking the drawers in an absent manner. ‘George Nailer’s outside,’ Mike said. ‘He’d like a word.’
‘Told you,’ Dione replied. ‘Okay, you can handle things with Juliana for a while?’
‘We’re starting with the female victim.’
‘Juliana’s okay?’
‘Kind of determined to see justice done, actually. And she knows what kind of justice will be done too.’
Juliana was, in fact, standing with her head bowed in what looked like prayer when Dione walked past her. She looked up and gave her boss a slightly embarrassed smile and Dione returned the smile before carrying on outside to meet Nailer.
‘George,’ Dione said as she walked up to the Conciliarum, ‘I was kind of expecting you to turn up.’
‘I didn’t know Andrew well,’ Nailer replied, ‘but I knew him, and his supplicant. They’re both gone?’
Dione nodded. ‘He was nailed to the wall and beheaded. An axe of some sort. She died… in a rather more long-winded and unpleasant manner.’
‘Ah… He was a valentine. Do you think he was ended because he was a valentine?’
‘I don’t know, but it seems likely. The Concilium needs to act on this or we’ll have more of them.’
‘I’ll speak to Leo.’
‘Good. When I find these bastards, I’m going to end them. I hope I’ll have your support on that, George.’
‘I liked Sandra,’ Nailer said, his eyes on the house. ‘She was a nice woman. Open, pleasant to talk to. She enjoyed life. You’ll have the support of the whole Concilium.’
~~~
‘You prayed for Sandra Wallow,’ Dione said as they were all riding back to New York in the van. ‘That’s nice.’
‘Well, I…’ Juliana trailed off, looking a little uncomfortable.
‘Worried your God isn’t listening?’
Rather than answer, Juliana asked, ‘Are you religious at all?’ Or maybe that was an answer of sorts.
‘Yes, though not perhaps in a way you would call religion. Back in the day, I was a priestess of Aphrodite and I still keep the faith. I suppose you would call me a pagan.’
‘Oh… I suppose I would. Except I’m not even sure what that really means. I, uh, guess I figured you’d be an atheist.’
‘Perhaps I am. I’m not sure I really believe in anything. After all this time, I couldn’t say that any religion has really… come up with any answers. Religions, all of them, no exception, are constructs of the human mind.’
‘Are you saying no vampire has ever played the god card and started a religion?’ Mike asked.
‘Oh, well… Not in recorded history. A couple of cults, yes, but never a full-on religion. That’s not the point, however. Religions are made by people. Even if some powerful being did actually come down and start them,
and I’ve no evidence to call it either way, the religion was made by the people who saw that event. If Jesus existed and was the Son of God, he told his stories and gave his sermons, but the religion which resulted really began when no one who ever heard him was left alive to tell the tale. People bring their own prejudices and needs to the table. I think that if people could just learn not to be assholes to each other, they wouldn’t need religions to tell them how they should behave.’
‘The Bill and Ted philosophy,’ Mike said, grinning.
‘Hated that movie. Neither Socrates nor Jeanne were anything like that.’
‘Uh… Jeanne.’
‘The English pronounced it Joan.’
‘You met Joan of Arc?!’ Juliana squeaked. It was probably a good thing that Dione was driving.
‘She had been captured by the Burgundians and transferred to the custody of the English. The Summus Concilium requested that I look in on her. There were some suspicions that she might be a vampire, possibly a very old but unknown one. So, I walked into where she was being held in Rouen and had a chat. She was a bright girl, very religious, obviously. Also not a vampire and I had to let her go unaided. I was rather displeased about what happened to her, but we are generally disinclined to mess with that level of politics.’
‘But… You met Joan of Arc!’
Dione smirked. ‘I slept with Socrates, Plato, and Xenophon, but I don’t suppose that’s quite as exciting.’ Juliana made a little strangled squeaking sound. ‘Oh, not at the same time…’
New York, NY.
‘Very well,’ Winthrop said, shuffling notes. ‘Let us begin with recent events. I shall not list the range of insults and injuries to Miss Wallow. If you have some desire to read them, they will be in my final report. Suffice to say that her death was undignified, unnecessary, and abhorrent.’
‘We got that impression at the scene,’ Dione said. They were in Winthrop’s lab, everyone except Mary, who was not in the office.
‘Quite. Andrew Quarry was ended by decapitation. A bladed, heavy weapon. Likely a fire axe wielded by a relatively incompetent user. It took at least two blows to sever the spine. Michael could have done better, I have no doubt, without a vampire’s enhanced strength. Quarry was, however, unconscious at the time since his heart had been pierced by a large metal spike which was driven through his chest and into the wall behind him. It is something of a shame that these… people did not perform the same courtesy on Miss Wallow; however, their… zeal in mistreating her has given me good viral samples. I’ve identified three carpathians and one nubian. Slight variations in the virus genome allow me to give numbers, if not any clues to the individuals.’
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