‘They were drained,’ Alex said. ‘Probably while they were still alive. Then whoever did this tore them apart.’ She stepped over a half-eaten ribcage. ‘There are five, maybe six men here. I’m guessing these are the guys we thought we were here to meet.’
Greg was about to say something when the claustrophobic space around them was filled with blasting noise.
Becker had been standing at his shoulder, surveying the scene inside the room. Suddenly he was flying forward, pitching over on his face, screaming in agony, his legs kicking out.
For an eighth of a second, Alex stared down at him. Watched the grotesque swelling of his flesh, his face distorting, the veins standing out from the skin. Reaching burst-point and then erupting in a spray of gore. Even before Becker had spattered like a ripe tomato in a vice, she knew what she was seeing.
The effects of a Nosferol bullet.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Out of the shadows of the passageway came six fleeting, running shapes; and suddenly the darkness was filled with bursts of white-yellow flame as their attackers opened up with automatic gunfire. Alex threw herself flat on the floor and saw the others do the same. Bullets whipped past and slammed into the walls behind them. She caught glimpses of the attackers by the strobe lights of the muzzle flashes.
The leader was female. Her long hair was jet black and wild. The red leather jumpsuit she was wearing could have been painted onto her slim, curvaceous figure. She was cradling a Heckler & Koch submachine gun, and a sword in a scabbard dangled from the gunbelt around her narrow waist.
Behind her was one of the biggest men Alex had ever seen. He was more than six and a half feet tall, and the combat vest he was wearing stretched tightly over his muscular chest and shoulders. His bulk contrasted sharply with the ferret-like, darting shape of the guy next to him. Behind him, another woman, blonde, studded white leather biker jacket, gripping a stubby pistol like she knew how to use it. The rear was brought up by an Oriental male and a Teutonic-looking, sharp-featured female with cropped brown hair, who was clutching a grenade launcher.
They’d walked into a trap. But these six were no vampire hunters. Alex could recognise her own species with split-second intuition. These were vampires. Hunting their own kind. She could worry about the reason why later.
As Greg and Mundhra scrambled for cover, Alex lashed out with her foot. Her heel connected hard with the hatch door and it slammed shut with a juddering clang before the attackers could reach it. She leapt to her feet and jumped over Becker’s ruined body to grab a length of scaffold pole from the bloody floor. She wedged it between the hatch door and the opposite wall just in time. Something rammed against the door with the force of a battering ram. The door quivered, but held. Muted gunfire came from outside. Bullets raked the steel and punched a wild pattern of dents in it that jutted proud like rivet heads.
Alex and Greg looked at each other. ‘You thinking what I’m thinking?’ she said.
‘Grenade launcher.’
And if the grenade was primed with Nosferol, in a few seconds the room would be no place for vampires to be hanging about. Alex snatched up Becker’s fallen 9mm Walther and leapt across the butcher’s yard in the middle of the room, using the muzzle of the gun to punch out the glass in the porthole. She sprang up into the deep, round recess in the wall and scrambled through. Outside, the cold wind whipped her hair over her face. She dropped ten feet down the side of the hull and landed softly on a walkway. Looking up, she saw Greg emerge and drop down to land beside her, then Mundhra. They sprinted away along the clattering walkway, heading towards the deck.
Less than two seconds later a deafening blast and a shriek of ripping metal shook the ship. The attackers had breached the hatch. Alex glanced back to see the black-haired female leap from the smoking porthole and land like a gymnast on the walkway behind them. The huge black guy came thudding down in her wake, then the others. The woman opened fire with the submachine gun and bullets screamed off the metal wall by Alex’s head.
Then it was sixty seconds of frantic sprinting, zigzagging, staying low while bullets zipped all around them, ricochets howling off the walkway rail and the steel floor. Alex leapt down a further fifteen feet to the deck and hit the ground running. Greg was close behind, followed by Mundhra. They retreated up the deck as the attackers kept coming, using the stacks of drums and other ship debris as cover while they returned fire. Greg dropped into a crouch, took careful aim and let off a string of rapid shots that took down the sharp-faced female with the grenade launcher before she could fire another round and blow them all to pieces. Before she’d even hit the deck, she was bursting open like a sausage on a hot grill and her blood was spattering in a wide circle. A voice screamed out ‘Petra!’
With Becker’s Walther in one hand and her own Desert Eagle in the other, Alex chased the Oriental vampire in her sights as he leapt behind a stack of crates and old rope. She squeezed off four rounds from each so fast it sounded like one continuous explosion. The strangled shriek and the blood burst from behind the crates told her that now it was three against four. Maybe the odds were evening up. Maybe.
Mundhra gave her the thumbs-up as he aimed his pistol over an oil drum. In the split second that he took his eyes off the enemy, the black-haired female rattled off a string of rounds at him. Mundhra ducked, but not before one of her bullets had sent his gun spinning out of his hand. He yelled in pain and rage as the weapon clattered across the deck. He took a chance and went rolling out to retrieve it.
Too big a chance. The woman chased him with another sustained burst of automatic fire and his body went into spasm as bullets punched a ragged line of holes through his chest. His tortured eyes met Alex’s as he went down – then he was spattering across the deck in a shiny slick of blood and meat.
Now it was just Alex and Greg against four, and they were being steadily beaten back towards the ship’s great square prow. Alex fired Becker’s gun until it was empty, tossed it, then blasted off shots from her Desert Eagle until that was empty too. She did a lightning reload and realised with a shock that she was down to her last magazine.
Greg called across to her. ‘I’m out.’
Bullets were whipping and pinging all over the place. They both fell back, pinned with nowhere to go, rolling and scrambling over heaps of debris and coils of rope and chain. Risking a glance over the edge of the hull, Alex could see the mooring cables like silvery spider thread in the moonlight, stretching between the hull and the quay, gently flexing with the movement of the ship. She tossed her Desert Eagle to Greg.
‘Make them count.’
As Greg kept their enemies’ heads down with steady, well-aimed covering fire, Alex whipped off her belt and looped it over the cable. She thumped his shoulder.
‘Hold on to me,’ she yelled. He rattled off the last three shots, stuck the gun in his belt and grabbed hold of her waist as she launched herself over the edge, one end of the belt in each hand. The wind tore at their clothes and bullets whipped by them as they abseiled wildly down the cable. The concrete quayside came up fast and they hit the ground running. Alex pointed at the dark clusters of storage units, twenty yards away across the dock.
‘That way.’
Glancing back at the ship, she saw what she’d known she would see – their attackers were already swarming over the side and coming after them. The female leader used her gun to ride the mooring cable. Ten feet from the quayside she launched herself into the air, twisted like a cat and landed square on her feet, her eyes shining in the dim moonlight, weapon ready.
Unarmed, Alex and Greg could do nothing but run. They ducked into the shadows, but the woman had spotted them. Furious gunfire raked the walls of the buildings, dust and stone fragments flying, windows exploding into shards.
A door on the left was heavily padlocked and bore a sign that read ‘THAMES RIB TOURS’. Alex booted it open with a splintering of wood and they burst inside. It was a storage depot with a flight of concrete steps that led down to
a gated boathouse. Five large speedboats were tethered up, drifting gently on the water.
‘RIBs,’ Greg said. ‘Rigid inflatables. Navy SEALs use them.’
Alex leapt into the nearest of the boats. It had been heavily adapted for taking sightseers up and down the Thames tourist trail, but it was the massive Yamaha inboard engines that mattered. She grabbed the steel cable that secured the boat to the wall and yanked it out with a big chunk of brickwork.
‘Make it go.’
Greg jumped in. His jaw was set as he urgently examined the control panel at the helm. He found the ignition switch, hammered the starter. The twin diesels churned into life with an eager roar and white foam boiled up around the props.
And the door of the storage unit came crashing off its hinges. Their pursuers burst inside the building, shooting wildly. Rounds thunked into the fibreglass of the boat and shattered the windscreen. Alex was thrown back into the boat as Greg nailed the throttle wide open and aimed the RIB at the chained wooden gates of the boathouse. They went smashing through, planks and splinters flying, the nose of the speedboat rising high out of the water under hard acceleration. Then they were roaring down the Thames, bouncing on the water, ducking down behind the shattered windscreen. Greg’s temple had been gashed from a flying splinter and there was blood on his face.
‘Who are those people?’ he yelled over the noise.
‘Vampires,’ she yelled back.
‘Why? What’s happening?’
She glanced back at the docks, now far away beyond the tail of their foaming white wake. The Anica was a hulking shadow against the gloomy quayside. No sign of anyone coming after them. But she knew they would. Vampires didn’t give up as easily as humans.
‘Make it go faster,’ she shouted.
He pointed at a gauge on the control panel. ‘I’m going as fast as I can, but something’s taken a hit and we’re losing oil pressure.’
Within three minutes, Alex could see the lights of a second speedboat coming up behind them. It was a long way back, but gaining rapidly.
‘Let’s lose some weight.’ She grabbed hold of one of the RIB’s dozen passenger seats and ripped it from its mounting, tossed it tumbling into their wake. Then another.
‘Pressure still dropping,’ Greg yelled over his shoulder.
Two more minutes, and now their pursuers were just a couple of hundred yards back. Alex tensed, waiting for the first shot. Across the dark water, the London nightscape was alive with light and movement. The Houses of Parliament and Big Ben were lit gold in the distance. Their ears filled with the booming echo of the engine roar as they passed under the arches of Westminster Bridge; then they flashed out the other side and Alex could see the illuminated glass pods of the London Eye suspended high in the sky, and the tiny figures milling about inside them.
‘She’s going to die on us,’ Greg shouted.
Alex felt the whip of a bullet pass close to her, and looked back to see the second RIB drawing dangerously close. There were spits of fire as muzzles flashed. Another Nosferol-tipped round shattered the glass of the instrument panel six inches from Greg’s body.
Almost instantly, the engines began to chatter and then stall. A final cough, and then nothing. The boat began to drift.
‘Here we go,’ Greg said. ‘Trip’s over.’
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Bullets churned up the water as they floated towards the Millennium Pier. Ten feet, five, and Alex sprang up onto the prow of the dead speedboat.
‘Come on!’
Without hesitation she leapt through the air and clambered up the side of the pier. She reached out an arm to haul Greg up behind her, and then they were running towards the lights and the crowds of people milling about the foot of the gigantic wheel of the London Eye. A party was going on; it looked to Alex like some kind of corporate event – women in expensive dresses, men in dark suits and ties. Inside the slow-moving pods people were sipping champagne, nibbling canapés, laughing, chattering animatedly. She and Greg attracted a few stares as they pressed through the throng. A fat woman stumbled and dropped her glass with an outraged ‘Excuse me!’ as Alex shoved her out of the way.
The other four vampires weren’t far behind. Alex saw their leader heading fast towards them, scanning the crowd. The sword slapped her thigh as she ran.
These idiot humans would think it was fancy dress.
Alex and Greg joined a press of people funnelling inside one of the pods as it passed slowly by on the end of its gigantic steel latticework arm. Alex dabbed the blood from Greg’s face with a handkerchief as they boarded. ‘Whatever happens, stay close to me.’
‘I can take care of myself,’ he muttered.
‘These aren’t Taliban insurgents, Greg. You’re in my world now.’
As they were about to enter the pod, a stocky guy in a plain suit stepped up to them. The earpiece and mike he was wearing told Alex he was a security official. He ran a cold eye over them. ‘Excuse me, folks. You’re aware this is a private party, yeah? Can I see your invitations?’
Alex raised a hand. ‘Back off, pal. Leave us alone, or I’m going to rip your spine out through your mouth.’ She said it with enough sincerity that the guy frowned, paled, then swallowed hard and took a step back. ‘Wise choice,’ she said as he disappeared back into the crowd.
They stepped onboard and soon the pod was rising slowly into the air. A panoramic view across London opened up below. Alex peered down and saw the black-haired woman shoving through the crowd. The same security guy who’d approached them a moment ago walked up to her and Alex could tell he was demanding to see her invite. Just then, the other three vampires appeared at the woman’s side and the security guy began to look nervous all over again. But whatever it was he was trying to stammer out, he didn’t finish. The woman stared at him contemptuously for a second, pulled out a pistol and shot him between the eyes, in the middle of the crowd.
‘Wasn’t his day, was it?’ Alex said. She turned to Greg. ‘We’re going to have company.’
Down below, the party was erupting into mayhem. The crowd dispersed like a shoal of minnows at the approach of a great white shark. The animated buzz of conversation and laughter instantly gave way to screams of panic. The woman stood calmly over the fallen body of the security official. There was blood on her face where his brains had splattered at point-blank range. She wiped a finger through the red on her cheek and sucked it clean. Her cold gaze ran upwards and her eyes locked on Alex’s. She pointed and said something to the big man. He grinned. Then all four of them raised their weapons and opened fire.
The glass panels of the pod blew apart, fragments raining down from the ceiling. The pod’s other occupants began to scream in terror. A man clutched his arm, blood pumping through his fingers. Another woman was screaming as she clamped her hand over a torn earlobe.
‘We need to go higher,’ Alex said. She shoved past the petrified humans and launched herself up through the shattered roof.
‘I think you’re right,’ Greg said as he quickly followed her. A second volley of shots punched through the pod. The humans huddled on the floor, moaning and shrieking.
Standing on the roof of the pod, Alex and Greg were surrounded by the white steel latticework of tubular struts that held the arms of the enormous wheel on its axis. The metal was slick with moisture from the drifting mist, slippery to the touch. If Alex had a plan, it was simply to keep putting distance between them and the enemy until the four vampires ran out of ammunition. Just a scratch from a Nosferol bullet, and it was game over.
The wind crackled in their ears as they hauled and swung themselves from one strut to another. Two tiny spiders on a gigantic steel web three hundred feet across. Alex looked down; they were already a long way above the pod. Greg was making his own way up, ten feet below her and a little way to the right. The river was a black mirror shimmering with coloured lights. The spangled cityscape sprawled all around as far as the eye could see. It was a dizzy drop down, but that was the last
thing on Alex’s mind.
She knew she’d made a bad mistake. The four vampires had split up. She couldn’t see the other three, but the black-haired female had boarded a pod. As it steadily rose into the air, the motion of the wheel was bringing her and Greg downwards in relation to it. In minutes they’d be level with one another. Alex climbed on, using all her vampire strength to keep moving faster – but the laws of physics were an opponent nobody could defeat.
The dark female punched out the glass side of her pod. She stepped out onto the arm with a smile and walked nonchalantly towards Alex. Leaning on a vertical strut, she crossed her arms. ‘Going somewhere?’ she purred.
‘Oh, I come up here all the time,’ Alex said.
‘You’re Alex Bishop, aren’t you? Heard all about you, but you don’t know me. My name’s Lillith. Thought you’d like to know who destroyed you.’ She shrugged, then pulled the gun from her belt and aimed at Alex’s face. Taking her time, drawing it out.
A gust of wind caught her unawares. Her foot slipped on the shiny, wet steel piping and she lost balance. Grabbing for a strut, she knocked the gun from her grip and it went clanging and tumbling down through the lattice to the water far below.
‘Clever,’ Alex said.
Lillith flushed, but quickly regained her composure. ‘Who needs a gun? More fun this way.’ She grabbed the hilt of the sword at her hip, drew out the blade with a ringing of steel and lunged at Alex.
If Alex had stayed where she was, the whooshing sword would have taken her head off. Instead she ducked, moving in towards Lillith’s body, and threw a right hook that connected hard with her face. The punch would have knocked a human out cold. Vampires were a little tougher than that. Lillith went sprawling on her back on the pipe, but sprang instantly back on her feet and came on again with the sword poised. Another humming sideways slice, so fast a human wouldn’t even have seen death coming.
It takes a vampire to destroy a vampire properly. Alex recalled the words she’d spoken in Romania just days ago. In a quarter of a second the blade was going to chop through her windpipe, carve through her neck and separate the spinal vertebrae on its way out. Her head would hit the water just before her body.
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