Blood Royal

by Will McDermott

  ‘Bester,’ said Dungo.

  ‘Arin Bester?’ said Kal, almost spitting out the ‘Snake. He swallowed hard. ‘Nah. It’d take an army to kill that old pit champion. He’s stronger than Hern.’

  ‘He’s dead all right,’ said Skreed. I brought him in myself. Vampire snapped his neck like kindling and bent the barrel of his shotgun.’ He dropped the ruined weapon on the bar as an exclamation point.

  ‘Damn. Not Bester?’ Jerico slammed his bottle onto the bar. ‘Damn. He owed me two hundred credits!’

  ‘Beddy also found the body of Pete Parcher earlier today,’ said Hagen. ‘He runs a guild shop over on the south side of the dome…’

  ‘Or used to before his body was drained and left on the roof of his shop,’ added Dungo.

  ‘I take it the guild has put out a bounty?’ said Kal hopefully. Maybe he could get the money Bester owed him, with interest.

  ‘Two thousand credits!’ said Skreed. ‘Beddy’s out there right now trying to cash in.’

  Credit symbols danced in Kal’s eyes. The debauchery he could wreak in watering holes throughout the Underhive with that kind of money made the bounty hunter’s heart thump as fast as a repeating rifle. But another more immediate yearning, one that had quickly developed below his beltline, forced Kal to retreat from the throng, which had now broken into several groups who all seemed to be planning their attacks on the vampire.

  In the alley beside Hagen’s Hole, Kal relieved his watery burden against the wall while pondering the best way to track and defeat the vampire. It was obviously some mutant beast from the deepest depths of the Underhive. How else could The King have heard about it? It was strong and apparently attacked without warning.

  But Jerico knew that none of that mattered. Sure the beast had taken out Bester, but the man was getting on in years and anybody can be taken by surprise. Jerico, though, had three things that even the best in the business, all of whom were in the Hole tonight, did not have. He had Plan W, which was a tried and true method to defeat any kind of surprise. He had two partners to draw the beast’s attention while he lined up a shot. And he had the fabled Kal Jerico luck.

  Kal heard a noise behind him and turned too late. Helmawr’s rump. That’s just my luck, thought Jerico to himself.

  3: HEADS OR TAILS

  Yolanda’s laspistol blast echoed in the empty streets. A shape dropped from the conduit above her. When it hit the street in front of her, something rolled off into the ever-present rubble. The object at her feet was about a metre long, brown, furry, and headless. Bare patches of skin dotted the body, showing old sores from battles and diseases that had never quite healed over.

  It was a rat. She’d been startled by a lousy Hive rat. Good thing Kal and Scabbs weren’t around to see her so jittery. Her paranoia circuits must be working overtime. Stupid Jerico. This was all his fault, she remembered. With Nemo on them again, even a rat could be dangerous. Yolanda kicked the headless rat into the rubble.

  That’s when she saw it. The head. But it wasn’t the rat’s head. She’d blasted that clean away. This was a human head, covered by tightly-curled, black hair. Yolanda had a sick feeling in her stomach as she walked over to get a better look. Not from the shock of seeing a human head. She’d carried enough of those into the guilder’s offices as proof of her bounties. No, she was fairly sure she recognised this particular head, even though she could only see the back of it.

  She picked up the head to get a better look. Much of the skin and underlying muscles on the face had been gnawed away by rats, leaving a gruesome, bloody patchwork. But the thick, black curls with roughly the texture of steel wool, along with the gold teeth clearly visible within the lipless mouth, confirmed Yolanda’s fears. It was Beddy Bor’Wick.

  Yolanda examined the head to see if she could figure out what had happened to her fellow bounty hunter. The skull seemed to be intact, and what was left of the skin had no burn holes or scorch marks. Beddy could have been shot in the torso and her head severed afterward.

  She examined the cut marks. Luckily, the rats hadn’t eaten their way down to the neck yet. The cut was clean, but it hadn’t been cauterised. So, not a laspistol, power sword or laser scalpel. The cut was too clean for a chainsword, though. And who, or what, would have the strength to make such a clean cut with only the strength of their bare hands behind the blow?

  Yolanda opened her pack and pulled out a blood-stained cloth bag. She stuffed Beddy’s head into the bag and dropped it into a special compartment in her pack. She looked at the pile of rubble. It sloped gently up toward the roof where she had shot the rat. Probably the local thugs and thieves had shaped it for an easy escape. She would use it for a different purpose. It was time to hit the rooftops and find Beddy’s killer. Or at least the rest of Beddy.

  Rats scurried off across the conduit pipes as Yolanda reached the top of the pile. She reached up and pulled herself onto the rooftop. Standing with her hands on her hips, she surveyed this section of the dome from her elevated vantage point. It looked exactly the same as every other part of Glory Hole. The once glorious dome now held little more than partially-destroyed buildings and rats. Lots and lots of rats.

  Yolanda decided to follow the rats. If there was a body anywhere up here, the vermin would find it first. She looked at the bundle of pipes that stretched to the building across the street. The rat she had killed had been scampering across with Beddy’s head when she’d taken its own head. The conduit looked sturdy enough, and the bounty hunter could see footprints in the dust from recent vermin traffic of the human variety, so she decided to chance it.

  She loped easily across the pipes and dropped onto the roof on the other side. Judging from the huge exhaust tubes rising up from the building all the way to the dome, she was atop an old factory of some sort. The rats had all vanished before she arrived but a trail of blood led away from the pipe, probably from the rat dragging Beddy’s head. She followed this across the roof and another set of conduit pipes to a large, flat roof with a blast hole in the middle.

  Two trails of blood led away from the hole: a fresh one coming toward her that she was now sure had come from the severed head in her pack; and another, leading off from the other side of the hole. There was no body in sight, though, and an eerie silence had descended around her.

  Yolanda slipped her sword from the sheath banging against her bare thigh. Her other hand found its way to the butt of her laspistol as she scanned the rooftops. Nothing. Not even the rats scurried about anymore. As she crept toward the hole, she began to hear a strange scrabbling sound. There was more blood at the edge of the hole, but it didn’t seem to have any connection to either trail. She could also see that the other blood trail had already dried.

  The scrabbling sound was louder, and she could hear what she recognised as the chirping sound of rats again. She looked down into the hole. There, twenty feet below, just barely visible in the deepening gloom of the Glory Hole twilight, was a body. Yolanda flicked on a torch and shined it into the hole, revealing a headless body covered in a swarm of huge rats. She shot a blast into the pack beside the body and the swarm dispersed. It was Beddy alright. Her rifle was still sheathed on her back, and a spool of grapnel wire laid coiled atop her body. Oddly, there was no blood visible, not even oozing from the numerous rat bites.

  ‘What in the Hive?’ asked Yolanda.

  Kal Jerico awoke to a bright light shining in his eyes. His side ached. He couldn’t move his arms or legs, and he had a headache that started at the base of his skull and wrapped around his head to dig into his eyeballs. ‘I won’t tell you anything!’ he cried out automatically. ‘I don’t care how much you beat me, how much you torture me, I…’ He paused as he looked around at his surroundings, ‘…am yours to command.’

  The bright light streamed in from a bank of windows over the massive bed where Kal lay. He was pinned to the mattress by a slim brunette in a sheer bodysuit snuggled up against one shoulder, a buxom blonde in a black corset and stockings lying on the
other shoulder, and a voluptuous redhead in a long satin nightgown sprawled across his legs. Kal’s leather coat and trousers had, at some time during the night, been replaced by red silk pyjamas.

  The Spire. Even without the golden rays of sunshine beating down on him and the bevy of gorgeous ladies who smelled of lilacs instead of sludge, he would have known where he was. The walls of the room were white. Not even the grungy, brownish white of Hive City, but pure, alabaster white; whiter even than the pale skin of the redhead at his feet.

  And the air. It didn’t hang there in your mouth and nose like a haze of grease in a fry kitchen. It simply passed through to your lungs with just the barest whisper of pine dew. Of course, the air was thinner. He was, after all, about ten miles higher within the Hive than when he went to sleep.

  Sleep. No. Drugged. Or stunned. Or both. The night before started to come back to him. He’d stepped outside Hagen’s to shake out the snake. Then he’d turned to find Spire guards surrounding him and a needle gun jammed into his ribs. That explained the pain in his side. The headache must have come from whatever the needle had injected, which also put him out for the rest of the night.

  He looked at the girls and the silk pyjamas again. ‘If this is a jail, then I’m signing up for a life sentence.’ He extracted one arm and started stroking the bare shoulder of the blonde on his right. Her tanned skin was smooth, supple, and freshly bathed. A far cry from the grungy and sometimes scaly women he normally had on his arms downhive.

  ‘A man could get used to this,’ said Kal. All three women were still deep in sleep. He watched their bosoms rise and fall as they breathed, mesmerised by the rhythmic dance of soft flesh. His headache persisted, but what bothered Jerico even more was that he couldn’t remember anything after losing consciousness. Here he was with perhaps the three most beautiful women he’d ever slept with, and he was pretty sure all he had done was sleep. Well, that would change soon, he said to himself as his hand strayed from the blonde’s shoulder toward her neck.

  But his suspicious mind, attuned to life in the Underhive, wouldn’t relax and let go of the fact that he had been kidnapped and drugged by someone as yet unknown. Plus, the oversized paranoid region of his brain told Kal that it couldn’t be a coincidence that the kidnapping had occurred only hours after he’d found Nemo’s man spying on him.

  He should get up, he knew that. He should get out of bed, find his clothes and weapons, figure out where he was and deal with whoever had brought him here. The brunette on his left moaned and shifted in her sleep, brushing her entire stocking-clad body up against Kal’s side. ‘Or I could stay here and interrogate the girls,’ he said. ‘Repeatedly. It could take hours, but I’m sure it will be fruitful.’

  Maybe it was a prison after all. A prison specially built to hold Kal Jerico.

  Derindi crouched behind the large conduit pipe and watched the entrance to Hagen’s Hole below. Beads of sweat dotted his bare head from just above his eyes all the way down to his neck. He wiped one temple, running his hand through the thin wisps of hair above his ears, only succeeding in plastering the little hair he had against his head. He wiped the other side, forgetting again about the bandage over what was left of his ear.

  Clenching his teeth to hold in the scream, Derindi groaned and grumbled, ‘Damn Jerico. He’ll pay for this!’

  ‘Concentrate,’ purred a voice in his good ear. ‘Where is Jerico?’ asked Nemo through the radio his men had so graciously implanted in the snitch’s eardrum.

  A subvocal transmitter attached to his vocal cords was obviously broadcasting everything he said back to the spymaster. It had been a shock when he realised it earlier at Pinky’s Parlour in Down Town. He had since resigned himself to the fact that he was now an owned man. ‘My sources say he and the half-breed went into Hagen’s several hours ago. Nobody’s seen them leave, so I assume they’re still in there.’

  ‘You assume!’ roared the voice. Derindi’s inner ear felt like it was going to explode. He definitely didn’t want to make Nemo angry anymore. ‘Go in and find out, you fool!’

  The protest came out before he could think to hold his tongue. ‘But the place is crawling with bounty hunters,’ he blurted. ‘They’ve come from all over the Underhive to catch some mutant vampire.’

  There was a pause that was almost more frightening than the impending scream. ‘Interesting,’ came the subdued response. ‘I had not heard about a gathering of hired guns in Glory Hole or of this mutant vampire.’

  ‘Yeah, it killed Bester last night,’ said Derindi under his breath, happy to have something of value for his new master. ‘Supposed to be huge. Some say it’s invisible.’

  ‘Hmmm. Doubtful, but possible.’ Another pause. Derindi knew better than to interrupt Nemo’s thought processes. ‘Get into that bar,’ he said after a moment. ‘Find out everything you can about this so-called vampire – and find Kal Jerico!’

  The ringing in his ears subsided after a moment, but the headache that followed would linger for quite some time. Derindi knew there was one way he could get into Hagen’s undetected, but it would mean crossing the conduit to the roof where the first vampire attack had supposedly taken place. This was not something he wanted to do. But the alternative was to fail Nemo, which was just as deadly, and probably more painful.

  He looked across the street at the dark roof where Bester had fought the vampire. The shadows loomed and seemed to move. Fear gripped the little man and he wished, not for the first time, that he’d picked a different line of work. Of course, in the Underhive, you didn’t so much choose your life as it chose you, often for dinner.

  ‘Okay,’ he said to himself and Nemo, if only to give that final push he needed to get up, ‘here I go.’ There was silence from the other end of the radio. Derindi climbed out from his hiding place and crept across the conduit.

  Halfway across, he remembered that the twins, Seek and Destroy, had given him some new gear as well as the implants. Derindi wrapped his legs around the pipe and opened the pack. Inside was a pict camera with an attached antenna, a grapnel, a needle gun and a pair of goggles. He slipped the goggles on and flipped them to nightvision.

  He scanned the roof and the dome overhead, but saw nothing moving against the greenish background of conduits, cables, and broken concrete. Feeling only slightly better (they said Bester never saw the monster coming), Derindi crawled the rest of the way across.

  ‘Now, where’s that access panel?’ he asked himself. He felt along the end of the conduit until his fingers found the hidden clasp. Depress for two seconds, wait three seconds, depress twice for one second each. A hatch slid open and Derindi crawled inside the pipe. The panel slid shut behind him.

  The trip back to the roof of Hagen’s was far easier on his nerves. The vampire was said to be three metres tall and as broad as a Goliath. It would never fit inside the pipe. Halfway back, something banged on the end of the pipe behind him. Derindi fell flat inside the pipe and didn’t move. Another clang came shortly after the first, and this one was closer.

  Bang. Bang. Bang. Something big was running down the pipe. Derindi scrambled to get onto his hands and feet and ran like a crab the entire length of the pipe. He dove into the shaft at the end, plummeting into the darkness toward the basement of Hagen’s Hole.

  ‘So, do you mean to tell me that you girls don’t know where we are either?’ asked Kal.

  The blonde, whose name was Candi, currently sat behind the bounty hunter, giving him a back rub while he in turn stroked the back of Sandi, the redhead. Brandi, the brunette, was taking a break in an overstuffed chair next to the door. All three girls worked at the infamous Kitty Club, renowned the whole Hive over for their beautiful and accommodating employees.

  Brandi sucked on a grape before answering. ‘We were hired for a private party by some guy,’ she said. ‘That’s all we know.’

  Candi nibbled on Kal’s ear as her hands rubbed his bare shoulders. ‘We were blindfolded and brought here,’ she whispered. ‘I still have the bl
indfold if you like that kind of thing.’

  Kal took a deep breath and shook his head. He had to stay focused and Candi was making that difficult. The interrogation had been enjoyable, but not terribly fruitful. Whoever had imprisoned him certainly wanted Kal to enjoy himself, but the door was locked and outside the window was a ten mile drop to the base of the Hive. Worst of all, his clothes and weapons were nowhere to be found within the small apartment.

  ‘What did he look like,’ he asked, ‘this guy who hired you?’ In his mind Kal was taking a cold shower, desperately trying to maintain some control as Candi licked at his earlobe. Sandi turned around in front of him and began kissing Jerico’s chest. The water in Kal’s imaginary shower began to steam.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Brandi. ‘He was a guy. All I saw was the top of his head.’

  ‘Yeah,’ added Sandi, ‘They never look you in the eye.’

  All three girls laughed at the private joke. Kal had to admit he would have a hard time looking them in the eyes. As beautiful as their faces were, there were just more interesting aspects to these girls than their eyes.

  ‘He had short hair and professor glasses,’ said Brandi. ‘You know the little round ones with the wire frames? The kind that all the bookish types always wear.’

  Kal exhaled in several short gasps as the girls’ ministrations threatened to break his concentration. ‘What was he wearing?’ he asked after a few minutes.

  ‘Why all the questions, lover?’ asked Brandi. ‘Enjoy the party. If you’re good, I’ll show you something fun I can do with these grapes.’ Brandi grabbed a handful of grapes and sauntered over toward the bed.

  Before she could show Kal her grape trick, the door opened and a short man with a buzz cut and wire-rimmed professor glasses walked in, flanked by two House Helmawr guards.

  ‘Good morning, Mr Jerico,’ he said. A smile crept across his face as he looked at the shirtless bounty hunter and the semi-clad ladies. ‘My name is Obidiah Clein. I hope you have been enjoying Lord Helmawr’s accommodations. But I’m afraid this party is now over.’