by Glen Duncan
Walker was at the top of the stairs, face rich with what he’d just seen: me, the woman who’d been fucking him with increasing nuance and dangerous warmth, down on all-fours eating an eviscerated human being. He was thinking of the times our eyes had met with profound recognition. Yes, that was me. And this was me. The woman was me and the monster was me. He hadn’t grasped it before. He’d conceded it, intellectually, but he hadn’t believed. Now here it was. Nine feet tall wearing blood evening gloves and winking gobbets of meat. The shock of it was a brutal refreshment. A possible paradigm shift into the future, since there was no route back to his past.
The lover wanted to comfort him. The monster was blood-buoyed and turned on and ready for more flesh. The mother was desperate, feeling time boiling away to nothing.
I turned and ran.
Two more flights of stairs brought us, I could smell, to ground level. Double doors stood open to a large, messy office, more desks and computers, papers scattered, no personnel. Identical double doors across the floor. Locked doors. Electronic. Card-swipe and access code required.
But these weren’t vault thickness, and this time there were three of us. I put Caleb down. No need to even crudely instruct Wilson and Devaz. At the third yank the left door screeched and snapped free of its lock. Beyond, not the atrium or reception I was expecting, but a loading bay. Stacked metal crates, forklifts, a snub-nosed British truck with no trailer. The place was oil-stained and freezing and stank of rust. The roll-down door to the outside world was three feet off the ground. Devaz leaped the truck, grabbed the handle and flung it upwards.
Night air full of damp fields and moonlit cold. A large asphalt compound containing a few small trucks and vans, more ribbed cargo trailers, weeds coming up through the concrete. The whole space enclosed by aluminium fencing topped with razor wire. Thirty metres away the moist silence of close-packed trees. The smells and the moon-carved openness rushed my heart up to joy. It was like running into the arms of a lost love.
Devaz and Wilson, splashed with their first Curse moonlight, lifted their ravished heads to howl – which was when I saw the gunman.
He was protruding from the sun-roof of a 4x4 parked so that it was almost completely concealed between two trailers.
I flung MOVE! at Wilson with a violence that must have struck his head like a discus – then he was down, hit in the chest – and this time, I knew, the bullets would count.
There was no time to move and all the time in the world to feel myself not moving, the stalled synapses, the neurons’ long-winded math that couldn’t possibly be done before the bullet arrived. The moment expanded, big and slow and clear enough for me to think: this is my last moment, standing with a vampire child in my arms in a—
Then the blood-rush and cellular scintillation like a billion tiny stars coming on in the flesh as out of the darkness beyond the fence a werewolf dropped, the lethal end of her giant parabola, a jump that had begun twenty metres away, triggered by the silver exploding through Wilson’s chest.
Madeline, transformed, hit the sniper like a meteor.
47
The 4x4’s driver – Murdoch, I knew – reacted fast. Within a second of Madeline’s impact on the roof he’d slammed the car into gear and motion. Madeline, having bitten through the shooter’s throat, wrenched his head clean off and flung it towards us. Murdoch floored the gas. Tyres screamed. Side-arm shots cracked dry and small over the outraged engine. Madeline hung on. It took Murdoch sideswiping a cargo crate to dislodge her. A moment more and she would have had another head to pitch us.
Murdoch rammed the fence and burst through under the wire. He swung the car right and hit what must have been an access road. Automatic-weapons fire followed him, but he kept going.
Devaz was on all-fours over Wilson’s corpse, head hanging, sniffing. I put Caleb down and ran to where Madeline had fallen.
KID OKAY. WITH LUCY.
She wasn’t hurt, and was on her feet sending me this by the time I reached her. But she was starving. Her roiling scent and shimmering heat said hunger at the end of its leash. Her roused dead were there in misery on her breath; her livened cunt had its own prowling gravity. I could have put my arms around her. She felt that, had no room for it, was already moving past me, electric with appetite. Caleb’s odour on me made her gag.
PLEASE WAIT. PLEASE.
She did, but it pulled her blood the wrong way. I could feel what she could feel: that the building was still manned, that live prey was scurrying around less than fifty metres away.
CAN’T WAIT. ASK THEM. LOOK.
Behind me. I turned. Konstantinov and Cloquet were approaching, armed. Mike got out. A metal gate swung on its hinges behind them.
‘Zoë’s safe,’ Cloquet said. ‘Thank God you’re all right. Transport close by. Hurry.’
Konstantinov was packing an AK-47 but there was silver on him too. The holstered handguns, one on each hip. The blade in his boot. He wasn’t taking any chances.
‘Hurry,’ Cloquet repeated.
Walker had collapsed a few feet away. Konstantinov ran to him and broke an ampoule of something under his nose. Caleb, pale as a root, had crawled to one of the trucks and now sat propped, semi-conscious, against one of its enormous wheels. I hesitated. Truth was I hadn’t eaten nearly enough. The half-dozen mouthfuls from the youngster in the corridor had teased the hunger rather than satisfying it. If I didn’t get more the humans would soon be at risk. A few hours from now even Cloquet wouldn’t be safe. A cloud shifted from where it had been half-covering the moon and the light in the yard surged. It was too much for Madeline. She sprang towards the building’s open maw.
At that moment several bursts of gunfire sounded from within. Screams. More shots – then three WOCOP agents came staggering and backpedalling from the loading bay.
Followed by two more werewolves.
TRISH, FERGUS, I got from Madeline. Both of them bleeding from a handful of not-silver bullet holes, manifestly not suffering for it. Konstantinov was the brains here. Attack from both ends.
Murdoch had slipped through somehow, another exit. Murdoch would always know another way out.
Devaz grabbed the first agent by the throat, lifted him off the ground, broke his wrist when he tore the machine gun from his hand. The other two agents were out of ammunition. There was nowhere for them to go.
48
Trish and Fergus were soon blissfully off-mission. In the time it took Konstantinov and Cloquet to get Walker in the van, they’d entered the state beyond reason, the state beyond – period. Trish was on all-fours, muzzle shoved under her victim’s ribs, Fergus, throat up, snout blowing bouquet after bouquet of moonlit breath, was fucking her from behind. A nerve in their victim’s leg made it jounce to their rhythm, as if he were enjoying the tune of his own death. I was wet from watching them, from the live flesh, from my share of the chaotic little pack consciousness, plus, obviously, haywire resurgence of the night with Jake at Big Sur. Not the same without love – no tenderness to sweeten the cruelty, no refined counterpoint to the beast – but still, a bacchanalian alternative, an exquisitely filthy feast for the Cursed.
Not that I’d spent all my time watching. I’d claimed my victim – mid-thirties red-haired Irishman failed swimmer with a long, sad, top-heavily muscled body – in a single leap and swipe and taken as much of him as I could in a furious and indiscriminate bolt: blood, meat, liver, kidneys, life; his life, his life – the drippy blonde babysitter he’d wanted to marry when he was six; shafts of orange gold sun like dividers in an evening forest; his mother’s small, weaselly face and that time he’d come home and found her crying at the bottom of the stairs and a cobblestoned street with a car on cinderblocks and his face fat and hot when Sean Neagle hit him that icy morning in the playground at St Michael’s in Ballyhist—
Madeline, meanwhile, was on all-fours next to me, soixante-neuf’d over her victim. She’d clawed through his pants and taken half the flesh from his left thigh. When her fangs had pierc
ed the femoral artery warm blood had splashed me, mouth, breasts, belly. The air was musical with its odour. She was close enough, it occurred to me now, with a sly loosening of my sexual self. If I wanted to reach out and touch her, to inaugurate the new era of anything sexual goes...
But the time, the time, the time. Aside from the mother in me screaming at the rest that there were THE CHILDREN TO GET TO, my strategist knew the window we were in was tiny. We were only still in it because no one left inside liked the odds outside now. The facility’s survivors weren’t looking to get out, they were looking to stay in, find a set of blast doors to lock themselves behind and wait for the moon to set. But phones would be ringing at other WOCOP bases. If reinforcements turned up they’d be packing silver – and if they were airborne they could be here in minutes.
A giant hot hand touched my butt. Devaz, sporting a prodigious erection, had crept up and was now, with obvious pride, presenting himself to me. The meat in my guts and the blood on my tongue shot a blazing imperative down to my cunt. Oh, God. Wasn’t there time? Surely there was time? Surely if we were—
The mother of my children was screaming and hopping about and pulling her hair and wringing her hands and forcing the pertinent images: I saw myself back on the scientists’ table or lying dead and naked here on the asphalt when the sun came up and Lucy one day soon realising the novelty had worn off and feeding Zoë a silver earring or just leaving her in a hotel lobby and Lorcan on the altar not knowing what was happening to him and never having known anything but aloneness and fear and looming alien presences...
It was enough – just. Even then I had to crawl out from under the seductive weight of the rest of me. Even then it took Cloquet blasting the van’s horn to haul me at last into the right kind of action. I jumped to my feet and shoved Devaz out of the way. He snapped at me, missing by an inch, then immediately turned, dropped to his knees and prodded Madeline’s thigh with his cock. Madeline stopped eating and looked at him.
Caleb had passed out a second time. He lay where he’d fallen by the truck’s big wheel, which stood over him like a dumb guardian. I ran to him and picked him up.
WE HAVE TO GO.
Madeline turned to me. In her left hand she held her victim’s bloodily torn-off cock, in her right Devaz’s, still attached to Devaz. (I thought: That can’t be much of an aphrodisiac for him, even in his state.) Like me she’d barely crossed the line into Enough, and like me she knew Enough was never enough for wulf. For wulf only more than Enough was enough. But also like me she was a businesswoman. Understood risk, gain, gamble, loss. They’d got me out, killed some of those who would otherwise have killed them, and fed. Not a bad night’s takings. Quit while you’re ahead. She dropped the severed cock, let go of the attached one and instead wrenched off what was left of her victim’s leg – complete up to just past the knee, thereafter a lot of bare bone – to bring with her.
THE OTHERS.
But there was no shifting Fergus and Trish. There was barely any reaching Fergus and Trish. Even when – with that same creepy sense of mutual invasion we’d shared back at the Dorchester – Maddy and I opened to each other, plaited wills and mentally screamed at them in unison: WE GO NOW! we got nothing back. Or maybe something, like a drunk on the very edge of complete inarticulacy trying to say Fuck you, but it had too far to travel from where they were, out there in the wolf-constellated void. Trish’s head was back now, soft-haired throat at full stretch. Fergus’s hands roamed and squeezed as if madly searching for something concealed under her skin. The stink of their sex was concussively sweet, wrapped around the big olfactory mass of slaughter, which was even now, even now a profound temptation—
‘Get in here now!’ Konstantinov shouted. ‘Or we go without you!’
I slung Caleb over my shoulder and ran towards the gate.
49
Ten hours later, human again, I sat washed and dressed in my own (Cloquet-provided) clothes at the breakfast table in Lucy’s cottage, holding Zoë in my arms. Holding Zoë in my arms. Holding Zoë in my arms. Love still made me an obscenity. Love still forced the sickening fall away from her. That wouldn’t change. Not for a long time. Not unless I got her brother back. This logic, like the idiot-proof logic of the Curse, was a comfort. Something to rely on. Something to help me through the cruelty I was going to have to inflict if I was ever going to get him back.
A wood-burning stove radiated narcotic warmth. All the curtains were closed but each window showed a lozenge of blue-grey light. The place was spotless, smelled (beyond the swirling perfumes of vestigial wulf) of fresh linen, frangipani incense, terracotta tiles and oiled oak – only occasionally muddied by the odour of the Undead: Caleb was in bed in an upstairs room, shivering, in and out of delirium, skin oozing the gelatinous pink sweat. I didn’t know how long his system would take to burn the blood he’d had last night, but he didn’t look like dying just yet. I’d tried to get a number for Mia out of him, but he was too far under.
A vampire boy, obviously, hadn’t been expected. Lucy had almost thrown up when we carried him in. (Which, given what she would have thrown up, would have been a forensic disaster, despite the painter’s plastic lining walls and floor.) I hadn’t realised how used to Caleb’s smell I’d got in prison. In the close confines of the van (yes, a Transit van with comedy contents: three humans up front, three werewolves, a vampire and half a human leg in the back) his stink had caused serious trouble: it left Madeline and Devaz too queasy to fuck. They couldn’t eat, either. I ended up finishing most of the leg myself. (Who wants a leg? my dad used to ask, carving at Christmas or Thanksgiving.) They were disgusted and furious at the wasted opportunity. Devaz kept brattishly kicking the walls of the van, until Konstantinov turned in his seat with the silver-loaded Springfield and told him very calmly that if he didn’t stop making such a fucking racket he’d shoot him there and then. We’d driven for maybe an hour – all minor roads, all unlit – to Lucy’s divorce-settlement cottage, which appeared to be in the middle of nowhere, but which was in fact only a quarter of a mile from the nearest village – Yatesbury (which I’d never heard of, naturally) – but screened from the road at the front by a tree-lined garden and backed by sheep-dotted farmland. Unless anyone had been looking and listening for us they wouldn’t have noted our arrival. Nor, if all the precautions had served their purpose, would they have any idea that inside the chocolate box cottage, with its limewash and thatch and honeysuckle and rosebushes, a man had been killed and eaten by monsters. One of them less than a month old.
Even now, sitting in clean clothes and warmth and freedom with my daughter in my arms (and my obscene heart stuck in the loop of being forced near the love that forced it to fall away), I found it incredible that what had happened had in fact happened. After his escape Konstantinov had made it back to London and called Cloquet. Not because he had any regard for Cloquet’s abilities, but because he needed money. Lots of it. To buy information and raise a team. I’d underestimated his friendship with Walker. He wasn’t prepared to abandon him. ‘The team’ didn’t materialise. Word of Hoyle’s fate had spread. The WOCOP moles went silent and of the individuals on Murdoch’s hit-list only three were still in the UK – and they emphatically weren’t interested, at any price. Cloquet, meanwhile, having heard nothing from me for days, had contacted Madeline for help with Zoë. The dots were there to be joined: Madeline, Fergus, Lucy and Trish would come out of it loaded, Konstantinov would get four werewolves ready for human slaughter (or rather three werewolves, since one of them still had to babysit Zoë) and the monsters would get a free all-you-can-eat WOCOP buffet more or less without risk of legal reprisal. Konstantinov had guessed what sort of show Murdoch had in mind so he was confident Walker would be kept alive till full moon. They’d have to get in quick, as soon as the werewolf troops were transformed.
There remained – for Cloquet, for Lucy, for Zoë – the problem of feeding.
Cue Madeline – and the punter she didn’t like.
‘Wife beater
,’ she’d told me, earlier. ‘He wanted to hire me to join in.’
‘In beating-up his wife?’
‘Yeah.’
‘But not because she’s a masochist?’
‘You’re not getting it. She’s not a masochist – she’s terrified of him. He wanted me to burn her with cigarettes then shit in her mouth. This is his wife, right?’
The expected moral reflex – checked. It’s only the best thing for us if it’s the worst thing for someone else. Moral judgement rights went that night in Big Sur. Before that, even. I kept my mouth shut.
‘So I thought, Well, it’s got to be someone, you know?’
She contacted him and told him she was considering his proposal (double her usual rate, to make the lie credible) but wanted see him on his own one more time before taking the plunge. This weekend she had the use of a friend’s cottage in Wiltshire. Why didn’t he come down so they could discuss it?
‘And that was him fucked. I slipped him one in his drink and off he went to sleep. Luce said he didn’t wake up till things started to happen.’
When he did wake up – when things started to happen – he was naked, gagged and hog-tied in Lucy’s bathtub. With Lucy standing over him. Not looking like the Lucy any of her friends would have recognised.
‘Serves him right,’ Madeline had said. ‘And I hope he was life insured up the arse too. Poor cow deserves a pay-out.’
I hadn’t been able to discuss any of it with Lucy, how it had gone, how Zoë had been, whether she’d had any trouble feeding. Initially because we were all still in wulf mode and physically incapable of discussing anything, later because once the moon had set there were too many grim practicalities to deal with. Before it could be disposed of the wife-beater’s body had to be prepped: decapitated, fingerprints burnt off, teeth knocked out, lungs punctured. I did most of it. It seemed appropriate. A lot of his face was gone. Not eaten, just rubbished. To erase the person, I knew. His St Christopher had survived, as if to prove its own uselessness. It went in the bleach along with his wedding ring and wristwatch, to be disposed of separately far from here. Separately from the rest of him. Lucy’s ex had a tiny boat at a quiet mooring a few miles south of Weston-Super-Mare. As soon as she was back in human form she’d left with Cloquet (and a single portion of human remains) in the van. They were to take it out into the Bristol Channel and drop the weighted carnage overboard.