by Glen Duncan
I wasn’t, quite, quick enough. Before I could make my move—my one move, my first and last and only resort—his other hand had torn through my shirt, executed a deep screw manoeuvre into the flesh of my chest and come away with a bloody gobbet of pectoral muscle, hardly Shylock’s pound but more than enough to take my scream (for a moment I thought my poor nipple had gone) to the comedy edge of falsetto.
It probably worked in my favour, that scream, pleasurably diverted enough of his concentration so that my wriggling under him played as just more futile struggling. I’ll never know. Because having at last got proper purchase on the top half of Harley’s bone-handled walking stick, which had been left propped against the wall when I’d poured the first of the day’s drinks, and had snapped under me when we fell, I whipped it out from behind my back and with a blurred prayer to the God who wasn’t there drove it with all my strength into the vampire’s heart.
As at all such moments the prosaic din of things subsided out of respect for the magnitude of our event. Time paused and space solidified around us. For a moment we were figures in a paperweight. He managed a look of nude surprise—a sudden, a cartoon change of expression, as if he were exaggerating for the benefit of a child—when he lifted his hands to see their veins blackening as if hurriedly filling with ink. What he couldn’t see was the same phenomenon at work in his neck and face, the blood vessels showing as a darkening web, the magical roadmap of his death. He stiffened, paralysed first by incredulity, second more literally by … well, paralysis. I jerked my hips up, swiped, knocked him off me. He went over with a lightweight or taxidermed rigidity onto his side, knees bent at ninety degrees, hands fixed as if readying an invisible basketball for a shot. His eyes closed.
I got to my feet. The face and chest wounds were burning. Obviously I’d heal, but the pain was determined to show its stuff while it could.
However. This was a chance. Russell & Co. all had mobiles. I’d just doubled the time I had to set up a rescue. (There remained the question of how, once inside the renegade WOCOP facility, I was going to let my guys know where that facility was, but again, since there was nothing to do but trust I’d find a way, that’s what I did, wondering, with haggard realism, whether mobile phones were small enough these days that I might conceal one up my arse.) I hurried out onto the landing.
Cold air and the sound of heavy rain came down from the floor above. The boochie must have taken out roof-man, Andy, and got in through the skylights—whereupon I remembered young red-haired Wazz, as yet unaccounted for, who’d been on watch on the ground floor. If he was alive he’d be on a hair trigger. I didn’t want him shooting me by mistake. Also, depressingly, I’d have to kill him if I was going to take full advantage of the phones.
I stepped over Russell and Chris’s remains and took a cautious peep over the banister. Blood crept down my face like the hot tears of childhood.
“Is this what you’re looking for?” a female voice said.
I spun left. The blond vampire, Mia, stood on the landing maybe fifteen feet away. The bottom half of her face was covered in blood in just the supposedly endearing way a Kodak toddler’s is covered in chocolate (or a scat star’s in shit, I always think every time I see one of these revolting infants) and in her hand she held the raggedly severed head of the unfortunate Wazz. His tongue protruded lewdly from between his lips and his eyeballs had rolled back in their sockets. He looked as if he’d died just as he was about to blow a halfhearted raspberry, to express extreme tedium.
Mia, on the other hand, in black boots, black suede skirt, black nylons, black satin blouse and black leather jacket, appeared superabundantly alive, smiling through the blood mask. Her blue eyes—not the dark lapis lazuli of Ellis’s but somewhere between periwinkle and turquoise—glittered with what looked like joy. A vein in her temple showed. She was white, even by vampiric standards. From her name and the company she’d been in at Jacqui Delon’s I’d made her Italian, but now that I mentally replayed Is this what you’re looking for? the accent, though elusively mixed, put her roots a long way east of Trieste. A Russian with Norse colouring—but why not? Scandinavian marauders sailed down the Volga and took charge of Novgorod more than a thousand years ago. For all I knew she’d been there when the Vikings raided Constantinople.
All of which redundant speculation laboured under the perceptual paradox of a beautiful woman exuding a smell of decomposing meat and ripest pigshit. Initially her teammate’s odour—less faecal but gamier—had obscured hers. Now I got it clear and unmingled. I sank to my knees, put a hand out to stop myself from complete collapse, slipped in Russell’s lake of blood and fell facedown next to his corpse.
There was very little time. No time, really. Any moment now she’d drop Wazz’s head and be upon me. Any moment now it would already have happened.
Nonetheless I’d made certain calculations. (Whatever is happening, something else is going on.) Russell had ended up on his front with his right arm trapped under him. That put most of the kit—including the UV stick he still had in his hand—out of reach. The Staker’s holster was empty, the Staker itself lay five feet away in the library doorway. Getting at the stake, still buried in his throat, would require three seconds more than the one I’d actually have from the moment I made my move. The only weapon within reach was the flamethrower, and I wasn’t sure how to—
I heard the head drop and felt the air shift. She Is Coming. Hopeless hopeless hopeless but I rolled and plucked at the BBs’ gun-unit holstered at Russell’s thigh—not fast enough. Her boot heel gouged a divot from the side of my skull as she went past in a blur. I collapsed a second time.
Stay put.
Not only because the blow, a rude and deafening bok, had dazed me but because the position concealed my Braille navigation of the flamethrower. She hadn’t seen that. Didn’t know the weapon was there. What I needed from her now was the Bond villain’s soliloquising delay. I wasn’t going to get it. She was here to kidnap, not to kill.
“Uhhhr,” I said, not entirely faking. The head gouge was in the transitional stage between very cold and very hot. The wound in my chest was a rose of fire. I opened my eyes to see her descending gently to the floor. Flier. Fuck. Closed them again. Forced nimbleness into my fingertips. It’s basically a glorified water pistol, Harley had said, knowing not whereof he spoke. Two triggers, one for fuel release, one for ignition. Ergo I’d need both hands. The odds had just worsened.
“Phil?” Mia said.
Flying over me she’d passed the library doorway. Peripherally registered its lone occupant. She hadn’t known.
Two-thirds out of the holster.
She stood with her feet apart and an ugly hang to her limbs, face slack, staring at the crisping corpse by the hearth. Rain was a continuous exhalation against the house.
The weapon’s nozzle was caught on something, I couldn’t tell what. Talulla’s voice said quietly in my head: You’re running out of time.
Closing my eyes would’ve helped my fingers but Mia turned in the doorway and looked at me. “You?” she asked. I opened my mouth to lie but she said: “Don’t bother.” In the brighter light of the library her face’s colours vivified: red; blue; white. Very calmly she bent—one nyloned knee ticked, humanising her—and picked up the Staker that lay by her feet.
“You want me alive, don’t forget,” I said. She stood over me. I looked up at her. Here was the submissive’s camera angle of choice for his dominatrix, the perspective all boot and thigh and hip narrowing to the remote worshipful contemptuous head like a mountaintop divinity. I took a breath for reiteration—and she shot a stake through my left leg.
Pain, yes, sheet lightning, but also a peculiarly schoolboyish sense of injustice. She’d clipped the femur but not broken it, gone instead at an angle through the quadrilateral and vastus externus. No major arteries, but the sciatic nerve violently wronged already playing the Psycho shower scene strings in shock, a sensation that went all the way up to my molars.
Paltry vanda
lism as far as her ladyship was concerned. Something to keep me busy while she, tossing the Staker downstairs and turning with an expression testifying to the effect of my odour on her, took out a mobile and dialled. “It’s me,” she said. “I’ve got him.” Pause. “Phil’s dead.”
I wrapped my left hand around the stake, bit down on Russell’s leather elbow guard, pulled. One wonders why grimacing’s a reflex, since it can’t possibly help. In any case a few Popeye gurns and gurgles later I got the bastard thing out. No blood-spurt but a fart or squelch from the wound. The sciatic nerve was heartbroken, unable to do anything to comfort itself except sob. I lay, groaning, now practically on top of the Hunter’s body—and straight back to concealed woozy frantic work on the stuck flamethrower.
“Bring the van,” Mia said. She’d taken a few paces away and was now, with her back to me, searching her skirt pocket for something.
The weapon came free of the holster.
“Nothing serious,” she said into the phone. Having extracted from her pocket a white handkerchief she held it up to her nose. Her next utterance was muffled. “Four of them.” Pause. “What do you think?”
The little fuel unit in its bulletproof case remained strapped to Russell’s back. No time to get that off. Whatever I was going to do I’d have to do from where I was. Very well. Kneeling, I lifted the gun unit and hit both triggers.
Nothing happened. Or rather, the thing I wanted to happen—the throwing of flame—didn’t. What happened was that a quantity of unignited fuel squirted out of the nozzle and spattered the back of her leather jacket. Not surprisingly, she turned to face me.
I looked down at the weapon as if it were a child of my own who’d turned me in. Then I looked at Mia. The moment I had before she came at me again was courtesy first of her surprise and second of her embarrassment: She’d got cocky, turned her back. If Don Mangiardi had seen this … Shame enriched her. The white skin didn’t blush, but the access of professional guilt sensitised it. Her stink deepened.
Meanwhile I fumbled mentally with a handful of engineering components and a sketchy cross section: fuel hose, gas pipe, fuel-release trigger, valve plug, ignition trigger, spark plug, battery, ignition valve.
Ignition valve. Lets compressed gas into the business end of the gun where it mixes with air and fuel released through small holes in the nozzle. Unopened, there’s nothing for the ignition trigger to ignite.
I opened the valve.
She was in midair when the flame-jet caught her, spectacularly, in the chest. Momentum kept her coming but I held the triggers down. She veered and crashed into the library doorway—oddly silent. Fat heat filled the landing’s space. My face felt tight-skinned. I released for a second. She scrabbled and thrashed like a short-circuiting robot, threw herself backwards into the library. I hit the triggers again. Her arms flung petals of flame. She got airborne, jackknifed, dropped to the floor. A bookcase was on fire. So was the couch. I’d taken the hose to full stretch from the tanks on Russell’s back but she was still, just, in range. I released and fired again, the dregs of the fuel, I could tell. The smoke alarms went off. Into perhaps the last margin of her strength, she launched herself straight at the window, crashed through it and disappeared, upwards.
Fire was thriving in the bookcase, living it up on the couch. The room was a box of priceless kindling.
Sorry, Harls.
No time for elegy, however. The couch’s conflagration had spread to the rug, where my journal (this journal, dear reader, dear finder and I pray honourer of the dead) lay within a hand’s span of the flames. I leaped in, snatched it, leaped out again. A quick frisk of Russell’s carcase yielded his phone. Ditto headless Wazz’s after I’d more or less fallen down the stairs. I grabbed an overcoat of Harley’s from the hall, threw a chair through the kitchen window (the boys had kept the place locked and there was no time to hunt for keys), cut my shin on a shard getting through and, with on top of all this the Hunger raking my guts, made my escape through the sodden back garden.
52
AN HOUR LATER I lay on a king-sized bed in a double room at the Grafton Hotel in South Kensington. Checking in had been delicate. Harley’s overcoat hid most of the bloodstains but the singed hair and four diagonal stripes across my face, though already semihealed, gave the desk clerk pause. “Don’t ask,” I said, snapping the Amex Platinum (Tom Carlyle) down on the counter. A tactical simultaneity: brusque tone and class plastic. It worked, just.
“What the fuck, please, is going on?” Ellis asked, very calmly, on the Ellis phone. (I now had the Ellis phone, the Grainer phone, the Russell phone and the Wazz phone. The Grafton phone—untapped!—had made the latter two redundant.) His team hadn’t called in. He’d rung their phones, obviously. I’d deemed it prudent to answer only the one I was supposed to have. “I mean,” he said, still very calmly, “what the fuck, please, is going on?”
I told him about the Attack of the Vampires. I did not tell him that I’d already called my contact at Aegis (the U.K.’s version of Blackwater, former SAS, MI5, army and navy) and woken the dozing funds at three of the Swiss banks.
“You’re a lucky sonofabitch, Jacob,” he said.
“Yes, well, I recommend you make flamethrowers compulsory kit.”
“I don’t mean that. I mean you’re lucky we had one of our guys in the local force.”
“The police?”
“Think about how this would look: four Hunters dead and Jake Marlowe miraculously at large in perfect health. It would look, would it not, as if you’d done my boys in yourself and fled.”
This hadn’t occurred to me. A worry: What else hadn’t occurred to me? The hotel room was deep-carpeted and thick-draped. A small part of me thought how wonderful it would be to lie down to sleep here and never wake up.
“Fortunately for you,” Ellis continued, “our agent verified the vamp remains, once they’d got the fire out. There’s not much of Harley’s library left, I’m afraid.”
I opened the curtains a couple of inches and looked out. There was a break in the rain. Wet London breathed, half asleep, twitching here and there where night-drama neurons fired: a woman getting raped; a junkie expiring; someone proposing; a baby slithering out. In the daylight the city’s all brash bounce, no question of not going on. Nights you feel the exhaustion, see the going on for what it is: terror of admitting the whole thing’s been a mistake.
“I’m not in perfect health, as it happens,” I said. “I got staked in the leg. I’ve got a gouged skull and a hole in my chest the size of a tennis ball.” All of which were healing—the whispering knitting circle, the cellular cabal—even as I spoke.
“I should have been there,” Ellis said. “I would have made a difference.”
“Maybe. It happened very fast. Did you get a trace on the Land Rover?”
“What? Oh, that. No. Guess Russell flaked on it. I clean forgot myself. Anyway it was the vamps, evidently.”
“Looks that way,” I said, although Mia, I quite clearly recalled, had said “bring the van” not “bring the car.” Competition for my attention was fierce, however, and the Land Rover question was lightweight.
“We’re going to have to redirect the pickup,” Ellis said. “Where are you?”
“Tell your guy ten a.m. outside the Masonic headquarters in Long Acre.”
“Jake …”
“Listen, Ellis, I’ve had more than two weeks of not being able to go for a piss without someone’s say-so, and then with someone else listening in while I’m having it. You can give me one night of privacy. You know I’m not going to run. You’re still holding the cards. I just need to get my head together. What’s your driver’s name?”
Over the phone I could feel his will to autonomy. There was someone he should okay it with, someone he didn’t like. Whoever this person was their days of unchallenged leadership were numbered. Ellis liked me more than he liked them.
“Okay,” he said. “But don’t dick me, Jacob. You know the cause-and-effect reality.”<
br />
“Hundred percent.”
“Driver’s name is Llewellyn. He’ll know you, but just in case, he’s in a BMW four-by-four license plate Foxtrot Tango six seven two Echo Uniform Delta. Code word is lupus. Ten a.m. Don’t let me down. Don’t let your lady down. And no”—as I drew breath to ask—“you can’t talk to her now. You’ll see her tomorrow. Trust me, she’s fine. She’s comfortable.”
I spent what was left of the night on the hotel phone.
53
THE DRIVER, LLEWELLYN, young, fair, leanly muscled, with the cleanliness and near-skinhead haircut of a Mormon proselytiser, was precisely on time. The code word seemed redundant but I asked for it anyway and received “lupus, sir” in reply. Sir. Okay. Picked for this job because he followed orders to the letter. You will treat Mr. Marlowe courteously, but you will not engage in conversation. Fine. I was in any case itchy with sleeplessness and inwardly ajabber with Hunger. “I’m going to have to chain-smoke, Llewellyn,” I warned him. “I hope that’s not going to be a problem for you?”
He opened the rear nearside door. “Not a problem, sir,” he said. “We’re partitioned in any case.”
Indeed. Bulletproof glass, by the look of it. Ditto the windows. “Are we expecting to be shot at?” I asked him, giving it a rap.
“Fitted as standard on these, sir,” he said. “Do you want the radio on or anything?”
He called in to let whoever it was (not Ellis, the ether said) know I was on board, then we were on our way. It was a pretty morning. Blue spring sky and lively sunlight and a breeze that shivered the puddles and set London’s buds nodding on their stems. Not that much of it got through to me, quietly bearing up as I was with the Curse’s foreplay, the phantom elongation of snout and finger, the compressed spasms, the importunate erections, the occasional prescience in toenails and eyeteeth. My teeth chattered, actually, as in the first phase of the flu, prompting Llewellyn to remind me I had my own heat controls in the back. Meanwhile Piccadilly, Park Lane, Marylebone, the Westway, the M40. I tried to sleep. Failed. Instead pictured the effects of the dumped money, the fertility of the down payment. Impossible to know yet how many men a breakout would need, but I’d paid Aegis for a squad of fifty up front, nonrecoverable. My guess was that wherever they had Talulla there wouldn’t be a large defence. Ellis’s London renegades couldn’t number more than five hundred and the majority would be carrying out regular WOCOP duties as normal. Poulsom’s installation would rely on concealment rather than a standing force.
