The man, predictably, was nowhere to be seen.
If Redlaw had been the swearing type, he would have sworn.
He paused to catch his breath, bent double, fists planted on thighs. Well the wrong side of his half-century. Old, old man. His knees would be a nightmare tomorrow. Why did he do this to himself? What was he trying to prove?
Straightening up, he set off across the recreation ground. The building beyond seemed the likeliest place to go looking for the fugitive. It was asking for trouble, he knew, heading in there. Indoors, inside a Sunless lair, you were more than vulnerable. You were dead meat. SHADE training had drummed into Redlaw that this was a Thing You Never Do, especially alone, even more especially at night. Experience, however, had taught him that if you never did any of the Things You Never Do, you never made any progress.
He entered a lobby through a door that had once been glassed and was now patched over with plywood. Outside, there’d been just enough ambient light to see by. Inside, once the door creaked shut, the darkness was all but impenetrable. Regulation image-intensification goggles remedied that. Redlaw peered around at a glowing, fuzzy green night-vision world. There was a pair of lifts, or rather two sets of sliding steel doors that gaped ajar to reveal empty lift shafts. There were lockable mailboxes, not one of them in a fit state to keep anyone’s correspondence private any more. There were a couple of vending machines, cobwebbed inside and out, still loaded with packets of crisps and cans of soft drink that were years past their sell-by dates.
Something scurried at the periphery of the goggles’ visual field. Redlaw spun, aiming his Cindermaker. Just a mouse, whiskering along the wainscot.
He nudged open a door to a stairwell. The stench that poured out almost bowled him over. The Sunless were using the stairwell as a kind of communal open-plan latrine. Covering his nose, he listened for footfalls; heard none. His quarry had not gone up there. Thank God.
He checked the lift shafts. These would be how the residents chose to get from floor to floor, rather than the foetid, faeces-spattered stairs. Vampires loved a climb, the sheerer the better. All Redlaw could see, as he craned his neck upwards, were slack cables and jammed-open doors, rising into dimness. No movement.
That left the ground floor itself. A corridor tunnelled away from the lobby, leading to flats. Redlaw ventured down it, reckoning this a futile action but unwilling to admit defeat just yet. Wearing the night-vision goggles, he felt as though he were in a murky, fluorescent cave. He hunched under a length of duct pipe, dangling loose from the ceiling, and squeezed past a wingback chair that had been thrown out of one of the flats and lay on its side across the corridor. He brushed aside some loose-hanging electrical wiring, and cat-stepped over a smashed vacuum cleaner, a computer monitor with a punctured screen, and a twelve-string guitar whose neck had been brusquely snapped. These items symbolised everything Sunless rejected. They were too comfortable, too practical, too materialistic. Too human.
The corridor right-angled at the end. Redlaw took the turn, leading with his gun. The adjoining corridor was empty apart from more domestic debris. He counted six doors, all firmly shut. If Sunless were lurking behind them—and some undoubtedly were—they already knew he was there. He could tread as softly as he liked, but they could still detect his footfalls with their ultrasensitive ears. Moreover, they could smell him.
The opening lines of the Lord’s Prayer helped steady his nerves, but only because it always had. The response was ingrained. Had reciting a limerick done the same trick, Redlaw would have recited a limerick.
Try a door handle? He could, were it not unwise. A startled vampire, cornered in a room, confined, would react unpredictably. It might cower, but equally it might go on the offensive. Redlaw wished to avoid further violence tonight if possible. He definitely didn’t want to be obliged to dust a Sunless and then have a score or more of them come down on him, alerted by the gunshot, screaming vengeance.
The corridor dead-ended. Redlaw began to retrace his footsteps, accepting that the man he’d been chasing was lost to him.
When he reached the lobby, he halted.
Had to.
It was full of vampires, blocking his path to the exit.
They’d been waiting for him.
Redlaw didn’t have time to count heads. Seven, maybe eight, maybe more. He straight away dropped to one knee, Cindermaker levelled. His free hand went to his vest, unclipping an aqua sancta grenade.
But the Sunless swarmed him, a wave of swift shadows. He felt claws and the rough, clammy touch of dead skin. His Cindermaker was slammed from his grasp. He threw the grenade, but he hadn’t had a chance to pull the pin beforehand. Its explosive not primed, the device was just a ball of near unbreakable Perspex which bounced harmlessly off a vampire’s shoulder and rolled away into a corner, priest-blessed holy water sloshing inside.
His attackers pinned him up against a wall. One of them yanked off his night vision goggles, leaving him in darkness, benighted. Redlaw squirmed, struggled, but he knew it was useless.
Foolish old man. Careless. Overconfident.
“Make it quick,” he told the Sunless. “All of you at once.”
That was the best he could hope for, under the circumstances. Multiple bites, simultaneous draining, and a relatively speedy escape to his eternal reward. The vampires could stretch the process out, if they were in the mood. Take it in turns, tap off a little at a time from the jugular, keep their victim lingering half faint with blood loss, hovering in a continuum of nausea and pain that could last up to three hours and no doubt feel like forever. If Redlaw was lucky, this lot would go for all his major veins and arteries as a pack, and it would take less than five minutes. If he was lucky.
“No,” said a voice from the dark. “I don’t think that will be happening.”
It was a woman’s voice, East European accent—Albanian?—with the usual slight sibilant lisp that came with having sharp fangs instead of teeth, the usual slurring of the dental consonants. It was, too, a surprisingly mellifluous voice, far from the harsh, grating growl that usually issued from a Sunless throat.
“Redlaw, is it not?”
“You have me at a disadvantage,” Redlaw said. “You can see me, I can’t see you. Who are you?”
“Yes, without those goggles of yours you’re blind as a bat in the dark. Whereas we see as clearly as if it were day.”
“Why not give them back? Let’s level the playing field.”
“I think not, old bean.”
Old bean? “Then I’ll ask again: who are you?”
“I’m...” A soft laugh. “Well, at this precise moment you might call me your saviour.”
“I have only one Saviour,” Redlaw said, “and He isn’t you.”
“Ah, faith,” the owner of the voice said, drawing closer. “Is that still an essential requirement for SHADE recruitment? Or have they done away with it, along with the minimum height restriction?”
“If it isn’t still essential, it ought to be.”
“For, without faith, those crucifixes and those stars of David and all the other religious tokens you people wear won’t work, will they? They’re just so much tawdry costume jewellery.”
“If it makes you happy pouring scorn on my beliefs, ’Less, then go ahead. Far greater men than me have suffered far worse persecution in the name of God. It would save everyone a lot of hassle, though, myself included, if you simply got on with the bloodletting.”
“Eager to sit at the right hand of the Lord, eh, shady? Heaven can’t wait, is that it?”
“Spare me the cheap jokes.”
“You are John Redlaw.” The Sunless woman was talking almost directly into his ear now, in an insinuating purr. He had the feeling this was all a piece of play-acting, a knowing, self-mocking parody. “You are considered the scourge of our kind, a holy terror. Possibly that is how you see yourself. And now here you are, your precious life in our hands. Delivering yourself to us like a Christmas present, ready to be unwrapped. We
could kill you, yes. Quaff your lifestuff like a fine wine until not even the dregs remain. Or... one of us could turn you. How would that be for irony? John Redlaw, vampire slayer, become vampire himself.”
“I am not a ‘vampire slayer.’ I am a SHADE officer charged with keeping the peace between humans and Sunless. And were I ever turned, rest assured that at the first opportunity I would drive a stake through my own heart.”
“So you say. You would, I suspect, feel differently once you discovered how joyous it is to be Sunless, as you non-vampires insist on calling us. The power, the freedom, the senses, newly awakened...”
“The cannibalistic thirst.”
“The world opening up around you like a night-blooming flower. The darkness breathing its secret consolations over you. The realisation that there is so much more to life than, well, mere life.”
“Very witty.”
“Redlaw.”
He could feel cold lips butterfly-brushing his cheek.
“Oh, Redlaw, there is so much I could offer you,” she sighed. “So much you could be.”
She pulled away.
“But,” she said briskly, “why waste such a gift on so undeserving a recipient? You came here chasing Grigori. You’ve scared the poor blighter half out of his wits. What has he done? What is his crime? Grigori is not one to misbehave. I know him well. Meek as can be.”
“Are any of you meek when the bloodlust’s on you?” Redlaw retorted.
“True. No. Has he killed, then?”
“Not to my knowledge. But there’s been a riot. You must have heard it.”
“The blood dropoff.”
“Havoc. I’ve seen it happen before but never this bad. The delivery drivers have been taken. Your Grigori seemed to have some idea where they might be.”
“This is all you’re after? The drivers?”
“Yes.”
“If I promise to find them for you, will you leave?”
“Gladly. Can you find them?”
“It shouldn’t be too difficult. I can’t guarantee their... health.”
“I’m not expecting you to. Bodies for their families to bury, the assurance that they haven’t been turned—if they’re not alive, that’s the next best outcome.”
“Very well, Redlaw,” said the voice. Then she issued an order, and the many hands holding him let go. He was chaperoned outside, and his goggles and Cindermaker were returned to him. Redlaw scanned the vampires, but they were all male. The owner of the voice had stayed indoors.
Anonymous.
Well, if that was how she wanted to play it, then fine. No sweat. As long as she made good on her promise.
An hour later, two corpses were brought to the entrance of the SRA and deposited there.
By then, Redlaw had obtained copies of the two drivers’ personnel files from BovPlas’s human resources department. He compared the faces on the ID photos, flushed with life, to the white, shrivelled faces of the bodies. A match. Trevor Martin and Derek Bannerman. Both married men, with a total of five kids between them.
Then came the grisly business of post mortem neutralisation—decapitating the corpses. It had to be done on-site, as soon as possible after discovery of a drained body, regardless of whether the victim had been fully bled or only partially. Standard procedure. While even just a few fluid ounces of blood remained in a corpse’s venous system, the potential for reanimation existed. The next of kin would rather have their loved ones back in two pieces, definitely deceased, than as a handful of ashes or, worse, not at all.
Redlaw volunteered for the task, and the other officers were only too happy to let him. TV news crews had arrived on the scene, but a cordon tape held the reporters well back. All the camera operators were able to film was distant footage of a white tent and a man going into it carrying a surgical steel saw.
Ten minutes later Redlaw reappeared, nodded curtly to a fellow SHADE officer waiting outside the tent, said the bodies were ready now for the morgue, got into his car and drove off into the night.
CHAPTER THREE
Giles Slocock, Conservative Member of Parliament for Chesham and Amersham, awoke in his constituency home with a cocaine hangover and a prostitute snoring next to him in bed. He dealt with the former by means of a quick hair-of-the-dog toot from the stash in his bedside drawer, and the latter by means of a kick in the ribs, a thick wad of cash, and a taxi. He gave the girl a little more than the agreed-upon fee, mostly because she had consented to bum sex (bareback, too, a double bonus) but also to ensure her silence. He had hired her from a reputable escort agency which prided itself both on the exclusivity of its client list and the discretion of its employees, but still, one could never be too careful. Slocock had been burned a couple of times in the past by tattletales flogging their stories to the scandal sheets. His career had survived, but he was aware that the public’s tolerance for misbehaviour from its elected representatives was not infinitely elastic. It stretched only so far before it snapped, with often painful consequences.
A shower rinsed the smell of the girl’s cloying perfume from Slocock’s body and the smears of shit from beneath his foreskin. Then he dressed and went downstairs to breakfast and the morning papers.
More interesting than anything to be found in the pages of the print media was an item on BBC Breakfast about trouble the previous night at the Hackney SRA. Slocock, eating the first of three boiled eggs, watched with detached curiosity as a reporter spoke of a bloodlust riot and the deaths of two BovPlas delivery drivers. The twin brother of one of the dead men was interviewed.
“Derek, he was, like, a decent bloke who did his job,” said Keith Bannerman, fighting back tears. “He knew it was dangerous work, like, but the money was good and he was always a bit of a night owl anyway, so the hours, y’know, suited.”
“And what are your feelings about his killers?” the reporter asked, somehow managing to flutter her eyelashes even as she put on a concerned and solicitous frown.
“Scum,” Keith Bannerman spat. “It’s the only word for ’em. Bloodsucking scum. Come over here, make everyone’s lives a misery, we bend over backwards to help them, and this is how they thank us? Send them back home, that’s what I say. I mean, who invited them? Ruddy parasites. Send them back home—if we can’t stake the lot of them, that is...”
Six hours later, Slocock stood up in the House of Commons in his role as Shadow Spokesman for Sunless Affairs and quoted the grief-stricken Keith Bannerman verbatim.
“‘I mean, who invited them? Ruddy parasites. Send them back home—if we can’t stake the lot of them, that is...’”
Slocock let the words ring round the chamber, before continuing: “The view, Mister Speaker, of a man who has just lost his brother, his twin brother, in the most tragic and dreadful circumstances imaginable. A man whose closest relative fell prey to a crazed mob and was brutally, viciously attacked and exsanguinated by them. A man struggling to come to terms with the appalling knowledge that the very individuals whom his brother was helping turned on him and subjected him, along with his colleague, to the most cruel and barbaric form of murder that we currently know of. And Keith Bannerman is far from alone in holding the opinions he does. Rather, he speaks for a broad swathe of British citizenry. I put it to you, Mister Speaker, that the right honourable gentleman before me, the Secretary of State for Sunless Affairs, barely comprehends the level of public disquiet and disgust that his policies evoke.”
There was braying from across the floor of the House, cheering from Slocock’s own side.
Slocock raised his voice to make himself heard. “Furthermore, does the Secretary of State not realise—does he not realise—that to continue to pursue those policies is simply to invite repetition of the events of last night? Were it an isolated incident, I could perhaps understand the right honourable gentleman’s apparent lack of concern. However, as we all know, these so-called bloodlust riots have shown a marked increase in recent months, both in frequency and severity. The Sunless, if we must use tha
t word for them, are getting noticeably more restive and aggressive. On behalf of the Great British public, those who rightfully belong here, those with pulses and a dietary appetite that doesn’t extend to haemoglobin, I ask him what is the Department of Sunless Affairs going to do about these uninvited, unwanted immigrants? Their numbers are growing day by day, or should that be night by night? What is the government’s response to a situation which, no one is in any doubt, is becoming more and more untenable?”
Slocock sat down. From the Labour front benches his opposite number rose to his feet.
Maurice Wax, the Secretary of State for Sunless Affairs, was a gloomy-looking man with a sharp widow’s peak and a sallow, greyish complexion. The political cartoonists regularly depicted him with fangs and a black cape, often hanging upside down from the rafters of the debating chamber. More than one stand-up comedian had made the joke that the man with ultimate political responsibility for the Sunless could do with a little sun himself.
Wax had been chosen for the post because he was widely regarded as a safe pair of hands, someone workmanlike and imperturbable who wouldn’t court controversy or fumble what was an exceptionally tricky brief. He lacked flash, but he knew his way around a set of statistics, and nobody could argue that he did not take his job, or himself, very seriously.
“Mister Speaker,” Wax began, “at best reckoning there are a little over thirty thousand Sunless present in the UK. That is to say, one Sunless per two thousand humans. Or, to put it another way, the Sunless currently comprise zero-point-zero-five per cent of the overall population.”
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