The Heartless (The Sublime Electricity Book #2)

by Pavel Kornev

  The gun shook. The stock was kicking me painfully in the shoulder. Casings were flying around the floor as I confidently shot down the undead pouring in from outside. The bullets mangled the bodies. Their watery blood splattered everywhere. Chunks of rotting flesh flew, and yet the mummies just kept coming.

  After again changing out the mag, I followed my butler's example and started aiming for their heads. The barrel was recoiling, causing the bullets to go higher and higher, but when I hit my target, the bullet easily went through several bodies. The corridor became a meat grinder; the attack of the living dead had suffered a setback.

  I risked pulling away from the machine gun, and saw with relief that Theodor and Elizabeth-Maria had driven back the attack; the girl was wiping the saber on the arm-chair cover. My butler placed his remaining four shells on the fireplace shelf and reloaded his double-barrel. The room was full of wisps of gun smoke. There were blood spatters coloring everything a ruddy shade and lopped-off appendages lying about. In the doorway, there were quite a few mutilated mummies just piled up.

  "It's never a bore with you, Leo!" Elizabeth-Maria laughed. "You have a surprising talent for making new friends!"

  I couldn't find a good answer, but then an explosion rang out from outside and I no longer cared for mental exercises.

  I jumped over to the window and was blown away: while the mummies had our attention, a whole horde of undead wrapped in non-matching rags had come into the yard through the open gates. These restless souls weren’t as fast or deft, but their eyes were glowing with a transparent fire all the same. And there were many of them. Too many.

  A whole army was walking through the garden. At least fifty.

  Before my eyes, a grenade fell into the crowd, thrown from up above. I heard an explosion. Five mummies were thrown back in a wave. The others were struck with fragments. But it wasn't enough to stop Lazarus’ horde of filth.

  "Hold the doors!" I cried to my companions. I jumped over to the machine gun and gasped after grabbing it by the barrel. With a curse, my arm shot back from the red-hot steel. I took it by the grip and pulled the gun over to the window, set out the tripod and opened fire on the dead walking through my garden.

  My bursts mowed down the restless souls. One after the other, another three grenades plopped down. When the mummies started getting up close to the house, I stuck a hand out the grate with an incendiary grenade of my own. I wound up and threw the aluminum cylinder far from my manor.

  A white flame gushed forth. Dozens of the undead caught fire, and immediately picked up their pace, now moving too quickly and sharply to be normal dead. I cast a second incendiary grenade in their direction and got on the machine gun.

  The leprechaun was supporting me from the roof. Theodor walked back from the door to the window, unloading the double-barrel in a business-like fashion on the mummies, who were now up on the veranda. The buckshot knocked them off their feet, but before the butler reloaded, a few of the restless souls managed to come inside.

  I cursed out to myself and threw a third incendiary white-phosphorus grenade outside. The spark of white flame dispersed the corpses hobbling toward the front door, and Elizabeth-Maria noted calmly:

  "That's the last of them."

  Then, I armed myself with the Mausers, one pistol in each hand and commanded:

  "Follow me!" and went out into the hallway.

  The four ambling mummies who'd made it in started off in my direction, but I didn't even slow my pace, just threw up my pistols and opened fire with both hands, aiming at their heads. The clumsy corpses were great targets at short distance even for a relatively unrefined shot such as myself, so clearing out the corridor was a matter of just a few moments. Then, we jumped outside.

  I went first with a Mauser and incendiary grenade, then Theodor armed with the double-barrel and finally Elizabeth-Maria, covered head to toe in blood.

  It was quite the ugly spectacle. There were motionless bodies lying all around the yard. It smelled unbearably of burnt flesh. Many of the once restless dead were badly burned by the incendiary grenades and cut to pieces. I felt sick.

  "Looks like somebody raided the morgue!" Elizabeth-Maria decided, looking all around. "And this was all for our sake? Quite flattering, really!"

  "Not so much for our sake as mine," I corrected the succubus. And I wasn’t bragging, just stating the facts. Lazarus wanted me and no one else.

  "We need to check everything here," Theodor said wearily. "Some might still be alive."

  "Not very likely," I said with a shake of my head. I put the last incendiary grenade into the ammo bag hanging around my neck. Lazarus had fled. He'd fled and wouldn't hesitate to repeat his attempt. That scared me.

  But suddenly, I heard a raspy voice from the roof:

  "Uh… hey!"

  I threw up my head, looking at the leprechaun, and a moment later, Lazarus jumped out of the darkness. He simply wove himself out of the shadows of the rainy evening and would have surely been breaking my neck if Elizabeth-Maria weren't in his way. With a skillful twist of the saber, she met the vampire with a powerful side strike and, an instant later, flew away, knocked off her feet by a no-less-forceful jab.

  Throwing up my Mauser, I started turning toward the vampire. But before I managed to shoot, the pistol was ripped from my hands. Lazarus missed me, and Theodor shot twice, blasting the vampire a few steps backward.

  After grabbing an incendiary grenade out of the ammo bag, I lobbed it at the blood sucker and tried to lay into him with my illustrious talent, but Lazarus didn't even notice my attempts to control his mind. With a sharp, calculating kick, he knocked the aluminum cylinder away; the incendiary bomb somersaulted in the air, fell into the dead black bushes and spilled out a blinding white phosphorus explosion.

  My last incendiary grenade burnt up for nothing!

  The horribly burned countenance of the vampire twisted into a self-satisfied smile. Frightening stigmata on his cheek were bursting and streaming with ichor.

  "Payback time!" Lazarus creaked out as he walked forward, knocking Elizabeth-Maria from her feet with a careless motion before she could stand up. "We have the whole night ahead of us, illustrious one!"

  I took a step back in fear, and Theodor, opposite me, took a step forward and even managed to swing the unloaded double-barrel before the vampire hit him with a powerful blow, fracturing his chest with his bare hand and pulling out his heart to the crack of his ribs.

  "Oh, how I adore this!" he snarled out, clenching his fist. Next, he bit into the heart with his teeth and pulled a fair chunk out of it. "You, though, won't get away so easily!"

  On Lazarus' disfigured face, there was a mixture of his own blood mixed with Theodor's. It was hardly even a face anymore, having now transformed into a demonic mask. His nails had grown sharper, and a great many razor-sharp needle fangs were poking out from under his lips, disfigured by the fire.

  I took a step back, feverishly searching my consciousness for a fear appropriate to the situation. And although my illustrious talent was capable of turning the long-rotted heart of the living dead into a piece of fresh meat dripping with blood, no man can truly scare that which is pining away impatiently to disembowel him and strangle him with his own intestines.

  And that is precisely what Lazarus wanted to do to me. After flinging Theodor's heart aside, he stepped toward me and, blinded by hate, didn't notice the white-haired pipsqueak appear behind him. In the space of an instant, the leprechaun hopped over to Lazarus, tucked a mud-caked aluminum cylinder under his belt and swiftly ran away to a safe distance.

  Lazarus shot up like he'd been stung by a bee and stuck his hand in in his pants, but before he managed to pull the incendiary grenade out, the detonator activated and the white phosphorus blew violently. The powerful blast tore the vampire in two. The searing flame enveloped him head to toe, burning through his skin, muscles and flesh to the very bone. There was almost nothing left of him.

  And suddenly, the blanket of silence
enveloping my manor and dividing it from the rest of the world started thinning. Thunder rolled over again and the wind started whistling.

  "Bugger, it's windy!" the leprechaun gave an admiring whistle, watching the dying bloodsucker convulse. "Went up like a firework, that one!"

  I caught my breath with untold relief and asked:

  "Did you pull that out of the ditch?"

  "I wasn’t gonna let it go to waste, bugger!" the pipsqueak declared proudly and hid inside.

  I was left alone in the yard. First of all, I picked up the pistol that had been ripped out of my hands and walked over to the garden filled with piles of corpses. The garden was black and wet. It had bald patches where bushes had burned and wood chips from broken trees, but signs of life – or afterlife? – were nowhere to be found.

  All the corpses, carelessly wrapped in dirty rags in the manner of Egyptian mummies were spread-eagled on the earth motionless. In places, I saw livor mortis spots peeking out from under their bands; apparently, Lazarus hadn't been too discerning when selecting his army of the dead.

  I walked through the garden to the wide-open gates, closed them and returned to the manor, not knowing what to do first: check the house or help my maimed companions. And was it really worth helping Elizabeth-Maria?

  She was still alive; Lazarus' masterful attack had damaged her trachea and spine, but the succubus could still follow me with her gaze.

  "It's for the best," I decided, but then Elizabeth-Maria got up on an elbow, wheezed and grabbed me by the arm.

  "What the devil was that?!" she gasped out hoarsely.

  "A vampire," I answered with some disappointment.

  "Unbelievable!" Elizabeth-Maria croaked, letting me go and lying down on her back. The girl's chest was heaving rapidly, as if she couldn't catch her breath.

  I left her, stuck my Mauser into the empty sack, found Theodor's heart with clear marks from Lazarus' teeth, and stuck it back in his torn-up chest. There wasn't any real necessity, but it seemed the right thing to do.

  I closed my eyes and restored the living image of my servant in my memory. I didn’t manage to even get near his fears before Theodor's chest gave a shudder under my hand and my fingers picked up a feverish heartbeat. My butler returned to life. He wasn't resurrected, he just stopped being finally and irrevocably dead.

  "Thank you, Viscount," he whispered.

  I opened my eyes and saw with surprise that there was a gray patch in Theodor's thick hair, and his face had grown noticeably older and sickly, as if two deaths in one day had robbed him of a good portion of his life force.

  "Leo!" Elizabeth-Maria shouted back to me, unraveling the bandages from the nearest corpse’s head. She was looking with fastidious curiosity at a symbol carved in the middle of its forehead.

  I came up close, took a look and immediately felt nauseous.

  "Black magic?" I supposed, turning away.

  "Black as it comes," the girl confirmed. "Though, that's actually fortunate."

  "How so?" I asked in surprise.

  "Leo!" Elizabeth-Maria looked over her shoulder. "Tell me, where were you preparing to store fifty rotting corpses? We'd simply never fit that many into the icehouse!"

  "We'll have to take them out of town."

  "No, we won’t," the girl said, shaking her head. "These charms squeezed the dead dry. In the sun, they'll just smolder to ash."

  "In the sun?" I laughed, wiping my face, smearing the dirt and drops of rain around it. "There's a storm brewing!"

  "Doesn't matter," Elizabeth-Maria waved it off. "After a few days under open skies, all that will be left of them is bones."

  I nodded, taking it into account.

  "I'm more worried about the vampire," I said after that. "Do you think he'll come back to life?"

  "I've never come up against anyone from that brotherhood before," the girl answered, walking over to the burnt remains of Lazarus and asking: "How'd you get him to burn?"

  "I have my ways," I winced. "So, should we worry about him or not?"

  The girl looked at the corpse and shook her head:

  "It seems to me you did him in."

  "Great!" I grew joyful and shouted to my butler: "Theodor! Drag the corpses outside, would you!" After that I called Elizabeth-Maria: "Let's go inside."

  "Aren't you going to help Theodor with the bodies?" the succubus asked, confused, as we got to the stairs and started up to the third floor.

  "There’s another body up here I have to drag down to the icehouse," I said and led the girl to the bedroom where the dead illustrious gentleman was lying. The old man was frozen in an unnatural pose. His feverishly clenched fingers were squeezing the edges of the rug.

  "I remember him!" Elizabeth-Maria jumped up. "This is the old guy, who showed up before I started feeling bad!"

  "That was his talent," I explained, and fell into the armchair without any strength left. I felt something under me and pulled the illustrious man's notebook out. In mute silence, I then stared at the uneven letters, reading their unbelievable words:

  "Loy and Coe, Zurich. Ten million francs in bearer deposits. To be claimed by..."

  Part Three. Demon

  High-Voltage Shocks and Morse Code

  1

  GREED IS BAD. The sin of money-making is unbefitting of a noble person. There's no happiness in money, at the end of the day.

  I knew that. I knew it, but I couldn't tear my gaze from the three scant lines.

  "Loy and Coe, Zurich. Ten million francs in bearer deposits. To be claimed by..."

  And what was there to be claimed? What did I have to send to the bank to get this pile of money? Also, considering the years of interest, how much might it have been now? Curses! Not even all African colonies can boast of such a yearly income!

  This was riches! True riches, and they belonged to me by birthright!

  But the old man didn't write anything further. He got up to where the picture was ripped, then lit and burned the copy of the encoded message.

  And that caused me unbearable spiritual torment.

  The illustrious gentleman was counting on finding traces of the materials the Duke of Arabia had once used to blackmail them, but instead of that, he found a rainy-day nest egg. The old man's money was of no interest to him, but it had clearly driven my uncle to utter madness.

  The Count Kósice had bet on that card and lost. I wouldn't like to meet the same fate as him, but I couldn't forget about the ten million francs either. It was just eating me up inside.

  Ten million! Ten million, devil take me!

  I stood from the armchair, stuck the notebook in the back pocket of my pants and walked up to the desk where the pieces of burnt photo were lying. It hadn't burned all the way but, no matter how closely I stared, I couldn't make out a single digit.

  "Leo!" Elizabeth-Maria shouted in surprise. "Are you going to help with the body?"

  "One second," I called back, smoothing out the remnants of the photos.

  It suddenly occurred to me that these copies were still slightly damp, as if they had been printed just a few hours earlier.

  As if? Not at all, that was it!

  And that could have only one explanation: the piece of the photograph my uncle had kept was found on the site of the dirigible crash. And beyond that – the robbers' accomplice from the Newton-Markt not only had access to the ponderous evidence, he had also been able to copy the photographs confiscated from me on my arrest.

  "Leo!" Elizabeth-Maria frowned. "I'm getting the impression you're not being totally honest with me, dear."

  Anger rolled over me in a prickly wave. I turned to the girl, and she immediately took a step back from the ill reflection of my eyes.

  "What about you?" I asked in reply.

  "We all have our secrets, beloved," the succubus smiled carelessly, masking a feeling of confusion, or perhaps also fear.

  "Albert Brandt!" I suddenly declared in reply to her chest-thumping.

  Elizabeth-Maria pretended she was think
ing.

  "The poet?" she contorted a brow after a short pause.

  "You've been meeting with him!" I exclaimed. "Behind my back!"

  "Did he tell you that?"

  "Don't try to fool me! I worked it all out on my own!"

  The girl twirled a lock of her red hair around a finger, then laughed carelessly.

  "And what of it?" she asked.

  "We had an agreement!"

  "Leo, my sweet!" Elizabeth-Maria took a step toward me and led her mud and blood caked fingers over my cheek. "Our agreement is extremely simple. I don't hunt for people, that is my end of the bargain."

  "So, leave Albert alone!"

  "We have a relationship," the girl answered calmly. "What does that matter to you?"

  "Don't try to play word games with me!"

  "I wasn't using my... special powers," Elizabeth-Maria announced, "and I didn't break our agreement. Albert and I like spending time together, what's the harm in that?"

  "Nonsense!"

  "So, you're getting jealous, Leo!" the succubus laughed uncontrollably. "I just can't figure out who exactly you're jealous of, him or me?"

  "I don't want you to drag his soul to hell!"

  "Our relationship has nothing to do with you!" the girl cut me off. "You upset all my attempts to make an agreement, and I am not preparing to stay in this house just to play the unwanted servant girl."

  "Find someone else!"

  "I don't want anyone else. Want me to leave Albert alone? Then you'll have to work to defeat me. If you can do it, I'll forget all other men then and there."

  Such unabashed blackmail enraged me. I took a step toward the girl, intending to grab her by the neck and squeeze, but instead, I fell to my knees with the fierce pain that suddenly struck inside my head.

  "Leo, my Leo!" Elizabeth-Maria shook her head. "We cannot harm one another. Such is our agreement. And don't be afraid, I won't do wrong by your poet. We really do just have fun together. He's fun."