“And that, people,” said the stern-jawed man, “is how you exterminate a nest of vamps.”
There were nods and grunts of assent all round. A couple of the other Red Eyes unclipped their masks too.
“Hope you got all that back home.” Red Eye One tapped the infrared microcamera affixed to his helmet. He cocked his head as a reply from base was transmitted to him via an in-ear feed. “Clear as day? Good. I was a mite concerned. All this brickwork and bedrock above us. Nice to know there was no signal interference.”
Red Eye Seven lurched into the camera’s scope, grinning. “We came, we saw, we dusted their asses!” he crowed, both thumbs aloft.
Red Eye Three, the sole woman on the squad, rolled her eyes.
Red Eye Five, a hulking African-American the size of a bedroom wardrobe, dragged his toecap contemplatively through one of the piles of dust littering the ground. “Guess they ain’t so tough after all.”
“Fuck, no, they’re not tough,” said Seven. “And you know why? ’Cause we’re tougher. We’re Team motherfucking Red Eye! Baddest of the bad. Ain’t that right, Six?”
Seven and Six hooted and high-fived.
Three shot One a look that said, Children; One just shook his head at her in return. High spirits at the end of the successful mission were permissible. Men would be men, and indeed boys would be boys.
He secured his mask back into place. “Let’s evac. Job’s done, and if God is in His heaven there’ll be hot coffee and turkey sandwiches waiting for us at the debrief.”
“I’d settle for a pint of haemoglobin,” said Four.
“Man, me too,” agreed Seven, his eyes lighting up.
And in the eyes of all of them, even One’s, there was a similar sudden glint of greed.
They all knew what their metabolisms should have: meat and drink.
They also all knew what they really wanted: something that was both meat and drink.
They craved it, in fact.
PERHAPS IT WAS the prospect of fresh human blood. Perhaps it was the exhilaration that came with completing a potentially hazardous task.
Either way, Team Red Eye weren’t on high alert as they marched back through the system of abandoned tunnels towards their exit point, a defunct station somewhere below 9th Avenue. They had lowered their guard and weren’t paying full attention to their surroundings.
Otherwise one of them would surely have spotted the bright scarlet LED status indicator light glowing in a trackside alcove once used by subway workers to avoid oncoming trains.
And the hi-def digital camcorder to which the status indicator light belonged.
And the young woman who was holding the camcorder and who crouched in the alcove, eye to the viewfinder, hand trembling, scarcely daring to breathe as the seven heavily armed and armoured paramilitaries filed past.
CHAPTER
TWO
JOHN REDLAW WAS in an alleyway, on his knees.
He did not like being on his knees. Not unless he was praying, which at this moment he most assuredly was not.
His knees were old knees, clicky and stiff from fifty-plus years of running, fighting, beat-pounding and general wear and tear.
They often ached. Chronic progressive cruciate ligament and meniscus damage in both of them. A doctor had once suggested the possibility of titanium replacements. Redlaw had not visited that doctor again, preferring to think that the knees God gave him at birth ought to see him out the rest of his life.
They ached particularly badly at this moment because they were buried in snow some ten inches deep. The cold and damp were making them throb.
But worse than that, the reason why Redlaw was truly not enjoying being on his knees, was the gun which was pressed against his head.
Not just any old gun, either.
A Cindermaker.
Now, there was irony.
Or, perhaps, poetic justice.
“SO I’M THINKING,” said the young man holding the Cindermaker, “all that cash you just flashed, that nice thick stack of Benjamins, you should hand it over to me. ’Cause why should an old geezer like you have so much of it, you knowum sayin’? ’Cause you’re, like, eighty, and I’m just turned eighteen. My whole life ahead of me. Got bills to pay, ho’s to lay, you get me?”
He was a white kid who dressed and spoke like a hip-hop star and went by the name of D-Funkt, which was doubtless not what his parents had christened him. He wore a huge thick quilted jacket and had a do-rag tied round his head, and a fur-trapper hat on top of that with the earflaps fastened under his chin. A silver lip ring lent him a perpetual sneer. A fuzz of beard clung to the underside of his jaw like moss.
“Whereas you, mister”—and D-Funkt ground the barrel of the Cindermaker harder still into Redlaw’s temple—“don’t got more’n a few years left. Way less than that, you don’t do like I say right now.”
“I don’t want any trouble,” Redlaw said, as calmly as he could.
“‘I don’t want any trouble.’” D-Funkt mimicked Redlaw’s accent badly, sounding more Australian than British. “Izzat so? Then how come you’re on the Lower East Side after dark, buying a motherfucking gun?”
“That’s all I want. The gun. I’ve paid you the amount you asked for. We have a deal.”
“Yeah, and you know what I have to say to that? ‘Fuck you, nigga’ is what I have to say to that. I don’t want to give you the goddamn gun no more. I want you to give! Me! All! Your! Money!” He accompanied the last five words with several harsh jabs of the Cindermaker that bent Redlaw’s head further and further to the side.
“All right, all right.” Redlaw reached inside his overcoat and produced his wallet. He held it out to the kid between index and middle fingers. It was, he had to admit, rather ostentatiously stuffed with dollar bills. In hindsight, he should have been more careful.
“Now that’s what I’m talking about, old man.” D-Funkt plucked the wallet from his hand. “See? Wasn’t so difficult, was it? And now I don’t haveta put a cap in yo’ wrinkly white ass. Everyone’s a winner, baby.”
He proceeded to tuck the wallet away in a pocket. For that moment, barely even a second, his attention was divided, not fully on the gun and Redlaw.
That was when Redlaw struck.
He grabbed the wrist of the hand holding the Cindermaker and twisted the gun away from his head. At the same time, he drove the elbow of his other arm into D-Funkt’s knee, hard as he could. He felt a satisfying pop as the patella dislocated. More satisfying was D-Funkt’s sharp, startled howl of agony.
Keeping a grip on the kid’s wrist, controlling the gun, Redlaw rose to his feet. He turned to see a once-jubilant face now crumpled in distress.
“Jesus, man!” D-Funkt blubbered. “My motherfucking knee! Oww! Jesus fucking Christ...”
Redlaw punched him in the face.
“Don’t.”
He punched him again.
“Take.”
And a third time.
“Our Saviour’s name in vain.”
D-Funkt sagged to the snow, nose broken and gushing blood. Redlaw wrenched the Cindermaker out of his numb grasp.
“Ohhh, man,” D-Funkt groaned. “Oh, God. Don’t hurt me. Don’t hurt me no more. I’m begging you.”
“I said I didn’t want any trouble,” Redlaw said. “I gave you every chance.”
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”
“Wasn’t it enough that you’re charging me a thousand dollars for this gun? How much money do you really need?”
D-Funkt mumbled something about rare imported items, backstreet deals, a guy had to do what he could to get by in this economy.
Redlaw sniffed in disdain. He reached down and groped in the kid’s pocket for his wallet. “I’ll have that back, thank you,” he said as he restored it to its rightful place in his own pocket. “And you owe me a box of Fraxinus rounds too. I believe that was included in the price.”
“There.” D-Funkt nodded to indicate the other side of his jacket. Red
law delved into that pocket and found the box. Fifty 9mm ash-wood rounds, all present and correct.
“You want your grand back? Take it. It’s in my jeans,” D-Funkt snivelled. “Please. Just leave me alone. I ain’t gonna give you no more problems. Take it and go.”
“No. We had a deal,” Redlaw said. “And I, at least, am a man of my word. The money’s yours. You could probably do with it anyway. I’ve heard the healthcare system in this country is extortionately expensive, and you don’t look to me like the type to take out insurance.”
LATER, IN HIS hotel room, Redlaw sat at the dressing table and field-stripped and cleaned the Cindermaker. As he did so, he reflected on the fact that he ought to have foreseen D-Funkt’s attempt to mug him. Really, what had he expected? It was a furtive, illegal exchange taking place in a blind alleyway in one of New York’s roughest districts. The surprise would have been if the kid hadn’t tried to rip him off.
Maybe I’m getting old.
But there was no maybe about it. He was getting old. Every day, one step further away from the acuteness and resilience of youth. Every day, one step closer to the grave.
With deft, practised movements, Redlaw reduced the gun to its components. The guide rod and recoil spring were a little rusty, but he’d bought some oil and a lint-free cloth. He’d also bought a bore brush and some solvent to clean out the dirt and carbon build-up in the barrel. A bit of a scrub, some lubrication for the moving parts—the hammer, the trigger assembly—and he’d have the Cindermaker working as good as new.
A television bantered in the next room, a late-night chat show, the volume up too loud as if to hide something bad going on. Directly below, a man and a woman were arguing, voices escalating as their tempers rose. The heating vent in the floor wheezed, pumping out air that was lukewarm at best. The hotel, occupying a slender brownstone just south of Gramercy Park, was hardly the Ritz Carlton. But then Redlaw was on a tight budget. The Cindermaker was a hideous but necessary expense. Aside from that, he was having to make every penny count. He had plundered his savings in order to make this trip. A few thousand quid, all he had in the bank. Not much to show for thirty years’ loyal service in both Her Majesty’s constabulary and the Night Brigade, but it would have to do, because he had no income now. As far as SHADE was concerned, John Redlaw was persona non grata. If he showed his face around headquarters, he would be arrested on sight. He was on wanted lists, technically a fugitive from justice.
He had nothing.
Nothing except a promise made to a woman he’d barely known but greatly admired. A woman he might go so far as to say he had loved.
That promise and his faith were the only two things keeping him going.
And he wasn’t so sure about his faith any more.
Reassembling a gun was, Redlaw always found, a therapeutic act. Barrel into slide, slide into frame. Slotting the interlocking pieces together, like solving a jigsaw, or a crime.
When it was done, he racked the slide on the Cindermaker, checking that the action was smooth. Then he loaded the clip with Fraxinus rounds and slapped it into the magazine well.
The Cindermaker rested nice and heavy in his hand, intimately familiar, lethally fit for purpose.
Unable to take a Cindermaker of his own through customs on the transatlantic flight, Redlaw had made it his first priority on arrival to find one. Enquiries at a firearms dealership in Little Italy had met with shaken heads and puzzled frowns. British-manufactured pistol? Ash-wood bullets? Not in this country, buddy. No call for that sort of thing in the US of A, no sir. Leastways, not yet.
But a customer in the shop had overheard, and had drawn Redlaw aside and told him in a low voice that he knew a guy who could get him what he was after. It would take some greasing of the wheels, but...
A hundred-dollar arrangement fee had set up the meeting with D-Funkt in the Lower East Side alleyway.
Now Redlaw was armed. He had protection, just in case.
It was time to go looking for vampires.
CHAPTER
THREE
REDLAW HAD NO contacts in New York. He had never been to the Big Apple before, never even travelled to the States. In his entire life he’d left British shores on only two occasions. Once was a brief jaunt to Spain to walk the last section of the Way of St James, the pilgrim trail leading to the cathedral of Santiago de Compostela in Galicia. The other time was a SHADE-sponsored cultural exchange trip to Paris to compare notes and swap tips with the Sûreté, whose zero-tolerance policy toward the Sunless had been proving unusually effective in dealing with the issue of vampire immigration. Neither excursion was exactly what you’d call a holiday and, anyway, Redlaw was not the holidaying type.
He was certainly not in America to see the sights and do a spot of shopping.
He had come to chase down a rumour and divine the truth of it, or otherwise.
He had nothing to go on other than stories. Vague reports, mostly second-hand. Starting with something a vampire had told him back in London...
“...KILLING US,” THE vampire said.
He was originally from Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, one of the Caucasus -stans at any rate. And Redlaw had just saved him from a staking.
Two Stokers lay sprawled on the slimy floor of a vacant lockup beneath some railway arches in Leytonstone. They were unconscious and surrounded by their homemade anti-Sunless paraphernalia: several rather blunt-looking stakes, a plastic Coca-Cola bottle containing what they were evidently convinced was holy water, and a makeshift flamethrower constructed from a pesticide spray gun with a cigarette lighter duct-taped to the nozzle.
Sometimes these vigilantes were such idiots, it was a wonder they could tie their own shoelaces.
“I hear it from friend,” said the vampire. “Good friend. Human. We keep in touch, even after I become vampire. My family, they turn their backs on me, chase me away.” He mimed spitting, to illustrate his relatives’ contempt for him, or perhaps his own for them. “I am monster, they say. No longer can be talked to. But my friend Nurzhan, he not so bad. We know each other since school. I sometimes phone him. He is in America, studying health sciences. Temple University in Philadelphia. He is to be doctor. We talk. Nurzhan, he tells me recently there have been bad things happening to my kind in that country. Because he knows what I am, he is interested in vampires. He goes on internet, reads things. I think he hopes to find cure for me, if there is one. He doesn’t find cure yet, but he does find rumours.”
“That someone’s slaughtering vampires over there.”
“Yes. Yes.” The vampire nodded animatedly. “As I tell you, killing us. Like these men try to.” He gestured to indicate the Stokers. Redlaw had spotted the two men behaving suspiciously outside a pub in West Ham that was a known Stoker haunt, and had followed them to the lockup. Morons they might be, but they had possessed enough basic cunning to choose to attack the vampire during the daytime, when there was every chance he’d be asleep.
“But America has hardly any Sunless.”
“And it is busy destroying the ones it has already got.”
“What I mean is, there isn’t really an anti-vampire movement there. Not a well mobilised one like here, with cells and meetings and ringleaders.”
“According to Nurzhan, there is. Or there is something. Two, three nests have been wiped out. So the internet says.”
“The internet says a lot of things,” said Redlaw.
“I know. But I tell you because I think you should know. You are John Redlaw. Once we feared you. Now you are vampires’ friend. This is what everyone says, and today I see for myself.”
“I don’t know about ‘friend’, but I do have a new set of priorities.” Redlaw rubbed his fist. His knuckles still throbbed from cold-cocking the Stokers. “A burden of care.”
“And I thank you for caring for me,” said the vampire sincerely.
“You’d be better off, you know, in a Sunless Residential Area. Safer. Then you wouldn’t be vulnerable to attack.”
“Safer? In SRA?” The vampire gave a gruff, scoffing laugh. “I think not. We do not trust SRA now. We do not trust government. We take our chances out in the city, the countryside. You yourself know what happened when we did trust government. Can you blame us for not wanting to again?”
Redlaw looked at him. “In all honesty, I can’t.”
LATER, AT AN internet café called the Java Crypt, Redlaw surfed and searched. The content of various US-based forums and chat rooms backed up the vampire’s assertion. People were posting comments suggesting there was some kind of clandestine backlash taking place in the States. The oldest of these dated back to three weeks ago and purportedly came from an actual vampire. Since there were so many wannabes and fantasists out there, it wasn’t difficult for Redlaw to discount the authenticity of that claim. Had the poster chosen a more original username than Dracul12345, he might have stood more of a chance of being taken seriously.
What he wrote, however, had a distinct ring of plausibility:
There were three of them near my place in Trenton, NJ, nosferatu like me, holed up in this old timber mill down by the river. I’ve been watching them come and go at night. This one night, I swear, there was shooting. Saw gun flashes and everything inside the mill. After that, no more nosferatu.
Another poster corroborated his testimony, to some extent:
I’m from New Jersey too, Hopewell, just north of Trenton. I don’t know about any timber mill, but I go hiking in the woods round Kuser Mountain County Park and lately I’ve been coming across dead raccoons, woodchucks, this one time even a deer. And when I say dead, I mean no blood in them. Just laying there *empty*, if you know what I mean. Like deflated balloons. I make sure I don’t go in those woods any time near sundown, you can bet on that, not now. But even so, I’ve noticed there’ve not been any dead animals for a week. Seems to have stopped.
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