Red Eye - 02

by James Lovegrove

  A third poster said:

  Don’t know about you guys, but if it *was* vampires, could some local gun nuts have gotten them? Like a posse or something, gone in there blazing away with wooden bullets? Or else maybe the cops?

  To which someone calling himself StarzNStripes retorted:

  Good to know somebodys doing SOMETHING coz our a-hole of a President sure as fuck isn’t, and neither’s any of those loudmouth cocksuckers in Congress tho their sure as hell making plenty noise about it. ;-)

  There were other similar accounts of anti-vampire activity, centring on Trenton and two further New Jersey locations: Newark and Atlantic City. The more Redlaw read, the more he sensed there was substance beneath the surface. The seemingly discrete incidents had a clear common link, even if it was only that groups of Americans could no longer tolerate the presence of vampires in their midst, or stomach their government’s continued refusal to treat the matter as urgent, and had elected to deal with it themselves, by force.

  It was interesting, but no real concern of his. He had enough on his plate in London without having to worry about events three thousand miles away.

  REDLAW SHELVED ALL thoughts of the American attacks at the back of his mind, and he had every reason to believe that that was where they would stay.

  His view changed after two close brushes with the authorities that very same evening.

  The first occurred as he was leaving the internet café. A police car trundled past him in the street, the two officers inside apparently just cruising the area, keeping an eye out, nothing more. Nevertheless, Redlaw shrank into the shadows of a shop doorway, sinking his head into the pulled-up lapels of his overcoat like a tortoise withdrawing into its shell. The police car drove onward... then halted. The reversing lights winked on. Redlaw spun out of the doorway and walked at a fast lick in the opposite direction, back past the Java Crypt. He wanted to run, but didn’t, for fear of making himself look more suspicious. He rounded a corner and dived into the front garden of the nearest house. Peering over the privet hedge he saw the police car reverse past the end of the street, then turn in. He ducked out of sight. The police car crawled by his hiding place more slowly than he thought any automobile could. And just when he believed it had gone and he could emerge, back it came the other way. The officers certainly now seemed to be hunting for someone. Was it him, specifically? Had one of them ID’ed him from the warrant that was doing the rounds? Had they recognised the man the tabloid press had dubbed “Redlaw the Outlaw” and “the Shady Dealer”?

  He stayed hunkered in that front garden until well after nightfall. By then, the coast seemed clear and he finally dared to venture out and head homeward.

  Home wasn’t his flat in Ealing, to which he couldn’t return for the time being and maybe not ever, not as long as a SHADE patrol car remained parked outside twenty-four seven. Home was a squat above an abandoned curry house on the fringes of the Stoke Newington SRA. The roof leaked; pigeons played havoc in the loft. But at least whoever owned the premises hadn’t got round to having the water cut off, so the toilet and the cold taps worked.

  Redlaw was dog-tired and looking forward to burrowing down inside his sleeping bag and getting some kip.

  An uninvited guest, however, had other ideas.

  REDLAW FAILED TO draw his Cindermaker in time. The figure standing in the living room of the squat, silhouetted against the curtainless window, had a Cindermaker too, and was aiming it at Redlaw’s head.

  “Drop it, Redlaw. Nice and slow. On the floor. That’s it.”

  Redlaw laid his gun down, wishing he’d been feeling a little less weary, a little more awake. Wishing, too, that he didn’t know the owner of the voice and the gun.

  “Sergeant Khalid,” he said. “You found me.”

  “Captain Khalid,” replied Redlaw’s one-time nemesis at SHADE. “But then, you’ve obviously not been keeping up with the promotions situation at HQ. There’ve been a lot of changes since you went rogue on us, Redlaw. Positions vacant, new blood replacing old. It goes all the way to the top, and for that we have you to thank, seeing as how you’re the one who cleared the space.”

  “So happy to help with your ascent up the ladder. Last I saw of you, Khalid, you’d just been beaten up by rioters. How are you feeling now? Bruises all healed?”

  The other man’s grin was mirthless. “I’m fine. Qureshi’s fine too, although he carries a nasty scar on his forehead. We call him Harry Potter. He hates that. As for poor old Heffernan...”

  Redlaw felt a twinge of guilt.

  “Wheelchair-bound,” Khalid went on. “Surgeons couldn’t reconnect his spinal cord. He’s started a desk job with us, using voice recognition software to run his computer, but it’s quite a comedown for someone as physical as him. You should see the look on his face whenever your name’s mentioned—which happens quite often. This awful combination of loathing and frustration. The things Heffernan would do to you, if only he could.”

  “It wasn’t me. I didn’t hurt him.”

  “No, it was the shtriga. But she was with you. She snapped his neck protecting you. If it wasn’t for your association with that bitch, Heffernan would still be playing rugby every Sunday afternoon.”

  “Don’t call her that.”

  “A bitch is a bitch.” Khalid cocked his head. “Aren’t you at all curious to know how I tracked you down?”

  Redlaw shrugged.

  “It wasn’t hard,” Khalid said. “Interrogate enough ’Lesses, you soon get the answers you’re looking for. Truth is, they can’t stop going on about you. They hear your name and it’s hard to shut them up. The ones you’ve saved from Stokers sing the praises of the mighty John Redlaw, and the rest just love the idea of this ex-shady becoming the vampires’ champion. How come you’ve turned, Redlaw? Why are you their new hero?”

  “You wouldn’t understand and I can’t be bothered to explain.”

  “And did you know that vampire-on-human incidents have been on the up since you switched sides? Some of the figures put the increase as high as eighteen per cent, in just a few months.”

  “That’s nothing to do with me. Blame the government. After the whole Solarville episode, the Sunless don’t trust anyone any more, least of all SHADE, and they certainly don’t want to have anything to do with Residential Areas if they can avoid it. Once bitten, et cetera.”

  “Well, anyway,” said Khalid. “Thanks to your newfound pals showing you so much love, all we then had to do was collate the data, triangulate, and reconnoitre. I had an entire unit dedicated to just one goal: locating the murderer of Giles Slocock, MP, Nathaniel Lambourne, businessman, and Gail Macarthur, SHADE commodore. They worked round the clock for me, with the full cooperation of the Met, and they’d be in this room with me right now, only...”

  “Only you wanted to hog all the glory for yourself,” said Redlaw. “And the credit. No doubt you’ve an eye on the commodore’s chair.”

  Khalid tried to look affronted.

  “You know that I didn’t kill Lambourne? I’m innocent of that one. It was Macarthur.”

  Khalid puffed out his lips. “What does it matter?”

  “And with Slocock and Macarthur, it was self-defence, not murder.”

  “Frankly, I couldn’t give a toss. Those are matters for a judge and jury to establish. Me, I just want to be the one who drags you back to HQ by your ear. Don’t worry, we’ll look after you once you’re there, you can count on it. There’s any number of officers who’d like to drop in on you in the interview room, pay a nice social call, and I’ll make sure Heffernan gets a ringside seat for the whole event.”

  “I won’t come quietly. You must realise that.”

  “I’m really hoping you won’t. Injured, intact, it doesn’t make any difference to me. This way, I get to see you squirm in pain before anyone else does. A win-win. I believe a leg shot ought to do the trick. I’ll try my best to miss the femoral artery.”

  Khalid re-sighted his aim at Redlaw’s thigh.
/>   Redlaw leapt.

  The bullet splintered the floorboard just beneath his feet.

  At the same time, Redlaw struck Khalid horizontally like a battering ram.

  The force of the collision drove them straight into the window... and through.

  They plummeted onto the pavement outside, Khalid underneath, Redlaw on top. It was a drop of some twelve feet, and Khalid took the brunt of the impact on his back. He and Redlaw lay together amid shards of glass and splinters of frame, both stunned, but only one of them was capable of getting to his feet. Khalid moaned as Redlaw pushed himself up off him. Redlaw suspected the SHADE captain was hurt pretty badly, but that was the least of his concerns. Khalid might have been in the squat alone, but he wouldn’t have come without backup. There would be other shadies somewhere around, lurking out of sight, and the sound of the gunshot and the window smashing would surely—

  “Hey!”

  A voice from across the street. Someone emerging from the door of another empty house. Footfalls, rapid, running.

  Redlaw snatched up Khalid’s Cindermaker and fired it wildly in the direction of the voice. His intention was to deter, not hit, and he succeeded. He glimpsed the SHADE officer scurrying for cover behind a lamppost. He fired again, to convince the man to stay put, then sprinted off along the road.

  Return fire came his way, but belatedly, not before he was more or less out of range.

  Round the next corner, Redlaw came face to face with a SHADE patrol car rolling towards him. Without hesitating, he loosed off two bullets at it. One pierced the radiator grille, the other the bonnet. Whether he had fatally damaged the engine, or just startled the driver, the car skidded to a halt. Two shadies sprang out and started shooting.

  Redlaw doubled back, racing past the end of the curry house road. Fraxinus rounds pinged and ricocheted around him. Out of the corner of his eye he saw a couple of SHADE officers standing over the supine Khalid, concerned. Several others were haring up the road and quickly joined in the chase with the pair from the car. Redlaw ran, and ran, and kept on running, London a blur around him, until his body couldn’t bear to run any longer. When he finally stopped, staggering to rest against a wheelie bin, his lungs felt as though they had been stripped inside out, his legs burned, and his heart was hammering so fast and hard that he seriously thought it was going to give out or else seize up like an over-wound alarm clock. He bent over and heaved his stomach contents onto the paving stones. For a time, everything went hazy. He may even have blacked out, while somehow still managing to remain upright.

  Only as his head cleared did he realise that he had given his pursuers the slip. Up until that moment, he had been beyond caring. He dimly recalled zigging and zagging through the city, darting down side streets and up back alleys and across patches of park, using his knowledge of the lay of the land to throw his pursuers off. He sagged against the bin in relief.

  For the rest of the night he wandered the wintry city, twitchy as a trodden-on cat. Every unexpected sound, every wail of an emergency vehicle siren, was a sharp reminder that he was a hunted man. By dawn he had come to a decision. It wasn’t so much a choice as an acceptance of the only course of action available to him. The Hand of God seemed to be pushing him in a definite direction. The usual divine strategy of closing all other doors and leaving just a single exit. Free will? Well, you didn’t have to take the exit...

  Redlaw found a branch of his bank, and the minute it opened he cleaned out his savings account.

  Luckily, he had his passport on him already. Even more luckily, no one had considered that John Redlaw might be an international flight risk and taken steps to warn the Border Agency.

  From Heathrow to JFK, and a bridge as wide as the Atlantic lay in smouldering ruins behind him.

  IF THERE WAS one thing Redlaw knew how to do, it was locate vampires. He was in a strange, alien city, and the weather was diabolical. But wherever you were and whatever the conditions, certain aspects of vampires’ behaviour were constants. They took refuge in shabby, tucked-away places, mostly through necessity but also by preference. They tried to draw as little attention to themselves as possible. And they always left traces, signs that the eye could be trained to detect.

  It might be a litter of dead vermin, rats especially, heaped in a basement lightwell. It might be a pile of faeces, unusually red, spattery and pungent. It might be the urine with which, doglike, they left their scent and alerted other vampires to their presence. Vampires were not the cleanest or most foresighted of creatures. They were as much animal as human, and didn’t think to tidy up their own mess or consider that others could track them by their detritus.

  Redlaw, with Cindermaker lodged in trouser waistband, steered clear of the well-lit avenues with their shops and restaurants. He ranged southward, down to where the city’s grid pattern broke up and intersections were no longer invariably right-angled crossways. The rigid geometry of upper Manhattan and midtown gave way to something he found more recognisable: unplanned urbanisation, a street layout that seemed to have occurred naturally rather than been imposed by ruler and set square.

  Here, between the ruins of the World Trade Center and the vaulting arrogance of the financial district, was the sort of warren of cramped old buildings he could see vampire immigrants favouring. He assumed that, like the City of London, this part of New York tended to be busy by day but unfrequented at night, which also suited the Sunless.

  Patiently, doggedly, Redlaw trudged through the snow. He bent to check doorsteps for the telltale, acrid-smelling stains that betokened territorial marking. He scanned the upper-storey windows of the more dilapidated tenement blocks, looking for crude methods of blotting out daylight, such as newspaper pages and scraps of cardboard box taped inside the panes. He was a big game hunter searching for spoor, but to passers-by—of which there were few—he looked like nothing so much as a madman, one of those quietly tormented schizophrenics of which New York seemed to have more than its fair share, performing arcane public rituals to stave off some private apocalypse.

  Midnight deepened into the small hours, and Redlaw had nothing to show for his efforts except sodden shoes, damp feet, and an uncontrollable shiver that came and went but was more violent each time it returned. He had never, ever been so cold. Tomorrow—note to self—buy warmer clothing.

  To add to his woes, around 2am fresh show started falling. The flakes were huge and silent, floating down like autumn leaves. They clumped on his eyebrows and built up in white epaulettes on his shoulders. His unprotected head was soon snowcapped, which made his scalp ache, especially at the crown where the covering of hair was thinner.

  He forged on because that was the sort of man he was. A bit of snow—no, a lot of snow—wasn’t going to deter John Redlaw. He could almost hear Róisín Leary telling him he was an idiot and he should get his arse indoors now or he’d catch his death. His former SHADE partner had not been one to mince her words.

  Similarly, he could almost hear the voice of Illyria Strakosha, the shtriga he had allied himself with not so long ago, saying much the same as Leary. Putting it less bluntly, perhaps, but with an equal amount of eye-rolling exasperation. Really, Redlaw, stop this bally nonsense. You’re only human, old bean.

  Ghosts of the dead. The sounds of his conscience. Redlaw knew they were just memories, disembodied echoes haunting the hollows of his mind, but sometimes he thought of them as angels.

  And then, at last, success. A result. Persistence rewarded.

  He had passed the deconsecrated church twice already, and only on the third time did something about it strike him as anomalous. A small round window high in its façade appeared to have been neatly removed. Not vandalised, as some of the others were, with starred holes in their stained-glass panes where stones had been hurled at them. This one window was simply not there any more, leaving a circular aperture that was just large enough to permit a human-sized body to squeeze through.

  Looking closer, Redlaw discovered scratches in the stone
work below the empty window. A column of little runic scuff marks led up the wall, the kind that might be left by unnaturally sharp, powerful talons. For a vampire, climbing up the sheer face of a building was a far from impossible feat.

  The church was tall and sandwiched between two former warehouses that had been converted into blocks of fashionable boho loft apartments. In its day, it would have been quite something. No doubt a property developer was eyeing it up with a view to making it quite something again in the near future. For now, though, it was very much nothing. A useless, hollow excrescence. A place of worship that was no longer needed, especially in a part of the city where money was God and the general opinion of religion was that it was a madness that made people fly jumbo jets into skyscrapers. The world had moved on and left this church behind like a large, steepled gravestone.

  The handles on the double doors were secured by a padlocked chain. A laminated notice warned that, by civic ordinance, trespassing on this property was an offence punishable by a steep fine and a possible jail sentence.

  Redlaw glanced both ways along the street. Nobody around as far as the eye could see. Nobody but him. The snow tumbled in thick flurries, encrusting streetlamps and burying parked cars. His gaze fell on the railings that fronted the church. Vandals had been busy there too. Several of the railings had been worked loose from their settings; a couple lay discarded, poking up out of the snow. Redlaw fetched one. The sturdy iron rod promised to make a decent crowbar. He inserted it inside the loop of chain. Several minutes of wrenching and twisting him did him no good. The chain held fast. He tried another tack. He stuck the railing inside the shackle of the padlock. Bracing the tip of it against one of the doors, he leaned back like a signalman pulling a lever. The padlock resisted. Redlaw strained, putting his back into it, all his strength. He grimaced. Breath steamed through clenched teeth.