by Lee McGeorge
There was a moment of pause. Paul watched the detective, wondering, contemplating how to finish this man. Latis was looking back over his shoulder. It was then that Paul could see he’d run as far as he could go. The floor beyond Latis had been excavated to a deep hole. It looked as though there were floors beneath the church, a basement or dungeon, exposed now that the floor had been removed.
“You killed her,” Paul whispered.
“Paul… I’m sorry… I… I...” he tried to speak, he tried to say things but nothing happened. His body trembled, his hands lifted to his face, still holding the empty handgun.
Paul approached.
The man didn’t try to run. He didn’t cry out.
Paul swung the karambit and caught Latis across the hands first, cutting deep into his fingers. He grabbed his hands into fists as Paul slumped forward as though falling to his knees, but then punched up and out, making a powerful slice through the detective’s abdomen, the intestines instantly spilling.
“Oh, God…” was all Latis had time to say.
Paul jumped forward and grabbed at the spilling guts as he shoved him over the precipice, sending him backwards into the crypt, his intestines spilling out like a guide rope, one looped end in McGovern’s fist, the rest unspooling until he hit the stone floor at the bottom. Paul tossed the loop of guts after him once he’d crashed.
The fall was sickening but survivable.
Paul wanted to go down there and finish him but the only way up and down was via a hydraulic platform. The control panel was filled with unlit lights. Did it have power? What if he went down and couldn’t get back out.
It didn’t matter, there was a worse fate for him.
In the crypt Paul could now see three naked white men. They were made of marble, with perfect muscle definition. The strigoi were in there. Three of them. They weren’t his own strigoi, they were uniquely different. He watched as they circled and took turns laying on top of Latis, completely invisible to the detective but perfectly visible to himself. They were ghosts. Wraiths. Invisible naked men trying to infect the wounded man.
Somehow Paul could sense it wouldn’t work. The strigoi were keys, the host was the keyhole. The key fit Cornel but the lock wouldn’t turn. It would drive him into madness. Paul couldn’t understand how he knew this, but somehow the whole strigoi lifecycle was laid before him. This place made perfect sense to him and he would have loved to stay and touch the strigoi down there.
A sound came to break the silence. A faint buzzing of rotor blades.
Paul backtracked out of the church in time to see a helicopter fly overhead as it turned on a searchlight. The helicopter was painted in camouflage colours. Military.
----- X -----
Lucian Noica was sitting in a pool of Ildico Popescu’s blood. He was hugging Alina to his chest and rocking back and forth. Paul stepped through the plate window into the lobby. Over the front entrance of the hospital the searchlight beamed strongly and the sound of the helicopter increased as it prepared to land.
Lucian stared up at Paul wide eyed as he approached. He knelt down beside Ildico’s corpse. He leaned forward on his knees like he was about to pray and touched his lips against Ildico’s shattered skull. “I’m sorry, Ildico… I love you… I’m sorry.” He rested a hand on her back for a moment then turned his attention to the doorway. The helicopter was landing.
“Paul, you can stop this,” Lucian said. “You can stop everything.”
He nodded, staring away to the side in contemplation.
Alina held out her hand towards him. He reached back and allowed her to wrap her hand around one of his bloody fingers. “I can’t look after you yet… You are beautiful… You are my daughter.”
The helicopter engines were at full tilt. Over the entrance snow was blowing in from the downdraft of the rotors. Soldiers would be here in seconds.
Paul stood and looked directly into Lucian’s eyes. “I want you to look after her,” he pointed to baby. “You, Noica. Understand? You are going to be her guardian. Don’t let anything happen to her. Don’t make me come back and hurt you.”
He turned his back and walked a few steps, then stopped in his tracks to say one last thing. “It’s deeper. The source. The church was built to cover it. There’s something very horrible down there. If you dig deeper you’ll find it… but I suggest you don’t…” he pointed a finger at the baby. “Look after her.”
The sound of voices came from outside. Orders were barked in military tones against the sound of the helicopter’s thunder. Paul jogged away crashing through the corridor doors.
Lucian held Alina tighter, the little girl making barely any sound whilst staring curiously at her mother’s corpse. He heard shouting, lights beamed into his eyes. Soldiers with guns, rifles with flashlights slung beneath them.
“He’s gone that way. Noica pointed. He’s been shot in the chest. You can follow the blood trail.”
----- X -----
The soldiers followed the blood trail through a corridor and out through a fire exit. They followed it to the foot of the mountain and discovered bloody footprints in the snow. They knew they had to follow now before the tracks were covered by any further snowfall. They did it slowly and carefully and it took them most of the night to climb the three hundred meters to the summit of the ridge and they wasted more time when the tracks led to a lookout post to which they took defensive positions for some hours before realising it was empty. They slowly followed the trail, periodically losing it and carefully searching to reacquire without causing false trails of their own. It was long and slow. Dawn was breaking by the time they’d made it down the other side.
They found the hovel.
They found tracks from a motorbike. The blood trail had ended. The bike trails ended. They found nothing.
Epilogue
“I hope we never see him again. I have personal reasons for that.” Lucian Noica said as he sipped his coffee.
Minster Vadescu had his eyes on the ass of a waitress as she walked through the restaurant. “Ah, ha… yes, you do. I don’t think I’ll ever understand why you adopted his daughter?”
“Because he told me to and I’m terrified he might be watching. If one day he does come back, I will have done nothing to upset him.”
“You’re appeasing the criminal,” Vadescu said with a soft air of self-righteousness.
“To protect myself. He’s out there somewhere and one day he may come knocking on my door.”
“Oh, I doubt it,” Vadescu said. “but let’s suppose he did… what do we do? If he ever resurfaces? How do we contain him?”
“How do you contain McGovern? Drop a bomb on him, that’s my advice. That is a law enforcement issue, I haven’t an opinion on it. But over fifty armed police tried to arrest him. He killed eight and put twenty in hospital. If we couldn’t catch one man with fifty officers, how many do you think you need?”
“I thought he killed seven?”
Lucian shook his head. “Corneliu Latis, the man who tracked him in London died of injuries and illness about a month ago… Of course, that’s just McGovern’s Brasov death toll, God only knows how many people he’s killed that we don’t know about.”
Vadescu dropped a sugar lump into his coffee and stirred. “I dread to think what would happen if he resurfaced.”
“He surfaces all the time, in stories. At least once a month I get an email about an Englishman in Uzbekistan knife fighting for money. Apparently all the criminals of Tashkent are terrified of him like he’s Batman or something… but nobody ever has details, nobody can take a picture of him, it’s always third hand as a friend of a friend. I get other reports from Russia, about an Englishman who murders prostitutes, and I’ve seen more than twenty rumours of an Englishman with a Samurai sword murdering young girls in Siberia… They’re stories. Urban legends. He’s become a myth. There are websites about him. There is even a website where women share their sexual fantasies about him. The Brasov attack videos are so well circulated
that Paul McGovern has become the modern day Bigfoot… Sightings here. Trails there. Unsolved murders someplace else. It’s at a point where anytime there’s an unsolved murder involving a knife or a sword the first thing people think is Paul McGovern.”
“I have heard disturbing chatter that he is idolised in certain avenues.”
“From day one,” Lucian responded. “Anyone who has ever held a grudge against the police loves that there’s someone like him. He’s the patron saint of anyone who has suffered police oppression.”
“My goodness... what a world we live in.”
“I know. Hard to fathom really. He was by all accounts a nice and pleasant man who began to believe he was a vampire. With time those hunting him became convinced he was a vampire too and now anyone with an internet connection can participate in the fantasy… except, this is real. There are men like that walking around. We rub shoulders with them every day. There are men in this world who harbour the most violent and vicious fantasies and you would never realise. You could work with them, you could ride on the bus beside them. They could be your brother or uncle, all smiles and happy families whilst underneath they’re fantasising cruel ways to hurt others.”
“Is there anything we can do? Against men like that? These men hidden in society.”
Lucian Noica shook his head. “No, Minister. There is nothing you can do. Nothing.”
Other Books by Lee McGeorge
PREMIUM EDITIONS
Gingerbread Economy
Vampire "Untitled"
Vampire "Unseen"
Vampire "Unleashed"
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FREE BOOKS
The Tourist
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