by Steve Feasey
The police barrier posed about as much hindrance as the forsaken cars had, and Alexa cried out as Trey jumped again, simply soaring over the heads of the officers who’d been standing there. At the sight of the werewolf, the police and the crowd ran in panic in the opposite direction, those that had refused to leave earlier, despite the protests of the police, finally deciding that enough was enough.
Trey ran on for another hundred metres before he stopped, crouched behind a deserted police van, and allowed Alexa to climb down.
She grinned at him. ‘Crude but effective.’
The werewolf winked back at her. A bit like your driving.
They paused and looked up in awe at the hellish, zombie-filled dome that had been dropped smack in the middle of London. Alexa was about to say something when she heard somebody call her name. She looked off in the direction of the sound. Behind a mangled wreck of a car, not far from the Shield wall, was one of the Maug guards that her father had been speaking to earlier. The demon – Alexa could always see nether-creatures for what they really were – was kneeling over a crumpled figure at the kerbside.
‘Hag,’ Alexa said in a whisper as she hurried in the sorceress’s direction.
The old woman lay on her back, clearly in terrible pain and unable to get up. She managed to raise a hand, which Alexa took in her own.
‘You made it,’ the old woman said in a small voice. She glanced over Alexa’s shoulder and managed a toothless smile in the direction of the seven-foot lycanthrope standing there. ‘And you managed to get your werewolf back.’
‘Thanks to you.’
The old woman waved the remark away. ‘You performed that magic, not me. I doubt I’d have been able to combine those spells.’ She coughed and tiny crimson pearls flew into the air before settling back on her lips and chin.
‘We need to get you away from here,’ Alexa said. ‘We need to—’
‘You need to be quiet and listen,’ the old woman said, fixing the girl with an icy stare. ‘Your father is in there. I got him in. And I did as he asked and got as many people out of there as I could.’
She coughed again, wincing in pain as she did so.
‘Your father cannot defeat Caliban and Helde alone. You and the lycanthrope boy must get inside to help him.’
Alexa nodded. ‘Tell me how to breach the Shield. Tell me the magic and I’ll—’
The old woman stopped her with a wave of her hand. ‘You’re a skilful and powerful sorceress, Alexa, and I’ve enjoyed teaching you in the short time we’ve been together. But even a teacher as good as me could not teach you the sorcery required to breach that thing in the time we have left.’
‘But—’
‘I will open the Shield again. For you and Trey.’
‘You’re not strong enough, Hag.’
‘I’m strong enough to do this one last thing.’
Alexa frowned as she took in what the old woman said. ‘No.’ She looked down at the broken body and tried to stave off the tears that threatened. Hag portrayed herself to everyone as a bad-tempered and disagreeable old harridan, but during their times together Alexa had seen beyond this, and come to know the sorceress as she truly was. She hated to see her like this.
‘Goodbye, Alexa,’ Hag said, and then turned to nod at Trey. ‘Take care of her, lycanthrope. And remember that you have the power within you to put an end to all of this.’ She motioned with her hand in the direction of the dome. ‘If you come up against Helde, you must remember that her heart is the only surviving part of her. Destroy that, and you destroy the sorceress.’
Alexa shook her head. ‘Hag …’
But the old woman ignored her. She’d already closed her eyes and begun intoning the words necessary to perform her final act of sorcery.
28
Caliban stood at the exit to the tower and scanned the area before him. This was going to be far too easy. He stopped for a moment and considered. If everything went to plan, this was how he would feed in the future – from a herd of entrapped stock that couldn’t run and couldn’t escape. There would be no hunt, no need to use the vampiric powers and qualities that made him and his kind reviled and revered in the Netherworld. He would become little more than a consumer. He hissed at himself, pushing these thoughts away, angry that he’d allowed them to creep in. The anticipation of fresh, warm blood helped to dispel any doubts he might be having about his plan, and he forced himself to concentrate on what he had come out here to do – to feed. The vampire deliberated. He wanted something young and vibrant and female. Yes, a meal like that was exactly what he needed now.
He cast his eyes about. In a car parked about fifty metres away from him he sensed what he was looking for. She was hidden from sight, but the vampire knew the young woman was there. He opened his mind some more.
She ‘d locked herself in. She ‘d been about to get out of her car and go into her flat when that vast black tower materialized. Then she ‘d watched in terror as those vile, undead creatures had appeared and attacked the people. Her mobile was dead, and so was the car: turning the keys in the ignition had elicited nothing at all. It was as if the entire thing had ceased to function as soon as that monstrosity had appeared. It was an older car, a classic VW Beetle. She ‘d never been so glad in all her life to have doors that locked mechanically via buttons you depressed at the top of the door sill, instead of a system that relied on the car’s electrics.
She’d pushed those buttons down with fingers that shook so badly she could hardly work them. And she ‘d checked again and again that they were fully depressed before clambering into the back of the vehicle, pulling the travel blanket she kept on the rear seat over her, and hiding in the footwell between the front and rear seats.
The vampire laughed quietly to himself and strode out in the direction of the vehicle.
When he came alongside the car he bent forward, peering in through the side window at the uneven blanketed thing huddled on the floor. He thought about tapping on the glass with his talons, just to see what the response might be. The vampire was in a playful mood. He smiled as a better idea came to him. Caliban misted, disappearing from where he’d been standing on the street and reappearing in the front passenger seat of the old car. It wasn’t easy translocating himself from a standing to a sitting position, but the ancient vampire performed the feat without too much effort.
‘You look rather foolish beneath that blanket,’ the vampire said.
The muffled scream behind him brought a look of grim satisfaction to the nether-creature’s face. He ran his tongue over the tip of a fang, testing it. The car stank of fear, and the smell excited the vampire, making him all the more eager for the coppery, warm blood he craved. He’d always liked to toy with his food a little before feeding on it.
‘I’d like you to come out now, please.’ He paused for a second. ‘If you do not come out, I will be forced to physically remove you from your pathetic hiding place. And that could get a little … unpleasant.’
He smiled again when he heard her moving to get up on to the seat behind him.
The woman shook violently as she stared at the thing in the front seat of her car. She pushed backwards with her legs, pressing into the leather rear seat, trying to put even this tiny additional distance between her and the creature. How it had got into the car she had no idea. The locks were still down, and she’d have heard if the doors had been opened. It was as if the thing had appeared out of thin air. Right now she could only see the back of the creature’s head. It was a human head; bald with a greyish-white skin stretched so thin that a criss-cross map of blue veins could clearly be seen. Despite its appearance, she knew that whatever was in the car with her was not human. As if sensing this, the vampire turned to face her. Ghastly yellow eyes glared out at her from deep-set orbs, and the creature’s top lip pulled back to reveal the fangs that promised nothing but death. She opened her mouth and screamed, the fear-soaked sound filling the small space of the car so completely that it hurt her ears. Caliban t
hrew back his head and laughed. He reached out a hand to grab her.
There was a thump on the window quickly followed by another. The vampire, momentarily distracted, flicked his eyes towards the source of the sound. A zombie stood outside the car. Caliban cursed under his breath. Unless he was very much mistaken, it was the mounted police officer he’d seen felled from his horse earlier. The undead creature was missing an ear and had bite marks all down one side of its face. Its nose was also missing, an ugly black and scarlet hole in the place where it had once been. But it was clear that the wound to the erstwhile policeman’s abdomen had been his undoing: most of the creature’s lower intestines were hanging loose from a great fissure in its body just above the leather belt it wore. It carried these slippery, gore-covered tubes as best it could in one hand, using the other to bang on the car roof while letting out a loud moan.
The woman screamed again.
‘Shut up!’ the vampire commanded, all hint of amusement now gone.
The combined sound of the woman’s cries and the zombie’s moans attracted another undead creature. The newcomer might once have been an attractive woman, but now her looks were that of a corpse. Her neck had been broken so that her head hung back at a strange angle, forcing her to peer down her chin to see ahead. The second zombie joined the first in banging repeatedly on the roof of the car.
Caliban cursed under his breath. Looking out through the front windscreen he could make out more of the creatures, drawn by the noise, beginning to make their way towards the car.
There was no way the vampire could feed now. He was very particular about when and how he fed, choosing whenever possible to do so in private, and the thought of drinking from this girl beneath the derelict gaze of these mindless monsters filled him with utter revulsion. He could simply kill her – rake his talons across her throat and shut her up for good. That would get rid of the revenants at least – he’d seen how quickly they lost interest in their victims once they were dead. But the lust for blood still gnawed away at him, and he knew that the sight of the gore in this state could produce an undesired effect in him, leading him to go on a murderous rampage. No, he needed to control his anger and desires.
‘I won’t kill you,’ Caliban said. He nodded at the zombies outside the car. ‘But they will.’ He paused, then added, ‘For a little while, at least.’
He opened the door beside him, forcing it against the undead body of the ex-policeman, and barged his way through the frenzied push of the zombies. He walked away to the sound of the woman’s screams as the creatures tore at each other to get at her inside the car.
The vampire hissed in anger and frustration. He turned his head to look up the road. There were more humans hiding up ahead – he could already sense some of them. Maybe he would have to make a house call to get some privacy. He paused for a moment, glancing up at the tower behind him, momentarily remembering the promise he’d made to protect Helde.
I won’t be gone long, he told himself. She’ll be fine.
29
The few zombies that Lucien and his party encountered when they’d crossed through to the other side of the Shield had been dispatched quickly. The undead ignored the demon and its vampire master, heading straight for Tom with an unerring single-mindedness. With so few of them out here by the perimeter, it was simply a matter of positioning Tom behind them so that the vampire and the Maug could put the pathetic and unfortunate creatures out of their misery with one or two swings of the blades they carried. The Maug had been a little slower to react than it should have been and received a nasty-looking bite to its arm – luckily it was only a flesh wound and the zombification process that brought humans back from the dead did not apply to nether-creatures. Nevertheless, it was clear that the revenants would attack anything in their path that tried to stop them getting to their prey.
When it was over Tom looked down at the decapitated bodies, reminding himself that not too long ago they’d been living humans. ‘Poor bastards,’ he said with a shake of his head.
They moved on up the road, taking care to check the side streets, alleyways and shop doors for any undead that might be lurking there or on the verge of reanimating.
‘We should decapitate all the bodies,’ the Maug said, gesturing with the machete in its hand at a cadaver in the road. ‘That way they won’t come back to life and be behind us as we move on.’
Lucien walked over to the body. It was that of an elderly man. ‘This man was not a victim of a zombie attack,’ he said. ‘He appears to have been crushed and trampled underfoot. He’ll stay dead.’
‘We can’t check every body we come across to assess the cause of death,’ the Maug said. ‘It would be safer to just lop off their heads and—’
‘We will not be “just lopping off the heads” of the dead!’ the vampire said, staring at the creature. ‘This man had a family. Friends. When this,’ he gestured about him, ‘is all over they will come to try and find him. How do you think they’ll feel when they find that somebody has “just lopped off his head”?’
The Maug mumbled something under its breath and looked down at its feet.
‘We need to make our way to the tower,’ the vampire said.
‘I’m assuming it’ll be much worse there,’ Tom said.
‘That’s where they were released from, so yes, I’m guessing that’s where the fatalities were the most numerous. If I’m right, after that initial attack everyone would have spread out to the perimeter of the Shield. Others will be in hiding. It’ll be slower for the zombies to locate their victims now. But if the ones out here are reanimating, I think it’s safe to say that more will be reawakened the nearer to the centre we get.’ Lucien looked at his friend. ‘You, like every other human inside this place, are most vulnerable,’ he reminded him.
‘And that is why I’m the bait in this here fishing trip. You need me to draw them out.’
‘Just stick behind us. You and I,’ Lucien nodded at the Maug, ‘will flank him. Between us we should be able to deal with whatever comes at us. We need to get to the tower and stop Helde. If we neutralize her, the Shield will cease to function and all those infected but not turned yet will be saved that fate. There’s nothing we can do for those poor souls who have already reanimated except put them out of their misery.’
‘Aren’t you forgetting someone?’
‘I’ll deal with my brother if and when he shows up. My guess is that he’s safely holed up in the tower too, watching his handiwork. But there’s not much keeping him here now. Now that the zombies are reanimating, he can simply up and leave. We don’t have much time.’
‘Then let’s quit yapping and go,’ Tom growled.
30
The new opening in the Shield that Hag managed to create for Alexa and Trey was small. They stood before it for a moment, and then the werewolf stooped forward, bending at the waist, and hurried through.
He crouched, tense and alert, fully expecting to be attacked by something or someone as soon as he was on the other side. He reached out with all of his lycanthrope senses, hoping to anticipate the danger he was certain awaited him. The smells and colours were those of the Netherworld that he’d experienced when he fought in the Demon Games, but the human roads and the structures that lined them looked alien bathed in the purple light. There was no sign of any other living creature on the street. He glanced down at the severed body of the Maug lying on the floor, and the creature’s dead eyes stared straight back up at him. The sight of the demon sent a cold shiver through the teenager and he correctly guessed that it must have been bisected when Hag’s first opening had crashed shut.
The lycanthrope turned, noticing that Alexa had not yet followed him. He quickly bent down again and peered back through the breach. She was watching Hag. The old woman was on the ground where they’d left her, her body shaking violently with the effort of performing the sorcery necessary to create and maintain the opening.
You have to come through now, Lex, or all her effort will have been
for nothing.
He watched as she turned to look at him, tears running freely down her face.
Now! Before this thing shuts!
She nodded, took one last look at the sorceress and ducked through the gap.
The last Maug demon didn’t join them. They’d agreed the creature would stay behind until Hag died and arrange for her body to be taken back to Lucien’s building. The nether-creature had not needed too much persuading.
No sooner had she ducked through the opening than it disappeared behind her.
Alexa felt Hag’s death like a physical blow. Attuned to the energies of the magical plane as she was, she felt something collapse and fall in on itself, like a vast building being demolished with dynamite – the sense that something had been lost, and at the same time released, forever. The young sorceress gave a little gasp and turned to look at Trey to see if he too had felt it. It was clear he had not, but the look on Alexa’s face must have told him everything he needed to know.
Has she gone?
‘Yes.’
She took a deep breath and told herself that now was not the time to mourn the loss of Hag. She glanced at the Shield again before turning her attention back to Trey. ‘That’s it,’ she said. ‘We’re trapped in here now. There’s no way out unless Caliban and Helde move elsewhere or they’re stopped.’
Trey nodded. He was looking up the road at two bodies lying there.
‘What is it?’ Alexa asked.
By way of an answer, Trey walked over to the corpses and peered at them intently.
‘Trey?’
It looks like Tom and your father didn’t have the unchallenged entry that we did. These bodies have had their heads removed. Zombies.
‘Then they can’t be too far ahead of us. We should go.’
The lycanthrope nodded. The tiniest movement caught his eye, and he turned to look up at a window above a tailor’s shop. The old man peering from between the gap in the curtains quickly stepped back into the darkness of the room behind him.
