Wrenching the needle out, he tossed it onto the passenger seat and massaged his left pectoral convulsively. Regaining his breath, Mark opened the car door and stepped out onto the footpath.
An icy sheet of water cascaded over him: he was soaked before he had gone two steps. The cheap black hooded jumper, though warm, was in no way waterproof. Beneath it, he wore another even cheaper jumper, and then a t-shirt he’d bought in a bag of three at his local supermarket.
When he left his house, the night had been cold but dry. The weather report had promised it would stay that way until mid-morning tomorrow, at which point a storm was expected. It had landed early. The severity of the downpour had caught Mark unprepared. Fortunately, he was wearing khaki canvas trousers and a sturdy pair of black Alt-Berg boots. They went some way to keeping the rain out of his socks.
Pulling the hood over his head so his face was hidden, Mark followed the woman. It was not hard: Whoever she was, she appeared to be completely absorbed with her walk in the rain. Mark knew that this wasn’t necessarily the case, but he did not mind. It suited his purpose. The woman moved on, hurrying through side streets in a southerly direction.
They came to Claremont Road. Mark was pleased to see that it was deserted. The rain was working for him. The woman crossed to the opposite side, and Mark followed. The railings of Alexandra Park appeared through the rain. The woman disappeared through a gate into the park. Mark walked up to the entrance and stopped. A frown creased his brow as he stared in cautiously.
It was completely black. There were no lights beyond the boundary railings, and any ambient illumination from the street was quickly beaten down by the hammering rain. Mark peered in as if uncertain, but he was smiling inside. After a few seconds, he moved into the park. The darkness swallowed him.
For a while he followed the curving paths randomly, trying to ignore the relentless rain that held the numbing chill of the night. Five minutes passed, then ten, and still nothing happened. Mark began to wonder if maybe the target had simply slipped through the park and vanished, leaving him soaked to the skin for nothing. It had already happened twice before – she was smart and seemingly possessed of a sixth sense to danger. Every time he had tried to get close with a gun, she had managed to slip away.
Mark kept walking. Soon he came to the side of a large pond at the opposite side of the park. Just as he was beginning to give up, she stepped in front of him from out of nowhere.
For a second they stood in silence. The wind had picked up and the rain was coming in horizontally now, slicing up under his hood and stinging his face and eyes. They watched each other, maybe ten feet apart. The path they were on was close to the road. Only a ragged line of bushes and a few leafless trees ran along the railings. Consequently, some light filtered through from the sodium lamps on Alexandra Road South. In the dull light, Mark saw that the woman was about six feet tall, with broad shoulders and narrow hips. Her features were hidden behind a huge pair of sunglasses.
‘Why are you following me?’ she hissed, her words cutting through the pounding of the rain like tearing paper. Cold water dribbled down Mark’s back, and he shuddered; whether from the cold, apprehension, or anticipation, he could not tell. Mark did not answer the question, and after a moment the woman continued. ‘I’ve seen you sitting outside my house in that old car for days now. You have followed me twice, carrying a gun, yet you come unarmed this time, so I allow you to get close. I am curious. You are watching me. Why?’
Mark just smiled. The woman grunted in anger. ‘What? Do you want to rob me? Do you? You have the wrong person if that is your plan. Do you think you followed me here? No, I led you here. I led you here to have a small heart to heart with you.’ Still, Mark didn’t answer. ‘Answer me, damn you!’ The woman’s shout rang through the empty park like a gunshot, then went on to echo around the squat buildings that surrounded it.
‘I’m here to kill you,’ Mark said quietly.
For a second, the woman simply stared through the thick, black sunglasses. Then she began to laugh. ‘Kill me?’ she asked through her mirth. ‘Little man, I do not know who put you up to this, but you have made a terrible mistake. Even with your gun, you are defenceless against me.’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘Well I do.’ The sunglasses on her face suddenly cracked. The noise was loud, a sharp contrast to the pattering of rain. Spider webs marred the black surfaces, but these soon lost their lines as the plastic began to bulge outwards. The bulges began to glow a dull red, becoming blisters that bubbled and spat. Red burned to white, and the plastic lenses collapsed and dribbled away. Mark stared at what lay beneath.
Instead of eyes there were only gaping pits, the skin around them black and charred. In those holes, twin balls of flame spun and flared. The fire danced out over the woman’s face to caress her cheeks and nose. The glasses finally succumbed to the inferno and melted, running down her face and dropping in molten globs that hissed angrily when they hit the rain-swept ground. They left a trail of black plastic tears that ran from eyes to chin. The flames blazed brighter; fire spilled out of her eye sockets. Where the fire touched her flesh, the skin blistered and cracked, only to heal again almost instantly.
‘Do you see?’ the woman asked mockingly. ‘I will tear your heart out and eat it.’ She moved as she spoke, a fluid stream of lithe muscle in the curtain of water. Where the rain hit her eyes, it sputtered and steamed. Mark tried to throw his hands up in defence, but he was not fast enough. The woman with the flame eyes was on him in less than a second, and hot, slender fingers wrapped around his throat.
Mark drove a fist up into the woman’s gut. His knuckles popped against her tough, solid body. Up close, he could see deep into her fiery eyes, and it was like staring into the sun. A blinding pain ran through the back of his head as he felt his retinas sear away. The woman was laughing. Fire licked Mark’s face, and he felt his own skin begin to blister. The agony was intense. He screamed. It was a wretched, bestial sound.
Mark was carried to the ground, kicking and punching futilely. He felt something slam into his ribcage, over his heart. There was a tearing sound as the skin parted, and then a sickening cracking noise as the bones beneath splintered. A moment later he felt something scorching, writhing in his chest, and he knew it was the woman’s fingers.
Pain lanced through him, and he screamed again as his attacker began to tug at something deep in Mark’s body. Another scream as the arteries that held his heart in place parted under the assault, and Mark felt the organ ripped from him.
‘Kill me?’ the woman demanded furiously. ‘I, who have lived for centuries, feasting on your kind – you dare to threaten me? I’ll eat your heart and take your soul.’ Mark heard the woman begin to chew. He waited for a few seconds as the awful pain subsided. Then he sat up.
Vision was already returning. The damaged cells in his eyes were regenerating so quickly that he felt the tingle of growth. He felt a new heart growing in his chest, even as the bones fused back together and the skin puckered and healed without a scar.
He fingered the blood-drenched hole in his hooded top and absently thought it a shame that it couldn’t repair itself as well. He forgot about it as he levered himself to his feet and stared down at the woman who had torn out his heart and eaten it.
Her mouth was smeared with blood, her lips peeled back in a rictus of pain; the fires of her eyes began to dim. The woman thrashed around on the ground, clearly in agony. Mark wandered over to her and kicked her as hard as he could in the side. He heard something snap.
‘That’s for breaking my heart, you bitch,’ he said wryly.
‘What did you do?’ the woman gasped.
‘I haven’t met one of you bastards that doesn’t want to rip a man’s heart out, one way or another. You’re the first one that I’ve noticed enjoys eating them, though. I’ve been watching you for months; obviously, you noticed me. As you said, I couldn’t get close to you with a gun, so I improvised. I injected myself with a mix
ture of silver and cyanide. Right in the heart. The silver will keep you down until the cyanide can do its work. You’re going to die hard, but it’ll be quick. It’s more than you deserve.’
The flames in his enemy’s eyes were little more than a flicker now, and her eye sockets were nothing but blank, staring holes that led to nowhere. Mark hawked and spat into one of them. The flame went out.
‘How?’ the woman demanded with a death rattle. ‘How did you live?’ For a moment, Mark thought about telling her, and then he shrugged.
As he watched her die, he did not feel the rain or the cold, or the stickiness of the blood that had welded his clothes to his torso. All he felt was satisfaction. The feeling culminated when the last flicker of fire in her remaining eye – the light of her life – was finally extinguished.
Seconds later, the body ignited. Flames punched out of her torso and into the rain. Hunched up against the wet, Mark watched the corpse burn away until nothing was left but a sludge of soggy ash. When the last embers had died, he turned and walked away, back to his car, and back to his warm, comfortable home.
Lying in the darkness, the gash in his throat burning as the rest of his flesh faded away, Sam tried to make sense of what had just happened to him. The alcohol was gone from his system; the shock of the assault had caused a surge of adrenaline that had neutralised the drug in moments.
The rain still poured down on him, and the icy deluge felt strange against the hot blood pumping out of his throat. Sam had both hands clamped around the wound in a desperate attempt to staunch the flow. He wanted to scream but he couldn’t. So, he just lay there, praying for a miracle and wondering how his life had come to this.
A lot of things ran through his mind as he lay there dying. He thought of his wife, Tabby, and how he wished fervently that he could see her one more time. He only needed a few seconds: just long enough to tell her that he loved her and that the time he had spent with her had been the happiest of his life.
He thought about how he would never have children; about how he would never see his father again; about the things he would never do, like pack it all in and go and live on a beach somewhere in the Caribbean.
Mostly, he thought about a man impaled on a sword, impossible words in his head, and razor-sharp teeth in his throat. Try as he might, Sam simply couldn’t rationalise what had happened. He thought about how a random act of kindness had brought him to this dark street, in the driving rain, while his lifeblood pumped onto the tarmac of the street and washed away forever down the nearest grid. He should have known better. He had known better. Stupid.
Idly, he wondered how long he had been unconscious. It could have only been moments, he reasoned – any more time and he would have bled out and woken up dead. The thought of waking up dead caused a grim laugh to hiss through his lips. He felt air brush over the gash in his throat, and he began to cry soundlessly. His limbs were dead weights, and the cold was starting to disappear. Worryingly, he began to feel comfortable. The world around him drifted away in a warm haze. There was nothing …
A noise brought him back from his death-fugue: footsteps. Sam wrestled himself up with a titanic effort of will, and saw a man walking towards him through the sheets of rain. It wasn’t the man who had attacked him. Hope blossomed, and Sam reached out a heavy hand imploringly. The man came and stood over him.
Looking up into cold, dead eyes, Sam’s hand slowly slipped back to his throat. He clutched at his wound protectively. At first, he could not make out whether the figure was a man or a woman. The street was dark, but there was enough light to see an androgynous face, set in a head far too big for an unnaturally skinny body. Wispy hair lay plastered against a huge forehead. Beneath it, a long, sharp nose hooked out over thick, rubbery lips. It was wearing a cheap blue polyester suit that was also far too big. It was a man, Sam decided.
The rain had soaked the man’s clothing. Beneath the billowing jacket, he had a scrawny frame. There wasn’t an ounce of muscle or fat on his body. Stick thin, Sam thought. The man would have been a laughable sight if it weren’t for his eyes. Even in the gloom they glittered in a blank, soulless way. They had a bulbous quality to them, and they stuck out from his face obscenely. After a few moments of staring up into those dead eyes, Sam realised that they never blinked, even when rain spattered directly into them.
Sam tried to ask for help, but his throat was thick and raw. The only sound he could make was a rasping gasp. Dead Eyes cocked his head to one side and stared down at Sam a little longer. Sam felt like a small animal in a vivisection lab. Fear started to well up in him. The blood was hot beneath his hands. He wondered how he could still be alive. The man knelt beside him and there was a look of hunger in those awful eyes, which terrified Sam more than anything else that had happened to him that evening. The man quickly rifled through Sam’s pockets. Sam noticed that the man had no fingernails – just blunt, fleshy fingertips that splayed out slightly at the end like suction cups. Then he bent down close, and his tongue flicked out to lick at the blood at Sam’s throat. Sam closed his eyes.
A rumble of thunder echoed down the street. The man stood up urgently, his oversized head weaving back and forth as he peered into the gloomy rainstorm. Sam was apparently – and thankfully – forgotten. Lowering his head back to the hard ground, Sam began to concentrate on staying alive. He counted his heartbeats. They thundered in his ears. Strangely, they were constant and steady. Something farther down the alley caught his attention. Dead Eyes was staring at it too; his face twisted into a snarl that bared large, crooked teeth set into bloodless gums beneath wormy lips.
A localised tornado had sprung up a few feet away. The rain was sucked up into the funnel until it became a manifest thing of furious water. The spout hovered in place, ignoring the wind that blew around it. Then the road beneath it slowly erupted.
Sam watched, amazed, as the hard surface was ripped away like wet paper. Slabs of tarmac were flung away, hissing through the air and smashing into walls with gunshot cracks. A water main ruptured with a boom, and a geyser shot up into the night. It was sucked into the tornado, which whipped up above the buildings around it, its top lost in the haze of the rainstorm.
Dirt and earth turned it a brooding black. It spun upward, weaving an odd pattern that was shot through with its own radiance, as if a lightning storm raged deep at its core. Dead Eyes stood before it, both hands opening and closing spasmodically, his uneven teeth still bared as if spoiling for a fight.
The whirlwind started to shrink. Soon, it was a squat man-sized thing of rolling fury. It decelerated on the spot until its energy was spent, and nothing was left but a deep waterlogged hole that quickly overflowed. A stream of water washed over the feet of Dead Eyes and continued towards Sam. Sam barely noticed when the dirty rivulet flowed under him. Dead Eyes watched the pool. For a moment, everything was still.
A hand burst through the surface of the water, then another. The hands writhed and splashed, desperately clawing the mud and earth at the edges. Sam had the overwhelming impression that whoever it was felt as lost and alone as he did.
A man dragged himself from the hole and lay on his stomach, gasping for air. Then he staggered clumsily to his feet. He was naked, like the man Sam had found impaled, though the resemblance ended there. This man was heavily muscled and covered in blue and green tattoos: wingless dragons crawled sinuously from his ankles, up his legs and over his torso, wrapping around each other in a display of Gordian intricacy. At his collarbone, the ophidian shapes reared up into tiny sightless mouths rimmed with fangs. Hundreds of the evil heads bristled around his neck in a collar of spitting rage.
The tattooed man’s face was covered in a tangled mat of muddy hair, which made him look like some kind of painted Bigfoot. Rain poured over him, but the tattooed man didn’t seem to care. He stared at the ground as though he were in a daze. Then he started to shake his head from side to side.
Dead Eyes cannoned into the tattooed man at a sprint. The two fell backwards onto the
muddy ground. What followed was the most vicious and bloody fight Sam had ever seen. He lay there and watched, his hands still clasped around his throat, his own blood bubbling up through his fingers.
The tattooed man was massively muscled and taller than Dead Eyes by a clear foot, but it didn’t seem to matter. Dead Eyes made up for the weight disparity with sheer, unadulterated fury. As he collided with the tattooed man, he sank his chisel-like teeth into the big man’s cheek, tearing a flap of skin clear off his face. Blood sprayed out in an arc, visible even in the heavy rain, and the tattooed man bellowed in pain and anger.
From where he lay, Sam’s vision was confused by blood loss and a curtain of rain, but it appeared that Dead Eyes had become taller and even thinner. His skin was slick with rainwater, but there was something else – something slimy about him that Sam couldn’t place.
The two rolled on the ground in a flailing mess of arms and legs. Dead Eyes slipped clear of the tattooed man and leapt to his feet. He immediately stamped on his adversary’s head. Sam heard hollow thuds as he trampled the tattooed man’s forehead and temples. The tattooed man tried to roll away, and Dead Eyes unleashed a powerful kick into his exposed face.
The tattooed man covered his head with his big arms. Dead Eyes slammed a foot into them and Sam heard bone break. The tattooed man lashed out with one thick leg and knocked Dead Eyes to the ground. The tattooed man climbed unsteadily upright. His left arm hung loose and deformed at his side. His attacker bounced back to his feet in an unnaturally double-jointed way.
Moving fast, the tattooed man grabbed his opponent in a one-armed bear hug, crushing the smaller man beneath his huge strength. Sam could see the smaller man’s ribcage flattening; Dead Eyes didn’t seem to mind. Instead, he opened his mouth wide – too wide – and buried his teeth into the skin below the tattooed man’s right eye. He thrashed his head around as he tried to rip the flesh from his eye socket.
Immortals' Requiem Page 4
