The Cross vf-2

by Scott G. Mariani

  The cable car loomed large; then its dark underside obscured its windows from view as it passed above the level of the chalet’s living room and glided in to dock at the landing station.

  And then they heard the sound of footsteps on the stairs.

  Alex, Joel, Dec, Chloe, Gabriel, Lillith, Zachary and Kali: all eyes were on the door. Nobody breathed. Nobody spoke. Alex braced her feet apart and squared the sights of the Desert Eagle on the doorway. Joel, Dec and Chloe held their swords tightly.

  The footsteps stopped outside. The handle turned.

  And the door swung open.

  Chapter Sixty-Two

  An arm wearing a gold Rolex darted inside the door as it opened, and flipped on the light switch. Its owner took one step inside the room, staggered to a halt and stared at them all, colour rising instantly in his cheeks.

  Not even Lillith could remember ever having seen Gabriel let out such a sigh of relief. ‘Baxter, you infernal cretin, what do you mean by bursting in here unannounced?’

  It was obvious that the infernal cretin had come ready for a fight. ‘I’ve just about had it with all this bullshit, Gabe,’ he launched straight in. ‘Who the fuck are all these folks in my house? Who said you could have a goddamned party in here?’

  As Baxter went on with his tirade, the rest of the group filed inside the room in his wake: a wearily resigned-looking Tiberius, then Yuri, followed by Albrecht shaking the snow from the brim of his fedora hat. They were accompanied by an extremely attractive pair of female vampire companions Gabriel recognised as Sonia and her inseparable Japanese friend, Makiko, both wearing outfits a human woman would have frozen to death in this time of year in the Alps. Sonia’s white satin skirt was short enough to reveal the ornate little silver dagger tucked into her suspender belt. She flashed a hungry look at Dec, nudged Makiko, licked her lips and let out a burbling giggle.

  ‘Oohh, humans,’ they chorused. ‘Gabriel, how thoughtful of you.’

  Tiberius made an apologetic gesture to Gabriel as Baxter, sensing he was being ignored, redirected his ranting at Lillith and Zachary.

  ‘He was going on so much, Gabriel,’ Tiberius said. ‘Announcing he was going to come over here and reckon things up with you. I thought we should accompany him, in case he did anything rash.’

  ‘Rash?’ Baxter yelled, interrupting his own stream of abuse. ‘I’ll give you rash, you buncha dipshits. Listen to me, Gabe, I want my fucking money back. That’s all there is to it, okay? The deal’s off. I don’t wanna be part of this Trad thing any more. I mean, Jesus Christ, we were better off under the fucking Feds …’

  ‘Enough,’ Gabriel said.

  But Baxter hadn’t finished. ‘And another thing. Where’s my plane? What’s the point of having my own goddamn plane if I’ve gotta charter another one just to fly to my own …’

  ‘Enough!’ Gabriel repeated more loudly.

  Baxter’s eyes bulged. He was about to add just one more tiny comment when he stopped suddenly and pointed at the window. ‘Hey. Did you see that?’

  ‘See what?’ Gabriel said, turning.

  ‘I saw it too,’ Alex said. ‘Something ran past the house. Down there in the snow, on the edge of the crag.’ She’d only noticed it out of the corner of her eye — a flitting figure that had darted out of the shadows of the rocks and then vanished as quickly as it had appeared.

  ‘What was it?’ Joel asked. Alex shook her head, scanned the rocks intently for another sign of it.

  ‘Extinguish the light,’ Gabriel commanded, and Makiko flipped off the switch, the smile gone from her face.

  ‘The back window,’ Alex whispered. Joel and Dec followed as she trotted nimbly out of the living room and into the hallway behind it, where the rear balcony overlooked the face of the mountain behind the chalet. ‘There,’ she said, pointing. ‘Two more of them.’ She’d seen them better this time. As Joel followed the line of her finger he spotted a third: the hooded figure, no taller than a child, scampered out from behind a rock, darted across the snow and disappeared again.

  ‘What was that?’ he said again.

  ‘God damn these local brats,’ Baxter yelled, joining them at the back window.

  ‘Kids couldn’t make their way up here,’ Joel said.

  ‘Fucking gypsies,’ Baxter growled. ‘Last year they stripped out a whole ski hut for firewood, down the valley. Well they ain’t robbing a solitary plank from this place, that’s for damned sure.’ He marched out onto the rear balcony, swung a leg over the sturdy wooden rail and dropped off the edge. It was only a twenty-foot leap to the snow below, nothing for a vampire, and Baxter prided himself on doing his own stunts.

  There was nobody there. Baxter trudged around the corner of the chalet, wading through the thick snow, cupping his hands around his mouth as he shouted, ‘Hey, you little rat-asses! Get away from here! You hear me? This is private property! So fuck off!’

  A whistling sound, moving fast towards him. Baxter turned and felt something strike him in the chest. ‘What in hell’s name—?’ he muttered, squinting down his nose at the peculiar object that had attached itself to him.

  The shaft of an arrow.

  ‘Those bastard gypsies,’ Baxter said, outraged, but in a strangely slurred voice. He plucked the arrow out and was about to toss it away when he suddenly realised that his arm wasn’t obeying the command of his brain. He tried to make his fingers open and release the arrow, but they wouldn’t move. Panic began to surge through him. What was happening? He couldn’t even turn his head. Gazing fixedly at the bloody point of the arrow, he could see its strange glass tip, like a vial, that had been shattered by the impact. Dripping from the broken glass was an odd kind of liquid that was too black and thick to be just his blood.

  At that point, the paralysis took Baxter over entirely and he went down like a felled tree in the snow.

  He didn’t scream, didn’t move, was completely unable to react as the horrible little hooded figures appeared as if out of nowhere and gathered around him in a circle. Something glinted in the moonlight. A razor-sharp blade gouged his flesh, and Baxter felt every bit of the pain.

  Then the figures were all over him, hacking and chopping and slicing. The arm clutching the arrow rolled away across the bloody snow. The last thing Baxter saw was his body rolling away from him — no, it was him rolling away from his body. A glimpse at the stars above … then down at the snowy ground … and then nothing at all.

  Chapter Sixty-Three

  Alex was the first to leap down from the rear balcony and follow Baxter’s tracks in the snow around the side of the chalet. She heard the meaty chopping sounds and the strange chittering, twittering noises before she rounded the corner and saw the strange little figures, no taller than children, that were crowded around what was left of the movie star. The crude, hooded robes they wore were like scaled-down versions of the habits worn by medieval monks, held in at the waist with broad leather belts or lengths of stout rope. But what drew Alex’s eye was the cruel-looking assortment of bloodied butcher’s knives, machetes and cleavers the creatures clutched in their grey, clawed, three-fingered little hands.

  The twittering stopped abruptly. The creatures looked up from the bloody circle in the snow and stared at her from under their hoods. Alex counted eight of them as she backed away a couple of steps. Suddenly she was aware of Joel at her side. Lillith, Gabriel, Zachary and Tiberius had joined him. Glancing up, she glimpsed Dec and Chloe standing above on the balcony, leaning out over the rail with looks of horror.

  ‘It seems to be curtains for our thespian friend,’ Gabriel said, nudging Baxter’s severed head with his toe.

  ‘Never mind him,’ Alex said. ‘What about those?’

  ‘Whatever they are,’ Joel said, ‘they’re not afraid of us.’

  As if to prove him right, the little hooded figures charged at them with uncanny speed and aggression. Alex shot the nearest one in the face and it somersaulted backwards in a dark mist of exploded skull and brain matter, the wicked
machete flying from its hand.

  Lillith snatched the weapon out of the air. As the creatures closed on them she windmilled it around her, splitting one from hip to shoulder and lopping off another’s arm. Without a sound, the thing bounded away from her, blood spraying the snow from its stump. It would have knocked Joel off his feet if he hadn’t thrust out his katana in time. Impaled through the middle, the creature fell back, its surprising weight almost tearing the sword from Joel’s grip.

  Tiberius stepped back out of the arc of a cleaver blow that would have halved a strong man, grabbed his attacker by the folds of its habit and dashed its brains out against one of the chalet’s thick wooden support struts; meanwhile, Gabriel swept the feet out from under another and crushed its throat with a stamping kick. Zachary had scooped one up by the rope around its middle, knocked the knife out of its hands and was busy strangling it in his fists.

  The remaining creature turned, chittering to itself, and went bounding away like a mountain goat over the rocks.

  ‘One thing’s for sure,’ Alex said, using her foot to roll over one of the corpses. ‘These things are no vampires.’

  ‘Then what are they?’ Joel said. He knelt down beside the dead creature and ripped away the hood, exposing its face to the moonlight. Its skin was grey and leprous. It had the wrinkles of a very, very old man. The large eyes of a cat. The jutting, muscular jaws of a barracuda, slick with slime and drool. Joel looked away in disgust.

  ‘I’ve never seen anything like this before,’ Alex said.

  ‘Zachary and I have,’ Lillith said. ‘At the Uber citadel in Siberia. Their answer to a ghoul, I thought.’

  ‘This thing’s never been a human. Look at it.’

  ‘It is a Zargoyuk,’ Gabriel said. ‘The nearest translation of the ancient word would be “goblin”.’

  Lillith looked at him. ‘You knew about these things?’

  ‘They are drones, hunters, the slave workforce of the citadel, hatched deep in its bowels from mutated Ubervampyr spawn. I told you before, sister, of the secrets and wisdom of the Masters.’

  ‘I wouldn’t say it was wise to create something like this,’ Lillith said, pointing at the dead creature.

  ‘The question is,’ Alex cut in, ‘how many more are there?’

  Zachary gazed up the mountainside to where the goblin had disappeared among the rocks. ‘She’s right. There could be dozens of the little mothers hiding up there.’

  ‘What do we do, Gabriel?’ Tiberius said. ‘Go up there and hunt for th—’

  Before he could finish, something came whistling out of the darkness and thwacked into the wooden support next to them. A dark liquid spatter caught Tiberius across the face as he was speaking. He clapped his hand to his lips, spitting and choking. A second arrow whooshed out from somewhere in the rocks, narrowly missing Alex.

  ‘Get inside,’ Gabriel said. ‘Quickly.’

  Within instants of the strange black fluid spattering his face, Tiberius couldn’t walk properly. He fell on his knees and would have collapsed on his face if Gabriel and Zachary hadn’t caught his limp arms. As they dragged him across the snow to the chalet, more incoming fire came whistling in from the mountainside. A shaft juddered into the wall inches from Joel. Another plunged into Tiberius’s calf and yet another embedded itself deep in his back.

  Alex booted open a back door, shouting ‘Everyone in!’ It was a storeroom filled with junk, tools, gas cylinders and old ski equipment. Gabriel and Zachary dragged Tiberius inside and laid him down on the floor. The remaining vampires piled in behind them and Alex slammed the door shut just as another arrow thunked into it.

  By now, Tiberius was completely paralysed.

  ‘We saw this too,’ Lillith said, pointing at the black fluid that was dribbling from his arrow wounds.

  ‘We sure did,’ Zachary muttered. ‘Some kinda ugly poison.’

  ‘An Ubervampyr neurotoxin,’ Gabriel said grimly. ‘Akin to the venom with which a spider paralyses its prey. It is less effective on our kind than on humans. But even for us, only in the tiniest quantities are the effects temporary. I fear that Tiberius has suffered far too great a dose.’

  ‘You mean he’ll be paralysed like this—’

  Gabriel gave a solemn nod. ‘For the rest of time. We must deliver him. Sister, hand me that blade.’

  Lillith hesitated, aghast, then passed him the machete she’d taken from the dead goblin.

  ‘My very old friend,’ Gabriel said, bending over Tiberius’s prone body. ‘Forgive me.’

  Joel had to look away as the blade came down.

  ‘Poor Tiberius,’ Lillith breathed.

  ‘In such circumstances, I would expect any of my brethren to show me the same mercy,’ Gabriel said, stepping up from the decapitated body and handing the machete back to her.

  ‘I don’t want it,’ she was about to say — when they suddenly heard an urgent shout from upstairs.

  Chapter Sixty-Four

  The voice was Yuri’s. They found him standing at the living room window, joined by Dec and Chloe. ‘Look!’ he shouted again as everyone raced into the room.

  While they’d been distracted by the goblin attack, the cable car had started moving again. They watched, helpless, as the gleaming aluminium and glass cube glided smoothly back down towards the boarding station across the valley.

  There was a woody thunk behind them as another arrow hit the chalet from the mountainside. Zachary grabbed hold of the living room door and ripped it off its hinges. ‘Someone run down to that storeroom and bring me up a hammer and nails, quick. We don’t board up the windows and outside doors, those little fuckers’re gonna be swarming all over this place.’

  Joel left the room and crossed the hallway behind it to peer out of the rear window, across the balcony to the rocky slope behind the house. There was no sign of movement out there, no running figures flitting across the snow. No telling how many of these goblin things could be out there, either: and by now they should be pressing their attack, storming every weak point, swarming up the walls, jumping up on the roof, smashing windows. It would be tough to stop them getting inside.

  So why wasn’t it happening?

  ‘I wouldn’t bother boarding the place up,’ he called through the open doorway to the vampires in the living room.

  ‘Say what?’ Zachary rumbled.

  ‘This is no invasion,’ Joel told him. ‘It’s a containment strategy. They’ve no intention of coming in; they only want to prevent us from leaving. Don’t you see? They want to trap us in here.’

  ‘Guys! The cable car!’ Alex shouted from the living room window. ‘It’s coming back!’

  Lillith turned to Gabriel. ‘Can’t we stop it?’

  ‘I’m afraid it is too late for that,’ Gabriel replied.

  The solitary figure of Ash was unmistakable behind the glass front of the cable car. At one hip hung the executioner’s sword in its scabbard; at the other, attached to a strap around his shoulders, was the lead-lined case. As in a trance of horror, the assembled vampires watched the man reach inside and slowly draw out the horribly familiar shape of the cross.

  Standing by the window with Yuri and Makiko, Alex cried out at the jet of agony crackling through her body. All three recoiled violently away from the glass, their bodies spasming as the awful pain took hold. Alex’s fingers loosened on the grip of the pistol and it dropped out of her hand and bounced away from her. To go back for it now would be suicide. She staggered away in the opposite direction, desperately trying to reach the door and widen the distance between herself and the approaching cross.

  Makiko was attempting to do exactly the same. In her frenzied haste to escape she cannoned into Chloe, stumbled over the edge of the rug and sprawled on the floor. Makiko struggled to get to her feet, but the crippling power of the weapon was too much to overcome.

  Chloe was standing just a few feet away as, with a final shriek that rose up in a horrible tortured wail, Makiko turned black and then cracked and peeled apar
t and crumbled into a puff of cinders.

  It wasn’t the first time Dec had seen the effects of the cross, but even he gaped in appalled horror at the sight. Chloe covered her face with her hands.

  Alex had reached the door, just inches ahead of the lethal energy field, and was racing across the hallway outside towards the back of the house along with Lillith, Kali, Gabriel and Zachary. Joel had no choice but to flee along with them. He could scarcely believe what was happening to him. Only days ago, wielding the cross himself, he’d been the predator. Now he was the prey, just one of the pressing melee of vampires all desperate to get beyond its reach.

  Yuri hadn’t been as fast as Alex to the door. A shockwave of agony arched his back to breaking point and slammed him down to the floorboards at Dec’s feet.

  ‘Help me!’ Yuri croaked, reaching out a trembling hand.

  For an instant that seemed to last minutes, Dec stood frozen. This was a vampire. It sucked the blood of humans. It deserved to fry.

  Yet in that moment, all he could see was a man suffering horribly, screaming in pain, red-rimmed agonised eyes imploring him for help. Dec thought of Joel, and a powerful surge of pity made him reach out to grasp Yuri’s wrist and drag him towards the door fractions of a second before the cross’s power would have blown him apart.

  ‘Thank you, human,’ Yuri shouted as he went staggering off across the hallway.

  ‘Any time,’ Dec mumbled. Dec Maddon, vampire hunter. A great start to his career, this was.

  The cable car was getting closer. And now the single figure inside could be clearly seen through the glass. Even from forty yards away, the triumphant jagged grin was visible on Ash’s face.

  Chloe spotted Alex’s fallen pistol and scooped it up off the floor. The controls were different from the air gun she was used to, but the essentials were the same. She stuffed it into her waistband. ‘Down the stairs, quick!’ she yelled to Dec. ‘We have to stop that thing so I can get a clear shot.’