by Lee Markham
ADVANCE PRAISE FOR
THE TRUANTS
‘Markham’s take on the inside of an ancient vampire’s head is as invigoratingly fresh as his story is, by turns, brutal and touching. Stripped of romance, paced like a crime novel, it engages a milieu which most of us, happily, will never need to see – the teen gangs on the cruel, poverty-stricken streets, the ‘rats’ in the gutters – and makes us give a damn. An extremely smart, talented first novel’
Jack Ketchum, author of Off Season
‘Markham takes the tiredest concept and re-clothes it in the rags of slumland addiction. You’ve never read a vampire story like this before… the Trainspotting of supernatural prose’
Liam Sharp, author of God Killers
‘The best vampire story since Let The Right One In and a bleak and bloody antidote to the romanticised prettification of the vampire myth popularised by Twilight, The Vampire Diaries and other toothless, teen-oriented nonsense. Markham takes the vampire mythology and twists it into fascinating new shapes… definitely one for your must-read list’
Neil Martin somethingyousaid.com
‘By the end of chapter two my coffee was untouched and cold beside me. This wasn’t about vampires at all. It was about the emerging social underclass in the UK. It was about knife crime. It was about the London riots. It was about the social neglect that led to the murders of Baby P, James Bulger and Damilola Taylor. And it stirred me’
Vanessa Austin Locke, Latest 7
‘An absolutely stonking good read… the Tarantino-esque timeline gripped from start to finish’
Russ Williamson smashwords.com
CONTENTS
TITLE PAGE
DEDICATION
CHAPTER ONE: ASHES AND AFTERMATHS
CHAPTER TWO: INFECTION AND AWAKENINGS
CHAPTER THREE: TRUANCY AND TERROR
CHAPTER FOUR: MERGERS AND ACQUISITIONS
CHAPTER FIVE: OBSERVATION AND RENDITION
CHAPTER SIX: PESTILENCE AND PAIN
CHAPTER SEVEN: SUNBURN AND DEADLIGHT
CHAPTER EIGHT: SANCTUARY AND REJECTION
CHAPTER NINE: CALCULATIONS AND CHAOS
CHAPTER TEN: ENTRAPMENT AND RELEASE
CHAPTER ELEVEN: ASCENSION AND DENIAL
EPILOGUE: GLORY
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
COPYRIGHT
This one is for the kids.
CHAPTER ONE
ASHES AND AFTERMATHS
1
The old-one sat on the bench and looked to the east and waited.
Much as she must have done.
The police tape was gone now, most of it. The odd scrap here and there, twig-snagged and fluttering. The mouldering remains of the bouquets lay all around, the ink on the November-rain-stained cards smudged, purposeless and forgotten. Yesterday’s news.
He sat there and he watched and he waited. Not long now.
He missed her.
All those years, decades – centuries – being the last, with just one another: it does that to you.
And he’d known she was going to go. That this time she’d meant it, and that she’d do it.
But he hadn’t known.
Hadn’t believed it until it was done and she was gone.
And now he was alone.
And how he felt those years now.
Oh, he’d felt them before, of course he had, they both had, but they’d taken on a terrible mass now. Now that he was carrying them on his own. So it was fitting, appropriate, that weight.
He smiled. A sad smile.
But a smile nonetheless.
Not least at the thought of all these mindless rodents, with their tape and their bouquets, desperately pretending to care, or understand. Or matter.
Buried in the guts of the newspaper on the bench beside him was a plea for witnesses to the senseless murder, the torching of the as yet unidentified victim. The article was skewed to the sound of its usual judgemental tune, the song of the terminal descent of rodent kind, of youth out of control, of blah blah blah. The screeching of rats who thought they were ever anything more than vermin. And he smiled.
They can have it. Her words, and he’d agreed, but she’d put her money where her mouth was. They could have it. The rats had taken over the ship. And she’d thrown herself overboard, into the darkness beyond the prow of this world’s gloom horizon. Devoured by flame and resignation. She’d gone.
And now he was alone. On the bench where she’d done it. About to do it too.
He looked to the east and waited. Nearly time. The faintest furnace-glow of dawn in the hairline of the trees.
The bench still harboured the charred scars of her departure. He picked at them distractedly with his tough old fingernails. He was hungry. He’d not eaten since she’d gone. Not a drop to drink. Food was cheap these days, but it tasted cheap. He’d lost his appetite and he was tired and old and spent and alone.
He was looking forward to the darkness.
He didn’t know why he’d waited so long.
Habits. Old-ones. Die hard.
He almost laughed at that.
Old-ones do indeed die hard. The hardest.
And he was the last now, and so the oldest. And yet this was so easy. The actual doing of it. It was the deciding to do it that had been so hard. The great avoided.
Habit. Sometimes living just becomes a habit, and the longer you do it, the harder it is to kick…
‘Gimme what you got.’
A rodent. One of the young ones. The ones that thought they had teeth.
The old-one looked up at him, in his hoodie and his low-slung jeans, and his feet playing hot potato with his bodyweight, passing it back and forth, as if denial of responsibility was embedded at a molecular genetic level. Which, from where he was sitting, he believed to be the case. As had she. He smiled at the rat in the hoodie that wanted what he’d got. ‘I have nothing for you.’
‘Don’t fuck with me you old cunt. I’ll fucking stick you.’
Something glinted in the darkness between them. The rodent might not have teeth. But he carried a standard-issue claw. They all did these days. Slice-and-dice.
And in the east, a blazing in the trees.
Here she came. For him.
He smiled up at this rodent.
‘Do what you like, rat, it’s all yours anyway.’
The rodent smacked the old-one across the cheek with his empty hand, but before he could retract it it was seized. The old-one had it in his grasp. The rodent pulled and scrabbled and struggled to break free.
The old-one pulled him close.
He sighed old and hungry breath into the rodent’s face.
‘Understand this, rat: you are nothing. You have always been nothing. And you will always be nothing. You and your rat-children will feed and fuck and fight until this useless rock falls into its dying sun and that will be that. You are bacteria, on a dust-mote, falling into a fire. So take it. Have it. Have it all.’ He growled.
Sunlight bled over the rim of the trees and ran across the space towards the bench, and the rat, and the old-one.
‘Fuck you blud,’ mewled the rat.
He swung the knife into the old-one’s side.
The old-one arched his back. He clenched his fist and snapped the rat’s arm.
The rat’s screech ricocheted across the dawn’s mist-shrouded parkland.
The old-one pulled the rat in close, eye to eye, and hissed his last: ‘Rise.’
The rat looked into his eyes and saw fire in there.
He saw the old-one’s face blister and crack and swore he saw smoke.
‘Fuck you blud…’ he wept.
He pulled his broken arm from the old-one’s grip, tugged the knife free and ran.
Behind him, on the bench, in the cold light o
f dawn, the old-one started to smoulder from the wound in his side. He smiled. Closed his eyes, looked into the sun. And erupted into flame.
‘Risssssssssssssssssse…’
2
Nothing came in threes. That was bullshit. Everything came in a cruel and constant stream that every now and then found a subsonic resonance that drove people, society, to a fever pitch of hysterical wailing and gnashing of teeth.
This might be one of those times. Might not be.
You never can tell.
It was the second burning on the same park bench in a week. And, crouched down once again in front of the same bench she’d crouched down in front of this time last week, poking fruitlessly through the ashen remains with a plastic pen, surgical gloves on her hands, blue elasticated plastic sheathes over her shoes, Anna Hamilton shook her head and sighed.
She’d worked for the police long enough, and seen enough, to not feel anything more than weary. She could see the next few weeks buckling under a fruitless trail of paperwork that illustrated little more than the fact that they didn’t know, and would in all likelihood never know, why two people had burnt to death on this bench.
Heads could well roll. Token heads too in all likelihood, probably no more responsible for the general state of things than anyone else, but, well, something would have to be done. But this was, as in the end it usually tended to be, just another thing that happened because this was the way of things. Nothing more. Nothing less. Just another output of the mindless mass that the human species had become.
But then, having said that, there were things here that were… peculiar.
She laughed bitterly at that. That people being burnt alive on a bench wasn’t peculiar enough in and of itself. The first peculiarity was the fact that it was the second immolation, a week to the day – practically to the hour – since the first. In the city attacks happen, frequently ugly, but rarely with the kind of forethought and punctual regularity that seemed to be at play here. The second peculiarity was that, once again, there was nothing left but a pile of ash and bones. No flesh had survived the flames. At all. And that was odd. You’d expect a scorched cadaver, charred on the outside, baked on the inside, but substantially there. But this time, nothing. Ash, and bones. The wood of the bench merely, and hardly even, blistered. Again.
It didn’t make sense. It was as if they’d burnt from the inside out. Things like that happened on the X-Files. Maybe. But they didn’t happen in real life. Certainly not twice. Week in, week out.
She shook her head again and stood up with a grunt. Her back complained. She turned away from the bench, ducked under the police tape and walked slowly back down to the car. She snapped off the gloves as she walked, stuffed them in the pocket of her coat. At the car she leant on it and pulled the plastic overshoes from her feet and gingerly dropped them in the litter bin on the other side of the path, before heading back to the car and slumping into the passenger seat.
‘Anything?’
‘No.’
‘Told you.’
‘Yes, Tom. You did. Well done.’
Tom Hume had worked in the same department as Anna for a few years now. They were colleagues. Not friends. But they got on fine. Did what had to be done. Worked well enough together. They’d never slept with each other. Or ever even flirted. There was no story. No big deal. Tom was married. Happily. One kid, a daughter. Anna wasn’t married. No kids. Had nearly married once, but it hadn’t worked out and that was about it. Nothing to tell.
‘Camera guys have sent a few shots through.’
CCTV. Last week there hadn’t been anything. Nothing of any use at least.
She held out a tired hand and Tom passed her a tablet computer. She flicked through the images that had been picked up plus or minus an hour of dawn this morning: three shots of a couple of men walking arm in arm across the camera’s field of vision and towards the south end of the park. Nope – too cosy. Then three shots of a homeless guy, face obscured with scarves and the oversized hood of his enormous coat. No laces in his shoes. He was heading past the bench across the opposite side of the park – it would be the longest of shots that could put this guy in the right place at the right time. She shook her head. Then another three images, this time of a youth, hooded, holding his arm, running.
‘Maybe things do come in threes after all,’ she mumbled to herself.
‘What?’
‘Nothing.’
‘The kid running?’
Anna nodded.
Tom laughed. ‘Yep. Quite the hot lead, huh? Shithead in a hoodie.’
She nodded again and flicked back and forth through the three images of the shithead. Time was right. Direction he was running in was right. But he looked like a mugger, not like someone who had a thing for burning people on benches. Not that she knew what someone like that would look like, but nonetheless. He might have seen something though.
She frowned and rolled her eyes.
Might have seen something.
Such a cliché. But there you go. Life was a cliché.
Then you die.
And bang, there’s another one right there.
‘Well, he’s headed for the St Alban’s Road exit. We need the camera guys to find him and follow him. Tell us where he went.’
Tom nodded. ‘They’re already on it. They’ve got him as far as the Underground and they’re chasing the transport police for their footage.’
‘That’s gonna take all day,’ she sighed.
‘At the very least. I need coffee. Are we done here?’
She nodded.
Tom started the car and pulled away. He waved to the duty officer stationed at the entrance to the park. The officer raised his hand. Anna pushed herself back in her seat and closed her eyes. Her head hurt. ‘Just drop me home, Tom.’
He didn’t look at her. ‘You don’t want coffee?’
‘No. I want to sleep. I’ve been up all night. If I want coffee, I’ll have it when I get in. No offence.’
Tom shrugged. None taken.
They drove through the streets slowly. Mid-morning logjam. The city had a cholesterol problem. Its arteries were blocked. All day, every day. They didn’t speak to each other. They looked out of the windows and tried not to think. It wasn’t difficult.
The car pulled up outside Anna’s block forty-five minutes later.
‘Call me when… if something comes up.’
He looked her. She looked at him. He nodded. She closed the door. He drove away.
She let herself into the lobby, pushed the button for the lift and waited for it to head down from above. It descended slowly. Even the buildings had clogged arteries. She sniffed a half-smile at that. On the fourteenth floor she climbed out of the lift, walked past three numbered doors to that of her own apartment. She went in, threw her coat on the chair in the hall, dumped her satchel on the floor beside it. Kicked off her shoes and went into the kitchen. Put the kettle on. Then through to the bathroom. Peed. Washed her hands. Went back into the kitchen.
Made herself a cup of coffee. Black. No sugar.
She cupped it in her hands and looked out of the window, out onto the city. It was a blank, colourless concrete switchboard of faceless windows. There was so much to see that nothing stood out. It looked like a scrapheap. And it went on and on and on. In the distance, glass cathedrals of commerce were hidden somewhere in the fine November mist. She didn’t know why she stayed here. She didn’t have anywhere better to go. Nothing better to do.
She didn’t put any food down for the cat. She didn’t have a cat.
She poured what was left of her coffee – half a mug – down the sink and went through to the living room. The curtains were closed. She picked up the cordless phone and hit the dial button. No stutter in the tone. No messages.
The sofa caught her when she flopped onto it. She flicked the TV on and unbuckled her belt. She turned to a news channel and the news was about the news. How the news guys broke the news rules. Apparently some police guys had brok
en some police rules too. She couldn’t think of anyone who hadn’t broken the rules and she didn’t know why it was news. If people being burnt on benches wasn’t news, then how was people breaking rules?
But then people burning on benches wasn’t news. Nothing was. Nothing to hear that hadn’t been heard before. The news was as grey and repetitive and faceless as the city, and the people, and the lives they all lived there. Just an endless stream of events, of no consequence and to no avail. The news was eating itself. Life was eating itself: caught in the jaws of its own chuntering momentum, the teeth of its entropy. And the news just a streaming coroner’s report on this existential mastication.
White noise. Processed foods.
Fluoridated water.
Greenhouse gases.
Immigration, congestion, contraception, vaccination, indoctrination.
Indigestion.
Just things followed by things that just happen to follow each other.
None of it in threes.
That was all.
She flicked across to a music channel and hit mute. Closed her eyes and pulled her feet in. She fell asleep that way and she dreamt.
She didn’t dream of a time when she didn’t feel this way.
Because her dreams didn’t make any sense.
Nothing did.
3
Tom had lived here all his life and he actually thought things were getting better. He tended to keep that little nugget of insanity to himself. It wasn’t the way to think these days. In fact, as far as Tom was concerned, the only thing that had actually gotten harder to bear was how much more we knew about how bad things were.
And that was the thing. He didn’t believe for one minute that the estates hadn’t seen the kind of things the papers got all worked up about years ago – he was sure of it, in fact: he could remember the stories in the playground: so-and-so got stabbed. Such-and-such got shot. Beaten. Killed. Whatever. It’s just that back then no one gave a fuck, and no one reported it. The knowledge of just how rough things got wasn’t as common back then as it was today. Unless it happened to someone white. Somewhere where such things weren’t supposed to happen. There wasn’t that vicarious hunger for the horror that seemed to exist nowadays. The news had been seconded to the advertising space it carried and horror had been commoditised. The city had to compete with beheadings and obliterated wedding parties being streamed live online from war zones and hell-holes around the world.
