by James Fahy
I didn’t have much time to ponder this because the Pale, hunched over what was left of Coleman’s body that now resembled shredded pork, flicked its head my way, realising that I had escaped its attack.
There was nowhere left to run, no hiding. I wouldn’t get a second reprieve. It stood, its furious gimlet black eyes, like sparkling lumps of coal, were trained on me as gore dripped from its jaws.
There was a thump from above. The Pale and I both looked up at the same time to see the surreal sight of the Bonewalker and Allesandro tumbling down the well shaft towards us. Allesandro had his arms wrapped firmly around the Bonewalker.
He must have thrown himself at it, diving for it in a rugby tackle and driving both of them stumbling over the lip of the pit. He looked, as he descended, as though he were wrestling an outlandish oversized bat, as the Bonewalker’s black robes whipped about them.
They landed directly on top of the Pale, crushing it into the water in a confusion of limbs and struggling movement in the darkness. Water erupted, blinding me.
I had half pulled myself to my feet when out of the flailing pile of bodies, the evidently unharmed Pale disentangled itself and threw itself at me.
It hit me hard, slamming me into the floor, its solid, bristling weight above me. Its jaws snapped inches from my face, once, twice, as I thrashed to keep out of its range. And then it sank them into my collarbone.
The agony was immediate and unbearable. I felt it tear through meat, sinew and muscle until its sharp teeth scraped against my bone. I heard a scream, distant and horrifying. I didn’t immediately realise that it was coming from me. I felt its long claws puncture the skin of my upper arms where it was holding me fast. Each nail was like a slim knife, sliding into my flesh.
Then something landed on top of the Pale, yanking it away. Allesandro had just dragged me from the jaws of living death. I felt each blade-like claw tear out of me.
The vampire looked wild. His face was grazed and bloody, his hair drenched and plastered to his head. He had the Pale in a headlock, the creature roaring furiously and snapping at his arm. His teeth were grinding, fangs fully extended. He didn’t look much like a human there in the darkness. Pulling backwards, the two of them rolled away from me in a confused tangle.
My hands went to my throat, choking and coughing, and came away shiny with blood I was losing a lot. The pain was almost too much to bear and I knew I was going to black out soon. I couldn’t afford to do that.
I rolled onto my knees and crawled away from the vampire and the Pale, who were rolling around in the water, each trying to get the upper hand. Allesandro was strong but he had only taken the creature by surprise. It was adjusting now.
That was what they did. They adapted, they reacted. It was what made them such efficient killers. It was already gaining the upper hand. The Pale would kill him, there was no doubt about that.
Next to me, rising into a standing position, was the Bonewalker. Its robes were drenched but its expressionless mask was still in place. It seemed to survey the chaos around it with interest. It noticed me and though its dead black eye-holes seemed to pin me to the spot, it made no move toward me.
“Allesandro!” I shouted. The effort tore through my body. The Pale had cut me badly. Part of my rational science brain was telling me it was all over – there was no point struggling now. Even if the Pale didn’t kill me, I was as good as gone now.
It had bitten me, tore me up good. In a matter of hours or maybe less, the virus, the genetically engineered code of the Pale, would spread through my system, infecting me. I would become one of them, or else my body would reject the virus and collapse on a cellular level. Either way, to put it in proper clinical scientific terminology, I was well and truly fucked.
But I was damned if I was going to sit here and die quietly. I wasn’t going to let the one person who had come to try and help me get ripped apart.
As I watched, the Pale slashed at Allesandro, tearing through his sodden shirt and opening deep red parallel wounds across his stomach. The move would have disembowelled a human. Vampires were physically denser than us, but it still looked like it hurt.
The vampire went down, his head slamming against the flagstones under the water. The abomination stood, reached down and grabbed Allesandro’s head in its claws – it slammed the vampire’s skull against the floor three times. Allesandro went limp in its arms. Throwing its head back with a triumphant howl, the creature gathered my now unconscious saviour up in its arms and threw him like a light rag doll towards us.
The vampire landed at my feet in a twisted heap, raising a slurry of water over my knees. I stared down. His lips were bloody but I heard him moan faintly, his eyelids fluttering. He wasn’t dead.
I leaned down and put my hands under his armpits, heaving him upwards to his knees. He was larger than me and soaking wet so he felt as heavy as lead – a dead weight in my arms. Or an undead weight, I suppose. The blood loss was making me feel lightheaded and a little giddy.
I hoisted him up, wrapping one arm around his waist and holding him to me protectively, though the effort of doing so made my vision blur and threaten to fade altogether. I shook my head, trying to clear it, trying to ignore the searing pain now coursing through my body and spreading outward from my wounds like a fever.
The infection of the Pale was taking hold.
With my free arm, I reached up and gripped a handful of the Bonewalker’s robes, twisting the fabric around my hand tightly.
I looked up to see the GO looking down at me. Its mask regarded me solemnly, as though it had only just noticed the blood-soaked human woman kneeling next to it, cradling the half-conscious vampire lying sprawling at its feet. It seemed to regard us both with faint interest, as though observing lesser creatures in a detached manner.
“Get us out of here!” I shouted up at it.
It stared back at me blankly, its black eyes beyond the mask like dark mirrors.
“I know you can! If we stay here, we all die,” I spat. “You will too, you know. You might not be human but you’re physical. You have a body and that fucking thing is going to tear it apart as surely as it will mine and his.”
The Bonewalker looked over to the Pale, as though noticing it properly for the first time. The grey skinned monster was flexing its claws, looking at the three of us, sizing us up. Its weight shifted from foot to foot. It was preparing to jump for us. We had seconds before it was on top of us again.
“You will die down here too,” I insisted. “Move us! You know how. That what you do! You move things around. Take us out of here, or die down here with us. Do it!”
There was nothing I could feel under my fistful of robe that seemed like a normal body. But I held on tight, making it drag me and my vampire with it.
“Now!” I screamed.
The Pale leapt. I saw it leave the ground in a spray of water and sailing through the air towards us, a blind knot of aggression, fury and intent to kill. The Bonewalker’s hands were suddenly in view, long and white in the darkness. It made a small gesture in mid-air, like elegant tai-chi.
As the Pale descended onto us, I closed my eyes instinctively and braced for the attack, but then the world shifted. My stomach lurched, like when a rollercoaster drops you, and my ears popped.
There was suddenly silence around me. Cold kisses on my face and shoulders, soft and chill.
My eyes shot open. It was snowing. The flakes fell onto my face, onto the vampire before me, and onto the wet black robes of the Bonewalker.
We were outside. The pit, the Pale, the dead bodies and the slurry were all gone. The Bonewalker was standing in an inch of snow on a deserted side street, myself and Allesandro in a tangle by its feet, exactly as we had been a second ago.
I let go of the robe in shock and the GO moved slowly away from me, still staring down inscrutably through its mask. I couldn’t guess what it was thinking. It was utterly alien. It didn’t feel particularly hostile. I wondered why on earth it was working for Gio. Why
did any of the Bonewalkers work for others, when they were so powerful?
I looked around frantically. The street we were on was no more than a large alleyway emptying out from the backs of shops with cold cobbles underfoot. I stared down at the cobbles incredulously, watching the snow turn red slowly, drop by drop. I didn’t immediately realise that it was my blood tinting the scene. I was bleeding from the throat, where the Pale had bitten me.
Infected me.
“W—where?” I tried to ask.
At the end of the alleyway, I could see out into the street beyond. There was a lot of action out there. Several police cars were pulled up, and a few dark tinted unmarked vehicles that I guessed were Cabal. They were arranged haphazardly in the street, parked in a rough semicircle around what I saw was a church. I recognised the stubby square tower. It was Carfax, which meant we were on the corner of St Aldate’s on Cornmarket Street.
Suddenly, there came the muzzle flash of gunfire within the church. Was that where we had been? Beneath Carfax? Gio’s private torture room, right here in the heart of the city? Good transport links, excellent Wi-Fi and an en-suite monster pit in the basement.
The Bonewalker, for reasons I couldn’t understand, had done exactly what I had asked. It had moved us from the pit beneath the cellars under Carfax to street level, just a little way from the action.
I watched the Bonewalker take in the scene at the end of the alleyway; the chaos of the firefight within the church, its dark windows occasionally blossoming with muzzle flashes, the straggling crowds of rubberneckers it was attracting. It seemed to reach a decision.
Turning to look down at Allesandro and myself one last time, it took another step away from us and simply vanished. It faded away almost instantly, like a shadow blown apart. The last thing to go was the mask, which floated in mid-air alone for a millisecond before disappearing altogether.
We were alone in the snow. Allesandro coughed, his head resting in my lap as I knelt sprawled in the shadows.
“We’re alive?” he asked weakly.
I couldn’t speak, so I nodded down at him. My body was racked with agony from my infected wounds and it seemed to be getting worse by the second.
“Thank you for coming for me,” I managed. “… I got bit.”
He forced himself into a sitting position, his eyes widening with alarm.
“The creature?”
I nodded again.
“’Fraid so … Hurts…”
My voice was coming in a croak. I was finding it hard to form coherent sentences in my head now. I knew what this meant. The virus was spreading, much faster than I had thought.
I could feel something building deep inside me, a latent rage, and I knew it was growing. It would get bigger and bigger until it ate me whole and nothing else was left. My mind falling apart as it took over. It wouldn’t stop until I became one of them. One of the Pale.
Allesandro rolled off me and to my amazement, he managed to stand, bracing himself against the brick wall of the alleyway. His clothes dripped with the filth from the well. His hairline was bloody, but he didn’t seem to notice.
“You can stop it,” he insisted. “The infection, you can stop it.”
I stared up at him.
“There’s no cure,” I said. “I’m sorry … if you wasted your evening.”
I felt drunk, not all there. It seemed such a shame to me that he had gone to all this trouble for nothing. My beautiful would-be rescuer.
“This makes three times you’ve tried to save me now … Is it a hobby for you? Didn’t work out so well … in the end.”
I could hear my words slurring.
The vampire reached down and lifted me roughly by my elbows, dragging me upright. I howled in agony, but he ignored my cries.
“Third time’s the charm,” he grinned, though it didn’t reach his eyes. “Epsilon. I was at your lecture Doctor, I know your work. You must try.”
I shook my head, sending spasms of pain shooting down my neck.
“Not a cure, just … a … retardant,” I said. “Plus … Boom.”
I tried to convey a rat exploding, but I didn’t feel coherent enough to do so. I knew I was dead. I had gotten him out alive, or undead – whatever he was. In one piece anyway, more or less. That would have to be enough for me.
“Saved your life,” I croaked. “We don’t have to keep taking turns you know. They have a boy, Oscar, save him … try to, anyway.”
I gripped the sodden front of his shirt.
“Promise me.”
Allesandro, who seemed to be already healing from his wounds thanks to his nifty undead constitution, caught me under my arms as my legs went from under me completely. My head lolled on his shoulder as he took my weight.
“Save him yourself,” he insisted.
He lifted me up and threw me over his shoulder in a fireman’s lift. I tried not to throw up as he started to walk down the alleyway, carrying me with him.
“Your serum, it’s at your laboratory, right?”
He didn’t wait for me to answer. I wasn’t sure I could have if I wanted to. I was losing all reasoning. My speech had gone and the anger was building in me, slowly but relentless as a forest fire. Not all of the wetness on my cheeks was blood. I was crying. I didn’t want to turn into one of them. I didn’t want to disappear and become the thing that went bump in the night.
“My bike is this way,” the vampire said, heaving me away from the pandemonium still raging inside Carfax tower as the police and Cabal battled Gio and his men within.
I wondered how Allesandro had found me, how he had gotten down to the basement. But I couldn’t have asked him if I’d tried. I was already beginning to think sharp red thoughts, like how good it would feel to bite into his shoulder, to tear at the skin just to feel it rip. I forced the thoughts away, but the hunger was rising.
26
I didn’t really remember the ride across the city. Only glimpses, sensations. Streetlamps blurred by, the bike roaring under me. New Oxford slid by in a drunken blur-I passed out more than once, the icy wind whipping around my hair. I felt hot, burning all over with the fever of the Pale.
I awoke to feel myself being carried in his arms across the snowy silent quad, the buildings of the university rearing up dizzily around me, hallucinatory. I felt weightless in his arms, my arms and legs like lead, my head lolling.
And then we were somehow inside, in the blinding antiseptic glare of the entrance corridor.
Mattie, our night security guard, rose from his chair as we approached, a look of shock and horror on his round face. Allesandro said something to him, I didn’t catch what. The vampire waved his hand in front of the man’s face and the guard dropped out of sight behind the counter – unconscious, I think. I have no idea how he did that.
Another blur and we were in the elevator, descending into the ground. Allesandro was crouched over me, pinning my arms to my sides. I was sat on the floor of the lift, thrashing against him furiously. I don’t remember why; I only remember the anger, the furious bloodlust. I wanted to hurt him, to eat him.
He was stronger than me though, for the time being anyway, and held me pinned like a spitting cat. He was talking to me, trying to calm me I think, but I couldn’t understand his words anymore. I could hear nothing but my own blood roaring in my ears.
He dragged me out of the elevator and I passed out again, drifting in and out of consciousness. In my brief bouts of downtime, I dreamed of teeth and claws and redness, all primitive lusts and hungers. And part of me liked it.
I came to with my a bar of light sliding across my bleary eyes. I felt my hand roughly slapped against a panel, held tightly by Allesandro and forced into place. He was getting us through the lower security – the iris scanner, the palm pad. He was using me to get in.
The small rational part of me which still existed wanted to warn him about the corridor, the long ultraviolet walk between here and the lab. It was impossible. We couldn’t make it.
But th
e next thing I knew, I was being carried again and on every side of me was blinding blue light, stinging my ever more sensitive eyes. We moved forward haltingly, step by step, shuffling. When I managed to focus enough to look up at the vampire as he carried me along, I saw that his skin was blistering badly. Smoke was rising from the neck of his shirt, from his sleeves, everywhere. He was roasting as though we had stepped into a nuclear reactor, his beautiful face blackening and cracking.
But he didn’t stop. He moved onwards still and didn’t drop me, gripping me to him so that I could feel the heat and pain radiating from him like a furnace.
The last thing I recall is the lab itself.
I was on the floor, lying in a pool of blood. Allesandro was on his hands and knees next to me, shaking in agony, almost unrecognisable. His clothes had burned to cinders and were glowing with dancing ash. If before he had looked like a renaissance angel, now he had clearly been cast burning from heaven and had landed, scorched and in tatters, deep in the pit. He had fallen.
Someone was shouting, incoherently, and then there were hands on me. Griff’s face was above, staring down, filled with shock. I heard him shout to someone else and from the corner of my eye, Lucy, dear sweet Lucy was there, holding a syringe while Allesandro barked orders at the two of them, even as his own body convulsed in shock.
I closed my eyes.
Lucy was alive. This was strangely important to me. A tiny part of me let go, stopped struggling. I couldn’t think anymore. I just wanted to rest, and then to wake and feed … and feed … and feed.
27
I woke up on a mortuary slab, which is never a good start. I was disoriented, and groggy. But instantly I felt, I was me.
I wasn’t a monster.
The terrible knowing void of hunger was gone. I tried to move but my head rolled weakly to the side. I was in pain, a lot of pain. I was dying.
“She’s stable, I think,” I heard Griff say, somewhere beyond my vision.
