Kardina

by Thomas Emson

  “All right,” said Aaliyah. “Let me look.”

  She elbowed the Romanian out of the way. He grunted. Aaliyah pressed her eyes to the lens. She recoiled. The magnification was powerful. She could see the camp clearly. The single-storey structures covered a considerable area. Above them, the floodlights towered, spilling down their powerful beams. Vehicles were parked to the west of the site. Aaliyah clocked gleaming 4x4s and an Army truck.

  The whole site had been constructed in less than a day by a team of military personnel. The equipment had been shipped from Dubai, and Aaliyah and Goga had tracked it after they’d arrived in the region. Soon after their arrival in Iraq, countries started to close their borders to anyone travelling from Britain. Governments were worried about the vampire plague. But what Fuad planned to dig out of the earth near Hillah sounded much worse than vampires.

  Perhaps Goga had been right

  “Forget Britain,” he’d told them all. “Britain is doomed now. You have to save the rest of the world. Find and destroy the god of vampires. Kill Nimrod, and every vampires dies.”

  Aaliyah fell for Goga’s pitch. She had a future planned with Jake. A future without death and blood. Dreams of Jake and her living an idyllic life. And Goga’s promise of a world without vampires made that future possible. So she’d abandoned Jake. She’d turned her back on him so they could be together. So she could live her dream.

  But Jake had wanted to stay and fight for Britain, not fight for them – for her and him. Her heart ached. Maybe he didn’t love her like she loved him. Maybe he didn’t see the same future she did.

  And now, to make matters worse, there were rumours that he was dead.

  The idea made her sick. Life without Lawton would be meaningless.

  But they were only rumours, she kept telling herself. She would remain hopeful until someone showed her his dead body. Because until you knew for sure that Jake Lawton was dead, you couldn’t believe it. She’d seen him go through hell. She’d seen him fight monsters. She’d seen him survive impossible odds. He was alive, she was sure of it. Alive and coming for her.

  “What are we going to do?” she asked Goga. “Let’s tell the authorities.”

  “They are aligned with Fuad. He has tricked them. We have to do this ourselves.”

  “Just you and me?”

  “Who else is there?”

  “If we wait, Jake will come.”

  “We cannot wait for him,” said Goga. “Fuad will not wait. Nimrod will not wait.”

  “We can’t on our own – ”

  “It is not only Jake Lawton who can kill monsters.”

  He put on a pair of aviator-style sunglasses and strode towards the stairs running down the side of the house. He slung his black cane over his shoulder as he descended. His footsteps were heavy and angry.

  CHAPTER 10. THE RALLY.

  Hyde Park, London – 6pm (GMT), 17 May, 2011

  GEORGE Fuad put his feet up on the table in his trailer.

  He gazed up at the flat-screen TV bracketed to the wall, and he smiled.

  The smile became a chuckle. The chuckle became a laugh. The laugh nearly threw him off his couch.

  The TV screen showed 10,000 people crammed into Hyde Park. They had come to the rally to hear him speak.

  Members of George’s United Party mingled with the crowds. You could spot them. They carried large white banners, emblazoned with a red U. The flag bearers were mostly Nebuchadnezzars. But other citizens were joining the campaign. People are picking the winning side, thought George. They could see what was going to happen, and they didn’t want to be on the wrong side come the revolution.

  George got up and poured himself a drink. He gazed out of the trailer window. It was a bright day over London. Hyde Park wasn’t what it used to be. The grass was overgrown. There was litter everywhere. The gates and fences were rusted and broken. The buildings were boarded up. But at least today it offered glimpses of its former glory – it was packed with people. People who had come to hear him lie to them.

  He laughed.

  The locals loved a good lie.

  He rubbed his chest proudly. He felt strong and powerful. The world was within his grasp. Three months ago, he had been convinced his dream was over. Vampires and humans had battled in the streets of London.

  And humans, it seemed, had won the day.

  They had fought back as vampires over-ran the streets.

  They had fought back as poisoned water turned more of them into the undead.

  They had fought back as the Nebuchadnezzars had Britain in their clutches.

  They had driven the vampires back into the shadows. They forced the Nebuchadnezzars into hiding. They reclaimed Britain.

  But the country was ruined.

  And the excitement of victory over the vampires quickly faded. The interim government’s honeymoon period hadn’t lasted long. Soon, the people were in revolt again. They were fed up of having no jobs, no food, no water.

  And George stepped into the breach.

  He saw how desperate people were. He saw their anger. They were looking for someone to blame for the vampire plague and for their miserable lives.

  So George gave them someone.

  “It is people like Jake Lawton,” he’d said in an early broadcast, “who have brought this misery upon us. Many say he’s the hero. But that’s a lie. He is the villain. He is the aggressor. He angered vampires who had innocently appeared in Britain. He attacked them. And what do you do when you are attacked? You fight back. What would you do?”

  Thinking back to that speech, he smiled. He took a sip of his drink and swilled it in his mouth. A speaker had taken the podium. Her voice echoed through the sound system. Checking the programme on his desk, George saw that she was called Leeza Dervish. She used to be an anti-war campaigner. She was an anti-anything campaigner, as long as it meant opposing America or Britain, or Western principles such as capitalism and democracy.

  Just my kind of girl, thought George.

  “Jake Lawton’s a killer,” Dervish was saying. “He was part of the occupying forces in Iraq, who killed thousands of innocent Iraqis” – she was really shrieking into the microphone – “and now that he’s killed enough humans, he’s turning on another species – a rare, beautiful species. A species that is related to us, that is almost us. An ancient species that has the same rights to this earth as we do. This man Lawton is not a hero. Support the United Party. Bring vampires and humans together.”

  The crowd roared its approval.

  George laughed and thought what idiots they were.

  This was going like a dream.

  It was so easy to dupe people. When they were desperate, they would believe anything. When their hate burned strongly, all you had to do was stoke it gently.

  Dervish continued to speak: “What if Lawton’s victims were gay or black or women? Then we would be up in arms. Then we would join forces against his fascism. I say vampires are the new oppressed. They are the new victims of Western imperialism. I say stand up for the vampire. Stand up against the Jake Lawtons of this world. Stand with the U.P. and George Fuad.”

  The crowd was in a frenzy. Their cheers washed across Hyde Park.

  Someone knocked on the door, and a pretty blonde head appeared. “Five minutes, Mr Fuad.”

  “Thank you, Jade,” said George. “You want to come in here and speak to me for a few minutes?”

  “I’m actually quite busy, Mr – ”

  “I said, come in here and speak to me for a few minutes, Jade.”

  She was a slim, pretty thing, aged about twenty. She had pale skin and bright blue eyes and was delicate. George liked them delicate. They snapped more easily.

  He smiled at her. “Now then,” he said, starting to undo his chinos. “I want to go over a few things with you before I wow the crowds.”

  Jade quailed. “No, please don’t make me – ”

  “You know what’ll happen to you, Jade.” He grabbed her arm, and with his other hand
plucked at the protective red mark on her collar. “I’ll throw you to the vampires, darling. And without this, you know what’ll happen to your pretty little veins, don’t you? There, now. Seeing sense. Down you go, darling.” George put his hand on her head and pushed her down.

  After he was finished with Jade, her lips were bleeding, and blood and semen were smeared across her mouth. He gripped her chin and looked at her pretty, soiled face. He liked the mess he’d made of her. He slapped her gently across the cheek and said, “Go fuck someone else – make yourself useful.”

  After he’d dismissed her, George pulled on his jacket and adjusted his tie. Outside, a voice boomed from the sound system: “And our next speaker needs no introduction… ”

  Nerves suddenly gripped him. It always happened moments before he had to speak publicly. He wasn’t used to it. George had preferred to be in the background, planning and conspiring. But over the past few years, a real hunger for power had burned in him. Still, speaking to thousands of people made his balls shrivel.

  His old mate Bernard Lithgow would have been good at this. Lithgow was smarmy and sly. He was a barrister, skilled at lying in front of an audience. But that bastard Lawton had killed him while Lithgow was trying to poison the London water system with vampire DNA produced by Dr Afdal Haddad. It was the old doctor who had gathered all the Nebuchadnezzars together in the first place. He’d produced Skarlet, the pill that created the first London vampires in 2008. But Haddad showed a lack of vision. He only wanted to rule Britain. George wanted to rule the world. And no one was going to stand in his way. His plan was to control a vampire army, and leading them would be Nimrod.

  He mentally urged his brother to get a move on and excavate the Great Hunter.

  Make our dreams come true, Alfred, he thought.

  In Hyde Park, the crowd cheered when the announcer said George’s name. He left his trailer and strolled along the wooden walkway towards the stage area. The noise of the crowd grew. It made George shudder with excitement. By the time he walked on to the stage, the noise was like thunder, and it seemed to shake the whole earth.

  George lifted his hands to greet the crowd.

  They cheered even louder.

  He loved politics.

  CHAPTER 11. THE SPEECH.

  GEORGE lapped up the welcome. The crowd cheered. Banners flapped. There was one depicting George as Christ, with long hair and a beard, a serene expression on his face, a halo crowning his head, and awed kids at his feet.

  He nearly burst out laughing.

  Fools, he thought.

  He came to the microphone and quieted the crowd, thanking them for the welcome. The day grew darker. Night was coming. The time of vampires.

  He scanned the area.

  Outside the park perimeter, police loitered. They mingled uncomfortably with the black-clad Nebuchadnezzar militia George had formed “to protect humans and vampires”. The militia sported the red flesh of the vampire trinity on their uniforms to protect them from the undead.

  Police and government had opposed the militia when it was formed. But George argued they were necessary to keep the peace. The police, he claimed, had been infiltrated by supporters of the “Lawtonites”. They were sympathetic, he said, to Jake Lawton and the foreign gangs that had led the war against the vampires in February.

  As soon as George started to speak, the crowd was in awe. These people were looking for a saviour. They were desperate. You could spin them any old yarn, and if you told them you were going to transform their lives, they’d believe it. George merely told the people what they wanted to hear, and a few things they needed to hear. He started now on the “vampires are our friends” speech.

  “We destroyed their country. How would you feel if someone destroyed ours? Remember, the vampires are only defending themselves. We are the aggressors. Not them. They are defenders. But the truth, the truth that has been hidden from you by the authorities, is that we can live side by side with vampires. This is what the vampires want. They don’t want to harm us. It is true, some people have tried to manipulate the species for their own ends. There were malign forces who distributed drugs some years ago, creating a violent sub-species of vampire. And only this year, as you all know, London’s water network was poisoned. It has caused much illness, many deaths, and terrible suffering. But the men who committed these criminal acts, the men who poisoned your children’s drinking water, are allied with the likes of the murderer Jake Lawton and the illegal immigrant Kwan Mei and her army of foreign invaders.”

  The crowd cheered.

  George nodded and looked mournful. But inside he was laughing – at his own lies and how the crowd fell for them. He could almost taste the power. He salivated. His heart thundered and his loins simmered. He’d have to pay that Jade girl a visit when he got off the stage. He felt violently excited and wanted to run riot on her body.

  “On Thursday, in just two days, Britain votes for a new government. The country is in ruins, brought to its knees by aggressors like Jake Lawton – who has now abandoned these shores – and cowards like Elizabeth Wilson, who has allowed this violence to spread. They have fed you lies. They have led you into an illegal war against a unique species. I say it again: we can live side by side with vampires. Human and vampires are biological cousins. Only a little DNA separates us. They, like every other living thing, have a right to share this earth with us. We protect pandas and polar bears, and today I say: let’s protect the vampire.”

  More cheers came from the crowd. The night approached. Vampires stirred in their hiding places.

  “I dream of a Britain,” continued Fuad, “where vampire and human live side by side. They don’t want to kill us. They don’t want to feed on us. They are our friends. They have emotions like we do. They love. They feel fear. They feel anger. They want to protect their kind, like we do. So, on Thursday, I urge you to vote United. Vote United for a Great Britain. Vote United for peace, for water, for food, for jobs, for education – vote United!”

  After his speech, they applauded for ten minutes. They chanted his name – “George! George! George!” – and they waved their banners. He left the stage, waving at the horde. And when he turned his back, he winked at a Nebuchadnezzar in the wings.

  “Went well,” George told him.

  The man scowled.

  “What is it?” said George.

  “You’ve got some guests in your dressing room.”

  “Who?”

  “Unhappy ones.”

  CHAPTER 12. KILLING FUAD.

  DAVID Murray, nearly fourteen but older than his years, barged through the Hyde Park crowd as it started to disperse.

  The people were excited. They jabbered and gossiped. They were full of love for George Fuad. They were full of hate for Jake Lawton.

  David’s fury grew. He was already angry. He’d been angry for years. He had been ten when all this started – a ten-year-old boy whose childhood was stolen, whose family was destroyed.

  He’d lost his father and his brother to the vampire plague. His mother, who was hardly a mum before all this had started, had disappeared. He’d not seen her in months.

  And now his friend, Jake Lawton, who was like a father and brother to David, was also missing – and worse than that, Jake was hated by the people he’d saved.

  David kept moving. He was heading towards the stage. He elbowed his way through the crowds. He kept a tight grip on the strap of his rucksack, which contained stakes and a hammer. Under his jacket, tucked into his belt, he had a gun. He was planning to shoot George Fuad with it.

  Someone touched his arm.

  He wheeled in panic, ready to lash out.

  It was Kwan Mei. He’d forgotten that she’d been with him in the park. Forgotten that she’d had to listen to Fuad insulting her in public, calling her an enemy of Britain.

  Mei was eighteen. She was from China. She’d arrived in Britain earlier that year. She’d come hoping for a better life. But she had no idea that she, and the other migrants,
were being trafficked into the country as food for vampires. Jake Lawton and Aaliyah Sinclair saved Mei’s life on Ramsgate harbour. Since then, the Chinese girl had been committed to helping Jake defeat the vampires.

  She had built an army of migrants in the north of England and marched them to London, where they had battled the vampires a few months previously.

  Mei was brave. She wanted to save Britain. It was her home now, whatever people like Fuad said.

  Now she said, “Vampires here.”

  “Yeah, so?”

  “We kill them, David.”

  “I’m killing George Fuad.”

  “Waste time. Kill the vampires.”

  David looked around nervously. He didn’t want the dwindling crowd to hear them talk. They were among enemies.

  He leaned in to Mei and said, “It’s not a waste of time. Not for me. It’ll make me feel better.”

  “But not country.”

  “It might make the country feel better. At least he won’t win the election.”

  “They choose someone else like him. Make no difference. Without George Fuad, vampires will still be strong. Without vampires, George Fuad will be weak. We kill vampires.”

  “You kill the vampires, Mei. I will kill Fuad.”

  He started to walk towards the stage.

  Mei grabbed his arm again.

  “What?” he said.

  “You are good vampire killer,” she told him. “Like Jake was. You are like young Jake.”

  He looked at her face. She was really pretty. She stared right at him, her brown eyes shining.

  Mei had been a good friend to him. He liked her. A lot. But he was embarrassed. He always blushed when he thought about her in that way. He was too young to be her boyfriend. Just a kid to her. And she was friendly with a young Turkish guy named Ediz Ün. He was part of her army. A nice bloke. He was about twenty and a brave fighter.

  “But not always like Jake,” said Mei.

  He stepped away from her, turning his back. He knew what she was going to say. She said it anyway, loudly: “He never put people in danger. He never use human as bait.”