by Thomas Emson
She heard him start locking the door.
She opened her eyes.
He had his back to her.
She sprang from the sofa.
He turned.
She smashed him across the temple with the teapot.
The porcelain shattered.
Blood sprayed.
The waiter teetered.
She cracked him another blow across the skull. The jagged edges cut him.
She hit him a third time. He keeled over, groaning. Blood pulsed from wounds in his scalp.
He fell forward on all fours. Murray saw red. She smashed him across the back of the head, once, twice, three times, until he hit the floor face first, blood everywhere.
Murray reeled away, crying, covered in the waiter’s blood. He wasn’t moving. She’d killed him. She felt scared, appalled by what she’d done.
But I had to, she thought. I had to survive. I have to survive.
Murray went to the waiter’s body and rolled it over, retrieving his keys.
They were soaked in blood.
Then she looked at the gun.
CHAPTER 58. ESCAPE.
Corley Service Area, M6 – 5.21am (GMT), 20 May, 2011
“LEAVE her alone,” said Ediz as a Neb tossed Mei roughly into the back of a police van.
“Shut your gob, Arab.”
“I told you, brain-dead, I’m a Turk,” said Ediz.
“Well fucking shut up then, doner meat. Get in the fucking back of the van, and no fucking monkey business.”
“You fucking racist,” said Ediz.
He got in and sat next to Mei on the bench. He put an arm around her, and she nodded to say she was OK.
The Neb laughed. “Racism’s the least of your worries, son.” He turned back to other Neb militia. They wore black. They sported black Kevlar vests. They carried automatic weapons. Pistols and knives were strapped to their utility belts.
They had travelled down from Manchester in the back of a cattle truck. Crammed in with dozens of other people, the journey had been terrible. They’d been tossed around. People were crying and screaming. Mums and dads were desperate to comfort their children, but how could they? People were asking, “Where are they taking us?” and “What’s going on?”
Mei knew where they were going and what was going on, but she didn’t have the heart to tell them.
After about two hours, Mei guessed, the truck pulled off the motorway. They came to a stop, and the rear doors were opened. They were in the car park of a motorway service area. It was quiet, no cars, no travellers taking a pit stop on the M6.
Milita men warned everyone to stay put in the truck, but some tried to make a run for it. They were either shot or shoved back inside.
A militia man had stepped forward and said, “Kwan Mei, who’s Kwan Mei?”
“I’m Kwan Mei,” said Ediz, standing up.
“Sit down, Spartacus, before I cut your balls off.”
Ediz stayed standing.
The Nebuchadnezzar militia man glared at him.
Mei pulled Ediz down.
“Don’t get killed,” she said.
“I don’t care.”
“I care. I need you with me.”
“Get out,” the Neb had said. “Come on, China girl.”
Mei hadn’t moved. And that’s when two black-shirts bounded into the truck and grabbed her, dragging her out.
Ediz lunged at them.
“Right,” said the milita officer, “if he’s so in love with her, he can come too.”
Mei went quietly. Ediz had ranted and railed against the black-shirts.
But the Nebs finally shoved them in the back of the police van.
The officer shut the door.
“They’re taking us to London?” said Ediz
“If one of us get chance, we got to escape,” she said.
“You thinking of trying to get out of here?”
“I try to get out of every trouble, Ed.”
Mei leaned her head against the side of the van to listen. It was quiet. Maybe the Nebs were dealing with the other prisoners.
She said to Ediz, “Don’t stop for nothing, OK. I don’t stop, you don’t stop. Just keep running. We got to get our brothers and sisters together again. Got to march on the city like before. OK?”
Ediz nodded.
The back door opened.
Ediz kicked it.
The milita men reeled.
Mei had no idea how many of them were outside, but she and Ediz had to take a chance.
They leapt out of the van and started running.
“Run, Ed, run fast,” she said as the Neb black-shirts realized what had happened and started chasing them.
“Stop or we’ll shoot,” came the warning. “Stop or we’ll shoot. Stop – ”
Ediz ran ahead of her across the car park. She sprinted after him.
“Stop, I said,” came the warning, and then: “Shoot to kill!”
Mei flung herself down when the gunfire started.
CHAPTER 59. POSITION OF POWER.
Soho – 6am (GMT), 20 May, 2011
GEORGE Fuad put the phone down. Some good news, some bad. You can’t have it all, he thought. But it was going to be his first full day of power, and that was reason to celebrate. He’d not slept much. Far too excited. And he liked to be around at night, when the vampires hunted. He enjoyed seeing them kill and feed.
One of his officials was waiting to talk to him, and the bloke had that rabbit-caught-in-the-headlights look. He was shifting from foot to foot. Sweat trickled from his ginger hair down his brow.
“Go ahead,” said George.
“Yes, sir,” said the ginger. “In parts of London, Kent, South Wales, Scotland, and Leeds, we have incidents of the Armed Forces fighting back – ”
“Fighting back?” said George. “Tell me again, with details.”
The official reported. More bad news.
“And what are our forces doing?” he asked now.
“They’ve been able to quell the incidents, Prime Minister. But it is taking a lot of manpower. Although the Armed Forces are not well armed anymore, they are, of course, still trained military personnel and are providing us with a few casualties.”
“Said like a civil servant,” said George. “Are we using vampires?”
“Yes, sir, the vampires are being deployed.”
“That’s good.”
He sat back in his chair. He concentrated for a moment, thinking about things. It was quiet now. The calm before the storm. Builders were coming in later to start the refurbishment. They were building him a castle in Soho, on the site of the old Religion nightclub. A castle for a king. A seat of government. It would protect him from any enemy. It would be guarded by Neb militia in daylight and vampires in darkness.
He tipped his chair back, eyes scanning the room.
Portraits hung on the walls. They were mostly of his family – father, mother, even his brother. But taking pride of place was a black-and-white photo of his grandfather, who had first told George about his bloodline. Grandfather Fuad stood alongside a short young man with black hair and a moustache: Afdal Haddad, the man who’d brought the Nebuchadnezzars together in recent years, the man whom George had tipped out of a window in Westminster.
Afdal had no vision. He couldn’t see beyond Britain. He rejected the idea of resurrecting Nimrod. Said it was too dangerous. Said it was impossible.
But to George, nothing was impossible. If things were impossible, he would not be in power.
“I want the insurgents caught alive, if possible,” he said. “I want them brought to London, where they’ll be put on trial for treason. Every fucking one of them.”
“Yes, sir,” said the official.
“Bring our guest in and fuck off.”
The official scuttled out of the room.
George thought about Alfred and wondered if his brother was any closer to digging up Nimrod. He felt a shudder go through him. A moment of doubt shaking his confidence.
It’ll be all right, he told himself. Everything will be all right. What can go wrong, now?
Elizabeth Wilson entered with two Nebuchadnezzar guards.
“So what do you think of my first few days in power?” George asked.
“I think if this were still a democracy, you’d be trounced at the next election,” she said.
He laughed. “Lucky it isn’t, then. You look like shit, if you don’t mind me saying. When was the last time you had your hair done, Liz? And you never wear make-up these days. You should. You used to be a relatively tasty old bird; now you’re just a weather-beaten old slapper.”
She said nothing.
“Anyway, too late for all that,” he said. “After tonight, no more hair-dos, no more make-up. Judgment day for you, Lizzie. The day you pay for your treason.”
She trembled, and George thought she might fall over.
“You’re destroying this country,” she said.
“I’m rebuilding it.”
“The nation dies and you… you fiddle.”
He laughed. “Oh, fuck off.”
“You’re killing people.”
“I’m culling them, Liz. The population is being put to good use. No more fucking welfare. No more free rides. Everyone does their bit. You are either breeder or food or worker. It’s easy. This is a perfect political system. It’s a model that’ll spread worldwide, I’m telling you.”
She said nothing, just stared in horror at George.
“Britain will be a trading culture,” he said. “People will have to produce to survive. If they can’t, they die – or they think of another way to serve the ruling class. Democracy has failed. It’s produced a dependency culture. We are returning to the days of absolute monarchy, of feudalism. I’m king. The rest of my Nebuchadnezzars are the ruling classes. The wealth stays with us. It’s for the best, because we know how to use it. We’ll make decisions. We’ll run the show. Britain will be fucking great again. It’ll be built on the bones of the underclass.”
“And on vampires.”
“Yeah, what an army, eh. Nothing’ll stop ’em. And when we have Nimrod, we’ll have a god to go with our army. Religion and military might combined – now that’s unbeatable.”
“This won’t last, Fuad.”
“It will. For-fucking-ever.”
“The people will turn against you.”
“The fucking people can’t turn in their graves.”
“Maybe the vampires, then. Why would they need a human leader?”
Something stirred in his belly.
He stood up and went to the door.
“Take her back to her room,” he said. “Give her a decent last meal and all that. Execution day today, need to plump her up a bit.”
He grinned at her and then opened the door, but when he turned to leave the room he found himself staring down the barrel of a gun.
CHAPTER 60. THE “SOME GOOD NEWS, SOME BAD”.
“CHRISTINE,” said George when he saw who was holding the gun. “I think you’re outnumbered, darling.”
Her eyes stayed on him. Big, bright eyes full of fear, glinting with desperation.
The kind of desperation that makes someone pull a trigger.
He had to play it cool.
Out of the corner of his eye, he saw that the two Neb guards had their weapons trained on Murray. Liz Wilson had been shoved into a corner, where she was cowering.
“All I got to do,” he said, “is give them the word, and you’re smeared all over that corridor.”
“You’ll be smeared with me, Fuad,” said Christine Murray.
How the fuck has she got out? he thought. Whoever fucked up would face judgment tonight with her, Wilson, and the rest of them.
Murray stood in the door. She was shaking. Sweat beaded on her brow. Her hair was matted. She was there for the taking. But she had a gun. And it was pointed directly at George’s face.
His bowels were icy with dread. But he tried not to show that he was scared.
“So what’ll it be, Christine?” he said.
“I can kill you right now,” she said.
She meant it. Or sounded like she did.
He wondered what the two bodyguards were doing behind him. If they had a clear shot, Murray should have been dead. Perhaps if he shuffled to the right or to the left, they’d be able to nail her. But if he did, she might just shoot him.
His fear diminished. Having a gun pointed at your face made you jittery. But when you pulled yourself together and realized you had the upper hand after all, the fright faded.
George played his trump card.
“Do you want to see your son again?”
Some good news, some bad, he thought. The phone call he’d received before he’d spoken to his rabbit-caught-in-the-headlights advisor was a message from the frontline, where the Neb militia were bravely butchering and kidnapping the waste-of-space chavs and the fat-cat bankers.
“We’ve got that kid, David Murray,” the Nebuchadnezzar officer had told him.
Very good news.
Added to the very good news of Lawton’s incarceration in Iraq. Added to the very good news of Kwan Mei’s arrest in Manchester. The bad news was the escape of Mei’s fellow prisoner. He’d legged it while they were being transferred from vehicle to vehicle. George wasn’t going to worry too much about it. The kid would go into hiding. No one would probably see him again. It was a glitch, that was all.
Everything was coming together.
Hearing about her son made Murray flinch. A little twitch. A sign of weakness. A bolthole into her brain. And once he was inside her head, George could wreak havoc.
He’d always been good at that. Finding a flaw in people. And once he’d done it, he was like cancer, eating away at their confidence, their hopes.
He’d done it with his own brother.
Alfred’s weakness was that he loved George so much. And that love had the potential to make him weak. But George enjoyed the adulation, so he allowed it. He let the weak spot grow.
“Well, do you?” said George now. “Do you want to see your kid? If you kill me, you never will.”
“You don’t know where David is,” she said, panic in her voice.
“Why shouldn’t I know where he is?”
“You don’t know.”
“Christine, my darling, I know everything. I am the man. The man in the know. The man in charge. I know.”
The doubts made her brittle.
“You know,” he said, “that we picked up your little Chinky friend in Manchester? She’s on her way down here.”
“You’re lying,” she said. Her hands shook, the gun getting heavy. Her heart like lead, he imagined. Thinking about her son. Missing him. Broken up about not seeing him. George knew a mother’s love could be strong, but it could also make a woman vulnerable.
He showed his hand and played his cards: “I have your son, Christine.”
She made a funny noise, like an animal in distress.
“You can see him soon, if you like,” he said. “Or not. Up to you. I’m sure he’s missing his mum, ain’t he. Young fellow. Not seen you in an age. Crying his heart out, no doubt.”
She had no cards left.
She burst out in tears.
Her gun hand sagged.
George lunged forward, followed by the two bodyguards.
He slapped Murray in the face and snatched the gun out of her hand.
The guards went for her, but he stopped them.
He watched her roll up into a ball on the corridor floor. She was shaking and crying and looking up at him.
“You bastard,” she was saying, “you fucking, monstrous bastard.”
“Thanks,” he said. His phone rang. “Oh, Avon calling.” He answered it and listened and said, “See you in a second.” He put the phone back in his pocket. “What’s that Paul Simon song? ‘Mother And Child Reunion’, that’s it.”
The door at the far end of the corridor flew open. Two Nebuchadnezzar militia men shoved a
young boy into the passageway. He was dirty, his hair matted. His clothes torn. His shoes too big.
Murray screamed her son’s name and was up on her feet in a flash.
The boy yelled for his mum and stumbled down the corridor towards her.
They fell into each other’s arms and cried and howled, while George laughed at them and thought how nice it was of him to let a mum and her kid face his wrath together.
PART SEVEN. RESURRECTION.
CHAPTER 61. SPILLING THE BEANS.
Al-Askandariyah, Iraq – 5pm (GMT + 3hours), 20 May, 2011
HER eyes burned red, her fangs brushed Laxman’s throat, and he said, “OK, OK, I’ll fucking tell you, just get this fucking witch off me.”
After the street fight with Laxman, and in the chaos that ensued, Lawton had handcuffed the mercenary and tossed him in the Toyota’s boot.
Ereshkigal, protected against the sun by the burkha, had terrified the crowd by killing Ashton.
The panic had given Lawton the chance to get the Land Cruiser started. Ereshkigal, encased head to toe in the black garment, leapt in next to him. She had said nothing. They had looked at each other for a second. Although her eyes were hidden behind the face-veil, Lawton felt her gaze on him.
Then, he’d sped off.
With the authorities at sixes and sevens, they’d fled the city and driven through Al-Mahmudiyah, the southern district known as “The Gateway to Baghdad”. That morning it was the gateway out of Baghdad.
Lawton’s plan was to hit Highway 8, south, and head for Hillah. But they would be hunted. And in daylight, so soon after the incident in Baghdad, they would be sitting ducks.
He left the main highway and made his way along dirt tracks. He even doubled back a few times. He was trying to out-think the authorities, trying to stay one, or even two, steps ahead of them.
At Al-Askandariyah, an ancient city named after Alexander the Great, they stopped. They had only driven twenty-five miles out of Baghdad but had spent most of the day doing it.
They needed a break, and he needed the truth.
Laxman had been in the boot for a while. They had made sure he had water, passing it through a compartment in the back seat. While they did so, Laxman swore at them and threatened them, before finally trying to bribe them with treasure “from this dig I’m protecting”.
