by King, Danny
And skewered his dinner dates to their chairs.
18 shook his thermal image detector. One of the hot bodies in the farm below had disappeared from the screen but 18 couldn’t understand how.
“Where the hell did he go?” he asked himself, convinced it must be his equipment rather than his vigilance. But he looked again and sure enough, only one red silhouette remained in the farmhouse. The other had seemingly dropped off the face of the Earth.
The radio crackled in 18’s ear to answer his question.
“Sir, we’ve got movement,” 33 radioed in from the other side of the farm.
“What’s happening?” Bingham demanded.
“You’d better come for yourself and see. I think… I think they want to talk,” 33 told him.
*
Henry stood in open ground beneath a silvery grey sky. The night was no longer pitch black. The darkness was beginning to drain away. It was almost imperceptible to normal eyes but Henry was only too aware of the change. The hourglass was emptying. And their sands were slipping away.
Colonel Bingham took a few minutes to circumnavigate the farm to where Henry was waiting. He studied him through his binoculars before he got too close and concluded he did indeed appear to want to talk. He looked unarmed except for a white flag and a human hostage who was kneeling beside him with a flour sack over his head. This cleared up the mystery of where the other warm body had gone but not what Henry wanted. And there was only one way to find that out.
Colonel Bingham rose from the grassy knoll behind which he was crouching and stepped out into the open. Three of his troops went with him, two wielding crossbows, the other an SMG. The vampire might be prepared to walk out under a white flag without a weapon but the Colonel most certainly was not. A war zone was no place to be caught without a gun, white flag or otherwise.
Colonel Bingham approached to within twenty feet of Henry and his men fanned out behind him, their fingers at the ready should negotiations grow too heated.
Henry noted the Colonel’s pips. He didn’t belong to any army Henry recognised, which suggested a private force, which in turn suggested a limited number of resources. Sebastian’s idea perhaps wasn’t such a bad one after all and Henry already had a better idea of who he was facing before either man had even opened their mouths. He yanked Sebastian’s jacket collar to warn the soldiers not to come any closer and was rewarded by an understanding nod from the Colonel and a muffled outburst from beneath the flour sack.
“Good evening,” Henry eventually said, figuring he should get the ball rolling as he’d been the one to request this meeting.
“Good evening,” Colonel Bingham replied with a raised eyebrow. It always hearted him to find courtesy in the most unlikely of places and he was happy to reciprocate.
“How are you doing out here? It’s cold tonight,” Henry sympathised despite not being able to feel it himself.
“We’re holding our own, thank you. And how about yourselves?” the Colonel said, noting he could see his own frozen breath as he spoke but none from Henry.
“We’ve seen better nights,” Henry confirmed.
Colonel Bingham almost laughed. “I should imagine you have. A great many of them, I’d wager. You want to talk?”
“We want to go,” Henry said, cutting to the chase.
“Go?” Bingham shrugged. “Go where?”
“Go home. Go abroad. Go anywhere this is not happening,” Henry said. It was a request more than a demand and Bingham could sympathise. Henry and his cohorts hadn’t come here for this fight and they weren’t ready for it. But Bingham and his men had. And this gave them the edge, both tactically and psychologically.
That said Bingham was in no more of a mood to do deals with this devil than the one he had lashed up on the mound. But he continued to the dialogue anyway. Just out of courtesy.
“Why should we let you go?” he asked. It was a reasonable question and deserved a reasonable answer. Fortunately Henry had one pre-prepared.
“Have you ever seen Zulu?” he asked.
In his youth Bingham had been a great fan of war movies. Not too many mercenaries got into the business off the back of Disney cartoons, so of course he had seen Zulu. It was a classic. A small band of British soldiers, hopelessly outnumbered at Rorke’s Drift, and destined for immortality. Although, in their case, not literally. But Bingham could see the parallels.
“I’ve seen it,” he confirmed.
“Good. That should speed things along,” Henry said to himself.
Bingham pre-empted the conversation and tried to outline what Henry was suggesting in non-Michael Caine terms. “You’re proposing an honourable withdrawal? One set all and let’s leave the field with a mutual respect for one another?”
That sounded good to Henry. “Something like that?”
“How very civilised,” Colonel Bingham smiled.
“Enough have died tonight – on both sides. And neither of us wants that to continue.”
Bingham glanced at the men on either side of him. None of them flickered. None of them flinched. He had their loyalty and their belief. They would follow him to their ends of the Earth. But who would’ve guessed they would find it in Sussex.
“I agree,” Colonel Bingham conceded. “But we are trapped here just the same as you. You might be inside and we might be outside but neither of us can leave. As well you know.”
“Look around you,” Henry urged his opponent. “You’ve killed more of us tonight than any man has in a thousand years. Your place in history is assured. Go and get your rewards. We’re ready to let bygones by bygones – if you let us go.”
Bingham regarded the creature opposite him. He looked like any normal man: average height, average weight, average build and average looks. He would’ve blended into a crowd of two and been gone before you knew it. This thought unsettled Bingham more than anything he’d seen tonight and he didn’t much fancy the idea of ending up like 18 and unable to go to sleep without turning over his bed first.
“Supposing we did just let you go? How would we know that you wouldn’t turn around and kill us the moment you got out?” Colonel Bingham asked, setting out his concerns with an understated smile.
“Because there’s something else we want,” Henry told him. “Our friend you’re holding up on the hill. We’ll trade you: one of ours for one of yours.” The flour sack once more erupted with a tirade of obscenities and objections, much of which was fortunately censored by a sock in the mouth.
Colonel Bingham glanced at his watch and noted the time. Dawn would be here soon enough. At which point they could decamp their positions in the forest and move in. Incendiaries and petrol would do the difficult job for them and they could knock down the roof and sifted the rubble at leisure until they were satisfied that everything and everyone inside could pass through a cook’s colander. Then, and only then, would Colonel Bingham relax.
“What’s your name?” Bingham asked Henry.
“Does it matter?”
“I guess not,” Bingham conceded. “Do you know what I have at the moment?”
“Tell me,” Henry said.
“Certainty. And for that, uncertainty is no exchange.”
And with that, Bingham drew his sidearm and shot both men before him. The soldier with the SMG lent his support, peppering Henry and Sebastian with short bursts while reinforcements rushed forward at this given signal to lasso Henry around the neck with snare poles.
“Snag him. Get his arms. Get his neck,” Bingham directed his men until Henry was caught, just as Vanessa had been earlier.
“You bastard! You bastard! You could’ve walk away from this!” Henry screamed. “You could’ve lived!”
“If only I could say the same about you,” Colonel Bingham replied, waving Henry’s white flag in front of him before tossing it across Sebastian’s dead body at their feet.
*
It took four of them with snares pole to drag Henry across the fields and up the hill towards the next hast
ily erected A-frame but Colonel Bingham was determined to take him alive – at least for the moment.
He had quite a little collection going.
“You can still walk away from this. You can still live!” Henry berated the soldiers as they strung him up against the frame with wire ties.
“Make them tight,” Colonel Bingham told his men. “Don’t worry, he’s tough, he can take it,” he added, giving Henry a little wink.
It took all of their strength to restrain Henry and all of their guile to avoid his teeth and claws but after ten minutes of struggling Bingham’s men were finally able to step back and admire their handiwork.
“You bastards!” Vanessa screamed at them all from the adjacent A-frame. “You bastards. You’ll pay for this you will. Your whole families will pay for this.”
“And put a muzzle on that one,” Colonel Bingham directed. Vanessa was duly gagged but Larousse was left to jabber in terror for the Colonel’s amusement.
“Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: For thou art with me; Thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me…”
It sounded to most of the lads nearby like the 23rd Psalm but unfortunately for Larousse, he was well beyond deliverance, either from above or below, and he knew it. His blood had frozen solid in his veins and his senses had spun off in all directions. His transformation was all but complete but it would do him no good. He was a newly hatched butterfly falling from his cocoon and straight into a spider’s web. The sun would boil his body and the devil would take his soul. Nothing would be left of the late Mr Larousse but a sense of sadistic satisfaction in the pit of the Colonel’s belly.
Henry glanced across at his newest comrade and knew whatever happened he wouldn’t make the grade. If Boniface had blackballed Sebastian, Larousse would have no chance of joining the Coven.
“Last chance, Colonel; release us or die,” Henry warned the Colonel as he hung suspended by the wrists a few feet from the smiling soldier.
“And disappoint my benefactors?” Bingham shrugged dismissively.
“Whatever they’re paying you, we can double it. Money is no object to us,” Henry said, still trying to reason with the man who was planning on selling them to medical research.
“As tempting as that might be, I’m afraid I am a man of my principles. And they bribed me first,” Bingham replied.
This ignited a fury within Larousse that surfaced in a misplaced tirade of righteousness. “The Synod will not rest until they find you. You have betrayed all that is sacred. You are no better than they are.”
Bingham laughed. Not least of all because Larousse was still referring to the vampires as “them” and “they” when he should’ve been saying “us” and “we”.
“The Synod took twenty years to find these assholes, Padre. And that was only once they hired me. I think we’ll take our chances. What do you say boys?”
Bingham’s men laughed in agreement. At least most of them did. 18 was a harder nut to crack. As a veteran of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, he remembered George W. Bush’s speech delivered two months later on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln in which he declared, “Mission Accomplished”. Up until that moment, British forces had suffered 33 casualties, only to lose a further 146 men in the weeks and years after George’s speech before finally pulling out in 2011. American losses were even greater. George W. Bush himself ‘somehow’ managed to escape the war unharmed.
“I’m going to do something I haven’t done in over six hundred years,” Henry told Bingham sternly.
“Oh yes? And what would that be?” Bingham asked, allowing Henry his say.
“I’m going to enjoy killing you,” he snarled.
Bingham smiled. “I like your confidence. If only we could bottle that too.”
CHAPTER 24
Troopers 40 and 41 were returning to their reserve positions after helping capture Henry when 40 signalled to 41 to stop.
“Wait!” he said, sweeping the track with his infrared headgear when he saw something in the trees ahead.
“What is it?” 41 said, readying his gun in case anything sprang out at them.
The night was black and still, almost unnaturally so. There wasn’t even a breeze to stir 40’s breath and yet he could’ve sworn he saw a few leaves flickering against a backdrop of deathly calm.
“It’s nothing,” he concluded once he was satisfied the track was clear. “Just thought I saw something.”
But 41 didn’t answer. He couldn’t, because 41 was no longer there. 40 turned at the lack of a reply and saw only empty space at his shoulder. The night had swallowed 41 up without a trace.
“What the hell…?” he just had time to say before he too was sucked into the shadows and spat out without a sound.
Two less bolts in Bingham’s ring of steel.
*
The first hint that something was awry was the sudden burst of radio traffic in Colonel Bingham’s ear. As the officer in charge he kept track of his men’s communiqués whether they concerned him or not. Now they most certainly did.
“40? 41! Are you there, over? Come in please 41. Check in, over!”
Colonel Bingham listened for either 40 or 41’s reply but neither gave one. Nor ever would again.
“41? Can you hear me, over?” the radio asked again.
No reply.
“42, have 40 or 41 checked in with you yet, over?”
Nothing.
“42, are you there, over?”
Silence.
“For Christ’s sake will someone please reply, over?”
Dead air.
“Colonel, I think we have a problem, over.”
A sudden scream in the night caught everyone unaware and an accompanying burst of gunfire further away endorsed Bingham’s fears.
“What’s going on, over? Anyone and everyone. Report in immediately,” Bingham demanded, taking charge of the situation.
“There’s something out here, sir. There’s something in the woods,” the reply came back as more gunfire and screaming echoed in the distance.
Bingham looked up to see pinpricks of muzzle flashes in the foliage towards the east. That was beyond their lines. Something was happening to their rear.
“That’s impossible,” Bingham barked into the radio. “All of our targets are contained.”
“Negative sir, it’s out here. It’s all around…”
But Colonel Bingham was left to fill in the blank for himself because the transmission was cut dead and only static remained.
“Soldier, come in. Soldier? Report in, Goddamnit!”
But no one was left to report in. Section three was gone.
“You had your chance,” a voice called out. Colonel Bingham turned and saw Henry glaring back knowingly.
*
Once breached, Bingham’s lines began to crumble quickly. No one knew which way to look or, indeed, for what. Foxholes were abandoned and positions deserted as the panic set in.
A black shape streaked across the woods drawing gunfire from all quarters but nothing seemed to stop it. 33 had lost 34 in the woods as they retreated back to the trucks but they wouldn’t get far. Something grabbed 33’s collar and swung him with immense force into the trunk of a tree to knock the wind from him.
He squeezed the trigger but shot only air as his head was yanked to one side and he found himself staring into the eyes of his own death.
“Too little, too late,” Boniface told him as he ripped his throat out with a swipe of his claws.
33 sprayed him with rivulets of warm blood but Boniface didn’t care. His suit was back at the farm, carefully folded and placed over a chair. These were Sebastian’s clothes he was wearing.
See, whilst all eyes had been on Henry throughout his tete-a-tete with the Colonel, no one had thought to look under his hostage’s flour sack. Everyone had naturally assumed it was Sebastian because he’d worn Sebastian’s clothes. He’d even had a trace of heat about him thanks to his clothes being placed on th
e AGA first. But the whole meeting had been a subterfuge: a sleight of hand to get Boniface into the shadows. Henry knew they weren’t about to talk their way out of here. But if he could get outside, beyond the farm, and close to the trees, he might just be able to draw their attention while ‘Sebastian’ (aka. Boniface) rose from the dead and slipped away unnoticed.
Now Boniface was clear, in the woods and at the back of their persecutors, as per their original plan.
But unlike Colonel Bingham, he had no intention of taking prisoners.
*
More shots and more screaming rang out in the night but this time from a different direction. Boniface had cleared a gap in the lines and Angel had slipped through to join the fun.
Unlike Boniface Angel enjoyed killing for sport. She liked it very much in fact. For her, hunting soldiers on the hoof was as good as it got and she dashed this way and that, picking them off with a snap of the jaws like a terrier snatching at rats.
34 felt something at his back before he heard or saw it but all at once his face was in the mud and something heavy was on his back.
“Wait…!” he yelped but Angel bit his pleas in two as she clamped her teeth around his larynx.
His racing heart just fed her faster and once drained, she leapt off him and into the trees, disappearing as fast as she had appeared, to leave 34 facedown in his own sludge.
*
Like Bingham, 18 knew the game was up, but unlike the Colonel he had an exit strategy he’d been working since they’d started decorating the place with vampires. He reasoned, quite logically, that if the enemy had slipped through their lines and were now attacking them from the rear, the one place they wouldn’t want to linger would be the farm, the place in which they’d been pinned down in all night.
He scanned the buildings with his thermal image detector one last time and saw nothing down there but the AGA. The two hot bodies had now both disappeared and the cold bodies were never there to begin with.
“Fuck this!” he said when a new batch of gunfire broke out to his rear. All eyes turned towards the source of the commotion and now 18 saw his chance. He slung the heavy thermal image detector into the nettles, glad to be rid of it, picked up an SMG and slipped away as his comrades began firing wildly in all directions in the gloom.
