by James Fahy
“What’s a ghoul?” I asked.
“A ghoul is a pathetic creature; half dead, basic animal instincts, servile, obedient. They are the perfect, if extremely unattractive, slave. They do not think for themselves. They obey only their master, and they are endlessly hungry. They can be useful to us. We can control their actions, their movements, like puppets.”
He laced his fingers together on the table top.
“The Pale, all of them, came from a mixture of human DNA and the DNA of one vampire, one master vampire. Tassoni. And he was understandably angry at humanity. The Pale were, and are, his ghouls.”
“Christ,” Lucy said, looking horrified. “But if a vampire can control any ghoul it makes—”
Allesandro smiled ironically.
“Of course these ghouls, thanks to human scientific intervention, were strong and bold and clever. They were filled with killing aggression on a scale unheard of. You unwittingly created your own perfect murderers. We can control ghouls remotely, using our minds. You must know by now, Phoebe, that my kind has advanced psychic potential. We can speak directly into your minds. We call this the whisper. We can force truth from your lips. We call this persuasion. And we can command those who we have created. We call this will.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Griff look from Allesandro to me and back again. Eventually, my vampire broke our gaze.
“From inside his prison, his personal hell, Tassoni bided his time. He watched through the eyes of his creations and chose his moment carefully. When the ghouls – the human-engineered hybrids – were globally positioned, he awoke them with his will, and with them he tore your civilisation to shreds.”
This revelation settled over all of us in the quiet lab.
“They created his own sleeper agents for him,” I breathed. “The humans did this. They used him for themselves but they were building his army, not theirs.”
“But he was stopped,” Allesandro said, holding up a finger. “As the wars raged, as mankind fought to retain their world and Tassoni’s Pale sought to tear it apart in vengeance, the very people who had stolen his DNA and who had tampered with his genetics to make this race of monsters, they pulled the plug on him. Someone shut him down.”
He shook his head, the sad look in his eye again. I wondered what it was like to lose your clan master. Did Allesandro feel the same way I did when my father never came home?
“We don’t know when they realised the connection, but some bright spark, maybe one of the scientists who made this mess in the first place, one of them killed him. They cut the head off the hydra.”
“But the Pale didn’t die,” Griff said, frowning. “They’re still out there.”
“The ghouls do not die if their master dies,” Allesandro explained, “but they do lose their focus, their purpose. In a regular ghoul, made by a vampire in the old world, they become pathetic, aimless creatures. They usually starve to death eventually, mindless and inactive with no instruction from their master. But these ghouls…
“This new breed were deliberately spliced with the most aggressive instincts, genetically enhanced and engineered to be so much more than either of their parent species. They lost their purpose, their organisation and their direction. But with no higher mind to guide them, they became what they are now: feral, animal, lost things in the darkness. But they are still filled with the anger they were made for, still fuelled by the hunger they cannot sate.”
The lab was silent for a moment. It was like the air around us was heavy with what we were being told.
“That’s when the tide turned, isn’t it? That’s when we started winning the war. Slowly. It was when the vampires, the Tribals, the Bonewalkers, all the others – one by one, you came out into the world to help us and announced your existence to help combat this common enemy who was threatening to wipe out the world.”
The vampire nodded.
“A world without humans would be no good to us.” A tiny smile played across his lips. “We have to have a food source after all. I’m sure most of the other GO races thought along similar lines. We have a symbiotic relationship, your kind and mine. We needed each other to survive. We would starve in a world of ghouls and no humans, and you would all die if we didn’t help you survive.”
“And the rest is history,” Griff said quietly.
He took off his glasses and slowly rubbed his eyes.
“I understand,” I said slowly, still trying to digest this information, “why your vampire clan would want vengeance. Why Gio wants revenge … it was humans that were the scary monsters in the night, not the GOs. It was us who kidnapped and tortured your leader, us who were responsible for creating the ultimate tool Tassoni could use as revenge for our mistreatment and, well you know, accidentally ending the world…”
I cleared my throat as Allesandro smiled grimly at me.
“But this still doesn’t explain what Gio and his mini-cult is doing now. Why us? Why the teeth and the Bonewalker mojo? How is this getting revenge on humanity? Tassoni is dead, you just told us as much.”
My vampire looked tired then. I realised that he was old.
Unlike me who had been born into this world and had never known any other, he must have lived back in the old civilisation. The world I was obsessed with. He had witnessed its death, its loss, the end of everything he knew. Unlike the rest of humanity, he knew the awful truth of how and why it had happened.
“Gio and the Black Sacrament have never given up on Tassoni,” Allesandro explained. “They have spent the last thirty years, since the walled cities were built and since our kinds have begun to reform some kind of civilisation from the ashes of the old world, searching for a way to bring him back.”
“From the dead?” Griff asked incredulously. “That’s impossible!”
Allesandro peered at him questioningly.
“Last night, myself and your good Doctor were teleported from a hole deep underground to a distant street on the surface. Bonewalkers deal in magic. They are practically made of it. We don’t know what they are truly capable of. Nothing is impossible.”
He noticed our expressions and bristled.
“I know ‘magic’ may be a dirty word to you scientists,” he said. “But it is a very real force in our shared earth, whether you like it or not. Call it by another name if you wish; unexplained phenomena, existential will. Magic is just science which has not yet been explained by you people.”
“So the Black Sacrament are trying to resurrect Tassoni,” I said in wonder. “They want to bring him back to life … so he can finish what he started.”
Allesandro nodded grimly.
“So he can take control of the Pale again. Right now, they have become nothing but mindless animals, scattered throughout the countryside, aimless. He will mobilise them, focus them into purpose again. They will attack the walled cities of Britannia, and everywhere else; not as thoughtless feral animals but as the unstoppable fighting force they were designed to be.”
Allesandro leaned back in his chair.
“The Black Sacrament wants to finish the apocalypse, to bring things to the bitter end. For all of us.”
The message on the DataStream made more sense now.
Gio’s voice was now such an angry grumbling roar, so thick and distorted, we could barely understand his words. I had misheard what he had been saying all along. He had not said the sun will rise. He had said Tassoni will rise.
I stood, feeling too twitchy to stay seated.
How could no one know this? How could our public not be aware that we had committed such crimes against another species, incurring their wrath and bringing destruction down on our heads with our own hubris?
I paced around the floor, all of their eyes watching me. At the end of the day, I was a scientist. I had to make sense of this.
“So, why the teeth?” I said. “What does Gio and the rest of the doomsday group want teeth for? When they had me under Carfax, Gio told me that they’d wanted Marlin Scott’s but
that as he didn’t have any, they had settled for Oscar’s. Same bloodline, same family.”
“I don’t know how the Bonewalkers work,” Allesandro shook his head helplessly. “There are many in our clan who disapprove of Gio having any dealings with their kind. But it is said they have many talents, other than twisting space and matter. They speak with the dead, I’m told. They can control the dead. Perhaps, with the right ingredients, they can bring them back.”
“It’s pretty clear to me that this Black Sacrament think you’re one of the ingredients, Doc,” Griff said. “You told us that the torture video that was delivered with Trevelyan’s teeth was aimed at you. They said your name.”
I waved his comment away with my hand. I was trying to think.
“They said my surname,” I said. “I don’t think they were speaking to me, I think it was aimed at my father. Trevelyan knew something about our respective parents, about the link between us all. I don’t know if she’d always known or if it was something secret she had stumbled on, being head of so many highly classified departments. It was something to do with her own father, long before the wars. She wouldn’t have been able to resist looking into it more, who could?”
I hugged myself by the elbows, my voice quiet.
“When they came at her face with the pliers, I imagine she told them everything she knew. I know I probably would have.”
I couldn’t help seeing Trevelyan’s corpse in my mind’s eye, dumped at the bottom of the pit under Carfax. She had been all alone in the darkness until Jennifer Coleman came to join her – and who knows, maybe even Oscar by now.
I swallowed hard. I tried to turn my thoughts to more useful and less nightmare-worthy things.
“Trevelyan has my name as one of her passwords. I wonder if she has her father’s name as another, or maybe Marlin Scott’s?” We need to know what was on those encrypted files. Trevelyan had been snooping; she knew she’d found something dangerous. She knew the bad guys were coming for her. It’s why she hid them. I need to speak to … to Cloves.”
My speech trailed off. I stopped abruptly, frozen in mid step, my eyes staring wide.
Oh … Mother … Of … Fuck.
“What is it?” Allesandro began to rise, seeing my horrified expression. “Phoebe? Is the serum…”
“Cloves!” I yelled at them, almost making Lucy fall off her stool in shock. “Oh, bollocks! Cloves!”
“What about her?” Griff asked, baffled.
“We have to find her! She’s in danger! When the vampires rolled me under back in Carfax…”
Allesandro looked quizzical.
“Rolled you under what?” he asked
I rolled my hand in the air frantically, searching for the word he had used.
“Persuasion,” I said. “When they forced information out of me, that blonde one Helena, she scrabbled around in my brain. They said they were waiting for the files to be decrypted, letting the Cabal do the work for them, and then they were going to seize them. Jesus, I told her about Cloves.”
I cursed Helena, the softly spoken vampire whose smile had been friendly, so sweet and reassuring, who’d been ever so nice to me. Except for the slap, of course, which hadn’t moved her smile an inch – not to mention the fact that she had stood and watched with faint interest and absolutely no concern for my predicament as Gio had shoved me into the pit with the Pale.
“I told the blonde bitch that Cloves had the files,” I said. “I gave them her bloody address! If they didn’t go down in the standoff at Carfax…”
I stared straight at Allesandro, panicking.
“I get the feeling that when the Bonewalker left us in the alley and disappeared, it went back for them. I think it went to pull them out of there the same way. If I’m right, Allesandro, they could have found her by now. She could be dead, or worse.”
“I thought you couldn’t stand her,” Lucy said.
“That’s not the point,” I snapped. “I don’t want her blood on my hands. If she’s attacked by Gio, it will be my fault.”
I stared around wildly, trying to think.
“I don’t even know how to get in touch with her,” I said. “It’s not like she gave me a pager. We didn’t even have each other’s numbers. Crap!”
“Phoebe,” Allesandro was standing in front of me, “please calm down. I think I can help.”
“Unless you have some super-magical vampire skill to whisper into her head from all the way across the city and through four stories of subterranean bedrock, I doubt it.”
I paused, considering this for a moment.
“You don’t have that skill by any chance, do you?” I asked.
“Not quite.”
He crossed the lab to the small desktop where those parts of his clothing which had not been scorched or burned had been carefully placed. His boots, a rather twisted and burnt belt, and a few other less flammable peripherals. He brought something back for me, holding it out like a gift.
“But I do have this,” he offered.
He was holding a very scorched and partially-melted mobile phone. The glass surface had cracked in the exciting heat blast as he had strolled down our security corridor. It looked warped, as though it had spent a few minutes in a microwave, but the screen still lit up as he unlocked it.
It must be a Nokia, I reasoned.
I took it from him. The phone displayed twenty three missed calls, all within the last few hours. The name by each: Cloves.
“You have her number?” I spluttered, staring up at him. “How?”
Before he could answer, the phone vibrated in my hand. I almost dropped it in surprise. The incoming call read Cloves. She had really, really been trying to get hold of him recently. Twenty fourth time is the charm, I thought.
As Griff and Lucy watched me closely, I answered, holding the phone to my ear. I wasn’t sure what to say.
“Hello…?” I said haltingly. “Erm … Allesandro’s phone. Phoebe speaking.”
Through the terrible, half-melted earphone, I heard Veronica Cloves sigh deeply, a rattling exhalation which sounded half relief and half jaw clenching anger.
“Harkness? I have been calling this number all day. That had better fucking be you on the phone!” She snapped down the line. “I don’t know where the hell you are, but—”
“Listen,” I cut her off. “I’ll explain everything but you’re not safe. Your apartment—”
“No shit, Sherlock,” Cloves spat angrily at me. “I have had a very entertaining few hours fleeing my own home and evading some pretty fucked up people! I know they want the files. I know someone told them I had them.”
She said this very pointedly and I have to admit, I felt guilty.
“Lucky for you, I’m slightly more competent than you are. I have the files on me. I think I’ve lost the motherfuckers who have been trailing me all damn day and I’ve spent the last God knows how long trying to get hold of your bloody vampire, who swore to me he would bring you to me when he got you back from those gun-toting arseholes. The lying little bastard…”
I leaned my ear away from the headset a little. Her volume was rising.
“Doesn’t he know how to answer a phone? What has he been doing for the last half a sodding day anyway?”
“Sleeping, for most of it,” I said slowly. “That’s what they do. Where are you?”
“Right now?” she bit back her fury long enough to tell me. “I’m at some shithole greasy spoon on the Slade, near the east gate of the wall. I’m in hiding, trying to shake these assholes. I don’t care where you are, Harkness, or what you’re doing. Get here. Now!”
“Give me the address,” I sighed.
I repeated it to Griff, who jotted it down on his hand. Griff is the kind of man who always has a pen.
“Stay put,” I said. “We’re on our way over.”
“The files,” Cloves said. “I told you, they’re decrypted. I read them while I’ve been holed up in this shithole – you’re going to want to see what’s in them.�
��
I didn’t need her to convince me of that.
30
The Slade was in the south east sector of walled New Oxford. Well out of Veronica Cloves’ comfort zone, I imagined.
It had probably been a respectable neighbourhood once, long before the wars, but these days it was something of a ghetto. Like all the walled cities of Britannia, we had a housing crisis; too many people trying to live in a space that simply couldn’t expand anymore. The rich moved to the north of the city, to live in the sky in spears of glass and steel where there used to be meadows. The poor and the desperate had ended up here, like sewage running downhill.
If you lived in the city, you knew better than to wander south of the Churchill Hospital after dark. There had been a golf course there once but it was gone now, fenced in. Now it was home to most of New Oxford’s Tribals – those who didn’t own the Botanical Gardens, that is. To the east of the Tribals’ turf, everything from the hospital to the woods were shantytowns. Once there had been leafy streets and choice, middle-class real estate but three decades can bring a lot of changes. The slum spread from the Slade – long ago an innocent enough B-road, now an invisible no-go barrier – to the wall itself beyond the woods.
Don’t let me fool you into thinking ‘the woods’ are anything picturesque. When the wall went up, Marlin Scott’s great gift to mankind and the Bonewalkers’ magical and unfathomable handiwork, it cut through the three woodland areas which had existed in the old world, beyond the circle of the old city’s bypass. Brasenose, Magdalen and Monks Wood, all three forests had been suddenly inside the city.
You might wonder, with the Slade slums brimming over with the poor and disenfranchised, why the woods had survived. Why they hadn’t simply been cut down, the land razed all the way to the wall itself for housing, when tiny lean-to shacks jostled for space in the now narrow streets, practically built on top of one another.
The reason was simple, really. The woods had already been claimed by Gos, and not the kind you want to tangle with either. There are more types of GO that you can shake a stick at, and trust me, if you ever come to New Oxford, stay out of the woods, steer clear of the south east slums at the Slade, and don’t wander south of the Churchill hospital.
