Blood Red City

by Justin Richards

  Closer to them, the soldier who had made the first journey across the square rose up from his cover and hurled a stick grenade. It turned end over end in the air, disappearing into the ruins of the building where the shots had come from. A moment later, smoke and flame billowed out of the ruins, followed by the percussion of the blast.

  A volley of shots from one of the other Germans gave his colleague the chance to hurry across the square and join the one who had thrown the grenade. The man moved awkwardly, hampered by the heavy cylinders attached to his back.

  ‘Flamethrower,’ Hoffman said grimly.

  Even as he spoke, a jet of liquid fire shot out from where the two soldiers were sheltering. It bathed the outside of the broken building with orange, leaving the brickwork charred and black where it had been. The third soldier dashed across to join them as the fire ate into the ruins.

  ‘This way,’ Hoffman said in a low voice.

  To Guy’s surprise, he led them not away from the Germans, but towards them. Skirting round the shattered buildings, they approached the soldiers from behind and slightly above. Edging closer, Hoffman drew his handgun. Guy didn’t realise what he was intending until he rose up above a broken section of wall and fired.

  The first soldier was hit in the chest, knocked backwards. The second got off a single shot, which ricocheted off the brickwork close to Leo. Then Hoffman’s bullet dropped him like a stone. The third soldier was firing the flame thrower and didn’t seem to notice the fate of his comrades. His face snapped from grim determination to abrupt surprise. He fell backwards, a stream of flame arching up over the building as he toppled back, before it cut out.

  Hoffman jumped down into the rubble, picking his way past the fallen soldiers towards the building.

  He called out in Russian: ‘Are you in there? It’s safe – they’re dead.’

  Guy and Leo followed him as he clambered up into the wrecked house. Guy expected at any moment a bullet from the sniper would hammer into his chest. But they got inside with no problem.

  What remained of the internal walls was as blackened as the outside of the building. Several small fires still burned on the floor, and one in the remains of the ceiling. At the back of the devastated room, a dark shape lay stretched out – as if it had been trying to claw its way through the back wall. It was impossible to tell if it had been a man or a woman. All that remained was a smoking, blackened mess in the vague shape of a human being. The charred remains of a rifle lay twisted and melted close by.

  Movement in the far doorway. A rifled aimed at them. Guy swung round, bringing his gun up.

  ‘No!’ Hoffman shouted in Russian.

  The woman – barely out of her teens – stared across the room at them, eyes filled with a mixture of hatred and fear.

  ‘It’s all right,’ Hoffman said gently. ‘The Germans are dead. I shot them. We’re on your side.’

  The woman’s rifle wavered slightly, but she didn’t lower it. Instead she kept them covered as she edged across to the window and peered out at the bodies below. She stared down for a moment, then spat. The gun lowered, and the woman collapsed slowly to the ground, sobbing suddenly.

  Guy instinctively moved to comfort her. But Leo caught his arm. He pointed out of the window across the shattered square.

  ‘We’ve got more company.’

  Another group of German soldiers had appeared. They made their way cautiously through the rubble.

  ‘They must have heard the shots,’ Guy said. ‘Maybe even seen what happened.’

  Hoffman helped the woman to her feet as Guy and Leo watched the smudges of field-grey uniform almost invisible in the colourless landscape. Without comment, the woman levelled her rifle, steadying it on the broken edge of the window. She glanced back at the blackened mess on the other side of the room, then set her eye to the rifle sight.

  ‘Is this a good idea?’ Leo asked. ‘I can’t help feeling we’re both outnumbered and outgunned.’

  But before Guy or Hoffman could reply, the rifle kicked back in recoil. The sound of the shot was deafening inside the ruined room. Out in the square, a soldier cried out and collapsed behind the wall he had been clambering over.

  The woman worked the bolt on the rifle, muttering to herself as she did.

  The next shot kicked up a thin shower of dust from the rubble, missing its target by inches. The woman cursed, and reloaded.

  ‘Leo’s right,’ Guy said. ‘We should go. Can we persuade her to leave, do you think?’ he asked Hoffman.

  ‘I doubt it. But we may not have to.’

  His words were punctuated by a scream from outside. Guy turned quickly back to the remains of the window.

  In the distance a German soldier was silhouetted against the ruins. Upright, back arched, mouth open. A dark spear was thrust through his body from behind, emerging in a bloody mess from the front. As Guy watched, a dark shape reared up over the dying man. Its sharp, serrated tentacle withdrew abruptly from the soldier. For a moment the man didn’t move. Then he collapsed, falling straight down like a string-severed puppet.

  Hoffman spoke quickly to the woman. Her face was pale and her eyes wide, but she nodded, aimed, and squeezed the trigger of the rifle.

  The bullet hammered into the bloated dark body of the Vril. It exploded in a mass of tissue and viscous, steaming liquid.

  The other German soldiers were running, all thought of cover gone as more Vril emerged from the ground beneath them.

  ‘They must have burrowed under the rubble,’ Leo said. ‘Persistent buggers, aren’t they?’

  A soldier screamed as his legs were ripped from beneath him by a mass of dark tentacles. Another turned to fire at the Vril, but was dragged down before he could get off a shot.

  ‘How many can you see?’ Guy demanded.

  ‘Half a dozen,’ Leo said.

  ‘I count seven,’ Hoffman told them.

  Another soldier dropped, this time from a bullet fired by the sniper beside them. Her next shot severed a Vril’s tentacle, and the air was filled with inhuman screeches of pain, until she fired again and the creature was splattered across the ruins.

  The last of the soldiers was almost at the edge of the square when two Vril erupted from the broken ground beside him, hammering into his body and knocking him down. He was carrying a rifle, bayonet fixed to the end. It scythed through the glutinous body of one of the creatures, ripping it open. But the other Vril’s tentacles tore the gun away and the man’s screams faded and died.

  ‘Five left to deal with,’ Hoffman said grimly.

  ‘They’ll just hide in the rubble,’ Leo told him. ‘We’ll never pick them off from up here.’

  ‘And if we go down there…’ Guy said. ‘Well, we’ve seen what will happen. Unless…’ He leaned forward, peering out of the remains of the window to the bodies of the first group of soldiers, lying sprawled below.

  ‘What are you thinking?’ Hoffman said.

  ‘The flamethrower,’ Guy told him. ‘As long as there’s still fuel in those tanks.’

  ‘You know how to operate it?’ Leo asked.

  Guy shook his head. ‘Haven’t a clue.’

  ‘I do,’ Hoffman told them. ‘Come on.’ He turned to the woman. ‘Keep us covered, as best you can. But if things get too dangerous, just go. Leave us.’

  She started to protest, but Hoffman shook his head. ‘Just stay safe,’ he told her. ‘Keep doing what you do best. You’re a good shot.’

  Hoffman went first, clambering over the window edge and dropping easily to the ground on the other side. Guy followed, reaching up to help Leo down. Even so, Leo winced as he put weight on his injured leg.

  ‘We should hurry,’ Hoffman said.

  Across the ruined landscape they could see dark shapes oozing up from between piles of rubble, scuttling towards them.

  ‘They know we’re here,’ Leo said.

  ‘They can sense me, now they’re close,’ Hoffman said. ‘The axe too.’

  Together they struggled to unb
uckle the heavy fuel cylinders from the dead soldier. Above them the woman’s rifle cracked out several shots. One caught the edge of a Vril, sending it scuttling away, a dark trail leaking behind it.

  As Hoffman and Leo finally managed to get the flamethrower free, Guy drew his gun. He scanned the nearby rubble and debris for any sign of movement, any shadow that was just a little too dark. Something moved in the crevice between a fallen wall and the ruins of a doorway. Guy’s shot ricocheted off the stone.

  ‘Ready,’ Hoffman announced.

  He strode forward across the rubble, flanked by Leo and Guy. The rifle barrel in the window above them tracked their movement. As they neared the area where the Vril had attacked, they could see that the ground was a mass of squirming shadows. Sensing their approach, the creatures rose up suddenly in front of them.

  A rifle bullet took one immediately, splattering the gelatinous creature across its fellows. Undeterred, they surged forwards. Just as Hoffman ignited the end of the flamethrower. Fire jetted out, raking across the ground and scorching its way into the Vril. Black smoke billowed out. The shrieks of the creatures filled the air, and the sudden stench was impossible to ignore.

  Slowly and methodically, Hoffman worked his way across the square, squirting flames into the smallest opening in the rubble. Off to one side, a Vril suddenly hurled itself out of the ground, scuttling rapidly towards them. Guy’s shot knocked it sideways. A bullet from the sniper burst into its body. A sweep of the flamethrower reduced it to a charred mess imprinted on the rubble.

  It was not just the Vril that were the enemy. Guy was acutely aware that there might be more Germans in the area – drawn by the noise or following their comrades. Both he and Leo paid as much attention to the edges of the square as they did to the ground closer to them.

  Most of the Vril seemed to have been caught by surprise in Hoffman’s first assault. Another was trapped and burned in a narrow crack in the debris. Others might well have been incinerated as Hoffman made his way through the ruins. It was impossible to tell.

  Eventually they reached the end of the square. Hoffman sprayed flames across an area of unmarked ground, leaving a black trail. But the flames were less fierce than they had been as the fuel started to run out.

  ‘Is that all of them, do you think?’ Leo asked.

  ‘I don’t sense any more,’ Hoffman said.

  ‘But some of them could have got away?’ Guy said.

  Hoffman nodded. ‘It’s possible,’ he conceded. ‘There are always more.’

  ‘So what now?’ Leo asked.

  ‘Thank our friend,’ Guy suggested, glancing back towards the building where the woman was concealed. ‘Then I think it’s time we got out of this godless place.’

  CHAPTER 41

  She needed a bath after the flight. Sarah wondered if Jane Roylston would be there. But there was no sign of the woman. Either she was far more tidy than Sarah, or her bed had not been slept in. In fact there was little evidence that she had been there at all.

  Not that Sarah was too worried. Miss Manners would know where she was – she’d be sure to be keeping an eye on her friend. And if the woman had recovered from the ordeals inflected on her by Crowley then that had to be a good thing.

  Soap was a luxury that Sarah had not enjoyed for several days. She lay soaking in the bath, the water right up to the ‘plimsoll line’ painted on the inside to show how much she was permitted. But finally, she had to get out and face the real world again.

  Sarah went straight to the British Museum from her flat. But the door down to the vault below the Great Court was locked and there was no sign of Elizabeth. Hunting through the building, she finally found the elderly man that Elizabeth called Young Eddie sitting drinking tea in a storeroom.

  ‘Just taking a quick break,’ he apologised. ‘Elizabeth has left me a list of things she wants moved or sorted or catalogued.’

  ‘Where is she?’ Sarah asked.

  ‘Just having a day off. Or as close as she gets. She’ll be reading up on something or writing about something else. Then she’ll go and see a play, if there’s anything good on. She always wanted to be an actress, you know.’

  Sarah wasn’t sure what she would find at Station Z or where she might be sent by tomorrow, so she entrusted Vasilov’s letter to Eddie to pass on.

  ‘I’ll see she gets it,’ he assured her. ‘Vasilov is one of the good guys.’

  ‘You know him?’

  ‘We met. A long time ago. You ever heard the term Vrolak?’

  Sarah shook her head.

  ‘Well, pray you never do,’ he said, pushing the envelope into his jacket pocket. ‘Right then, best get back to work. No peace for the wicked – and if they don’t rest, neither should we.’

  * * *

  Hoffman had his own uniform stashed away together with his identify papers not far from the Square of Fallen Heroes. Heading back that way, Guy and Leo stripped the uniforms from two of the German soldiers they had killed earlier in the day. It was an unpleasant process, made more horrendous by the fact the rats had already found the bodies.

  ‘You sure about this?’ Guy asked, not for the first time as Hoffman buttoned his jacket.

  ‘This place is just a sample of how the world will be if the Vril take over,’ Hoffman said. ‘I came here to find someone, hoping she was here waiting for me. Alive and well. Now I hope to God that if she’s still here then she’s dead already. But whatever happened to her, she’s lost to me, I know that.’

  ‘But the risk,’ Davenport said. ‘Not just to us. You’re suggesting we gamble everything.’

  ‘It’s already in play. The Vril have two of the keys. I don’t know if they have another they can use. But I do know that we can’t destroy this one.’ He picked up the axe, and slammed it hard against the remains of a shattered wall. ‘You see,’ he said, showing them, ‘not even scratched. And if we keep it or hide it, the Vril will seek it out. They can feel it. It calls out to them. You thought you had one of the keys safe, and now they have it. Eventually they will get this one too. Oh, it might take months or even years, but they’ll get it, and when they do…’ He turned a full circle, his arms out to show them. ‘Well, you can see for yourselves.’

  ‘The axes stayed hidden for thousands of years up till now,’ Guy pointed out.

  ‘It’s only now they want them back,’ Hoffman told him. ‘Perhaps it’s only now that they found they were missing.’

  ‘What puzzles me,’ Davenport said, ‘is how they went missing in the first place. They were all down in the Labyrinth originally, we saw where they were kept. Who took them and why?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Hoffman said. ‘But I think I can guess. The legends have some truth in them. And we are not the first people to fight back against the Vril.’

  ‘Theseus and the Minotaur?’ Guy said. ‘Well, we saw the Minotaur in the Labyrinth, so that much is true.’

  ‘Did he rescue the girl or retrieve the axe?’ Davenport said. ‘Two of them perhaps. And so a legend is born.’

  ‘And the Minotaur?’ Guy asked.

  ‘The Vril have been here a very long time,’ Hoffman said. ‘Most of them are sleeping, deep underground, but not all. They experiment constantly. And that includes perfecting their Ubermensch technology – developing how they administer the infection, how they control people like me afterwards. Who’s to say they haven’t experimented with other creatures – bulls, hybrid humans?’

  ‘And people knew about them before,’ Guy said. ‘Was that writer, Bulwer-Lytton, picking up on the legends and myths, do you think?’

  ‘More likely his mind had some affinity with the Vril,’ Hoffman said. ‘They control the Ubermenschen by putting thoughts into their minds and enhancing those thoughts and instructions with the bracelets. But not everyone needs a bracelet to hear them. Bulwer-Lytton probably thought the ideas came to him in a dream, or that he just imagined them.’

  ‘Whereas in fact there was a mental link of some sort, he picked up on the
actual Vril transmissions and thoughts,’ Davenport said. ‘H.G. Wells too, perhaps, to a lesser extent. Well, it would also explain why the book caught on. The notion of Vril energy became a very popular one.’

  ‘I’d never heard of it before,’ Guy said.

  ‘Oh yes you had,’ Leo told him. ‘You ever had Bovril?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘That’s where the name came from. The “bo” from bovine, as it’s derived from beef. And the “Vril” was to imply it gives you mysterious energy. If Hoffman here is right, these creatures have been influencing our lives, our evolution, to a greater extent than we ever imagined.’

  ‘So let’s get out of this hell, and do what we can to stop them,’ Hoffman said. ‘At least, to prevent the Vril hibernating beneath Crete from ever waking up.’

  The greatest danger now they were in German uniform was from Russian snipers. They moved cautiously, keeping inside buildings as far as possible. Hoffman had a good idea of where the Russian strongholds were located. Being shot was barely more than an inconvenience to him, so Hoffman tested the open ground they had to cross by going first.

  It took them all night to reach the German lines, the sounds and smells of the battle enveloping them and the darkness constantly dispelled by fires and the flashes of explosions. But once they were behind the front line, Hoffman’s uniform got them out of the ruined city. They walked through fields of wounded men lying on the ground, the lucky ones getting some rudimentary attention.

  ‘They evacuate the ones that have a chance of surviving,’ Hoffman said. ‘If I can get us on an evacuation flight back to Germany then we can arrange transport to Crete.’

  ‘As simple as that?’ Guy asked.

  ‘I work directly for Heinrich Himmler,’ Hoffman said. ‘I may have been rather out of touch, but I’m hoping that will still count for something.’

  ‘How much does Himmler actually know?’ Leo asked. Speaking in English, he kept his voice low. ‘About the Vril, I mean?’

  ‘Enough. But he’s more interested in how he can exploit their knowledge and technology than in the threat they pose. He doesn’t see that at all. Most of what he knows comes from a Vril craft that crashed near Freiburg in 1936.’