To Hold the Bridge

by Garth Nix

  ‘See what I mean? And an Ancient vampire is faster than me.’

  That was blarney. Or at least I hoped it was. I’d met Ancient vampires who were as quick as I was, but not actually faster. Sometimes I did wonder what would happen if one day I was a fraction slower and one finally got me for good and all. Some days, I kind of hoped that it would happen.

  But not this day. I hadn’t had to go up against any vampires or anything else for over a month. I’d been surfing for the last two weeks, hanging out on the beach, eating well, drinking a little wine, and even letting down my guard long enough to spend a couple of nights with a girl who surfed better than me and didn’t mind having sex in total darkness with a guy who kept his T-shirt on and an old airline bag under the pillow.

  I was still feeling good from this little holiday, though I knew it would only ever be that. A few weeks snatched out of …

  ‘Okay,’ panted Mike. He wasn’t as stupid as I’d feared but he was a lot less fit than he looked. ‘You do your thing. We’ll take the vampires on the factory floor.’

  ‘Good,’ I replied. ‘Presuming I survive, I’ll come down and help you.’

  ‘What do … what do we do if we … if we’re losing?’ asked Jenny. She had her head well down, her chin almost tucked into her chest, and her body language screamed out that she was both scared and miserable. ‘I mean if there are more vampires, or if the Ancient one—’

  ‘We fight or we die,’ said Karl. ‘No one is allowed back out through the cordon until after dawn.’

  ‘Oh, I didn’t … I mean I read the brochure—’

  ‘You don’t have to go in,’ I said. ‘You can wait out here.’

  ‘I … I think I will,’ she said, without looking at the others. ‘I just can’t … now I’m here, I just can’t face it.’

  ‘Great!’ muttered Mike. ‘One of us down already.’

  ‘She’s too young,’ said Susan. I was surprised she’d speak up against Mike. I had her down as his personal doormat. ‘Don’t give her a hard time, Mike.’

  ‘No time for anything,’ I said. ‘They’re getting ready to power down the gate.’

  A cluster of regular police officers and VET agents were taking up positions around the gate in the cordon fence. We walked over, the others switching on helmet lights, drawing their handguns, and probably silently uttering last-minute prayers.

  The sergeant who’d wanted to give me a hard time looked at Mike, who gave him the thumbs-up. A siren sounded a slow whoop-whoop-whoop as a segment of the cordon fence powered down, the indicators along the top rail fading from a warning red to a dull green.

  ‘Go, go, go!’ shouted Mike, and he jogged forward, with Susan and Karl at his heels. I followed a few meters behind, but not too far. That sergeant had the control box for the gate and I didn’t trust him not to close it on my back and power it up at the same time. I really didn’t want to know what 6,600 volts at 500 milliamps would do to my unusual physiology. Or show anyone else what didn’t happen, more to the point.

  On the other hand, I didn’t want to get ahead of Mike and Co., either, because I already knew what being shot in the back by accident felt like, with lead and wooden bullets, not to mention ceramic-cased tungsten-tipped penetrator rounds, and I didn’t want to repeat the experience.

  They rushed the front door, Mike kicking it in and bulling through. The wood was rotten and the top panel had already fallen off, so this was less of an achievement than it might have been.

  Karl was quick with the flares, confirming his thorough training. Mike, on the other hand, just kept going, so the light was behind him as he opened the fire door to the left of the lobby.

  Bad move. There was a vampire behind the door, and while it was no ancient, it wasn’t newly hatched either. It wrapped its arms around Mike, holding on with the filaments that lined its forelegs, though to an uneducated observer it just looked like a fairly slight, tattered-rag-wearing human bear-hugging him with rather longer than usual arms.

  Mike screamed as the vampire started chewing on his helmet, ripping through the Kevlar layers like a buzz saw through softwood, pausing only to spit out bits of the material. Old steel helmets are better than the modern variety, but we live in an age that values only the new.

  Vamps like to get a good grip around their prey, particularly ones who carry weapons. There was nothing Mike could do and, as the vamp was already backing into the stairwell, only a second or two for someone else to do something.

  The vampire fell to the ground, its forearm filaments coming loose with a sticky popping sound, though they probably hadn’t penetrated Mike’s heavy clothes. I pulled the splinter out of its head and put the stake of almost two-thousand-year-old timber back in the bag before the others got a proper look at the odd silver sheen that came from deep within the wood.

  Karl dragged Mike back into the flare-light as Susan covered him. Both of them were pretty calm, I thought. At least they were still doing stuff, rather than freaking out.

  ‘Oh man,’ said Karl. He’d sat Mike up, and then had to catch him again as he fell backward. Out in the light, I saw that I’d waited just that second too long, perhaps from some subconscious dislike of the man. The last few vampire bites had not been just of Mike’s helmet.

  ‘What … what do we do?’ asked Susan. She turned to me, pointedly not looking at her dead husband.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. I really meant it, particularly since it was my slackness that had let the vamp finish him off. Mike was an idiot, but he didn’t deserve to die, and I could have saved him. ‘But he’s got to be dealt with the same way as the vampires now. Then you and Karl have to go down and clean out the rest. Otherwise they’ll kill you too.’

  It usually helps to state the situation clearly. Stave off the shock with the need to do something life-saving. Adrenaline focuses the mind wonderfully.

  Susan looked away for a couple of seconds. I thought she might vomit, but I’d underestimated her again. She turned back and, still holding her pistol in her right hand, reached into a thigh pocket and pulled out a Quick-Flame™.

  ‘I should be the one to do it,’ she said. Karl stepped back as she thumbed the Quick-Flame™ and dropped it on the corpse. The little cube deliquesced into a jelly film that spread over the torso of what had once been a man. Then, as it splashed on the floor, it woofed alight, burning blue.

  Susan watched the fire. I couldn’t see much of her face, but from what I could see, I thought she’d be okay for about an hour before the shock knocked her off her feet. Provided she got on with the job as soon as possible.

  ‘You’d better get going,’ I said. ‘If this one was already up here, the others might be out and about. Don’t get ahead of your flares.’

  ‘Right,’ muttered Karl. He took another flare from a belt pouch. ‘Ready, Susan?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Karl tossed the flare down the stairs. They both waited to see the glow of its light come back up, then Karl edged in, working the angle, his pistol ready. He fired almost immediately, two double taps, followed by the sound of a vamp falling back down the stairs.

  ‘Put two more in,’ I called out, but Karl was already firing again.

  ‘And stake it before you go past!’ I added as they both disappeared down the stairs.

  As soon as they were gone, I checked the smoldering remains of Mike. Quick-Flame™ cubes are all very well, but they don’t always burn everything, and if there’s a critical mass of organic material left then the vamp nanos can build a new one. A little, slow one, but little slow ones can grow up. I doubted there’d been enough exchange of blood to get full infestation, but it’s better to be sure, so I took out the splinter again and waved it over the fragments that were left.

  The sound of rapid gunshots began to echo up from below as I took off my T-shirt and tucked it in the back of my board shorts. The tau cross on my chest was already glowing softly with a silver light, the smart matter under the scars energizing as it detected vamp activity clo
se by. I couldn’t see the one on my back, but it would be doing the same thing. Together they were supposed to generate a field that repulsed the vampires and slowed them down if they got close, but it really only worked on the original versions. The latter-day generations of vampires were such bad copies that a lot of the original tech built to deter them simply missed the mark. Fortunately, being bad copies, the newer vampires were weaker, slower, less intelligent, and untrained.

  I took the main stairs up to the fourth floor. The Ancient vampire would already know I was coming, so there was no point skulking up the elevator shaft or the outside drain. Like its broodmates, it had been bred to be a perfect soldier at various levels of conflict, from the nanonic frontline where it tried to replicate itself in its enemies to the gross physical contest of actually duking it out. Back in the old days it might have had some distance weapons as well, but if there was one thing we’d managed right in the original mission, it was taking out the vamp weapons caches and resupply nodes.

  We did a lot of things right in the original mission. We succeeded rather too well, or at least so we thought at the time. If the victory hadn’t been so much faster than anticipated, the boss would never have had those years to fall in love with humans and then work out his crazy scheme to become their living god.

  Not so crazy perhaps, since it kind of worked, even after I tried to do my duty and stop him. In a halfhearted way, I suppose, because he was team leader and all that. But he was going totally against regulations. I reported it and I got the order, and the rest, as they say, is history …

  Using the splinter always reminds me of him, and the old days. There’s probably enough smart matter in the wood, encasing his DNA and his last download, to bring him back complete, if and when I ever finish this assignment and can signal for pickup. Though a court would probably confirm HQ’s original order and he’d be slowed into something close to a full stop anyway.

  But my mission won’t be over till the last vamp is burned to ash, and this infested Earth can be truly proclaimed clean.

  Which is likely to be a long, long time, and I reminded myself that daydreaming about the old days is not going to help take out the Ancient vampire ahead of me, let alone the many more in the world beyond.

  I took out the splinter and the silver knife and slung my Pan Am bag so it was comfortable, and got serious.

  I heard the Ancient moving around as I stepped into what was once the outer office. The big pot was surrounded by soil and there were dirty footprints up the wall, but I didn’t need to see them to know to look up. The vamps have a desire to dominate the high ground heavily programmed into them. They always go for the ceiling, up trees, up towers, up lampposts.

  This one was spread-eagled on the ceiling, gripping with its foreleg and trailing leg filaments as well as the hooks on what humans thought were fingers and toes. It was pretty big as vamps go, perhaps nine feet long and weighing in at around two hundred pounds. The ultrathin waist gave away its insectoid heritage, almost as much as a real close look at its mouth would. Not that you would want a real close look at a vamp’s mouth.

  It squealed when I came in and it caught the tau emissions. The squeal was basically an ultrasonic alarm oscillating through several wavelengths. The cops outside would hear it as an unearthly scream, when in fact it was more along the lines of a distress call and emergency rally beacon. If any of its brood survived down below, they’d drop whatever they might be doing – or chewing – and rush on up.

  The squeal was standard operating procedure, straight out of the manual. It followed up with more orthodox stuff, dropping straight onto me. I flipped on my back and struck with the splinter, but the vamp managed to flip itself in midair and bounce off the wall, coming to a stop in the far corner.

  It was fast, faster than any vamp I’d seen for a long time. I’d scratched it with the splinter, but no more than that. There was a line of silver across the dark red chitin of its chest, where the transferred smart matter was leeching the vampire’s internal electrical potential to build a bomb, but it would take at least five seconds to do that, which was way too long.

  I leapt and struck again and we conducted a kind of crazy ballet across the four walls, the ceiling, and the floor of the room. Anyone watching would have gotten motion sickness or eyeball fatigue, trying to catch blurs of movement.

  At 2.350 seconds in, it got a forearm around my left elbow and gave it a good hard pull, dislocating my arm at the shoulder. I knew then it really was ancient and had retained the programming needed to fight me. My joints have always been a weak point.

  It hurt. A lot. And it kept on hurting through several microseconds as the vamp tried to actually pull my arm off and at the same time twist itself around to start chewing on my leg.

  The tau field was discouraging the vamp, making it dump some of its internal nanoware, so that blood started geysering out of pinholes all over its body, but this was more of a nuisance for me than any major hindrance to it.

  In midsomersault, somewhere near the ceiling, with the thing trying to wrap itself around me, I dropped the silver knife. It wasn’t a real weapon, not like the splinter. I kept it for sentimental reasons as much as anything, though silver did have a deleterious effect on younger vamps. Since it was pure sentiment, I suppose I could have left it in coin form, but then I’d probably be forever dropping some in combat and having to waste time later picking them up. Besides, when silver was still the usual currency and they were still coins, I’d gotten drunk a few times and spent them, and it was way too big a hassle getting them back.

  The vamp took the knife-dropping as more significant than it was, which was one of the reasons I’d let it go. In the old days, I would have held something serious in my left hand, like a deweaving wand, which the vampire probably thought the knife was – and it wanted to get it and use it on me. It partially let go of my arm as it tried to catch the weapon, and at that precise moment, second 2.355, I feinted with the splinter, slid it along the thing’s attempted forearm block, and, reversing my elbow joint, stuck it right in the forehead.

  With the smart matter already at work from its previous scratch, internal explosion occurred immediately. I had shut my eyes in preparation, so I was only blown against the wall and not temporarily blinded as well..

  I assessed the damage as I wearily got back up. My left arm was fully dislocated, with the tendons ripped away, so I couldn’t put it back. It was going to have to hang for a day or two, hurting like crazy till it self-healed. Besides that, I had severe bruising to my lower back and ribs, which would also deliver some serious pain for a day or so.

  I hadn’t been hurt by a vamp as seriously for a long, long time, so I spent a few minutes searching through the scraps of mostly disintegrated vampire to find a piece big enough to meaningfully scan. Once I got it back to the jumper, I’d be able to pick it apart on the atomic level to find the serial number on some of its defunct nanoware.

  I put the scrap of what was probably skeleton in my flight bag, with the splinter and the silver knife, and wandered downstairs. I left the bag unzipped, because I hadn’t heard any firing for a while, which meant either Susan and Karl had cleaned up, or the vamps had cleaned up Susan and Karl. But I put my T-shirt back on. No need to scare the locals. It was surprisingly clean, considering. My skin and hair shed vampire blood, so the rest of me looked quite respectable as well. Apart from the arm hanging down like an orangutan’s, that is.

  I’d calculated the odds at about five to two that Susan and Karl would win, so I was pleased to see them in the entrance lobby. They both jumped when I came down the stairs, and I was ready to move if they shot at me, but they managed to control themselves.

  ‘Did you get them all?’ I asked. I didn’t move any closer.

  ‘Nine,’ said Karl. ‘Like you said. Nine holes in the ground, nine burned vampires.’

  ‘You didn’t get bitten?’

  ‘Does it look like we did?’ asked Susan with a shudder. She was clearly think
ing about Mike.

  ‘Vampires can infect with a small, tidy bite,’ I said. ‘Or even about half a cup of their saliva, via a kiss.’

  Susan did throw up then, which is what I wanted. She wouldn’t have if she’d been bitten. I was also telling the truth. While they were designed to be soldiers, the vampires were also made to be guerrilla fighters, working among the human population, infecting as many as possible in small, subtle ways. They only went for the big chow-down in full combat.

  ‘What about you?’ asked Karl. ‘You okay?’

  ‘You mean this?’ I asked, threshing my arm about like a tentacle, wincing as it made the pain ten times worse. ‘Dislocated. But I didn’t get bitten.’

  Neither had Karl, I was now sure. Even newly infected humans have something about them that gives their condition away, and I can always pick it.

  ‘Which means we can go and sit by the fence and wait till morning,’ I said cheerily. ‘You’ve done well.’

  Karl nodded wearily and got his hand under Susan’s elbow, lifting her up. She wiped her mouth and the two of them walked slowly to the door.

  I let them go first, which was kind of mean, because the VET have been known to harbor trigger-happy snipers. But there was no sudden death from above, so we walked over to the fence and then the two of them flopped down on the ground and Karl began to laugh hysterically.

  I left them to it and wandered over to the gate.

  ‘You can let me out now,’ I called to the Sergeant. ‘My work here is almost done.’

  ‘No one comes out till after dawn,’ replied the guardian of the city.

  ‘Except me,’ I agreed. ‘Check with Lieutenant Harman.’

  Which goes to show that I can read ID labels, even little ones on metal-mesh skinsuits.

  The sergeant didn’t need to check. Lieutenant Harman was already looming up behind him. They had a short but spirited conversation, the sergeant told Karl and Susan to stay where they were, which was still lying on the ground essentially in severe shock, and they powered down the gate for about thirty seconds and I came out.