01 - Underworld

by Greg Cox

  Chapter Seven

  Muffled groans and whimpers escaped from the gagged mouths of the two captive humans. Strung up like sides of beef, and stripped to the waist, the men hung limply from a metal bar running the length of the abandoned subway station. Nylon webbing stretched across their mouths, while their mortal flesh was battered and bruised.

  Singe paid no attention to the men’s incoherent bleatings. They were just test animals, after all; he was interested in their blood chemistry, not their conversation.

  The derelict Metro station had been converted into a makeshift laboratory and infirmary. Test tubes, beakers, retorts, and other chemical apparatus were arranged on crude benches fashioned of splintered plywood and salvaged metal struts. Grungy plastic sheets dangled from the ceiling, dividing the chamber into separate compartments. Jury-rigged fluorescent lights provided just enough illumination to allow Singe to get on with his work. The dark, dingy locale was somewhat less than completely sterile, the lycan scientist acknowledged, but what could you do? Hiding out underground had its disadvantages.

  Photos, maps, and scribbled notes were plastered all over the cracked tile walls. Dog-eared pages bore long lists of names, each appellation meticulously scratched out. At the center of the collage of papers was an elaborate family tree headed by a single name written in large block letters: “CORVINUS.”

  It may or may not have been of interest to the two trussed-up humans that their names and faces were among those displayed on the cluttered walls. Under the circumstances, Singe rather doubted that his two unlucky specimens were much concerned with the finer points of their ancestry. Too bad, he reflected. It’s a fascinating story.

  A weather-faced lycan wearing a stained brown lab coat, Singe had a receding hairline, a wrinkled brow, and a sly, foxlike expression. He calmly fitted an empty syringe with a twenty-three-gauge hypodermic needle, then approached the mortal he’d designated Subject B. The human’s eyes widened in alarm at the sight of the massive needle, and his stifled cries took on a shriller tone. He thrashed helplessly within his restraints, unable to free himself.

  Singe slunk behind the terrified specimen and waited quietly for the human to abandon his futile efforts. Within moments, the exhausted mortal gave up his struggles and slumped with his bonds, surrendering to the inevitable. Singe raised the syringe and nonchalantly jabbed it into the specimen’s jugular vein.

  Subject B writhed in agony. A muffled shriek came through his gag, and his tortured veins stood out like vines of clinging ivy.

  “Come on, stop whining,” Singe said impatiently. He was hardly known for his soothing bedside manner. An Austrian accent gave away his nationality. “It can’t be that bad.”

  He tugged back on the plunger, and the thick syringe filled with dark venous blood. He waited until he had several cc’s of the vital fluid, then abruptly withdrew the needle from the specimen’s throat. Blood continued to stream from the site of the venipuncture, so Singe quickly slapped a bandage over the wound, just in case he needed to keep this specimen alive.

  An identical bandage already graced the throat of the other specimen, a.k.a. Subject A.

  Leaving the trembling human behind, he crossed the floor of the infirmary to a roughhewn counter, where he coolly and efficiently squirted the contents of the syringe into a pre-prepared glass beaker labeled B, Shrewd brown eyes examined the beaker, eager to see how this subject’s blood reacted to the catalyst. An electronic timer ticked off the seconds.

  A pity I can’t report my findings to any of the established medical journals, he reflected. Singe had been a prominent biochemist in his native Austria before being recruited into the pack by Lucian himself, who had offered the dying scientist immortality in exchange for his loyalty and genius. But I suppose wartime always imposes an element of secrecy.

  A door at the rear of the station slammed open, and Lucian swept into the laboratory, accompanied by a palpable aura of strength and authority. His glossy brown coat swept the floor.

  He did not waste time with pleasantries. “Any progress?” he asked.

  Singe dipped his head in deference to his pack leader. He opened his mouth to reply, only to be preempted by the sharp beep of yet another electronic timer. Ah, perfect timing! he thought with a smile. “Let’s find out.”

  He turned his attention to a different beaker, this one labeled A. He gave it a gentle swish, to mix the contents thoroughly, then watched in disappointment as the crimson solution turned completely black.

  “Negative,” he announced sadly. Again.

  Lucian frowned, clearly unhappy with the results of the experiment. Singe understood, however, that science was a matter of trial and error. Sooner or later, we’re bound to locate just the right specimen. He thrilled in anticipation of that glorious day, when they finally would gain the means to dispose of their vampiric cousins once and for all.

  But not today, it seemed.

  A philosophical expression creased his vulpine features as Singe trudged over to one of the lengthy lists of names posted to the walls. With a sigh of weary resignation, he scratched out the name of Subject A: “JAMES T. CORVIN.”

  Michael Corvin read the faded printing on the door of his locker at Karolyi Hospital. A wrinkled set of puke-green scrubs hung inside the locker as Michael clanged the metal door shut. Yawning, he pulled a plain black T-shirt over his head, getting ready to head home at last.

  It was five-thirty in the morning. Nearly nine hours had passed since the shoot-out in the subway station, and the blood on his street clothes had completely dried, but Michael still felt shell-shocked and on edge.

  “Heading home?”

  Michael turned to find his colleague, Adam Lockwood, standing behind him. A lanky man with short black hair, the other American resident was in his mid-twenties, but heavy-duty fatigue made him look older. His horn-rimmed glasses failed to conceal the dark, puffy circles shadowing his eyes. A stethoscope hung around his neck, and a pair of metal hemostats peeked from the corner of his rumpled white lab coat, as he sipped on his ninth or tenth cup of coffee.

  “Yeah,” Michael answered. “Nicholas gave me a few hours off.”

  Adam nodded sympathetically, and Michael wondered if he sounded half as wiped out as he felt. Probably, he thought.

  “By the way,” Adam added, “he said you did a terrific job tonight with that girl.”

  Michael managed a grim smile before grabbing his wind-breaker and shuffling wearily toward the exit. He couldn’t wait to get back to his apartment; with luck, he’d be in bed before the sun came up. But there was somewhere else he needed to visit first.

  Moments later, he was in the Intensive Care Unit, staring through a large glass window at the injured girl from the subway. The Hungarian teenager was fresh out of surgery, unconscious and on life support. Michael felt a flare of anger on the girl’s behalf. The poor kid had done nothing to deserve getting caught in that crossfire. She had just been in the wrong place at the wrong time.

  Like Samantha, he thought bleakly.

  He gazed at the injured girl. An electronic monitor, displaying illuminated green wave forms, kept watch over her blood pressure, temperature, and heart rate. Bags of whole blood flowed down IV tubing to replace the blood she had shed beneath Ferenciek Square.

  The surgeons had stabilized her condition, at least. With luck, she’d make it.

  This city is going straight to hell, he thought glumly.

  Hell, in fact, was several meters beneath Budapest, in a vast subterranean bunker system built during the Second World War. The cavernous excavation once had been used as a storehouse but had been forgotten long since and allowed to fall into jumbled disrepair. Chunks of rubble were strewn across the floor of the bunker, amidst filmy pools of stagnant water. Rusted chains dangled from the vaulted ceiling high overhead, scraping against the mangled remains of dilapidated metal catwalks. Spiders, cockroaches, and other vermin infested every corner of the forgotten sanctuary, scuttling along the walls, yet the hangar-
sized enclosure remained curiously free of rats or mice; even the hungriest rodent knew better than to venture into this man-made purgatory.

  Now employed as rudimentary hovels and barracks, the decaying bomb shelters teemed with predatory life. Flickering lights shone through cracked and sooty windows. Humanoid lycans went about their business, while other pack members, who preferred their canine form, lounged amid the scattered debris like junkyard dogs. Bestial blue eyes glowed from the shadows.

  Water dripped from the leaky ceiling, the constant tiny splashes echoing off the crumbling, mildewed walls. The fetid air was thick with the smell of unwashed bodies, both human and lupine, but despite the sizable population inhabiting the dismal bunker, not a single campfire burned. On two legs or four, lycans liked their meat raw and bloody.

  Beyond the huge central chamber, a dark and twisted maze of war-torn passageways, gloomy chambers, barred windows, and shattered porcelain tiles extended through the ruins of the old bunker system, like an expressionist lunatic asylum designed and built by the inmates themselves.

  Naked and bloody, Raze came staggering through one of these tenebrous corridors. He stumbled beneath the weight of Trix’s bullet-filled body, wincing in pain from the shining metal stars embedded in his own lacerated chest. He cursed the bloods in general and that star-throwing vampire bitch in particular with every agonizing step.

  Their time is coming, he remembered, drawing strength from grisly imaginings of the carnage in store. Just two more nights, then the stinking vampires will get what’s coming to them! Lucian has it all planned…

  At long last, after what felt like an endless, arduous trek through the underworld, he made his way to the crudely constructed infirmary where he found both Lucian and Singe. A pair of dead humans, their throats cleanly ripped out, still hung from the subway station’s soot-stained ceiling. From their lifeless state, Raze guessed that these latest experimental subjects had proven just as unsatisfactory as the many others before them, which only made Raze all the more upset and embarrassed about letting that American medical student get away.

  Damn bloods! he cursed again. It was all their fault!

  He dumped Trix’s bloody corpse onto an empty metal exam table, then looked over at Lucian and Singe. Pain and exhaustion were written all over his face, but he knew that Lucian would want his report before he could even think of getting rest or medical assistance.

  “We were ambushed,” he said tersely, leaning against the metal table for support. His deep voice rumbled like a kettle drum. “Death Dealers, three of them. We killed two, but one got away. A female.”

  Lucian greeted this news with a stern, inscrutable expression. “And the candidate?”

  Raze lowered his head. If he’d had a tail, he would have tucked it between his legs. “We lost him,” he admitted.

  Lucian expelled a slow, exasperated breath. Clenching his fists at his sides, he turned to stare morosely out the grease-smeared windows. “Must I do everything myself?” he muttered under his breath.

  Raze considered replying, then thought better of it. Better to redeem myself through action, not words, he decided, vowing not to let Michael Corvin—or any other future candidates—escape him again. And heaven help any sun-shirking vampire who gets in my way!

  The body on the table attracted Singe’s attention. “Look at this mess,” he said, tsk-tsking at the gory bullet holes desecrating Trix’s chest.

  “AG rounds. High content,” Raze supplied. “Kept him from making the change.”

  The Austrian scientist didn’t appear too broken up by Trix’s violent demise. He grabbed a pair of stainless-steel forceps and began rooting around in the dead lycan’s gaping chest wounds. Raze recoiled from the squishy noises made by the doctor’s ungentle explorations, but within moments, Singe had extracted the mushroom-shaped remains of a shiny silver bullet.

  “No use in digging out the rest,” he declared. Taking pains not to touch the toxic slug himself, the scientist dropped the squashed bullet onto a blood-stained metal tray. “Silver’s penetrated his organs. Regeneration’s impossible at this point.”

  Raze had figured as much. He knew a dead lycan when he smelled one. I owe you, bitch, he thought, picturing the female Death Dealer in his mind. You and the rest of your kind.

  Having written off Trix, Singe cast an appraising eye on Raze himself. “Ah, but there’s still hope for you, my friend.” He approached Raze, inspecting the larger lycan’s injuries. The silver points of the shuriken jutted from Raze’s dark skin. “So let’s take a closer look at these nasty little stickers, shall we?”

  He traded in his now bloody forceps for a black steel hex wrench and took hold of one of the throwing stars in Raze’s broad, hairless chest. The wounded lycan tensed in anticipation of the pain to come.

  “Relax,” Singe told him, sliding the wrench into a depression and slowly applying pressure. He turned the wrench, and Raze winced in agony. He bit down hard, clenching his jaws to keep from screaming, but a tortured grunt still escaped him. Undeterred by the other lycan’s obvious discomfort, Singe used the wrench to activate the star’s arming mechanism. Click. The points of the star retracted back into the silver disk, and Singe slowly worked the unlocked weapon out of Raze’s flesh, millimeter by excruciating millimeter. “See,” the doctor announced, holding up the bloody silver coin. “Not so bad.”

  Easy for you to say, Raze thought, glowering at the beaming lycan scientist. The extraction process had hurt like blazes, and there were still three more stars to go!

  Several paces away, Lucian finally emerged from his brooding silence. He turned and locked eyes with Raze. “The vampires didn’t realize you were following a human… did they, Raze?”

  The urgency in his voice cut through the pain of Raze’s ongoing ordeal. “No,” the bleeding lycan replied, even as Singe slid the hex wrench into the next star. “Aaarrgh!”

  Click. The second star was pulled from his chest. Raze gasped and swallowed the pain before speaking again. “I mean, I don’t think so.”

  Lucian pounced on the uncertainty in his voice. He advanced on Raze, extracting information the same way Singe was extracting the poisonous stars. “You don’t think, or you don’t know?”

  Singe inserted the wrench into the third star, and it took all of Raze’s self-control not to flinch. “I’m not sure,” he blurted, on the cusp of another starburst of pain. “Rrgggg!”

  Click. The star released its locking blades but refused to let go of Raze’s throbbing muscle and bone. Singe had to wiggle the star back and forth for a while, which hurt like hell, before the silver disk finally came free.

  “Ooh, that one was really in there,” Singe commented breezily, dropping it into the waste bin along with the rest of the silver detritus. Raze noticed that garbage bag was marked with the universal symbol for biohazardous waste; as far as lycans were concerned, silver was as toxic as plutonium.

  Tell me about it, he thought irritably. The beginnings of a growl rumbled at the back of his throat. His hands cramped into claws, the jagged nails extending imperceptibly.

  An electronic timer beeped, calling Singe away from him and granting Raze a momentary respite. The Austrian scientist hastily inspected a row of glass beakers, all of which contained an opaque black fluid. Raze had spent enough time around the laboratory to know that these were not the results Singe and Lucian were hoping for.

  “Negative, the lot,” Singe said, shaking his head. “We’re rapidly running out of candidates.” He walked over to the family tree on the wall and drew a bright red line under a single name located near the bottom of the complicated genealogical chart. “So I really must insist we have a look at this Michael Corvin.”

  Lucian gave Raze a scathing look, then stalked wordlessly out of the infirmary. Singe turned toward Raze, an amused expression upon his wizened face. “Congratulations. I think you just made the top of his shit list. After the vampires, of course.”

  It wasn’t my fault! Raze thought indignantly
. He wasn’t sure what angered him more, Lucian’s unspoken scorn or the doctor’s mockery. Infuriated, he didn’t wait for Singe to apply the wrench to the fourth and final throwing star.

  Snarling like a rabid hound, he yanked the offending missile from his flesh with his bare hands, ignoring the scalding heat of the exposed silver. The star’s razor-sharp barbs shredded his raw and mutilated flesh. Blood spurted from the wound, and steam rose from his fingertips, as Raze threw back his head and roared with all his might.

  Chapter Eight

  The atmosphere in the grand salon was refined, civilized. Bach’s Das wohltemperierte Klavier played softly in the background as the elite of the coven welcomed their distinguished visitors from America. Crimson nourishment, of a particularly choice pedigree, flowed freely, sipped from sparkling crystal chalices. Vampire ladies and gentlemen, in their finest and most stylish raiment, flirted decorously with their honored guests.

  Kraven should have been in his element. The gala reception was precisely the kind of chic, tony soiree he thrived on. Holding court near the entrance of the salon, accepting fulsome compliments from the visiting dignitaries while flattering them in turn, he found himself distracted and unable to enjoy himself. His eyes restlessly searched the faces of the crowd, looking for one particular vampiress, but Selene was nowhere to be seen.

  Devil take the woman! he thought, concealing his growing vexation from the distinguished guests conversing with him. Where in blazes is she now?

  He glanced over at a tall, black-haired vampire standing watch over the reception from a discreet corner of the room.

  This was Soren, the imposing head of Kraven’s not-so-secret police. Although reputed to be nearly as old as Viktor himself, Soren was usefully unambitious, preferring to place his considerable strength and lack of scruples at the disposal of his chosen leader. Of Black-Irish descent, he had the broad shoulders and baleful looks of his fierce ancestors. Soren once had been Viktor’s personal bodyguard; now he was Kraven’s.