Blood Winter

by S. J. Coles

  I thought he might hit me, but instead he just stared. “I didn’t believe it,” he breathed, “but it’s true, isn’t it?”

  “What’s true?”

  He kept staring at me like I was something he’d found rotting under a stone. “Karlsson reckoned you had more than just Bloodlust for this thing. And he was right right, wasn’t he? Fuck me. I knew you were bent, but I didn’t think you were perverted as well.”

  “You don’t know—”

  “There’s CCTV of you getting into its car and driving out of Glasgow,” Ogdell countered. “Willingly. Leaving your little friends behind. What would make you abandon them like that without a struggle, I wonder? Two people you supposedly care about, leaving them to face what the rest of us are facing alone?”

  “You have no idea what you are talking about.”

  “You let that thing loose.” His voice rose. “You, the Lord of the Manor, King of the Hill, judgmental, self-righteous arsehole, helped it escape to go on a blood-rampage. And now you’re protecting it for the sake of a Blood-fueled fuck?”

  I managed to land one punch before a guard wrestled me back. Ogdell was laughing, though his eyes were watering and his nose bled into his mouth, reddening his teeth.

  “Like that, do you?” he said, wiping his nose with the back of his hand. “The sight of blood? Turn you on, does it?” He spat in my face. I swore, wiping at my eyes. “You’re the degenerate here, MacCarthy.”

  “At least my degeneracy was consensual.”

  He grabbed me by the hair, spittle and blood speckling my face as he shouted, “Tell me where that thing is or I will put bullets in your head.”

  “You don’t scare me.”

  He laughed again. “Then you’re even dumber than I thought.” He gestured to the woman, who raised her gun.

  “You think shooting me will change my mind?”

  A slow grin split his face like a wound. “All right. How about I shoot Miss Carlisle?” He put his head over to one side. “Or possibly Mr. Carlisle? Which would be more effective, do you think?”

  “You’re crazy.”

  “You’re crazy if you think I’m going to let you get out of this with anything you care about in one piece. And I’m not just talking about Glenroe. Which I will take, by the way, just to grind to rubble. Karlsson was the one who wanted it standing, but we’re way beyond that now.” He leaned close, his voice dangerously low. “I’ll kill Megan Carlisle and her brother. Then I’ll make you watch as I kill the haemophile…slowly.”

  “You’re bluffing.”

  “Am I?”

  “You’re a self-indulgent narcissist prick with too much money and not enough balls.”

  His smile didn’t falter. “Not seen the news, have you? Riots. Shootings. Haemophiles hunted, humans attacked in the night. All bets are off, Lord Aviemore. It’s every man for himself.”

  “It won’t last,” I countered. “It can’t last.”

  “Maybe not,” he replied. “But I’m going to make the most of it while it does.”

  “I was wrong,” I murmured. “You’re not just crazy. You’re full-blown criminally insane.”

  “Says the man who let my family be slaughtered then fucked the monster that butchered them.” He narrowed his eyes. “I bet he let you watch. Did you lick their blood off his hands? Or suck it off his—”

  “Shut it!” My pulse thundered in my hears. My breath misted in the air, but I was hot, the sweat standing out on my palms. He watched me hungrily, his eyes empty as a shark’s.

  “You know what you’ve done,” he said quietly. “Help me find the thing and I’ll put you out of your misery quickly.”

  I clenched my teeth shut, fighting back a roll of nausea. My fingers dug into the fabric of the couch, the couch where I’d been with Terje, where I’d given him everything I was, praying only that he’d feel something back, without sparing a thought for what was going on beyond the cottage walls.

  He hadn’t done these things, but he hadn’t stopped them. And I’d wanted him anyway. Still wanted him—and Jon Ogdell knew it.

  “Still no answer?” he said after another loaded silence. He shook his head in disappointment. “So that’s that. Tie him up.” I tried to run but the three guards were too fast. They bound my hands and feet with zip-ties then secured my ankle to the leg of the couch, pulling the plastic loops cruelly tight.

  “Those cupboards are empty. But the fridge is full. This would suggest to me,” Ogdell said, kneeling to pile the last logs into the stove, “that our toothy friend is planning to return…and soon.” He lit the stove and shut its screen, staring into the gathering flames.

  “You’re wasting your time. He’s not coming back.”

  “It won’t let its pet perish from starvation. Not before it had had its fill, that is.” He sent me a poisonous look. “So we wait.”

  “I’m not going to help you do this. You might as well shoot me now.”

  “And let you miss out on all the fun?” He was no longer smiling. “Oh no, Lord Aviemore. I’m not nearly through with you yet. Very obliging of the haemophile to bring you somewhere without witnesses. I must remember to thank it before I cut its throat.”

  The wood-burner gradually fought back the chill in the air. The guards paced, taking turns keeping their weapons trained on me and going to the windows to peer out into the falling snow. Ogdell sat in the corner, staring at me. I became very thirsty then even more hungry, but I refused to speak, refused to ask for anything. I schooled my face when I remembered my penknife was in my pocket. But I didn’t dare reach for it with the woman’s gun aimed at my head.

  I prayed for something to distract them, but the day crawled on and nothing happened. No one spoke. They barely moved. For the first time in days, I dreaded night coming. The shadows gathered and the male guards lit a lamp then drew all the blinds but one. They stood watch at the window like hawks. Ogdell, returning from the bathroom, resumed his seat, alternating between watching the guards and watching me. If anything, he’d grown edgier, shifting in the chair, biting his nails, darting his eyes around the room.

  I sat in silence whilst my mind reeled through and rejected plan after plan. Night fell. Still nothing happened. As the hours wore on, the guards began to glance amongst themselves, muttering in low voices. Ogdell paced to the window then back to his chair. He ran his hands through his hair, the hundred-quid haircut sticking up in every direction. Blood flamed in his cheeks. He muttered to himself between clenched teeth.

  My relief that Terje had stayed away warred with the pain at the knowledge that he’d abandoned me.

  Ogdell was growing frenzied when the guard at the window tensed. “Shit,” he muttered.

  Ogdell’s head snapped up. “What is it?”

  “Kill the light,” he hissed, pulling night-vision goggles from his utility belt. The other man doused the lamp whilst the woman stiffened next to me.

  “What is it?” Ogdell repeated, voice tight, blundering toward the window in the darkness.

  “Quiet,” the man ordered and I heard the clicks of weapons being readied.

  “I’m the one paying you. Tell me what the hell is going on.”

  “There’s something out there.”

  “What?”

  There was a series of loud bangs followed by a smashing noise and the banshee screech of tearing metal.

  “What the fuck was that?” Fear sharpened the mania in Ogdell’s voice.

  “Something’s gone for the car,” murmured the guard. “Burst the tires. Smashed the windscreen.”

  “What?”

  “I can’t see what,” the other continued. His silhouette was black against the paler square of darkness of the window. The small red dots from the guard’s communicators jerked about in the blackness.

  “I didn’t hear a car, did you?”

  “There is no car,” the other man muttered.

  “Bollocks,” Ogdell growled. “Nothing could get out here without—”

  Someone knocke
d on the door—three slow, hard knocks. My heart went into my boots.

  “Why’s it knocking?” the woman breathed. “Surely it has a key?”

  Silence filled the room like concrete. I strained at the ties binding my feet and my heart hammered at my ribcage. I prayed the woman was focused on the door and fumbled for my penknife. I hacked at the bindings on my feet, sweat standing out on my face, whilst the others took up positions around the door.

  “Don’t let it get close,” someone muttered. “Shoot first.”

  “Get it alive,” Ogdell hissed. “Hear me? Alive.”

  “On three. One. Two. Three.”

  The door slammed open. Cold air rushed in. Boots thundered on the carpet then crunched on snow. The bindings on my feet gave. I sawed through the ties on my wrists and crept toward the door, my pulse thundering in my throat. The air tasted like ice. The guards fanned out, weapons raised, the red lights from their radios bobbing about in the darkness.

  “Anything?”

  “Negative.”

  “Where the hell’d it go?”

  A scream pulled the air apart, followed by a snap then a hideous tearing noise.

  “Depak? Depak!”

  “What’s happening?” Ogdell yelled from somewhere in the darkness. A torch flashed on, flooding the night with white light.

  “Shut that off,” another guard ordered.

  “Like hell…” Ogdell trailed off as the beam swept over a spreading red stain in the snow.

  “Depak?” The woman’s voice was tight.

  The beam revealed a heavy boot, a black-clad leg, a torso. The clothes were soaked with something dark. His gun lay at his side, his fingers still curled around the grip. I couldn’t look away, even when the beam swept over the place where his head should be. I had time to make out the remains of his neck, the ocean of blood staining the snow and the jutting white of broken bone before I bent over and vomited.

  “Shit, shit, shit,” Ogdell swore over and over again. “Shoot. Shoot, you idiots.”

  “Stay back,” ordered one of the remaining guards, panic sharpening the words. “Stay behind us. Don’t move.”

  “Don’t move?” Ogdell screamed. “It’s out there! Get it! Get it now.”

  “If we miss its head, it’ll make it worse—”

  The bone-jarring noise of screeching metal silenced them. They spun, Ogdell’s torch illuminating the 4x4. Four ragged scratches, like the marks of fingernails, were torn clean through the bonnet.

  I ran.

  “MacCarthy!” Ogdell was nearly shrieking now. “He’s getting away.”

  Bullets thundered into the snow around me. Someone fired in another direction with a wild cry. Then came another sound, above and below all the panicked noises of the humans. A laugh. A high, eerie laugh in the wind.

  Adrenaline surged through me. I pelted uphill, wrestling through the snow. Above the sound of my heaving breaths and thundering pulse came the confused sounds of pursuit. Ogdell’s torch beam swung drunkenly around me as he shouted hysterical orders. More rounds were fired, but struggling uphill in the snow threw off their aim. I ran, refusing to think about rocks, cliffs, caves. When I stumbled onto the plateau and almost into the jutting rock that marked the start of the ridge, I scrabbled around it and squatted in its lee, out of the wind, making myself as small as possible, trying not to think about the yawning gulf at my side. I heard their labored approach and saw the torch beam sweeping the snow as they got close.

  “Follow the trail,” Ogdell ordered. “Find him. He’s our only leverage—”

  A high-pitched scream rent the air, followed by a bowel-churning bubbling noise. Just as suddenly as it started, it was cut off. Someone yelled and opened fire. The air was torn apart by the flash and thunder of gunfire. When it was over, the silence that fell was heavier than lead. I heard their ragged breathing and Ogdell’s mumbled curses.

  “Where’s Willman?”

  “She’s dead.”

  “Fuck.”

  “This is not good,” the remaining guard said. “We need to get to a defensible position.”

  “Defensible my arse,” Ogdell spat. “Fucking kill it, already.”

  “I can’t see it,” the guard ground out. “I can’t hear it. Out in the open like this, we’re sitting ducks.”

  “This is what you do,” Ogdell cried. “You caught it alive once before. Killing it should be easy.”

  “That was a planned operation,” the guard growled back, “in a known environment. We warned you about trying to ambush it out here when it’s on the offensive.”

  “Just fucking shoot it,” Ogdell ordered.

  “I can’t—”

  “There are caves,” I called. The two men swore and jerked around, the torch beam bobbing about the wind-whipped plateau.

  “MacCarthy? Show your face, you cowardly shit.”

  “Kill me and you’re both dead,” I called. I heard them muttering, the crunch of boots in the snow. “Give me some night-goggles and I’ll find the caves. We can defend ourselves better there.”

  “Don’t listen to him,” Ogdell ground out. “He’s setting us up.”

  “I’m trying to keep us all alive.”

  “Bullshit,” Ogdell yelled with mounting hysteria. “You’re in love with the damn thing.”

  The words went through me like a knife. I marshalled my strength and called back, “This isn’t Terje.”

  “You’re lying.”

  “I’m not,” I cried. “Listen… Either shoot me and wait for this thing to come tear you apart or give me the goggles, accept my help, and maybe we have a chance.”

  “I have spare goggles,” the guard called over the babbled objections of his employer. “Where are you?”

  I took a deep breath of the freezing air and stepped into the beam of the torch. Ogdell barked something incomprehensible but the guard dragged him back with a hand on his elbow. He held out a pair of goggles. “Get us somewhere enclosed,” he said. “I’ll do the rest.”

  I put the goggles on, wincing at the sticky substance coating the eyepiece. The guard ordered Ogdell to shut off the torch, which he did only after he, too, was given goggles. I blinked through the lenses at a world washed dull green. Blackness yawned on my left. I shuddered at how close I’d been to the edge before turning and hurrying along the angled, snowy ridge. I tried to dredge up the map of the area in my head, battling to keep my focus in the whipping wind and flurried snow. My feet pulsed with cold, my breathing was shallow and my chest tight. Ogdell had fallen quiet, but he was close enough behind me for me to hear his chattering teeth. When I glanced back, his face, ghostly-green in the goggles, was a rictus of fury and fear. The remaining guard brought up the rear, his weapon ready, sweeping this way and that in the dark.

  We froze when low, almost-inaudible laughter was whisked toward us on the wind.

  “It’s coming,” Ogdell whimpered.

  “Hurry,” was all I managed to get out. I struggled on, scanning for any sign of the rock shelf that marked the way to the caves. I cried out, beyond words, when we scrambled over a rise and I made it out ahead, overhanging the swirling shadows like the beak of some monstrous bird. The snow had obscured the scree slide under its overhang, but I scrambled blindly on, my hands so cold that they were beyond pain. The icy scree shifted. I clung on and kept moving, not letting myself still long enough to be swept away. Ogdell came down behind me, too close, spitting and swearing as the ground gave under his feet.

  I grabbed his arm to stop his fall, grunting with the effort. He hung over nothing for an agonizing moment before he got his feet under him again.

  “Don’t stop moving,” I ground out, “and don’t get too close to me.”

  “Get a fucking move on then, MacCarthy.”

  I scrambled farther and, finally, spotted a jagged black opening, rimmed in snow. My arms, legs and shoulders were all pulsing with the effort, but I gave it one final push, then I was crabbing, stiff-limbed, down into the cave, falling out of rea
ch of the wind with palpable relief. My feet hit level ground and I heard the muffled curses and clatters of the other two men making their way down behind me.

  We all stood panting in the dark.

  “We need to get deeper,” the guard muttered. Too breathless to question, we followed him. The jagged ceiling dropped claustrophobically low overhead. The walls bellied in then fell away in stony folds. We scrambled over scree, rock piles and icy stones. We didn’t stop until our way was blocked by a fall of boulders. I wrapped my arms around myself, feeling like I could drop to the cold stone right there, adrenaline the only thing keeping me on my feet.

  The guard took up position with his gun aimed at the narrow gap we’d just squeezed through. Our breaths misted in the air, toxic green in the goggles. My heart continued to race. Minutes slid by. Nothing happened. The wind groaned through the cave opening like some long-buried monster waking in pain. The guard stiffened.

  “What is it?” I murmured.

  “Stay back.”

  A shadow moved across the entrance to our hiding place. Ogdell swore and pressed himself against the rock. There were muttered curses and the sound of fumbling, and his torch beam flooded the enclosed space, blindingly bright in the goggles. I just had time to make out a tall, white-faced figure staring at us and grinning, when the guard opened fire.

  I dropped to the ground, covering my head. Shards of rock rained down and bullets ricocheted off and exploded in the stone. The noise was deafening. It seemed to go on forever. When it stopped, my ears were ringing so loud that I only just made out the sound of him frantically reloading. I raised my head just in time to see a white hand whip out of the shadows, quicker than a snake, and latch on to the man’s throat. He let out a strangled yell that spluttered into gasps as the strong fingers and razor-sharp nails crushed into his windpipe and tore open the flesh. Blood fountained into the air. Ogdell dropped his torch to the floor. I heard him scrambling at the rock, gibbering curses and prayers.

  I tore off the goggles, now cracked and useless, and reached for the dropped torch. The guard’s body, throat a ragged mess of flesh and bubbling blood, crumpled into the circle of light and was still. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t breathe.