“Oh, we’ve got you now, soldier boy!”
Then, briefly, Beamish’s panting growing louder and louder in his throat mike…and what sounded like a sharp intake of breath at the beginning of a fresh bout of shrieking…until a tearing sound cut it off before it could get started—
—And finally silence…
“What?” Bently asked of no one in particular. “What?”
And from the portside party: “Sir, we’ve got the woman—I think. But these dead ’uns—I don’t understand it—they’ve got body heat. They’re showing up on our nite-lites!”
“What do you mean you think you’ve got her?” (This was from Bently. Suddenly things were on the move—moving too fast for him—and he was having difficulty staying ahead of them.)
“She…she’s hanging on to us,” came the reply. “And God, she’s strong! And the dead ’uns under this busted furniture…they’re not dead! They’re fucking mobile!”
“We’re coming up!” Bently yelled over the muted but frantic clatter of booted feet on polished wooden stairs. And: “Mr. Beamish?” he commenced calling. “Beamish? Lieutenant Beamish? Where are you?…Where the fuck are you?”
But Beamish didn’t answer…
Aboard the Sea King, the face of the marine called Williams was a picture of fear. He had heard Lieutenant Beamish’s last transmission; also the gunfire and Beamish’s screams, which he would have heard anyway and without the aid of his radio.
The E-Branch team had heard them, too, and now Trask turned to the locator David Chung, and said, “What do you make of it?”
“Make of it?” Chung flinched from the suddenness, the sharpness of Trask’s tone. The locator’s face had turned a very pale shade of yellow. “They’re everywhere, that’s what I make of it! They’re under us and all around us. We’re in the midst of them. The only place where they aren’t is above us…which is where we should be! They’re on all the lower decks—maybe even this deck—hiding in the shadows. It’s not dark enough for them up here yet, but it’s getting darker all the time! And I can feel them creeping.”
“Liz?” said Trask.
“They’re like one big mind,” she answered. “One big silent but seething mind. And there’s only one thought in that awful, awesome mass mind: blood! The picture I’m getting is red, Ben. It’s red with blood!”
“Ian?” said Trask, turning to the precog.
Ian Goodly was white as death itself. Swaying this way and that where he was still hooked up, he said, “I see what Liz and David saw: a sea of red. But it’s not for us. We…we’re getting out of this.”
“What the fuck are you lot talking about?” Williams’s eyes swivelled this way and that. He leaned out of the big chopper’s door, looked toward the Star’s prow to see if he could discover what had happened to Beamish. But his weapon remained pointing at Jake’s middle, only inches away, and Jake couldn’t make his move.
And now, too late, you see that I was correct, said Korath in Jake’s mind. If you had knocked this one down, Necroscope—if you’d crippled or killed him—he wouldn’t be blocking your way now.
And I’d be a murderer, Jake answered. Anyway, it’s easy to be wise after the fact.
But I was wise before the fact, said Korath.
“Williams,” said Trask, “you’ve got to let us off this helicopter. You heard those screams, those gunshots, but you don’t have any idea what they meant. They meant that Beamish is dead. And any time now the same thing will apply to your Warrant Officer and friends. They don’t know what they’re up against, and we’re the only ones who can help them.”
Taking Trask’s elbow, the cadaverous Goodly shook his head and said, “No, Ben. When I said we would get out of this, I was talking about us, E-Branch. I didn’t say anything—didn’t see anything—of them except for the pilot. Obviously he will make it, too. But as for the rest of them, no. Not even this one.” He looked at Williams…looked pityingly at him.
“So if you’re right,” said Jake, glancing first at the precog and then at Williams, “it should be okay to tell him what’s going on.” (He almost added, “For after all, he isn’t going to be repeating it to anyone, now is he?”)
“What the fuck is all this mumbling?” Williams was sweating now, shaking in his boots. “What? You’re trying to talk me down or something? I have my…I have my orders.”
“To hell with your orders!” Jake told him, without waiting for Trask’s say-so. “You want to know what we’re talking about? We’re talking about vampires. That’s what this so-called infection is all about. The ex-passengers and crew of this ship have become vampires—and all of your mates are meat!”
For a moment Williams’s brow was lined in a frozen frown—before his lips turned down in a sneer of disbelief. “You fucking…” he began to say. But then, as gunshots sounded from the port stairwell, his eyes went wide again and he leaned from the door to look in that direction. With the barrel of the marine’s rifle momentarily deflected, Jake saw his opportunity.
Making a grab for the weapon, he simultaneously lashed out at the man holding it. Jake hit hard, a blow to Williams’s face that drove him even farther out of the helicopter. The Old Lidesci had been expecting some such; the razor-sharp blade of his machete hissed where it sliced through the marine’s safety harness. Windmilling his arms, Williams uttered an outraged cry as he released his rifle, crashed down onto the boarding ramp, and bounced off onto the deck.
Crowding the doorway, Trask and his people looked down on the fallen marine. For a moment he lay there in the shadows—the shadow of the Sea King, itself in the shadow of the jagged central fang of the little island—with his face contorted in rage. Then he made to get to his feet.
But among those gradually lengthening shadows were several much darker ones that were moving a lot faster, and pale, eager hands were already reaching for Williams from under the bulk of the helicopter!
He didn’t see what grabbed him, but he certainly felt those powerful hands closing on his ankles, the terrible urgency with which they dragged him out of sight.
Williams screamed high and shrill—just once and briefly—a scream that quickly gurgled down into silence. And all across the Evening Star’s decks the shadows came alive!
In that same instant the tableau of frozen faces in the Sea King’s doorway shattered into motion, as Trask yelled, “That is what we’re here for! We want one of those! Ian and David, guard the door and look after the pilot. Liz, Jake, Lardis…you’re with me…”
Three minutes earlier, and one and a half flights down the port stairwell:
WO2 Bently and his number two had been forced to slow down where broken furniture littered the stairs. Now, as they clambered their way up toward a right-angled bend, a deafening burst of gunfire sounded from just around the corner.
Brought up short by the sound of the shooting, the spanging of ricochets, and the terrified cries of men-at-arms around the bend, Bently’s thermal imaging showed him a tall man staggering into view, his head a crimson blob that appeared to be spraying red out the back like the tail of a comet. Both the Warrant Officer and his subordinate were so astonished that they fell back against opposite walls as this figure passed between them, somehow staying erect as it went stumbling down the stairwell.
But the junior rank had to know what this thing was that he was seeing. And in the deep gloom of the confined area he switched off his nite-lites in favour of normal vision.
“G-God!” he said then, despite that he still wasn’t absolutely certain. But what the thing had looked like before it fell over and went tumbling down the stair like a scarecrow released from its pole…was a man in an evening suit with the back of his head blown off!
And that wasn’t all the junior ranker saw. For creeping up the stairs, following close behind him and his superior, an incredible swarm of silent night-black figures filled the narrow passage wall to wall and as far back as could be seen!
Bently saw them, too—the weird ebb and flow of
their low body heat in his nite-lites—and the red blaze of their feral, triangular eyes!
Then, over a renewed outburst of shooting and screams from around the bend—coming right into Bently’s ear from the receiver in his headset—he heard his underling’s hoarse, terrified whisper, “Wh-what the hell? What are they, s-sir? Shall I d-dart one?”
Bently switched his rifle to rapid-fire, and with his mouth half-open breathed, “Dart one? Throw your popgun away, son, and cut the fuckers down!”
Which was perhaps three seconds before the wave from below, and another from above, washed over them…
Trask and Jake went down the ramp side by side, turning off at the bottom to fire into the darkness beneath the helicopter. In the gloom under there, a whole nest of triangular eyes—maybe ten pairs—shrank back from them, their owners squealing their terror of the hot death that the two men poured into them. Jake fired full metal jacket, and Trask snub-nosed silver. And vampires or mere mortals, flesh and blood simply couldn’t withstand the onslaught. The shadows shrank back, and the deck behind the Sea King turned darker as the vampire flood dispersed in every direction, taking cover in every hiding place.
At the same time Liz and Lardis had come down the ramp more slowly, spraying aerosols until the air was hot with the stench of cordite and garlic. Of Williams there was no trace; wherever the “shadows” had gone, he had gone with them.
Vavara’s spawn, most definitely! Korath told Jake. Her essence is in them…and copiously! See how easily they disguise themselves, melting into shadows and darkness?
“But they’re barely thralls,” said Jake out loud.
Aye, but a good many are hers, taken by Vavara or those she took first. And as I said, she wasn’t sparing with her essence.
Trask, who thought Jake had been speaking to him, answered, “Vampires, thralls, lieutenants: I don’t give a damn what they are—they’re undead and should be dead!”
A fresh burst of shooting and muted screaming sounded from the port stairwell. Looking that way, Jake said, “Shouldn’t we try to do something about those poor bastards?”
No, said Korath. It’s far too late. There were only four of them, whelmed under by a horde. Even with your superior weapons you wouldn’t stand a chance. And moment by moment the darkness deepens. Even here on the deck you are far from safe.
Jake looked all around, and Korath was right: the “shadows” were creeping again, and feral gleams lit the deeper gloom.
“You heard what the precog said,” Trask answered hoarsely, as the chaotic chattering of gunfire ceased and its echoes were replaced by gurgling screams, which in their turn were abruptly smothered. “We can’t help anyone. They’re gone, Jake.”
“Look!” Liz cried.
“Help me!” a young girl’s plea rang out, as she came staggering from the direction of the exhaust array in the stern of the ship. “Oh, won’t somebody please help me! I’ve been hiding from them! Hiding from…from all the rape and the murder!”
She was maybe eighteen, had a beautiful figure, and in normal circumstances would be lovely. Now her makeup was streaked from her tears, and her cocktail dress was hanging by a single strap, leaving her right breast bare. Her blonde hair was everywhere, stringy and unkempt, falling over her face and shoulders as she came stumbling. Her panties, snagged on the buckle of a shoe, trailed her left ankle.
The sight of her stopped Trask and his people short. “Jesus Christ!” Liz heard Trask’s gasp. And: “Thank God I don’t have a daughter, because she could be it.”
For Liz this was a new situation; she’d never seen anything like it before; automatically, she stepped off the helicopter’s ramp and moved toward what looked like a second survivor. Jake, on the other hand, had been in precisely this situation before, in Australia, and he wasn’t about to be taken in a second time. Side by side with Liz, he advanced on the girl as she came on, arms reaching.
Even so, it was a hard thing to do: to point the rifle at her and pull the trigger. So hard that at first he couldn’t do it. What if she really was a survivor?
“You poor thing!” said Liz, moving quickly forward.
“Liz!” Jake cautioned her, but needlessly, for in fact she knew exactly what she was doing. Then, when it seemed that the girl was about to fall into her arms (and as the eerily mobile pools of shadow on the deck crept forward in the rapidly deepening gloom), Liz lifted her hand to arm’s length, and instead of gathering the “poor thing” up sprayed oil of garlic directly into her face.
The effect was immediate and dramatic.
Before, the girl had been slumped, staggering, her shoulders drooping, her eyes mainly hidden in tangles of matted hair. Now: it was as if Jake really had pulled the trigger! She shot upright straight as a rod, her hair straightening in an effect that was almost electric, flying out from her head and framing it in spiky tufts. Her eyes, previously weepy and disguised by running mascara, opened wide in shock and fear, blazing yellow as boiling sulphur pits. And Liz said:
“Surrounded by thoughts as red and evil as hell, I had to close my mind to them or lose it altogether. And so I couldn’t be sure—until now.”
And merely pointing his weapon, scarcely taking aim at all, Jake pulled the trigger. On rapid-fire his weapon stuttered an obscene war cry, ripping the girl’s heart to pieces inside her. Her feet left the floor and she flew backwards two full paces. But before her heels touched down and tripped her, Lardis Lidesci was looming up alongside with his machete already raised.
“Poor lass!” he said, as his blade made a gleaming arc.
Liz and Jake—even Jake—turned their faces away. Shooting the girl had been one thing: instinctive, a necessity, even a mercy. But what Lardis must do was calculated butchery.
Then Trask was shouting, “That’s it, let’s go! We’ve got to get out of here right now!” And all four E-Branch agents on the ground could see why:
The shadows were no longer creeping but rising up! Up from the stairwells and the lower decks—up over the four-bar railings at both sides of the ship—up into view! The vampires had thrown caution to the wind now; they came on like a flood, with their yellow Halloween eyes lighting the night and illuminating their sallow, hollow-cheeked faces.
Scything among them, Jake’s bullets cut a swath as he emptied his magazine. Liz and Trask, too, with Lardis between them, firing silver death as they backed up the ramp to the Sea King, whose vanes were turning faster and faster.
As they got aboard David Chung slammed and secured the door—slammed it on the horde that swarmed after them—while Ian Goodly signalled the pilot it was time to go. But the pilot had seen enough and needed no special urging. He withdrew the ramp, fed power to the engine, began to lift off. The Sea King felt a little sluggish, and Trask switched on the intercom to ask:
“Is everything okay?”
“No,” the pilot answered. “Those mad things are clinging to the undercarriage! And the ones on the deck up front are trying to disable the fan!”
Jake, who had run up front, rapped on the pilot’s interior window until it was slid open. Looking out through the cockpit windows, he saw what the pilot meant: among the crush of vampires crowding the decks around the swimming pools, several had chair legs and other pieces of broken furniture which they were hurling up at the gleaming blur of the blades. And:
“Drop your nose,” Jake told the pilot. “They want your fan, so let’s give it to them!”
“But…but they’re people!” the pilot shouted.
“No,” said Jake. “They were people. Now they’re things and better off dead. So do it, or we’re all dead.”
And as finally a wooden chair leg hit the fan and flew into a thousand splinters, so the pilot got the message. Then he did as Jake had suggested: floated the big chopper forward, dropped its nose, and went ripping like a horizontal buzz saw along the deck. And Jake had a clear view of the ensuing carnage.
The cockpit’s windows turned red, yellow, and black as blood and guts sprayed back f
rom the whirling blades, and the screams of the vampires could be heard even over the thunder of the big helicopter’s engine. Then she was rising, but still sluggishly, lopsidedly, as the Evening Star was left below and behind.
“Now what?” Trask’s anxious voice on the intercom.
“God knows how,” the pilot answered, “but I think we’ve got a bunch of those things still hanging on underneath!”
“Yes,” Trask told him. “They’re good at that. But there’s a cure for it. Take her up a couple of hundred feet into the sunlight.”
And up they went until the sun was once more visible low on the western horizon, and its cleansing beams reached out to the dragonfly plane. Golden fire blazed in through the windows, but more importantly on the creatures that were clinging impossibly to the undercarriage and other projections.
Liz was “listening” to them. With them, she felt the seething of the sun, and heard their cries, then their sighs, as one by one—perhaps thankfully—they let go and went fluttering down the sky. Striking the sea from that height would be similar to crashing down on concrete. None would live through it.
But in any case, she didn’t stay with them that long…
In the Sea King’s belly, Lardis Lidesci wrapped the girl’s head in a jacket from one of the NBC packs, while Trask spoke to the pilot and asked to be patched through to Invincible.
On a spare headset, Captain McKenzie sounded much subdued. “I saw something of what went on belowdecks,” he said. “And it seems I owe you an apology. As for those poor lads, my marines, God only knows what I owe them.” (Trask sensed the sad shake of his head.) “But Trask—I’ve got to know—what was so secret that I couldn’t be told?”
“I tried to tell you,” Trask answered. “And in fact we did tell your marines. But…they had their orders.”
“As I had mine,” said McKenzie. “So why couldn’t the Admiralty tell me? I mean, a plague’s a plague—but that had to be something else again.”
“It was,” said Trask, “and it is. But listen, you won’t be blamed. Heads higher up might roll, but not yours. And while it won’t be much consolation, we did get their bloody specimen.”