None of the above sounded particularly useful to Marcos. He bit his lips, while he was thinking and suddenly he came up with an idea.
“Christina, look up one last thing for me. Did these companies receive any sizeable donations? A patronage, perhaps? Anything?”
“Well… yes, quite a few, but all were rather small and coming from different people. Also, they don’t appear to have received any money directly, since that scandal”, she answered, leafing through the contents of the dossier she had before her.
“Anything, Christina, really, the name of an associate, something, give me something!” Marcos insisted, almost desperately.
She didn’t reply, but he could hear her searching, opening and closing drawers from the metal file cabinets around her. Marcos stayed on the line and almost ten minutes later Christina picked up the receiver.
“Still there? How does a series of storage units owned by a transportation company sound? The company is doing business with the fitness chain where the Hatzikostas are shareholders… I can’t find anything more interesting than that, really…” she told him, but Marcos could detect in her voice a note of satisfaction that she had managed to uncover something, even a tiny detail like that.
“It’ll do; let’s hear the addresses”.
Two minutes later Marcos had hung up and was holding in his hands a piece of paper containing six addresses. Six storage units, some small and some large, but all relatively isolated from inhabited areas, according to the provisions of the law, after all. He glanced at the phone and wondered whether he should share this particular piece of information with his colleagues. However improbable a lead, protocol dictated that he had to inform his superiors, secure a search warrant and proceed with an organized operation to investigate the units. He picked up his cell phone, only to put it in his pocket. He exited the apartment, locking the door behind him. He was wearing his coat, which was a bit tight, making his gun holster press against his ribs. A part of his brain knew at that moment that he wasn’t thinking clearly, but he did not care. The image of his dead friend kept returning to his mind and he couldn’t stop hearing that phrase: “Just for you, buddy, remember that, because you went ahead and asked a third idiotic question…”
The first hours after that incident were a true nightmare for Travis. He was unable to get Erica to wake up. Her wounds had healed, but still she was leaning against the seat of the car, as if she were dead. Dawn was about to break, so in his desperation he had stopped at the first place that appeared to offer food and shelter: a bar-restaurant on a side road close to the highway, which stayed open round the clock. His choice was rather simplistic and, admittedly, quite naïve, but he was desperate and out of ideas. He intended to barge in, kill everyone and stick Erica in a freezer. Then, he would get some help. He was bound to find a vampire who’d have some idea what to do and, if the worst came to the worst, he’d return to Lucas. He stopped the car almost directly in from of the restaurant and got out, heading directly for the trunk. In his panic, stressed as he was, he dropped the keys. He picked them up, opened the trunk wide and grabbed a pump-action shotgun. He took a deep breath and with all the courage he could muster, charged into the restaurant. The door was already open and the second he set foot inside he heard a scream. He turned towards that voice, aiming the barrel of his shotgun there, but froze. Erica had saved him the trouble. He saw her holding a waitress by the head with one hand, while with the other she was strangling a patron of that place who had attempted to attack her. Without paying particular attention to the man, she had sunk her teeth in the neck of the hapless woman, hungrily sucking her blood. As the initial shock subsided, Travis could better understand what he was seeing. Three more people, seated around the place, were dead at their tables, their throats slit end to end, as if they had been butchered by some wild animal. At that moment, the kitchen door opened and from there came a rather large man, dressed in white, though his apron was covered in dried stains. He was holding a double-barreled shotgun and was shaking from head to toes. Immediately, Travis turned the shotgun he was holding against him and pulled the trigger. The weapon packed some serious kick, narrowly missing his face, but the cook got hit by the buckshot right in the chest, sending him flying back to the kitchen. Right then, Erica raised her head off the waitress and growled at him.
“Hey, I want them as intact as possible!” she scolded him.
Then, she let the now dead woman drop to the floor and turned her attention to the man she had been grabbing in her other hand and who was still struggling, in an attempt to escape that vice of a grip. She sunk her teeth in him as well and went about bleeding him dry. When she was done, she turned again towards Travis.
“The barman is unconscious behind that counter. Eat”.
Travis obeyed without hesitation, while Erica approached one of the men she had killed as she entered the place. She grabbed his head and opened his mouth. She concentrated for a second, took a deep breath and exhaled in his open larynx. She felt the microbes flowing from within, millions of microorganisms which, with the same hunger she had displayed moments earlier, flooded the man’s dead body. The Order was wrong, as it turned out; these organisms weren’t responsible for her vampirism, she was the one producing them. She could sense them flowing through his lifeless veins, regenerating the cells they came in contact with. The second the microbes reached the man’s heart, they focused their actions there and within a few seconds had it beating again. The man opened his eyes and saw Erica staring at him. Instinctively, he knew that he had been turned into a vampire; gradually, the microbes were flooding his brain as well. He growled at her, irritably, but Erica kept on staring at him. His anger began to dissipate and eventually he lowered his eyes, signaling his submission. Even when his creator moved away to turn some more of her victims into vampires, he sat there, awaiting instructions.
The search at the first storage unit proved fruitless. In fact, he met some of the personnel of the facilities, who allowed him to take a look, even though he had no warrant. At the second unit, Marcos had to pick the lock, praying that no one would see him. The only thing he found inside were hundreds of moldy cardboard boxes, containing slimming products. He made a mental note to lodge an anonymous complaint later on and moved to the third unit. The results were equally disappointing, and Marcos felt disheartened. “What if he came up empty handed?” he wondered. He was dreading the possibility that he would be unable to catch these people. With such grim thoughts accompanying him, he arrived at the fourth unit. Already it was getting dark. He sought solace in the thought that now he could move about more freely. In any case, he parked his car behind the storage facility, which overlooked an old, abandoned stadium. Near the front side there were a couple of houses and he didn’t want to risk his car being seen or someone calling the police. He took a flashlight from the dashboard and circled the facility, to check whether there was another entrance or some window. Having found nothing, he approached the door on the front side and noticed it was a sliding, rather large metal door, chained with a cheap padlock. He thought about breaking it, but in the end he took from his pocket a couple of metal pins and set about picking it. It proved tougher than he would have thought, in relation to the few lockpicking lessons he had taken back at the Academy.
Eventually, he was able to pick the lock, remove the chain and slide the door. A wave of decay, an asphyxiating fetidness, assaulted his senses. His stomach churned and his eyes watered. For a second, he feared he would pass out and instinctively retreated from the door. Thankfully, it was now dark and fairly windy. First, he gulped a couple of breaths of fresh air to calm down, then he filled his lungs and returned to the door. He grabbed it with both hands and pulled it wide open. Still holding his breath, he took a few steps back, in order to check out the place from a distance and switched on his flashlight, as fresh air was rushing into the storage unit. He took a deep breath. He knew what he was about to see, the stench left little doubt about it, and yet the scene shocked
him more than he would have thought possible. Bodies were strewn on the bloodied floor of the otherwise empty unit.
Marcos got in, indifferent now to the stench, observing the scene, almost numb. He walked mechanically towards the center, training the beam of his flashlight about, attempting a first count of the dead. He estimated that some over one hundred men and women lay dead around him. It wasn’t just the sheer number that had shocked him, but also the condition of the bodies: festering with wounds, mutilated, with limbs scattered left and right. Almost all the victims appeared to had been armed with melee weapons prior to their deaths; lying next to them were axes, daggers and even some swords. It was as if a veritable battle had erupted in that place and all hell broke loose, or at least that was Marcos’ impression, since he couldn’t discern a pattern that differentiated the dead. He tried looking more closely around, hoping he could find some more clues. The only thing that caught his attention was a switch on the wall, close to the door, next to a distribution board. He walked towards that spot, while at the same time he was taking out his cell phone to call the station and report what he had found. He threw the switch and the lights along the ceiling began simmering, one after the other. Marcos was left holding his phone, uselessly, as he stared, stunned, at the massive dark red hieroglyph that had been painted on the center of the ceiling. Mechanically, he moved forwards, standing beneath it. The hieroglyph covered most of the ceiling and he was convinced it had been painted in human blood.
“We had been hoping that we wouldn’t be discovered with that painted on the ceiling”, he heard an eerily familiar voice say behind him.
Marcos turned towards the entrance of the storage unit and saw the man who had murdered his friend approach, perfectly calm.
“We didn’t expect that their papa knew something about black magic as well. Not that it matters, we killed most of them. Though, as you can see, we suffered some loses”, the man kept on explaining, pointing at the various bodies around them.
Now, he was less than ten feet away from Marcos.
“Freeze, you bastard!” shouted Marcos, drawing his gun from its holster. “Hands in the air, now!”
“Okay”, said the man, smiling, as he raised his hands, with the palms turned towards Marcos.
Suddenly, the center of his right palm became shiningly bright. At the same moment, Marcos screamed in pain and covered his eyes as best as he could, letting his gun drop to the floor. Everything went white around him, it was as if he had gone blind. He rubbed his eyes with one hand, in a desperate attempt to recover, while blindly groping at his gun. However, he had lost precious time, as he felt the man grabbing him by the hair. Before he had time to react, the man’s knee connected with his face, right between the nose and the left eye. A searing pain shot through him, as the nasal bone cracked under the blow.
“Fret not, I have no intention to bore you with questions”, the man announced menacingly.
He let go of Marcos’ hair and grabbed him by the neck, lifting him upwards as if he weighed nothing. He landed a punch right at the same spot, whereupon Marcos’ mouth filled with blood. His left eye felt like it was on fire, but his vision from the other was getting less blurry.
“Hey, are you recovering this quickly? Let’s remedy that”, said the man, with the same tone as before.
He was toying with him and Marcos knew it. The man slammed him against the wall, pressing down on his neck with his right arm, while he tried to land another punch with his left, but Marcos managed to raise his hand in time to parry the blow. Now, using both his arms he shoved the man away, enough to escape his grip and, stumbling, he moved a few steps away from the wall. His opponent appeared unworried by this development and moved calmly towards him. His face was a mask of madness and sadistic satisfaction.
Marcos kept retreating, trying to regain his composure. Each breath he took was hurting him. Glancing about so as not to trip on some body, he tried to locate some weapon he could use. He spotted an axe nearby and he lunged, picking it up. The man, meanwhile, was almost upon him.
“Know how to use that, pretty boy?” he taunted him, as he ran towards him.
Lifting the axe with both hands, Marcos purposefully brought it down in a clumsy swing, aiming for the man’s head. His opponent was indeed able to avoid the blow easily, while also landing his fist on the policeman’s ribs. Marcos, expecting such a move, withstood the blow with gritted teeth. He felt one of his ribs give way, but managed to ignore the pain. Fiercely, he brought down his head, head-butting his opponent on the temple, catching the man off-guard. Marcos took advantage of that temporary reprieve and kicked his stunned opponent at the side of his knee. The man’s leg buckled under the force of the kick, forcing him to drop to the floor, face down, and Marcos immediately raised the axe again with both hands and brought it down on his opponent’s shoulder, with crushing force. The axe’s blade sliced the man’s skin with ease, breaking the bone underneath and almost severing his arm. Blood gushed from the gaping wound and, for the first time, the man howled in pain.
Marcos would have sworn that the axe was smoking while lodged in the man’s body, but did not get the chance to realize what was happening. The man, defying all expectations and screaming in pain, got up and struck him with his good arm. He followed up by lunging at him. The two of them rolled on the floor and the man bit Marcos on the neck, pulling his teeth ferociously, trying to rip his flesh. Marcos couldn’t even scream. He tried to get the man off him, but he could feel his teeth sinking ever deeper in his neck. Panicking, he pounded the man as hard as he could, to no avail.
Suddenly, the man made a choking sound, as if he was being strangled and got off him. He tried to cough, as blood was spewing from his mouth. His face had become a mask of sheer terror and with his fist he was thumping his chest, in a desperate attempt to draw breath. He grabbed his neck, at the same time making hair-raising sounds, like a beast slowly suffocating and eventually he collapsed by Marcos’ feet, who was looking at his assailant, dumbfounded. The man’s body was raked by spasms and a few seconds later it went still, now dead. Marcos, stunned, looked at the body in utter disbelief for a few seconds and then began crawling, panting and grunting, towards the place where he had dropped his gun. Nearby, he would find his cell phone, to call for an ambulance. With a little luck, he thought, he would manage to do all that before losing consciousness from the pain and the wound on his neck.
The next days passed in a blur. The doctors diagnosed him with severe concussion; mostly in order to be able to explain the things Marcos had told them in describing what had happened, than from a medical point of view. He spent several days with his neck and ribcage bandaged, under strict orders to keep his talking to a minimum. That suited him fairly well, since he, too, was a loss at how to explain what had happened, and to whom. The painkillers and sedatives they had prescribed made him sleepy most of the day and time crawled for the next two weeks he spent on a hospital bed. His contact with the rest of the world came mostly through the television set in his room. Very few colleagues dropped by to visit him and only a couple of old friends, who would keep him company for a few hours. He was hailed as a hero by the journalists, since he had put an end to the cult that had butchered so many women. No one seemed to be interested in discussing why or how so many of those people had gotten together in one place and fought amongst them. They were deemed to be insane, the lot of them, and no further time was wasted on some “pointless analysis”, as his captain told him during the two whole minutes he spent at the hospital, the entire duration of his visit.
When the day he would be discharged arrived, Marcos called at the station and had two more weeks of leave added. He met with no one, he simply went home, packed up a few clothes and left to get on the first available bus that would take him to his village. He wanted to visit his grandfather, the only member of his family he continued to have good relations with. The old man almost had a heart attack when he learnt that his grandson had been hospitalized with serious injur
ies, so his joy upon seeing him was great. He hugged him, with tears in his eyes, and held him close without speaking a single word, his face shining from joy. He was the only person who did not ask him a single thing, neither about the case in general, nor the man who had tried to kill him, or anything else. For two weeks, they would play backgammon, eat and spent time weeding and tending the large garden his grandfather kept. On the last day of his leave, Marcos hugged him, bade him farewell and with a heavy heart he left.
He arrived in Athens the following morning with enough time to just drop off his bag at home. Immediately afterwards he reported at the station, where he dealt stoically with his colleagues, while they were bombarding him with questions:
“How are you?”
“How are you feeling?”
“Well done, you killed that bastard”.
“I’m good, I’m feeling fine, yes, thank God”, he would answer at first.
After a while, he would just nod and kept at it, until they left him in peace. When the questions ceased, the first thing he did was to go to the archives, since the case officially had been closed. He took the massive file and began reading its contents: the final report by the police, any information on the perpetrators, the lot. When he was done reading, he went to the storage area where they kept the evidence on the various cases and asked to see whatever they had gathered from the scene. No less than ten boxes were delivered and after several hours of rifling through them he was unable to find a single thing that would pique his interest. He did manage to locate the cell phone of the man who had attempted to kill him, but left that for last, since it had to be charged, after all this time. Feeling tired, once he was done with the other evidence, he picked up the phone and opened it. The pin was written on a yellow piece of paper, stuck on the device, possibly by a colleague over at the cybercrime unit. Most messages were fairly mundane, everyday fare: messages from the job that man held, before he went into a killing spree, as well as messages from friends and family. Out of the dozens of such messages found on the device, a single one interested Marcos, as it was dated a couple of days before the first murder: