Red Eye - 02 (2 page)

Lately, they’ve moved out. They’ve had to.

Another kind of dweller has taken up residence.

Down here, where it’s pitch black.

Where it’s sunless.

Where it’s always night.

CHAPTER

ONE

T
HE NEST NUMBERED
twenty in all. Sometimes the total might be a couple more than that, or a couple fewer, as newcomers arrived or existing members departed, but by and large it stabilised at twenty. Twenty seemed optimal. Sustainable.

Food was the one regulating factor. There wasn’t much of it to go round. Rats were the main source of nourishment, followed by stray cats and dogs, the odd pigeon or bat. Enough prey could be found to keep twenty bellies full, twenty thirsts slaked, but only just.

Humans?

Not advisable.

Tempting.

But off the menu.

To abduct and kill a human would be to risk drawing attention to the nest’s existence. The nest members were trying to be as unobtrusive as possible. They didn’t want to advertise their presence. That way, they might just survive.

There were, after all, dangers.

Vampires were not welcome in this country.

No one wanted them.

More than that: no one had any sympathy for them.

Feelings ran deep in America. There were powerful social currents at work. Certain hostile forces at play.

Dangers.

M
LADEN WAS NOMINALLY
in charge. A vampire community really needed a shtriga if it was to be orderly and at peace with itself, but in the absence of a shtriga an ordinary vampire would do. In this instance, Mladen was the smartest among them, or—which amounted to the same thing—the most cautious. So the others listened when he spoke and, unless they strenuously objected to something he said, they complied with his wishes.

Mladen hailed from the former Yugoslavia. He had grown up watching his nation tear itself apart during the civil war, neighbour turning against neighbour, friend against friend, like fighting dogs let off the leash. He had seen his hometown, Sarajevo, bombed to rubble, with certain streets becoming shooting galleries for snipers bearing cheap Russian rifles and ancient ancestral grudges. By the age of seventeen he had witnessed more death than any youngster should.

His memories of that time were perhaps hazier than they would have been if he were still just a man. Mladen’s old life, before he was turned, often seemed little more than a dream, a succession of loosely linked events that may well have happened to someone else.

The memories were still sharp, however. They filled him with the belief that what mattered, above all else, was cohesion. Societies could fall apart in an instant, with little prompting, unless their leaders remained vigilant. Someone had to watch out for everyone else and take care of them.

That was why Mladen was on sentry duty, carrying out a self-imposed routine of patrolling all the tunnels near the nest. Now and then he would assign the job to one of the other vampires, but nobody performed it as thoroughly and diligently as he did. And nobody treated it with the same level of seriousness. The vampires felt cosy where they were, safe from intrusion and harm. They were pleased with this little haven of theirs.

Mladen could never be that complacent himself.

Alert as always, he picked his way along the old rusted rails, pausing every so often to listen out and sniff the air. He was alive to the minutest of stimuli: the scurry of mouse paws, the drip of distant water, the invisible patterns of draughts and breezes. He had established a detailed picture of his environment in his mind. He knew every inch, every nuance of his subterranean home. He knew when things were as they should be...

...and when they were not.

Mladen caught a stray scent. Something shadowy and pheromonal. Hard to identify. Anomalous.

Halting, he lifted his nose, drawing in a deep breath.

A part of his brain recognised the scent and understood it to be familiar and no threat.

Another part said the opposite.

It was a hybrid smell. A composite of known and unknown.

Mladen’s hackles rose. Unconsciously, he bared his fangs.

People were coming. Vampires? Not-vampires? Mladen was confused as to what they were, and his confusion was in itself alarming.

Instinct urged him to flee, find refuge, save his own skin.

But Mladen was responsible for the others in the nest. He was their alpha male, their protector.

So he turned and ran back to his fellow vampires.

And by doing that, doomed them all.

“S
IR
? G
OT A
hit. Motion, dead ahead. You got it?”

“Loud and clear. This is Red Eye One to all units. We have probable V-contact. Converge on me and prepare to engage. I repeat, converge on me and prepare to engage.”

“Roger that. Red Eyes Four and Five on their way.

“Reading you, Red Eye One. Six and Seven also en route.”

“Hee hee hee! Here we come. Who you gonna call? Nestbusters!”

“Seven, kindly stow that shit. We are not a bunch of beer-chugging hillbillies out on a duck hunt. These are military-grade operations, and if you do not treat them as such I will personally put a nine-millimetre round in your goddamn skull. Do I make myself clear, soldier?”

“Sir, yes, sir.”

“Sir?”

“Two?”

“Sonar suggests a cluster of at least a dozen V’s. Maybe more. Half a klick due north. And, uh, nasal-input data confirms it.”

“Yeah, I smell ’em too. Gentlemen, lady, let’s go do what they’re paying us to do, and make some undead properly dead.”

M
LADEN DIDN’T NEED
to shout out a warning. The nest members sensed his panic from a distance. They detected the sharp, fearful odour radiating off him as he approached, long before they could see or even hear him. It had a distinctive sour tang, like milk gone bad.

Some of the vampires had been asleep; now all at once they were not. They sprang from their beds—the creaking cots and stained mattresses left behind by previous occupants of the tunnel—shedding their threadbare blankets and quilts.

Others, already awake, set aside whatever they were doing and rose to their feet. Two of them, a husband and wife, laid down the half-drained carcass of a black cat they had been sharing. They wiped their mouths and peered in the direction Mladen’s scent was coming from. A pair of teenaged girls—they looked like teenaged girls—abandoned the game of chess they had been playing in the dark.

The air was filled with expressions of uncertainty. Hisses. Growls. The vampires looked at one another, hunching into defensive postures.

Mladen appeared at the furthermost visible point of the tunnel, where it curved out of sight. He was running full tilt, helping propel himself along by digging fingernails into the brickwork of the wall.

“Quick!” he yelled. “We must go! They are coming.”

“Who?” enquired one of the others. “Who is coming?”

“I don’t know. It doesn’t matter. They are enemy, I can tell. We go or we die.”

Now the other vampires could smell what Mladen had smelled, that inexplicable mix of human and something else, something essentially vampiric. It threw them into consternation.

“Don’t just stand there!” Mladen cried. He had covered most of the distance between him and the nest, some two hundred metres, in a little under ten seconds. “Do as I say. Go that way, further into the tunnel network. Split up. If they catch us, they will—”

And then Mladen was no more. He exploded in a spray of particulate matter that scattered along the tracks with the momentum of his running. The
boom
of a gun report rumbled like thunder.

The vampires gaped.

Seven armour-clad figures were spread out across the width of the tunnel. They were sprinting as fast as Mladen had been, if without the same feral urgency. They had rifles in their hands. Their bodies were festooned with other weaponry: pistols, knives, grenades. Their heads were helmeted and their faces entirely masked save for their eyes, which gleamed crimson.

Boom!

One of the pair of teenaged girls recoiled, flying backwards. She was dust before she hit the ground.

Boom!

The husband of the married couple disintegrated before his wife’s eyes.

Overcoming their shock, the vampires counterattacked. As a pack, united in fear and rage, they hurtled at their assailants. Several of them took to the walls, scurrying horizontally along on all fours so as to be able to leap off and hit their opponents from above. The rest charged, a loping nightmare of talon and fang.

“A
LL OF YOU
, stand firm. Make every shot count. The man who writes our cheques likes us to put on a good show. Let’s give him his money’s worth.”

“Affirmative, Red Eye One.”

“Heard, understood, acknowledged.”

“Hell, yeah!”

T
HE VAMPIRES LAUNCHED
themselves into a withering salvo of gunfire. It wasn’t a fair fight. Really, it wasn’t a fight at all.

Most of the nest members were annihilated in the first few seconds. Those that survived managed to get within striking distance of their foes, secure in the belief that their superior strength and speed would win the day. One on one, at close quarters, no human was a match for a vampire.

But
these
humans, or whatever they were, had astonishing reflexes. Knives were drawn. A single flickering sideways slash, and a vampire head was lopped clean off at the neck. Hardwood blades plunged into hearts and were pulled out again almost instantly, the action so swift that the victim had time to look down and actually see his own ribcage crumbling in on itself, his own torso hollowing into a cascade of ashes.

Even hand-to-hand, with no weapons at all, the combat was asymmetrical. The vampires were startled to encounter a level of muscle power that was at least equal if not superior to their own. Their talons raked uselessly on armour-sheathed chests and limbs. Crushing fists squeezed their necks and splintered their upper vertebrae.

Perhaps a minute passed between Mladen’s demise and the elimination of the last member of the nest. It was certainly no longer than that.

Seven armoured figures stood surrounded by the ashy remnants of almost three times as many vampires.

No one was even breathing hard.

T
HE TEAM COMMANDER
, designated Red Eye One, unclipped the mask covering his mouth and nose. It was a contoured bulge of black polycarbonate, miked-up and soundproof. Useful in the theatre of conflict, but also stifling.

“And that, people,” said the stern-jawed man, “is how you exterminate a nest of vamps.”

There were nods and grunts of assent all round. A couple of the other Red Eyes unclipped their masks too.

“Hope you got all that back home.” Red Eye One tapped the infrared microcamera affixed to his helmet. He cocked his head as a reply from base was transmitted to him via an in-ear feed. “Clear as day? Good. I was a mite concerned. All this brickwork and bedrock above us. Nice to know there was no signal interference.”

Red Eye Seven lurched into the camera’s scope, grinning. “We came, we saw, we dusted their asses!” he crowed, both thumbs aloft.

Red Eye Three, the sole woman on the squad, rolled her eyes.

Red Eye Five, a hulking African-American the size of a bedroom wardrobe, dragged his toecap contemplatively through one of the piles of dust littering the ground. “Guess they ain’t so tough after all.”

“Fuck, no, they’re not tough,” said Seven. “And you know why? ’Cause we’re tougher. We’re Team motherfucking Red Eye! Baddest of the bad. Ain’t that right, Six?”