Red Eye - 02 (20 page)

“We can’t leave Father Tchaikovsky behind,” said another of the vampires, a plump woman whose hair retained the vestiges of a bad perm and who was dressed in a dirt-stained fleece embroidered with the logo of a supermarket chain. A name badge on her chest said
Hi! I’m PATTI. How may I help you today?
“We’ll stay put until he comes for us. He’ll lead us out of here.”

“There’s no saying he
is
coming,” Redlaw said. “When I last saw him, he was fighting one of those armed men. He was defending you, buying you time to get to safety. We can’t presume he’ll be catching up soon—if ever.”

Whimpers of dismay from the vampires. The shtriga priest’s hold over them was strong, so strong that they were lost without him. To them he was part shepherd, part drug. They feared and adored him.

“Now, pay attention,” Redlaw said sternly. “Those people back there have one objective only, and that’s to destroy you. They’re going to keep after you until they’ve turned you all to dust. You can’t stop them. The only thing you can do is run. If death’s what you want, fine, stay here. They won’t be long. But if you have any desire whatever to survive, you’ll move, right now.”

The vampires looked at one another.

Redlaw raised the Cindermaker, which had just one round left. “Put it this way. If they don’t shoot you, I will.”

He saw them weighing things up. They weren’t to know the gun was almost out of ammunition, and even if they suspected it, it didn’t matter. He could target any one of them. Nobody wanted to be the unlucky victim, the one who got singled out.

“But... we don’t know where to go,” said Miguel forlornly.

“I’d suggest that direction,” said Redlaw. “The way the water’s going. It must decant somewhere, some outflow pipe, maybe even into the river.”

The vampires set off, hesitantly.

Redlaw recalled something Illyria had told him:
They are like dogs in many ways. They simply need to be shown who’s boss
. Well, he’d done that. The role of shtriga meant imposing your will on other vampires and reinforcing your dominance by means of threats and, when called for, violence. Being leader of the pack, in other words. Alpha vamp.

“We’re heading that way, too,” he told Tina. “Stick with me.”

“Sticking,” she replied. “Like glue.”

He waded through the sewer water, Tina stumbling along beside him. He went as fast as he could while making allowances for the fact that she was effectively blind. The vampires remained a few paces ahead but kept checking back to reassure themselves that Redlaw was still with them. He, in turn, looked over his shoulder at regular intervals, expecting the soldiers to appear at any moment.

Sure enough, a helmeted head emerged from the shaft opening in the ceiling. A soldier had clambered down and was reconnoitring, getting the lie of the land. The fact that he was upside down suggested he was braced against the sides of the shaft, holding himself in an inverted position. That was some feat of athleticism, and once more Redlaw found himself wondering what sort of people these soldiers really were. Were they even people?

He debated whether to open fire. But it was a tricky shot—a target the size of a football at fifty yards with a handgun—and he couldn’t afford to waste the last bullet. Refilling the clip took a minute, time he currently didn’t have.

Instead, he redoubled his pace, almost hauling Tina along now. The vampires sensed his urgency and sped up too.

The sewer trended downward. The water grew shallower, its rush more hectic. Ahead, in the distance, Redlaw glimpsed an end to the tunnel. Behind him, meanwhile, the soldier had lowered himself out from the shaft, uncurling, dropping lithely to the floor. A second soldier eased out after him. They began to prowl along the sewer, dogging their prey.

The tunnel disgorged into a huge chamber, a nexus where a dozen sewers of various calibres met and emptied. Streams of water cascaded into a frothing, boiling central pool, whose contents were funnelled into a broad channel leading underground. Iron bars formed a grille across the channel’s exit, too narrowly spaced for a person to fit through. Redlaw wouldn’t have contemplated taking that route anyway. The water was a coursing torrent and there was scant headroom. Drowning was all but guaranteed.

There was a way out, though. Had to be. Tchaikovsky wouldn’t have designated this an escape route otherwise.

He spotted a ladder on the far side of the chamber. It hugged the wall, rising to an aperture near the ceiling. There for maintenance purposes, presumably. Municipal workers must come down here from time to time to inspect for leaks and blockages.

Acutely conscious of the two soldiers breathing down their necks, Redlaw indicated the ladder to Miguel and the other vampires. They sprang down from the lip of the sewer into the pool.

“Tina,” Redlaw said in her ear, “we’re going to jump. It’s a drop of about five feet, no more. Then we’re going to swim. You first. I’ll be right behind you.”

He thought she would object. It seemed that there was nothing straightforward with Tina Checkley, nothing she wouldn’t argue about first. But she surprised him by nodding assent and taking a shuffling step forward. She plunged feet first into the pool and surfaced straight away, spluttering. Redlaw launched himself in after her, on his back, spread-eagling himself so as to distribute his weight out. The night vision goggles were water-resistant but not waterproof. If the mechanism got wet, they might short out and stop working.

He managed to hit the pool without going completely under. The goggles were splashed but not soaked and remained functional, allowing him to thrash over to Tina and guide her across the pool towards a platform around the base of the ladder.

The vampires were already there and shinning up the ladder at inhuman speed, like monkeys up a palm tree. Redlaw heaved himself out of the bitterly cold, noxious-smelling water. He helped Tina out too. Then he turned, just in time to see the two soldiers arrive at the mouth of the sewer, their guns unshipped. They scanned around, searching for the vampires. One spied them on the ladder and pointed them out to the other. Both trained their rifles, curling their fingers inside the trigger guards.

Redlaw steadied the Cindermaker with both hands and aimed at the soldier on the left. It was unlikely he could kill the man, not with that body armour on, but the kick from the bullet impact might put him out of action. At the very least he could draw the soldiers’ fire, giving the vampires a few extra moments to make it to the top.

God, really, if you’re listening, I could do with a little divine intervention
.

He squeezed the trigger.

He hit the soldier in the dead centre of his body mass. The man reeled, his finger tightening convulsively on the trigger. A volley of rounds pumped from his rifle into the soldier on the right, who was hurled backwards as though yanked by an invisible rope. His body struck the edge of the sewer mouth a glancing blow, then fell flailing into the pool, bellyflopping with an almighty splash and disappearing below the surface.

The first soldier, winded by Redlaw’s shot, slumped against the sewer wall. He clearly couldn’t quite believe that he had just fired on his comrade at point blank range.

Regaining his senses, he staggered to his feet and leaned out over the pool. No sign of the other man. He was clearly wracked with indecision. The vampires had, nearly all of them, scaled the ladder. They were getting away. But a fellow soldier was down, injured, in danger of drowning...

With a grunt of thwarted anger, the soldier leapt into the pool and dived under.

Redlaw grabbed Tina and hustled her over to the ladder. He clamped her hands on one of the rusted rungs.

“Up,” he said. “Don’t think about it. Just climb.”

“But I can’t see a damn—”

“Doesn’t matter. It’s a ladder. One rung after another. You could do it blindfolded.”

“What about you?”

“I’m coming. Right behind you.”

As Tina fumbled her way up the ladder, Redlaw ejected the Cindermaker’s clip and snugged fresh rounds into it from the box in his pocket. He rammed the full clip home and racked the slide.

All the while, the soldier continued to scour the pool for his comrade, breaking surface every so often to take a breath.

Redlaw kept an eye on him as he himself began his ascent of the ladder. The rungs were slimy and corroded. The ladder creaked alarmingly, rusty bolts juddering loosely in crumbling sockets.

At the top lay an access duct just large enough to stand upright in. The vampires had again halted, awaiting instructions. Redlaw ushered them forward. “We can’t be far from the surface,” he said. “There’ll be a door, a manhole, something.”

As the vampires moved off, he took Tina’s wrist. “Come on now. Last stretch.”

“It better be.”

Instinct made him turn. The soldier had abandoned the pool and mounted the ladder in pursuit of them. He was clambering into the duct, about to bring his rifle to bear.

Redlaw emptied five rounds into him. Tina shrieked as the Cindermaker flashed and boomed in the confined space. The soldier was pounded backwards by each bullet, the last knocking him clear off the ladder. He toppled out into space, and a moment later there came the heavy slap of a body hitting water.

“Is he...?” Tina said.

“I don’t know. Let’s not hang around to find out.”

A couple of hundred yards on, there was another ladder, this one leading up to a manhole cover. Miguel shoved the iron disc aside as though it weighed nothing, and everyone climbed out into the middle of a road and the teeth of a blizzard. Snow raced sideways, driven by a knifing northerly Atlantic wind beneath a black sky. It came not in flakes but in cotton-ball-sized clumps that landed thickly and clung. Redlaw felt his damp clothing begin to stiffen and freeze. Tina was already shivering, and even the vampires, less susceptible than humans to extremes of temperature, looked uncomfortable and unhappy.

“Shelter,” Redlaw said, deactivating the goggles and pulling them off. “We’re not going to last ten minutes out in this. Tina, where are we?”

She peered around, trying to get her bearings. “Beats me. Can’t see shit in this weather. I think—is that trees down that way?”

“Could be.”

“Then that’s probably Battery Park.”

“What’s Battery Park near?”

“Nothing. It’s kind of at the ass end of Manhattan. Catch a ferry to Staten Island from there, see the Statue of Liberty in the distance, that’s about it.”

Redlaw thought. “How far are we from the subway tunnel? The one we explored this morning?”

“What are you talking about?” Tina said with a scowl. “Let’s find the nearest chain hotel and check in. We don’t have to share a room. Long as it’s somewhere close by, it’s warm, and it’s got cable and a mini bar. We can ride out the storm there.”

“It isn’t just the two of us, Tina.”

“What the—? Oh, you cannot be serious.” She jerked a thumb at the vampires. “Them, too? They can take care of themselves, surely.”

“We’ve got to find them a place of refuge,” Redlaw said. “While that paramilitary death squad is around, no Sunless is safe.”

“Yeah, don’t know if you noticed, but you and me, we’re not vamps. We don’t have to worry. We can blend in, disappear. Those guys won’t come looking for us.”

“You can disappear if you want to. In many ways, I’d prefer it if you did.” He handed over her rucksack. “Me, though, I’m taking charge of these ’Lesses. Point me in the general direction of the tunnel entrance. I’m sure I can find it if I try. And be quick about it, would you? Before we die of hypothermia.”

T
INA RUMMAGED THROUGH
her rucksack, stalling for time. The bag’s canvas had a rubberised inner layer, so the outside was sodden from the plunge into the sewage pool but the interior was more or less dry. She took out her camcorder and switched it on. It powered up as normal.

“Looks okay,” she said. “Damp but not ruined.”

“Tina, please.”

“One second, all right? I’m thinking.”

Tina was, in fact, asking herself several hard questions. She had just been through a harrowing ordeal. She had been violently manhandled, almost ended up as a living juice bar for vampires, been shot at, been dragged along shit-stinky tunnels—she was altogether convinced that pursuing this vampire story was, after all, a very bad idea. She hadn’t bargained for quite this level of personal risk and suffering. It made sense to give up. Quit while she was ahead. Quit while she
had
a head. It could have been blown clean off her shoulders any time during the shootout in the church.

If she bailed now, however, she might not be able to hook up with Redlaw again. Lose track of him, and she’d lose the best chance she’d ever had of getting her work noticed and her name known. Some of the footage she had shot while with him was primo stuff, and if she stuck around she was likely to get more, of even better quality. Redlaw was the story really, as much as vampires.

And not forgetting the fact that here, right in front of her, was an actual group of vampires, and she was with them, alongside them, and nobody she knew of had ever gotten so close to the creatures before, no journalist or reporter. The word
embedded
sprang to mind, like those intrepid souls who bunked down with troops during a war, sending home filmed packages and blog updates from the front line. Tina could see herself getting embedded with vampires. She could see the value of it. Unprecedented access. Vampires up close and personal, like never before. The exclusive to beat all exclusives.