Red Eye - 02 (32 page)

“Sorry!” someone called out from inside the factory. “Are you okay? Tell me I didn’t hit anybody.”

“Who the hell is that?” Redlaw barked.

“It’s me. Mary-Jo.”

“And why in God’s name are you shooting at us?”

“I didn’t mean to,” the vampire replied plaintively. “I was keeping watch, and I just thought, this rifle was laying around, and I’ve fired a gun before, and if those vampire killers happened to turn up before you did...”

Redlaw stood and clambered up onto the dock. Mary-Jo Schaeffer hung back in the shelter of the large entranceway, whose retractable steel door had long ago been dismantled and taken away for scrap. She was petite, and Colonel Jacobsen’s Colt AR-15 looked huge in her hands.

“I’ve been on ranges a few times,” she said. “Notched up some hours.”

“Handguns?”

“Yeah.”

“No experience with semiautomatic assault weapons?”

“No.”

“Idiot.” Redlaw snatched the rifle out of her hands. “You could have taken my head off.”

“I didn’t realise the trigger was so sensitive,” Mary-Jo protested.

“Or, apparently, that there was a round in the breech.”

“I said sorry.”

“‘Sorry’ is no good to a corpse.”

Mary-Jo looked crestfallen. Harsh words from her shtriga. They stung.

Tina felt the tiniest bit of sympathy for her. “She thought she was doing the right thing, Redlaw. No need for the verbal bitch-slap.”

“Would you rather it was a physical bitch-slap?”

“Just saying.”

“Well, don’t,” snapped Redlaw. “If you want to be useful, why not start daylight-proofing the bus? Paper over every inch of window on the inside. Leave a slot on the front windscreen so that I can see out when I’m driving. Think you can handle that?”

“I think I’m probably up to it,” Tina drawled. “And what’ll you be doing while I’m being handicrafts queen?”

“There’s an exsanguinated corpse on the premises. I’m going to chop off its head to make sure it stays dead.”

“Oh.”

“Unless you’d care to swap? I’d gladly mess around with scissors and tape instead.”

“No. No, I’m good.”

“Thought so.”

R
EDLAW USED
J
ACOBSEN’S
own combat knife to hack through the corpse’s neck. It was a grisly task, but he was used to it. Muscle and gristle cleaved easily under a ten-inch carbon-and-chromium-steel blade. There was very little mess until near the end, when he parted two cervical vertebrae and a trickle of colourless cerebrospinal fluid leaked out.

He wiped the knife clean on Jacobsen’s fatigues. Nice piece of kit. Jacobsen wouldn’t be needing it any more. Redlaw attached its sheath to his belt and slotted the knife there for safekeeping.

T
INA WAS THOROUGH
with the bus windows. She secured each sheet of cartridge paper into place with a double thickness of tape. She trimmed the paper to fit perfectly.

Every now and then she paused from her labours to take out her BlackBerry and check her site. The hit counter on Tick Talk was starting to go up. On a normal day she could count on perhaps a half-dozen visitors, if that. It wasn’t surprising; it was early in the site’s life and, until now, there had not been much on it that was particularly earth-shattering.

In the hour since she’d posted up the uncut vampire footage, however, she’d had over a hundred hits. And each time she checked, the total increased. Visitors were leaving comments, too. There were the predictable jaded cynics saying that it was faked, actors in makeup, contact lenses, prosthetic teeth, it was a performance art project or a teaser promotion for some upcoming found-footage Hollywood horror. But, for every one of these, there were three or four who knew the stuff was the real deal and vowed eagerly to tweet and blog about it to their friends.

That was all Tina wanted. All she needed. Shares, retweets, links, hashtags, burgeoning interest. An exponential chain reaction in cyberspace that would see her video clips go viral and become a phenomenon. Once global critical mass had been achieved, there was no way she could not be noticed any more. Her time of rejection, of continually being overlooked, would be at an end.

Eventually the interior of the bus was fully dark, not a chink of light coming in other than from in front of the steering wheel, where she had left an aperture the size of a standard envelope.

The hit counter broke the 1,000 mark and kept on rising, far faster than she’d dared imagine, clocking upwards in leaps and bounds.

She could feel it in her gut. It was happening. Her site was making waves, the ripples spreading far and wide. Tina “Tick” Checkley was on the brink of the big time.

CHAPTER

TWENTY-NINE

T
HEY MOVED IN
a pack, but not as a rabble. Not like hounds or wolves. Organised. Their training was deeply ingrained and still held sway. At all times four of them maintained defensive quadrants around the fifth. The point man led. The rear man checked his six at regular intervals, walking backwards for a few paces.

They crossed Central Park. Mostly they kept to the wooded areas, using rocks and the winter-bare trees for cover. At the reservoir they startled a jogger, who ran away screaming as fast as his legs would carry him. He didn’t get far. Two of them overtook and overpowered him, bringing him down and tearing him apart.

Some teenagers having a snowball fight near the Belvedere Castle spotted them. They dug out their phones and started filming. It was the last thing they ever did.

On the other side of the park, a police cruiser came to a halt. Its siren blurted. Two officers emerged, sidearms drawn. They weren’t quick enough to get off a single round. Their eviscerated stomachs steamed in the chilly air.

Down the western side of the city, the soldiers loped. They were tireless. They were relentless.

Not everyone who strayed into their path died. Some people were merely crippled, or knocked unconscious, or left on the critical list.

Soldiers in Manhattan. Threading through the snow-packed streets. Leaving citizens sprawled and bloodied in their wake.

Within themselves, though, they were more than soldiers. They were pure. They were free from doubts and concerns. They operated in a world of utter simplicity, life reduced to the fundamentals.

Acquire objective. Eliminate interference.

They reached the Hummer. Tracked it with a GPS locator. The stink of Jacobsen was all over the vehicle.

They dug the Hummer out of the snow with their hands. The engine started first time. They hunkered inside.

Jacobsen’s final journey was marked clearly in the air, his scent trail so vivid it almost had a colour.

The Hummer drove, and all across Manhattan sirens were wailing and snow was stained red.

CHAPTER

THIRTY

O
NE BY ONE
the vampires darted across the dock from the loading bay to the back of the bus. They ducked through the rear door and huddled in the darkened interior. The sun was low and occluded and they were in the shadow of the factory. As long as they moved swiftly, the danger of combustion was minimal.

When the last of them, Miguel, was safely inside the bus, Redlaw pulled the door shut and headed down the aisle to the front. Tina had bagged the seat directly behind the driver’s. Jacobsen’s stash of weapons lay heaped on the steps that led down to the side door.

“All aboard the special needs express,” Tina said. “Next stop, music therapy class.”

Redlaw shot her a look.

“What?” she said. “What’s with the beetle brows?”

“Poor taste.”

“No sense of humour, some people.”

“I didn’t quite catch that. What did you say?”

“Nothing. Just grumbling under my breath. About you.”

Redlaw settled into the driver’s seat. “You seem in an unusually good mood, Tina.”

“I’m perky. Nothing wrong with being perky. Coach trip. Yay.” She pumped her fists in the air like a cheerleader with pompoms. “Anyone know any songs? How about ‘Bingo Was His Name-oh’?”

Grimacing, Redlaw fired up the engine. He crunched the gearstick noisily into first.

“Hey!” Miguel called out. “Easy on the old girl. You’re going to strip a cog, you keep doing that.”

“If they’d just put the stick on the correct side...” Redlaw hunched forward and peered through the slot in the cartridge paper. “Well, World War Two tank drivers managed.”

He bore down on the accelerator and the bus drew away from the building.

Ahead, the factory gates lay askew, dangling off their hinges. Redlaw had bulldozed through them on the way in, much as he’d done with the depot gates. He gentled the bus into the gap. One of the gates buckled and bent under the nearside wheels.

The bus trundled out along a narrow approach road lined with industrial units.

“Everyone all right so far?” Redlaw asked over his shoulder. “Don’t expect a quick ride. We’re never going to be travelling much faster than this, not with the restricted view I’ve got.”

“We’re cool,” said Denzel.

“Just relieved to be on the move at last,” said Diane.

“Yeah,” said Anu. “It’s good not feeling like sitting ducks any more.”

“Mr Redlaw?” little Cindy piped up. “Where are we going
to
, exactly?”

“Out of Manhattan,” Redlaw replied. “I haven’t thought ahead much further than that. We’ll find somewhere to pause and take stock eventually. Consolidate our plans there. For now, I just want to put the immediate danger behind us. Get us out of the line of fire.”

A car was coming the other way along the road. It was squat and dark grey, one of those military-style vehicles that rock stars and movie stars seemed to like. Redlaw couldn’t see into its windows.

His hands tightened on the steering wheel and he squeezed a little more speed out of the accelerator.

The car definitely seemed to be on the prowl. Looking for something.

It passed by, disappearing from Redlaw’s sightline. Automatically he glanced in the rearview mirror, before remembering that the mirror was useless. He could see nothing at the back but black paper. He refocused his attention on the road. The snow had more or less stopped falling by now, but it lay thick and he could feel its resistance against the bus’s wheels. The tyres had snow chains on, but still the bus seemed ready to slew at any moment unless he kept a firm grip. It felt more like being at the tiller of a boat in a sea swell than driving.

The car was nothing. He couldn’t afford to think about the car. He had a bad feeling about it, but he couldn’t let that distract him. Concentrate on driving. Keeping on the road. Trying not to—

CRASH!!!

An immense impact at the rear of the bus. The whole vehicle resounded with it. Everyone was jolted forward in their seats. The wheel bucked in Redlaw’s hands. The bus swerved. He fought to straighten up and stay on course.