Red Eye - 02 (35 page)

CHAPTER

THIRTY-THREE

M
IGUEL WAS FADING
fast. His wounded leg was crumbling, slow-burning with a sickly smoky-barbecue stench. His fangs were bared and clenched.

Yet, between feverish groans, he was still able to argue with Tina.

“Eleventh? Don’t be dumb. Eleventh isn’t—isn’t two-way this far south. Stay on Tenth... until Thirtieth Street. That’s the best route.”

“But the Eleventh entrance is quicker.”

“But it’s for cars only. Don’t you know anything? I’ve been driving these streets for years. I know what I’m talking about.”

“Well, I still say we should take the Holland Tunnel anyway.”

“Listen,
chica
, the Lincoln has a bus lane. A
bus
lane. And this is a bus.”

“What, and you think somehow that’ll stop those psychos following us? ‘Oops, we can’t go down there, we don’t have a bus.’ I don’t know if you’ve been paying attention, but they don’t give a damn about the law.”

“I’m just—just trying to gain us an edge,” said Miguel, and he hissed as another spasm of pain wracked him.

“Tina, leave him be,” said Redlaw. “If you want to be useful, go to the back and look out.”

“No way. The back is where the bullets come in. I’m not planning on getting shot.”

“
I’ll
shoot you if you don’t do as I ask.”

Tina glared at him. “You know what the trouble with you is? I can never tell whether you’re joking or not.”

“Presume I’m not and act accordingly.”

Tina stomped to the rear of the bus and cautiously put her eye to one of the bullet holes in the paper. “Yup. They’re still there. Gaining on us, but slowly.”

“Can you tell what avenue we’re on? Is it Tenth?”

“Looks like it. I think that’s Chelsea Park we just passed.”

“You ‘think’?”

“Everything looks different in the snow. And I’m not a fucking tour guide.”

“No, a tour guide wouldn’t resort to profanity all the time.”

“You’re calling me on that?” Tina shot back. “Even now? Bunch of trigger-happy goons gunning for us and I’m still not allowed to swear?”

“You two, get a room,” gasped Miguel.

And then he screamed in pure, all-consuming agony. The decaying process had abruptly accelerated, an exponential increase achieving overload. His body hurtled towards dissolution. He became a shuddering, smouldering thing, fiery blackness spreading through him, his clothes disintegrating with the heat. Sinews tightened, turned brittle, snapped. Bone was reduced to cinder. Hair crackled to nothingness. All at once his writhing form collapsed, spilling across seat and floor as just so much incandescent dust.

“Oh, my sweet fucking Jesus,” Tina breathed.

“No!” sobbed Diane. “That was ghastly. No.”

Anu had his ears covered.

Patti turned her face away, dumbstruck, appalled.

The vampires had seen many of their own number annihilated during the past twenty-four hours, but Miguel’s demise seemed to hit them particularly hard. It had been so protracted, so clearly excruciating. Not the instantaneous oblivion offered by an injury to the heart.

“You’re supposed to be our shtriga,” said Andy to Redlaw. His voice quivered with fear and indignation. “Supposed to be protecting us. Good job you’re doing of it, huh? You ‘protected’ Miguel pretty well, didn’t you?”

“Hey!” said Denzel. “You stow that shit, you Tim Burton reject. Man’s doing his best. Just put his life on the line climbing on top of the bus. Show some goddamn respect.”

“I’m just saying, Father Tchaikovsky would never have let Miguel get shot like that.”

“Father Tchaikovsky’s not here. We got to make do with what we’ve got. You want to go it alone? Fine, be our guest. First chance we get, we’ll drop you off. See how long you last.”

“Yeah, I might just do that. Cindy’ll come with me. Won’t you, Cindy? We can make it on our own, the two of us.”

“Uh, actually, Andy,” said Cindy nervously, “I think I’d be better off with Mr Redlaw. Not being mean or anything, but he’s a whole lot tougher than you are, and he seems to know what he’s doing.”

Andy goggled. “Cindy, I’m your sire. I made you. You’re beholden to me.”

“I’m not completely sure what ‘beholden’ is,” the girl vampire replied, “but I’d much more like to be it to Mr Redlaw than to you. Sorry, Andy.”

Andy’s doughy features set into a glum pout. “This would never have happened to Lestat,” he murmured.

Redlaw said, “I’ve just seen a sign overhead on that railway bridge. ‘Expressway To Lincoln Tunnel,’ right.” He made the turn. “Tina? What’s the status on our pursuers?”

“The status,” Tina said, peering out again, “is that they’re still behind, but kind of keeping their distance now.”

“Of course they are. They can afford to. We’ve just tipped our hand, and they think we’ve trapped ourselves. Which we may have. This tunnel. Just so we’re clear. There aren’t any barriers or tollbooths?”

“Not going west. You pay to enter Manhattan but not to leave. Because nobody’d pay to go to Jersey.”

“So we’re not going to be forced to slow down or ram through anything,” said Redlaw. “Good. But the Hummer wouldn’t be hanging back if the soldiers didn’t believe they can use the tunnel to their advantage.”

“Can they?”

“Possibly. But so can we.”

T
HE
H
UMMER DOGGED
the school bus along Dyer Avenue and down the walled-in approach ramp to the tunnel. The bus entered the rightmost of the three tunnel tubes, and the Hummer did the same.

Suddenly both vehicles were on snow-free roadway. The Hummer picked up speed. So did the bus. The bus’s engine produced a shade over 200 horsepower, while the Hummer’s was capable of twice that. The bus was also twice the weight of the Hummer. The car quickly whittled down the distance between them. In no time it was sitting right on the bus’s tail. The noise of engines was amplified by the tunnel. The Hummer nosed still closer to the bus. Its bonnet was dented and one headlight was missing, broken during its glancing altercation with the snowplough truck. The bus was battered too, and acned with bullet impacts.

Lieutenant Giacoia leaned out of the passenger-side window. He had a pistol, a SIG Sauer P226 Blackwater Special. Steadying his gun hand on his left forearm, he took careful aim at the bus’s rear offside tyre.

Then the bus’s back door swung open and something large came flying out.

I
NSIDE THE BUS,
the vampires were able to move freely again. They were no longer pinned in contorted crouching positions by the rods of daylight.

As soon as the tunnel roof closed over the bus, blotting out all natural light, Redlaw ordered the vampires to pull up a bank of paired seats. Denzel, Anu, Patti and Mary-Jo all bent to the task. With their combined strength they were able to wrench the seat frame free from its bolted mountings.

The bank of seats was what came barrelling out of the back of the bus towards the Hummer. It flipped end over end and slammed into the windscreen. One metal leg embedded itself in the glass, creating a perfect spider web of cracks. The bank of seats stuck fast, almost completely obscuring the driver’s view.

Berger was forced to jam on the brakes. The Hummer came to a greasy, sidewinding halt. Berger and Giacoia piled out. Giacoia sprinted after the bus, loosing off several rounds from the SIG, but he was too far away and the bus was going too fast for accuracy. He took out one indicator light, but that was all.

Berger, meanwhile, wrestled with the bank of seats and at last managed to yank it free. She tossed it aside in disgust.

“LT! Get back in!”

Giacoia leapt into the Hummer as it rolled past, and Berger gunned the car for all it was worth, swearing heartily under her breath. The delay had cost them a good thirty seconds. The bus was already out of sight and probably closing in on the other end of the tunnel.

The Hummer reached the exit, coasting up into daylight and deep snow again. To the left was the toll plaza through which traffic was funnelled down into the tunnel from the New Jersey side. Beyond lay the Weehawken Helix, the pretzel of flyover and underpass that brought Route 495 through a 180º turn and merged it with JFK Boulevard. Of the school bus, there was no sign.

But among all the pairs of parallel ruts in the snow there was one that was particularly broad and deep. Berger followed this trail confidently until, at the next intersection, the ruts diverged into two separate pairs. The bus had been ghosting over the tyre marks of some other vehicle with a similar axle length. Damn.

The question was, had Redlaw turned off the freeway or carried straight on? Berger assumed the Brit would play it safe and stay on the main roads.

A mile further on, the Hummer caught up with... a FedEx truck that was pluckily battling the elements to make its deliveries.

Berger cursed, threw the car into an about-turn, and headed back down the freeway. She wove in and out of the sporadic oncoming traffic. Headlights flashed and horns beat out an angry Morse. The Hummer hairpinned onto the off-ramp that the school bus must have taken.

“Goddamn
suburbs
,” Giacoia said. “They could be anywhere.”

“Tell me something I don’t know,” Berger growled.

Berger drove around the area, wind whistling through the hole in the windscreen. She crisscrossed Union City and Hoboken, trying vainly to pick up the vampires’ scent again. She headed west along the South Marginal Highway, north along the New Jersey Turnpike, east along I-95. Nothing.

The bus was gone, lost in the wilds of New Jersey.

She pounded the steering wheel several times, bending it ever so slightly out of true.

“I don’t believe it! The fuckers have gotten away!”

CHAPTER

THIRTY-FOUR

T
HE
S
UNOCO GAS
station was blissfully warm inside. Tina spent a full minute in the shop just revelling in the heat. The bus, with its bullet holes and missing windows, had become a freezer on wheels.

Then she remembered she didn’t have a lot of time. It wouldn’t take Redlaw long to fill up the tank. She asked the attendant if she could use the restroom. The pimply teenage kid barely glanced up at her as he handed over the key on its large rectangular plastic tag. He had a bottle of Coke Zero open in front of him and looked tired and wired. He’d probably been pulling a double or even triple shift, stuck here with nobody able to come to relieve him. Tina could empathise.

In a toilet cubicle, she checked her site. The hit counter had reached five figures. Unbelievable. And the waspish and abusive comments were now few and far between. The vast majority of visitors were posting single-word positive critiques—“Awesome!” “Amazing!” “Fangtastic!”—some with emoticons such as “8D,” “@_@” and “((v=v))” tacked on.

At the washbasins she studied herself in the tarnished mirror. Grubby, ratty-haired, eyes red-rimmed from lack of sleep. She did what she could to smarten herself up. She hand-scrubbed some of the sewage stains out of her clothing with warm, soapy water. She splashed cold water on her face.

Pursued. Shot at. Nearly killed.

This was frontline journalism. Never mind the Middle East or Sub-Saharan Africa or Afghanistan. She was in the thick of a war and it was happening right here, on people’s doorsteps.

She envisaged herself giving an interview, perhaps on Piers Morgan’s show on CNN. Telling that slimy Limey how she obtained her extraordinary footage, what she went through to break her story about paramilitary vampire killers, the terror, the danger, the adrenalised highs and—

Her BlackBerry was buzzing. The incoming call was from an unrecognised number.

“Yes?”

“Do I have the pleasure of speaking with Tina Checkley?”

“Uh, yeah.”