Talulla Rising (32 page)

HURRY.

Wilson was two flights ahead, but slowing. The meat-glut was catching up with him, an effect like over-oxygenated blood: you went fat in the vessels and veins, hands and feet full to bursting. I joined him where the stairs ended – another corridor, with a reflective vinyl floor that smelled of disinfectant – just in time to see two WOCOP agents disappearing up a second stairway twenty yards away. I looked back past Devaz. Walker was struggling up the steps. He looked as if any minute he might stop, sit down, close his eyes. I couldn’t wait for him.

A bullet hit me in the shoulder. Another struck Caleb in the thigh. A neatly muscled agent who looked about twenty, dressed only in red running shorts and blinding white sneakers and armed with a handgun, had sprung out of a door on our left, seen us and fired, though he would have known from basic training it was pointless without silver. Devaz caught him in three strides and spun him by his hair. The agent dropped to his knees, facing me. He got another round off – hitting a wall – before Devaz kicked the pistol from his grip. The young abdominals were beautiful things. Devaz yanked on the hair to get the head back, then claw-swiped the tautened throat, which waited a moment before splitting and sending out a thin arc of blood. It was too much for me. I leaped forward, dropped Caleb, slashed my lethal fingernails across the supple midriff, then fell to my knees and sank my teeth in just below the ribs.

A never-off-duty analyst in an alcove of my brain said: You’ll have to watch it, there’s a preference emerging for healthy young men. You can’t afford to establish a type. Establish a type and you establish a pattern. Establish a pattern and you get caught... Oh, but it was good. It was good to feel his life thudding into me (it wasn’t all mine; Devaz scored random chunks, having slammed his fist through the sternum and torn out the heart); the double hunger forced by last month’s pass made each fragment bright: his fair-haired mother and a sun-smashed white yard with a red pedal car and the peachy diptych of a brunette’s ass he couldn’t believe had got straight into a sixty-nine with him that one time and the guy passed out in a pool of vomit at a White Stripes show and all the remote giant sensations of childhood like that time the clouds were racing and if you lay on your back in the street it looked like the buildings were falling and his dad carrying him upstairs when he was ill and suddenly through his fever he’d known in the warm strong arms the certainty of his father’s love but somehow it spun away or diluted and so much of his head now was full of junk and TV and porn and he didn’t even want to join these guys but Nog said he could get him in and it would be a laugh—

Stop.
Stop
.

But I didn’t, immediately. Feeding cons you out of seconds, minutes, hours. The life-haemorrhaging flesh stretches time. Like a black hole. Just a few more seconds. Just another bite.

The corridor was qualitatively different when I raised my snout, as if someone had opened a sluice and all the noise and urgency had drained away. The fire alarm had stopped, but the silence had more to it than that. I turned and saw Caleb on his hands and knees lapping up the before-death blood. He was still weak, but there was a new tension in his bent elbows, new promise in his wrists. I got to my feet and grabbed him. He wasn’t strong enough to offer anything but comedy resistance but I wondered what would happen to me if he bit me, which, when I slung him back over my shoulder, I felt sure he was going to do. He didn’t, however.

Walker was at the top of the stairs, face rich with what he’d just seen: me, the woman who’d been fucking him with increasing nuance and dangerous warmth, down on all-fours eating an eviscerated human being. He was thinking of the times our eyes had met with profound recognition. Yes, that was me. And this was me. The woman was me and the monster was me. He hadn’t grasped it before. He’d conceded it, intellectually, but he hadn’t believed. Now here it was. Nine feet tall wearing blood evening gloves and winking gobbets of meat. The shock of it was a brutal refreshment. A possible paradigm shift into the future, since there was no route back to his past.

The lover wanted to comfort him. The monster was blood-buoyed and turned on and ready for more flesh. The mother was desperate, feeling time boiling away to nothing.

I turned and ran.

Two more flights of stairs brought us, I could smell, to ground level. Double doors stood open to a large, messy office, more desks and computers, papers scattered, no personnel. Identical double doors across the floor. Locked doors. Electronic. Card-swipe and access code required.

But these weren’t vault thickness, and this time there were three of us. I put Caleb down. No need to even crudely instruct Wilson and Devaz. At the third yank the left door screeched and snapped free of its lock. Beyond, not the atrium or reception I was expecting, but a loading bay. Stacked metal crates, forklifts, a snub-nosed British truck with no trailer. The place was oil-stained and freezing and stank of rust. The roll-down door to the outside world was three feet off the ground. Devaz leaped the truck, grabbed the handle and flung it upwards.

Night air full of damp fields and moonlit cold. A large asphalt compound containing a few small trucks and vans, more ribbed cargo trailers, weeds coming up through the concrete. The whole space enclosed by aluminium fencing topped with razor wire. Thirty metres away the moist silence of close-packed trees. The smells and the moon-carved openness rushed my heart up to joy. It was like running into the arms of a lost love.

Devaz and Wilson, splashed with their first Curse moonlight, lifted their ravished heads to howl – which was when I saw the gunman.

He was protruding from the sun-roof of a 4x4 parked so that it was almost completely concealed between two trailers.

I flung
MOVE!
at Wilson with a violence that must have struck his head like a discus – then he was down, hit in the chest – and this time, I knew, the bullets would count.

There was no time to move and all the time in the world to feel myself not moving, the stalled synapses, the neurons’ long-winded math that couldn’t possibly be done before the bullet arrived. The moment expanded, big and slow and clear enough for me to think: this is my last moment, standing with a vampire child in my arms in a—

Then the blood-rush and cellular scintillation like a billion tiny stars coming on in the flesh as out of the darkness beyond the fence a werewolf dropped, the lethal end of her giant parabola, a jump that had begun twenty metres away, triggered by the silver exploding through Wilson’s chest.

Madeline, transformed, hit the sniper like a meteor.

47

The 4x4’s driver – Murdoch, I knew – reacted fast. Within a second of Madeline’s impact on the roof he’d slammed the car into gear and motion. Madeline, having bitten through the shooter’s throat, wrenched his head clean off and flung it towards us. Murdoch floored the gas. Tyres screamed. Side-arm shots cracked dry and small over the outraged engine. Madeline hung on. It took Murdoch sideswiping a cargo crate to dislodge her. A moment more and she would have had another head to pitch us.

Murdoch rammed the fence and burst through under the wire. He swung the car right and hit what must have been an access road. Automatic-weapons fire followed him, but he kept going.

Devaz was on all-fours over Wilson’s corpse, head hanging, sniffing. I put Caleb down and ran to where Madeline had fallen.

KID OKAY. WITH LUCY.

She wasn’t hurt, and was on her feet sending me this by the time I reached her. But she was starving. Her roiling scent and shimmering heat said hunger at the end of its leash. Her roused dead were there in misery on her breath; her livened cunt had its own prowling gravity. I could have put my arms around her. She felt that, had no room for it, was already moving past me, electric with appetite. Caleb’s odour on me made her gag.

PLEASE WAIT. PLEASE.

She did, but it pulled her blood the wrong way. I could feel what she could feel: that the building was still manned, that
live prey
was scurrying around less than fifty metres away.

CAN’T WAIT. ASK THEM. LOOK.

Behind me. I turned. Konstantinov and Cloquet were approaching, armed.
Mike got out.
A metal gate swung on its hinges behind them.

‘Zoë’s safe,’ Cloquet said. ‘Thank God you’re all right. Transport close by. Hurry.’

Konstantinov was packing an AK-47 but there was silver on him too. The holstered handguns, one on each hip. The blade in his boot. He wasn’t taking any chances.

‘Hurry,’ Cloquet repeated.

Walker had collapsed a few feet away. Konstantinov ran to him and broke an ampoule of something under his nose. Caleb, pale as a root, had crawled to one of the trucks and now sat propped, semi-conscious, against one of its enormous wheels. I hesitated. Truth was I hadn’t eaten nearly enough. The half-dozen mouthfuls from the youngster in the corridor had teased the hunger rather than satisfying it. If I didn’t get more the humans would soon be at risk. A few hours from now even Cloquet wouldn’t be safe. A cloud shifted from where it had been half-covering the moon and the light in the yard surged. It was too much for Madeline. She sprang towards the building’s open maw.

At that moment several bursts of gunfire sounded from within. Screams. More shots – then three WOCOP agents came staggering and backpedalling from the loading bay.

Followed by two more werewolves.

TRISH, FERGUS, I got from Madeline. Both of them bleeding from a handful of not-silver bullet holes, manifestly not suffering for it. Konstantinov was the brains here. Attack from both ends.

Murdoch had slipped through somehow, another exit. Murdoch would always know another way out.

Devaz grabbed the first agent by the throat, lifted him off the ground, broke his wrist when he tore the machine gun from his hand. The other two agents were out of ammunition. There was nowhere for them to go.

48

Trish and Fergus were soon blissfully off-mission. In the time it took Konstantinov and Cloquet to get Walker in the van, they’d entered the state beyond reason, the state
beyond
– period. Trish was on all-fours, muzzle shoved under her victim’s ribs, Fergus, throat up, snout blowing bouquet after bouquet of moonlit breath, was fucking her from behind. A nerve in their victim’s leg made it jounce to their rhythm, as if he were enjoying the tune of his own death. I was wet from watching them, from the live flesh, from my share of the chaotic little pack consciousness, plus, obviously, haywire resurgence of the night with Jake at Big Sur. Not the same without love – no tenderness to sweeten the cruelty, no
refined
counterpoint to the beast – but still, a bacchanalian alternative, an exquisitely filthy feast for the Cursed.

Not that I’d spent all my time watching. I’d claimed
my
victim – mid-thirties red-haired Irishman failed swimmer with a long, sad, top-heavily muscled body – in a single leap and swipe and taken as much of him as I could in a furious and indiscriminate bolt: blood, meat, liver, kidneys, life; his life, his
life
– the drippy blonde babysitter he’d wanted to marry when he was six; shafts of orange gold sun like dividers in an evening forest; his mother’s small, weaselly face and that time he’d come home and found her crying at the bottom of the stairs and a cobblestoned street with a car on cinderblocks and his face fat and hot when Sean Neagle hit him that icy morning in the playground at St Michael’s in Ballyhist—

Madeline, meanwhile, was on all-fours next to me,
soixante-neuf’
d over her victim. She’d clawed through his pants and taken half the flesh from his left thigh. When her fangs had pierced the femoral artery warm blood had splashed me, mouth, breasts, belly. The air was musical with its odour. She was close enough, it occurred to me now, with a sly loosening of my sexual self. If I wanted to reach out and touch her, to inaugurate the new era of anything sexual goes...

But the time, the time, the
time
. Aside from the mother in me screaming at the rest that there were THE CHILDREN TO GET TO, my strategist knew the window we were in was tiny. We were only still in it because no one left inside liked the odds outside now. The facility’s survivors weren’t looking to get out, they were looking to stay in, find a set of blast doors to lock themselves behind and wait for the moon to set. But phones would be ringing at other WOCOP bases. If reinforcements turned up they’d be packing silver – and if they were airborne they could be here in minutes.

A giant hot hand touched my butt. Devaz, sporting a prodigious erection, had crept up and was now, with obvious pride, presenting himself to me. The meat in my guts and the blood on my tongue shot a blazing imperative down to my cunt. Oh, God.
Wasn’t
there time? Surely there was time? Surely if we were—

The mother of my children was screaming and hopping about and pulling her hair and wringing her hands and forcing the pertinent images: I saw myself back on the scientists’ table or lying dead and naked here on the asphalt when the sun came up and Lucy one day soon realising the novelty had worn off and feeding Zoë a silver earring or just leaving her in a hotel lobby and Lorcan on the altar not knowing what was happening to him and never having known anything but aloneness and fear and looming alien presences...

It was enough – just. Even then I had to crawl out from under the seductive weight of the rest of me. Even then it took Cloquet blasting the van’s horn to haul me at last into the right kind of action. I jumped to my feet and shoved Devaz out of the way. He snapped at me, missing by an inch, then immediately turned, dropped to his knees and prodded Madeline’s thigh with his cock. Madeline stopped eating and looked at him.

Caleb had passed out a second time. He lay where he’d fallen by the truck’s big wheel, which stood over him like a dumb guardian. I ran to him and picked him up.

WE HAVE TO GO.

Madeline turned to me. In her left hand she held her victim’s bloodily torn-off cock, in her right Devaz’s, still attached to Devaz. (I thought: That can’t be much of an aphrodisiac for him, even in his state.) Like me she’d barely crossed the line into Enough, and like me she knew Enough was never enough for
wulf
. For
wulf
only more than Enough was enough. But also like me she was a businesswoman. Understood risk, gain, gamble, loss. They’d got me out, killed some of those who would otherwise have killed them, and fed. Not a bad night’s takings. Quit while you’re ahead. She dropped the severed cock, let go of the attached one and instead wrenched off what was left of her victim’s leg – complete up to just past the knee, thereafter a lot of bare bone – to bring with her.