The Last Vampire (13 page)

If only the French customs agents hadn’t made such a mess of things at de Gaulle. If only he hadn’t had to screen the operation through Interpol. The way he saw it, they should have disabled the creature with a shot as soon as it reached customs, then dropped it in a vat of sulfuric acid, or cremated it. Instead, they took it to an airport brig. It escaped before they even got it in the cell. Of course it did.

“I wish I could tell you what it is I’m doing,” Paul said. “It’d be a lot easier if every damn security officer and cop on the planet knew. But there would be huge problems. It’d be the most unpredictable goddamn thing you could imagine.”

“Well, that explains that. You gonna get yourself wasted, old buddy, on this thing. Your politics are all used up, way I hear it.”

They pulled up in front of the long, impressively French Victorian building that housed the Sûreté. Paul expected a lot of bureaucracy and a long wait, but they were soon in a very quiet, very ornate office facing an extremely fastidious midget.

“I am Colonel Bocage,” he said.

“Where’s Henri-Georges?” Sam asked.

“You will interview with me.”

Paul said in French,
“J’voudrais mon peuple, monsieur. Tout de suite.”

Colonel Bocage laughed. “Mr. Mazur, this is the man in charge, that you promised us to meet?”

Sam nodded. “I made that promise to Henri-Georges Bordelon.”

“And he transmitted it to me.” “I need my people,” Paul said. “We’re saving lives.” “You speak French. You should think in French. It’s more civilized . . .” “I can’t think in French.”

“ . . . because we have so many ways of expressing concepts of good and evil.” He smiled again, and Paul thought he looked, for a moment, like a very hard man. “Mr. Mazur, could you step out for a moment? I am sorry.”

This wasn’t the usual drill when you went to beg to keep your spies in place. But Paul was in no position to ask what was going on. When Sam had left, the colonel went to his window, which looked out over a lovely park. There was a difference between being a high official in the Sûreté and a lowly intelligence officer like Sam.

Colonel Bocage closed a manila folder he’d been appearing to review. It was only a pose, a tension builder. Paul had done it himself a thousand times, to a thousand nervous supplicants in ten different countries. “So,” the colonel said at last, “you are here investigating
les sauvages
. Tell me, what do you Americans call them?”

Paul Ward had not had the sensation of his heart skipping a beat since the moment he had looked upon his father’s remains. No matter how violent or how dangerous his situation, he always remained icy calm . . . until this second. His heart was skipping a whole lot of beats. He parted his lips, but nothing came out.

The colonel raised an eyebrow and with it one corner of his mouth. “I am your counterpart,” he said, “your French counterpart.”

Paul wiped his face clean of expression. Tell him nothing.

“You are surprised, I see,” Colonel Bocage said. “Genuinely surprised. Tell me, how long have the Americans been working on this?”

Paul reminded himself never to play poker with Colonel Bocage. “A few years,” he said dryly.

“My friend, we have been struggling with this problem for fifty years.”

“We cleared Asia.”

“Cleared?”

“We killed them, all of them.”

“Except for Mrs. Tallman.”

“Except for her.”

“Elle est une sauvage, aussi?”

“You call them savages?”

“To keep the record clean. We know what they are. But you come from Asia, where we know you have been working very hard. Why not start in America, where the lives are more important to you?”

“Our first solid lead was in Tokyo.”

At that moment, Charlie and Becky were brought in.

“Ah,” Colonel Bocage said, “your colleagues. Now, please, we shall all sit together.”

“You guys okay?”

“Fine,” Becky said. She looked wonderful when she was angry — her eyes full of sparks, her cheeks flushed, her lips set in a line that was at once grim and somehow suggestive.

Beside her, Charlie played with the damn cigarette machine. His style under this kind of pressure was sullen defiance.

There was a silence. Paul was trying to remember if he had ever felt quite this embarrassed and uncomfortable before. He decided that the answer was no.

“This matter has the very highest level of secrecy attached to it in France,” Bocage said. “Government does not care to inform the population of such matters.” He paused. “You have concluded the same.”

“All governments that we’ve been to have concluded the same.”

“Given that we cannot protect our people, there seems little choice but to hide this until matters are resolved.”

Bocage rested his eyes on Becky, so frankly that she looked away. Paul was fascinated. Becky was the very essence of self-possession, and Becky did not look away.

“You obtained what you needed, I trust,” he said to her.

“Yes.”

He strolled over to his desk. “We used a computer spying program to watch your keystrokes,” he said, his voice rippling with self-satisfaction. There were few things more pleasant in the life of an intelligence agent than getting the drop on a colleague from a friendly country. Paul knew, he’d done it. “If you’d like a copy of your work —” He held a file folder toward Becky and Charlie. “In the interest of friendly cooperation.”

“It’d be friendlier,” Paul said, “if you shared something with us that we didn’t already have.”

“With pleasure, Mr. Ward,” he said. Then his mouth snapped closed, as if he had caught himself in a moment of indiscretion.

Paul saw that the man’s carefully relaxed appearance was concealing a state of extraordinary emotional tension. Paul’s experience as a wartime interrogator told him that this man was about to address something that he considered extremely terrible.

“Go ahead, Colonel,” Charlie said, no doubt reading the same signs.

“We have had one of these creatures under observation in a house in —”

“Let us tell you that,” Becky said. “Thirteenth Arrondissement. Rue des Gobelins.”

“Very good. Do you know which house? Or exactly what has happened there?” The colonel was sweating now.

“Tell us,” Paul said. He decided that the colonel was a man who habitually exploded in the face of his own staff, but in this situation had to contain the energy.

“We have had
une sauvage
trapped in a house in the Rue des Gobelins for over a year. It hasn’t eaten for twelve months, but it still lives.”

“So why not go in? If you got the thing trapped, kill it.”

“We were hoping that it would attract some response from its peers — curiosity, compassion, something that would draw them to it. But it did not, and now — well, it’s too late.”

Something had gone terribly wrong, which explained the ominous lowering of the colonel’s voice.

“What’s the trouble, Colonel?”

“The house is at this moment burning to the ground. In it, there are two vampires that we know of.” He stopped again. He rubbed his cheek, as if hunting for stubble. “There are six of my own people.”

“God save them,” Paul said. He knew, now, why the map of the Thirteenth Arrondissement was so up-to-date, and also why the sewer system had been altered. They had cut off access from the vampire’s lair. Exactly the approach Paul would have taken.

“But I do have some good news for you. This ‘Mrs. Tallman’ of yours was in the house.”

“That’s goddamn good news, Colonel!” Maybe she hadn’t had time to spread her warning. Maybe now she would never have time. “Do you know how long she’s been there?”

“She appeared yesterday afternoon at about six. That we know.”

“Yesterday afternoon?”

He nodded. “The taxi brought her from a hotel.”

“It’s possible that she didn’t reach any of the others.”

“It is. But they are aware that something is wrong, the Paris vampires.”

Paul had assumed that there would be resistance if they realized they were under attack.

“Only very recently,” the colonel continued, “have we been able to deal with them. Only since we understood the difficulties involved in — the difficulties with the blood —”

“How do you kill ’em?”

“We shoot them to incapacitate them with a gun that has been especially designed for the purpose, then we burn them to ash.”

“That’ll work.”

He bared his teeth, sucked in air with a hiss. Paul thought,
This is one tough bastard. I like this guy.
Bocage stuck out his jaw. “We made many kills over the years. But the numbers, they still went up. Slowly, but always
up!
My God!”

“It’s been hard for us, too.”

“We would shoot them in the chest, then bury them. They would come out, but carefully, so we would not notice the disturbance to the grave. We thought we were eradicating them, but we were accomplishing nothing. Eventually, even we could see that the pattern of killing went on. But we could not track it because they come up out of mines under the city. All sorts of places. No pattern, you see.”

“What about the Ninth and the Thirteenth,” Becky asked.

“We eventually tracked one of the creatures back to the Thirteenth. To Nineteen Rue des Gobelins, to be precise. The only one in Paris living above-ground. The rest of them — dear God, those mines are a horrible place.” He fell silent for a moment.“We have a seventy percent casualty rate down there.”

Paul said nothing. Of the seven people who had started with him, he’d lost four. He and Justin had thought over fifty percent was monstrous.

The telephone rang. Colonel Bocage went around his desk and answered it. He spoke in French at some length, then put it down abruptly. He stood, silent. Paul knew what had happened without even asking.

“Another casualty report. The whole team that entered Nineteen Rue Gobelins was lost. Six men.”

“Shit!” Charlie said.

In the distance, a church bell sounded.

“There is good news. Of one
sauvage,
bones were found. They are being taken out to be burned.”

“And the other one?”

“Mrs. Tallman was reduced to ash.”

“Then we’re done,” Becky said. “Back home to find out if my fiancé remembers my name.”

“We are going to attempt to isolate and sterilize the mines,” Bocage said with that carefully practiced mildness of his. “We’re short six essential personnel. It’ll take us months to find and train replacements.” He raised his eyebrows. “I think that our two countries have some secrets to share.”

Langley would be as nervous about this as an old maiden aunt about a slumber party. There were protocols to create, careful integration procedures so that the secrecy laws of both countries could be followed during the operation. He ought to go back and make a full report up supervisory channels. On the other hand, he could just stuff the whole damn process straight up Langley’s ass, and do it without telling them.

“May I take it that you’re on board,” Colonel Bocage asked.

He didn’t even need to look at Becky and Charlie. Their answer would be the same as his. “You bet.”

I
f she did not have blood immediately — absolutely fresh blood — she would die. Where she lay, trapped, helpless, and in agony, there could be no blood. Here in this dank place, with pain radiating through her body as if an army with burning coals for heels were marching up and down her, Miriam saw that she was coming to the final edge of life.

She had ended up here for one reason only: She had been surprised by the disaster in Chiang Mai and running like a desperate rat ever since. No planning, no forethought, simply a wild race across the world.

The humans had blocked the escape tunnel with concrete and reinforced it with bars of iron. She’d taken to the stairs, running up to the top of the house, to the ancient rooms where Lamia had lived. The old brocades still hung on the walls, rotting and falling though they were. And there was the bed she had used, where Miriam had cuddled with her, and where they had so happily shared kills. But the flames had come, marching like soldiers, and Miriam had been forced to the roof. She’d looked from the edges of the house; the streets had been filled with dozens of police and firemen. She could not climb down the wall into that, not in broad daylight. She could not jump to another building, not quite. She’d found a way, though. She always found a way. She had climbed down inside the chimney, down into the hearths in the basement, below the level of the fire. As she crawled out, covered with ash, the floor above had begun to cave in. Fire had swept over her, fire and the agony of fire.

There had been a tiny space at the back of the fireplace, where they had pushed the ashes. She’d pulled bricks out and made her way into a brick pipe not more than eighteen inches in diameter, forcing her body into the space until her joints ground.

She lay with her eyes closed, willing herself not to cry out with the agony of it. If she opened her eyes, all she saw was wet, moldering brick a few bare inches above her face. The whole time she was struggling through the crack, she’d heard Martin screaming and screaming. The only thing the food she’d brought him had done was give him enough energy to die slowly.

They were gaining control over the fire, and above her she could now hear human voices. Water cascaded down.

She heard a sound, very distinct, and very different from the water, or the popping of Martin’s hot bones. This sound she heard was breathing —
snick snick, snick snick
— quick breathing, very light.

A rat was coming along the tunnel she was in, interested, no doubt, in the scent of raw, bleeding flesh. Or perhaps it was a devotee of cooked food. A French rat might be expected to be a sophisticate.

This rat represented a chance — a small one, admittedly, but its presence changed the odds from nonexistent to . . . well, a little bit better than nothing.

Here, little one, come here, little fruit. “The closer they are genetically to man, the better they are for you. The rats, the apes, the cows, all may be consumed to benefit.” So had said the Master Tutomon, her childhood tutor, with his lessons in geometry and languages and survival.

The rat hesitated. She could not see it, but the sound of its breathing and the patter of its feet were clear. It was on her left side, just parallel with her foot. To encourage it to come closer to her hand, she began to wriggle her fingers.

She needed to open her eyes, and she prepared herself as best she could. The space might be entirely dark by now, and that would be better. The light was much less, but she saw the bricks, so close that they were blurred to her vision. An involuntary gasp came out of her. The rat scuttled away.

She raised her head until it was pressed against the top of the pipe, then looked along her arm. The creature came back. She could just see its interested little face as it went
snick-snick, snick-snick
against her fingertips.

She stretched her arm, opening her fingers, letting the rat venture closer to the center of the trap. But it came no closer.

The indifferent trickle of water that had been slipping around her body was becoming a steady stream. If this pipe backed up, they would notice. They would send a crew down to unblock it. They would drag her out, even if it tore her to pieces. There would be no mercy. There was never any mercy; that had become quite apparent.

Now, the rat was returning. The rat, in fact, was very close to her fin-gers. Her exquisite nerves communicated the sensation as it sniffed their tips. Finally, it decided to stop sniffing and try a bite of the cool, still flesh that had drawn its curiosity. Instantly, it was in Miriam’s hand. It was wriggling and screaming its rat screams —
ree-ree-ree
. She sucked in her breath and moved her arm, drawing the creature closer to her mouth. She had to drag it against her naked breast, and as she did its needlelike teeth slashed the pale skin.

Then the creature was at her mouth. She bit off the shrieking head and drank the body dry, crumbling the remains, which were no more substantial than a little leaf.

The blood of the rat tasted surprisingly good. She could feel it spilling through her. It was going to be useful. But would it be enough for the task that lay ahead?

To continue the motion that her exhaustion had stopped, she had to work her arms over her head and press hard against the edges with her feet. In time, her bones would compress a little more, and she would move a few inches. However, if the pipe got any more narrow, she could be trapped.

Now that she was moving again, the water was sluicing around her, bringing with it bits of spent coal and ash. She pushed, felt more pressure, waited. Nothing.

If she was trapped — her heart began going faster. Harder she pushed, harder and harder. Still nothing. She felt her tongue swelling from the effort. Her bones ground and creaked. Her tongue began to push past the rows of cartilage that filled her mouth, that provided the seal when she sucked blood.

Still nothing, nothing,
nothing!
And then — worse — louder voices. Yes, the humans were in the basement, speaking about the slowness of the drain. They must unclog it, of course. They would find within it this strange, distorted being that would slowly return to its previous form, and they would know another secret of the Keepers, that vampires’ bones that were not brittle like their own, but pliant.

How would they kill her? Burn her until she was ash, as they had done to her mother? Hammer a stake into her heart until her blood stopped, then let her die over however long it took in a coffin — years, or even whole cycles of years? Or explode her head and dissolve her in acid?

There was a sound, and immediately a dagger of pain shot straight up her spine. The next instant, she slid along the pipe a substantial distance. She could have howled with the sheer joy of it, the wonderful sensation of release from the terrible compression.

The water she had been stopping came behind her, a gushing torrent that swept her down a wider sluiceway. Where she was now, there was considerably more light. It was coming from slits near the ceiling, that appeared at regular intervals. The space was high enough to stand up in, and she could peer through these slits.

She rose to a sitting position. She was exhausted. A rat was not worth much to her body, and she soon must feed again. She needed a human being.

She drew herself up and up, fighting the great blasts of pain from her tormented body. Finally, she was crouching. To see out, she would have to straighten herself, and she could not until her bones had spread again. She forced herself to try, to hasten the process as much as she could. Agony ran up and down her spine, causing her toes to curl and her lips to twist back. She hissed with it, she stifled the screams that tried to burst out of her throat.

Minutes passed. The water, which had been gushing past her knees, subsided to a milder flow. Its acrid stench was replaced by a surprising odor — the scent of a fresh spring. Her kind needed a lot of water and loved fresh water. She was smelling a clean, limestone spring beneath the streets of Paris, in the very sewer. She turned herself toward it and began slowly placing one foot in front of another, walking toward the source. Now she could see that the arched space widened. To her left and right there were muddy banks. In the water, there swam tiny fish, sweeping along before her like little schools of pale starlight.

This wonderful, entirely unexpected place must be the ancient River Bièvre. The rumbling overhead was a street. And indeed, when she finally managed to peer out one of the slits, she saw passing tires. As she moved along, the water became better and better. No sewage here at all, just the stream still dancing in its ancient bed of stones.

She began to look for a spring. There was certainly one nearby. She could smell its wonderful, stony freshness. Ten steps along, twenty, and she found it, its water bubbling cheerfully out of the ground. Above it, somebody in the long-ago had made a little grotto and set a cross, which now stood encrusted with rust. She lay herself down in the water and let it flow over her, let it kiss her wounds with its clean coldness.

The pain grew somewhat less. The cold was helping to heal the burns, the clean water to reduce the need of her blood to ward off infection. If the process was to speed up to a normal rate, though, she had to have food.

She lay in the pouring spring, twisting and turning slowly, allowing the water to clean every part of her, to sweep away the ashen skin and the burned flesh, and the debris that had collected in the wounds. The thick stink of it all washed away with it, leaving behind only the smell of the water and the smell of her.

Finally, when those two odors had not changed for a long time, she rose from the stream. She began moving along the riverbank, a naked, burned creature, svelte and, she supposed, pale. She was looking for a manhole, some means of getting up into the city again, to the food supply that swarmed in its streets.

What she found instead was a door. It was steel and set high up in the wall, at the top of a series of iron rungs. The door was half the normal height and had a lever rather than a handle. She climbed the rungs, pulled the lever, which dropped down with a thud. She drew the door open and found herself looking into a dark room full of humming machinery.

She climbed into the room. In contrast with the wet cold that had surrounded her for hours, it was warm and dry. It felt fiercely hot, although she knew that this was only the effect of the sudden change.

Her nostrils had been seared, but her sense of smell seemed unimpaired. She smelled machine oil, the fumes of burning, and the scent of lots of electricity. This was a furnace room. She knew boilers and furnaces well. She had special uses for them. This one reminded her of the Ehler that she had in her house, a good, hot system with an ample firebox.

Beyond the furnace, she saw stairs. She mounted them, stopping at the top to listen and catch her breath. She laid her ear against the door that was there. On the other side, she heard the tap of footsteps. They moved slowly about,
tip-tap, tip-tap,
pausing here and there, then moving on. Suddenly a voice began to speak, using English. It spoke about the manufacture of tapestries.

This work had been going on when she was last here. Across the street from her mother’s house there had been a manufactory of tapestry. So it was still in operation, but there were also observers now, people from the English-speaking world being taken on tours of the works.

She turned the handle of the door. Locked. This was of little consequence. They had not learned the art of the lock, the humans. Shaking it a few times, she dislodged the tumblers. She knew exactly what she sought: a female creature of about her own size, preferably alone.

The tour group consisted of about twenty people being led about among the tapestries, which hung on large looms. She stepped out onto the gloomy area before the door, then slipped behind the nearest loom. On the other side, the weaver worked, stepping on her treadle and sliding thread through her beater.

Beneath the smock, the girl wore dark clothing of some sort; Miriam could not see exactly what it was. The casual dress of the modern age. She peered at the creature. It was intent on its work. She listened to the talk of the guide. The tourists drifted closer. In another moment, they would see this person, observe her working at her loom.

Miriam stepped into the girl’s view. She didn’t notice, such was her concentration. Miriam moved closer. Now, the girl stopped working and glanced her way, then looked harder. Her mouth dropped open. She looked the naked apparition up and down. An expression of pity crossed her face, mixing with horror as she realized that the woman she was seeing was severely burned.

Miriam stepped toward her. She swayed as if falling, causing the girl to instinctively move forward to help her. Miriam enclosed her in her arms and drew her behind the loom, then opened her mouth against the neck and pulled the fluids in fairly easily, requiring two great gulps to fin-ish the process.

Her whole flesh seemed to leap with joy; it was as if she were going to fly up to the sky. She fought against crying out, such was the pleasure. Her body from the top of her head to the tips of her toes filled with an electric tickling as her newly refreshed blood raced to repair her wounds.

The shuddering, tickling sensations were so overwhelming that she was dropped like a stone to her knees. She pitched forward, gasping, her body deliciously racked with a sensation very like climax. Again it came, again and again, and the voices came closer, and the tip-tapping of the shoes.