The Reformed Vampire Support Group (15 page)

Dave sniffed. He obviously wasn’t reassured.

For a few minutes we staggered on without speaking, while I struggled to find the right words. It’s hard to explain how I felt just then. Confused, of course, but the confusion was lifting. Sick, naturally. Horrified. Scared. And grateful – so grateful that Dave had been with me. That he was
still
with me, despite my recent conduct.

‘Dave?’ I squeaked at last. ‘Did I do anything really … really bad?’

‘No.’ He shook his head. He knew what I was talking about.

‘I think – I remember trying to jump someone—’

‘You didn’t.’

‘Because you stopped me.’ Tears welled in my eyes. ‘You stopped me, Dave. Thank you. Thank you so much.’

‘Don’t worry. You’re okay, now.’

‘It was awful.’

‘I know.’ He paused. ‘It was.’

‘I can’t believe it didn’t affect you. All that blood …’

‘Oh, I felt it,’ he murmured. ‘Believe me, I felt it. Just not the way you did.’

‘How did you stop yourself?’ I couldn’t imagine having the strength. ‘What happened, did you hold your breath, or something?’

‘I saw your face.’ His tone was flat. He had to lick his lips before continuing. ‘You weren’t there anymore. When I saw that, I couldn’t think about anything else.’ He heaved a shaky sigh. ‘It was like seeing you dead. No – worse. It was like – like—’

‘Like seeing me turn into Casimir.’ I can’t tell you how distraught I was. If Dave had kneed me in the gut, it would have been less painful. For thirty years I’d been able to ignore the truth, because I had never really
felt
like a vampire. Not like a vampire in the traditional sense, at any rate; not like one of those ravening, mindless, deformed monsters on the silver screen, with their bloodstained mouths and screeching cries and razor claws.

For thirty years I’d been telling myself that I was different, somehow – until, at that moment by the pit, I had behaved exactly like every vampire I’d ever condemned.

‘Hey. Don’t cry.’ Dave squeezed me in such a comforting way that I barely managed to avoid throwing myself onto his chest. ‘It might have been hard, but you did it,’ he murmured. ‘That’s the important thing. You held back.’

‘Because
you
were there!’ I said, and he shrugged.

‘It was the same for us all,’ he replied softly. ‘None of us did it without help. And from now on you’ll find the whole thing much easier to handle.’

‘Hey!’ It was Dermid. When I looked over my shoulder, I saw him pointing. ‘See that light?’ he demanded. ‘That’s the kitchen door. You can go straight through there, and the bathroom’s on your left.’

‘Aren’t you coming in?’ Father Ramon queried, with obvious surprise.

‘Nah, I gotta get back to the pit,’ said Dermid. ‘These things don’t run themselves, y’know.’ He waved the rest of us towards the house. ‘Go on. Dad’ll be along in a minute.’

So Dave and I stumbled forward, through the back gate. From there it was perhaps half a dozen metres to the kitchen door, across a cement patio littered with firewood, auto parts, rolls of chicken wire and dead pot plants. As I checked to make sure that Father Ramon was keeping up, I noticed that Dermid had begun to retrace his steps.

But he hadn’t washed his hands of us. On the contrary, he repeatedly glanced back to monitor our progress – and I realised that we wouldn’t be able to depart unseen.

‘He’s watching us,’ I informed Dave, very quietly.

‘Then we’ll have to head straight through,’ said Dave, in equally hushed tones. ‘We’ll go inside and leave by the front entrance. Then we’ll double back to the van.’

‘Can you do that, Nina?’ Father Ramon asked. He was directly behind me. ‘Can you walk that far?’

‘If she can’t, I’ll carry her,’ said Dave. ‘Because we have to get the hell out of here.
Now
.’

And he pulled open the kitchen door.

I suppose we should have worked out that there’d be someone inside, waiting for us. As soon as Dave crossed the threshold, he was bailed up. I heard a click, turned my head, and spied a short, weathered, nuggetty man aiming a rifle directly at Dave’s left ear.

Dave stopped – so abruptly that the priest bumped into him.

‘Oh no!’ cried Father Ramon ‘Please – wait – I’m a priest—’

‘And I’m an atheist,’ the armed man spat. I recognised his cramped country vowels, having heard them already over the public address system. His appearance matched his voice; it was compressed but strangely formidable. Where he wasn’t bald, his ash-grey hair had been clipped like a shorn sheep’s. His rubbery features looked squashed, and he didn’t have much of a neck. Yet his broad shoulders, big hands and broken nose were intimidating – as were his scars, and his empty blue eyes.

‘We didn’t come here to cause trouble!’ Father Ramon quavered. (By this time he was holding his hands in the air.) ‘Believe me, we didn’t know anything about this event—’

‘But you do now.’ The armed man lowered his weapon slightly, to prod Dave in the ribs. ‘Thing is, I’m busy. I’ve got a show to run. We’ll talk later.’ He jerked his chin. ‘Downstairs. Go.’

‘But—’

‘
Move!
’

You can’t argue with a rifle, especially when you’re feeling sick. From where I was standing, the barrel of that thing seemed enormous. Like the mouth of a cannon. Of course, I knew that nothing discharged from it could possibly kill Dave. But I also knew that a bullet in the chest wouldn’t improve his quality of life, either.

The thought of seeing him a permanent invalid, wheezing and choking through tattered lungs, almost made me throw up all over again. To be honest, I just … well, I couldn’t bear it.

‘Even if you shoot us, it won’t make any difference,’ I began, almost incoherent with panic and distress. ‘You – you don’t understand who we are—’

‘
Nina!
’ Dave’s urgent reprimand silenced me at once. He kept his arm clamped around my shoulders as we shuffled towards a
rough-cut hole in the kitchen floor. I can’t tell you much about that kitchen, because I was more interested in the gun. Nevertheless, I did get a vague impression of pineapple-print curtains, unwashed dishes, old newspapers, dog bowls, dog leads, pliers, bones and rat traps. (It was pretty obvious that no females were living in the house.)

‘Are you Barry McKinnon?’ The priest seemed determined to keep talking; I was awed by his ability to do so. ‘Because if you are, I assure you, we simply came here to make inquiries about your silver bullets—’

‘Later,’ the man barked. ‘We’ll discuss it later.’

‘So you
are
Barry?’

‘Not to you, mate. To you I’m Mister McKinnon. Now get down there, and we’ll work things out when I’m done.’

The staircase didn’t inspire confidence. Someone had obviously sawn through the linoleum and thrown together a single flight of stairs using whatever timber happened to be lying around. Upon gingerly making my way to the bottom step, I found myself in a brick-lined basement with several doors leading off it. These doors resembled the hatch in the tiled pit outside; they were all thick and heavy and made of iron or steel, painted yellow, and they were reinforced with enormous bolts. I couldn’t help wondering if Barry had used recycled prison doors, because they looked very old.

One of them was standing open.

‘In there,’ said Barry. He was bringing up the rear, his gun resting between Father Ramon’s shoulder blades. ‘Go on.’

‘In
there?
’ The priest sounded appalled, and I understood why. The whole set-up was like something out of a horror movie. ‘But what on earth—’

‘Just
do
it!’ Barry growled.

Even then (believe it or not) the little bottle of spiked Windex
didn’t so much as cross my mind. I’d completely forgotten about it. Perhaps I was still groggy from the blooding – or perhaps I’m not one of those people who react quickly and heroically to adverse circumstances.

Not like Zadia Bloodstone.

Anyway, the fact is that I allowed myself to be herded into Barry McKinnon’s underground cell like a brainless farm animal, without uttering a single word of protest. The first thing I spotted was a stainless steel toilet without a seat. The second thing was an unmade bed. The third thing was a barred gate, clamped across an opening on the other side of the room.

Beyond the solid iron framework of this gate stretched a long, dark corridor. And from the somewhere down one end of this corridor echoed the faint sound of distant cheering.

Aghast, I stared at Dave.

‘Right,’ said Barry. ‘I’ll be back in a couple of hours.’

Then he pushed Father Ramon over the threshold, shut the door, and drew the bolt.

For at least
fifteen seconds no one spoke. Finally Dave said, ‘This is a tank.’

When I looked around, I saw that he was right. We were standing in what appeared to be a huge concrete drum – the kind normally used to collect rainwater. I’d seen quite a few of them so far on my trip into the outback; they were generally sitting beside some farmhouse, half-buried in the earth.

‘It must be connected to that pit,’ I remarked dully. ‘By an underground passage.’

Father Ramon gave a sudden start, then began to grope around in his pockets. When he produced his mobile phone, however, his shoulders drooped.

‘No signal,’ he lamented. I reached for my own mobile, just to check – and my fingers closed over the forgotten perfume bottle.

‘Oh, hell!’ I pulled it out. ‘Oh, damn! My spray! I’m so sorry!’

‘We can still use it,’ was Dave’s opinion. And the priest said, ‘Use what?’

‘It’s like Mace,’ I explained. ‘For self-defence. I can squirt it in people’s eyes.’

‘As a last resort,’ Dave added, seeing Father Ramon wince. ‘I know it would be dangerous, what with the gun and everything.’

All at once I felt dizzy. When I wobbled over to the bed, however, I discovered that it wasn’t very comfortable. The sheets smelled bad, the blankets were filthy, and the rusty old springs squeaked like distressed guinea pigs. Nevertheless, it was better than the cold, hard, concrete floor.

‘It’s half-past eleven,’ the priest observed. ‘When did he say he’d be back? In a couple of hours? That’ll be one-thirty.’

‘We have to get out,’ said Dave.

‘We have to think.’ Father Ramon put his hands to his temples. ‘Just let me think.’

I couldn’t think. My brain felt numb. I was still trying to process what had just happened – what I’d just seen. The pit. The creatures. The basement.

The blood.

My gaze travelled slowly around the oddly shaped room, from one item to the next. There was an overhead light and a wall-mounted heater. A power cable had been taped across the ceiling; it disappeared through a small, irregular hole in one wall. There was also a pile of old paperback books, and a plastic drink bottle. Various bits of torn clothing were scattered around.

It all looked pretty innocuous at first glance. But then I spied the manacle and chain attached to a bolt in the floor.

‘Someone lives here,’ I said.

Dave grunted.

‘A person. Not an animal. There’s a toilet.’ I started to shake. Even my lips were shaking. ‘You don’t think it’s like the Roman Empire, do you?’

‘What?’ Dave stared at me in confusion.

‘You don’t think they actually feed human beings to those things out there?’

Even as I spoke, the distant clamour of massed voices swelled
to an appreciative roar. Our eyes swivelled fearfully towards the barred gate. Then Dave said, ‘Nina, those things out there
are
human beings.’

‘But—’

‘They have to be. You were blooded. That only happens with human blood.’

‘So you’re quite sure, are you?’ Father Ramon was doing his best to stay calm. ‘You really believe that those creatures are were-wolves?’

‘Why not?’ Dave said. He had removed his sunglasses. ‘Nina and I are vampires.’

I wanted to point out that we weren’t vampires like Zadia Bloodstone; we couldn’t fly, or turn into bats, or walk through a hail of bullets. Whereas the things outside appeared to be genuine shape-shifters.

But I couldn’t summon up the energy to speak.

‘And you think they’ve actually been living in here?’ Father Ramon glanced around at the meagre furnishings. ‘As prisoners?’

‘If you can call it living,’ said Dave.

The priest rubbed his mouth. ‘Of course we might be wrong,’ he allowed, though not with much conviction. ‘There are people who build underground homes in the desert, to keep cool. This room might be for casual workers who come here during the hotter months.’

Dave snorted. Even I was unimpressed.

‘You don’t chain your workers to the wall,’ Dave argued, and Father Ramon couldn’t disagree. In the silence that followed, another bloodthirsty roar from beyond the barred gate made us all flinch.

It occurred to me that we might have been left in the tank for a reason. What if, when the fight was over, Barry McKinnon decided to open that barred gate? What if the victorious werewolf retreated back into its lair – and found us waiting? If that happened, an
atomiser full of Windex wouldn’t be enough to defend us.

‘We’ve left our luggage at the hotel,’ Dave pointed out suddenly, in hoarse accents. ‘We’ve booked a room. When someone starts searching for us, the trail will lead straight here.’ He turned to Father Ramon. ‘I mean, you
asked
about Barry McKinnon, didn’t you? You asked the receptionist.’

‘And she winked,’ said the priest, pulling a long face. ‘She might be a friend of his.’

‘Yes, but even if she lies, we talked to other witnesses. Out there by the pit.’

‘Who probably won’t want the police to know what they’ve been doing,’ was Father Ramon’s glumly expressed view. Dave’s response was to bend over, propping his hands on both knees. Suddenly he looked exhausted – and very sick.

‘Come and sit down,’ I entreated, patting the vacant stretch of mattress beside me. Poor Dave couldn’t move, though; not without help. Father Ramon had to take his arm, and lower him onto the bed.

I recognised all the symptoms of a blinding headache.

‘Okay, listen.’ As the priest addressed us both, he flicked a nervous look at the door. ‘I’m sure these people will have the sense to let us out,’ he said, very softly. ‘But if the worst comes to the worst, we mustn’t forget that there are three of us. We should be able to defend ourselves.’