Voice of the Undead (19 page)

Chapter 31

In the ballroom Paul returned from the punch bowl to find a blank space where Minhi had been standing.

He kept his chin up—not one to go about slouching was Paul—but he had to admit this date was going poorly.

“Is that champagne?” Vienna spoke, and Paul looked up to see her standing with her father, who was the
ministro de
something or other.

Paul held out one of the glasses. “It's, ah, sparkling . . . fruity something or other.”

She took the glass. “And to think the crystal is Lalique,” she said. “This just seems wrong.”

Vienna's father was round at the middle and mustachioed, and he could have passed either for an aged matinee idol or a mustache-twirling cartoon villain. Paul turned to him and offered the other glass. “Care for one?”

“Sparkly fruity something or other?” said the man, with the same accent as Vienna's. “No, that's for recovering alcoholics and teenagers.”

“Wouldn't care to live like a teen?” Paul smiled.

“Wouldn't care to recover,” the Spaniard said. He didn't wink but his mustache sort of danced. “I'm off to find the real thing. Let me know if anything interesting happens.”

Minhi's mother approached. “Have you seen Minhi?”

Paul shrugged.

“It's a small ship,” Mr. Cazorla said to Minhi's mother. “She can't have gotten far. Join me, I'm looking for something stronger than sparkly fruity something or other.”

Minhi's mother rolled her eyes exactly, precisely the way that Minhi often did, and the two of them headed off for the good stuff.

“Where
did
your girlfriend go?” Vienna said, watching the parents wander away.

“Is that what she is?” Paul asked. “I sort of wonder.”

“That's a terrible answer,” Vienna said. “That's an American answer; I'd expect that from Alex, not from you.” She laughed, and Paul found her teasing very soft edged and infectious.

Vienna went on, “You're supposed to say ‘But of course! She is my girlfriend!' Or, ‘No, you fool! I would not have her!' Leave the half answers and melancholia to the Americans. And the French. They hate one another but they are alike in those ways.”

Paul took a sip of the sparkling whatever and blanched. Syrupy stuff. “I don't know. She wandered off.”

“My date wandered off before we got in the car,” answered Vienna.

“That's . . .” Paul shook his head, suddenly defensive of Alex. “He can't help that. The bloke's on a short leash.” And that was the truth. Alex was always going to be half there. “He's another bloody tennis player.”

“A what?”

“Tennis players. Gymnasts, speed skaters, prodigies. The professionals. They look like high school students, they talk like them, but they catch whatever bug, get nabbed by some agent, and you've lost them as a friend, or lost a lot of them. That's what Alex is. Think of him as a speed skater.”

“Eh, I look around this room and I will bet the speed skaters were able to make it,” Vienna said. “I think it's absurd. You're only supposed to be married to your work when you have an actual marriage to ruin; when you're fourteen it's simply ridiculous.”

“Boy,” said Paul, “get a few sparkling ciders in you and you're a Spanish Audrey Hepburn all of a sudden. Where's Javi?”

“Around here somewhere,” Vienna said.

“I
love
Audrey Hepburn,” said Ilsa as she appeared with Sid in tow. Paul had noticed Sid gamely attempting to keep up with his taller, more graceful date. Not so bad when the band was playing calypso, but when they took a break and the PA started pumping French techno, Sid was lost. “Did you know she grew up in the Netherlands?”

“Who's that?” Sid asked.

“Audrey . . . someone who was never in a vampire movie,” Paul said.

Sid looked around. “Where's Minhi?”

Paul and Vienna shrugged, and then the music cut out.

It happened suddenly—one minute the PA system playing an appalling French cover of Rammstein's “Du Hast,” and the next the heavy bass and French singing stopped, interrupted by a sudden high-pitched whistle.

“May I have your attention,” came a mellifluous voice speaking in English with an untraceable accent. Paul watched as the entire crowd stopped, listening, some in curiosity and some in anger.

“Some of you are prepared for this night. If so, there is something that you will want to do.”

Paul looked at Vienna and Sid. “Oh, no.”

Most of the crowd was listening to this new voice with complete incredulity, but Paul noticed a subtle shift among a few of them—among the debutantes. The debs had frozen, and appeared to be in full receiver mode next to their parents.

Paul saw a tall chestnut-haired deb step forward, her head lifted toward the sound. Another girl near her, a senior by the look of her, had also tilted her head up, eyes glassy and wide.

They were the same girls who had gone gaga over Sid's stories. They were still poisoned.

“You have in your hands a symbol of your own slavery,” said the voice. “It is time to make yourself free.”

Suddenly the daughters lashed out with the pens, leaping behind their parents, each bringing one arm around the parent's waist, the other bringing her newly received, sharp-as-a-knife Montblanc pen up to the mother's or father's throat.

“Come with us,” said the voice on the intercom.

“Come with us,” said the daughters.

Paul saw Vienna running. She grabbed her own father, but she was dragging him away from the others. “I'm sorry,” he heard her say. “Hurry, we have to get out of here.”

Chapter 32

Alex lay in the bunk, thinking about the night he had spent with his father in the Munich train station as he began to drift to sleep. He shifted his head. He didn't really need anything more than a light pillow, but the one on the bunk was less than ideal. It seemed hardly there.

The words of Ultravox were still looping in his head, repeating in multiple threads of sound, urging him to rest, to sleep, to give up, to let it go.

The words seemed quiet and yet they were so constant that they blocked out everything, even blotting out the thought of the train station in Munich, the thoughts of his family. Every thought that was not still echoing the voice of Ultravox seemed dulled and distant, and it made him tired to think.

Far in the back of Alex's brain, a lion was moaning, quiet and far-off, muffled and blanketed.

Alex felt himself drifting to sleep but his head wasn't perfectly comfortable, the pillow was too thin. Ultravox had picked up some extra bedding and moved it away. Had there been another pillow?

The moaning was rumbling, far-off, like a jackhammer a mile away, a jackhammer he couldn't hear because the millions of whispers of Ultravox drowned out those troublesome sounds.

Jackhammers and lions . . . all the noise . . . Alex's life was made up of noise and conflict and constant movement. But Ultravox had explained to him that there was a better path: sleep. Don't listen to the jackhammer, to the lion.

His head was miserably uncomfortable. He couldn't even accomplish sleeping right. Alex opened his eyes slightly, looking for the stack of bedding Ultravox had set aside.

It sat there on a small table, the stack of blankets and pillows Ultravox had pulled out.

No one can overcome it, Alex. His voice threads the brain with his will, until you can't hear anything else.

In the distance, he heard trees falling and roots being pulled aside. Giant paws slapping earth. Faraway trees in the back of the woods, where the lion growled, barely audible.

The stack of bedding seemed strange and dull. Alex looked at it.

There's something special about you, and it has them worried.

The whispering of Ultravox, the echoes in his head, increased, and for a moment he lost the sound of the falling trees. But suddenly the distant noise was there again, growling and pounding.

The bedding stacked on the table looked strange and shimmering. For a second it changed and Alex saw a block of aluminum cans, pressed by thousands of pounds of force into a perfect and portable block.

Now the sound of the pounding was growing, and Alex saw the bedding and then he blinked on purpose and saw the block, and tried to think.

There was a clicking sound, a machine, and Alex started to feel the bunk vibrating.

The lion—his own brain, his own Alex Van Helsing static—was running desperately toward him,
wake up
, the trees falling with wrenching and tearing sounds, and now Alex did something he had never done before.

He saw the static. He was aware of it, he reached out to it and beckoned to it, and like a lion of legend it burst through and uprooted trees and roared.

The lion roared and Ultravox whispered in his brain until the lion opened its jaws and sucked the whispering wind away.

The bedding was compacted aluminum cans. The bunk was a recycling compactor. He was about to be crushed.

Alex rolled, kicking and falling to the floor as the sides of the compactor began to vibrate louder. In a moment a heavy glass door, like an oven door, dropped over the compactor, and he watched as the two sides slammed together with incredible force, reducing absolutely nothing to jelly.

He nodded to himself, shaken but satisfied. So that was it. Ultravox was a one-man superweapon but Alex had the capacity to resist. That power in his brain that he called the static—it was more powerful than a magic voice. Alex heard footsteps and spun around to see Minhi, running into the hold.

“Alex!”

She leapt into his arms and hugged him for a long moment before pulling away.

“Minhi, what's going on up above?” He was looking around. He could barely remember the walk down here.

“Nothing,” she said. “I found your pin; I thought you were in trouble.”

Alex looked at the compactor. “It's all right now. I think I figured some things out.”

“Are you all right?” She came closer, looking at him. He realized he was still shaking his head, trying to sift away the last vestiges of the voice of Ultravox.

“I'm fine, sincerely, I'm fine.” Then Alex smacked his forehead. “We gotta go. He's gonna kill someone. Come on.” He started to run for the stairs.

“Sometimes I can't believe you,” Minhi said, running after him.

“I told you I'd catch up,” Alex answered as they bounded up the stairs together.

Chapter 33

By the time they had climbed up three flights to the promenade deck, Alex and Minhi could hear a new sound—a warbling, hissing voice playing over the orchestra in the ballroom.

Alex stopped, holding up a hand.

“What?” Minhi asked.

“Minhi, you're still infected. The vocal virus, something that was passed to you in the first of Sid's readings.” He looked around at the pristine carpeting, looking for anything. What could he use? He looked at her handbag. “Do you have, like, tissues or something?”

She shook her head. “I can barely fit my room keys in this thing.”

“You need something to stuff in your ears.” Then he realized what he could use. He reached down and took off his dress shoes, ripping out the laces as he spoke. “Here.”

He knotted one lace, holding it up to check the size. He knotted it again. “Look, I know it seems weird, but you've got to trust me: You need to stick this in your ear.”

She took it, eyeing him. “And here I thought you were going to tie my hands again.”

“This one, too,” he said, handing her the second knotted string. “For the other one.”

“Alex, don't be ridiculous.”

“Trust me,” he said.

Minhi shook her head and pulled back her hair, stuffing the knots in her eardrums. She drew the strings back so they disappeared behind her hair. “Okay?” she shouted.

“I think it'll do in a pinch,” he said.

“What?”

Alex gestured. “This way.”

A scream lit up from the ballroom and he looked back at her with alarm. They reached the ballroom and saw bedlam.

Alex and Minhi ran onto the floor and found people looking about in shock. A voice was speaking over the intercom, whispering, “This is the moment of your freedom.”

In the rear of the room, a group of students and adults were beating on a pair of double doors that led to another dining hall. Alex didn't see any of the debutantes, but he had a good idea where they had all gone.

Paul and Sid forced their way through the crowd. “Alex!” Paul shouted.

“Minhi, you're here,” Paul said, showing visible relief. She didn't hear him but nodded.

“She's got her ears stuffed up,” Alex explained.

“What, why?” Paul asked.

“Because of
that
,” Alex said, pointing to the air and the droning, strange message. “What's happening?”

Paul looked unnerved, which was unusual for him. “The music cut out and all of a sudden the girls pulled their Montblancs on their parents.”

“All of them?” Alex looked around.

Sid said, “All of the ones that got the pens. Well, not Minhi. So that means eleven of them.”

“Is Vienna one?”

Paul shook his head. “She and her father disappeared. She looked panicked, not robotic. But forget that for now: The rest of the girls moved like vampires, Alex; they grabbed their parents and dragged them back there.” He looked at Alex's socks. “How did you get here?”

“WaveRunner,” Alex said, glancing up at the droning sound. “That voice is live. He's
here.
Paul—grab an ax or a fire extinguisher or something and batter those doors down. Get those people out. Sid? We've got to find him and shut him down.”

Alex ran for the bar, Sid and Minhi following. A youngish bartender was on the phone trying to call for help.

“Hey!” Alex called. “Where's the intercom?”

“The bridge,” the bartender said.

“Okay,” Alex said to Sid and Minhi, sure that Minhi could see his lips. “Wait,” he said, and ran for the orchestra, which was deserted, all the musicians having fled with the remaining parents. He emerged again with two drumsticks, their heads broken off to make them sharper, and a violin.

Sid said, “What, you're hoping to subdue him with ‘The Devil Went Down to Georgia'?”

“I hate these things,” Alex said, bashing the violin on the bar, and handed Sid and Minhi the drumsticks. He brandished the jagged, splintered neck of the violin, its strings hanging from the tuning bolts.

As Paul began battering away at the blocked doors to try to rescue the parents from a horde of hypnotized girls, Alex, Sid, and Minhi hit the stairs.

The bridge was a large room at the prow of a ship on the second-to-topmost deck. Alex held up a hand again, stopping Sid and Minhi as they reached the metal door at the top of the stairs. A static charge had hit his brain. Alex put his hand on the door, waiting.

Calm down. Chill. In the past he had gotten static from a quarter mile away, but the Merrills in the van had completely caught him off guard. Just like how he had failed to listen to the static on the night of the worm, because he had been upset and distracted. Several times he had been too worked up then to listen to his own mind.

Alex was determined to master the static. He had to clear out the noise.

Alex listened, cutting through the droning of Ultravox, which wasn't for him this time.
Hear the static. Where is it?
He felt himself pointing for Sid's and Minhi's benefit.

Ultravox had lied; he might not have an army but he'd brought protection. There was too much static for it to be just one vampire.
Listen. This is what you were born to do. Pick them out.

One on the left. One on the right. One in the center, farther back, and powerful.
He turned and said to Minhi, “You go right; I'll go left.” To Sid, “You go for the microphone.”

One, two, why then, 'tis time to do it.

Alex turned the doorknob and stepped back, kicking the door, causing it to fly open.

Inside, the PA echoed a half second later than Ultravox, who was speaking live in the room. Alex saw the captain and one crewman, unconscious on the floor. He turned left as a guard vampire lunged for him, and Alex dropped, letting the guard slash over him. Alex rose and swept his leg, knocking the vampire off balance, and dived, driving the violin neck into the creature's chest. Silver-and-wooden shafts from the Polibow were prime weapons, but in a pinch like this, any wood would suffice. He put all his weight on it and felt a crunch, and the vampire burst into flame.

Alex turned and looked behind him as Minhi kicked up, catching the other guard in the chin. She avoided his lunge expertly as though he were moving in slow motion. As she drove the drumstick home, she shouted, “What? I can't hear you!”

Ultravox was at a control panel, watching a closed-circuit security feed. On the black-and-white screen, Alex could see the parents, the influential, targeted ministers, pleading with their daughters, who held them all at bay and had traded their Montblancs for flashing steak knives. They had not yet delivered the killing stroke, although Ultravox seemed to be working them up into a lather. Killing someone, especially a parent, would go against every instinct, so he had to build a symphony of emotion to mask over that, to go beyond merely threatening to actually delivering the final act, the killing blow.

On the security monitor, Alex saw a large figure go into the room carrying a huge amplifier. It was Paul. He lunged for one of the debutantes and she turned around, slashing at him.

“Yes, the terror they feel is the terror you can overcome, but don't wait. Now is the time,” said Ultravox, showing his fangs. He had to keep talking for the spell to work.

Alex cleared his throat as the sound from the PA cut off, ceasing the echo. The vampire snarled as he saw Sid holding an unplugged microphone cord.

“You think you know everybody,” Alex said.

Ultravox swatted Sid aside and grabbed the cord, searching for an outlet.

“But you don't,” Alex continued. “It's a fake. You tell people things that hurt them because you know they'll believe you.”

“Alex,” Ultravox said, as he turned to face him. Time slowed for a second as the vampire's eyes burrowed into his. “You're going to do something—”

“I don't think so,” said Alex as he swept the violin handle, catching the vampire in the throat.

“Killthrrrmm,” Ultravox gurgled, and Alex plunged the violin neck home.

A burst of brilliant flame filled the bridge as they jumped clear.

For a moment, smoke and ash rained in the small metal room and they all stood in silence. Sid finally brushed a handful of ashes out of his hair and said, “Yeah, that and his book was overrated.”