[Dept. 19 Files 02] Undead in the Eternal City: 1918 (2 page)

The Special Reconnaissance Unit had returned to headquarters without discussing the thing they had seen in the church; the loss of Thorpe was too heavy in their hearts, and they found it easier not to speak of what had happened. Months later, after Harker had broken the nose of Field Marshal Gough and the squad had been despatched back to the front, after they had seen out the end of the war and been ordered to Rome for some richly deserved and much needed rest, they had still not really talked about it, except in passing.

Thorpe’s memory loomed large, casting a shadow that never fully lifted. Quincey Harker’s grief was the deepest and most profound: the loss not only that of a brother-in-arms, but also of a friend he had known since he was a child. But it also fell to him to keep his men going, to prevent them from becoming melancholy or distracted, conditions that would have almost certainly proved fatal in the final chaotic days as the war wound down.

Harker had done his best to keep their spirits up, even as his languished at their lowest and, once they arrived in Rome, he had seen an appreciable change in his men. They laughed more, even amid reports of the flu that was apparently sweeping through Europe. Ellis, an authority on such things, had dismissed the rumoured numbers of infected and dead as ‘fairy tales’, and he had never given Harker reason to doubt him in the past. They walked taller, as though a weight had been lifted from their shoulders: fear of potential injury, or death, or something worse. It did nothing to ease the pain Harker felt every time he thought about Thorpe, but it heartened him nonetheless, and gave him hope that perhaps a time would come when he too would recover from what had happened.

As he watched McDonald and Kavanagh thump Potts on the back and stand him up straight, Quincey Harker, the man who would become a legend among the most secret community in the world, whose actions would save countless lives and souls, began to laugh, a robust, glorious laugh full of hope.

“Let’s go,” he said. “Ellis, where’s this bar you were telling us about? My hand has been empty for far too long.”

“Just around the corner,” replied Ellis, still watching Potts. The young private was attempting to stand unaided, and the sight brought a smile to the schoolmaster’s face. “Two minutes’ walk, sir.”

“Excellent,” said Harker. “Then let’s be on our way. Kavanagh, pick Potts up if he falls over.”

“Yes, sir,” grinned Kavanagh.

“Lead on, Ellis.”

The schoolmaster saluted his Captain and staggered south on Via Rasella. Harker followed him, as Kavanagh and McDonald brought up the rear, walking on either side of Potts, whose face was starting to regain its colour. Kavanagh began to sing as they made their way along the crowded street, his deep bass voice rolling out into the cold night air. McDonald joined in, and Harker was about to do the same when he heard a noise in the darkness of the alleyway they were passing that sobered him up faster than the strongest coffee.

It sounded like a woman trying to scream.

One of the things Valeri Rusmanov liked most about humanity was its ability not to see what it didn’t want to see.

He strode in a straight line across Via Rasella, then stopped, allowing the woman with the lowered head to walk straight into him. She raised her face, her eyes wide, her mouth a tiny shocked O, and began to apologise for her clumsiness, until the words froze in her throat. Valeri growled at her, his fangs sliding into view, a red glow rippling in the corners of his eyes, then clamped his hand over her mouth and lifted her off her feet; he carried her effortlessly into the alleyway beside them, little more than a narrow crack between buildings.

He moved quickly, although nowhere near as fast as he was capable; he could have taken the woman at such a speed that none of the surrounding bystanders would have been physically able to see him do it, but he didn’t, because it amused him not to. He carried the thrashing, terrified woman into the alleyway at a pace that gave five or six men, all of them soldiers back from the battlefields with rifles over their shoulders, the chance to notice the commotion, see what was happening, and then turn away from a young woman who was clearly, obviously, in distress.

Valeri strolled down the alleyway and pressed the woman against the cold brick wall. He didn’t remove his hand, as she was screaming; he could feel the breath against his fingers, could hear the muffled, high-pitched sounds with his supernatural ears.

“She’s scared,” breathed Ana, appearing silently at his shoulder. “I like it when they’re scared.”

She leant forward and ran her fingers down the woman’s cheek. The flesh trembled at the vampire’s touch; the tears, which had been brimming in her eyes, burst loose and spilled down her face, dripping on to Ana’s hand. She instantly brought her hand to her mouth, licked away the salty liquid, and growled with pleasure, her eyes blooming red.

Valeri watched his wife, saw the naked lust on her face, and felt love fill his entire body. She was the most beautiful creature he had ever seen, and thanks to the soft, tender bite he had given her more than four centuries earlier, she always would be; an immortal, savage goddess, a pure predator, her desires so urgent that sometimes they shocked even him. He watched her lean towards the petrified woman, saw her lick her lips as she prepared to take her first, sweet taste, then registered movement in the corner of his eye.

He growled, a low sound that rose in the back of his throat, and Ana turned to look at him.

“What is it?” she asked.

Valeri didn’t answer; he merely nodded in the direction of Via Rasella, where a number of dark shapes were entering the narrow alleyway. A shaft of watery light shone down from an open window on the second floor of the building that made up the right-hand wall of the alley, and when the approaching figures passed through it, he felt a grin break out across his face.

Walking towards them were five British Army soldiers.

Their green uniforms were dark in the half-light of the alleyway, their faces pale from the perpetual darkness of the trenches. They wore expressions of concern on their faces; the nearest, a slight, middle-aged man wearing thin spectacles, had already seen the woman pressed against the wall, and was staring at Valeri and his wife with disgust on his face.

Ana laughed, a high-pitched sound of pure malice. Valeri smiled at her, maintaining his grip on the woman’s mouth, then turned to face the approaching soldiers. He flexed the muscle at the back of his throat, felt his fangs slide down from his gums, felt his eyes flood their terrible, glowing red, opened his mouth and snarled at the intruders. Under normal circumstances, this was enough to send even the bravest man fleeing into the night, but not on this occasion; Valeri noticed that there was no surprise on the faces of these men, let alone fear, in the same instant that they swung their rifles up to their shoulders and opened fire.

The first bullet, aimed with his usual devastating accuracy by Private Potts, entered Valeri’s right eye and exited just above his ear, taking with it a large piece of skull and a chunk of brain. Valeri, who had never even considered the possibility that any human would stand their ground against him, was suddenly blind in one eye, his vision replaced by empty, inky blackness and a pain that exploded through his head. He released the woman and grabbed for his face, but only one of his hands made contact; his left arm hung uselessly at his side, the nerve endings that controlled it destroyed by the bullet’s spiralling journey through his head.

I’m hurt
, he had time to think, before the rest of the bullets hit home.

The second, fired from the Lee-Enfield rifle in Private McDonald’s huge, steady hands, tore through one of his kneecaps, obliterating it and sending him down to one knee. The pain was immense; Valeri hurled back his head and howled, his remaining eye staring up at the black night sky, before bullets thudded into his shoulders and stomach, and he slumped backwards on to the ground, writhing in agony. He heard an uncertain growl rising from his wife, and then silence. It was as though she had been switched off, and for the first time since he had been a child in Wallachia, in the middle of the fifteenth century, Valeri Rusmanov felt real fear.

He rolled on to his side and looked desperately around for Ana. She was lying several feet away, her eyes wide and blank, her mouth hanging open. In the middle of her forehead was a perfectly circular hole, the result of Private Potts’s immaculate second shot. On the ground between them, steaming in the cool air, lay the former contents of her head, a thick streak of blood and off-white brain.

Valeri pushed himself up with his one good arm and saw the soldiers advancing towards them. The woman he had carried into the alleyway had fled the second he released his grip, and her screams could still be heard in the distance. The soldiers were less than twenty feet away; they were walking at a casual pace, reloading their rifles as they came, expressions of professional calm on their faces.

Run, you arrogant old fool. Run, before it’s too late.

Summoning all his strength, Valeri forced himself up to a sitting position. He reached over, grabbed Ana’s limp, unresponsive body by her shoulders, and pulled it towards him. The motion sent blood spilling out of her head and into his lap, and panic flooded his damaged, groggy head. He wrapped his arms round her and, with superhuman effort, forced himself into the air. He couldn’t stand, or run; his left leg was useless, the lower section hanging from the upper by little more than a few flaps of skin. So he flew, painfully slowly, down the alleyway, away from the men who had reduced him so quickly to this shadow of himself.

Behind him, the rifles fired again, their reports deafening in the narrow alleyway, and he felt their bullets crunch into his back. One sliced clean through his left lung and he fell hard on to the floor of the alley. He couldn’t breathe; when he inhaled, he could hear the shrill whistle as the air immediately exited through the hole in his chest. He raised his head, terror pounding through him, and saw that he had only managed to fly for thirty feet. The soldiers were closing again; as he watched, one of them said something and two of the others laughed.

They don’t fear me. They don’t fear me and they’re going to kill us both. How is this possible?

The hole in his lung had doomed him and Ana both; he could not escape if he couldn’t breathe. The hole could be healed, but it would take blood to do it, and there was no one in the alleyway apart from himself and the five men who were about to kill him.

Then Valeri realised that wasn’t true.

He looked at Ana, lying beside him on the ground where she had spilled from his arms as he fell from the air. He had no idea whether she was alive or dead, whether the bullet that had obliterated her brain and skull had been the end of her, or whether she could still be revived. It was not something he had ever given any thought to, so remote had the possibility of her death seemed, the possibility of his own death; now he wished he knew.

He had heard tales, from those who had seen vampires killed, that their kind exploded, leaving nothing but blood behind. Ana, although she wasn’t breathing, was still whole, her body still in one piece, and Valeri clung to the belief that she could still be saved, clung to it with everything he had. If he had been forced to accept that she was really gone, he would have lain still and let the soldiers finish him; without her, he would be nothing.

He heard the approaching footsteps of the soldiers and realised there was only one option available to him. What he was about to do was unthinkable, a violation of everything he held sacred, but unless he did it, they would both surely die.

I’m sorry, my love.

Valeri seized Ana’s leg and pushed her dress up to her hips. Her pale thighs were almost luminous in the darkness, and he took a millisecond to admire them before he sank his fangs into the left one. His wife had lost a great deal of blood through the gaping hole in her head, and her heart was no longer pushing what remained round her veins, but there was still a small amount pooled in her femoral artery. He tore at his wife’s flesh, digging for the wide vein, and felt a wave of relief flood through him as his fangs pierced it and still-warm blood spurted into his mouth.

There wasn’t much, not nearly enough to repair all the damage the soldiers’ bullets had done to him, but there was sufficient to plug the hole in his lung, and that was all he needed. Valeri looked over his shoulder, saw the soldiers less than fifteen feet away, and moved. He gripped Ana round the waist and leapt as high into the air as he was able, which was now no more than ten feet above the ground. Then, whispering a second apology to his wife as he did so, he threw her body over his shoulders and wrapped it round his back like a shawl.

A millisecond later the rifles rang out again, as he had known they would, but the bullets thudded into Ana’s dormant body, digging awful red craters into her unresponsive shape. One slid beneath her armpit and punctured his side, breaking one of his ribs and causing him to lurch in the air, but he gritted his teeth and pressed forward. Behind him, he heard first the sound of the soldiers reloading, then the heavy drumming of boots as they gave chase.

“After it!” shouted Captain Quincey Harker. “After it, men!”

The foul creature that was floating away down the alleyway was not the same abomination that had killed Thorpe; that had been Quincey’s first terrible, panicked thought, when its eyes had turned red and he had seen the bright white fangs in its mouth, and it had paralysed him, so much so that he had not actually given his men the order to fire.

The initiative had been taken, as it so often was, by Private Potts. Before Harker’s eyes, the drunken, swaying boy had disappeared, replaced instantaneously by a professional killer with a target before him. The Lee-Enfield rifle had been at the young man’s shoulder so quickly it had appeared a blur, then the first deafening report had echoed through the narrow alley, snapping the monster’s head backwards, blood spraying into the air. His paralysis snapped by the ruthless, frightening precision of his sniper, Harker had grabbed his Webley from its holster and joined in, firing at the writhing, howling creature, reloading and firing again. Now he and his men were running, their boots clattering on the street as it tried to escape them, its partner’s body slung around its back like some sort of grotesque shield.