Last Days (57 page)

Jed wiped sweat off his face. ‘OK. Change of plan. Seek and destroy is off the table. Too many of them, and too risky.

We take the next set of stairs. I flare up. We come across another crowd, we fall back to the ground. Operation over.

Max, you can’t shoot for shit, and I ain’t putting money on Spielberg being any better. I’ll drop them far out as I can.

Any get past me, you two take them close. Heads and chests.

Brains and hearts.’

‘OK,’ Kyle said, but barely heard his own voice.

‘Max in the middle. You pick up the tail, Spielberg. You holler you see anything. And boys, ceilings and doors, ceilings and doors, eyes everywhere. Mutha fuckers can climb like bats.’

‘Oh, dear God.’ Max crouched in the darkness. He peered through his fingers with frantic eyes.

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‘Shit,’ Jed said.

Kyle stayed quiet and withdrew the camera from the rucksack; it was still running. He pointed it at the walls and ceiling of the second-floor lobby; a miniature reception modelled on those in old theatres, found outside the royal boxes on the upper tiers. The lobby had opened around them as they reached the second floor, before the stench of decomposition and unclean water brought them to a halt and held them fast; a foulness that lingered about the evidence of a great birthing.

In three beams of torchlight, entry points upon the blackened wallpaper were visible; imprints of the Blood Friends as they manifested. The plaster of the ceiling revealed a dozen fossilized silhouettes of those that had dropped to the marble floor, wet and mewling for life. A foetal abhorrence. A post-natal blasphemy.

What he saw in greater detail inside the viewfinder nearly shut Kyle’s mind down. When his thoughts reassembled after the quakes of shock, a disinterest he identified as the numbing of his parts calmed him, but left him unable to move his jaw or his legs. When mobility returned, afterbirth was tacky beneath the soles of his boots.

When reborn to the world, he believed they were like newborn calves: sticky, semi-transparent, clumsy, blind, and amniotic, kicking with half-realized limbs on the other side of where they had been trapped for so long. He had heard their labours in the night during the trauma of gestation.

Heard their mouths open to cry for food on waking in the air of the world, before the rooting for sustenance began in earnest.

Another flare from Jed lit up the catacomb mural, this 508

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Neolithic cave patterned with petrified relics of the long buried who had risen again. The Satanic graffiti seemed to fade, immediately, like photographs exposed too early to light. But the flare also brought out the suggestions of scurrying nearby.

Two arches led out of the lobby, and beneath the hem of darkness the flare peeled back, Kyle glimpsed thin limbs kick away into the security of the lightless. From beneath their feet, hoots and whines and whistles came together to form a hellish crescendo one floor down, close to the staircase.

Doors opened and slammed shut, opened and slammed shut, as if in protest, or excitement.

‘We gotta find her real quick, Max.’ Jed’s grinning days were over. Their current situation had finally called time on his levity. ‘This is the penthouse floor. Chet’s gotta be in one of the big rooms. There’s twelve up here. Left or right?’

‘I don’t know!’ Max screamed.

‘Gimme one of those flares!’ Kyle called to Jed and shoved the camera back inside the bag. ‘You find the room. Max in the middle. I’ll take the rear.’ Jed threw a flare to Kyle. He snatched it up, said, ‘How does it bloody work?’

‘Light the frigging touchpaper. Strike it like a match.’

‘They’re coming up the stairs.’ It was Max; he fired two rounds down and blindly into the darkness they had just ascended.

‘Make them count, Max.’ Jed threw his flare down to the next landing. Shadows fled until the magnesium burst sput-tered on the marble. ‘Let’s move.’ Jed walked to the arch on the left. Crouched, fired twice at the ceiling inside the corridor. A shape dropped from the darkness and smacked the floor. ‘On me.’ Jed walked. Max followed, almost squashed 509

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into Jed’s back. As they moved past the kill, Jed smashed a brittle skull under his boot heel to stop it twitching. Kyle looked down at the thing Jed had shot from the ceiling. It wore a smock so soiled with age and blood the old linen had plastered and dried around a prominent ribcage. He looked away.

Moving as fast as they dared, they moved through another between-decks corridor. The doors were grander: peacocks fanned over the top of each gilt-edged door; a willowy silhouette of a beautiful woman, inlaid into the wood with lacquer, curved around the door handles.

Jed turned the handle of the first penthouse suite door.

Stood back and kicked it open. The beam of his torch flashed back and forth in the dark, before he went inside at a crouch and ready to fire. Max followed Jed inside. Kyle heard Jed say, ‘Jesus Christ.’

Kyle remained in the corridor, directly outside the door -

way, and held the dripping white flare aloft. It illumined the entire corridor down to its end, where occasional whistles and barks echoed from the mouth of the connecting passage.

Back in the lobby, on his left, he could still see through the arch they had just run through. And a thing raced around the surge and retraction of chemical light, bent over and using its hands like feet; the limbs were as thin as a dog’s. The face was turned away, the back of the head was pale and strung with laces of dark hair. He gripped the Gloch’s handgrip tighter.

Behind his back, he heard Max talking frantically to Jed or to himself. He sounded unhinged. ‘The blood is drunk quickly. It keeps them here. In France, Lorche’s angels even cultivated the tastes of the town under siege. They became 510

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cannibals. Their suffering was so terrible, they marked the sky, the air, the world . . .’

Kyle glanced over his shoulder. And saw plasma bags hanging from a long steel rail on wheels, the sort of rail seen backstage at a fashion show. Flat but stained plasma bags from a blood bank hung and dripped feed from plastic tubes into a trough, as if to suckle piglets. Beside the rail, two elderly women sat side by side on white chairs. Their eyes were wide open and glassy. ‘Sister Gehenna and Sister Bellona. The last of The Seven,’ Max said. ‘Katherine’s most beloved. Most fanatical . . . they gave themselves. Even after . . .’ Max never finished, his voice died out into a wheezy hopelessness.

In strobes of torchlight the two bodies were robed in habits like nuns; the red uniforms of The Last Days’ blessed Seven.

But once the plasma bags were empty, they had been drained to their sinews and fibres and bones where they sat; emptied by many broken teeth that made incisions in their thin legs, their arms, and finally their throats. It appeared the sisters had let their own blood flow from their wrists, like hellish mothers feeding their young. But it only seemed to have oiled a frantic collusion of the living and the dead; the rusty fragrance of their aged blood must have begun a frenzy; the visible results of which made Max’s knees give way. Jed had to hold him upright and drag him from the room.

Silent with horror and shock, they moved off in formation. Kyle walked backwards and wondered if he would freeze or fire when one of them came at him from down there, from out of the vast lightless tunnels. In that room they had just seen their own end if they made one mistake, up here, in the darkness. Their exhalations were deafening. They 511

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all breathed heavily through open mouths, to stifle the nauseating stench.

‘She’s been collecting them.’ Kyle heard Max say in the next large room they broke into. There were no retorts from either handgun so it must have been clear.

‘Holy shit, Max, we need more firepower. Could be hundreds of them up here.’ At that, Kyle did turn his head, to look at what he really did not want to see. But his first view of the room was anticlimactic. He screwed up his eyes and took another look. It resembled a room in a museum. Display cases lined the three walls he could make out. Beneath their glass screens a suggestion of fragments, of brownish remnants, came back to his imploring eyes.

‘Signs,’ Max said. ‘Artefacts from the beginning. From those Lorche’s angels collected at St Mayenne.’

Kyle put his head inside the room. Glanced into the nearest cabinet. Saw a horrible shoe; small and blackened and pointy.

Beside the shoe was a smock small enough for a child, marked with ruddy-brown stains. And further along, a crudely hewn crown of wood was placed on white card, as if with reverence. He wondered if it had once belonged to Lorche, the Father of Lies. It was surrounded by blackened bones mounted by steel pins on purple baize.
Heavenly letters. The
rain of black bones.

He looked back to what the dying flare lit up in the corridor. A shriek of rage or hysteria pierced the far darkness of the corridor on their right. Bony hands and feet drummed against one of the closed doors. Sounds that made Kyle’s stomach soften as he imagined such a fury howling against his face. He aimed the Gloch down there; the end of the torchlight speared a shape thinner than the starving and as 512

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naked as the newly born. Before he could take the first gunshot of his life, it slapped at the side of a head mercifully bowed and staggered away on bowed legs stained a dysen-tery-brown. ‘They’re down there,’ Kyle said to Jed as he came out of the exhibition room.

‘They’re everywhere. Come on. There’s another ten suites up here on the plans. Three flares left. Then we’re down to torches. Gonna draw some fire then, boys.’

The sound of what appeared to be a child’s distress gave them pause outside the next room. ‘In there, the child!’ Max shrieked. ‘Get it open.’ Jed tried to catch Max with a swipe of his free hand, but missed his shoulder. ‘Careful Max!’ Jed slapped at a side pocket; tore a photograph from it. ‘The kid.

Make sure it’s this kid, Max. Spielberg, get your ass outside.

Cover the corridor!’

‘You’re not killing a child. No! You are not killing a child!’

‘Stay outside, Spielberg!’

‘Fuck you!’

Max scrabbled at the handle and threw the door open. Jed crouched into a firing position.

A child. A child. They are not killing a child.
Unthinking, compelled by a surge of reckless energy, before he even realized what he had done, Kyle ran at Jed and threw his weight into the man’s back. Falling to his knees, he watched Jed stumble forward with a grunt, into glimpses of a luxury suite lit up by Max’s probing torch. A place decked out in purple, the bed vast. Giant mirrors on each wall reflected their chaotic entrance, expanded their torchlight.

The infant cries descended into a canine growl. Max gasped in shock, then screamed as something came over the bed in one bound and leaped onto Jed. Who stayed down 513

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under a busy mouth and sharp fingers, the snarls of the attacker more terrible than the shaking of the threadbare skull.

Jed screamed. Mottled legs raked at his stomach, like a starving cat trying to empty the abdomen of its prey. An eruption of dark liquid across Jed’s face coincided with a gargle inside the throat of the leathery thing no bigger than a ten-year-old child that hung from him.

In his horror, in his paralysis, Kyle heard the thump and bump of bony limbs in the corridor outside, as if a crowd now rushed towards the room. Jed fired a shot through the little skull tearing at his neck. Twisted onto his stomach.

Came up silent, mouth open, a hand clutched to a wet black throat. Their eyes met; there was nothing he recognized in Jed’s but fear and pain. Max screamed again as a scampering of thin bodies came through the door and into the room with them.

Kyle fell against the wall beside the top of the bed. Remembered he had a gun. Raised his arm. Lit Jed up on the ground with the Maglite bolt-on. Two ragged shapes scurried through the thin beam of shaky white light to growl about the feed. One dull retort came out of the scrum as Jed’s Gloch went off, and then he stopped moving of his own volition.

Max shrieked and shot at the crowd upon the floor.

Missed. The Blood Friends dug clawed toes into the rug and yanked Jed’s limp body backwards, out of the room and back into the fathoms of darkness.

Kyle lit up their hasty retreat, but couldn’t sight the weapon or squeeze the trigger in time, at those things no bigger than children, hauling a grown man like a toy across 514

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their nursery floor. He clutched at his belt for a flare and realized the last three were attached to Jed’s belt.

‘We’ve got to get out!’ Max’s entire face was a quivering of pale flesh about an open mouth. Drool hung from his bottom lip. He ran out of the bedroom and left Kyle pressed into the wall, as still as an art deco lampstand. Kyle found his voice. ‘Max.’ It came out a whimper.

Max’s feet thumped in the corridor outside, heading towards the lobby. Straight into a chorus of avian shrieks.

Shots rang out in quick succession. Dull slaps followed the salvo.

Kyle moved to the door, flashed the torch attached to his gun to the right. Saw frantic limbs rake and wet hands slap about in the gloom over the recently felled quarry: Jed. A mottled face rose to show the torch its bleached eyes and a forehead papered in shrivelled flesh. It hissed once before its foul head re-engaged with the grisly business upon the moist carpet.

Kyle looked to the left, following the thin beam of the gun’s Maglite, and sucked in his breath. The lobby suddenly resembled CCTV footage of hell glimpsed through a single ray of light: dark shapes on the walls, the floor, the ceiling; dirty teeth, eyes rolled back and white as billiard balls amidst a writhing around where Max’s little gun still barked and flashed in panic. Kyle dropped his gun hand and put the lobby back into darkness.

His mind screamed:
Out! Out! Out! Out!
He had to get out. How? He crouched in the darkness, still in the doorway, and used everything he had left to suffocate a scream and to prevent his body breaking into a thrashing rout right into those flitting bones of the dark. Shook the camera from his 515