Something of the Night (33 page)

Chapter Fifty

Jacob
felt
something heavy pressing down against his chest. The dust cleared and he found
the huge, dark vampire lying over him. To his right, he saw the twisted
wreckage of a truck or jeep, which was now little more than a pile of
smouldering metal. A huge tear had ripped the Airstreamer almost in half. The
clouds above looked low enough to touch. The recent storm seemed to have pushed
the churning clouds closer to the ground, and the flicker of nearby explosions
reflected closely off them.

Jacob twisted his head from
left to right. The floor of the trailer banked upwards at a forty-degree angle,
then dropped down at about the mid-point, turning the compartment into an
inverted V. Neither his son nor Elliot were anywhere in sight.

The tracker pushed against
the vampire, but the undead fiend was a dead weight. He felt his hands had been
released from their bonds. The sheer violence of the impact had freed him. He
tasted the coppery tang of blood in his mouth and panicked for a second,
thinking the vampire had bled over him. He reached up to his face. His bottom
lip felt thick and painful and his fingers came away glistening wet. His own
blood, thank God.

“Elliot?” he wheezed, the
deadweight compressing his chest. The call had been barely audible. “Elliot?”
he called again, louder. Movement came from his right. Bound hands appeared at
the break in the floor. The skin of the knuckles had been stripped away.
Elliot’s head appeared, his hair a matted mess of mud and soot. They made eye
contact and Jacob asked, “My son?”

“He’s not on this side,”
Elliot responded.

Fear caused Jacob’s heart to
flutter wildly. He looked into every corner of the misshapen trailer. The table
Thalamus had sat behind was now overturned and split into three separate
pieces. One part had two legs remaining, both pointing upwards, another was
little more than a small triangular piece of timber, and the last part – the
tabletop – had embedded itself into the side of the trailer at an awkward
angle.

“He’s not on this side,
either,” Jacob said worriedly.

“The impact may have thrown
him clear,” Elliot told him. “Stay there. I’ll check around.”

Jacob tried vainly to prise
himself free, his son’s fate adding strength to overtired muscles, but even
with all his efforts, the vampire above held him fast.

In the distance, more
explosions sounded as shells thumped into the earth. The wreckage of the Airstreamer
rocked slightly with each shockwave. Gunfire and the screams of agony and anger
filled in the silences between mortar-fire. Jacob grinned despite himself. The
humans must have rejected Ezekiel’s plans of slavery. Good for them.

***

Elliot slid down to the rear of the trailer. Carefully,
he threaded his way through the open metal tear. It was pandemonium outside.
Soldiers were running around frantically. Some carried fire extinguishers in an
attempt to dowse the flames of burning vehicles. Others ran forwards with their
weapons drawn and grim determination etched into their bleached faces. One or
two limped about, injuries impeding their progress. Finally and, to Elliot’s
amazement, some of Ezekiel’s army seemed to be pulling back. The young tracker
frowned. The humans did not possess sufficient firepower to threaten such a
mighty army.

Thinking on his feet, Elliot
threw the cowl of his cloak over his head and let the garment sleeves drop over
his wrists. He waited until a single soldier hobbled past. The vampire’s hands
clutched at its sides. Blood oozed out from between skeletal fingers. It looked
as if a trail of meat dangled behind him. Yet as he drew closer, Elliot saw
that it was actually the vampire’s intestines.

“What the hell’s happening?”
Elliot snarled in the vampire’s direction. He kept his face hidden within the
shadows of the hood.

Despite his horrific
injuries, the vampire stopped. “They outnumber us three to one,” he said,
through bleached-white lips.

“They?” Elliot asked.

“Raphael and his men,” the
vampire spat. He stumbled slightly and a jet of blood sprayed onto his boots.

“You’d better get someone to
look at that,” Elliot said.

The vampire laughed
hysterically. He tottered away, his lower intestines close behind.

The young tracker took a
moment to cut his way out of his bonds. He stepped up to the side of the
trailer and used the jagged chrome to saw through the rope.

He searched quickly around
the immediate vicinity of the trailer in hope of finding the boy. A couple of
charred bodies lay around, some of them half-buried in molten soil. An arm
jutted towards the sky, its fingers curled into a fist as if in defiance to the
world it had left behind.

Elliot stepped through this
hellish battlefield in search of Jacob’s lost boy. He took his time to examine
each and every one of the bodies he came across. Sure to determine that none of
them was indeed the remains of the young boy. Mercifully, they were not.

The sky released a loud,
drawn-out wail, and Elliot dived for cover as the incoming missile arced
towards him. Less than ten feet to his right, a tree disintegrated in a shower
of splinters. The wooden shrapnel flew over his head and stripped flesh from
bone as some of the vampires were caught out in the open. A chorus of screams
filled the night.

A different scream,
high-pitched and desperate, found its way to him then. He looked up and saw a
tall shape with a trail of long hair weaving its way through the darkness. The
figure cut through the woodlands as if the hounds of hell were snapping at its
heels. The cry for help came again. Elliot knew instantly that it was Jacob’s
son. The figure had the boy clutched in its hands and was carrying him deeper
and deeper into the woods. Elliot turned back towards the trailer. Did he have
time to go and get Jacob? No, he realised, as the figure became a small, dark
smear on the canvas of night.

Elliot jumped to his feet and
bolted after the shadow. As he negotiated his way through the woodlands, more
shells fell from the sky. Some passed over his head, exploding on the horizon
like brief bursts of sunlight. One, however, came dangerously close. It
screeched through the night with demented rage and homed in on the tracker’s
path. Elliot had a second to curse his bad luck and then the ground in front of
him exploded in a shower of dirt. He felt his feet lifted from the ground and
the air in his lungs burst from between bloodied lips as he crashed against a
tree. The world spun crazily. Then the flickering lights around him blinked
out.

***

The vampire twitched. Thalamus’s head jerked upwards
and he looked at the tracker through his one remaining eye. His lips parted and
blood oozed from a deep gash on his tongue. In a slur, he asked, “What is
this?”

Jacob pushed his head as far
back as he could. The vampire’s blood dripped harmlessly onto the front of his
jacket. “Get off me and I’ll show you.”

Thalamus blinked, his senses
doing their best to return. He turned his malformed head first one way and then
the next.

“What happened?” he mumbled.

“You picked the wrong fight,”
Jacob told him.

Thalamus groaned. The human
was right – this wasn’t shaping up to be a good day, not good at all. “Hold
your tongue human, before I cut it off.” His threat had been weak, and Jacob
sensed the vampire’s will to fight had all but abandoned him.

Then, with an impressive
display of strength, the vampire pulled himself upright, his shattered bones
seemingly capable of control and movement, and then pulled itself away from the
trapped tracker. Jacob climbed unsteadily to his feet after undoing his bound
ankles.

“Where’s the boy?” Thalamus
asked. The vampire had rolled onto his back now, but one of his legs was
twisted, with his foot pointed awkwardly away. White bone gleamed through dark
skin. Jacob looked down at him, and said, “For your sakes, he’d better be
alive.”

“What?” Thalamus asked.

“He’d better be alive,” Jacob
repeated.

Thalamus stared back, his
single eye full of confusion. “What is it to you?” he asked. Before Jacob could
answer, the large vampire coughed violently and a bright stream of blood
dripped from the corner of his mouth. Internal injuries, Jacob thought. And
understanding the giant held no threat, he said, “Because he’s my son.”

Thalamus blinked and his
confusion seemed to ebb away. He chuckled, but the sound was a ghastly gurgle
of trapped liquid. The vampire was drowning in his own blood. A second stream
of red liquid turned his chin crimson.

“What the hell’s so funny?”
Jacob asked.

“Me,” Thalamus responded.

“What?”

“Me,” the vampire repeated.
“Because I actually care.”

“Care about what?”

“The boy’s wellbeing,”
Thalamus said.

Jacob opened his mouth but
words failed to form. What was his son to the vampire, a readymade meal? “Fuck
you,” he snarled.

Thalamus laughed again, and
again it sounded like a death-rattle. “I’m already fucked,” he said, through
teeth stained by a deep red. “My master’s compassion appears to have rubbed off
on me.” He twisted awkwardly and reached out towards one of the pieces of
broken wood. He pulled open a drawer and retrieved a powerful-looking handgun.

Jacob took a step back.

“Don’t worry,” Thalamus said,
“I’m not going to shoot you. Here, take it.” He jabbed the weapon in the
tracker’s direction. “Take it – take it,” he ordered.

Jacob hesitated for a second
before stepping forward and taking the weapon. “Why are you doing this?” he
asked, perplexed. “Do you care about my son?”

Thalamus took a second to
gather his strength. “The boy is what this is all about. My master’s strength
is also his greatest weakness. He loves the boy – truly loves him – and his
plan for an allegiance was in the hope of setting him free, to set the whole
world free. You think we are nothing but savages, only interested in the
spilling of blood. You’re wrong. We have the ability to care, protect, love,
dream
.
My master will show his people the way forward, we
will
prosper.”

“It doesn’t sound like his
plan is going too well,” Jacob commented.

“There are those who seek to
destroy any hope of peace,” Thalamus explained.

Jacob frowned. “Like who?”

“Like Raphael, and others in
this army too.”

“What good does this do
against all them?” Jacob asked, and held the weapon up.

“It’ll help you to save
Ezekiel. Find him and you will find a way to save your people. Trust me – he
and your boy hold the key to saving what is left of this battered world we
share.”

“I don’t have time for this
bullshit,” Jacob grunted.

“Time?” Thalamus began. “If
you don’t succeed,
time
is all you’ll have. An eternity of hunger awaits
all those who fail to look further than this night.”

The vampire’s garbled words
meant little to the tracker. His thoughts were focused solely on his son and
the people of the underground. If Thalamus was right about Raphael’s
involvement, then the humans’ fight had just gotten all the more difficult. To
defend against one army was desperate; to defend against two would be
near-extinction.

Thalamus coughed again and a
great globule of red phlegm bubbled and burst from his mouth. He shuddered, as
if his body had somehow remembered how to respond to the cold, and then lay
still.

Jacob stepped away from the
giant’s body, then chambered a round into the weapon. He crouched under a
crumpled part of the roof before stepping out into the chaotic maelstrom of
battle.

The ground was scattered with
broken bodies and the injured, and the soil had begun to turn into a red scab.
Screams for help punctuated the night, but most were left writhing in agony,
bleeding out and dying alone. The tracker stepped over the dead and dying
alike. A vampire, his left arm ending in a bloodied stump just below the elbow,
cried for help. The soldier looked barely out of his teens, no more than a boy
really, and all alone. The call for assistance sounded disturbingly similar to
that of any human. Fear filled its eyes, and Jacob understood instantly it was
the fear of being alone.

“Please help,” the injured
vampire moaned. Blood pumped from the terrible wound. His other hand clutched
at the mess of bone and tissue, but the stream of crimson leaked heavily from
between his fingers. The thing’s face looked waxen and drawn - its life’s
energy pooling out around it.

“Please,” the young vampire
cried again.

Jacob looked around,
unwilling to involve himself. His quest was to find his son and then somehow
help save his people, not tend the wounds of the ones he loathed.

“Please …”

Jacob became trapped by
indecision – what could he do, anyway? The vampire had already lost too much
blood, and there was nothing that could save him now. The thing’s eyes looked
back pleadingly. It didn’t want to die here in the mud all alone.