The Last Werewolf (34 page)

The vampires had other ideas.

Just after midnight I heard Russell outside the library door saying: “Andy? You reading me?” Pause. “Andy, come back.” Pause. Then loudly: “Andrew, put your twatting headset back on.”

Nothing.

“What’s going on?” I said.

Russell put his head round the door. “Sit tight in here,” he said. Then into his com: “Chris, I’m not getting anything from Andy. Go up there and check, will you?”

Andy was on roof duty. Chris on the floor immediately below him. Russell was on the library level with me, and fourth man Wazz (I hadn’t enquired into derivation) patrolled the ground floor. “Wazz? You copy all that? Yeah. Look lively.”

I’d got up from the couch and was about to advise being given a weapon just in case, when what happened next happened.

Very fast.

A (literally) staggering stink of boochie. Clamped salivary glands and the surge of nausea. One foot came off the floor for a moment while the room tilted. I found myself back on the couch. My vision clouded. Someone upstairs screamed.

When my sight returned I saw Russell in profile through the library’s open doorway. He was looking at something out of shot and his face was the face of a child in deep distress. In an admirable testament to Hunt
training his hands were doing what they’d been drilled to do and searching his belt for optimal weaponry. I saw his fingers close on a UV stick and begin to draw it out—before the sound of flesh and bone rupturing followed a split-second later by a spray of blood that covered his face and chest stopped him. He groped, blinded, managed to get the UV stick out—then jerked and dropped it, undetonated, both hands ascending with a strange slow grace to his throat, where what was unmistakably one of the Hunt’s own wooden stakes had buried itself.

Flung or fired by whatever was coming along the landing towards him. He went with what looked like deliberate slowness down onto his knees, eyes wide, mouth open, trying and failing to swallow,
khah … khah … khah
.

The black vampire from Heathrow appeared on the landing. Seductively calm long face suggestive of immense patience and capability. In his left hand he held a Hunt Staker, lately discharged. With his right he dragged the body of Chris, the second-floor man, by its spinal column, which had been yanked through the abdomen and ribs. In with the stench of vampire I caught a poignant whiff of shit from the gashed human bowels.

Two rapid computations. First, that only Wazz downstairs remained alive. Second, that only a dozen paces stood between me and capture.

The library had a second door connecting to a bedroom, from which another exit took you back to the landing. The question (posed in the distended dreamscape of perhaps two seconds, while the vampire dropped Chris’s corpse, moseyed over to kneeling Russell and took the young man’s skull gently between his hands) was which door to go for.

A person steps into the road, turns, sees a truck about to hit him, seems to freeze. The freezing is the amazingly quick brain making its honourable start on the avoidance mathematics, the geometry of
getting out of the way
. And even the amazingly quick brain is too slow. The first trajectory calculations are barely—BAM! Good night.

Ditto here. I was still in the early trigonometry when the vampire with a deft twist snapped Russell’s neck, turned and launched himself at me.

One finds oneself flying through the air. That’s quite something. Time stretches to accommodate peripheral details: my foully smouldering
Camel abandoned in the onyx ashtray; the empty Macallan bottle on the floor; a signed first edition of
American Psycho
one of the agents had brought up from the contemporary collection downstairs; the bellows I gave Harley for Christmas twenty years ago.

Nearer details were regrettably vivid too: the vamp’s dark eyes with whites tinctured brown, his bad meat odour and long calm face, the feel of his cold left hand around my throat (a nail had already drawn blood) and his cold right in a grab that pinched the flesh of my chest through my clothes. Overwhelmingly the power discrepancy. Overwhelmingly his being able, now that he had hold of me and we were flying through the air, to do pretty much whatever he wanted.

Not that revulsion wasn’t mutual. His face’s calm was forced.
The werewolf
, a vampire has written,
smells like the Platonic form of a filthy animal
. I wondered—as I had such liberty for wondering, while we sailed across the library—if vampires ever threw up. Throw up what, though? All they had was blood. Harley would have known. (Poor Harls. He hadn’t much liked
American Psycho
. Savage satirist or twisted fuck? he’d asked me, when he’d finished it. Both, I’d said. It’s a false dichotomy. The romantic days of
either/or
are over. Who’d know that if not me?)

As one we crashed into the chimney breast and fell, just to the right of the hearth. Something brittle snapped under me.
My spine
, I thought, since the vertebrae had taken the brunt of impact—but in the moment it took him to slash four fingers across my face (white heat, blood welling in my left eye as if half the world were having a red cocktail poured into it) I knew both that it wasn’t a bone and that it was my only chance of escape.

We’d ended up with me propped at an angle against the wall, him sitting astride my thighs. His face had a sprinkle of dark skin-tags or moles (that in a genuine horror evocation brought Lula’s fair torso with its beloved beauty-spot constellations) and a likeable outcurve from nose to top lip. Black typecasting would have him as nirvanic drug lord or philosophising janitor. He put his hand over my face and I writhed as if trying to get out from under him—in fact trying to get hold of the thing that had snapped under my back.

I wasn’t, quite, quick enough. Before I could make my move—my one move, my first and last and only resort—his other hand had torn through
my shirt, executed a deep screw manoeuvre into the flesh of my chest and come away with a bloody gobbet of pectoral muscle, hardly Shylock’s pound but more than enough to take my scream (for a moment I thought my poor
nipple
had gone) to the comedy edge of falsetto.

It probably worked in my favour, that scream, pleasurably diverted enough of his concentration so that my wriggling under him played as just more futile struggling. I’ll never know. Because having at last got proper purchase on the top half of Harley’s bone-handled walking stick, which had been left propped against the wall when I’d poured the first of the day’s drinks, and had snapped under me when we fell, I whipped it out from behind my back and with a blurred prayer to the God who wasn’t there drove it with all my strength into the vampire’s heart.

As at all such moments the prosaic din of things subsided out of respect for the magnitude of our event. Time paused and space solidified around us. For a moment we were figures in a paperweight. He managed a look of nude surprise—a sudden, a cartoon change of expression, as if he were exaggerating for the benefit of a child—when he lifted his hands to see their veins blackening as if hurriedly filling with ink. What he couldn’t see was the same phenomenon at work in his neck and face, the blood vessels showing as a darkening web, the magical roadmap of his death. He stiffened, paralysed first by incredulity, second more literally by … well, paralysis. I jerked my hips up, swiped, knocked him off me. He went over with a lightweight or taxidermed rigidity onto his side, knees bent at ninety degrees, hands fixed as if readying an invisible basketball for a shot. His eyes closed.

I got to my feet. The face and chest wounds were burning. Obviously I’d heal, but the pain was determined to show its stuff while it could.

However. This was a chance. Russell & Co. all had mobiles. I’d just doubled the time I had to set up a rescue. (There remained the question of how, once inside the renegade WOCOP facility, I was going to let my guys know where that facility
was
, but again, since there was nothing to do but trust I’d find a way, that’s what I did, wondering, with haggard realism, whether mobile phones were small enough these days that I might conceal one up my arse.) I hurried out onto the landing.

Cold air and the sound of heavy rain came down from the floor above.
The boochie must have taken out roof-man, Andy, and got in through the skylights—whereupon I remembered young red-haired Wazz, as yet unaccounted for, who’d been on watch on the ground floor. If he was alive he’d be on a hair trigger. I didn’t want him shooting me by mistake. Also, depressingly, I’d have to kill him if I was going to take full advantage of the phones.

I stepped over Russell and Chris’s remains and took a cautious peep over the banister. Blood crept down my face like the hot tears of childhood.

“Is this what you’re looking for?” a female voice said.

I spun left. The blond vampire, Mia, stood on the landing maybe fifteen feet away. The bottom half of her face was covered in blood in just the supposedly endearing way a Kodak toddler’s is covered in chocolate (or a scat star’s in shit, I always think every time I see one of these revolting infants) and in her hand she held the raggedly severed head of the unfortunate Wazz. His tongue protruded lewdly from between his lips and his eyeballs had rolled back in their sockets. He looked as if he’d died just as he was about to blow a halfhearted raspberry, to express extreme tedium.

Mia, on the other hand, in black boots, black suede skirt, black nylons, black satin blouse and black leather jacket, appeared superabundantly alive, smiling through the blood mask. Her blue eyes—not the dark lapis lazuli of Ellis’s but somewhere between periwinkle and turquoise—glittered with what looked like joy. A vein in her temple showed. She was white, even by vampiric standards. From her name and the company she’d been in at Jacqui Delon’s I’d made her Italian, but now that I mentally replayed
Is this what you’re looking for?
the accent, though elusively mixed, put her roots a long way east of Trieste. A Russian with Norse colouring—but why not? Scandinavian marauders sailed down the Volga and took charge of Novgorod more than a thousand years ago. For all I knew she’d been there when the Vikings raided Constantinople.

All of which redundant speculation laboured under the perceptual paradox of a beautiful woman exuding a smell of decomposing meat and ripest pigshit. Initially her teammate’s odour—less faecal but gamier—had obscured hers. Now I got it clear and unmingled. I sank to my knees, put
a hand out to stop myself from complete collapse, slipped in Russell’s lake of blood and fell facedown next to his corpse.

There was very little time. No time, really. Any moment now she’d drop Wazz’s head and be upon me. Any moment now it would already have happened.

Nonetheless I’d made certain calculations. (Whatever is happening, something else is going on.) Russell had ended up on his front with his right arm trapped under him. That put most of the kit—including the UV stick he still had in his hand—out of reach. The Staker’s holster was empty, the Staker itself lay five feet away in the library doorway. Getting at the
stake
, still buried in his throat, would require three seconds more than the one I’d actually have from the moment I made my move. The only weapon within reach was the flamethrower, and I wasn’t sure how to—

I heard the head drop and felt the air shift. She Is Coming. Hopeless hopeless hopeless but I rolled and plucked at the BBs’ gun-unit holstered at Russell’s thigh—not fast enough. Her boot heel gouged a divot from the side of my skull as she went past in a blur. I collapsed a second time.

Stay put.

Not only because the blow, a rude and deafening
bok
, had dazed me but because the position concealed my Braille navigation of the flamethrower. She hadn’t seen that. Didn’t know the weapon was there. What I needed from her now was the Bond villain’s soliloquising delay. I wasn’t going to get it. She was here to kidnap, not to kill.

“Uhhhr,” I said, not entirely faking. The head gouge was in the transitional stage between very cold and very hot. The wound in my chest was a rose of fire. I opened my eyes to see her descending gently to the floor. Flier. Fuck. Closed them again. Forced nimbleness into my fingertips.
It’s basically a glorified water pistol
, Harley had said, knowing not whereof he spoke. Two triggers, one for fuel release, one for ignition. Ergo I’d need both hands. The odds had just worsened.

“Phil?” Mia said.

Flying over me she’d passed the library doorway. Peripherally registered its lone occupant. She hadn’t known.

Two-thirds out of the holster.

She stood with her feet apart and an ugly hang to her limbs, face slack, staring at the crisping corpse by the hearth. Rain was a continuous exhalation against the house.

The weapon’s nozzle was caught on something, I couldn’t tell what. Talulla’s voice said quietly in my head: You’re running out of time.

Closing my eyes would’ve helped my fingers but Mia turned in the doorway and looked at me. “You?” she asked. I opened my mouth to lie but she said: “Don’t bother.” In the brighter light of the library her face’s colours vivified: red; blue; white. Very calmly she bent—one nyloned knee ticked, humanising her—and picked up the Staker that lay by her feet.

“You want me alive, don’t forget,” I said. She stood over me. I looked up at her. Here was the submissive’s camera angle of choice for his dominatrix, the perspective all boot and thigh and hip narrowing to the remote worshipful contemptuous head like a mountaintop divinity. I took a breath for reiteration—and she shot a stake through my left leg.

Pain, yes, sheet lightning, but also a peculiarly schoolboyish sense of injustice. She’d clipped the femur but not broken it, gone instead at an angle through the quadrilateral and vastus externus. No major arteries, but the sciatic nerve violently wronged already playing the
Psycho
shower scene strings in shock, a sensation that went all the way up to my molars.

Paltry vandalism as far as her ladyship was concerned. Something to keep me busy while she, tossing the Staker downstairs and turning with an expression testifying to the effect of
my
odour on
her
, took out a mobile and dialled. “It’s me,” she said. “I’ve got him.” Pause. “Phil’s dead.”