Vampires: The Recent Undead (30 page)

Diving under its charge to the far side of the road, she got a grip on its other arm, braced herself against a piece of broken pavement, and hauled it sideways. There was a wet crack at the point where the arm met the body.

And more flailing.

Ren had shoved Star through the portal and was working on Gavin by the time the snake got moving forward again.

Another time, Vicki might have admired that kind of single-minded determination. But not right now. She grabbed the polished leg bone of the creature she’d killed when they arrived, made it between the snake and the portal just in time, and slammed it as hard as she could on the nose.

“Vicki, come on!”

A glance over her shoulder. The kids were through.

And the portal was about twice as big around as the snake.

The snake didn’t seem to know the meaning of the word
quit
.

She hit it again.

“Vicki! It’s closing!”

Mike.

The portal was still bigger than the snake.

And the sun was rising.

She threw the bone. It skittered off the scales. When the snake lunged, she stood her ground and emptied the Glock into its open mouth. Changed magazines, kept firing. Ignored the pain as a fang sliced into her upper arm.

Stumbling back, she could smell burning blood.

A hand grabbed her shirt then she was on her back, on the floor of the mausoleum, still firing into the snake’s open mouth.

The portal closed.

The snake head dropped onto her legs.

“Vicki!”

She felt Mike pull the weapon from her hand. Grabbed his hand in turn and sank her teeth into his wrist. Mike swore, she hadn’t been particularly careful, but he didn’t pull away. One swallow, two, and she had strength enough to tie up a couple of loose ends. “Star, Gavin, forget this night ever happened!”

“I don’t . . . ” Ren began.

Vicki cut her off. “Your choice.”

“I want to remember. Well, I don’t really want to remember but . . . ”

A raised hand cut her off and Vicki managed to growl, “Sunrise.”

“Got it covered.”

She was heavier than she had been but Mike lifted her and dropped her into the open crypt. The open occupied crypt.

And then the day claimed her.

“Okay, I’m impressed with your quick thinking . . . ” Vicki shimmied into the clean jeans Mike had brought her. “ . . . but waking up next to a decomposed body was quite possibly the grossest thing that’s ever happened to me.”

“At least the body didn’t wake up,” Mike pointed out handing her a shirt. “Given our lives of late, that’s not something you can rule out.”

“True.” She shrugged into the shirt and moved into his arms, head dropping to rest on his shoulder.

“You need to feed.”

The wound in her arm had healed over but was still an ugly red.

“Later.” She needed more than he could give and right now, she needed him. “The kids?”

“They’re all home. The two you told to forget are . . . ” She felt him shrug. “I don’t know . . . teenagers. The other girl, Ren, she’s something. You’re going to have to talk to her.”

“I know. Cameron?”

The arms around her tightened. “Teenagers run away all the time.”

She could tell he hated saying it. “I was too late to save him.”

“Yeah, Ren told me.” He sighed, breath parting her hair, warm against her scalp. “There isn’t enough crap in this world, they had to go looking for another.”

Vicki shifted just far enough to press the palm of her right hand over his heart. “There isn’t enough love in this world, they had to go looking for another.”

Outfangthief

Conrad Williams

The title of this chilling story is an archaic word meaning “the right of a lord to pursue a thief outside the lord’s own jurisdiction and bring him back within his jurisdiction to be punished.” But there’s nothing medieval about it. The bloodsuckers involved are the antithesis of benign. If you want “lite bite” fiction—this one is not for you. Of course if you are acquainted with the work of Conrad Williams, you’ll not be expecting “lite.” The author of six novels, four novellas, and around one hundred short stories, some of which are collected in
Use Once Then Destroy
, Williams has won the British Fantasy Award three times, most recently for Best Novel
(One)
. He is also a past recipient of the International Horror Guild Award and the Littlewood Arc Prize. His latest novel is
Loss of Separation
. He has a new collection,
Penetralia
, forthcoming from PS Publishing, who are also releasing his first foray into editing, with
Gutshot
, an anthology of weird west stories. Conrad lives in Manchester, UK, with his wife, three sons, and a monster Maine Coon cat. You can find out more at www.conradwilliams.net

At the moment the car slid out of control, Sarah Running had been trying to find a radio station that might carry some news of her crime. She had been driving for hours, risking the M6 all the way from Preston. Though she had seen a number of police vehicles, the traffic had been sufficiently busy to allow her to blend in and anyway, Manser would hardly have guessed she would take her ex-husband’s car. Michael was away on business in Stockholm and would not know of the theft for at least another week.

But Manser was not stupid. It would not be long before he latched on to her deceit.

As the traffic thinned, and night closed in on the motorway, Sarah’s panic grew. She was convinced that her disappearance had been reported and she would be brought to book. When a police Range Rover tailed her from Walsall to the M42 turn off, she almost sent her own car into the crash barriers at the center of the road.

Desperate for cover, she followed the signs for the A14. Perhaps she could make the one hundred and thirty miles to Felixstowe tonight and sell the car, try to find passage on a boat, lose herself and her daughter on the continent. In a day they could be in Dresden, where her grandmother had lived; a battered city that would recognize some of its own and allow them some anonymity.

“Are you all right back there, Laura?”

In the rear view mirror, her daughter might well have been a mannequin. Her features were glacial; her sunglasses formed tiny screens of animation as the sodium lights fizzed off them. A slight flattening of the lips was the only indication that all was well. Sarah bore down on her frustration. Did she understand what she had been rescued from? Sarah tried to remember what things had been like for herself as a child, but reasoned that her own relationship with her mother had not been fraught with the same problems.

“It’s all okay, Laura. We’ll not have any more worries in this family. I promise you.”

All that before she spotted the flashing blue and red lights of three police vehicles blocking her progress east. She turned left on to another A road bound for Leicester. There must have been an accident; they wouldn’t go to the lengths of forming a roadblock for her, would they? The road sucked her deep into darkness, on either side wild hedgerows and vast oily swells of countryside muscled into them. Head lamps on full beam, she could pick nothing out beyond the winding road apart from the ghostly dusting of insects attracted by the light. Sarah, though, felt anything but alone. She could see, in the corner of her eye, something blurred by speed, keeping pace with the car as it fled the police cordon. She took occasional glances to her right, but could not define their fellow traveller for the dense tangle of vegetation that bordered the road.

“Can you see that, Laura?” she asked. “What is it?”

It could have been a trick of the light, or something silver reflecting the shape of their car. Maybe it was the police. The needle on the speedometer edged up to eighty. They would have to dump the car somewhere soon, if the police were closing in on them.

“Keep a look out for a B&B, okay?” She checked in the mirror; Laura’s hand was splayed against the window, spreading mist from the star her fingers made. She was watching the obliteration of her view intently.

Sarah fumbled with the radio button. Static filled the car at an excruciating volume. Peering into the dashboard of the unfamiliar car, trying to locate the volume control, she perceived a darkening in the cone of light ahead. When she looked up, the car was drifting off the road, aiming for a tree. Righting the swerve only took the car more violently in the other direction. They were still on the road, but only just, as the wheels began to rise on the passenger side.

but i wasn’t drifting off the road, was i?

Sarah caught sight of Laura, expressionless, as she was jerked from one side of the car to the other and hoped the crack she heard was not caused by her head slamming against the window.

i thought it was a tree big and black it looked just like a tree but but but

And then she couldn’t see much because the car went into a roll and everything became part of a violent, circular blur and at the centre of it were the misted, friendly eyes of a woman dipping into her field of view.

but but but how can a tree have a face?

She was conscious of the cold and the darkness. There was the hiss of traffic from the motorway, soughing over the fields. Her face was sticky and at first she thought it was blood, but now she smelled a lime tree and knew it was its sap being sweated on to her. Forty meters away, the road she had just left glistened with dew. She tried to move and blacked out.

Fingers sought her face. She tried to bat them away but there were many fingers, many hands. She feared they might try to pluck her eyes out and opened her mouth to scream and that was when a rat was pushed deep into her throat.

Sarah came out of the dream, smothering on the sodden jumper of her daughter, who had tipped over the driver’s seat and was pressed against her mother. The flavor of blood filled her mouth. The dead weight of the child carried an inflexibility about it that shocked her. She tried to move away from the crushing bulk and the pain drew gray veils across her eyes. She gritted her teeth, knowing that to succumb now was to die, and worked at unbuckling the seat belt that had saved her life. Once free, she slumped to her left and her daughter filled the space she had occupied. Able to breathe again, she was pondering the position in which the car had come to rest, and trying to reach Laura’s hand, when she heard footsteps.

When she saw Manser lean over, his big, toothy grin seeming to fill the shattered window frame, she wished she had not dodged the police; they were preferable to this monster. But then she saw how this wasn’t Manser after all. She couldn’t understand how she had made the mistake. Manser was a stunted, dark man with a face like chewed tobacco. This face was smooth as soapstone and framed by thick, red tresses; a woman’s face.

Other faces, less defined, swept across her vision. Everyone seemed to be moving very fast.

She said, falteringly: “Ambulance?” But they ignored her.

They lifted Laura out of the window to a cacophony of whistles and cheers. There must have been a hundred people. At least they had been rescued. Sarah would take her chances with the police. Anything was better than going home.

The faces retreated. Only the night stared in on her now, through the various rents in the car. It was cold, lonely and painful. Her face in the rear view mirror: all smiles.

He closed the door and locked it. Cocked his head against the jamb, listened for a few seconds. Still breathing.

Downstairs, he read the newspaper, ringing a few horses for the afternoon races. He placed thousand pound bets with his bookies. In the ground floor wash room, he took a scalding shower followed by an ice cold one, just like James Bond. Rolex Oyster, Turnbull & Asser shirt, Armani. He made four more phone calls: Jez Knowlden, his driver, to drop by in the Jag in twenty minutes; Pamela, his wife, to say that he would be away for the weekend; Jade, his mistress, to ask her if she’d meet him in London. And then Chandos, his police mole, to see if that cunt Sarah Running had been found yet.

Sarah dragged herself out of the car just as dawn was turning the skyline milky. She had drifted in and out of consciousness all night, but the sleet that had arrived within the last half hour was the spur she needed to try to escape. She sat a few feet away from the car, taking care not to make any extreme movements, and began to assess the damage to herself. A deep wound in her shoulder had caused most of the bleeding. Other than that, which would need stitches, she had got away with pretty superficial injuries. Her head was pounding, and dried blood formed a crust above her left eyebrow, but nothing seemed to be broken.

After quelling a moment of nausea when she tried to stand, Sarah breathed deeply of the chill morning air and looked around her. A farmhouse nestled within a crowd of trees seemed the best bet; it was too early for road users. Cautiously at first, but with gathering confidence, she trudged across the muddy, furrowed field towards the house, staring all the while at its black, arched windows, for all the world like a series of open mouths, shocked by the coming of the sun.

She had met Andrew in 1985, in the Preston library they both shared. A relationship had started, more or less, on their hands bumping each other while reaching for the same book. They had married a year later and Sarah gave birth to Laura then, too. Both of them had steady, if unspectacular work. Andrew was a security guard and she cleaned at the local school and for a few favoured neighbors. They eventually took out a mortgage on their council house on the right-to-buy scheme and bought a car, a washing machine, and a television on the never-never. Then they both lost their jobs within weeks of each other. They owed £17,000. When the law center they depended on heavily for advice lost its funding and closed down, Sarah had to go to hospital when she began laughing so hysterically, she could not catch her breath. It was as Andrew drove her back from the hospital that they met Malcolm Manser for the first time.

His back to them, he stepped out in front of their car at a set of traffic lights and did not move when they changed in Andrew’s favor. When Andrew sounded the horn, Manser turned around. He was wearing a long, Nubuck trench coat, black Levi’s, black boots and a black T-shirt without an inch of give in it. His hair was black save for wild slashes of gray above his temples. His sunglasses appeared to be sculpted from his face, so seamlessly did they sit on his nose. From the trench coat he pulled a car jack and proceeded to smash every piece of glass and dent every panel on the car. It took about twenty seconds.