Kitabı oku: «Uprising»
Uprising
Scott G. Mariani
Dedication
for Lisa
Excerpt
SINCE THE DAWN of civilisation, vampires preyed on human beings, drank their blood and regarded them contemptuously as an inferior species, a mere disposable resource. For aeons, the vampires ruled.
But things have changed. With the birth of the modern age and the explosion in human telecommunications and surveillance technology, many vampires realised that they could no longer carry on the old ways. Something needed to be done if the ancient culture was to survive.
In the last quarter of the twentieth century, the World Vampire Federation was founded to control and oversee the activities of the vampire community. No longer would vampires prey unrestricted on human beings and turn them into creatures like themselves. New biotechnologies enabled the Undead to walk in daylight, living among us, in our cities, our streets. Strict laws were imposed to control vampire activity and allow their community to carry on. Quietly. Unnoticed. Undisturbed.
These laws were enforced by the Federation’s Vampire Intelligence Agency, or VIA, with a licence granted by the Ruling Council to hunt and destroy transgressors.
But not all the vampires were willing to obey…
Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Excerpt
Prologue
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-One
Chapter Forty-Two
Chapter Forty-Three
Chapter Forty-Four
Chapter Forty-Five
Chapter Forty-Six
Chapter Forty-Seven
Chapter Forty-Eight
Chapter Forty-Nine
Chapter Fifty
Chapter Fifty-One
Chapter Fifty-Two
Chapter Fifty-Three
Chapter Fifty-Four
Chapter Fifty-Five
Chapter Fifty-Six
Chapter Fifty-Seven
Chapter Fifty-Eight
Chapter Fifty-Nine
Chapter Sixty
Chapter Sixty-One
Chapter Sixty-Two
Chapter Sixty-Three
Chapter Sixty-Four
Chapter Sixty-Five
Chapter Sixty-Six
Chapter Sixty-Seven
Chapter Sixty-Eight
Chapter Sixty-Nine
Chapter Seventy
Chapter Seventy-One
Chapter Seventy-Two
Chapter Seventy-Three
Chapter Seventy-Four
Chapter Seventy-Five
Chapter Seventy-Six
Chapter Seventy-Seven
Chapter Seventy-Eight
Chapter Seventy-Nine
Chapter Eighty
Chapter Eighty-One
Chapter Eighty-Two
Chapter Eighty-Three
Chapter Eighty-Four
Chapter Eighty-Five
Chapter Eighty-Six
Chapter Eighty-Seven
In Conversation with Scott Mariani
Acknowledgements
About the Author
By the same author
Copyright
About the Publisher
Prologue
The Scottish Highlands
November 1992
Outside the cottage, the storm had reached its peak. Rain was lashing out of the starless sky, the wind was screaming, the branches of the forest whipped and scraped violently at the windows.
The lights had gone out, and the old place was filled with shadows from flickering candles. The twelve-year-old boy had been cowering at the top of the creaky stairs, listening to the argument between his parents and his grandfather and wishing they’d stop. Wanting to run downstairs and yell at them to quit fighting. Especially as he knew they were fighting about him—
…When the thing had come. A creature that looked like a man – but could not have been a man.
The boy had seen it all take place. Watched in speechless horror, peering through the banister rails as the intruder crashed in the door and strode through the hallway. The argument had stopped suddenly. His parents and his grandfather turned and stared. Then the sound of his mother’s scream had torn through the roar of the storm.
The creature never even slowed down. It caught his father and his mother by the arms, whipping them off their feet as though they weighed nothing. Like dead leaves. It dashed their heads together with a sound that the boy would never forget. Candles hissed, snuffed out by the blood spray.
Then the thing had dropped the bodies and stepped over them where they lay. Smiling now. Taking its time. And approached his grandfather.
The old man backed away, quaking in fear. Spoke words that the boy could not understand.
The thing laughed. Then it bit. Its teeth closed on the old man’s throat and the boy could hear the terrible gurgle as it gorged on his blood.
It was just like the stories. The stories his parents hadn’t wanted his grandfather to tell him. The boy shrank away and closed his eyes and wept silently and trembled and prayed.
And then it was over. When he opened his eyes, the killer had gone. The boy ran down the stairs. He gaped at the twisted bodies of his mother and father, then heard the groan from across the room.
The old man was lying on his back, his arms outflung. The boy ran to him, kneeled by his side. Saw the wound in his grandfather’s neck. There was no blood. All gone.
Claimed by the creature.
‘I’m dying,’ his grandfather gasped.
‘No!’ the boy shouted.
‘I’ll turn.’ The old man’s face was deathly pale and he gripped the boy’s arms so tightly it hurt. ‘You know what to do.’
‘No—’
‘It has to be done,’ the old man whispered. He pointed weakly at the sabre that hung over the fireplace. ‘Do it. Do it now, before it’s too late.’
The boy was convulsed with tears as he staggered over to the fireplace. His fingers closed on the scabbard of the sabre, and he unhooked the weapon from its mounting. The blade gave a soft zing as he drew it out.
‘Hurry,’ his grandfather croaked.
The boy pushed the sword back into the scabbard. ‘I can’t,’ he sobbed. ‘Please, Granddad. I don’t want to.’
His grandfather looked up at him. ‘You must, Joel. And when it’s done, you have to remember the things I told you.’ His life energy was fading fast, and he was struggling to talk. ‘You have to find it. Find the cross. It’s the only thing they truly fear.’
The cross of Ardaich. The boy remembered. Tears flooded down his face. He closed his eyes.
Then opened them. And saw that his grandfather was dead.
The storm was still raging outside. The boy stood over his grandfather’s body and wept.
And then his grandfather’s eyes snapped open and looked deep into his. He sat upright. Slowly, his lips rolled back and he snarled.
For a second the boy stood as if mesmerised. Then he started back in alarm as his grandfather began to climb to his feet. Except it wasn’t his grandfather any more. The boy knew what he’d become.
Candlelight flashed on the blade as he drew the sabre. He raised it high and sliced with all his strength – the way the old man had taught him. Felt the horrible impact all the way to the hilt as it chopped through his grandfather’s neck and took the head clean off.
When it was done, the boy staggered out into the storm. He began to walk through the hammering rain. He walked for miles, numb with shock.
And when the villagers found him the next morning, he couldn’t even speak.
Chapter One
Eighteen years later
October 27
Pockets of thick autumnal mist drifted over the waters of the Thames as the big cargo ship cut upriver from the estuary, heading for the wharfs of the Port of London. Smaller vessels seemed to shy out of its way. With its lights poking beams through the gloom, the ship carved its way westwards into the heart of the city.
On the approach to the docks, the beat of a helicopter thudded through the chill evening air.
Eight sailors of mixed Romanian and Czech origin were assembled around the helipad on the forward deck, craning their necks skywards at the approaching aircraft. At their feet lay a row of five steel-reinforced crates, seven feet long, all identical, unmarked, that had been wheeled up from the hold. Most of the crew preferred to keep their distance from them. The strong downdraught from the chopper’s rotors tore at the men’s clothing and hair as its pilot brought it down to land on the pad.
‘Okay, boys, let’s get these bastard things off our ship,’ the senior crewman yelled over the noise as the chopper’s cargo hatch slid open.
‘I’d love to know what the hell’s inside them,’ said one of the Romanians.
‘I don’t fucking want to know,’ someone else replied. ‘All I can say is I’m glad to be shot of them.’
There wasn’t a man aboard who hadn’t felt the sense of unease that had been hanging like a pall over the vessel since they’d left the Romanian port of Constantza. It hadn’t been a happy voyage. Five of the hands were sick below decks, suffering from some kind of fever that the ship’s medic couldn’t identify. The radio kept talking about the major flu pandemic that had much of Europe in its grip – maybe that was it. But some of the guys were sceptical. Flu didn’t wake you up in the middle of the night screaming in terror.
The crewmen heaved each crate onto the chopper and then stepped back from the blast as the cargo was strapped into place. The hatch slammed shut, the rotors accelerated to a deafening roar, and the chopper took off.
A handful of the ship’s crew remained on deck and watched the aircraft’s twinkling lights disappear into the mist that overhung the city skyline. One quickly made the sign of the cross over his chest, and muttered a prayer under his breath. He was a devout Catholic, and his faith was normally the butt of many jokes on board.
Today, though, nobody laughed.
Crowmoor Hall
Near Henley-on-Thames, Oxfordshire
Forty miles away, the gnarled figure of Seymour Finch stepped out of the grand entrance of the manor house. He raised his bald head and peered up at the sky. The stars were out, seeming dead and flat through the ragged holes in the mist that curled around the mansion’s gables and clung to the lawns.
Finch couldn’t stop grinning to himself, though his big hands were quaking in fear as he nervously, impatiently awaited the arrival of the helicopter. He glanced at his watch.
Soon. Soon.
Eventually he heard the distant beat of approaching rotor blades. He rubbed his hands together. Took out a small radio handset and spoke into it.
‘He’s coming. He’s here.’
Chapter Two
The Carpathian Mountains, Northern Romania
October 31
It was getting dark when Alex Bishop emerged from the path that cut through the woods and spotted the old tumbledown house across the clearing. She just hoped that her informant had been right. Lives were on the line.
She quickly checked the equipment she was carrying on her belt and unsnapped the retaining strap on the holster. The steps on the porch were rotten and she stepped over them, treading carefully. The peeling front door swung open with a creak and she could smell the stench of rot and fungus.
Inside, the house was all in shadow. Alex stepped in, peering into the darkness. The door creaked shut behind her. The red-orange glow of the sinking sun was receding fast across the cobwebbed window panes.
Her sharp ears caught something. Was that a thump from somewhere below her feet? She stiffened. Something was moving around down there. She followed the sound through the front hall towards a doorway. A rat, startled by her approach, darted into the deepening shadows.
A muffled yell from behind the door. Then another. Shrill, scared, all hell breaking loose.
Someone had got here before her.
She kicked the door open with a brittle cracking and splintering, and found herself at the top of a flight of stone steps leading down to the cellar. She wasn’t alone.
From her hidden vantage point at the top of the stairs, Alex took in the situation at a glance. Three young guys in their twenties. One lay writhing in a spreading, dark pool of blood. Two were still on their feet, one clutching a wooden cross, the other holding a mallet in one hand and a stake in the other. Both howling in panic, wild, demented, as the cellar’s other occupant rose up from their friend’s body and took a step towards them. His mouth opened to show the extended fangs.
Vampire.
The guy holding the cross rushed forward with a yell and thrust it in the vampire’s face. It was a brave thing to do – textbook horror movie heroics – but foolish. If he’d been expecting the vampire to cover its face and hiss and shrink away, he was in for a shock.
The vampire didn’t blink an eye. Alex had known he wouldn’t. Instead, he reached out and jerked his attacker brutally off his feet. Pulled him in and bit deep into his shoulder. The young guy fell twitching to the ground, blood jetting from his ripped throat.
There was nowhere for the remaining guy to run as the vampire turned his attention to him and backed him towards the corner of the cellar. The young man had dropped his mallet and stake and cowered against the rough wall, pleading for his life.
The vampire stepped closer to him. Then stopped and turned as Alex walked calmly down the cellar steps. He stared at her, and his bloodstained mouth fell open. Recognition in his eyes.
‘Surprise,’ she said. She reached down and drew the Desert Eagle from its holster.
The vampire snarled. ‘Federation scum. Your time is over.’
‘Not before yours,’ she said.
And fired. The explosion was deafening in the room. Even in Alex’s strong grip, the large-calibre pistol recoiled hard.
The vampire screamed. Not because of the bullet that had ripped a fist-sized hole in his chest, but because of the instant devastating effect of the Nosferol on his system – the lethal anti-vampire poison developed by the Federation’s chemists and issued under strict control to VIA field agents like Alex Bishop.
The vampire collapsed to the cellar floor, writhing in agony, staring at his hands as the blood vessels began to bulge out of the skin. His face swelled grotesquely, eyes popping out of their sockets. Then blood burst out of his mouth, and his hideously distended veins exploded in a violent spatter of red that coated the floor and the stone wall behind him. Alex turned away from the spray. The vampire continued to twitch for a second, his body peeled apart, turned almost inside out, blood still spurting out from everywhere; then he lay still.
Alex holstered the gun and walked over to the young guy in the corner, grabbed his arm and hauled him to his feet.
He gaped at her. ‘How did you—’
She could see that he had wet himself with fear. These amateurs had no idea what they were into.
‘It takes a vampire to destroy a vampire properly,’ she said as she unzipped the pouch on her belt. Before he could react to the meaning of her words, she’d taken out the syringe of Vambloc and jabbed it into the vein under his ear. He let out a wheezing gasp and then lost consciousness. By the time he came around, his short-term memory of what had just happened would be completely erased.
Alex replaced the Vambloc syringe and took out the one that was loaded with Nosferol. Leaving the young guy where he lay, she stepped over to his two dead friends and injected each of them with ten millilitres of the clear liquid. Standard procedure, to ensure they stayed dead. She carefully recapped the needle with a cork and put the syringe back into its pouch.
Two minutes later she was heading back out into the evening with the unconscious body over her shoulder. As she strode out of the house she tossed a miniature incendiary device into the doorway behind her. She was halfway to the trees before the whole place went up in a roar of flame, bathing the murky woods in an orange glow.
Hiding the traces of another day’s work.
‘Rest in peace,’ she muttered. She took out her phone, keyed in Rumble’s number at the London HQ.
‘Harry. You were right. It’s happening.’
Chapter Three
The Oxfordshire countryside, five miles from
Henley-on-Thames
The same night, 12.05 a.m.
‘Come back here, Kate!’
But she was already out of the car and trudging over the rough grass towards the road.
‘Piss off,’ she fired back over her shoulder as she stamped away. Dec thumped the steering wheel and swore loudly.
Kate was fuming as she reached the road and kept walking. No way she was getting back in that car. She’d walk all the way back home to Wallingford if she had to.
If she was angry with Dec Maddon, she was even angrier with herself for having accepted the boy next door’s invitation to go out for a drive. She liked him, she really did. But when he’d suddenly produced the little white pills and offered her one, she’d got scared. Scared of getting into trouble. Scared that he was trying to get her into a state where she’d have sex with him.
And scared that she’d give in. He was a few months older than her, not far off his eighteenth birthday. Better looking than any of the boys at school, and he drove a Golf GTI. He was exciting and wild. Maybe a little too wild. Kate drew the line at taking drugs.
She walked on as fast as her wobbly heels would let her. Shivering now, feeling the dampness of the mist and wishing she’d put on something heavier than the flimsy cotton top – but refusing to regret that she’d got out of the car.
It was a couple of minutes later when she saw the headlights coming up behind her. She turned and put out her thumb. The car sounded its horn at her and drove on. She did the V’s at the disappearing taillights. ‘Wanker!’
She kept walking. The dark empty road was spooky, but she didn’t care. So what if it was Hallowe’en? She wasn’t a kid any more. She was more concerned about the cold. Really getting to her now.
Then, a little further up the road, she saw another car approaching. She was about to put her thumb out again when it signalled and pulled up. She trotted over to it. Big square headlights, the luxuriant purr of a very expensive car. She noticed the Rolls-Royce radiator grille as she walked up close. The driver’s window whirred down.
Kate peered inside. ‘Thanks for stopping,’ she said.
Dec Maddon sat there muttering angrily to himself and slapping his forehead with his palm. What an eejit, blowing it like that. His dad was gonna kill him if this got back. The ecstasy pills were a new thing – in fact he’d never even touched the stuff in his life before deciding it would be a cool thing to try tonight with Kate – but of course nobody would believe him. He was in the deepest shit imaginable. Kate probably wouldn’t want to talk to him again, and her stuck-up bitch of a mother would have a field day.
He’d been crazy about Kate Hawthorne ever since his family had bought the house next door. She was beautiful, with china-blue eyes, tumbling red curls that looked like something out of an old painting and a smile that made his day – and up until now he’d been pretty sure the signals she’d been putting out meant she kind of liked him too. Trust him to go and fuck it all up.
He sat there fulminating for a few minutes before he decided to follow her. He’d explain. She’d understand…he hoped.
He started the car and bumped over the verge onto the country road, turning right to head back towards home. The mist drifted in his headlights. He was certain he’d spot her pretty quickly.
And he did. But she wasn’t alone. She was just getting into a black Rolls that was pulled over at the side of the road. She shut the door behind her, and the big car moved off.
Dec followed it for a few miles. The mist was rapidly thickening, and he was so focused on tailing the Rolls that he began to lose all sense of direction. They were deep into the winding country lanes now, way off his normal routes. After a while, the Rolls indicated left and glided through a tall gateway. Automatic gates closed behind it, blocking him out.
He parked the Golf at the side of the road. His breath was misting in the cool night air as he walked up to the gates and ran his hand down the cold wrought iron bars. He looked up.
Two giant birds were peering down at him out of the drifting fog. He stared up at their curved beaks and great wings, and it was a moment before he realised he was looking at stone statues perched on the gateposts. The way their eyes seemed to bore into him made him strangely uneasy. He looked away from them, and that was when he noticed the tarnished bronze plaque on the craggy wall. He had to pull away some of the moss sprouting over the stonework to read it.
CROWMOOR HALL.
What was this place? Some kind of stately home, he thought. Some rich guy’s place. What was Kate doing here?
Face it, Dec. You’re just not her class. She’s a solicitor’s daughter and you’re just a mechanic like your dad.
He was about to walk away, but then felt a powerful urge to go in there and have it out with her. He couldn’t let things end like this.
He started climbing the high wall.
