Читать книгу The Rising - Will Hill, Will Hill - Страница 22

“Incoming,” said Jamie. He spoke into the microphone built into the side of his helmet, which linked him to the other five Operators on the Operational frequency. “Heads up, Jack.”

“How do you know?” asked Jack, his voice sounding directly in Jamie’s ear.

“Larissa,” replied Jamie. It was all that needed to be said; the vampire girl’s senses were hundreds of times more sensitive than those of a normal human, and she had heard the trucks entering the shipyard long before the rest of the squad would have been able to.

Jack swore. “How long?” he asked.

“Less than a minute,” answered Larissa. “Three trucks, I don’t know how many vampires. At least ten.”

“Ready One,” said Jack. “Nobody moves until I give the go, clear?”

Squad G-17 immediately lowered their visors, pulling their T-Bones from their holsters. Ready One was the code for imminent contact with the supernatural; it meant that the use of force was authorised.

Four heavy thuds sounded from the edge of the dock, and Jamie craned round the corner of the container to see what had made them. Thick ropes were lying on the ground, thrown from the deck of the towering freighter. He looked up at the high steel wall, and saw a flash of movement through the fog, a dark shape disappearing into the gloom. Then the rumble of engines began to shake the ground beneath their feet, and three black trucks appeared from the north.

They drove in single file, approaching slowly along the crumbling central road of the shipyard. The Operators, concealed in the deep shadows cast by the containers and the high concrete wall, watched them as they passed. Their paint was peeling, and the trucks were coated in dirt and dust. But the engines purred as they made their way towards the ship, and Jamie saw that the tyres were new, the walls black, the manufacturer’s logos still bright white. He could not see anyone inside the vehicles; the windows were smeared with grime, and the cabs were high above his low vantage point, making the angle impossible.

He watched the trucks pull to a halt in a line near the edge of the dock, then waited, his breath held tight in his lungs, as the door of the first cab creaked open, and a figure emerged.

The fog drifted lazily round its feet as it made its way to the back of the truck, and began to unlock the rear doors. Behind Jamie, somewhere back towards the main road, something clattered; an animal most likely, skittering across the concrete. The figure’s head instantly flashed round, and Jamie saw the glowing red coals of its eyes.

For a long moment all was still, then the vampire, a man who looked to be in his late thirties so far as Jamie could tell in the gathering darkness, turned back to his task. Seconds later the lock was undone and cast aside, and doors were pulled open, exposing a square of jet black emptiness. Then movement filled the space, as a crowd of vampires piled out of the truck and on to the dock.

They gathered at the back of the vehicle, laughing and shouting, shoving each other with playful familiarity as the vampires who had driven the other two trucks joined them. Several lit cigarettes, and then they got down to business; eight of them went to the ropes, tied them on to huge metal mooring hooks, and began to pull the freighter tight alongside the dock, a display of casually superhuman strength. From somewhere on the hull there came a shout of greeting, which was returned by the vampires as they hauled at the thick lines.

Two of the vampires went to the other trucks and opened their rear doors, so all three vehicles sat open to the night. The first vampire who had emerged oversaw the activity, a cigarette clamped between his teeth; those without specific jobs milled around at the edge of the river, waiting for the ship to be pulled into position.

“I count fourteen,” whispered Jack Williams.

“Me too,” replied Jamie. “Plus seven on the boat. Twenty-one of them.”

“Hold positions,” said Jack. “Let’s see what they’re up to.”

From somewhere up on the high deck there came the sound of a metal door creaking open. Seconds later the seven vampires that they had seen as blobs of bright white heat on the infrared satellite image appeared at the railing at the edge of the deck, and began to shout greetings and insults at the vampires waiting below, their eyes glowing red as they traded friendly barbs and jibes with their welcoming party. This continued for a couple of minutes until the vampire who had opened up the first truck, who was clearly in charge of things, lit another cigarette and told them all to shut up. With a few snarls and hisses, the vampires did as they were told.

“Let’s get this done!” the foreman shouted. “There’ll be time enough for jokes later. Open up the containers; let’s have a look at what you brought us.”

The vampires on the ship disappeared from the railing and got to work, assisted by a number of the greeting party who flew up on to the deck to lend a hand. Another vampire flew easily up on to the freighter, and hauled down a long folding gangway, which met the concrete surface of the dock with an almighty clang of metal and settled beside the row of trucks.

As the doors to the containers screeched open, terrible sounds began to fill the air. There were cries of fear and misery, screams of pain and terror, and a relentless chorus of sobbing, pleading human voices, many of them speaking languages which were alien to the ears of the listening Operators. Then, through the mist, a small figure appeared at the top of the gangway, silhouetted against the grey canvas of the thickening fog. It took a nervous, shaky step on to the metal walkway, then another, and another. Then it passed through the beam of one of the freighter’s huge running lights, and Kate gasped.

Bathed in the bright white beam stood an Asian girl who could have been no more than five or six years old. Her tiny face was pale, her eyes narrowed against the light. She wore a dress printed with a pattern of flowers that had once been white, but was now the deep grey of dust and dirt. In her small hand she clutched a filthy doll that was missing one of its arms and both of its legs. She took a hesitant step forward on bare, filthy feet, then another, then stumbled backwards, grabbing desperately for the gangway’s metal rail. She sat down hard on the metal panel, looked around with awful confusion on her small face and began to cry.

A second silhouette appeared at the top of the gangway, running down towards the girl. In the light, the shape became a tiny Asian woman, as pale and filthy as the girl, who dropped to her knees beside the sobbing child and began to shush her gently.

On the concrete dock, one of the vampires began to laugh, and suddenly Jamie was full of an anger so intense he had only ever felt anything like it once before in his life, when he saw the terrified face of his mother standing beside Alexandru Rusmanov in the monastery on Lindisfarne.

“Let’s get them,” he growled.

“Negative,” replied Jack Williams, instantly. “Not until everyone clears the ship.”

Jamie gritted his teeth, and forced himself not to reply. Larissa’s hand rested momentarily on his arm, a show of support invisible to everyone else, and he felt his rage subside, just a fraction. He refocused his attention on the freighter, where a steady stream of men and women, emaciated, filthy, with looks of blank terror on their faces, were now making their way down the gangway.

The woman and the little girl had reached the bottom, where they stepped nervously off on to the concrete of the dock. Immediately, one of the vampires grabbed for the girl, who cried out with fear, pressing herself against the woman. There was more laughter, and more boiling, acidic anger spilled into the pit of Jamie’s stomach.

“Let them be,” said the vampire foreman. “Makes no difference if they want to stay together. They’re all going to the same place. Start loading them up.”

The vampire who had grabbed for the girl hissed, but did as he was told. He reached out, and grabbed the woman by her shoulder, sinking his nails into her flesh as he did so. The woman gritted her teeth, but did not cry out; instead, she fixed the vampire with a long look of utter contempt.

Good for you, thought Jamie. Just keep it together for a few more minutes.

The men and women, a dirty, shambling mass of damaged humanity, reached the bottom of the gangway, and began to spill out across the dock. The vampires moved beside them, funnelling the ragged group towards the waiting trucks; the prisoners, weakened and disoriented by their time in the containers, went unprotestingly.

“This is stupid,” breathed Kate. “It’s much easier with them still on the boat. Down here they’re just going to get in the way.”

“Hold your positions,” insisted Jack.

“She’s right,” said Angela. “We need to go now.”

“Angela, I’m warning—”

“Warn me later,” interrupted Angela, and moved.

Angela Darcy slid silently out from behind the wall that was sheltering Squad F-7 from view and brought her T-Bone to her shoulder as though it was the most natural thing in the world. There was a fluidity to the way she moved that was almost feline, and Jamie watched her from the other side of the dock with a feeling that made him almost guilty.

She sighted the vampire who had laughed at the little girl, who was now ordering the woman holding her to climb into the back of the nearest truck. The woman was refusing, shaking her head left and right, spitting torrents of what Jamie thought might be Mandarin. The vampire stared back at her with a lazy smile on his face, the face of someone who is eager to commit violence, and knows his chance is about to arrive.

Angela squeezed the T-Bone’s trigger, and then a loud bang and a rush of escaping gas sounded through the quiet evening air. The smiling vampire was beginning to turn his head towards the source of the noise when the T-Bone’s metal stake smashed into his chest, punching a hole the size of a grapefruit clean through him. His eyes widened, before he exploded in a steaming gout of blood, splashing the back of the truck and the woman and the girl standing beside it.

The freshly spilled blood hit the noses of the other vampires instantly, and their eyes darkened red. The Chinese woman, her face coated with blood, was staring at the space where the vampire had been standing, her eyes wide. The little girl pulled a strand of something red and wet from her hair, held it up before her face and started to scream. In an instant, the rest of the vampires appeared around her, snarling and hissing. The ones who had been unloading the containers on the freighter’s deck swooped down from the air and landed softly beside their colleagues. The foreman muscled his way through the crowd and grabbed the woman by her arm.

“What did you do?” he demanded. “What did you—”

His question was cut off as the stake from Jamie’s T-Bone tore through his throat, spraying his blood across the rest of the vampires, who recoiled, howling with alarm. Jamie hadn’t missed; the foreman’s heart was blocked by the throng of vampires. But he was confident that the rest of them would be a lot easier to deal with if their leader was unable to speak.

“Goddamnit, you two,” snarled Jack Williams. “We are go, repeat, we are go.”

The Operators broke cover and advanced from both sides towards the vampires, who immediately panicked. The foreman, who had sunk to his knees as blood gushed from his throat, was waving his hands and gurgling incomprehensibly, but the rest of the vampires ignored him. Instead, they hurled themselves at the approaching figures.

Kate dropped immediately to one knee, pulled her MP5 submachine gun from her belt and strafed the onrushing vampires at knee height, exactly as she had been trained to do. Bullets ripped through their legs, tearing flesh and shattering bone, and three of them crashed to the ground, screaming in pain.

Three more leapt into the air, where Larissa met them, her eyes red as lava, her teeth bared in a savage grin. She tore into them three metres above the ground, sending sprays of blood arcing high into the night sky, then landed as gracefully as a cat. The three vampires tumbled to the ground behind her, their blood pumping out across the concrete.

Across the dock, Shaun Turner drew his ultraviolet torch from his belt and raked its beam across the vampires who were streaming towards his squad. As the purple light touched their bare skin, five of the vampires burst into flames and immediately abandoned their attack, racing instead towards the cold water of the river.

They didn’t make it.

Angela detached herself from her squad and sprinted after them, firing her MP5 from her shoulder as she ran. Bullets thudded into the backs and legs of the burning vampires, and they crumpled to the ground, screaming and writhing in pain. They tried to crawl towards the water’s edge, but Angela kept firing, her shots calm and precise, and the vampires eventually slumped to a halt, their bodies billowing with purple fire and the revolting smell of cooking meat.

Shaun Turner watched her for a split second, a huge grin on his face, then he and Jack Williams threw themselves at the four vampires who were still coming. They attacked with deadly precision, and teamwork that bordered on instinct; the vampires, who wore looks of desperation on their faces, desperation born of the realisation that they were outmatched, fought with a panic bordering on mania. They leapt and clawed and bit and spat as Jack and Shaun slid through them like knives through butter; the flashing claws and snapping jaws touched nothing but thin air.

Shaun pulled the metal stake from his belt, ducked neatly beneath the flailing swing of one of the vampires, a man in a Sunderland football shirt who looked to be about thirty, with a shaved head and arms covered in blotchy blue tattoos, then drove the stake upwards with vicious accuracy. The metal point crunched through the vampire’s breastbone, soaking Shaun’s arm with pumping blood, until it pierced the wildly beating heart and the vampire burst like a balloon, his insides splashing across Shaun’s visor and helmet.

He wiped them clear, in time to see Jack Williams sling his arm round another of the vampires, and drive his stake through the creature’s back. It exploded into putrid liquid, and Jack staggered backwards as the thing he had been holding tightly in his grip ceased to exist.

Behind him, a vampire snarled with anticipation, and reached for Jack’s shoulders, its fangs gleaming in the reflected light from the ship. Shaun, whose brain was capable of an icy precision that was at least the equal of his father’s, didn’t hesitate; he drew the Glock 17 from his belt and fired from the hip, like a gunslinger in an old Western. The bullets tore away the vampire’s head above his eyebrows, and the vampire went down to the cold concrete, his eyes rolling, his hands grabbing reflexively at nothing as his brain lay in pieces on the dock. Jack regained his balance, spun round and buried his stake in the chest of the twitching vampire, then leapt clear as it exploded.

Shaun watched his squad leader with a look of great pride on his face; he and Jack had been through so many fights together, so many battles in dark corners of the world, and there was no one Shaun would rather have at his side. Then he felt the movement of air at his back, and realised that something was behind him.

He lunged forward, away from it, turning as he did so, and saw the contorted, hate-filled face of a vampire barely an arm’s length away from him. It was a man in his fifties, wearing a dark blue suit and tie, and Shaun had time to crazily think how much he looked like the housemaster he had so hated during his time at boarding school. The vampire was reaching for him, its hand centimetres from his chest, its eyes blazing red, its fangs huge and sharp as razors. Shaun started to swing the Glock up from his side, knowing it was going to be too late to stop the vampire reaching him.

“Down!”

It was Angela’s voice, cool and calm through his earpiece. As he heard the word, he also heard a loud bang he knew as well as any sound on earth. He threw his legs out from beneath him, and let himself fall to the concrete of the dock.

Confusion passed briefly across the face of the vampire, as he looked at what appeared to be a bizarre act of surrender. Then the stake from Angela’s T-Bone blew clean through his chest, directly above where Shaun Turner was lying, and the vampire exploded in an expanding column of blood, the majority of which came crashing down on Shaun. The T-Bone’s stake whirred back into its barrel, as Angela appeared above him. She pushed her visor up, and gave him a mischievous smile.

“Naughty boy,” she said, reaching down and hauling him to his feet. “Keep an eye on your six, Shaun. You can’t always rely on me to bail you out.”

“Piss off,” he said, mildly, then smiled at his teammate.

Jack Williams arrived beside them, his eyes wide with the thrill of the fight.

“I staked the ones you torched,” he said. “Let’s help Jamie’s team.”

Angela looked across the dock, towards Squad G-17.

“I think they’re doing fine,” she said, the smile widening on her face.

Kate ran forward, drawing the stake from her belt as she did so. Jamie ran with her, his MP5 in one hand, his stake in the other. They reached the trio of wailing vampires that Kate had blown the legs out from under, and staked them without a second glance. Then they were moving again, in the direction of Larissa.

Three more vampires fell out of the sky, blood pouring from wounds that looked like the work of a wild animal, and Kate skidded to a halt.

“Go on!” she shouted. “I’ll clear up!”

Jamie nodded, sprinting after Larissa, who had dropped back to the ground and taken cover behind the nearest truck. Behind him, he heard three gargled screams and three thuds of changing air pressure, as Kate staked what was left of the vampires who had met Larissa in the air. A second later she was at their side, panting, her uniform splashed with blood.

“How many left?” asked Jamie.

Larissa lifted her visor back and sniffed the air. Her eyes were blazing red, the colour of boiling blood, and her fangs were gleaming white triangles beneath her upper lip.

“Five,” she answered. “The one you T-Boned is still alive, but only just. The other four are between the trucks. The scents are too close together – I can’t separate them.”

Don’t worry, thought Jamie. Four frightened vampires. Easy.

A noise began to swell from the direction of the freighter, and Jamie peered round the corner of the truck. The woman who had been the second to leave the ship was standing at the bottom of the gangway, surrounded by a small group of emaciated men and women; she was still holding the little girl with one arm, but with the second she was waving frantically up at the deck of the freighter. As Jamie watched, an elderly woman nervously poked her head above the railing at the top of the gangway, then slowly started down it. Behind her, a crowd of men and women followed, the metal creaking beneath them as they made their way towards dry land.

Movement blurred in the corner of Jamie’s eye, and he pulled back round the corner next to Kate and Larissa.

“At least one is on the other side of this truck,” he whispered, his voice inaudible to anyone but them, the noise cancelled by the dampening contours of his helmet. “Kate, work your way round the other end. Larissa, go over the top. We’ll corner him.”

The two girls nodded. Kate moved away silently down the length of the truck, as Larissa floated easily up into the air. Jamie took a deep breath, and stepped round the corner. The vampire who was standing between the two trucks looked almost pitifully frightened; he was twitching and turning in circles, nostrils flared, trying to look in every direction at once. Then Kate appeared beyond him, and the vampire saw her. He hissed, a low, terrified noise, and turned to run, only to find Jamie barring his escape route. He screeched, a look of pure dread on his middle-aged face, and turned his head to the sky, to the one way he might escape the fate that had befallen his colleagues.

“Hi,” said Larissa, sweetly. She was sitting on the edge of the truck’s roof, staring down at the vampire with her red eyes glowing.

The vampire let out a howl of despair, and ran towards Kate. Then the stakes from two T-Bones pulped his chest, and he exploded in a shower of blood. Larissa floated down, then suddenly accelerated past Jamie, a low snarl of pleasure emanating from her throat. One of the three remaining vampires, his instinct for self-preservation overwhelmed by the torrent of fresh blood that had been spilled on the other side of the truck, was careering round the corner, a look of primal hunger on his face.

Larissa shot past him like a bullet, without even slowing, and tore his head from his shoulders without so much as a grunt of effort. The headless body took a couple of faltering steps, then fell face down in front of Jamie, who staked it, a grimace of disgust on his face. The head burst in Larissa’s hand like a water balloon, and she let out a yelp of annoyance.

“Give me a chance to drop the head next time,” she said. “I nearly made it through this mission without getting any blood on me.” She laughed, and Jamie felt his stomach flip.

Sometimes the awesome power that coursed through his girlfriend – is that what she is now? My girlfriend? – scared him more than he would ever have admitted to her, and made her take pleasure in things that even he, as battle-scarred as he was, found appalling. He knew it wasn’t really her, it was the vampire side of her; surrounded by blood, in a fight for her life, it took her over completely. But when it was over, she would be Larissa again, he knew.

Or at least, he hoped he knew.

Behind him, he heard the snarl of a vampire, but he didn’t even hurry to turn around. He trusted Kate completely; by the time he was facing her, the vampire was already staggering back against the side of the truck, a gaping hole in its chest. Kate turned her back as it burst, splashing blood and viscera against the backplate of her body armour.

Three down. One to go.

Squad G-17 regrouped at the front of the second truck, and walked slowly towards the third. They were careful, but not overly so; a single vampire was no match for them, and they knew it. As if on cue, the final vampire burst out from where he had been cowering as his friends died around him, took a single look at the three approaching figures, turned tail and ran for his life.

He made it ten metres before he collided with the mass of men and women emerging from the freighter’s gangway.

The first blow was struck by a tall Asian man with a metal fire extinguisher in his hand, crushing the vampire’s skull almost flat on one side. Blood pistoned into the air, and the vampire fell to the floor, his mouth working uselessly as he tried to form words, perhaps trying to beg them not to do it, to plead for mercy.

There was no mercy.

When it was over, the prisoners slumped to the ground, their heads in their hands, their arms wrapped round loved ones. Almost all of them were weeping, their narrow chests heaving up and down. The woman holding the little girl did not sit down, however; she had taken no part in the destruction of the vampire, but nor had she made any attempt to stop it. She looked at the six dark figures, their purple visors hiding their faces from view, and said two halting, uncertain words.

“Thank. You.”

“You’re welcome,” replied Jack Williams, and pointed at the ground. “Stay here. Help coming. Stay here.”

The woman nodded, then lowered herself to the ground, keeping the little girl carefully cradled against her.

Jack led the combined team away, and gathered them into a circle.

“Good work,” he said, raising his visor. “Damn good work today. That was as clean as I’ve ever seen it done, and we got the leader alive. Great work, truly.” He smiled around at the five Operators, who raised their own visors and grinned back at him, grinned at the pleasure of a job done well as the adrenaline began to leave their systems. “Alert the Northumbrian Police; tell them they’ve got two hundred refugees on the banks of the Tyne. Then let’s take our survivor home and find out what he knows,” Jack continued. “Shaun, radio the chopper.”

Shaun Turner nodded, and pulled the radio from his belt. As they made their way back towards the truck, he coded in and told their pilot that they were ready for extraction. A deep noise instantly rumbled through the night as the helicopter that had brought them north lumbered into the air less than a quarter of a mile away, on the other side of Hadrian Road.

At the rear of the truck they found the vampire foreman.

He was slumped on his knees, his head lowered against his chest, in the middle of an enormous pool of blood. He was pale, and his skin was flickering as his veins pushed what blood remained in his body desperately round his system, trying to keep it operational. He was breathing, incredibly slowly, as they approached him.

“He’s on the brink,” said Larissa. “He’ll be dormant by the time we get him back to the Loop. He’s lost too much blood.”

“Then they can revive him in the lab,” said Jack. “Makes transporting him easier.”

Shaun Turner stepped forward, and hunkered down in front of the vampire.

“Where were you taking all those people?” he asked.

There was the tiniest movement in the vampire’s shoulders, suggesting he understood he was being spoken to, but no response. Shaun reached out to lift the injured vampire’s head up, and Kate was suddenly overcome with panic. She stepped forward, saying Shaun’s name, as his gloved fingers touched the vampire’s chin. He paused as she arrived at his side, shooting a look of annoyance in her direction as she reached out to pull his hand away. Then the vampire’s head reared up, his eyes glowing a dull red, and he lunged forward with the last of his strength, like a dying dog.

His mouth closed on Kate’s arm.

The fangs slid into her flesh, and she watched with what was almost amazed detachment as the vampire shook his head, once, and tore a ragged chunk of flesh out of her arm. He spat it out on the concrete, and collapsed backwards, his eyes rolling back in his head.