Читать книгу The Department 19 Files: Undead in the Eternal City: 1918 - Will Hill, Will Hill - Страница 5

ROME, ITALY 14th DECEMBER 1918

Valeri Rusmanov strolled through the sick, bleeding city with a wide smile on his ancient face.

He was arm in arm with his wife Ana, who wore an expression of beatific pleasure on her beautiful features. They had eaten dinner in a restaurant in the narrow backstreets behind the Basilica di Santa Maria Maggiore, huge bowls of slippery white pasta smothered with a thick veal ragu the colour of drying blood, and were strolling contentedly along Via Milano towards the Fontana di Trevi, in search of dessert. All around them thick coughing rattled through the night, a continuous percussion of illness and pain, while the dead and dying lay slumped in doorways and piled in stable yards.

The Italian capital, like the rest of the world, was in the grip of a pandemic.

The panicked, fearful public called it Spanish flu, because the neutral southern European country’s press were the only publications reporting on the devastation the pandemic had unleashed; the rest of the European newspapers were still operating under wartime censorship and forbidden from printing the grisly, terrifying truth. The virus had actually originated in the deep wilderness of northern China, a strain of such viciousness that it had laid Valeri himself low for almost an entire day after he had fed on a French soldier who had been infected.

The European outbreak had apparently originated in northern France in January, where the huge concentrations of Allied troops in close proximity had created a fertile breeding ground for the microscopic virus. Unusually, it was the young and the healthy that succumbed in the greatest numbers, their noses running with blood, their stomachs and intestines haemorrhaging, their own immune systems destroying their bodies until pneumonia finished them off.

There was no way to stop it; the virus had infiltrated every part of the world, all the way to the Arctic and Antarctica. When the second strain, which, if rumour was to be believed, had already killed more than twenty million people, erupted through the continent in the late summer, all the authorities could do was bury the dead, try to isolate the infected, and wait for it to pass, as all pandemics eventually did.

Valeri, who still lamented having been born more than fifty years after the Black Death devastated Europe, killing almost a third of its population, thought it was wonderful.

The Great War, and the viral sting in the tail that had followed on its heels, had afforded Valeri and his kind an abundance of opportunity so vast it was almost bewildering. The incredible numbers of casualties on the Western Front meant that the majority of the vampires in the world had descended on northern France throughout the war, all of them unwilling to miss out on an event that was likely never to be repeated.

Humans are stupid, thought Valeri. But I doubt that even they are stupid enough to allow another war on this scale. The damage is going to take generations to undo.

In the pitch-darkness of the battlefields, the vampires had gorged themselves. Never before had a chance existed for them to be so utterly brazen; the number of victims they took was insignificant among the roaring, churning murder of the first mechanised war, and their presence went completely undetected. After a matter of weeks or months, the majority of the vampires had returned to where they had come from, their every appetite sated. Valeri was one of the few exceptions; he simply could not tear himself away from the horror unfolding around him.

Before his turning, the eldest Rusmanov brother had been a general, commanding the Wallachian armies of Vlad Tepes III, the man the world would come to know as Count Dracula. At his master’s behest, and often on his own sadistic initiative, he had ordered innumerable torments upon enemy soldiers and innocent civilians alike, had sent his own men, who trusted him like a father, into battles he knew they would not survive.

But even he could never have conceived of the slaughter that had taken place in the four long years of war that had just been concluded: the futile senselessness of the marches across no man’s land; legions of young men obliterated by the machine guns they had been ordered to walk towards; the devastating power of landmines that were tunnelled beneath enemy trenches and exploded with a noise so huge it seemed to tear the sky, leaving nothing behind except an agonising, high-pitched whine and a soft, warm rain of mud and flesh.

As the armistices were signed, one after the other, the mood of the men that had survived their time in hell changed from fear and misery to elation and relief. Valeri, on the other hand, had felt a great sorrow; he knew that he had been witness to something unique in all of history, and its passing saddened him. Bored, he had sent to Romania for his wife, and the two of them had followed a troop train south into Italy where it was immediately obvious that the euphoria that followed the end of the war was not going to last. The flu virus that had begun to kill soldiers on the battlefields in August had accompanied the survivors home, and was hungry.

No one knew exactly how many men and women had died in Rome. A bartender Valeri had spoken to the previous evening had heard rumours that the figure was already in excess of a million and climbing fast. This would have seemed ridiculous to Valeri had he not tasted the virus himself, felt it attack his biological system with such ferocity that even his supernatural physiology had needed the better part of a day to fight it off; what it must be doing to the bodies of normal humans, he could scarcely imagine.

Valeri felt his wife’s arm tense and his mind swam back into the present. He had been lost in thought as they walked through the cold evening air of Rome, thick with the scents of rot and decay, and he had not noticed the woman approaching them on the other side of the street. Ana had, though; she had spotted her immediately, plucking her delicate scent from among the clusters of drunks and vendors that were ambling back and forth across Via Rasella, and had felt the familiar fluttering of desire in the depths of her stomach.

The woman was tall, and possessed of the milky white skin and smooth lines of youth. Her black hair fell in a loose ponytail over her right shoulder and came to rest on the shelf of her breasts, where the application of a whalebone corset had engineered a startling cleavage. She walked quickly, her head lowered against the leering glances and whistles of the men she passed, her hands clasped together in front of her, the heels of her shoes clattering rapidly on the cobbled street.

Valeri stopped in the middle of the road and looked at his wife. “Do you want her?” he asked.

“I do,” replied Ana, her eyes full of lust. “I want her.”

Valeri smiled. “Then you shall have her.”

Thirty yards north on Via Rasella, Captain Quincey Harker swayed unsteadily on his feet. Beside him, Charles Ellis, the polite, bespectacled Private who had taught German in a northern grammar school until war broke out in 1914, looked on with mild disapproval as two huge men in British army uniforms held up a young man, his figure so slight it appeared as though a strong wind would blow him over, by the shoulders while he vomited enthusiastically into the gutter.

John McDonald, the enormous Scottish highlander whose hair and beard flamed red in the flickering, amber glow of the gas lamps, was booming with laughter.

“Get it out, son!” he bellowed. “Get it all out. You’ll feel better.”