CHAPTER
THREE
R
EDLAW HAD NO
contacts in New York. He had never been to the Big Apple before, never even travelled to the States. In his entire life he’d left British shores on only two occasions. Once was a brief jaunt to Spain to walk the last section of the Way of St James, the pilgrim trail leading to the cathedral of Santiago de Compostela in Galicia. The other time was a SHADE-sponsored cultural exchange trip to Paris to compare notes and swap tips with the Sûreté, whose zero-tolerance policy toward the Sunless had been proving unusually effective in dealing with the issue of vampire immigration. Neither excursion was exactly what you’d call a holiday and, anyway, Redlaw was not the holidaying type.
He was certainly not in America to see the sights and do a spot of shopping.
He had come to chase down a rumour and divine the truth of it, or otherwise.
He had nothing to go on other than stories. Vague reports, mostly second-hand. Starting with something a vampire had told him back in London...
“
...KILLING US,
”
THE
vampire said.
He was originally from Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, one of the Caucasus -stans at any rate. And Redlaw had just saved him from a staking.
Two Stokers lay sprawled on the slimy floor of a vacant lockup beneath some railway arches in Leytonstone. They were unconscious and surrounded by their homemade anti-Sunless paraphernalia: several rather blunt-looking stakes, a plastic Coca-Cola bottle containing what they were evidently convinced was holy water, and a makeshift flamethrower constructed from a pesticide spray gun with a cigarette lighter duct-taped to the nozzle.
Sometimes these vigilantes were such idiots, it was a wonder they could tie their own shoelaces.
“I hear it from friend,” said the vampire. “Good friend. Human. We keep in touch, even after I become vampire. My family, they turn their backs on me, chase me away.” He mimed spitting, to illustrate his relatives’ contempt for him, or perhaps his own for them. “I am monster, they say. No longer can be talked to. But my friend Nurzhan, he not so bad. We know each other since school. I sometimes phone him. He is in America, studying health sciences. Temple University in Philadelphia. He is to be doctor. We talk. Nurzhan, he tells me recently there have been bad things happening to my kind in that country. Because he knows what I am, he is interested in vampires. He goes on internet, reads things. I think he hopes to find cure for me, if there is one. He doesn’t find cure yet, but he does find rumours.”
“That someone’s slaughtering vampires over there.”
“Yes. Yes.” The vampire nodded animatedly. “As I tell you, killing us. Like these men try to.” He gestured to indicate the Stokers. Redlaw had spotted the two men behaving suspiciously outside a pub in West Ham that was a known Stoker haunt, and had followed them to the lockup. Morons they might be, but they had possessed enough basic cunning to choose to attack the vampire during the daytime, when there was every chance he’d be asleep.
“But America has hardly any Sunless.”
“And it is busy destroying the ones it has already got.”
“What I mean is, there isn’t really an anti-vampire movement there. Not a well mobilised one like here, with cells and meetings and ringleaders.”
“According to Nurzhan, there is. Or there is
something
. Two, three nests have been wiped out. So the internet says.”
“The internet says a lot of things,” said Redlaw.
“I know. But I tell you because I think you should know. You are John Redlaw. Once we feared you. Now you are vampires’ friend. This is what everyone says, and today I see for myself.”
“I don’t know about ‘friend’, but I do have a new set of priorities.” Redlaw rubbed his fist. His knuckles still throbbed from cold-cocking the Stokers. “A burden of care.”
“And I thank you for caring for me,” said the vampire sincerely.
“You’d be better off, you know, in a Sunless Residential Area. Safer. Then you wouldn’t be vulnerable to attack.”
“Safer? In SRA?” The vampire gave a gruff, scoffing laugh. “I think not. We do not trust SRA now. We do not trust government. We take our chances out in the city, the countryside. You yourself know what happened when we did trust government. Can you blame us for not wanting to again?”
Redlaw looked at him. “In all honesty, I can’t.”
L
ATER, AT AN
internet café called the Java Crypt, Redlaw surfed and searched. The content of various US-based forums and chat rooms backed up the vampire’s assertion. People were posting comments suggesting there was some kind of clandestine backlash taking place in the States. The oldest of these dated back to three weeks ago and purportedly came from an actual vampire. Since there were so many wannabes and fantasists out there, it wasn’t difficult for Redlaw to discount the authenticity of
that
claim. Had the poster chosen a more original username than Dracul12345, he might have stood more of a chance of being taken seriously.
What he wrote, however, had a distinct ring of plausibility:
There were three of them near my place in Trenton, NJ, nosferatu like me, holed up in this old timber mill down by the river. I’ve been watching them come and go at night. This one night, I swear, there was shooting. Saw gun flashes and everything inside the mill. After that, no more nosferatu.
Another poster corroborated his testimony, to some extent:
I’m from New Jersey too, Hopewell, just north of Trenton. I don’t know about any timber mill, but I go hiking in the woods round Kuser Mountain County Park and lately I’ve been coming across dead raccoons, woodchucks, this one time even a deer. And when I say dead, I mean no blood in them. Just laying there *empty*, if you know what I mean. Like deflated balloons. I make sure I don’t go in those woods any time near sundown, you can bet on that, not now. But even so, I’ve noticed there’ve not been any dead animals for a week. Seems to have stopped.
A third poster said:
Don’t know about you guys, but if it *was* vampires, could some local gun nuts have gotten them? Like a posse or something, gone in there blazing away with wooden bullets? Or else maybe the cops?
To which someone calling himself StarzNStripes retorted:
Good to know somebodys doing SOMETHING coz our a-hole of a President sure as fuck isn’t, and neither’s any of those loudmouth cocksuckers in Congress tho their sure as hell making plenty noise about it. ;-)
There were other similar accounts of anti-vampire activity, centring on Trenton and two further New Jersey locations: Newark and Atlantic City. The more Redlaw read, the more he sensed there was substance beneath the surface. The seemingly discrete incidents had a clear common link, even if it was only that groups of Americans could no longer tolerate the presence of vampires in their midst, or stomach their government’s continued refusal to treat the matter as urgent, and had elected to deal with it themselves, by force.
It was interesting, but no real concern of his. He had enough on his plate in London without having to worry about events three thousand miles away.
R
EDLAW SHELVED ALL
thoughts of the American attacks at the back of his mind, and he had every reason to believe that that was where they would stay.
His view changed after two close brushes with the authorities that very same evening.
The first occurred as he was leaving the internet café. A police car trundled past him in the street, the two officers inside apparently just cruising the area, keeping an eye out, nothing more. Nevertheless, Redlaw shrank into the shadows of a shop doorway, sinking his head into the pulled-up lapels of his overcoat like a tortoise withdrawing into its shell. The police car drove onward... then halted. The reversing lights winked on. Redlaw spun out of the doorway and walked at a fast lick in the opposite direction, back past the Java Crypt. He wanted to run, but didn’t, for fear of making himself look more suspicious. He rounded a corner and dived into the front garden of the nearest house. Peering over the privet hedge he saw the police car reverse past the end of the street, then turn in. He ducked out of sight. The police car crawled by his hiding place more slowly than he thought any automobile could. And just when he believed it had gone and he could emerge, back it came the other way. The officers certainly now seemed to be hunting for someone. Was it him, specifically? Had one of them ID’ed him from the warrant that was doing the rounds? Had they recognised the man the tabloid press had dubbed “Redlaw the Outlaw” and “the Shady Dealer”?
He stayed hunkered in that front garden until well after nightfall. By then, the coast seemed clear and he finally dared to venture out and head homeward.
Home wasn’t his flat in Ealing, to which he couldn’t return for the time being and maybe not ever, not as long as a SHADE patrol car remained parked outside twenty-four seven. Home was a squat above an abandoned curry house on the fringes of the Stoke Newington SRA. The roof leaked; pigeons played havoc in the loft. But at least whoever owned the premises hadn’t got round to having the water cut off, so the toilet and the cold taps worked.
Redlaw was dog-tired and looking forward to burrowing down inside his sleeping bag and getting some kip.
An uninvited guest, however, had other ideas.
R
EDLAW FAILED TO
draw his Cindermaker in time. The figure standing in the living room of the squat, silhouetted against the curtainless window, had a Cindermaker too, and was aiming it at Redlaw’s head.
“Drop it, Redlaw. Nice and slow. On the floor. That’s it.”
Redlaw laid his gun down, wishing he’d been feeling a little less weary, a little more awake. Wishing, too, that he didn’t know the owner of the voice and the gun.
“Sergeant Khalid,” he said. “You found me.”
“
Captain
Khalid,” replied Redlaw’s one-time nemesis at SHADE. “But then, you’ve obviously not been keeping up with the promotions situation at HQ. There’ve been a lot of changes since you went rogue on us, Redlaw. Positions vacant, new blood replacing old. It goes all the way to the top, and for that we have you to thank, seeing as how you’re the one who cleared the space.”
“So happy to help with your ascent up the ladder. Last I saw of you, Khalid, you’d just been beaten up by rioters. How are you feeling now? Bruises all healed?”
The other man’s grin was mirthless. “I’m fine. Qureshi’s fine too, although he carries a nasty scar on his forehead. We call him Harry Potter. He hates that. As for poor old Heffernan...”
Redlaw felt a twinge of guilt.
“Wheelchair-bound,” Khalid went on. “Surgeons couldn’t reconnect his spinal cord. He’s started a desk job with us, using voice recognition software to run his computer, but it’s quite a comedown for someone as physical as him. You should see the look on his face whenever your name’s mentioned—which happens quite often. This awful combination of loathing and frustration. The things Heffernan would do to you, if only he could.”
“It wasn’t me. I didn’t hurt him.”
“No, it was the shtriga. But she was with you. She snapped his neck protecting you. If it wasn’t for your association with that bitch, Heffernan would still be playing rugby every Sunday afternoon.”
“Don’t call her that.”
“A bitch is a bitch.” Khalid cocked his head. “Aren’t you at all curious to know how I tracked you down?”
Redlaw shrugged.
“It wasn’t hard,” Khalid said. “Interrogate enough ’Lesses, you soon get the answers you’re looking for. Truth is, they can’t stop going on about you. They hear your name and it’s hard to shut them up. The ones you’ve saved from Stokers sing the praises of the mighty John Redlaw, and the rest just love the idea of this ex-shady becoming the vampires’ champion. How come you’ve turned, Redlaw? Why are you their new hero?”
“You wouldn’t understand and I can’t be bothered to explain.”
“And did you know that vampire-on-human incidents have been on the up since you switched sides? Some of the figures put the increase as high as eighteen per cent, in just a few months.”
“That’s nothing to do with me. Blame the government. After the whole Solarville episode, the Sunless don’t trust anyone any more, least of all SHADE, and they certainly don’t want to have anything to do with Residential Areas if they can avoid it. Once bitten, et cetera.”
“Well, anyway,” said Khalid. “Thanks to your newfound pals showing you so much love, all we then had to do was collate the data, triangulate, and reconnoitre. I had an entire unit dedicated to just one goal: locating the murderer of Giles Slocock, MP, Nathaniel Lambourne, businessman, and Gail Macarthur, SHADE commodore. They worked round the clock for me, with the full cooperation of the Met, and they’d be in this room with me right now, only...”