The Brothers Cabal (28 page)

Above, the strange cloud rolled and shuddered as it dispatched more unearthly monstrosities to destroy the town and, incidentally, those it had been sent to kill. To his eye, it seemed to Horst that the cloud was no longer as large or as dense as it had been previously. He remembered how the much-smaller cloud they had first encountered had vanished altogether after disgorging six monsters; perhaps the same was happening here but with a proportionately greater number. At some point the cloud would be too thin to exert its curious ability to shield him from the usual effects of daytime and light upon him, which is to say, coma and combustion. Not that he'd be alive (in the vampiric sense) long enough to experience that. The great louse loomed, and Horst braced himself for the lightning-fast strike that would take him.

And it came. Not, however, from the louse. Unseen and unsuspected, the giant woodlouse had been stalked by the prowling sculpture. Now, in a flail of great rounded shapes with aesthetically placed holes here and there, it pounced upon its prey. The great louse went down in a jumble of art and arthropod.

Horst crawled from the fight, trying to find his way back to the edge of the field. Somewhere off to the other side of him there was an odd sound like a very large pair of scissors closing. Seconds later half a zombie—bisected from crotch to crown—landed in a wet wave in front of him in much the same way a slice of bacon might be laid in the pan. It seemed to Horst that whatever the Lord of Powers had summoned were many and varied, and poorly briefed as to what they were supposed to be attacking. If any further proof were needed, another zombie walked by Horst a few seconds later, head down and furious of expression, death failing to mediate its displeasure at being covered in a pulsating slime, transparent and animate, that was visibly dissolving the flesh of the walking corpse.

Horst dragged himself through the field, the sound of argumentative monsters filling the air as the attack on the town devolved rapidly into a free-for-all among the summoned and the raised. Staying low actually seemed to be the wisest thing to do, as well as the necessary thing to do thanks to his legs feeling like overcooked noodles. Thus, he crawled slowly and painfully through a battlefield of the dreadful, the fights between summoned, and the attacks of the summoned upon the zombies. For the zombies never seemed to retaliate, this being outside their orders. Instead they confined themselves to trying to struggle on despite eviscerations, amputations, and other nuisances. They did, however, look very cross by dead people standards while doing it, as if regarding the actions of their extra-dimensional tormentors as highly unprofessional.

In this, Horst had to concede that they might have had a point. Whatever control the summoned creatures were under seemed either loose, or perhaps their orders had been careless.

Abruptly the wheat thinned away and he was at the edge of the field. He had managed to navigate in the right direction—before him lay a country lane, the town off to his left, and dead ahead was the showground. Beyond it lay the train and sanctuary. Using the fence as a support, he pulled himself to his feet and awkwardly between the bars. Now all he had to do was travel a quarter of a mile across open country with legs that weren't as reliable as he was used to.

Then he saw the steam and smoke rising from the locomotive start to puff rhythmically and he knew it was moving. His unrequited need for blood was dimming his sight, his senses dulling as they starved, but even through the growing attenuation of his hearing, he could hear the
chuff
of the engine as it headed for the main line.

Despairing, he took a step and immediately fell. He tried to shout, but his voice was nothing but a croaking gasp in his throat. Behind him, he could hear things—what things they were he had no idea—moving closer. He started to crawl, but knew he couldn't outrun a hogtied terrapin in his current state. He was abandoned, he was helpless, and he was doomed.

An Interlude

It should be pointed out that Horst's recollection of events necessarily skipped over some facts that he did not know or was unaware of—as mentioned at the beginning of this narrative—but also things that he decided not to mention both for reasons of brevity, or because he simply did not wish to talk about them. Into this latter category fell the inner conflict he had felt with his inhuman side. Johannes Cabal, however, was very at home to his own inhuman side; indeed, he was less welcoming to his human side. This gave him a certain understanding of the sensibilities of the unconventionally moralled, and he had scented his brother's evasions throughout the telling.

‘Tell me, Horst,' he said with studied nonchalance, ‘how is the vampire business going for you these days?'

Horst was uncharacteristically dumbstruck. Eventually he managed, ‘By which you mean…?'

‘By which I mean that vampires, even those that were good men or women in their previous existences, are not pleasant company. There is a corruption of the spirit there, at least in the vast majority of cases. Have you felt within yourself any hints of such?'

Horst said nothing, but simply seemed uncomfortable and avoided eye contact.

‘Oh, for heaven's sake,' said Cabal, ‘we're talking about vampirism, not genital warts. I shall assume that you have been experiencing a desire to treat humanity as low and expendable.'

Horst swallowed. ‘Yes,' he said in a shamed whisper. ‘It's horrible.'

‘Is it?' Cabal was honestly surprised. ‘I was about to say I sympathise entirely. That has long been my relationship with my fellow humans. I can see it would be an unpleasant experience to you, though. There is, however, a simple enough solution, although one that requires mental effort and discipline on your part.' He indicated his eyes with a gesture of his index and middle fingers. ‘Look at me.'

Horst did so, somewhat suspiciously. ‘You're not going to try to hypnotise me, are you?'

‘That's rather more your forte than mine,' said Cabal a little pointedly, as Horst realised that his mild manipulations of his brother's memories during the early stages of his convalescence had not gone as unnoticed as Horst had hoped. ‘No, I simply want your full attention. Do I have it? Yes? Good. Then mark what I say and see in my face that there is no dissimulation or pettifogging.

‘Horst, you are a good man. You have always been so, and your soul is an untrammelled thing indeed.'

Horst winced and interrupted. ‘Ah. Well. Maybe not. There was that business with a lacrosse team…'

Now it was Cabal's turn to wince. ‘Did anyone suffer?'

‘Oh, no. Nothing like that.'

‘Was everyone happy?'

‘I flatter myself a little to think, yes. Everyone was very nice afterwards, anyway.'

‘Then shut up. In a world as grimy and sin-ridden as ours, you're a paragon precisely because your intentions are always good.'

‘Johannes, I killed a man.'

‘Pffft.' Cabal expressed his opinion of that crime with pursed lips and sharp exhalation. ‘A man who had just killed once before your very eyes and was about to murder at least three more unless you intervened. I mean, Horst … a
werebadger
.' He said it with leaden disdain. ‘That was a mercy killing. You are a good man. I've seen evil. By many metrics, I
am
evil. I know what it looks like. You are not even similar. Remember that, brother. Let that be your bulwark against the impulses your condition imposes upon you.'

Horst sat, absorbing whatever wisdom he could draw from the words, or at least, most of the words. ‘Bulwark?' he asked.

‘Bulwark. Do you know what that is?'

‘I can look it up later. But thanks. Thank you, Johannes.'

Johannes Cabal fluttered his hand, reinforcing the humanity of a vampire being child's play, apparently. ‘Now, kindly continue. You were just in a circumstance by which your doom was assured.'

‘It was pretty desperate,' said Horst, slightly miffed at his brother's lack of concern.

‘But here you are, telling me the tale. Really, Horst, you undermine all the tension of the narrative by being the storyteller. I
know
you survive.'

‘I can't help that,' said Horst, and continued.

 

Chapter 12

IN WHICH SACRIFICES ARE MADE

Horst imagined himself as a stilt walker, striding along on lengths of insensate wood, except in his case they were lengths of insensate flesh and blood that in happier times he would refer to as his legs. These were not happy times, however, and his legs—in addition to insensate—were not rigid. His first attempt to stilt walk upon his own legs ended in failure, as did the second and third. He only kept doing it because it was no slower than crawling and also because it raised him high so that perhaps Becky on the footplate might see him and stop the train.

And then the train
did
stop reversing out of the spur, but only for a moment while the gears were thrown into forward drive, and the train moved ponderously away from him. Behind, he could hear thuds, highly pitched screams emitted by no creatures that had ever walked the Earth before, and other noises that defied description exactly because their like had never been heard on Earth before. Also, they seemed to be growing closer.

Horst was forced to the conclusion that the jig was very likely up with him. Besides, even if the creatures didn't finish him, the cloud was still steadily thinning. He had only vague memories of how the sun had felt last time it sent him to leaves and ashes, but those memories were not joyful. He hated to die again, with things unfinished like this.

Beneath him, the ground purred with impacts and he rolled onto his back to see what was coming. His old friend, the giant carnivorous woodlouse or another very like it, was heading directly for him. He doubted he could depend on the statue creature intervening again, so resorted to feebly waving his hands at it and saying ‘Shoo' in a aged whisper.

This only seemed to incense the creature. It reared high, spreading the edges of the ridges behind its head in the way a hooded cobra might, if it had lots of legs and was very ugly indeed. Horst wished he had a spear, or a sword, or a pointed stick, anything that might upset it as it stood before him, convinced of its victory and with its underbelly exposed. Admittedly, he wouldn't go so far as to call it a
soft
underbelly, coated as it was with chitinous plating. It was still an underbelly, however, and he wished he had something with which to aggressively poke it there. Even if he couldn't kill it, he could perhaps bruise it a little, causing it some discomfort later. He appreciated that his situation was so hopeless that causing the thing that killed him mild discomfort sometime after it had eaten him would be the closest thing to a Pyrrhic victory he could arrange. This was the limit of his dismay beyond the wish he could have seen things through and perhaps died a little less pathetically. He could barely think anymore. He stopped waving his hands at the monster and just wafted one dismissively at it as he lapsed back.

He stared up at the arcane cloud that had brought his doom and all its little pal dooms. ‘Ah. Whatever,' he said, fully knowledgeable that they were poor last words. Last words weren't on his short list of final regrets, however, so he let them slide.

The woodlouse thing seemed upset by such inattention, however, and made a dreadful noise. It was a complicatedly dreadful noise, and Horst was unable to make out the nuances due to the mechanical chattering coming from the other direction. The chattering seemed vaguely familiar and probably something to do with the stream of bullets creasing the air above him. Ah, yes. Thompson sub-machine gun, .45 ACP. Now he remembered.

The creature was making so much fuss because, it transpired, its underbelly actually
was
quite soft when gunfire was hosed across it. It crashed back down to bring its heavier outer armour into play and then, either from surprise or prudence, rolled up once more into its great tyre-like form.

‘On your feet, Cabal!' he heard somebody … Major Haskins, yes … shouting.

‘I can't manage that,' he replied, slightly peevishly as if he'd been asked to do handsprings. ‘I'm weak. Run out of … oomph.' This latter thing he said, because his sense of propriety cavilled at talking about blood in polite company.

‘Oomph?' The major was closer now. ‘Take the gun, take the gun!' he said to somebody else. Then Horst felt his collar gripped and he was suddenly being dragged up the small slope to the edge of the showground.

‘This is very kind of you,' said Horst as he was unceremoniously rolled under the fence before being dragged again.

‘Never leave a man behind,' said the major. ‘Not if you can help it.'

‘How does this thing work?' That was Professor Stone.

‘It doesn't,' managed the major between heavy breaths. Horst
sans
oomph was turning out to be an awkward load. ‘Out of ammo. Damn it, help me, man!'