"Easily. We are not far."
"Good." He turned to the sledge, ignoring the movement and barking of the dogs; they had not been much trouble when there had been work to do, but now, stopped, they appeared restless, even nervous. De Vere rustled around among the items stowed on the sledge, and pulled out the bag he had given me. He hesitated for a moment; then he walked to where I stood waiting and pa.s.sed it to me.
"I would like you to open that," he said, and when I did so I found a small, ornate box made of mahogany, secured with a stout bra.s.s hasp. "Open the box, and remove what is inside."
I had no idea what to expect; but any words I might have said failed me when I undid the hasp, opened the lid, and found inside the box a revolver. I looked up at De Vere, who wore a mirthless smile.
"It belonged to a man who thought to use it on me, some years ago," he said simply. "That man died. I think you will find, if you look, that it is loaded."
I opened the chamber, and saw that it was so. I am by no means an expert with firearms, but the bullets seemed to be almost tarnished, as with great age. I closed the chamber, and glanced at De Vere.
"Now we are going to go over to the edge of the creva.s.se, and you are going to shoot me." The words were said matter-of-factly, and what followed was in the same dispa.s.sionate tone, as if he were speaking of the weather, or what he planned to serve for dinner that evening. "Stand close, so as not to miss. When you return to camp you will tell them that we came too near to the edge of the creva.s.se, that a ma.s.s of snow collapsed under me, and that there was nothing you could do. I doubt that any blame or stigma will attach to you-not with your reputation-and while it may be difficult for you for a time, you will perhaps take solace in the fact that you will not see Walker again, and that Castleton"s health will soon improve." He paused. "I am sorry about them both; more than I can say." Then he added some words in an undertone, which I did not quite catch; one word sounded like "hungry," and another like "tired," but in truth I was so overwhelmed that I was barely in a position to make sense of anything. One monstrous fact alone stood out hard and clear, and I struggled to accept it.
"Are you... are you ill, then?" I asked at last, trying to find some explanation at which my mind did not rebel. "Some disease that will claim you?"
"If you want to put it that way, yes; a disease. If that makes it easier for you." He reached out and put a hand on my arm. "You have been friendly, and I have not had many that I could call a friend. I thank you, and ask you to do this one thing for me; and, in the end, for all of you."
I looked into his eyes, dark as thunderclouds, and recalled our conversation on board the ship following Walker "s death, and for a moment had a vision of something dark and terrible. I thought of the look on Walker "s face-or the thing that I had thought was Walker -when I had seen it the night before. "Will you end up like him?" I asked suddenly, and De Vere seemed to know to what I referred, for he shook his head.
"No, but if you do not do this then others will," he said simply. I knew then how I must act. He obviously saw the look of resolution in my face, for he said again, quietly, "Thank you," then turned and began walking towards the creva.s.se in the ice.
I cannot write in detail of what followed in the next few minutes. I remained beside the creva.s.se, staring blankly down into the depths which now held him, and it was only with considerable effort that I finally roused myself enough to stumble back to the dogs, which had at last quietened. The trip back to camp was a blur of white, and I have no doubt that, when I stumbled down the final stretch of the path, I appeared sufficiently wild-eyed and distraught that my story was accepted without question.
The Guvnor had a long talk with me this morning when I woke, unrefreshed, from a troubled sleep. He appears satisfied with my answers, and while he did upbraid me slightly for failing to take a third person with us-as that might have helped avert the tragedy-he agreed that the presence of another would probably have done nothing to help save De Vere.
Pray G.o.d he never finds out the truth.
15 February: More than a week since De Vere"s death, and I have not seen Walker in that time. Castleton, too, is much improved, and appears well on the way to regaining his full health.
Subsequent sledge parties have inspected the creva.s.se, and agree that it was a terrible accident, but one that could not have been avoided. I have not been up on the plateau since my trip with De Vere. My thoughts continually turn to the man whom I left there, and I recall what Cook wrote more than one hundred years ago. He was speaking of this place; but the words could, I think, equally be applied to De Vere: "Doomed by nature never once to feel the warmth of the sun"s rays, but to be buried in everlasting snow and ice."
A soft flutter of leaves whispered like a sigh as Emily finished reading. The last traces of day had vanished, leaving behind shadows which pooled at the corners of the room. She sat in silence for some time, her eyes far away; then she closed the journal gently, almost with reverence, and placed it on the table beside her. The writer"s card stared up at her, and she considered it.
"He would not understand," she said at last. "And they are all dead; they can neither explain nor defend themselves or their actions." She looked at her father"s photograph, now blurred in the gathering darkness. "Yet you did not destroy this." She touched the journal with fingers delicate as a snowflake. "You left it for me to decide, keeping this a secret even from my mother. You must have thought that I would know what to do."
Pray G.o.d he never finds out the truth.
She remained in her chair for some moments longer. Then, with some effort, Emily rose from her chair and, picking up the journal, crossed once more to the rosewood desk and its shadows. She placed the journal in its drawer, where it rested beside a pipe which had lain unsmoked for decades. The ceramic cat watched with blank eyes as she turned out the light. In so doing she knocked the card to the floor, where it lay undisturbed.
Infestation.
by Garth Nix.
Garth Nix is the bestselling author of the Old Kingdom series, The Seventh Tower series, and The Keys to the Kingdom series. He is the winner of nine Aurealis Awards, given to best works of SF/fantasy by Australian writers. His short fiction has appeared in such venues as Eidolon, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Jim Baen"s Universe, and in the anthology Fast Ships, Black Sails. Before becoming a full-time writer, he worked in a variety of careers in publishing, including publicist, editor, and literary agent.
Most authors imagine vampires skulking in the shadows, their existence suspected but never confirmed by the outside world. But there are notable exceptions. In Richard Matheson"s cla.s.sic I Am Legend, vampires have completely taken over the world, and a lone survivor uses science to try to puzzle out their nature. In Laurell K. Hamilton"s Anita Blake series, various bureaucracies have grown up to deal with vampires, who live openly. This story is another in that mode. Here, vampires, law, and technology all intersect-in more ways than you might expect. You"ve probably never read a vampire story quite like this one.
They were the usual motley collection of freelance vampire hunters. Two men, wearing combinations of jungle camouflage and leather. Two women, one almost indistinguishable from the men though with a little more style in her leather armour accessories, and the other looking like she was about to a.s.sault the south face of a serious mountain. Only her mouth was visible, a small oval of flesh not covered by balaclava, mirror shades, climbing helmet and hood.
They had the usual weapons: four or five short wooden stakes in belt loops; snap-holstered handguns of various calibers, all doubtless chambered with Wood-N-Death low-velocity timber-tipped rounds; big silver-edged bowie or other hunting knife, worn on the hip or strapped to a boot; and crystal vials of holy water hung like small grenades on pocket loops.
Protection, likewise, tick the usual boxes. Leather neck and wrist guards; leather and woven-wire reinforced chaps and shoulder pauldrons over the camo; leather gloves with metal knuckle plates; Army or climbing helmets.
And lots of crosses, oh yeah, particularly on the two men. Big silver crosses, little wooden crosses, medium-sized turned ivory crosses, hanging off of everything they could hang off.
In other words, all four of them were lumbering, b.u.mbling mountains of stuff that meant that they would be easy meat for all but the newest and dumbest vampires.
They all looked at me as I walked up. I guess their first thought was to wonder what the h.e.l.l I was doing there, in the advertised meeting place, outside a church at 4:30 pm on a winter"s day while the last rays of the sun were supposedly making this consecrated ground a double no-go zone for vampires.
"You"re in the wrong place, surfer boy," growled one of the men.
I was used to this reaction. I guess I don"t look like a vampire hunter much anyway, and I particularly didn"t look like one that afternoon. I"d been on the beach that morning, not knowing where I might head to later, so I was still wearing a yellow Quiksilver T-shirt and what might be loosely described as old and faded blue board shorts, but "ragged" might be more accurate. I hadn"t had shoes on, but I"d picked up a pair of sandals on the way. Tan Birkenstocks, very comfortable. I always prefer sandals to shoes. Old habits, I guess.
I don"t look my age, either. I always looked young, and nothing"s changed, though "boy" was a bit rough coming from anyone under forty-five, and the guy who"d spoken was probably closer to thirty. People older than that usually leave the vampire hunting to the government, or paid professionals.
"I"m in the right place," I said, matter-of-fact, not getting into any aggression or anything. I lifted my 1968-vintage vinyl Pan-Am airline bag. "Got my stuff here. This is the meeting place for the vampire hunt?"
"Yes," said the mountain-climbing woman.
"Are you crazy?" asked the man who"d spoken to me first. "This isn"t some kind of doper excursion. We"re going up against a nest of vampires!"
I nodded and gave him a kind smile.
"I know. At least ten of them, I would say. I swung past and had a look around on the way here. At least, I did if you"re talking about that condemned factory up on the river heights."
"What! But it"s cordoned off-and the vamps"ll be dug in till nightfall."
"I counted the patches of disturbed earth," I explained. "The cordon was off. I guess they don"t bring it up to full power till the sun goes down. So, who are you guys?"
"Ten!" exclaimed the second man, not answering my question. "You"re sure?"
"At least ten," I replied. "But only one Ancient. The others are all pretty new, judging from the spoil."
"You"re making this up," said the first man. "There"s maybe five, tops. They were seen together and tracked back. That"s when the cordon was established this morning."
I shrugged and half-unzipped my bag.
"I"m Jenny," said the mountain-climber, belatedly answering my question. "The... the vampires got my sister, three years ago. When I heard about this infestation I claimed the Relative"s Right."
"I"ve got a twelve-month permit," said the second man. "Plan to turn professional. Oh yeah, my name"s Karl."
"I"m Susan," said the second woman. "This is our third vampire hunt. Mike"s and mine, I mean."
"She"s my wife," said the belligerent Mike. "We"ve both got twelve-month permits. You"d better be legal too, if you want to join us."
"I have a special licence," I replied. The sun had disappeared behind the church tower, and the street lights were flicking on. With the bag unzipped, I was ready for a surprise. Not that I thought one was about to happen. At least, not immediately. Unless I chose to spring one.
"You can call me J."
"Jay?" asked Susan.
"Close enough," I replied. "Does someone have a plan?"
"Yeah," said Mike. "We stick together. No hot-d.o.g.g.i.ng off, or chasing down wounded vamps or anything like that. We go in as a team, and we come out as a team."
"Interesting," I said. "Is there... more to it?"
Mike paused to fix me with what he obviously thought was his steely gaze. I met it and after a few seconds he looked away. Maybe it"s the combination of very pale blue eyes and dark skin, but not many people look at me directly for too long. It might just be the eyes. There"ve been quite a few cultures who think of very light blue eyes as the colour of death. Perhaps that lingers, resonating in the subconscious even of modern folk.
"We go through the front door," he said. "We throw flares ahead of us. The vamps should all be digging out on the old factory floor, it"s the only place where the earth is accessible. So we go down the fire stairs, throw a few more flares out the door then go through and back up against the wall. We"ll have a clear field of fire to take them down. They"ll be groggy for a couple of hours yet, slow to move. But if one or two manage to close, we stake them."
"The young ones will be slow and dazed," I said. "But the Ancient will be active soon after sundown, even if it stays where it is-and it"s not dug in on the factory floor. It"s in a humungous clay pot outside an office on the fourth floor."
"We take it first, then," said Mike. "Not that I"m sure I believe you."
"It"s up to you," I said. I had my own ideas about dealing with the Ancient, but they would wait. No point upsetting Mike too early. "There"s one more thing."
"What?" asked Karl.
"There"s a fresh-made vampire around, from last night. It will still be able to pa.s.s as human for a few more days. It won"t be dug-in, and it may not even know it"s infected."
"So?" asked Mike. "We kill everything in the infested area. That"s all legal."
"How do you know this stuff?" asked Jenny.
"You"re a professional, aren"t you," said Karl. "How long you been pro?"
"I"m not exactly a professional," I said. "But I"ve been hunting vampires for quite a while."
"Can"t have been that long," said Mike. "Or you"d know better than to go after them in just a T-shirt. What"ve you got in that bag? Sawn-off shotgun?"
"Just a stake and a knife," I replied. "I"m a traditionalist. Shouldn"t we be going?"
The sun was fully down, and I knew the Ancient, at least, would already be reaching up through the soil, its mildewed, mottled hands gripping the rim of the earthenware pot that had once held a palm or something equally impressive outside the factory manager"s office.
"Truck"s over there," said Mike, pointing to a flashy new silver pick-up. "You can ride in the back, surfer boy."
"Fresh air"s a wonderful thing."
As it turned out, Karl and Jenny wanted to sit in the back too. I sat on a tool box that still had shrink-wrap around it, Jenny sat on a spare tire and Karl stood looking over the cab, scanning the road, as if a vampire might suddenly jump out when we were stopped at the lights.
"Do you want a cross?" Jenny asked me after we"d gone a mile or so in silence. Unlike Mike and Karl she wasn"t festooned with them, but she had a couple around her neck. She started to take a small wooden one off, lifting it by the chain.
I shook my head, and raised my T-shirt up under my arms, to show the scars. Jenny recoiled in horror and gasped, and Karl looked around, hand going for his.41 Glock. I couldn"t tell whether that was jumpiness or good training. He didn"t draw and shoot, which I guess meant good training.
I let the T-shirt fall, but it was up long enough for both of them to see the hackwork tracery of scars that made up a kind of "T" shape on my chest and stomach. But it wasn"t a "T". It was a Tau Cross, one of the oldest Christian symbols and still the one that vampires feared the most, though none but the most ancient knew why they fled from it.
"Is that... a cross?" asked Karl.
I nodded.
"That"s so hardcore," said Karl. "Why didn"t you just have it tattooed?"
"It probably wouldn"t work so well," I said. "And I didn"t have it done. It was done to me."
I didn"t mention that there was an equivalent tracery of scars on my back as well. These two Tau Crosses, front and back, never faded, though my other scars always disappeared only a few days after they healed.
"Who would-" Jenny started to ask, but she was interrupted by Mike banging on the rear window of the cab-with the b.u.t.t of his pistol, reconfirming my original a.s.sessment that he was the biggest danger to all of us. Except for the Ancient Vampire. I wasn"t worried about the young ones. But I didn"t know which Ancient it was, and that was cause for concern. If it had been encysted since the drop it would be in the first flush of its full strength. I hoped it had been around for a long time, lying low and steadily degrading, only recently resuming its mission against humanity.
"We"re there," said Karl, unnecessarily.
The cordon fence was fully established now. Sixteen feet high and lethally electrified, with old-fashioned limelights burning every ten feet along the fence, the sound of the hissing oxygen and hydrogen jets music to my ears. Vampires loathe limelight. Gaslight has a lesser effect, and electric light hardly bothers them at all. It"s the intensity of the naked flame they fear.
The fire brigade was standing by because of the limelights, which though modernized were still occasionally p.r.o.ne to ma.s.sive accidental combustion; and the local police department was there en ma.s.se to enforce the cordon. I saw the bright white bulk of the state Vampire Eradication Team"s semi-trailer parked off to one side. If we volunteers failed, they would go in, though given the derelict state of the building and the reasonable s.p.a.ce between it and the nearest residential area it was more likely they"d just get the Air Force to do a fuel-air explosion dump.
The VET personnel would be out and about already, making sure no vampires managed to get past the cordon. There would be crossbow snipers on the upper floors of the surrounding buildings, ready to shoot fire-hardened oak quarrels into vampire heads. It wasn"t advertised by the ammo manufacturers, but a big old vampire could take forty or fifty Wood-N-Death or equivalent rounds to the head and chest before going down. A good inch-diameter yard-long quarrel or stake worked so much better.
There would be a VET quick response team somewhere close as well, outfitted in the latest metal-mesh armour, carrying the automatic weapons the volunteers were not allowed to use-with good reason, given the frequency with which volunteer vampire hunters killed each other even when only armed with handguns, stakes and knives.
I waved at the window of the three-storey warehouse where I"d caught a glimpse of a crossbow sniper, earning a puzzled glance from Karl and Jenny, then jumped down. A police sergeant was already walking over to us, his long, harsh limelit shadow preceding him. Naturally, Mike intercepted him before he could choose who he wanted to talk to.
"We"re the volunteer team."
"I can see that," said the sergeant. "Who"s the kid?"
He pointed at me. I frowned. The kid stuff was getting monotonous. I don"t look that young. Twenty at least, I would have thought.
"He says his name"s Jay. He"s got a "special licence." That"s what he says."
"Let"s see it then," said the sergeant, with a smile that suggested he was looking forward to arresting me and delivering a three-hour lecture. Or perhaps a beating with a piece of rubber pipe. It isn"t always easy to decipher smiles.
"I"ll take it from here, Sergeant," said an officer who came up from behind me, fast and smooth. He was in the new metal-mesh armour, like a wetsuit, with webbing belt and harness over it, to hold stakes, knife, WP grenades (which actually were effective against the vamps, unlike the holy water ones) and handgun. He had an H &K MP5-PDW slung over his shoulder. "You go and check the cordon."
"But Lieutenant, don"t you want me to take-"
"I said check the cordon."
The sergeant retreated, smile replaced by a scowl of frustration. The VET lieutenant ignored him.
"Licences, please," he said. He didn"t look at me, and unlike the others I didn"t reach for the plasticated, hologrammed, data-chipped card that was the latest version of the volunteer vampire hunter licence.