"G.o.dd.a.m.nit!"
He went on, deeper still, closer to the murmuring, to the whispering movement.
Then he heard a totally unexpected sound. A voice. A child"s voice."Sir?" His heart started hammering - not only because the voice was there, but because it was behind him.
Dare he turn? Dare he?
"Sir?"
Boy or girl, he could not tell. It sounded about ten, perhaps a little older. His finger slipped around the trigger. He felt sick, he did not think he could do this. But he whirled round, dropping to the floor as he did, firing.
There was n.o.body.
They were tricking him. The rat had also been a trick, he realized. No rat would cast such a big shadow. Somehow, they"d done it. They were tricking him, in order to get him to use up his bullets. They were probably counting his shots.
He looked out into the darkness, could see nothing. He listened, could hear nothing. Only his own breathing disturbed the silence. He was a strong man; he had learned that over the years of his life. But he had also learned that all strength has its limits. He had seen the Khmer Rouge bury a man alive, and listened to that man go mad in his hole. Paul himself had wept with fear, thinking he would be next.
The vampires knew the human mind. They knew his mind. They knew his limits. And that was why, when he heard the creaking, coming slowly closer, it was so very hard not to use his light or fire his gun. It was so hard. But he could not, because he knew that no matter how sure he was, this, also, would be a wasted shot.
As quietly as was possible for a large man, he moved so that his back was pressed against the wall. To give his ears whatever tiny extra edge that might be gained, he closed his eyes. Even though there was no light, doing this would direct his brain a little more toward hearing than sight.
He stuffed the book into his pants and cupped his free hand behind his ear. He listened in one direction. There was the creaking, just over there. But it was not a living sound, and no closer. In the other direction, though, there was another sound, more complex, far harder to hear.
It was, he thought, a living sound. It was the sound of breath being drawn, in his opinion. He would have to lower his hand, grab his light and shine it, then instantly fire if something was there.
But what if it was that child? They had known that he would be unable to fire at a child. They had known that he would take the split of an instant to be certain. That would be their their time. time.
It was a duel, and they had rigged it for him to lose the instant he disclosed his position. The only way to win would be to fire into the dark and risk a child . . . theirs, but still a child.
The breathing was close now. He would have to act and instantly. He did not go for his light. Instead, he reached out. He caught a sleeve. It was yanked away but he was fast; he"d always been d.a.m.ned fast. He found himself grasping a large, powerful, cold hand. The fingers closed around his wrist, closed and began to tighten.
There came laughter, soft and entirely relaxed. Foolishly so, he thought. He fired into the sound. In the flash, he saw a male face, powerful, dark, with a long, sharp nose and deep gleaming eyes.
There was a cry, deep, abruptly cut off.
Then he was deaf, as you always were deaf after that blast. When he could hear again, there was a high noise, the most terrible of noises, shaking the walls, echoing as it pealed again and again through the limestone chambers, the screaming of a woman in molten agony.
Now he used his light. It appeared, a female vampire, with beaded hair and a long dress on, dark blue silk, white collar, and the mouth fully open, a broad O filled with teeth. They had awful mouths, filthy and stinking of the blood in their guts, mouths that were made for sucking. They looked okay - a little thin-lipped was all - until they opened those wet, stinking maws of theirs. If you kissed a vampire, he thought, it might suck your insides right out of you.
The agony of grief was great for them, greater even than for a human being, as he had seen in Asia. She came maddened by it, her arms straight out ahead of her, her fingers long, lethal claws. He knew that she wanted to tear him to pieces. He knew that she wanted to feel his gristle break.
He pulled the trigger. In the flash, he saw her dress billow as if lifted by a funhouse blast. Her face folded in on itself, and her cry joined the cry of the gun and was gone.
Her body hit the wall behind her with a slapping thud, and she slid down a slide of her own thick, black blood.
They lay side by side, and he was amazed at what he saw. The male wore slacks and a black sweater, and a leather jacket so supple that Paul hardly dared touch it. The female beside him was equally pa.s.sable.
These European vampires were not like the Asians, things that moved only in the shadows. These things could go anywhere they pleased, any time they pleased. But how modern were they? Was there anything to prevent them from getting on the phone, calling their friends in the States?
Of course there wasn"t. Paul had to admit to himself that he"d been lucky in Asia. But that level of surprise was over now. The only thing he had on his side was speed.
Every single creature in this hole had to be killed, and it had to be done right now, today. Otherwise, there were going to be phone calls, G.o.d knew, maybe even e-mails, to vampires in America, in Africa - wherever they were as modern and technologically capable as he had to a.s.sume these creatures were.
Either he and his cohorts cleared the place out immediately or they lost any and all chance of surprising others.
A long shape like a gigantic spider came striding toward him from along the corridor, its shadow briefly visible in his light. He turned it out.
He listened to the steps, one, two, coming up the tunnel. He could hear its breathing now, slow, almost soulful, like a man in love. Closer it came, until it seemed as if it were directly before him. But tunnels deceive, and he knew that there was more time yet to wait. It seemed to slide along, as if it wore silken shoes or moved like a snake.
He held his gun straight out. He waited.
The footsteps stopped. The breathing became soft and low. Where was it? He was uncertain.
He turned on the light, and there were eyes glaring at him from three inches away. The face was sallow, gray, not a face from the world of the sun. He fired into the dark crystal hate in those eyes. The body took the whole force of the bullets and went sailing backward fifty feet, bouncing against the walls as it broke up. A leg went tumbling on down the steep incline into the dark.
The head was not severed. The eyes revealed shock, not death. He had to fire again, and he hated it, to waste a shot, but then there would be nothing further to worry about from this vampire.
He aimed, squeezed the trigger, felt the familiar satisfaction that came when they blew apart.
He went on down the pa.s.sage. He was spattered with vampire blood, and he could smell its rankness. He could feel it in his shoes, slick between his toes. The blood could invade your body. If you had a cut, it could make you d.a.m.ned sick. He"d seen it, they all had - the fevers, the monstrous, weird hungers, the slow recovery.
As he went deeper, he felt his adult personality slipping into its own past. The love of wine, the love of music, the long days spent in elegant places - all that was going. There remained only a hurt, furious little boy looking for the killer of his father.
On he went, deeper into the secret heart of the ancient nest, deeper still. He was below the meeting hall now, down where no human being would or could ever go, down in narrow corridors painted with glyphs, walls and ceilings and floors forged by the perfect hand of the vampire.
This was the great secret of the world, that places like this existed hidden and embedded in the planet, where terrible minds had orchestrated with terrible cunning the b.l.o.o.d.y history of mankind.
He knew, suddenly, that he was in a larger s.p.a.ce. He knew, also, that there was a new smell here. When he turned on his light, and he would have to do that, he feared that he would find himself face to face with hundreds of them.
He put his thumb on the switch. He pressed.
At first, he did not understand what had appeared in the beam. The place was so large that his light faded before the room ended. There were long brown lines of round objects arrayed in two rows facing a narrow aisle, and it took him a long moment to understand that they were skulls tightly encased in their own skin. Some had hair, and it hung in tufts like something left on totems.
He thought that there might be a million skeletons here. No rat came for them, no maggot, for they were too dry even to attract vermin - only little running things, nameless beetles of some kind, that were slowly turning them to dust.
As he walked slowly along shining his light, he became aware that this place was easily half a mile long. Face after face stared out at him, each with its goggled eyesockets and bucked teeth. They were stacked twenty high.
Here was where lay the real real dead of Paris, the anonymous, the disappeared, the forgotten. Ironic that this other, more terrible ossuary would lie deep beneath the Denfert-Rochereau, almost as if its human builders had known by some kind of race memory, or the whispered intelligence of the dead, that somewhere beneath their feet, there lay an even greater grave. dead of Paris, the anonymous, the disappeared, the forgotten. Ironic that this other, more terrible ossuary would lie deep beneath the Denfert-Rochereau, almost as if its human builders had known by some kind of race memory, or the whispered intelligence of the dead, that somewhere beneath their feet, there lay an even greater grave.
How many of these people had left weeping lovers behind, people who never knew whether to mourn them for dying or despise them for running away?
Such an anger filled Paul now that he trod steadily, uncaring of his own life, forgetful even of the vital importance of the book he had with him, marching like a soldier bent only on victory, going step by step toward his next kill.
In all this time, there had not been one more turning, not one place to hide. So all the vampires in this place must be ahead of him.
He had two shots left in his clip. He pulled it out, reached back and dropped it into the rucksack, grabbing a fresh one and jamming it in. If it came down to it, he would use the two shots left in that clip to blast the d.a.m.n book to bits and then kill himself. He might not get it out of here, but they d.a.m.ned well wouldn"t get it back, either.
The idea of being sucked dry like these poor people made a taste rise in his throat so vile that he had to choke back his own vomit. He would never, ever die like that, with the lips of a vampire pressed against his neck.
He had to get out of here. The air was sickening. The place was claustrophobic. The bodies were twisted in a hundred postures of struggle and suffering, the faces still radiating horror, agony, and surprise.
Eventually, he saw a door ahead. He hurried to it, looked for a k.n.o.b. There was a silver ring. When he pulled it, the door slid smoothly back on perfect hinges.
There had never been any place like this in Asia. At least, they had never uncovered such a place. But they had been on a killing spree, hadn"t they, compared to the subtle, expert French? He was good at dealing death, not at the cat-and-mouse game that Bocage was playing with these very much more dangerous vampires of his.
His light played on the walls - and he saw a human face staring at him. He gasped, momentarily disoriented by the eyes that looked back at him ... from the incredibly distant past. No human being had ever before looked upon what this must be, a vividly lifelike portrait of a Neanderthal, appearing as if it had been painted yesterday.
The picture was painted on what looked like a slab of highly polished stone, maybe using some sort of wax process. But when he looked closer, he realized that this was not a painting at all but an incredibly fine mosaic. It was constructed of bits and slivers of stone so tiny that to his wondering fingers the surface appeared absolutely smooth.
What a very fine hand had made this, and so long, long ago. Beside it there was another mosaic, this one of something he thought must be some sort of genetic map - incredibly intricate, incredibly detailed.
Was he was looking at a Neanderthal with its genetic map beside it? If so, then what was this room? What had been done here? All around the walls were more such images, some of even more ancient creatures, in which the shadow of man was dominated by the staring savagery of the ape. If you looked from first to last, there was a logical succession from a small ape with frightened eyes all the way to modern people. There were at least fifty of the pictures. They went on until they ended with a woman so beautiful that she seemed to have been born of the angels.
This looked like some sort of record of the evolution of man . . . or our creation. Quite frankly, it looked like a record of creation, the way one form followed another in close succession, each with its genetic plan beside it. For years, humankind had been sifting the dirt of Africa and searching the caves of France for its past. But we had never been able to find ourselves, had we? Never quite.
He went to the last figure. Even her green eyes were rendered to the tiniest nuance. Her face was so alive that she might as well have talked to him. She was a girl, maybe twenty, with dusty blond hair and an expression on her face of a sort of delight . . . as if she were beholding everything new. Maybe, he thought, he should call her Eve.
The vampires must be very much older than he had imagined. If this place was what it looked like, then they were also very much more important to us. In which case, we had not evolved through the accidents and ideas of G.o.d, but rather had been maneuvered out of the apes by another and terrible hand.
He was not a man who often felt like crying. He"d done a lifetime"s worth of crying when he"d lost his dad. But tears came now, rolling down his hard, silent face.
Why had they done it? Why not leave us as we must have been - helpless, two-legged cattle? One day, the secrets of the vampires would all be known. Only then, he suspected, would mankind truly come to understand itself.
He had the chilling thought that maybe they were our creators. He"d known that they lived a long time, but this was totally unexpected.
He went on, deeper into this cave of secrets. Now the chambers he found were rough, and here also the hidden past disclosed a story. This was human work, full of gouge marks. In some incredibly distant time, human beings had dug to this very room, to the center of the secret. Had they died here, in some forgotten effort to throw off our slavery?
There were no records of other vampire hunters in history. He and his team had read volumes of old histories, attempting to see if organizations like the Knights Templar or the Egyptian priesthoods might have known something. But they didn"t.
He moved through the rubble of the human tunnel - and, very suddenly, he found a lot of vampires. They were moving quickly, just disappearing around a corner ahead of him when he saw them.
They were running. He"d never seen that before. But there were a lot of things about the Paris vampires that were new to him. He sped up, jumped into the corridor they had gone down and fired. He ran, fired again, waited. Scuffling ahead. He fired. Sounds - gabbling, gasping noises. And then a vampire loomed out of the dust. Its chest was open like a cabinet. It came for him, but buckled, its lips working, its mouth sucking air. Another was behind it, and another. He fired. He fired again.
There was one bullet in the clip. He had to reload. He backed up - and tripped, falling onto the one he had just killed. He fell hard, and heard the clips clatter off behind him. As he was scrambling up, a hand grabbed his flashlight . . . and crushed it. The dying vampire"s last act had left him completely helpless.
He scrambled to his feet, then kicked into the dark, kicked at the softness of the creature"s wrecked body. He heard hissing and bubbling. The d.a.m.n thing wasn"t dead, despite its wounds. He backed away, lest it regain its strength and attack him. Then he squatted, sweeping the floor for his lost clips, finding nothing. And then he heard before him: "Come here, child."
Was there another of their kids here? He backed up again, trying to get a wall behind him, to gain some kind of defensive advantage.
"Your end has come, child."
He would have turned his last bullet on himself, but that would leave the book. He"d have to destroy it and just suffer the d.a.m.n sucking death he loathed.
The one that had spoken was coming closer; he could hear it. Should he shoot it? Was it the monster, the queen? Was this her lair? No, he thought not. That voice had been low and musical, but male, very definitely.
He"d lost his gamble, then. He held the book before him and pressed the barrel of the gun up against it.
But before he could shoot, light burst out around him. He saw a crowd of vampires, all watching him with their grave, strangely empty eyes. He saw them in jeans, in tattered clothes from olden times, in dresses and the shorts of tourists. Their faces, though, were filled with hate, and they were not human faces. Down here, they didn"t need to bother with makeup and disguise. All the lips were narrow; all the eyes were deep; all the expressions were the same: calm, intractable hate.
Becky was suddenly beside him, her gun flaring. He fired, too, his last bullet.
As he reached around for another clip, a flaming pain shot through his left side. The arm that held the book went limp, and the book thudded to the floor. He saw why - the handle of a knife was protruding from his shoulder.
From the crowd of vampires there came shots. These had some guns - another surprise for Paul. He heard a grunt behind him, saw Des Roches crumple. He and Bocage had come up behind Becky.
The guns fired again, from both sides. Becky moved to protect him with her own body. "Fall back," she snapped as she shot again and again.
Then there was silence. She said, in a quavering, incredibly tender voice, "You"re hurt."
That was a lover"s tone, and it touched his heart unexpectedly deeply. "I"ll be okay."
Her finger quivered along the protruding handle of the knife. "Oh, Paul, oh, G.o.d." She kissed his cheek, and his heart seemed to turn over within him. Thrumming through his pain, he felt a kind of contentment. He could see her rich eyes in the dark, full of tender concern. And he had to admit, it felt d.a.m.n, d.a.m.n good.
The beam of Bocage"s flashlight played across the room. In the smoke and the haze of blood, there were easily a dozen dead or damaged vampires, all heaped against the far wall. "It"s good," Bocage muttered. Then he went down to his man. Des Roches was pale, his face frozen. He was in agony and trying hard to suppress it. Paul was in exactly the same situation.
The question wasn"t whether they could go out and regroup, then do what needed to be done, which was to get back down here to spray these creatures with acid. The question was whether anybody was going to live long enough to get out in the first place.
"Bocage, are we all hurt?"
He shrugged. "I"ll live." His right leg was sheeted with blood.
"Becky?"
"I"m good."
"We must get out," Bocage said. "Des Roches is going into shock."
Becky was playing her light across the broken ma.s.s of vampires. "Eight," she said. "That"s a total of seventeen in this action."
"We killed a conclave," Paul said. "Half of Europe, maybe."
"The Germans are doing the same in Berlin," Bocage said.
"The Germans! Why don"t we Americans get told anything any-more?" Paul asked.
"You have Echelon," Bocage replied. "It"s supposed to put the rest of us in a fishbowl."
"Apparently it doesn"t."
Bocage smiled a careful smile. "No, it doesn"t."
Paul was beginning to feel the shuddering cold that came with shock. He took deep breaths, trying to stave it off.
Becky went over to the vampires. "Bocage," she said, "we need to blow their heads off. In case we can"t come back and sterilize."
They rounded up his lost clips, and Bocage and Becky went among them, blasting first one and then the next. Paul wondered what it would be like with a woman who could do that.
The knife was beginning to hurt a great deal. A wound that penetrated a bone into its marrow, which this one certainly did, was exceptionally painful. On his side he had the fact that he was an exceptionally fast healer. But that came later. Now, there was only the pain and danger of the wound.