Undead in the Eternal City: 1918 Read online

He growled, a low sound that rose in the back of his throat, and Ana turned to look at him.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  Valeri didn’t answer; he merely nodded in the direction of Via Rasella, where a number of dark shapes were entering the narrow alleyway. A shaft of watery light shone down from an open window on the second floor of the building that made up the right-hand wall of the alley, and when the approaching figures passed through it, he felt a grin break out across his face.

  Walking towards them were five British Army soldiers.

  Their green uniforms were dark in the half-light of the alleyway, their faces pale from the perpetual darkness of the trenches. They wore expressions of concern on their faces; the nearest, a slight, middle-aged man wearing thin spectacles, had already seen the woman pressed against the wall, and was staring at Valeri and his wife with disgust on his face.

  Ana laughed, a high-pitched sound of pure malice. Valeri smiled at her, maintaining his grip on the woman’s mouth, then turned to face the approaching soldiers. He flexed the muscle at the back of his throat, felt his fangs slide down from his gums, felt his eyes flood their terrible, glowing red, opened his mouth and snarled at the intruders. Under normal circumstances, this was enough to send even the bravest man fleeing into the night, but not on this occasion; Valeri noticed that there was no surprise on the faces of these men, let alone fear, in the same instant that they swung their rifles up to their shoulders and opened fire.

  The first bullet, aimed with his usual devastating accuracy by Private Potts, entered Valeri’s right eye and exited just above his ear, taking with it a large piece of skull and a chunk of brain. Valeri, who had never even considered the possibility that any human would stand their ground against him, was suddenly blind in one eye, his vision replaced by empty, inky blackness and a pain that exploded through his head. He released the woman and grabbed for his face, but only one of his hands made contact; his left arm hung uselessly at his side, the nerve endings that controlled it destroyed by the bullet’s spiralling journey through his head.

  I’m hurt, he had time to think, before the rest of the bullets hit home.

  The second, fired from the Lee-Enfield rifle in Private McDonald’s huge, steady hands, tore through one of his kneecaps, obliterating it and sending him down to one knee. The pain was immense; Valeri hurled back his head and howled, his remaining eye staring up at the black night sky, before bullets thudded into his shoulders and stomach, and he slumped backwards on to the ground, writhing in agony. He heard an uncertain growl rising from his wife, and then silence. It was as though she had been switched off, and for the first time since he had been a child in Wallachia, in the middle of the fifteenth century, Valeri Rusmanov felt real fear.

  He rolled on to his side and looked desperately around for Ana. She was lying several feet away, her eyes wide and blank, her mouth hanging open. In the middle of her forehead was a perfectly circular hole, the result of Private Potts’s immaculate second shot. On the ground between them, steaming in the cool air, lay the former contents of her head, a thick streak of blood and off-white brain.

  Valeri pushed himself up with his one good arm and saw the soldiers advancing towards them. The woman he had carried into the alleyway had fled the second he released his grip, and her screams could still be heard in the distance. The soldiers were less than twenty feet away; they were walking at a casual pace, reloading their rifles as they came, expressions of professional calm on their faces.

  Run, you arrogant old fool. Run, before it’s too late.

  Summoning all his strength, Valeri forced himself up to a sitting position. He reached over, grabbed Ana’s limp, unresponsive body by her shoulders, and pulled it towards him. The motion sent blood spilling out of her head and into his lap, and panic flooded his damaged, groggy head. He wrapped his arms round her and, with superhuman effort, forced himself into the air. He couldn’t stand, or run; his left leg was useless, the lower section hanging from the upper by little more than a few flaps of skin. So he flew, painfully slowly, down the alleyway, away from the men who had reduced him so quickly to this shadow of himself.

  Behind him, the rifles fired again, their reports deafening in the narrow alleyway, and he felt their bullets crunch into his back. One sliced clean through his left lung and he fell hard on to the floor of the alley. He couldn’t breathe; when he inhaled, he could hear the shrill whistle as the air immediately exited through the hole in his chest. He raised his head, terror pounding through him, and saw that he had only managed to fly for thirty feet. The soldiers were closing again; as he watched, one of them said something and two of the others laughed.

  They don’t fear me. They don’t fear me and they’re going to kill us both. How is this possible?

  The hole in his lung had doomed him and Ana both; he could not escape if he couldn’t breathe. The hole could be healed, but it would take blood to do it, and there was no one in the alleyway apart from himself and the five men who were about to kill him.

  Then Valeri realised that wasn’t true.

  He looked at Ana, lying beside him on the ground where she had spilled from his arms as he fell from the air. He had no idea whether she was alive or dead, whether the bullet that had obliterated her brain and skull had been the end of her, or whether she could still be revived. It was not something he had ever given any thought to, so remote had the possibility of her death seemed, the possibility of his own death; now he wished he knew.

  He had heard tales, from those who had seen vampires killed, that their kind exploded, leaving nothing but blood behind. Ana, although she wasn’t breathing, was still whole, her body still in one piece, and Valeri clung to the belief that she could still be saved, clung to it with everything he had. If he had been forced to accept that she was really gone, he would have lain still and let the soldiers finish him; without her, he would be nothing.

  He heard the approaching footsteps of the soldiers and realised there was only one option available to him. What he was about to do was unthinkable, a violation of everything he held sacred, but unless he did it, they would both surely die.

  I’m sorry, my love.

  Valeri seized Ana’s leg and pushed her dress up to her hips. Her pale thighs were almost luminous in the darkness, and he took a millisecond to admire them before he sank his fangs into the left one. His wife had lost a great deal of blood through the gaping hole in her head, and her heart was no longer pushing what remained round her veins, but there was still a small amount pooled in her femoral artery. He tore at his wife’s flesh, digging for the wide vein, and felt a wave of relief flood through him as his fangs pierced it and still-warm blood spurted into his mouth.

  There wasn’t much, not nearly enough to repair all the damage the soldiers’ bullets had done to him, but there was sufficient to plug the hole in his lung, and that was all he needed. Valeri looked over his shoulder, saw the soldiers less than fifteen feet away, and moved. He gripped Ana round the waist and leapt as high into the air as he was able, which was now no more than ten feet above the ground. Then, whispering a second apology to his wife as he did so, he threw her body over his shoulders and wrapped it round his back like a shawl.

  A millisecond later the rifles rang out again, as he had known they would, but the bullets thudded into Ana’s dormant body, digging awful red craters into her unresponsive shape. One slid beneath her armpit and punctured his side, breaking one of his ribs and causing him to lurch in the air, but he gritted his teeth and pressed forward. Behind him, he heard first the sound of the soldiers reloading, then the heavy drumming of boots as they gave chase.

  “After it!” shouted Captain Quincey Harker. “After it, men!”

  The foul creature that was floating away down the alleyway was not the same abomination that had killed Thorpe; that had been Quincey’s first terrible, panicked thought, when its eyes had turned red and he had seen the bright white fangs in its mouth, and it had paralysed him, so much so that he had not actually giv
en his men the order to fire.

  The initiative had been taken, as it so often was, by Private Potts. Before Harker’s eyes, the drunken, swaying boy had disappeared, replaced instantaneously by a professional killer with a target before him. The Lee-Enfield rifle had been at the young man’s shoulder so quickly it had appeared a blur, then the first deafening report had echoed through the narrow alley, snapping the monster’s head backwards, blood spraying into the air. His paralysis snapped by the ruthless, frightening precision of his sniper, Harker had grabbed his Webley from its holster and joined in, firing at the writhing, howling creature, reloading and firing again. Now he and his men were running, their boots clattering on the street as it tried to escape them, its partner’s body slung around its back like some sort of grotesque shield.

  They were gaining on it when the monster reached the end of the alleyway, burst out on to Via del Tritone, turned west, and disappeared momentarily from view.

  “It’s getting away!” yelled Kavanagh, but then a chorus of screams pierced the night air ahead of them and they knew he was wrong.

  The Special Reconnaissance Unit hurtled out of the alleyway at a flat sprint and accelerated down the wide street. Via del Tritone was crowded with people: gangs of soldiers reeling drunkenly in swaying lines; couples strolling arm in arm; vendors and thieves and pickpockets working their patches with consummate professionalism. But through the middle of the crowd there was a wide, empty corridor, formed by gaping men and women who were staring in the direction the creature had fled.

  The five men ran through the crowd, ducking and dodging as the frozen onlookers began to emerge from their shock, their brains already working overtime to rationalise away what they had just seen with their own eyes. Potts, the youngest and the lightest, was in the lead, his rifle slung over his shoulder, his feet flying across the cobbles as he fought to catch up with the thing with the red eyes and fangs.

  They could see it now, less than fifty yards ahead of them, weaving from side to side. It was now no more than five feet above the ground, and the body of the woman hung low across its waist.

  It’s tiring, thought Harker, his head pounding with excitement. We’ve got it.

  At Via del Corso, the shambling, broken creature turned north-west and the soldiers followed. They were gaining with every step, now close enough to see the fear in its eyes as it looked over its shoulder at ever increasing intervals. Potts suddenly skidded to a halt, dropped to one knee, and brought his rifle to his shoulder. Harker saw him take aim through the crowds of people, and was able to reach out and shove the rifle’s barrel up into the air a split second before the Private squeezed the trigger. The shot flew harmlessly high, although the huge report brought a fresh cacophony of screams from the staring, bewildered onlookers.

  Potts rounded on Harker and the Captain took half a step back. There was fury in the young Private’s usually open face and, for the briefest of seconds, Quincey was afraid. He swallowed it down and hauled his sniper to his feet.

  “Too many civilians!” he yelled. “Even for you! Come on!”

  The anger disappeared from Potts’s face so quickly it was as though it had never been there at all, and then he and Harker were running again, straining to catch up to the rest of their friends and the monster ahead of them.

  Valeri Rusmanov flew for his life.

  He knew that the soldiers were chasing him, that they were gaining with every thudding stride, and pushed himself to move faster, his body screaming with pain as he fought to keep it in the air. If he fell back to the ground, he was dead; there was no way he could escape them on one leg. If he stopped, if he tried to take blood from one of the crowds of gasping onlookers, he was dead; they would be on him before he could drink the first drop. And a terrible new thought occurred to him: he was not sure he would be able to overpower a human in his current condition, much less force his fangs through their skin.

  Valeri redoubled his efforts, careening down Via del Corso. He could hear the soldiers shouting, their voices ominously loud, and forced himself not to look back, not to check how close they were to pulling him down out of the air and killing him; it would do him no good to know. At Via del Pontefici, he swept to his left and headed towards the banks of the River Tiber. The shoe at the end of his shattered leg grazed the ground as he made the turn, and he realised with horror that he was exhausted; he was simply not going to be able to keep his broken, shattered body in the air for more than a few more seconds. At the end of the street, he could see the railings that marked the edge of the riverbank, could see the vast rise of St Peter’s Basilica in the distance, could hear the freezing water lapping against the stone banks, and an idea came to him, like a bolt from the blue.

  He forced himself forward, using the very last of his strength, and felt himself teeter precariously towards the ground. The voices behind him were loud, so very loud, so full of excitement and hunger, but he forced himself to ignore them. He dragged Ana’s body round so he was carrying her in his arms, like a bride across the threshold on her wedding night. As the sole of his shoe began to skid across the surface of the road, as the railing of the riverbank accelerated towards him, less than ten yards, less then five, Valeri Rusmanov gave a vast, ear-splitting howl of pain and outrage, dipped his head, and tore his wife’s throat out with his teeth.

  The jugular vein and the carotid artery gave up the last of their blood, spraying it into his mouth and filling him with temporary power even as his heart broke at the sight of what he had been forced to do to his beloved wife. His good foot touched down two yards short of the railing. Behind him, he heard the footsteps stop and the voices fall silent as, he knew full well, the men brought up their rifles to finish him.

  He let his knee bend, lowering himself into a crouch, then, with every fibre of his being, his superhuman being, fuelled by his wife’s blood and four centuries of self-preservation, he leapt into the air and out over the black waters of the Tiber.

  Quincey Harker’s finger was squeezing the trigger of his rifle when the monster jumped impossibly high, the body of the woman in its arms. He watched as the dark shape hurtled through the cool, stinking air and crashed down on the far side of the river with an impact that they could hear across the wide span of the Tiber. There was a momentary sense of movement where the monster had landed, then it was gone, lost in the shadows.

  Harker looked to his left and right. Ponte Cavour was a hundred and fifty yards to the south, Ponte Regina Margherita three times that far north. By the time they had made their way across either bridge, the monster, if it had survived, would be long gone.

  “It’s over,” he said, quietly.

  The men of the Special Reconnaissance Unit looked at their Captain. There was excitement on all their faces, tempered only slightly by the unsuccessful end of the pursuit.

  “Hell of a chase, though, sir,” said Kavanagh, his face red with exertion, but creased by a wide grin. “Chased it halfway across Rome, we did.”

  “It was,” replied Harker. “A hell of a chase.”

  The five men went to one another, slapping backs and throwing arms round shoulders, laughing and shouting all at once. When McDonald produced the silver hip flask that accompanied him everywhere, they took swigs of finest single malt and exhaled hot breath into the cool air. Ellis, who had drunk last, wiped his lips with the back of his hand and looked at his Captain.

  “Sir,” he said. “That creature was the same as the thing that killed… as the thing we saw in Passchendaele. Wasn’t it?”

  “I think so,” replied Harker. “It seemed different, though. The German boy was raving, his mind gone. This man, or whatever it was, didn’t seem like that. He looked very much in control of himself.”

  “Until Potts shot his eye out,” said Kavanagh, and the unit fell about laughing.

  “Until then,” agreed Harker. Potts smiled shyly; the remorseless, deadly killer had once again disappeared back inside him.

  “Here’s my point, sir,” continue
d Ellis. “This is the second time we’ve encountered this type of creature, in relatively close succession. So, I have to ask, sir. Just what the hell are they?”

  Harker looked at his friend. Then suddenly, a great desire filled him: to know the answer to Ellis’s question, to explore this new world that had now revealed itself to him for the second time, and to honour the memory of Thorpe, the friend who had shared his conviction that they could take whatever the world had to throw at them.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “But you can rest assured I’m going to find out.”

  “Not right now, though?” asked McDonald. “Not this second?”

  Harker smiled. “No, John. Not right now. Right now, I think we all deserve a drink. Ellis?”

  “Yes, sir?”

  “Lead the way.”

  In August 1918, a mutated version of the influenza strain that had first appeared at the beginning of the year unleashed a medical holocaust that lasted for barely two months, but remains unequalled in human history.

  By the end of the year, when the number of new cases began to fall, more than five hundred million people had been infected during the two phases of the pandemic. Approximately forty-five million died, almost five per cent of a population struggling to come to terms with the devastation wrought by the war that had been over for less than a year.

  For Quincey Harker, the end of the war would see him return to Britain with his mind full of the strange creatures he had now encountered on two separate occasions.

  He had no way of knowing they would occupy the rest of his life.

  Join Quincey Harker in London in 1919 for the third instalment of the Department 19 Files:

  THE NEW BLOOD

  London, 1919

  Safely returned from the killing fields of Europe, Quincey Harker is bored and restless, his mind full of the terrible things he has seen, images he cannot seem to forget. So when his father invites him to hear a proposition from him and his friends, Quincey is hopeful that a new project may be just the thing to take his mind off the monsters he encountered: terrible creatures that flew and howled and killed without mercy. He has no idea quite how wrong he is...