Anno Dracula (40 page)

By the end of her first week, every one of the nine men and three women on the course had propositioned Penelope. Six of the guys and one of the girls wanted to sleep with her as well as get bitten. She took up none of the offers. They told themselves she’d done it to them, that she was working on their minds. But she’d just opened them to the possibilities and let them do the rest.

She’d washed four men and one woman out of her class. Her word alone wasn’t enough but other instructors concurred. These pledges didn’t have the red stuff. Jedburgh, director of the Program, rubber-stamped the termination orders. They were back on the bus, bound to silence by confidentiality agreements. If they ever talked about Purgatory, they’d end up in court - or Arlington. Would any settle for less and become dhampires? There must be contingency plans. She’d learned not to ask about such things.

She spent time with Captain Gardner, a veteran of the US Bat-Soldier Program. Code Name: America. Turned shortly before America’s entry into the Second World War, he’d been maintained ever since. A defence asset. The Pentagon liked to keep its vampires in a glass coffin marked ‘In the event of war, break’. Gardner’s 1940s swing pace was a contrast with the 1980s MTV zoom of the pledges. He was blond, handsome, plastic. A Muscle Beach body. An Arrow Collar face. Wrapped in a flag. Andy would have loved him.

In his quarters, they drank from purebred army-issue cats. That mellowed her out nicely. Only on active duty would the Captain take human blood.

Gardner was as much out of his time as she was hers: Artie Shaw and Glenn Miller gramophone records filed in a purpose-built cabinet, signed photos of Franklin Roosevelt and Ernie Pyle framed on the wall, Stars and Stripes shield hung over the bedboard. She, at least, made an effort to embrace the new, and had a boxful of ruinously expensive little silver discs by Whitney Houston, Genesis and Bruce Springsteen. After her up-and-down turn-of-the-decade New York adventures (which she associated with spiky, unlistenable punk), mainstream rock suited her mid-’80s mood. It went with the tailored earth-tones suits - sharp shoulders, little skirt to speak of, worn at all times with high-heeled pumps and seamed stockings - and an even tan cultivated by exposing her face and arms to the sun in three-second bursts.

Gardner didn’t offer her his vampire blood and hadn’t made an effort to get her into his militarily-perfect bed. It was in the corner, blanket-folds as sharp as coffin-corners, tight enough to bounce dimes off.

The folders lay on the table between them.

Seven survivors. Five men and two women.

Tomorrow, Gardner would make them all his sons- and daughters-in-darkness, passing on his bloodline. His code name would mark the group. America. She hadn’t volunteered her own perhaps-dubious blood, though she supposed her contract meant the Shop could tap her if they wanted to. The pledges would be test-tube vampires. Their transformation would be passionless. A measured injection of blood direct to the vein. Very unlike the hot confusion of her own turning. Gardner wouldn’t even be in the room with his get as they were reborn.

She still had questions.

If the Program was such a success and had been for fifty years, why were there so few Bat-Soldiers? This inter-services training facility (outside Purgatory, New Mexico) had turned out a trickle of graduates over the decades, but nothing like an all-conquering vampire army. No undead legions had been unloosed on the Vietcong, no creature commandos sent in after the Iran hostages.

Word was that the Program was being stepped up. Her own recruitment by the Shop - a government agency she’d never heard of - suggested this was true. Besides the warm pledges, a group of already-established vampires were here in training. They were kept separate from her class. She understood most weren’t even American. Some were elders, veterans of Dracula’s Carpathian Guard.

Gardner looked through the folders, passing them to Penny for a second glance.

Real names were listed, but came as news to her. On the courses, code names were used: Banshee, Desire, the Confessor, Iceman, Nikita, the Angel, Velcro.

Their pre-course careers were outlined. The class was drawn from different forces: two Marines, a Navy SEAL, two regular army, a transfer from NASA’s astronaut programme and a CIA agent. All had home towns, parents, reasons for joining the services, employment histories, school and medical records, a tangle of living relationships and interests.

Tomorrow, at sunset, they would all change.

‘Do you ever regret turning?’ she asked Gardner. ‘Do you miss growing old, having conventional offspring, passing the torch?’

Gardner was firm. ‘No, ma’am.’

The class, whom she thought of as in part her get, were mostly coming along.

Nikita was in the infirmary with an unpredictable reaction like the infection which had laid Penelope low nearly a hundred years ago. An undetectable bug carried over from warm life into her new-born vampire state mutated into a dangerous parasite. Unlike Penny, the CIA girl was not treated with leeches. Paul Beecher, the Program’s vampire physician, had the patient on a regular drip of ‘golden’. Scuttlebutt had it that the high-quality blood was harvested entirely from virgin altar boys the night before their first wet dream. Dr Beecher said the prognosis was encouraging.

Otherwise, the ‘America’ new-borns took to the night with an enthusiasm it was her job to temper. Banshee, Iceman and the Angel -shapeshifters with flight capability - were often out in the desert, soaring aloft like gliders. She was worried they’d fail to learn the lesson of Icarus. If they stayed in the air past dawn, they’d burn up in sunlight. Desire was a mind-worm: she could put anyone under her spell and had a low-level telepathic link with those she sampled. She could potentially be a skull-walker, capable of projecting herself completely into someone whose blood she’d drunk. With the help of Darryl Revok, a Canadian expert, she was puppeteering cats, taking their minds for a spell and guiding them like remote-control spy-cams. There were obvious intelligence applications. The Confessor, who doubled as the group’s chaplain, and Velcro, a Grenada combat veteran, were like Penny, just vampires - with no ‘talents’ apart from living longer, healing faster, moving swifter and surviving on blood alone.

In 1941, Gardner had been bled to death on an operating table, as vampire blood - smuggled out of Europe - dripped into his veins. His heart stopped and restarted. Back then, it was generally believed turning was impossible without death. These new Bat-Soldiers had been slowly exsanguinated, hearts and brains never flatlining. They ingested Gardner’s blood in time-release capsules.

It wasn’t really new: Geneviève Dieudonné, with whom Penny had a complicated relationship, had gone through something similar in the fifteenth century. But it was still unusual. No one was sure whether the Bat-Soldiers were proper vampires or highly-evolved dhampires. Dr Beecher let slip that the Program was working on making the process reversible. Surviving grads could serve their fifty-year-hitches and muster out, restored to full warmth (and mortality). He foresaw a surprising percentage would opt for ‘normal’ life, even with ageing and death included in the package.

If the option were open to her, she would have to seriously consider it.

Before staying as she was.

She’d been a vampire much longer than she’d been warm.

One reason for the slow progress of the Program was that the Shop had got hold of extensive documentation of a project carried out during the First World War by the Germans, at the direction of Dracula himself. She knew a little about that from Charles, the warm fiancé who’d left her for Geneviève but still opted for old age and death rather than vampirism. He had been with the Diogenes Club, a more gentlemanly British version of the Shop. The Kaiser’s mad scientists had created a cadre of fearsome flying shapeshifters, far more mutated than any of the Program’s batmen. Few of those vampire aces came through the war human-minded enough to be of any use to anyone.

The last survivors of the experiment were exterminated by Hitler, whose own dreams of a pureblood German vampire race had fizzled. The Nazi plan was to kill off all extant ‘mongrel vampires’, whom they classed with gypsies and Jews. Then, a mass communion of Aryan blood would create a new iron bloodline. The War ended before Hitler’s vision was realised. Gardner told her he’d faced and bested a couple of the prototype vampire supermen, remarkable only for ugliness. Upon turning, their faces shapeshifted into scarlet skulls or batwing-eared fright masks and stuck that way. Dracula himself supported the Allies and went into Romania on a crusade in 1944, uniting the elder vampires of the region against the Nazis. She’d come into that story late, joining the Count’s household after Truman, Stalin and Churchill manoeuvred him out of his castle stronghold and into useless Italian exile at the Palazzo Otranto.

At one time, she’d thought vampires must become masters of the world. Would these new-borns, who could live as vampires but perhaps just switch it off, fulfil that dream? And where would that leave her?

It was good that these new-borns were imprinted on her.

One night, she might need them.

Penelope found out more about the other group.

One night, after visiting the infirmary to lend Nikita some fashion magazines, she bumped into a vampire she recognised from Europe. Baron Alexis Ziska. He pretended not to remember her.

Ziska had been in London in ’88 with the Prince Consort’s Carpathian Guard. He’d also hung about Otranto, a vague connection of Asa Vajda, Dracula’s annoying Moldavian fiancée. One of those carbon copy elders, he had cut his moustache and cloak too obviously in imitation of the Count. Since Dracula’s true death, the copy had faded. There were black smudges under his red-rimmed eyes.

‘Baron, we must catch up,’ she said.

Ziska grunted.

‘With each other’s news, I mean. What brings you here, to Purgatory?’

The vampire mumbled.

‘I have clearance,’ Penny reassured him. ‘I’m with the Shop.’

At mention of the agency, Ziska suppressed a flush of terror. He was a sender, leaking emotion all over the place. No wonder he was reduced to a hanger-on.

‘Have you found a friend, Lex?’ shouted someone from the ward. ‘Haul her in. She’s bound to be better company than you. Did you bring the fat mice, as I requested?’

The voice came from a bed behind black curtains. Ziska’s face darkened.

‘That sounds like an invitation,’ she said.

Ziska stamped into the ward. Penny tagged along and helped open the curtains.

‘My my, what a pretty one,’ said the thing in the bed. ‘You must introduce me.’

The patient was more coal than flesh, a living skeleton clad in black, cooked meat. The eyes were wetly mobile and the teeth sharp and white. Penny took the patient to be male, a vampire and on the way to recovery.

‘Baron Lajos Czuczron,’ said Ziska, ‘this is, ah, Lady Godalming.’

‘Penelope Churchward,’ she corrected, extending a hand. ‘Penny.’

Charcoal fingers took hers. She let Czuczron kiss her hand by pressing lipless teeth to her knuckles.

‘Enchanté, mademoiselle.’

Czuczron was another Carpathian, a Hungarian. She remembered the name. A sometime member of Dracula’s inner circle, he’d neglected to call on his old master in exile. An invitation to the Royal Wedding, sent care of his old regiment, had been politely declined. She understood he was among the few vampires to prosper under communism. If he was here, he must be on the outs in Budapest.

‘I regret offending your eyes with my present person. I am usually reckoned attractive. A dashing blade. I was staked out on a rock by ungrateful peasants and left for sunrise. Only the intervention of my good and faithful friends preserved me from the cruelty of true death.’

He was on a drip, like Nikita. She assumed he was getting ‘golden’ too.

‘Had I known flowers of undeath like yourself were to be found in America, I should have come to this Virgin Land years ago. It has been an awakening, my dear.’

Ziska hissed, trying to shut Czuczron up.