Anno Dracula (41 page)

‘Come, Lex, we are all comrades. We are all
nosferatu
of the Old World. If this Shop wishes to help our cause, for whatever reasons, it would be impolite to shun them. Dearest Penny, I yearn to rise from this bed and hunt again. I am reinvigorated by our prospects, willing myself back to strength for the night when we return to our homelands, to become the princes we should always have been.’

She recognised the tune. Most popularly associated with Baron Meinster, of the Transylvania Movement.

Dr Beecher came onto the ward and shooed the visitors away from Czuczron. Outside, Ziska was steely and silent. She could taste his distrust and couldn’t resist twisting the stake.

‘So the Shop is training an army of elders? Carpathians. Intriguing times ahead.’

Ziska actually growled and faded into the shadows.

They lost the Angel, not to the sun or bad blood but to ambition. In flying form, he affected white eagle-feathers rather than leathery bat-membranes. He further lived up to his call sign by sporting golden eyes, pre-Raphaelite hippie curls and loose white robes. While unfolding his new wings for an examination, his brain burst from the strain of the shapeshift. Blood squirted in streams out of his eye-sockets.

Penelope was glad she wasn’t there to see that. Blood was her sustenance, but she was wearied by endless spilling of the stuff.

The rest of the pledges were sobered by the casualty. Officially, a training accident.

She took the seminar. The others had to learn from this incident.

‘Here is the paradox,’ she said. ‘Vampires are immortal, but most don’t last a year beyond turning. In the weeks after my death, I was nearly destroyed. I was fortunate. Many I could name were not. Tigers are an endangered species, too. It doesn’t do to be too efficient a predator. They get hunted to extinction. Now, would anyone like to say anything about the Angel?’

Desire sat quietly at the back, inexpressive. The new-born had slept with the pledge, before and after turning. She must also have been in his head, a greater intimacy than sex. Penny couldn’t tell if Desire had the Angel’s ghost - or psychic echo - tucked in the corner of her skull.

After several long clock-tick moments, Banshee put up his hand. He hadn’t ditched the screaming shirts since turning but now wore his weird eyeshade all the time.

‘We were blood brothers,’ Banshee said. All of us, except Iceman, we’ve shared blood. After we got through the first week, we had that party...’

After passing blood tests, a gaggle of flashdancers from a town titty bar had been brought in. For the pledges, this was their first chance to drink from a warm neck. One girl died and Velcro was up on a charge for a week.

‘Before dawn, we had a ceremony. We cut open our wrists and let the flows go together.’

Penny shuddered. She’d suffered a year of fever after her first warm meal, a sick child. Her leech-spots itched when she remembered.

‘Is this true?’ she asked the class.

‘It was righteous,’ said Velcro.

Penny looked at Desire. The girl nodded.

‘Dr Beecher will have to check you all over,’ Penny said. ‘Iceman, congratulations on opting out of the idiot club.’

Iceman, a human-shaped machine even before turning, took the compliment with a nod. A solo hunter, he’d be top of the class if not marked down for straying from the team. He was literally the coldest vampire Penny had ever known, his body temperature corpse-cool even after feeding. He could exhale darts of frost.

‘It’s not a wrong thing,’ said the Confessor.

She didn’t understand.

‘The Angel lives on,’ said Banshee. ‘In us.’

Desire blinked, briefly flashing golden eyes.

After weeks of public foreplay, Penelope went to bed with Banshee. His quarters were decorated like a teenager’s bedroom with pin-ups and pennants. Giorgio Moroder pounded out of a chunky sound system and Madonna screamed in silence on the muted portable TV. The sex was like the entertainment: noise and light but no connection, synthesised orchestration but a banal tune. Banshee pumped to orgasms as if scoring baskets and whooped with each little victory, seeking approval. It was what Penny had expected and, in truth, wanted.

The mechanics of coupling were over and done with. Her mouth bled from the sharpness of her fangs. Banshee lay under her with his eyes closed. He hadn’t slept since turning, so he was overdue for a first lapse into death-like lassitude. Even the TV light patterns hurt his dark-adapted eyes, though he wouldn’t admit a weakness. She found his shades on the bedside table and fitted them onto his head so he could look at her.

Penny swallowed her own blood.

‘Jedburgh has us on an exercise tomorrow,’ said Banshee. ‘In the Ghost Town.’

An abandoned silver-mining community from the Old West a couple of klicks from Purgatory was often used for war games.

‘We’re going up against the other group.’

Penny felt cold.

‘The real vampires, Penny.’

She’d seen Ziska again, jogging in formation with old-faced killers. Czuczron was up and around, patches of skin forming over the charred meat. The elder was recovering remarkably.

‘We have to be better than the old ones, or there’s no point, is there? New has to be improved. We’ve got to be the best.’

She had an overwhelming
need.
The cat in her room wasn’t going to meet it. It was foolish, but a hundred years had not taught her how to resist temptation. She let her weight press onto Banshee, surprising and delighting him, then slithered down his body. She fastened her mouth to his sculptured belly, slid in her fangs, and began sucking gently, pressing and teasing with her tongue. She made a wound which seeped sweetly into her mouth.

Banshee slid his hands under her hair, pressing her face to his skin.

‘We have to win,’ he said.

In her head, dazed by rich half-warm, half-vampire blood, Penny flew. She rolled over, firework display in her back-brain, and watched the ceiling. Movement and sound caught her attention.

A dove had got into the barracks and was fluttering up in the eaves, dislodging clouds of dust motes which danced in the coloured light. Smoky candles burned on all surfaces, adding scent to the grainy air. The bird’s wings flapped, making pixillated flash-images in her vision. It seemed like a series of identical doves, appearing and disappearing about the beams and joists.

Penny sprang upright, shocking Banshee. Piloted by the lizard stem, she acted purely on instinct, personality and intellect left on the damp sheets.

Arms by her sides, she snatched with her mouth.

When she fell back to the bed, bouncing Banshee aside, she bit through feathers and bone. In two bites and swallows, the dove was gone, beak and feet and all.

She puffed feathers out of her mouth in a cloud and straddled Banshee like a bronc-buster.

‘Try and throw me, howling man,’ she said.

‘Howdy, girls and boys,’ said Jedburgh, waving his straw-mesh Stetson for attention. The director was Shop through and through. A large, untidy Texan, he was warm but looked as if he could take down a two-thousand-year-old hopping Chinese elder with his bare hands.

‘I reckon most of you have figured somethin’ out about the Program. We let you do your little jobs and we take care of the big picture, but you’re all smart folks. The Shop don’t take any other kind.’

This briefing was for the instructors. Penelope, still woozy from Banshee’s blood, sat next to Captain Gardner, who was sternly disappointed in her. Did he expect she’d become a nun for the USA? She was Code Name: Trampire, after all. Dr Beecher was there, along with Revok of Psi Division and Rainbird of Infiltration and Liquidation. Several unfamiliar men and women, vampire and warm, were also present. They must be with the other group. Up front with Jedburgh was a walking corpse.

‘This here’s Caleb Croft. A Brit, but don’t hold it against him. He’s one of the best buddies the Shop has. He’s been ridin’ herd on Carpathia Group.’

She had heard of Croft from Charles and poor dear Katie. He didn’t look much of a threat, but Penny understood he signed a dozen death warrants before every meal. He never bled without killing.

‘Y’all heard of Star Wars, I guess,’ said Jedburgh. ‘Not the kiddie movie, the Strategic Defense Initiative. The High Frontier. Lord God knows how many billions the Prez has flushed down that latrine. Big bucks, but so far no Buck Rogers. Ronnie loves rockets. Spooks the shit out of the Soviets. They’re spendin’ themselves silly to keep up. One of the few advantages of a space weapons system that don’t work is that there ain’t no limit to the mazooma your mortal foe has to waste tryin’ to duplicate it. But it still ain’t gettin’ the Job done. You know the Job: the eradication of the mental disorder known as Soviet Communism. The Kremlin gremlins have had it their own way in Eastern Europe since the Big One. They take it slow and steady, invadin’ somewhere every twelve years or so. We’re all set to toe-to-toe the bastards over Poland, and they sneak into Afghanistan instead. So, while they’re looking East, we shit in their front yard. The game plan is to turn the Transylvania Movement from a talkshow joke into a real alternative for the Warsaw Pact satellites. Heard about the domino theory? Well, this time, we’re knockin’ and they’re fallin’. They’re all shakin’ like Elvis with a burger jones. CzechoSlovakia, Poland, Yugo-Slavia and, our mostest bestest special favourite, Nicolae Ceauşescu’s Romania. Graduates of this Program will take out the puppet apparatchiks and restore the, ah, rightful rulers. Can you dig it? We’re puttin’ the Counts in the castles and the Barons in the back of the blood bank.’

‘Sir,’ said Gardner, ‘isn’t that dangerous? Many elders have bad human rights records. Mightn’t they prove worse in the long run than the Reds?’

Jedburgh waved his hat and grinned.

‘We thought of that, Captain. You’re right. Most of ’em ain’t just bloodsuckers, they’re scumsuckers. Each and every one out for their own damned self. As soon as we set ’em up, they’ll give us the finger. Your vampire elder is no friend of democracy and liberty. No offence, Caleb - I know you’re with the Program, all the way to Memphis. That’s why we’ve been mixin’ our own bloodline, soldier. That’s why FDR had you made way back when. We’re trainin’ up Carpathia Group to be good, but we have to train America Group to be better. Tragically, however, it would be a morale disaster if Carpathia got its ass kicked in the exercise, so y’all are goin’ to have our bright boys and girls lose tomorrow night. They ain’t gonna like it but that’s the way it is. Anyone who wants to kick up a fuss will just have to cry themselves to sleep.’

Penny knew one pledge who was going to hate this policy decision.