Anno Dracula (42 page)

Late in the afternoon, three black helicopters came in low out of the desert and landed on the parade ground. Jedburgh introduced Penelope, Gardner and Dr Beecher to the VIPs: Colonel Oliver North of the National Security Council, with his svelte aide Fawn Hall, and Vice-President Bush, accompanied by a CIA analyst named Ryan. George Bush conveyed a message of support from Rocket Ronnie. Ryan gave Jedburgh a golf bag full of bottles of Gentleman Jack, compliments of the boys in Langley.

Out of the third chopper came two vampires she recognised at once: Baron Meinster, figurehead of the Transylvania Movement, and Graf von Orlok, a known extremist. Meinster was small, dapper and boyish. Orlok slank behind him, a hideous spectre. The Vice-President could not disguise his sour grimace of distaste whenever Orlok’s spider-fingered shadow neared him. She was uncomfortable. If prodded, prejudice so naked would extend to far more human-seeming vampires... like her.

Jedburgh was in an expansive mood for the visitors.

Penny knew America Group, fully briefed on the bad news, were less cheerful. Being ordered to put on a good show but take a dive sat badly with their fundamental programming. Jedburgh had told them they were the Best There Was, which meant they ought to be the Best Losers in the World. That hadn’t made it any better. Only Iceman showed no outrage.

At sunset, America Group and Carpathia Group filed out of their respective barracks. They had started even, with twelve pledges in each group. Carpathia - experienced vampires all - suffered no wash-outs or casualties, and remained at full strength, while America was five down. Czuczron turned out, face still a ruin but otherwise in fighting form. He was in better shape than Nikita, who was still shaky but insisted on being on the team. To make the imbalance less obvious, Gardner was taking to the field with America.

The objective was Ghost Town. The teams were competing to take and hold the position. Gardner had outlined a gameplan, by which America took the town first then yielded it when Carpathia caught up. That would give America an achievement as a consolation for eating desert dirt.

Penny was with the observers. Bush, Jedburgh and Orlok took a Jeep out into the desert, to take up position in the old saloon on Main Street. Ryan, Fawn Hall and Beecher would remain at the base in the op centre, monitoring communications. She’d be in a helicopter, with North and Meinster. Other interested parties were scattered across the countryside.

War was to start at midnight.

Oliver North complained that he couldn’t see anything out of the open door. Andrews, the gaunt pilot, looked back without sympathy, red points shining in his vampire eyes. Penelope and Meinster had night-sight too. This exercise would be carried out in human darkness.

‘I’ll give a running commentary, Colonel,’ she offered.

The little soldier nodded a simulation of gratitude. He was strapped down and buttoned up tight. The pulses in his neck and temples ticked like a Swiss watch.

Meinster hadn’t deigned to speak to her yet.

The Baron was one of those slightly too pretty, slightly too dressy fellows she’d once been impressed by. Having inherited one of the great fortunes of Europe, he’d squandered it on shirts and chocolate while he was alive. She remembered him crawling around Palazzo Otranto, trying to wheedle favours. Dracula - no fan of nancy boys - had never taken him seriously. His ex-boyfriend Herbert von Krolock, openly an exquisite invert, got more respect. Always nakedly ambitious, Meinster was cast out of the inner circle when Princess Asa came on the scene. She rid the court of old guard hangers-on to make room for her own largely useless entourage.

Shapes flew below. Banshee and Iceman, wing to wing, coping with bladewash. Showing off. It would have been wiser to stay out of the helicopter’s draught.

‘America is in the air, Colonel,’ she said.

Meinster snarled, showing a dainty fang.

They were over Ghost Town. Down below bonfires burned around the site, almost in a pentagram. She saw old streets, some buildings almost buried under drifting sands. Jedburgh’s Jeep was parked by the hitching rail outside the saloon.

Banshee and Iceman touched down and folded their wings.

The two fliers had carried compact loads. Nikita and Desire. The America Group vampires took up positions around the saloon and checked for traps. Banshee, grin visible from space, kicked in the batwing doors and ducked out of the way of any fire. Nothing.

Jedburgh came out, hat clamped to his head, and shook hands with Banshee. Orlok crept in the deepest shadows, well away from the firelight.

In formation, the rest of America Group - Gardner, the Confessor, Velcro - jogged down Main Street. Gardner took point.

‘America has taken the saloon,’ she said.

North smiled, tightly. Meinster glared.

Shadows came alive. She had good night eyes, but hadn’t noticed Carpathia Group’s arrival. They moved like ghosts, silently overwhelming their targets, pressing claws to throats. Gardner dodged his shadow and Banshee hid behind Jedburgh. But the rest of America Group went down. Easily.

Meinster smiled and primped.

‘Inform Colonel North what has happened,’ he ordered.

‘America has fallen,’ she said, flatly. North blinked.

She didn’t even know if America Group had taken their dive. They might just have been taught a lesson about the capabilities of vampire elders.

There was a ruckus.

Nikita was on her feet, the front of her jump-suit torn open, throat bloody. She kicked a Carpathian with smart martial arts moves, jabbing her foot at his stomach and face. Her boot wiped off his blacking. Penny recognised Alex Ziska.

‘America won’t lie down,’ she said.

‘This is futile,’ declared Meinster. ‘The exercise is over. This goes beyond what was agreed.’

‘The exercise isn’t over until it’s over,’ said North. ‘By now, you Europeans ought to have learned that.’

Ziska dodged Nikita and stepped behind her, mouth open like a shark’s. He took a bite out of the America girl and spat it out.

Now, Nikita was down, bone flashing in her neck wound.

Banshee was on Ziska, stabbing his torso with gathered, sharpened dagger-fingers.

Jedburgh waved his hat.

Carpathians rallied to Ziska, which freed up other Americans to get back in the game. Velcro picked up a length of rotten wood to use as a club (a stake?). Orlok - who wasn’t even
in
Carpathia Group - took him down from behind with a deadly hug.

Banshee, wings stretched, rose into the sky, trailing Ziska by one leg. Carpathians, shifting in a heartbeat, took to the air after him. The American flier dropped the flailing Ziska, who fell onto the boardwalk and cracked rotten wood.

‘That viper’ll have an assful of splinters,’ said the pilot, chortling.

North signalled Andrews to keep height with the bat-fight.

On the ground, the Carpathian elders were masters, but in the air, Banshee flew loops around them. Bony barbs protruded like horns from his heels, spiking through his boots. He tore holes in the wings of the elders harrying him. He whooped and howled, an aural attack on anyone with oversensitive hearing.

First one, then another, fell out of the sky, wind tearing through ripped wings.

Banshee was one-on-one with a Carpathian, Czuczron.

They wrestled, eyes and arms locked, huge wings beating the air. Then Banshee shapeshifted, losing the wings and becoming a deadweight, wrenching Czuczron out of the sky, dislocating the elder’s wing-shoulders. The combatants came apart and Czuczron smashed into the dirt. Banshee - winged again - barely skimmed the ground before dancing upwards with a victory yell. Showoff.

Meinster was not happy.

On the ground, the exercise dissolved into an old-fashioned barroom brawl. Jedburgh punched out Orlok, who kept bouncing back as if on a board.

This was a fiasco.

‘Why can’t we all get along?’ she asked Meinster.

P
rom the top deck of his castle, John Alucard looked over Beverly Hills as the arclight in the sky wrought dawn on the downhill properties. Uncovered swimming pools glinted like sapphires on green baize. He wore Foster-Grant ‘Nightshades’ ($999.95) and a face-film of sun block, but had developed a tolerance to all but the blaze of California noon. In the Old Country even pre-dawn haze would send him shrieking for shadow, greasy smoke boiling from his pores. Now, in this far edge of the world, he was almost a daywalker.

He leaned against battlements transplanted from a Transylvanian castle, took a hit of Los Angeles’s smog-and-orange-blossom air, and listened to freeway traffic, already enlivened by the odd angry gunshot. His mouth watered and his fangs sharpened. This place was delicious. The Father approved.

The Father was with him, constantly. Through Alucard, Dracula’s will was done on Earth.

His visitors, three Romanian vampires, were less comfortable with the rising sun. Transylvania Movement hacks were in love with useless tradition. They liked to waste their days locked inside easy-seal travel coffins, wriggling on itchy carpets of native soil.

‘Coffin-sleep is for wimps,’ he declared. ‘Know how many deals you miss, scurrying for the crypt at cock-crow?’

None of the visitors answered him. Their eyes were on the shadows shrinking around their feet.

‘Have you heard the story about the vampire who went mad?’ Alucard asked. ‘His native land, from which he was in permanent exile, was a tiny European province endlessly passed back and forth between the great powers. Each colour change on the map invalidated the soil in his lair and he had to scramble for a fresh supply of dirt.’

Alucard laughed. Only one of the three even tried to join in: the pasty new-born, Feraru.

This last year would have been a nightmare for that apocryphal elder. Maps got redrawn every week, if not every day.

‘The post-Communist flag industry can’t keep up with the demand,’ said Alucard. ‘Many countries fly old banners with holes where the hammer and sickle used to be. Makes a bad impression. Looks like a cannonball was shot through the flag. When you tear out the symbol you keep the remnant handy in case you have to sew it back in.’

In the long view, Romania was as it had always been. After the revolutions of 1989, it was no longer under the Ceauşescus and within Soviet hegemony, but someone or something would come along to master the land. Before the Reds, it had been Nazis, domestic and foreign; and before that, before Alucard was born or turned, the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires. For a proudly independent nation, a Latin-Romance enclave in a Slav sea, the Old Country was the whore of Europe, sold over and over again to the highest bidder, taken by force and rapine by the most convenient strongman. Transylvania, sacred soil of the
nosferatu,
was the whore’s get, traded back and forth between Romania and Hungary at the behest of whichever foreigners were on the up in Bucharest or Budapest.

Alucard looked at the trio Baron Meinster had despatched on this mission. Crainic, gaunt from slow-incubating blood disease, currently Meinster’s Number Two in the movement. Feraru, who spoke with an upper-class English accent, a new-born of ancient bloodline. Striescu, ruddy from a recent (unauthorised) feeding; his well-cut black suit marked him as ex-
Securitate.