Something of the Night (38 page)

Chapter
Fifty-Seven

Black Bird fell, as if her wings had been suddenly
clipped. Nick and Tate battled valiantly with the Huey.

“It’s still no use,” Tate
began. “Without the full co-operation of the tail-rotor, we’re never gonna be
able to steer this thing.”

“Bring her down,” Nick
managed to say, his lips grey and hard to manage.

Tate caught most of his
words. “But what about The Ray of Hope?” she asked.

Nick forcibly moulded his
lips to form words. “Don’t worry. I’ll take care of it.” He shuddered, the last
of his strength threatening to abandon him. “Don’t argue with me,” he said,
offering her a weak grin – grimace.

Tate looked beyond him,
seeing the holes punched in his side by flying shrapnel. Apart from one or two
small pockmarks, the rest of the cockpit looked relatively undamaged, meaning that
all that shrapnel had to have finished somewhere. Her gaze fell onto Nick’s
bleached face, and she knew instantly where. She nodded to herself, accepting
the inevitable.

This would be Nick’s final
flight.

Hers too, if they didn’t land
this thing. “Okay,” she said, resolutely.

“Good girl,” Nick rasped.

Together, they managed to
steady the wayward craft, eventually bringing it under their control. Working
in synchrony, they steered the Huey towards the centre of the battlefield,
passing over vampires and humans alike. Only occasionally did they hear the
twang of bullets as they sang off the aircraft’s hull. For now, with the loss
of the ultraviolet light, the helicopter had become nothing more than a dark
patch against the black sky. The Huey plummeted towards the earth.

***

From inside the rear cabin, Ben cried, “Pull up! Pull
up!” squeezing his eyes tightly shut. At his side were Ella and Squirrel,
huddled together, offering quick, silent prayers.

Miraculously, both Ben’s plea
and Squirrel and Ella’s prayers were answered. The Huey levelled out just in
time. The left skid barely clipped the earth, trimming the coarse grass that
grew there, before racing down the hillside, mere feet separating metal from
compact soil.

“Shee-yit!” Ben yelled as the
ground passed before his eyes at an alarming speed.

The helicopter continued to
race down the hillside, somehow threading its way between the sparse lines of
trees, scattering dead undergrowth in its wake. Tree branches whipped past like
skeletal arms, reaching out, threatening to pluck out either Squirrel or Ben or
Ella and drag them to a grisly death. Somehow Black Bird broke through the
trees – unscathed – and with a mighty
whoosh
, came to a halt, abruptly,
a foot or two above the ground.

Instantly the cockpit door at
Tate’s side flew open. She piled out, quickly followed by Ben and Ella. In a
twisted heap they became pinned to the ground by the powerful downwash, gasping
for breath as the whirlwind above drew air from their lungs.

Inside the cabin, Squirrel
felt himself jostled about. He clung to the side of the generator, his face a
mask of concentration. The mains cable had to be replaced. A violent jolt
pushed him onto his behind. The cabin tilted dangerously steep, which
threatened to throw him clear. Understanding that his last chance had come, he
reached out, straining to the point where the sinews of his arm screamed with
agony. He pushed the plug home, having to use the very tips of his fingers, and
instantly the generator roared with approval. A thick plume of black smoke
billowed from its vents.

In the next second, Squirrel
was tumbling through the air.

The front of the cockpit
exploded in a flash of fire. For a brief moment, Squirrel was bathed in a
bright and beautiful incandescence. And, just beyond the blue brilliance,
Squirrel caught a flash of white teeth. He had a brief moment to believe he had
seen Nick smiling down at him. Then, the aircraft took to the skies. And there
it grew brighter than a shooting star.

The Huey fixed itself to the
summit of the hill. The damaged tail-rotor held her there, the cockpit spinning
gracefully in a continuous circle. The Ray of Hope cast a bright canopy of
ultraviolet light, dousing those below in its virtuous glow.

The horde of vampires looked
heavenwards. Both Ezekiel’s and Raphael’s men turned their bleached faces
upwards, the burst of starlight drawing their attention away from the dark
horrors about them. Some gasped in rapture, The Ray of Hope burning back the
darkness of their souls to deliver them into the light. Past lives, from a
distance that even memory struggled to bridge, surfaced from their fevered
minds, and eyes that had held nothing but hatred and hunger softened. It was
then when they realised they had once been something other than this hateful embodiment
of evil. They turned to each other and for the first time saw what had once
been their brothers and sisters. The hot, caustic weapons in their hands fell
from dirty fingers, their rage spent, to land in the blood-soaked mud at their
feet. Figures, thousands of them, followed as they dropped to their knees.

The bodies of some of the
kneeling soldiers burst apart, to leave behind a sphere of white light. Each
pulsed with the rhythm of an innocent heartbeat. These magical balls of light
stayed grounded for a second, before being called aloft, as if God himself had
summoned them home. Like a hundred screaming skyrockets, they tore upwards,
cutting through the dust cloud and far beyond. Small holes appeared in the dark
blanket, revealing glimpses of a beauty that rivalled The Ray of Hope.

Blue sky.

The spheres of light arced
upwards in a continuous curtain of fire, peppering the cloud above. At first
the dust quickly knitted the holes shut, yet, as more and more of them burnt
through, a few small tears remained. Sunlight pierced through dust cloud and
long golden fingers of light began to caress the scarred land below. Now, with
the combination of artificial and natural sunlight, the vampires below ignited
in a chain-reaction.

Nick’s hand slipped from the flight-stick.
His glazed eyes began to slowly close. From nowhere, something bright and
beautiful passed directly before him and his eyes abruptly cleared. He looked
down and watched as the spectacle below him unfolded. Innumerable spheres tore
past the cockpit. And, as Nick slumped in the flight-seat, he had the
understanding that it was these lights that now held him aloft. Another ball of
light flashed by and he forced his head up, following the glowing path into the
sky.
“Ahhhh… ”
he gasped in delight, feeling the sun’s rays wash over
his face. Without his knowing, his face slipped from agony to rapture. He
coughed and a bubble of blood burst from his lips. The taste was sweet,
however, and the agony that wracked his body dissipated, leaving him blissful
and warm.

More flashes of light hurtled
by, so many now that they merged and joined, and became a single shaft of
continuous light. Nick traced the glowing wall to its crest. At its summit the
shimmering wall now cut through the dust cloud, allowing sunlight to fill the
gap, so that it had now become a gigantic golden halo. Yet the dark cloud of
dust trapped at its centre reduced the magnitude of the sun.

Nick nodded – he knew what
had to be done. His hand found the flight-stick, and tilting it towards him he
pushed Black Bird’s nose upwards. She began to climb, continually spinning,
continually reaping lost souls. Black Bird climbed higher and higher until the
black miasma eventually consumed her.

Nick took one last deep
breath and then jammed the flight-stick to the left. Instantly, the Huey
increased in speed. The controls twisted the damaged tail-rotor into full turn,
which in effect sent the Huey spinning in a blur of motion. Faster and faster
Black Bird spun, until the forces of gravity and motion ripped her apart,
piece-by-piece. The helicopter’s fuel tanks erupted with a mighty flash.
Gallons of aircraft-fuel ignited and exploded in a cloud of fire, burning the
dust and darkness into oblivion.

Suddenly, the cloud parted
and in its place brilliant sunlight shone. Light filled the sky - a colossal
flare of anticipation, which dazzled the men and women caught on the hillside.
Those vampires that had escaped The Ray of Hope quickly vanished, reclaimed by
a power more potent than the shadows, or night, or even darkness itself.

And now, like the birth of a
new star, the world turned instantly bright.

Chapter
Fifty-Eight

Hot,
fiery
breath caressed the side of Hannah’s throat. She grimaced, expecting heat to be
replaced by agony. It never came. Instead the warmth she felt crept around her
neck, then spread out in a large wave, which covered her head and back in equal
measure. She opened her eyes to find something dark stood out before her.

A shadow.

She stood straight and the
shadow stretched out before her. It was then that she realised the dark
silhouette belonged to her.

Her shadow.

The heat at her back
continued to grow, until the sensation became too much. She twisted away from
it in an attempt to escape the hot embrace. As she turned towards the centre of
the platform, she found those who stood by staring at her open-mouthed.

“What is it?” she asked.

Major Patterson took a step
closer. A hand, unsteady, reached out towards her. Hannah straightened,
confused by the strange act. Her father’s hand disappeared into a red inferno:
Her hair. A blaze of fire flickered and danced as the light above caught wisps
of her auburn hair, setting them alight in a dazzle of fierce reds and spun
gold.

“It’s beautiful,” Patterson
managed to say.

Now almost at its zenith the
platform pushed the heads of those it carried over the lip of the cavern. Most
threw hands in front of their faces, the sudden blinding light too bright to
witness. Only Patterson and his daughter stayed focused - their eyes locked
together.

“What happened?” Hannah
asked.

The Major’s face split into a
look of rapture. “Salvation,” he said, his eyes twinkling with joy.

Hannah’s brow furrowed. She
turned her head first one way, then the other, and for the first time noticed
the vampires had gone. Each and every one of them had disappeared, as if she’d
been awakened from a terrible dream.

“Where did they go?” she
asked, dazed.

Patterson’s fingers slipped
from the inferno of her hair and instead they fixed themselves gently
underneath his daughter’s chin. “Up there,” he said, tilting her head upwards
slightly. Her face lit up as sunlight played across her face, and her eyes
sparkled like two green emeralds.

“Oh… my… ” she gasped. “It’s
so beautiful.”

***

Jacob Cain fell backwards, stunned. He hadn’t been hit
or shot, but the enormity of the scene that had unfolded before him threatened
to drop him to his knees. All around him the darkness had been replaced by
light. Light that he had seen only in his dreams – golden and natural and full
of hope.

“Dear God,” Alice Hammond
whispered.

Jacob turned to her and saw
that her face was torn between happiness and confusion. Joy for what lay above
her, confusion for what rested at her feet.

All about them were the
remnants of the vampiric horde. Torn clothing lay scattered randomly like shed
skin, weapons large and small collected in the mud, those that had wielded them
lost, gone forever, taking hatred and bloodlust with them. Raphael’s army was
now just empty shells; vehicles ticking idly, their occupants vanished as if they
had never existed. Two or three trucks rolled down the hill, lazily,
uncontrolled, their original destinations abruptly erased.

An eerie quietness had fallen
over the battlefield, broken only by the cries of the injured. A few human
survivors began to gather around Jacob and Alice; their attention riveted
either on the orange glow above them or on the amazing figure, crouched over
with its hands thrust deeply into the mud. More and more survivors appeared.
Scores of them, greater in number than any could have hoped for, or even dared
to dream. In one large, bedraggled group they assembled around the three
central figures.

“Kill it!” someone hissed.

“Why is it still here?”
another demanded.

“What trickery is this?” a
toothless old hag spat with the venom of a snake.

Jacob turned to find a sea of
faces, all expectant, all seething with the want for revenge.

“Here, I’ll do the deed,” a
large man said, bloodstained and hollow-eyed. He stepped forwards, breaking
through the tight crowd. A hand caked in blood reached out with a glint of
gunmetal.

“NO!” Jacob boomed, gripping
the other’s wrist. “There’s been enough bloodshed.”

“But it must die. Why does it
remain, but to taunt us?” the gun-bearer said.

Jacob opened his mouth, ready
to offer an explanation. Yet as perplexed as the rest, he simply shrugged. “I
don’t know why he remains. But he must be a miracle, not an abomination.”

The man at his side growled
disapprovingly. “Have it your way, fool. Me, I’m ready for a bit of payback.”
He jabbed the pistol towards the sky. More weapons were drawn aloft to meet the
gesture. The woman with no teeth joined him, followed by the ones who’d called
for bloodshed. Most, however, appeared to have had their bellyful of violence.
They looked at the large man and the few that flocked to his banner with
loathing. The small angry mob pushed their way through the crowd, quickly
disappearing across the torn landscape.

An old man stepped forwards.
His face was lined and his eyes were deep pools of wisdom. “I know who you are,
Jacob Cain, and I believe you to be a man of principle.” He turned towards the
wall of pale faces. “We should allow him this one privilege. We must help our
brothers and sisters. There is a lot to do. I suggest we start now, while the
sunlight remains.”

Two women cleared the main
body of people. One of them said, “We can sew. Help us to find needle and
thread, and we can begin to stitch the wounds of those who are injured.”

“I have both, but they’re
inside the underground,” responded a teenager, a redhead with a hint of
freckles on her nose. “Plus, we can use bed sheets to wrap wounds.”

“
They
,” a man said,
pointing to the figure at
Alice
’s feet. “
They
may still be inside, waiting.”

A soldier spoke up. “Then
we’d better go as a group.”

A second soldier appeared.
“It won’t be easy, but if we stick together then we’ll make it.”

“Yes, we’ll need to salvage
what food we have,” the wise old man commented.

Someone from the midst of the
crowd said, “I’ve some tin cans stored in my locker. Don’t know what’s inside -
the labels are paler than my butt - but I’m willing to share whatever I find.”

A short bout of nervous
laughter sounded.

More voices spoke and, before
long, hidden food piles, provisions and help of all kinds were being offered.
Eventually the crowd began to disperse, as the last of the human race embraced
the need to cooperate and reorganise. They left in small groups, ready to meet
this new world head-on. Only two remained, both dressed in muddy cloaks, their
bare chests poking through in hard slabs of ebony. Two dark cowls hid their
features.

Once the gathering had
scattered, the figure beside
Alice
climbed to his feet. During the encounter, he hadn’t
been scared of what would come, for he felt as if he had already arrived at the
place of reckoning. And, for whatever reason, he’d be spared. Why else had he
survived when all others fell? And he’d knelt not in submission, but in
rapture.

Jacob and the figure locked
eyes.

Ezekiel smiled. “A miracle or
an abomination?” he asked, referring to Jacob’s comment.

“I’m not sure,” Jacob
replied, disbelievingly. “What are you?”

Ezekiel’s arms spread wide.
He felt the heat of the sun, but none of its pain. “Brother Jacob, I believe
you have me stumped.”

Movement caught Jacob’s eye.
The two cloaked figures stepped forwards. They stopped, facing Ezekiel, and
then dark hands rose as their cowls fell back. “Master Ezekiel,” one said,
dropping to his knee. The other followed, although the gesture seemed awkward,
unpractised.

“I am Brother Ebon. This… ” –
his hand directed Ezekiel’s gaze to the second figure – “This is Tobias, one of
Raphael’s highest lieutenants.”

The figure looked up at the
vampire leader. “I throw myself at your mercy.”

Ezekiel was speechless. How
could they be?

Then it hit him like a
sledgehammer.

Their skin!

His skin.

Their birth as a race had
evolved from a distance and past that even he could not fully comprehend.
Unlike the fair-skinned couple standing nearby, these two and Ezekiel himself
had evolved from far-away shores, and even the curse of the bloodsucking plague
could not unravel the genetics hidden deep within their genome. Life, no matter
how delicate, had the strength to overcome; and Ezekiel understood then that
death was the weaker fate, only suffered by those who had already outlived
their intended purpose.

Ezekiel placed his hand on
Tobias’s shoulder. “Stand, Brother Tobias,” Ezekiel said, gently. The young
vampire climbed to his feet.

“Master,” Tobias said, his
head bowed slightly.

“No,” Ezekiel responded.
“From this day on, you will call me Brother, as I will call you. There will be
no more subjects or slaves. Our new Master shall be peace, and only peace.
Freedom for our kind. Deliverance for theirs. Peace for all humankind. Do you
swear to this, Brother?”

“Yes,” Tobias said. “Yes,
Brother, I do.”

“And you, Ebon. Do you swear
an alliance with those I call friends?”

“Yes, Brother,” Ebon said,
bowing his head slightly.

Ezekiel’s hand reached out,
gently holding the other’s chin. “Stand tall and be proud. A new destiny awaits
those who dare to take the first steps into the unknown.”

“I’m ready,” Ebon proclaimed
with conviction.

“As am I,” Tobias said,
absolute.

Ezekiel’s attention turned to
flint-grey eyes. “And you, Brother Jacob, I thank you the most.”

“For what?” Jacob asked.

Ezekiel’s face broke into a
great smile. “For helping me lead my people out of the darkness.
My people
.”

Jacob stood for a second,
feeling uneasy about the vampire’s gratitude. His own feelings of hatred and
hostility were still lurking at the surface of his soul. And not ready to
embrace Ezekiel’s allegiance fully, he simply said, “It isn’t me you should be
thanking, but those who have perished. They are the ones who have sacrificed
everything for your freedom.”

“Our
freedom,” Ezekiel corrected. “Jacob, what would you
have me do? To prove my worthiness.”

A sudden, dreadful thought
crept into Jacob’s mind. Was his son one of the many who’d been sacrificed?

Ezekiel understood
immediately what troubled the battle-weary man before him. “Come, Brother, let
us find your boy – together.” They locked eyes and both felt the other’s need
to do exactly that. Together, they began to traverse the hillside, two sets of
eyes darting from one pile of wreckage to the next. Behind them,
Alice
and
Brothers Tobias and Ebon followed.   The group followed the dirt track until
they reached its end.

“Which way now?”
Alice
asked,
the trees still offered many dark places to hide. Even with their bare
branches, the woods were oppressive and threatening.

“We should make our way back
to the command centre, see if we can pick up a trail,” Jacob reasoned.

“A good plan,” Ezekiel
agreed.

They started to move away,
when Brother Tobias said, “Wait! What is that?”

The shadows shifted slightly
and the woodlands jumped alive with movement. Tobias and Ebon quickly dropped to
the ground, retrieving discarded weapons that lay at their feet.

The tension grew.

Suddenly, the darkness
revealed itself.

Crystalline eyes blinked from
deep within the woods. A shiver ran up Jacob’s spine. The wolf pack lurked just
within the safety of the darkened woodlands. Either Tobias or Ebon fired a shot
into their midst. “NO!” Jacob said, stepping forwards. “They mean us no harm.”
He hoped they didn’t. With his hands open in a show of submission, he took the
first steps into the gloom of the forest. He sensed movement from behind.

“Wait,”
Alice
said,
drawing near.

A guttural noise came from
the nearest wolf.

“I think you’d better stay
here,” Jacob advised, understanding that what lay within was for him – and him
alone.

“Fear not, I’ll take care of
you,” Ezekiel said from the line of trees.

“Great… ”
Alice
whispered under her breath.

“It’s okay, he can be
trusted,” Jacob told her.

“He’d better be,”
Alice
muttered, retreating from the murky woods.