Authors: Charles Stross
Basil does not, for the most part, deal with young people. He experiences them as most pensioners do: as shadowy presences in menacing hoodies who dart and mock from the pavements and slums, fearful images touched up by
Daily Mail
headline writers and
Telegraph
editorials. He experiences them mediated through the distorting lens of the silver screen, the nightly drama of the television news broadcast. He is unmarried and has no living relatives that he is aware of. He does
not
experience them as the larval form of his co-workers. He was born so long ago that he has forgotten what it was like to be a teenager or a young adult male. Metrosexuality is something he reads about in newspaper op-ed rants but doesn’t actually
know
. And as for geek culture . . .
Most of the young men of Alex’s age who Basil has known over the past century had undergone military service. If they haven’t carried a gun, they’ve lived through bombing raids. Grew up playing Cowboys and Indians (or Provos and Army). Took a keen interest in things martial.
Basil is applying these sepia-toned benchmarks of young and virile manhood to Alex, and basing his assumptions of his capabilities upon them. But Alex is a child of the late 1980s, of helicopter parenting and stranger danger and school rides and the Snowdrop Campaign and a blanket ban on handguns. Alex is a brilliant mathematician and promising (if embryonic) applied computational demonologist. But Alex is also a geek who suffers from impostor syndrome and hypochondria to boot, and whose knowledge of handguns was acquired from movies where the stars hold their pistols the wrong way up and obey the laws of Hollywood physics. He is, in short, not exactly the ideal vampire bodyguard.
He is also prone to overthinking things.
• • •
WE ARE DELAYED IN TRAFFIC AGAIN. WHICH MEANS WE ARE
now twelve minutes behind our bellwether.
(I know the arguments for and against having a brick waiting outside the warehouse; let’s just say, the arguments against won. If there’s one thing worse than going up against an ancient and powerful vampire sorcerer with mind-control skills, it’s going up against an ancient and powerful vampire sorcerer with mind-control skills who has noticed you and taken over your eight-man squad of elite special forces soldiers before you arrive.)
“Orders, Mr. Howard?”
I rub my forehead. “Wait one.” I call up the police CCTV operations room again. They’ve got a constable monitoring the cameras around the warehouse in real time. “No change notified. One car arrived ninety minutes ago; a woman got out and went inside. Hasn’t left. Then our decoys arrived nine minutes ago and went inside. Monitoring commenced three hours ago; nothing before then, although presumably the security guard showed up for work this morning. So we’re looking at four souls inside: security chap, unidentified female, our two.” I pause.
“My working assumption is the female is hostile until proven otherwise. She may be a PHANG, or she may be a lamplighter for the adversary. We’re all warded but you should not assume that your wards will work normally around the adversary. Treat with extreme caution; put her down if she presents a threat.”
I pause again. “Scary, do you prefer to go in through the front door, or use the loading dock and the fire exits? You have tactical control.”
My ward vibrates briefly, then stops. I glance down at my smartphone, and see the particular app it’s running. (Burning goat’s skull—don’t ask: it’s part of our special occult countermeasures suite.) “Alex’s ward just overloaded and fried. We have contact.”
“Team alpha, plan two,” announces Scary. (That’s the fire exit.) “Team bravo, plan three.” (That’s the loading bay.) I feel the truck lean forward on its suspension and sway as it takes a bend, then bounce twice, very hard, on speed pillows. “We’re going to park in front of the office door, on top of the bike and the car: stand by for a bumpy landing. Action in thirty seconds.”
There’s a click in my headphones. “Mr. Howard, if you’d please
stay behind us
this time—”
“Thank you, Sergeant, your advice is noted.” I grit my teeth and close my eyes, forcing my inner eye to open. I can see surprisingly well this way, although
what
I see is nothing very nice: I have nightmares about using this talent. “You’ll need me to handle the adversary. Once you’ve cleared the way.”
“Yes, sir.” A hand pats me on the shoulder. Then there’s a violent crunching sound and I’m hurled against my seat belt. Poor bloody Pete, if he gets out of this alive, is going to have one
hell
of an insurance claim form to fill out. I’ll have to see if I can get the SA to sign off on buying him a replacement scooter, citing necessity . . .
I pull off my headphones and yank on my helmet in the moment of silence that follows. A gust of cold air hits me in the face as the doors slam. I pull my visor down, release my seat belt, and wait ten seconds as the heavies bail out, then I follow them through the nearest exit, opposite the entrance to the office.
So I’m standing right behind Sergeant Howe when the door explodes.
That’s why I survive.
I register it as a bright flash and a simultaneous ringing in my ears, then I realize I’m lying on my back looking up at the side of the OCCULUS truck.
What happened?
I wonder as I flail around and try to sit up, then slip on something warm and moist. I can smell shit. Something buzzes in my ears, and then my ward goes off like a hive of bees. I can’t hear properly. I roll to my knees and realize numbly I’m rolling in what’s left of Steve, which means
enemy action
, so I keep rolling and roll under the OCCULUS truck as I reach for my pistol and realize I can’t find the holster and my bad right arm is stinging like crazy so I open my inner eye fully and the confusion and darkness light up.
(I will note that Steve Howe wasn’t visible from the office window and wasn’t yet trying to open the door: it just went
bang
.)
Walls dissolve. There’s a smoking hole in the front of the warehouse, and a body inside, and another body—live, with a gun, and there’s an unhealthy bluish sheen to it like an oil slick or toxic waste or something. I hear faint shouts, the harsh metallic crack of gunfire. There are more people standing farther inside the building, but the one in the office is advancing and raising a pistol—
I grunt, and reach out for them with imaginary fangs and claws. I’m about five meters away but I’ve done this before, through a door even. I can feel their mind squirming like a toad, and there’s something sick about it. It tastes
foul
. No,
she
tastes foul. I bite and bite and chew and spit and then I find myself wishing for a psychic glass of water: the trouble with this Eater-of-Souls talent or curse or what-have-you is that there are some people whose souls you’d want to scrape off the underside of your shoe if you trod in them, and you
really
don’t want them giving you gastric symptoms.
I rewind her rage and her joy as the door blows, taking down the first attacker, and catch an echo of earlier memories: the memory of sex, the memory of her white-lightning orgasm as she broke Evan’s neck while sitting astride his lap, in a moment of total exultant control over everything she hated. I squeal and try to shove her out of my head but it’s too late, because she’s lying halfway through the doorway with bloody tears trickling from her eyes. I killed her and I’m going to have to live with that.
I retch at the overpowering stench of blood and shit and worm my way out from under the truck. My hearing is all fuzzed from the explosion and the gunfire, which has died down. I’ve got a job to do, dammit. The fire is suppressive, to convince the people holed up inside to stay down. That’s the plan, anyway. What were Steve and I meant to do, in the office . . . ?
Oh,
that
.
I kneel, then stagger to my feet and lurch forward, slip-sliding on a loop of intestines until I catch my balance and crunch down on the dead woman’s rib cage. There’s another dead body behind the desk, wearing a security guard’s uniform: he’s been dead for some time, going by the way he’s dark to my vision. I briefly consider raising him and using him as a proxy, but it’d take too long to summon a feeder.
There’s a fuse box on the wall beside the inner door, the one that leads to the archive. I open it and look for the circuit breaker I helped the electrician connect this morning. It’s still open.
Flick.
Inside the archive, the string of ultraviolet lights we laid along the top of the storage racks this morning blink on.
And then the screaming starts.
• • •
THE REST OF THE MOP-UP OPERATION GOES SMOOTHLY ENOUGH,
modulo the mopping up. Which is . . . disturbing.
The screaming from inside the warehouse is continuous, high-pitched, and terrible. It’s the kind of sound you associate with cats being skinned alive, or slasher movies, or mediaeval torture-fests.
I open the door.
Alex is moaning with fear, not screaming. He lies curled in a ball on the floor beside the doorway, hoodie pulled up, hands and face tucked in.
Clever boy.
His ward’s toast, so I have to assume he’s been turned, but right now he’s focussed on keeping his hands and face out of the light that burns. He’s smoking, but the duck’n’cover drill combined with his hoodie seems to have saved him from going the full barbie.
There’s the characteristic black dome of a powered-up ward at one side of the warehouse.
Later.
There is one other body in here, exposed to the eldritch purple glow of the booby-trap lights. It is making a hoarse screeching sound—almost a teakettle whistle. Its spine is curled over and its jaw gapes wide, and there is smoke pouring out of it, with pale fire flickering in its eye sockets and burning within its rib cage, where it is visible through the clothing that has scorched away. I can see the pallor of bone through the tattered charcoal of his trousers. A bell is ringing, and after a while I realize it’s the fire alarm—our friend must have tripped the smoke detector. The worst thing about it all is that he’s still alive and screaming.
Observe, Orient, Decide, Act.
I touch the press-to-talk mike attached to my helmet. Hope it still works. “Bob here, Howe is down, repeat Howe is down. Unidentified female oppo is down. I’m in the back, lights on, repeat, lights on. Alex is neutral, I can’t see Pete, unidentified oppo is on fire but undead. I need hands here.”
About a quarter of a ton of heavily armed specops soldiers tackle me onto the floor—forming a rugby scrum with me as the ball—then my earpiece crackles: “Awaiting orders, sir!” (Silly me, I guess I got in front of them again.)
“Get a tarp over Alex and get him into the front office, handcuffs and sedation—assume he’s been turned. Find the vicar. That dome: point your guns at it; if it collapses and anything comes out of it, shoot them. Then get off me.”
The weight eases momentarily. “Yes, sir.” I’ve got tinnitus, dammit. (I feel a momentary pang. I can still smell the contents of Steve Howe’s guts all over me. Taste that awful woman’s weird craving for sex with paralyzed vampires. Someone made her that way. Surely?) I shove the thoughts aside for later. “What about—”
I stand up. So does the burning man.
“Freeeeeze,”
hisses the burning man. We all freeze. Our wards simultaneously buzz violently, then give up the ghost and start to smoke.
“Misssster Howard.” Bits of carbonized cloth and flesh drip from his bones as he straightens up and turns to face us, like a walking skeleton with pale red worms writhing in the back of his skull. He’s not hissing just because of the flames: there’s something wrong with his dentition. “We meet again.”
“Name, rank, and number?” I ask.
“Don’t you recognize me, what-what?” Skeletal jaws grin, and now I realize I’m hearing his voice
inside
my head: he doesn’t have lungs or larynx with which to laugh. “I really must thank you. I
do
appreciate a warm welcome: it affirms my sense of self-worth.”
The blood-sucking Terminator impersonator steps around the table. “One of you fine upstanding chappies—yes, you—is going to go back there and
turn out the bloody lights
. Wait. Before you go, give me your gun.” The soldier he’s pointing at jerkily unslings his MP5 and extends it, butt-first, towards Basil. That’s when I realize how terribly pear-shaped this op has gone. “You’ve had your little jape, ha-ha. In case you were wondering, we get harder to kill as we get older. This confirms something I’ve suspected for a decade or two, but lacked the inclination to idly test: mind over matter and all that. It’ll be fun to go out in daylight again when all this is over. Now go and stand over there, in that corner. You’ve been very naughty boys.”
I stumble along with the other three heavies. I am ashamed to say I’m shaking. Unlike them, I’m faking obedience: his will-to-obey is amazingly powerful, but so is my will-to-resist. On the other hand, he’s pointing a submachine gun at us and I need a few seconds to think. What’s worse than an elderly vampire? Answer: an elderly vampire with a submachine gun and sunburn-induced bad attitude. He’s clearly a whole lot more powerful than the run-of-the-mill newbie PHANGs I’ve been dealing with up to now, and unless my middle names aren’t Oliver Francis I’m only going to get one chance to lay Basil the Self-Propelled Barbecue to rest. While my back is half-turned to him, I cross myself, banker-style: spectacles, testicles, wallet . . . and camera?
Ah. Camera.
I pull the battered little Fuji 3D camera out and flick the power button. Mhari’s lot didn’t break it, even though it’s a bit scratched and beaten up. I am going to assume it’s still loaded with the basilisk firmware rather than the normal happy snappy variety, because if I’m wrong I am going to die in the next few seconds. I’ll just have to trust my lack of any memory of having swapped out the memory card for the one with the regular boot image.
“You’re going to wait in that corner until I receive a phone call from the New Annex,” explains our chatty death-about-town: “There’s a bit of mopping up going on there right now, but once it’s over we can all get in your truck and go home.”
Mopping up? That doesn’t sound right,
I think fuzzily, stealing a surreptitious glance at the camera back.
Have we just been mousetrapped?
Yes, it’s showing the gunsight display, not the camera focus graticule. “And then, ah, yes. Most of you can just
forget
you ever saw me—”