Avengers, Page 3

  The woman at once went after him, seemed to flow upon him, her slender hands reaching out like long, raking claws. And as for the first time Galliard saw her actual face…so his jaw fell open. Beautiful? But she was the worst possible nightmare hag! Her eyes were green as jewels, but they burned crimson in their cores, as if lit by internal fires. And her jaws…her teeth!

  Her face closed with the steward’s shoulder in the joining with his neck, and Galliard heard her lustful snarl as she bit him there. Then he knew what they were—monsters out of myths and legends, but real for all that—and fought harder still. A mistake, for he left the man-creature no choice. And:

  You have a saying, said that one in Galliard’s mind, which has it that the eyes are the windows of the soul. It may be so; I who am without a soul cannot say for sure—but they are most certainly a means of entry to the brain! And likewise the ears: routes of access to the inner mind, these organs. The ears that hear—(his index fingers extended themselves, projecting deep into the purser’s ears, their knifelike nails slicing a way in through flesh and cartilage)—and the eyes that see. (Now his thumbs turned purple, vibrating as they elongated and dislodged Galliard’s eyeballs, penetrating the soft tissue behind them to sink into the purser’s brain.) I want to know what you’ve heard and all that you’ve seen. Painful, aye—but didn’t I warn you not to resist me?

  Galliard’s screams were thin, high-pitched wailing things—more like the whining of a small child than the agonized denial of a tortured man—as his mind was drained and he “forgot” all that he’d ever known about the Evening Star. And with his face hideously altered, he crumpled to the floor as Lord Malinari of the Wamphyri finally withdrew his brain-slimed fingers.

  By then Vavara, Malinari’s “partner,” if only for the time being, had dealt with the second steward. But the third was recovering from her hypnotic spell. Blinking his eyes and shaking his head, he peered slack-jawed at his shipmates where they had slumped to the deck in blood that fountained from severed arteries in their necks; also at the spastically twitching, crumpled figure of the purser, his eyes flopping on his bloodied cheeks, while his cries turned to a vacant moaning as his cruelly depleted, crippled brain closed down his survival systems one by one.

  But already muffled enquiries were sounding from beyond the reinforced door to the bridge. Someone in there must have heard the purser’s strangled, inarticulate babbling, and Malinari saw at least two outlines in motion behind the frosted glass of the door’s upper panel. With no time to waste on the third steward, he grabbed him and swung him out through a hatch and up against the deck rail. And stiffening his hand and arm to a ramrod, the vampire slammed bone fingers into his victim’s chest, rupturing his heart. Then, after yanking his hand free, a push was sufficient to topple the steward backwards over the rail, sending him plummeting to the promenade deck twenty feet below.

  Down there, a half-dozen or so early risers were leaning on the rail, taking in the view. As Malinari snarled his hatred of the seething sunlight and snatched himself back into the shade, he saw their startled, horrified faces glancing up at him. Hah! As yet they hadn’t the slightest notion of what real horror was. But they’d know soon enough. Oh, yes, they would know! And gritting his awesome teeth against the agony of his seared forearms and face, Malinari returned to Vavara—

  —In time to see her trying the handle of the door to the bridge. As Malinari had learned from the purser, however, this was a security door with a voice-activated lock; Vavara’s hiss of frustration wasn’t a voice or code that it would recognize. But she wasn’t much known for her patience, either, and before he could caution her against it she’d balled a fist and struck furiously at the pane of frosted glass.

  Fortified against ordinary shocks or blows, still the pane caved in, shattering as if struck by an axe. Vavara’s hand continued on unhindered, caught at the throat of a blurred figure on the far side, and drew him headlong through the razor-sharp, dagger-rimmed frame. Deeply cut about his face and arms, shouting his pain and shock, he was sent skidding along the deck in his own blood, only coming to a halt at Malinari’s feet.

  Malinari dragged him upright—scanned his bloodied, wide-eyed face, his tattered, spattered ship’s uniform—and said, “Not Captain Geoff Anderson, no. Merely his underling. But you are going to take us to him, aren’t you?” And he propelled him back towards Vavara at the door.

  Vavara’s guise was down now; furious, she showed herself in all her horror. Her forked devil’s tongue wriggled behind teeth like twin rows of knives; her eyes flared red; her clawed hands brooked no resistance as she sank fingers like rusty fishhooks deep into the First Mate’s cheek, lifting him up onto his toes. And:

  “Open this door,” she hissed, “lest I’m tempted to toss you through it. For I refuse to climb in the way you came out!”

  “It’s voice-activated,” Malinari told her. “Let him speak.”

  “Speak, then,” said Vavara. “Speak now, or lose what’s left of your face!”

  “D-d-door!” the man gasped, and a buzz sounded from within, followed by a series of clicks. When the clicks stopped, Vavara turned the handle, thrust her shoulder at the door, and when it sprang open hurled the Mate ahead of her onto the bridge.

  Captain Anderson was there; he was using a telephone at the traditional, mainly ceremonial wheel. Taking one look at Vavara and Malinari where they stood framed in the doorway, he dropped the phone and made a clumsy run for the radio room in a soundproofed, glass-walled wing of the bridge. Calmly following him, Malinari caught up with him just as he uttered the command that opened the door. And taking Anderson by the scruff of the neck, he thrust him ahead into the radio room.

  An operator sat at the console with earphones on his head. With starting eyes he glanced around, saw the Captain hurtling towards him, was slammed back into the console. Winded, he toppled from his chair as Anderson rebounded from him, and in the next moment Malinari stood over both men.

  Grabbing the radio operator by the hair, Malinari drew him to his feet and almost casually enquired of him, “Have you sent any messages? About a becalmed caïque, perhaps, and a rescue at sea?”

  “N-n-no!” the radio man gasped. “I…I was waiting on the Captain’s orders.”

  “Eh?” said Malinari, raising an eyebrow. “What’s that? This one’s orders, do you mean?” Grabbing Anderson by the throat, he exerted the massive strength of a Lord of the Wamphyri and tore out his windpipe. The Captain died in a crimson welter of blood and mangled gristle, which Malinari draped over the bald, sweating head of the radio operator. And as that one shrank back and down, the Great Vampire effortlessly took up the Captain’s body by the shoulder and hip, hoisted it overhead for a moment, then slammed it down onto the radio console with such force that the entire bank of dials and switches flew apart under the impact. Then, as a sputtering shower of electrical sparks ensued, and a whiff of acrid smoke drifted from the wreckage, Malinari said:

  “Thus you have a new Captain. You may call me Captain Malinari. Or better still, Lord Malinari.”

  “The…the radio!” the other sputtered hoarsely. “You’ve destroyed it! And not just the radio but navigation. Satellite navigation was routed through these controls!”

  “Oh, I know!” Malinari nodded. “So now we’re not only dumb, but we’re blind, too—that is, unless we go to manual. Can you by any chance pilot this vessel?”

  “I’m not q-q-qualified.” The man wiped blood from his face, his hand trembling violently. “But y-y-yes, I think so.”

  “Excellent,” said Malinari. “The purser thought so, too. So if you’d told me otherwise…well, that would have gone quite badly for you. So perhaps you’ll now consult the charts, find a suitable rock, and dock us?”

  “A rock?” The man looked this way and that. “Dock us?”

  “Wreck us,” Malinari nodded. “Bring us up aground.”

  “But first he must see us under way again,” said Vavara, as she entered the room. Seeing her in
close proximity, the radio operator shrank down more yet.

  “So then, things to do,” Malinari told him. “You have your orders. But try not to fail me, or I may put you over the side where you will be drawn into the propellers. And whatever else you do, do not think to disobey me. That would prove even more…unfortunate.”

  Hooking the man under the chin, Vavara drew him upright and let him see the gape of her jaws and smell her breath. And, “Very well, then,” she glared at him. “Is all understood?”

  He couldn’t speak, and so simply nodded his head.

  Releasing him, she turned to Malinari. “I think I hear running footsteps. Are they coming to their senses, do you think?”

  He shrugged. “Very possibly. As you’ll recall, the Captain was on the phone speaking to someone when we broke in. Also, I killed a steward and hurled him down a deck. That should definitely have alerted them to the fact that something is amiss.”

  “Then perhaps it’s time we introduced ourselves,” she said. “To the rest of the crew, and then to the passengers.”

  “Aye,” Malinari agreed. “To all of them eventually. Myself, I am sorely in need of refreshment, and I’ve heard the cuisine aboard these pleasure cruisers is superb.”

  “Cuisine?” she laughed throatily. “Then you shall have your choice. What’s your preference, blonde or brunette?”

  “Redhead, I think,” Malinari leered. “There are bound to be a few among the fourteen hundred on board. But first there’s an arms locker we should see to—just a few small arms—in the purser’s cabin on the main deck. We should heave that overboard, I think. Our leeches have work enough with all our burns, without that they’re overtaxed healing bullet holes, too!”

  “I agree,” she answered. “As for the rest—the passengers and crew—it won’t be long before they discover that the only safe places are on the open decks, out in the sunlight.”

  “Safe while it lasts,” Malinari nodded thoughfully. “And at least until tonight. By which time—if we’re assiduous in our work—we shall have a good many thralls to instruct, vampires in the making.”

  As they left the radio room and made for the shattered door to the bridge deck, the radio operator came staggering in their wake. Malinari glanced at him, reminding him, “Now don’t let us down, will you? If in five minutes’ time this ship isn’t making headway, I’ll know where to come looking for an answer. Oh, and as for that rock I mentioned: the Aegean has plenty of them, as I’m sure you’re aware. So find one on your charts—the nearest one will do—and take us to it.”

  He pointed at the telephone dangling over a varnished spoke of the wooden wheel where the Captain had let it fall. A second spoke supported the First Mate’s limp body; it was sunk deep in the socket of his right eye, having got stuck in his skull when Vavara had slammed him facedown onto it. Now he hung there like a wet towel, with his blood pooling around his knees.

  But the phone was squawking like a tiny strangled chicken, making shrill enquiries. And: “Carry on, then.” Malinari pushed the radio operator forward. “Do something—speak to whoever it is—tell lies and live. But remember, if you intend to survive this, don’t do or say anything too rash.” And with a final monstrous smile, he followed after Vavara out through the door and into hell.

  Hell for the passengers and crew of the Evening Star, but to the Wamphyri a way of life and of undeath which they had kept mainly suppressed for far too long…

  2

  The Survivor

  THREE DAYS LATER…

  Gunnery Commander John Argyle was thirty-eight years old, a good six feet two inches tall, immaculate in lightweight, warm-weather order, blue-eyed, blond, and crew-cut beneath his flat-topped naval officer’s cap…and plainly annoyed. As a man who had gone to sea at eighteen and climbed up through the ranks to his current position—in which he was a stickler for regulations and discipline in general—it was these despised “civilians” or, in ratings’ belowdecks parlance, “landlubbers,” who were the cause of his considerable displeasure.

  More to the point, however, it was the fact that the Captain had seen fit to detail him as escort to this polyglot party of nonnautical and apparently seriously disturbed people. Only add to this their implied VIP status…it did nothing to curb Argyle’s feelings of resentment. For in his estimation—based on previous, mercifully infrequent contact with such “VIPs”—the abbreviation usually stood for Virtually Incompetent Plebs!

  And as for this foursome…

  …Well, what was one to make of them?

  Three of them sun-browned and one pale as a ghost; three of them comparatively “old men” and one little more than a girl or “young woman” at best; three of them Caucasian and one as Chinese as they come—in his looks if not in his accent, which was “pure” Eastender London—and all of them wont to converse with his or her fellows in a kind of double-talk as alien as Martian to the down-to-earth gunnery officer!

  Argyle realized that he’d been scowling just a moment after the leader of his charges—a slightly overweight, broad-shouldered, somewhat lugubrious-looking man called Trask—gave him a much sharper, sideways look and said, “Can’t we get in closer than this? I’d like to get down there, ‘alongside’ or whatever, and see if we can take a look in through the bridge’s windows.” His voice over the headphones was tinny, but even so there was a definite bite to it.

  The group of five was standing in the midsection observation bay of a Royal Navy antisubmarine jet-copter, hooked up to a safety rail with the boarding door open. In front of them and below the oval door frame, the silvery curve of the streamlined starboard pontoon was plainly visible; to anyone suffering from vertigo, it would seem the ideal launching platform into oblivion! Trask and his colleagues had been in a great many far more dangerous places, however, and the height and frequently dizzying motion when the chopper manoeuvered were the least of their concerns.

  “We can indeed get down there and ‘alongside or whatever,’” Argyle eventually answered. “In normal circumstances we’d even be able to land on her—God knows she’s big enough! But we’ve already tried that, remember? And if this really is a new variant strain of the plague…” He let it taper off, shrugged, and went on, “Well, it isn’t a good idea. It could be airborne, and this chopper’s fan is disturbing an awful lot of air. You don’t want to be breathing plague germs, do you?”

  Now Trask looked at Argyle more closely, even penetratingly, and there was something in the older man’s keen green eyes, and in his frown, that warned the gunnery officer not to appear too defiant. But if Argyle couldn’t say it, he could at least think it:

  Get in closer, my backside! What, to a fucking plague ship? What a fucking idiot! A Virtually Incompetent Pleb, indeed!

  But even as Argyle smiled (albeit inwardly) at his own wit, again Trask’s eyes were flashing their singular warning. And:

  “So, you’re an expert in these matters, are you?” He cocked his head a little on one side. “You know all about this plague, right?”

  “I know enough to stand well back from sudden death,” said Argyle, stiffening at Trask’s dry tone, his deadpan expression. “I know that if it’s killed off an entire shipload of passengers and crew in the few days since the ship sailed from Cyprus—taking them all out before they could even tell us what was going on—and that if a chopper only has to touch down on the deck to cost the lives of a pilot, two aircrew, and the ship’s doctor—”

  “You know nothing!” Trask snapped, cutting him off. “You’re merely guessing, and you’re being deliberately obstructive. You don’t much care for me and my people, and you think that you’re wasting your time with us. We’re sightseers—sensation-seekers, that’s all—and you’d much rather be back on Invincible in the Officer’s Mess with your shipmates, than looking after a gaggle of dumb boffins. And as for us: since we can’t possibly achieve anything here, we’d do best to bugger off home and let the Navy handle things their own way…right?”

  For a moment Argyl
e’s mouth fell open in astonishment. This sudden outburst—despite that it was mainly correct—seemed to confirm his original opinion. But since he was here to cater to these people, pander to their needs…he gritted his teeth and said, “Let me assure you, Mr. Trask, that I’m only—”

  “Don’t you go ‘assuring’ us of anything!” The girl standing beside Trask spoke up, narrowing her eyes where she stared into Argyle’s face as intensely as Trask himself. “Mr. Trask’s right: you’ve been thinking your nasty, pig-headed thoughts all along. You consider us high-powered, mentally impoverished bureaucrats or something: morbid thrill-seekers swanning around in the Mediterranean, who’ll eventually report back to our bosses in Whitehall and make out we’ve actually done something. But at the end of the day it’ll be you who gets stuck with the job.”

  Argyle frowned back at her, rubbed at his chin awhile, finally grinned wonderingly…and genuinely! Both Trask and the girl, they’d come pretty close. “Actually,” he answered, “I was thinking you might be Lloyds underwriters or something. From Mr. Trask’s expression, I would have guessed he was calculating his personal losses!”

  Relaxing a little, Trask shook his head. “My future losses, possibly…and not just mine or Lloyds but the world’s. So let me straighten you out, Commander. We’re not the bureaucrats and utter assholes you might think we are. But this time around we are the experts. Yes, there was, and probably still is, a plague here, but it didn’t originate in China and it isn’t what you’ve been made to believe. In broad daylight like this—high noon, as it were—it can’t do us any harm. The only mistake the Navy made, which in the circumstances was pretty much understandable, even if it wasn’t what you’d been advised to do, was to send in that recce chopper in the twilight after sundown.”

  “Would you care to explain?” Argyle had begun to sense something of the other’s authority now. Just looking at this man he knew he wasn’t exaggerating, waffling, or just plain lying, yet at the same time he wasn’t saying too much, either. So what the hell was going on here? What was it all about? “You see, if you really want me to commit this aircraft, placing the pilot, your people, and myself in danger, I really should know what—”