[Dept. 19 Files 02] Undead in the Eternal City: 1918 (3 page)

They were gaining on it when the monster reached the end of the alleyway, burst out on to Via del Tritone, turned west, and disappeared momentarily from view.

“It’s getting away!” yelled Kavanagh, but then a chorus of screams pierced the night air ahead of them and they knew he was wrong.

The Special Reconnaissance Unit hurtled out of the alleyway at a flat sprint and accelerated down the wide street. Via del Tritone was crowded with people: gangs of soldiers reeling drunkenly in swaying lines; couples strolling arm in arm; vendors and thieves and pickpockets working their patches with consummate professionalism. But through the middle of the crowd there was a wide, empty corridor, formed by gaping men and women who were staring in the direction the creature had fled.

The five men ran through the crowd, ducking and dodging as the frozen onlookers began to emerge from their shock, their brains already working overtime to rationalise away what they had just seen with their own eyes. Potts, the youngest and the lightest, was in the lead, his rifle slung over his shoulder, his feet flying across the cobbles as he fought to catch up with the thing with the red eyes and fangs.

They could see it now, less than fifty yards ahead of them, weaving from side to side. It was now no more than five feet above the ground, and the body of the woman hung low across its waist.

It’s tiring
, thought Harker, his head pounding with excitement.
We’ve got it.

At Via del Corso, the shambling, broken creature turned north-west and the soldiers followed. They were gaining with every step, now close enough to see the fear in its eyes as it looked over its shoulder at ever increasing intervals. Potts suddenly skidded to a halt, dropped to one knee, and brought his rifle to his shoulder. Harker saw him take aim through the crowds of people, and was able to reach out and shove the rifle’s barrel up into the air a split second before the Private squeezed the trigger. The shot flew harmlessly high, although the huge report brought a fresh cacophony of screams from the staring, bewildered onlookers.

Potts rounded on Harker and the Captain took half a step back. There was fury in the young Private’s usually open face and, for the briefest of seconds, Quincey was afraid. He swallowed it down and hauled his sniper to his feet.

“Too many civilians!” he yelled. “Even for you! Come on!”

The anger disappeared from Potts’s face so quickly it was as though it had never been there at all, and then he and Harker were running again, straining to catch up to the rest of their friends and the monster ahead of them.

Valeri Rusmanov flew for his life.

He knew that the soldiers were chasing him, that they were gaining with every thudding stride, and pushed himself to move faster, his body screaming with pain as he fought to keep it in the air. If he fell back to the ground, he was dead; there was no way he could escape them on one leg. If he stopped, if he tried to take blood from one of the crowds of gasping onlookers, he was dead; they would be on him before he could drink the first drop. And a terrible new thought occurred to him: he was not sure he would be able to overpower a human in his current condition, much less force his fangs through their skin.

Valeri redoubled his efforts, careening down Via del Corso. He could hear the soldiers shouting, their voices ominously loud, and forced himself not to look back, not to check how close they were to pulling him down out of the air and killing him; it would do him no good to know. At Via del Pontefici, he swept to his left and headed towards the banks of the River Tiber. The shoe at the end of his shattered leg grazed the ground as he made the turn, and he realised with horror that he was exhausted; he was simply not going to be able to keep his broken, shattered body in the air for more than a few more seconds. At the end of the street, he could see the railings that marked the edge of the riverbank, could see the vast rise of St Peter’s Basilica in the distance, could hear the freezing water lapping against the stone banks, and an idea came to him, like a bolt from the blue.

He forced himself forward, using the very last of his strength, and felt himself teeter precariously towards the ground. The voices behind him were loud, so very loud, so full of excitement and hunger, but he forced himself to ignore them. He dragged Ana’s body round so he was carrying her in his arms, like a bride across the threshold on her wedding night. As the sole of his shoe began to skid across the surface of the road, as the railing of the riverbank accelerated towards him, less than ten yards, less then five, Valeri Rusmanov gave a vast, ear-splitting howl of pain and outrage, dipped his head, and tore his wife’s throat out with his teeth.

The jugular vein and the carotid artery gave up the last of their blood, spraying it into his mouth and filling him with temporary power even as his heart broke at the sight of what he had been forced to do to his beloved wife. His good foot touched down two yards short of the railing. Behind him, he heard the footsteps stop and the voices fall silent as, he knew full well, the men brought up their rifles to finish him.

He let his knee bend, lowering himself into a crouch, then, with every fibre of his being, his superhuman being, fuelled by his wife’s blood and four centuries of self-preservation, he leapt into the air and out over the black waters of the Tiber.

Quincey Harker’s finger was squeezing the trigger of his rifle when the monster jumped impossibly high, the body of the woman in its arms. He watched as the dark shape hurtled through the cool, stinking air and crashed down on the far side of the river with an impact that they could hear across the wide span of the Tiber. There was a momentary sense of movement where the monster had landed, then it was gone, lost in the shadows.

Harker looked to his left and right. Ponte Cavour was a hundred and fifty yards to the south, Ponte Regina Margherita three times that far north. By the time they had made their way across either bridge, the monster, if it had survived, would be long gone.

“It’s over,” he said, quietly.

The men of the Special Reconnaissance Unit looked at their Captain. There was excitement on all their faces, tempered only slightly by the unsuccessful end of the pursuit.

“Hell of a chase, though, sir,” said Kavanagh, his face red with exertion, but creased by a wide grin. “Chased it halfway across Rome, we did.”

“It was,” replied Harker. “A hell of a chase.”

The five men went to one another, slapping backs and throwing arms round shoulders, laughing and shouting all at once. When McDonald produced the silver hip flask that accompanied him everywhere, they took swigs of finest single malt and exhaled hot breath into the cool air. Ellis, who had drunk last, wiped his lips with the back of his hand and looked at his Captain.

“Sir,” he said. “That creature was the same as the thing that killed… as the thing we saw in Passchendaele. Wasn’t it?”

“I think so,” replied Harker. “It seemed different, though. The German boy was raving, his mind gone. This man, or whatever it was, didn’t seem like that. He looked very much in control of himself.”

“Until Potts shot his eye out,” said Kavanagh, and the unit fell about laughing.

“Until then,” agreed Harker. Potts smiled shyly; the remorseless, deadly killer had once again disappeared back inside him.

“Here’s my point, sir,” continued Ellis. “This is the second time we’ve encountered this type of creature, in relatively close succession. So, I have to ask, sir. Just what the hell are they?”

Harker looked at his friend. Then suddenly, a great desire filled him: to know the answer to Ellis’s question, to explore this new world that had now revealed itself to him for the second time, and to honour the memory of Thorpe, the friend who had shared his conviction that they could take whatever the world had to throw at them.

“I don’t know,” he said. “But you can rest assured I’m going to find out.”

“Not right now, though?” asked McDonald. “Not this second?”

Harker smiled. “No, John. Not right now. Right now, I think we all deserve a drink. Ellis?”

“Yes, sir?”

“Lead the way.”

In August 1918, a mutated version of the influenza strain that had first appeared at the beginning of the year unleashed a medical holocaust that lasted for barely two months, but remains unequalled in human history.

By the end of the year, when the number of new cases began to fall, more than five hundred million people had been infected during the two phases of the pandemic. Approximately forty-five million died, almost five per cent of a population struggling to come to terms with the devastation wrought by the war that had been over for less than a year.

For Quincey Harker, the end of the war would see him return to Britain with his mind full of the strange creatures he had now encountered on two separate occasions.

He had no way of knowing they would occupy the rest of his life.

Join Quincey Harker in London in 1919 for the third instalment of the Department 19 Files:

THE NEW BLOOD

London, 1919

Safely returned from the killing fields of Europe, Quincey Harker is bored and restless, his mind full of the terrible things he has seen, images he cannot seem to forget. So when his father invites him to hear a proposition from him and his friends, Quincey is hopeful that a new project may be just the thing to take his mind off the monsters he encountered: terrible creatures that flew and howled and killed without mercy. He has no idea quite how wrong he is...

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First published as an ebook in Great Britain by HarperCollins
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2013

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Text copyright © Will Hill 2013

Ebook Edition © FEBRUARY 2013 ISBN: 9780007522231
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