Red Eye - 02 Read online

  PRAISE FOR JAMES LOVEGROVE

  “John Redlaw is an inspired creation, a dauntless-hero-without-a-past saved from cliché by his faith and humanity, who carries the reader with him through the fast-paced, occasionally stomach-churning narrative.”

  The Guardian on Redlaw

  “Lovegrove has a terse, clear prose that carries the reader along... All in all, a stonking good read and a refreshing change to the paranormal romance that seems to dominate the bloodsucking genre. Buy it, read it, enjoy it.”

  The British Fantasy Society on Redlaw

  “The action doesn’t let up for a second, but it’s clear that Lovegrove has his hands firmly on the reins of the plot... It’s a lot of fun to read and gives you pause for thought at the same time. I really hope this is the start of the series and not a one off.”

  Graeme’s Fantasy Book Review on Redlaw

  “Pick up James Lovegrove’s latest novel and you can rest assured that you are in the safe hands of a master craftsman.”

  SFX Magazine on The Age of Ra

  “One of the most interesting and adventurous British writers... Lovegrove has become to the 21st Century what JG Ballard was to the 20th.”

  The Bookseller on Days

  “Typically clever and gripping... Written in clear, terse prose, this is hard-edged, fast-paced reading. Pure gold for boys who have read everything by Anthony Horowitz… or have not been able to tackle him yet.”

  The Times on Kill Swap

  JAMES LOVEGROVE

  REDLAW

  RED EYE

  Solaris Books

  ALSO BY JAMES LOVEGROVE

  Novels

  The Hope • Days • The Foreigners

  Untied Kingdom • Worldstorm

  Provender • Gleed • Redlaw

  Co-writing with Peter Crowther

  Escardy Gap

  THE PANTHEON SERIES

  The Age Of Ra • The Age Of Zeus • The Age Of Odin

  Age Of Aztec • Age of Anansi (e-book)

  Novellas

  How The Other Half Lives

  Gig

  Collections of Short Fiction

  Imagined Slights

  Diversifications

  For Younger Readers

  The Web: Computopia • Warsuit 1.0

  The Black Phone

  For Reluctant Readers

  Wings • The House of Lazarus

  Ant God • Cold Keep • Dead Brigade

  Kill Swap • Free Runner

  THE 5 LORDS OF PAIN SERIES

  The Lord Of The Mountain • The Lord Of The Void

  The Lord Of Tears • The Lord Of The Typhoon • The Lord Of Fire

  Writing as Jay Amory

  THE CLOUDED WORLD SERIES

  The Fledging Of Az Gabrielson • Pirates Of The Relentless Desert

  Darkening For A Fall • Empire Of Chaos

  First published 2011 by Solaris

  an imprint of Rebellion Publishing Ltd,

  Riverside House, Osney Mead,

  Oxford, OX2 0ES, UK

  www.solarisbooks.com

  ISBN (EPUB): 978-1-84997-450-9

  ISBN (MOBI): 978-1-84997-451-6

  Copyright © James Lovegrove 2012

  Cover Art by Clint Langley

  The right of the author to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owners.

  Designed & formatted by Rebellion Publishing

  NEW YORK IN winter.

  The city is white, white, whiter than white. Snow has fallen freshly today, and more is forecast to fall later tonight. The city is featherbedded in thick drifts of the stuff. Manhattan, all twenty-two square miles of it, is no longer its usual muscular, hard-edged self. The skyscrapers and wharves instead look soft and strangely fragile. This urban island has become like some massive, impossibly intricate snowflake, lying quiet beneath a grim grey sky.

  Down in the canyon streets, the valley avenues, traffic moves, but sluggishly. Yellow cabs make up most of it, crawling in long lines between the heaps of banked-up slush at the roadside. People are out and about but not in great numbers, and although in a hurry, because New Yorkers are always in a hurry, they walk with care. The ground is icy. Even boots with the ruggedest soles are no proof against slipping.

  It’s January, Christmas nothing more than a bauble memory, New Year a forgotten hangover. The whole of the eastern seaboard of the United States is in the grip of the freezing weather, and no one is finding it at all festive. The band of snow extends as far inland as Chicago and as far south as Florida, where frostbitten oranges are dying on the bough and retirees who thought they’d escaped the cold forever have begun to succumb to hypothermia and pneumonia.

  Here in New York, the Hudson is locked solid, a single rumpled floe. You could probably cross it on foot, if you were crazy enough to try. Icicles twice as long as a man is tall hang from the Statue of Liberty’s torch and crown. The wind that shoots in off the river lives up to the bird of prey it’s nicknamed after, the hawk. If it catches you, it sinks talons into you which seem to carve clean through your flesh to the bone.

  So let’s try and find some warmth, shall we? I know of a place. You might not like it, but at least there’s no snow there and the wind can’t penetrate.

  It’s underground. Deep down. Come with me.

  We glide below the city into the subway. We go from the lighted areas, platforms where evening commuters grumble and stamp, into the tunnels. We travel through the transit system, following labyrinthine twists and turns of track, shunning the roar and clatter of trains, heading for darker, deeper, silent parts.

  Now—yes—we’re where few dare venture, where maybe even angels fear to tread. We’ve come to a region of the subway that’s found only on old outdated maps. Its existence is a matter of debate even to the Metropolitan Transportation Authority itself. The assumption is that this and all the other disused sections have been walled up, fenced off, made safe and inviolable. They were taken off the grid long ago, and no one has really thought about them since.

  In recent years, people have inhabited these manmade caverns. The homeless. The destitute. Human moles. They’ve built little shanty villages, furnished them with scavenged scraps, and made themselves as comfortable as they could. They’ve established their own neighbourhoods, their own rules and laws, and gone about their business more or less free from interference from above.

  Lately, they’ve moved out. They’ve had to.

  Another kind of dweller has taken up residence.

  Down here, where it’s pitch black.

  Where it’s sunless.

  Where it’s always night.

  CHAPTER

  ONE

  THE NEST NUMBERED twenty in all. Sometimes the total might be a couple more than that, or a couple fewer, as newcomers arrived or existing members departed, but by and large it stabilised at twenty. Twenty seemed optimal. Sustainable.

  Food was the one regulating factor. There wasn’t much of it to go round. Rats were the main source of nourishment, followed by stray cats and dogs, the odd pigeon or bat. Enough prey could be found to keep twenty bellies full, twenty thirsts slaked, but only just.

  Humans?

  Not advisable.

  Tempting.

  But off the menu.

  To abduct and kill a human would be to risk drawing attention to the nest’s existence. The nest members were trying to be as unobtrusive as possible. They didn’t want to advertise their presence. That way
, they might just survive.

  There were, after all, dangers.

  Vampires were not welcome in this country.

  No one wanted them.

  More than that: no one had any sympathy for them.

  Feelings ran deep in America. There were powerful social currents at work. Certain hostile forces at play.

  Dangers.

  MLADEN WAS NOMINALLY in charge. A vampire community really needed a shtriga if it was to be orderly and at peace with itself, but in the absence of a shtriga an ordinary vampire would do. In this instance, Mladen was the smartest among them, or—which amounted to the same thing—the most cautious. So the others listened when he spoke and, unless they strenuously objected to something he said, they complied with his wishes.

  Mladen hailed from the former Yugoslavia. He had grown up watching his nation tear itself apart during the civil war, neighbour turning against neighbour, friend against friend, like fighting dogs let off the leash. He had seen his hometown, Sarajevo, bombed to rubble, with certain streets becoming shooting galleries for snipers bearing cheap Russian rifles and ancient ancestral grudges. By the age of seventeen he had witnessed more death than any youngster should.

  His memories of that time were perhaps hazier than they would have been if he were still just a man. Mladen’s old life, before he was turned, often seemed little more than a dream, a succession of loosely linked events that may well have happened to someone else.

  The memories were still sharp, however. They filled him with the belief that what mattered, above all else, was cohesion. Societies could fall apart in an instant, with little prompting, unless their leaders remained vigilant. Someone had to watch out for everyone else and take care of them.

  That was why Mladen was on sentry duty, carrying out a self-imposed routine of patrolling all the tunnels near the nest. Now and then he would assign the job to one of the other vampires, but nobody performed it as thoroughly and diligently as he did. And nobody treated it with the same level of seriousness. The vampires felt cosy where they were, safe from intrusion and harm. They were pleased with this little haven of theirs.

  Mladen could never be that complacent himself.

  Alert as always, he picked his way along the old rusted rails, pausing every so often to listen out and sniff the air. He was alive to the minutest of stimuli: the scurry of mouse paws, the drip of distant water, the invisible patterns of draughts and breezes. He had established a detailed picture of his environment in his mind. He knew every inch, every nuance of his subterranean home. He knew when things were as they should be...

  ...and when they were not.

  Mladen caught a stray scent. Something shadowy and pheromonal. Hard to identify. Anomalous.

  Halting, he lifted his nose, drawing in a deep breath.

  A part of his brain recognised the scent and understood it to be familiar and no threat.

  Another part said the opposite.

  It was a hybrid smell. A composite of known and unknown.

  Mladen’s hackles rose. Unconsciously, he bared his fangs.

  People were coming. Vampires? Not-vampires? Mladen was confused as to what they were, and his confusion was in itself alarming.

  Instinct urged him to flee, find refuge, save his own skin.

  But Mladen was responsible for the others in the nest. He was their alpha male, their protector.

  So he turned and ran back to his fellow vampires.

  And by doing that, doomed them all.

  “SIR? GOT A hit. Motion, dead ahead. You got it?”

  “Loud and clear. This is Red Eye One to all units. We have probable V-contact. Converge on me and prepare to engage. I repeat, converge on me and prepare to engage.”

  “Roger that. Red Eyes Four and Five on their way.

  “Reading you, Red Eye One. Six and Seven also en route.”

  “Hee hee hee! Here we come. Who you gonna call? Nestbusters!”

  “Seven, kindly stow that shit. We are not a bunch of beer-chugging hillbillies out on a duck hunt. These are military-grade operations, and if you do not treat them as such I will personally put a nine-millimetre round in your goddamn skull. Do I make myself clear, soldier?”

  “Sir, yes, sir.”

  “Sir?”

  “Two?”

  “Sonar suggests a cluster of at least a dozen V’s. Maybe more. Half a klick due north. And, uh, nasal-input data confirms it.”

  “Yeah, I smell ’em too. Gentlemen, lady, let’s go do what they’re paying us to do, and make some undead properly dead.”

  MLADEN DIDN’T NEED to shout out a warning. The nest members sensed his panic from a distance. They detected the sharp, fearful odour radiating off him as he approached, long before they could see or even hear him. It had a distinctive sour tang, like milk gone bad.

  Some of the vampires had been asleep; now all at once they were not. They sprang from their beds—the creaking cots and stained mattresses left behind by previous occupants of the tunnel—shedding their threadbare blankets and quilts.

  Others, already awake, set aside whatever they were doing and rose to their feet. Two of them, a husband and wife, laid down the half-drained carcass of a black cat they had been sharing. They wiped their mouths and peered in the direction Mladen’s scent was coming from. A pair of teenaged girls—they looked like teenaged girls—abandoned the game of chess they had been playing in the dark.

  The air was filled with expressions of uncertainty. Hisses. Growls. The vampires looked at one another, hunching into defensive postures.

  Mladen appeared at the furthermost visible point of the tunnel, where it curved out of sight. He was running full tilt, helping propel himself along by digging fingernails into the brickwork of the wall.

  “Quick!” he yelled. “We must go! They are coming.”

  “Who?” enquired one of the others. “Who is coming?”

  “I don’t know. It doesn’t matter. They are enemy, I can tell. We go or we die.”

  Now the other vampires could smell what Mladen had smelled, that inexplicable mix of human and something else, something essentially vampiric. It threw them into consternation.

  “Don’t just stand there!” Mladen cried. He had covered most of the distance between him and the nest, some two hundred metres, in a little under ten seconds. “Do as I say. Go that way, further into the tunnel network. Split up. If they catch us, they will—”

  And then Mladen was no more. He exploded in a spray of particulate matter that scattered along the tracks with the momentum of his running. The boom of a gun report rumbled like thunder.

  The vampires gaped.

  Seven armour-clad figures were spread out across the width of the tunnel. They were sprinting as fast as Mladen had been, if without the same feral urgency. They had rifles in their hands. Their bodies were festooned with other weaponry: pistols, knives, grenades. Their heads were helmeted and their faces entirely masked save for their eyes, which gleamed crimson.

  Boom!

  One of the pair of teenaged girls recoiled, flying backwards. She was dust before she hit the ground.

  Boom!

  The husband of the married couple disintegrated before his wife’s eyes.

  Overcoming their shock, the vampires counterattacked. As a pack, united in fear and rage, they hurtled at their assailants. Several of them took to the walls, scurrying horizontally along on all fours so as to be able to leap off and hit their opponents from above. The rest charged, a loping nightmare of talon and fang.

  “ALL OF YOU, stand firm. Make every shot count. The man who writes our cheques likes us to put on a good show. Let’s give him his money’s worth.”

  “Affirmative, Red Eye One.”

  “Heard, understood, acknowledged.”

  “Hell, yeah!”

  THE VAMPIRES LAUNCHED themselves into a withering salvo of gunfire. It wasn’t a fair fight. Really, it wasn’t a fight at all.

  Most of the nest members were annihilated in the first few seconds. Tho
se that survived managed to get within striking distance of their foes, secure in the belief that their superior strength and speed would win the day. One on one, at close quarters, no human was a match for a vampire.

  But these humans, or whatever they were, had astonishing reflexes. Knives were drawn. A single flickering sideways slash, and a vampire head was lopped clean off at the neck. Hardwood blades plunged into hearts and were pulled out again almost instantly, the action so swift that the victim had time to look down and actually see his own ribcage crumbling in on itself, his own torso hollowing into a cascade of ashes.

  Even hand-to-hand, with no weapons at all, the combat was asymmetrical. The vampires were startled to encounter a level of muscle power that was at least equal if not superior to their own. Their talons raked uselessly on armour-sheathed chests and limbs. Crushing fists squeezed their necks and splintered their upper vertebrae.

  Perhaps a minute passed between Mladen’s demise and the elimination of the last member of the nest. It was certainly no longer than that.

  Seven armoured figures stood surrounded by the ashy remnants of almost three times as many vampires.

  No one was even breathing hard.

  THE TEAM COMMANDER, designated Red Eye One, unclipped the mask covering his mouth and nose. It was a contoured bulge of black polycarbonate, miked-up and soundproof. Useful in the theatre of conflict, but also stifling.