'Those poor kids, and the people who had looked after them; their torn, sometimes shrivelled bodies were already cold. They had been dead before Ben had driven his car even halfway in to the HQ. And I believe that seeing that for himself— that knowing there was nothing he could have done — was the only thing that kept him sane.
'There were no survivors. Thirty-six kids and eight staff, dead or… or disappeared. Gone from us, anyway. For you see, we knew only too well that the ones who weren't there… that they weren't survivors, either. And certainly they'd have been better off dead. For they were now undead, or if not now, then soon. There was no other explanation for their absence; unless they had simply been taken as food, for later. But if that was the case, why only adults, when the children had been murdered out of hand and left behind? Anyway:
'The missing staff, three of them — or rather two of them, since last night — were Denise Karalambos, a paediatrician from Athens, Andre Corner, a psychiatric specialist from London, and
… and someone who isn't any longer a problem: Bruce Trennier, the engineer. As for why they were singled out, there are theories but we can't be sure. Trennier, as we've seen, found favour as a lieutenant. Perhaps the others are similarly situated. But anyone who feels sorry for them can forget it. They'd be better off dead — they're going to be better off dead. At least, that has to be our point of view. Not to mention our intention.
'But about Zek — and excuse me if I seem offhand; it's simply that I find it best to be cold about certain things, for I'm sure my emotions would be just as fragile as anyone else's if I were to forget myself and let them hold sway — Zek hadn't suffered. When that blast hit the sump, she hadn't felt a thing. Down in the basement, everything was askew. The reinforced concrete floor had buckled upwards; the turrets had been blown off their bases like popping a pair of corks; the cave of the resurgence… simply wasn't there any more! The walls and roof were completely caved in, and it's a wonder that the rear end of the Refuge hadn't followed suit.
'The Wamphyri and their lieutenants must have felt it, too: that awesome blast. Indeed, any creature in that basement — any creature of normal flesh and blood — would have been stunned by the concussion or even killed by the shock of it. But then, the Wamphyri aren't human, and in all probability it only served to enrage them further. Certainly they raged through the Refuge.
'The only good thing to come of it all, as far as I could tell, was that one of those bloody awful Gates was now well and truly closed. Oh, the Gate itself was still there, miles up the underground river, under the Carpathian foothills, but its single exit was finally blocked by two thousand tons of fractured concrete slabs and God only knows how much solid rock.
'So much for that, but what about the three creatures who had come through and were already in our world? What about them and their lieutenants, and now a trio of new thralls to aid and advise them in their Earthly ventures? And three very intelligent thralls, at that, who knew the ways of Earth?
'That, we believe, is the main reason why those three were spared… or cursed, depending on how you see it: because they could add to Malinari's intelligence of this new and potentially dangerous world. And we also see something of his cunning — and of his ruthlessness, too — in the murder of the innocents. It was simply a matter of leaving no one behind to speak about what they had witnessed.
'For you see, only six of the victims appeared to have… to have been used. And where they had been fairly well drained, the rest of them were just dead. But horribly dead. For most of them it had been instantaneous: stiffened fingers with nails as hard and as sharp as chisels had chopped through their backs or into their chests, to break their spines or crush their hearts. The terrible strength of the Wamphyri! But others… we don't think some of the others had it so, well, so 'easy'.
'I said that certain corpses were shrivelled. But 'shrivelled' doesn't say it all by any means. Lardis, when he saw those bodies, said it was Szwart's work. It wasn't simply a reduction of bodily fluids but of… I don't know, of the substance, the essence — the soul? — of the victims. The destruction of whatever it is that makes a person human, giving him shape, character, humanity, for Christ's sake.' These pitiful things, they no longer had any of that. Picture the last apple on the tree, all wrinkled and dried out by the sun, all fallen in, with the last of its juices fermented and sick inside it. When it falls or if you touch it, its skin splits, and deep in its core the pulp is rotten and black. That's what they were like… 'And there were others whose eyes were open, staring, quite empty, and for all that they were dead I couldn't help but feel that they hadn't known very much about it. Their bodies weren't shrivelled like those of Szwart's victims, no, but it seemed to me that their minds had been. And Lardis told us Malinari would have been responsible for that.
'As for the female victims: their pale dead faces were full of awe, amazement… rapture? Some kind of exquisite, delicious agony? It's true that I don't have the words for it, but I might have a name: Vavara….'
Well, enough. There are no words that can say how we felt. Appalled doesn't nearly cover it. And nothing we could do about it, not then, not immediately. What, we should alert the authorities, shout it to the world, initiate total panic and put the fear of God and all the devils of hell into every mortal human being on the entire planet… if we were believed? We couldn't do any of those things, and for obvious reasons. Can't you just picture the witchhunts? God, but we'd be back in the Dark Ages! Witch-pricking and human bonfires, and licences to torture and kill handed out willy-nilly, free to anyone with a grudge.
'Medical research would stop, stop dead — or undead! The laboratories would search for cures, of course they would, and spread the thing faster than a plague. Blood donors? You think we're short of blood now? But blood would become the most precious of commodities, and keeping it the first priority. People locked in their homes, making them impregnable fortresses, defending them with guns, silver, stakes, crossbows and whatever. And the filthy rich with their private armies, making the odd, eccentric hermit of, say, Howard Hughes's meager stature seem like a high-profile socialite by comparison.
'Borders. In the last fifteen to twenty years we've seen them open up. Britain has been cagey about controls, passports and such, thank God — but Europe? Can't you just imagine the panic, see the chaos as all the old rules and statutes were reinstated, the checkpoints rushed back into being, with armed guards at ports and airports, and not forgetting the reservoirs, farms, fisheries, and… and anywhere where food is processed? And how long before countries started blaming each other?
'When the shit — excuse me, the accusations — started flying, Russia and Romania would probably take the brunt of it, if only because the Gates are on their territory. But what about the UK, Great Britain? We've known about the Gates for thirty-odd years! Or am I just talking about 'we,' the team, the organization — E-Branch itself, for God's sake — and our involvement? As for our Minister Responsible, the 'Invisible Man' at the top: hull But haven't we all heard about this — er, how does it go? — this 'culpable deniability,' or some such gobbledygook? 'Damage limitation,' and the like? Does anyone care to guess what those things really mean? They're just ways of carrying on lying to cover up unpalatable truths that weren't told the first time around, that's all. And folks, what that boils down to is we would get crucified! The end of E-Branch… and who would look after the shop then?
'And that's not the end of it. Hell, I've barely started! Sooner or later the world would find out that the Russians had actually made the Gate at Perchorsk, an experiment that didn't work out. And the same world would demand that they destroy it. Too damned late, of course, but destroy it anyway. Oh, really? What, with Mikhail Suvorov's henchmen in Moscow still waiting for it to pay off) They should shut down a potential goldmine just because the gold-greedy West couldn't stand the competition? And can't you just see the old Iron Curtain slamming shut again, and that old red flag flying as before?
'Oh, they might get the message eventually — when nights turned to nightmares — and then they'd destroy it quick enough. But how? As they were ready to do it the last time around, with nukes? For just like the rest of us the Soviets have made 'progress' in the last quarter-century, and I really don't care to speculate about what they might do now… but I will, if only to make the point and get this over and done with:
'Nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons; missiles with multiple warheads, launched through the Gate at Perchorsk. The total devastation of a world — Nathan's world — and Nathan and all his people, all the Szgany, with it. Neutron bombs, yes, so that all life would die but the gold would still be there, with no one and nothing to deny its plundering, its massive, planetwide tomWooting! Which is fine, or not, except we don't even know if neutron radiation will kill the Wamphyri. Only that it will kill everything else.
'And meanwhile the vampires would be raging on this world.
Because if we killed a couple of thralls, the Lords would make more. Survival, people: the damned survival of the damned! And how long before total embargoes — in effect, sieges — were laid on entire islands, nations, continents, as the terror overtook them one by one? And how long then before the missiles and the neutron bombs were flying again, this time on our world? We've had 'final solutions' before, but there are holocausts and holocausts.
