lit up. The vessel was like a ghost ship. Alex led the team up clattering steps to a wire mesh walkway high above the water. Through an open hatch, and they found themselves wandering through dark, narrow passages that twisted left and right through the bowels of the ship.
‘You would think there’d be someone on board,’ Greg said. ‘Everything’s been left open.’ Alex didn’t reply, but she’d been thinking the same thing. After a few more turns and a few more open hatchways, they came to a deserted canteen with plastic chairs and tables.
‘Someone was here,’ Mundhra said, pointing at the half-eaten food on plates on one of the tables. A chair was overturned. ‘And left in a hurry,’ he added.
‘We’ll keep looking,’ Alex said.
On the next level down, they could hear the echoey creaking of the ship’s hull. It seemed almost alive, breathing, like being inside the belly of a giant whale. Pipes and ducts snaked along the grimy metal walls and low ceilings.
‘I can smell something,’ Alex murmured. She followed her nose a little way further. Put her left hand out and gently pushed open a hatch marked ‘STORAGE’ as she silently drew her pistol with her right.
Then Greg could smell it too, and experience told him what it was. If he’d still been a human, he’d have been puking out his guts.
They’d found the ship’s crew. And until someone found another for hire, the Anica wasn’t leaving the Port of London in a hurry.
Dim light streamed into the room through a single porthole. The ship’s crew had been using the place as a dump for scrap — a burnt-out winch motor, bits of old chain and cable, piles of rusty bolts, lengths of scaffold pipe.
But it wasn’t the heaped junk that Alex was looking at. The storage room looked as if it had been hosed down in blood. Gallons of blood. The walls were caked with dried purple-brown swirls of it. Pools had collected in the hollows of the floor, some of the larger ones still wet and congealing. The floor was scattered with body parts so torn and mutilated that it was hard to tell what some of them were. Those that were still recognisable as human arms and legs, heads and pieces of torso, were pale and shrivelled, almost mummified.
‘They were drained,’ Alex said. ‘Probably while they were still alive. Then whoever did this tore them apart.’ She stepped over a half-eaten ribcage. ‘There are five, maybe six men here. I’m guessing these are the guys we thought we were here to meet.’
Greg was about to say something when the claustrophobic space around them was filled with blasting noise.
Becker had been standing at his shoulder, surveying the scene inside the room.
Suddenly he was flying forward, pitching over on his face, screaming in agony, his legs kicking out.
For an eighth of a second, Alex stared down at him. Watched the grotesque swelling of his flesh, his face distorting, the veins standing out from the skin. Reaching burst-point and then erupting in a spray of gore. Even before Becker had spattered like a ripe tomato in a vice, she knew what she was seeing.
The effects of a Nosferol bullet.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Out of the shadows of the passageway came six fleeting, running shapes; and suddenly the darkness was filled with bursts of white-yellow flame as their attackers opened up with automatic gunfire. Alex threw herself flat on the floor and saw the others do the same. Bullets whipped past and slammed into the walls behind them. She caught glimpses of the attackers by the strobe lights of the muzzle flashes.
The leader was female. Her long hair was jet black and wild. The red leather jumpsuit she was wearing could have been painted onto her slim, curvaceous figure.
She was cradling a Heckler & Koch submachine gun, and a sword in a scabbard dangled from the gunbelt around her narrow waist.
Behind her was one of the biggest men Alex had ever seen. He was more than six and a half feet tall, and the combat vest he was wearing stretched tightly over his muscular chest and shoulders. His bulk contrasted sharply with the ferret-like, darting shape of the guy next to him. Behind him, another woman, blonde, studded white leather biker jacket, gripping a stubby pistol like she knew how to use it. The rear was brought up by an Oriental male and a Teutonic-looking, sharp-featured female with cropped brown hair, who was clutching a grenade launcher.
They’d walked into a trap. But these six were no vampire hunters. Alex could recognise her own species with split-second intuition. These were vampires. Hunting their own kind. She could worry about the reason why later.
As Greg and Mundhra scrambled for cover, Alex lashed out with her foot. Her heel connected hard with the hatch door and it slammed shut with a juddering clang before the attackers could reach it. She leapt to her feet and jumped over Becker’s ruined body to grab a length of scaffold pole from the bloody floor. She wedged it between the hatch door and the opposite wall just in time. Something rammed against the door with the force of a battering ram. The door quivered, but held. Muted gunfire came from outside. Bullets raked the steel and punched a wild pattern of dents in it that jutted proud like rivet heads.
Alex and Greg looked at each other. ‘You thinking what I’m thinking?’ she said.
‘Grenade launcher.’
And if the grenade was primed with Nosferol, in a few seconds the room would be no place for vampires to be hanging about. Alex snatched up Becker’s fallen 9mm Walther and leapt across the butcher’s yard in the middle of the room, using the muzzle of the gun to punch out the glass in the porthole. She sprang up into the deep, round recess in the wall and scrambled through. Outside, the cold wind whipped her hair over her face. She dropped ten feet down the side of the hull and landed softly on a walkway. Looking up, she saw Greg emerge and drop down to land beside her, then Mundhra. They sprinted away along the clattering walkway, heading towards the deck.
Less than two seconds later a deafening blast and a shriek of ripping metal shook the ship. The attackers had breached the hatch. Alex glanced back to see the black-haired female leap from the smoking porthole and land like a gymnast on the walkway behind them. The huge black guy came thudding down in her wake, then the others. The woman opened fire with the submachine gun and bullets screamed off the metal wall by Alex’s head.
Then it was sixty seconds of frantic sprinting, zigzagging, staying low while bullets zipped all around them, ricochets howling off the walkway rail and the steel floor. Alex leapt down a further fifteen feet to the deck and hit the ground running.
Greg was close behind, followed by Mundhra. They retreated up the deck as the attackers kept coming, using the stacks of drums and other ship debris as cover while they returned fire. Greg dropped into a crouch, took careful aim and let off a string of rapid shots that took down the sharp-faced female with the grenade launcher before she could fire another round and blow them all to pieces. Before she’d even hit the deck, she was bursting open like a sausage on a hot grill and her blood was spattering in a wide circle. A voice screamed out ‘Petra!’
With Becker’s Walther in one hand and her own Desert Eagle in the other, Alex chased the Oriental vampire in her sights as he leapt behind a stack of crates and old rope. She squeezed off four rounds from each so fast it sounded like one continuous explosion. The strangled shriek and the blood burst from behind the crates told her that now it was three against four. Maybe the odds were evening up. Maybe.
Mundhra gave her the thumbs-up as he aimed his pistol over an oil drum. In the split second that he took his eyes off the enemy, the black-haired female rattled off a string of rounds at him. Mundhra ducked, but not before one of her bullets had sent his gun spinning out of his hand. He yelled in pain and rage as the weapon clattered across the deck. He took a chance and went rolling out to retrieve it.
Too big a chance. The woman chased him with another sustained burst of automatic fire and his body went into spasm as bullets punched a ragged line of holes through his chest. His tortured eyes met Alex’s as he went down — then he was spattering across the deck in a shiny slick of blood and meat.
Now it was just Alex and Greg against four, and they were being steadily beaten back towards the ship’s
