wasn’t in the mood for it, so I kicked him in the face until he stopped screaming, and then I dragged him by the hair into the living room.
The second survivor wasn’t screaming, but he was conscious. Barely. He tried to crawl away, but his attempt was feeble. Once I disarmed him, I grabbed his ankle and pulled him out and dropped him next to his friend.
I had no cuffs and no rope. On the living room table was a big leather valise of the kind doctors used to carry. I fished in it and found various tools, more hammers and stakes, and a roll of duct tape. Nice. A thousand and one household uses.
I used a lot of it on the wrists and ankles of my two prisoners.
One of them-the guy who hadn’t screamed-had a pretty bad wound high on his thigh. He tried to use his taped hands to staunch the blood flow, so I tore the headscarf off of the dead woman and made a compress of it, then bound it tightly with the tape. Not a great job, but good enough for now. He watched my eyes as I worked, and from his expression of despair I knew that he knew that this wasn’t an act of kindness.
Patting the men down produced wallets with local driver’s licenses. Even though I was never a cop in Iran I could tell that the IDs were phony. Even so, the name on the conscious guy’s license was Krystos Gallikos. The other survivor was Constantin Enescu. A Greek and a Romanian. Add in the Russian broad, the Spanish Inigo, Irish Bob, and whatever the hell Victor and Mihai were and we had a real League of Nations here.
“You speak English?” I asked Krystos.
He stared at me without apparent comprehension.
I simplified things. I put the barrel of his pistol against his forehead, then bent and whispered in his ear. “Don’t fucking move.”
He grasped the subtleties of my request and gave me an enthusiastic nod.
Constantin lay in a fetal ball, apparently unconscious.
Out in the hallway Ghost barked weakly. I shoved the gun into my waistband and hurried out to him. He was a mess, totally entangled in the flexible wire net. It took me a couple of minutes to extricate him, and his panicked flailing did not help. I soothed him and spoke quietly, but Ghost had been pushed past his limits. When he was free he crawled toward me and buried his head on my thighs. He let loose a stream of urine that pooled around him.
I bent and kissed his head and told him that he was a good, brave boy. He gave my face a few nervous licks and his body trembled as badly as if he were in an icebox.
In the enclosed hallway the mingled smells of urine, blood, and garlic made a strange, cloying miasma that was completely unpleasant. It felt like horror and defeat. I tried to coax Ghost to follow me, but he wouldn’t; so I left him where he was for now.
Back in the living room I squatted in front of Krystos. His face was running with greasy sweat.
“I’ll ask this again,” I said, and I was mildly alarmed at how reasonable and calm my voice sounded. Given all that had just happened, this was not necessarily a good thing. “Do you understand English?”
He gave a stubborn shake of his head that allowed me to decide if he was saying no or telling me to go piss off. Behind me I heard a groan and whirled around. It was frigging Inigo, still alive with two bullets in his chest cavity. Tough son of a bitch. He was crawling like a slug toward a pistol that lay on the floor a yard away. I went over and kicked the pistol under the couch.
Inigo turned his head and glared up at me with total hatred. I stepped over and straddled his body, staring down at him from my full height. I looked from him to Krystos and back again.
“Who tipped you off about this place?” I asked him.
“Fuck you!” Inigo growled and tried to spit at me.
“Wrong answer,” I said and shot him in the head.
I made sure I was looking into Krystos’s eyes when I did it. Sometimes you need to use visual aids to really make your point.
Krystos screamed and tried to crawl backward into the wallpaper. There is a difference between seeing death in combat and seeing an execution of someone you know. I lowered the pistol and walked back to Krystos and hunkered down in front of him.
“Okay,” I said into an ugly silence. “Let’s try this again. Do you understand English?”
Krystos whimpered and forked the sign of the evil eye at me with his bloody hands. I rang the barrel of the pistol off the top of his head. Not too hard, but hard enough.
“Last try,” I suggested. “English?”
All at once the fight drained out of him. Maybe he finally grasped the fact that he was totally helpless and I owned his life. He kept staring at what was left of Inigo’s head. Without looking at me, he spoke in a tiny voice. “Y- yes. Some. A little.”
“Good, now we’re getting somewhere,” I said with an approving smile. “Are there any more of you fucktards around here? Anyone else in the house?”
His eyes roved around to take stock of all the dead. He shook his head.
I placed the hot barrel against the knee of his undamaged leg. “Be real sure.”
He whimpered as he cut a quick look toward the stairs and back. “No. My people… are all down here.”
I didn’t like the way he leaned on “my people” and knew that I was going to have to go upstairs. I sure as hell did not want to.
“Who sent you?”
“W-what?”
I said it slower. “Who. Sent. You?”
Now Krystos looked at me, and the expression that washed over his face was one of complete puzzlement. He said, “God.”
His tone of voice suggested that he was surprised I didn’t already know that.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“God,” he said again, shaking his head.
“You’re saying that God sent you to kill me?”
He nodded.
“Do you even know who I am?”
He shook his head. “It does not matter. You are one of them. Upier!”
“Which is what, exactly?”
He shook his head in exasperation, apparently perplexed that I did not know what he was talking about.
“We’ll come back to that,” I said. “Why does ‘God’ want me dead?”
Krystos licked his lips and winced at the taste of his own blood. “To… stop.”
“Stop what? Or who?”
“Evil. Big evil.”
I was getting tired of this and it must have shown on my face because he immediately recoiled from me. “No! Please, no!”
“You’re jerking me around, friend, and I’m not digging it. You can’t be this stupid, so tell me what I want to know or we can up the ante on this game. Who are you people?”
“We are Sabbatarians. We are Sat… Sat…” and again he fished for the English version of a word but this time he came up with it. “The… Saturday People. Our… cell… was alerted. About you,” he said, picking each word with care. “They said… you were working with… the Ordo Ruber. Against God. To… kill us all.”
I sat back on my heels. “What in the wide blue fuck are you talking about? What are ‘Saturday People’?”
Krystos touched his chest then nodded to the dead scattered around the room. “Saturday. All Saturday.” He was trying to tell me something but he was clearly playing the wrong song for the wrong audience. His face twisted in fear and frustration. “They said… I mean… we believed… that there were no more… like you… no more Upierczi left. We thought you were all gone. Years ago. A hundred years. More.”
“What do you mean ‘like me’?”
He looked away, not wanting to say the word. I used the barrel of the pistol to make him face me again. I repeated my question. He thought about it and finally came up with a word that I did understand.
“ Vampir!” he whispered.
Oh boy.
It was all so absurd that I almost smiled. Or, maybe I did. I felt my mouth do something ugly and
