and something warm sprayed across his face and chest. Pete shrieked, throwing his hands up to his face and wiping the liquid from his skin. He looked down at the ground in front of him, and Mrs. Marsden stared back up at him from wide, lifeless eyes. There were two ragged holes in her throat, and the white dressing gown she was wearing looked like it had been dipped in blood.
He heard a triumphant screech and looked up. Staring down at him from the attic window was a woman’s face, the lower half smeared with red, the crimson eyes wide and devoid of humanity. The face jerked back from the window, and he heard footsteps inside the house.
Pete Randall fled. He turned and ran back the way he had come, now hearing for the first time the sounds of violence and pain that were drifting from every part of the island, a terrible cacophony of screeches, breaking glass and screams.
So many screams.
He reached the gate at a flat sprint, and when his daughter stepped out in front of him, he threw himself to his right, crashing hard onto the pavement. He would have run straight over her if he hadn’t.
“Dad!” she screamed, and then she was crouched next to him, asking him if he was all right. He sat up, ignoring the grinding pain in his right arm where he had landed on it, and hugged her so tightly she could barely breathe.
“Where did you go?” he sobbed. “I couldn’t find you.”
“I went to the Coopers’,” she gasped, crushed against her father’s chest. “I went to the Coopers’. There’s no one there. There’s blood. .. so much blood.”
Pete let go of her and stood up, unsteadily. He was about to ask her if she was all right when the door to the Marsdens’ house slammed open, and the woman he had seen in the attic window howled at them. There was an answering call, terribly close, and Kate looked around and saw the thing that had come into her bedroom walking down the road toward them, blood covering its face and neck. She scrambled to her feet, then her father took her hand, and they ran down the hill toward the center of the village.
Floating fifty feet above the top of the hill on which the village was built, Alexandru surveyed the carnage beneath him. Maybe half the villagers were already dead, and those who had survived the initial attack were fleeing toward the dock and the boats that would carry them off the island. He supposed a few of them would make it, and that was fine. They would add weight to the message he was sending.
He spun gently in the cold air and looked across the hill that formed the middle of the island, at the ancient stone building standing above the cliffs against which the North Sea crashed in plumes of white spray.
Tonight’s work has barely begun, he thought, and permitted himself a small smile. He pulled a silver phone from his pocket, and keyed a number.
“Brother,” he said, when the call was answered. “You may proceed.”
In the village streets below, panic gripped the surviving islanders. They ran for their lives along the narrow roads, heading for the small dock that served the island’s fishing fleet, stumbling in the gathering dark, staring wildly in every direction, screaming the names of husbands and wives, parents and children.
Pete Randall sprinted down the hill toward the concrete dock, hurdling the bodies that were lying in the narrow road, forcing himself not to look at them. Every one of the island’s one hundred and sixty inhabitants knew each other, and he knew that he was running around and over the lifeless corpses of his friends and neighbors. Kate ran beside him. Her face was pale, but her eyes were bright, and Pete felt a rush of love for his daughter.
How did she get so strong? he marveled. I won the bloody lottery with her.
Men and women were streaming out of the houses, some screaming, others weeping and sobbing, running and stumbling down the hill. Dark shapes moved among them, floating across the cobblestones, lifting them shrieking off their feet as they ran. Blood pattered to the ground in a soft crimson rain.
On the dock John Tremain, the island’s biggest fisherman, had reached his boat. The Lady Diana occupied the largest berth at the end of the horseshoe-shaped dock, and acrid blue smoke was pluming out of her weather-beaten funnel as the big diesel engines roared into life.
“Hurry!” Tremain yelled from the deck. He was holding the mooring ropes in his gnarled hands, ready to cast off. “I’m not waiting! Move!”
The desperate, panicked group of islanders ran toward him.
Pete and Kate were the first on to the slippery concrete of the dock. On the ground in front of them lay the twisted body of a teenage girl, and Kate slowed as they approached the corpse. Pete grabbed her wrist and hauled her forward.
“Keep moving!” he yelled. “Get to the boat!”
“It’s Julie!” Kate cried. “We can’t leave her here.”
Kate’s best friend, realized Pete. Oh God.
Kate yanked her hand out of his and skidded to a halt next to the girl’s body. Pete swore, turned back to grab his daughter, but was forced backward as the fleeing, terrified survivors cannoned into him, blindly running for the boat. He screamed and punched and kicked as hands gripped him, but the flow of people was relentless, and he was driven back along the dock.
Through the crowd, he saw his daughter kneel down next to the corpse, reach out and gently touch the girl’s face. He screamed her name, helplessly, as he was dragged over the boat’s rail, but Kate didn’t even seem to hear him.
There was a thud, and a dark shape landed on the dock, between Kate and the running crowd. She leapt to her feet, the paralyzing shock of seeing her friend’s body broken. She looked for her father and saw him being hauled onto the Lady Diana, kicking and screaming her name. In front of her was the terrible thing from her bedroom, its skeletal body drenched in blood. It flashed her a hideous lustful smile, and without hesitation, she turned and ran back toward the village.
Pete saw Kate sprint away up the dock and disappear into the darkness, and he threw his head back and howled, a scream of utter desperation. He fought with renewed strength against the hands that held him, but it was too late.
John Tremain threw the mooring ropes into the water and ran up the steps to the small cabin above the deck. He threw the Lady Diana into gear, and the big propellers churned water as the boat slowly, terribly slowly, began to move away from the island.
Pete Randall threw himself at the stern rail as the Lady Diana picked up speed and the dock disappeared into the darkness.
“Kate!” he screamed. “Kate!”
But there was no answer.
His daughter was gone.
37
SPC Central Command
Kola Peninsula, Russia
Thirty-five minutes ago
Valeri Rusmanov thanked his brother, then closed his cell phone.
His heavy boots crunched snow beneath his feet as he crested the hill, and paused. The freezing night air was still. There was a gentle lapping from the Murmansk fjord to his left, the black water visible through a spider web of cracks in the thick, dirty-gray ice. An icebreaker slowly ground its way up the middle of the fjord, clearing a dark strip of open water, belching diesel smoke from its funnels.
Directly ahead of him, perhaps five miles away, was the closed city of Polyarny. The gray industrial town was dominated by the tall cranes and sodium arc lights of Russian Shipyard Number 10, the top-secret submarine base. During the Cold War, Soviet Typhoons and Akulas had slipped out from Polyarny and disappeared under the
