'Ten!' exclaimed the second man, not answering my question. 'You're sure?'
'At least ten,' I replied. 'But only one Ancient. The others are all pretty new, judging from the spoil.'
'You're making this up,' said the first man. 'There's maybe five, tops. They were seen together and tracked back. That's when the cordon was established this morning.'
I shrugged and half-unzipped my bag.
'I'm Jenny,' said the mountain-climber, belatedly answering my question. 'The… the vampires got my sister, three years ago. When I heard about this infestation I claimed the Relative's Right.'
'I've got a twelve-month permit,' said the second man. 'Plan to turn professional. Oh yeah, my name's Karl.'
'I'm Susan,' said the second woman. 'This is our third vampire hunt. Mike's and mine, I mean.'
'She's my wife,' said the belligerent Mike. 'We've both got twelve-month permits. You'd better be legal too, if you want to join us.'
'I have a special licence,' I replied. The sun had disappeared behind the church tower, and the street lights were flicking on. With the bag unzipped, I was ready for a surprise. Not that I thought one was about to happen. At least, not immediately. Unless I chose to spring one.
'You can call me J.'
'Jay?' asked Susan.
'Close enough,' I replied. 'Does someone have a plan?'
'Yeah,' said Mike. 'We stick together. No hot-dogging off, or chasing down wounded vamps or anything like that. We go in as a team, and we come out as a team.'
'Interesting,' I said. 'Is there… more to it?'
Mike paused to fix me with what he obviously thought was his steely gaze. I met it and after a few seconds he looked away. Maybe it's the combination of very pale blue eyes and dark skin, but not many people look at me directly for too long. It might just be the eyes. There've been quite a few cultures who think of very light blue eyes as the colour of death. Perhaps that lingers, resonating in the subconscious even of modern folk.
'We go through the front door,' he said. 'We throw flares ahead of us. The vamps should all be digging out on the old factory floor, it's the only place where the earth is accessible. So we go down the fire stairs, throw a few more flares out the door then go through and back up against the wall. We'll have a clear field of fire to take them down. They'll be groggy for a couple of hours yet, slow to move. But if one or two manage to close, we stake them.'
'The young ones will be slow and dazed,' I said. 'But the Ancient will be active soon after sundown, even if it stays where it is-and it's not dug in on the factory floor. It's in a humungous clay pot outside an office on the fourth floor.'
'We take it first, then,' said Mike. 'Not that I'm sure I believe you.'
'It's up to you,' I said. I had my own ideas about dealing with the Ancient, but they would wait. No point upsetting Mike too early. 'There's one more thing.'
'What?' asked Karl.
'There's a fresh-made vampire around, from last night. It will still be able to pass as human for a few more days. It won't be dug-in, and it may not even know it's infected.'
'So?' asked Mike. 'We kill everything in the infested area. That's all legal.'
'How do you know this stuff?' asked Jenny.
'You're a professional, aren't you,' said Karl. 'How long you been pro?'
'I'm not exactly a professional,' I said. 'But I've been hunting vampires for quite a while.'
'Can't have been that long,' said Mike. 'Or you'd know better than to go after them in just a T-shirt. What've you got in that bag? Sawn-off shotgun?'
'Just a stake and a knife,' I replied. 'I'm a traditionalist. Shouldn't we be going?'
The sun was fully down, and I knew the Ancient, at least, would already be reaching up through the soil, its mildewed, mottled hands gripping the rim of the earthenware pot that had once held a palm or something equally impressive outside the factory manager's office.
'Truck's over there,' said Mike, pointing to a flashy new silver pick-up. 'You can ride in the back, surfer boy.'
'Fresh air's a wonderful thing.'
As it turned out, Karl and Jenny wanted to sit in the back too. I sat on a tool box that still had shrink-wrap around it, Jenny sat on a spare tire and Karl stood looking over the cab, scanning the road, as if a vampire might suddenly jump out when we were stopped at the lights.
'Do you want a cross?' Jenny asked me after we'd gone a mile or so in silence. Unlike Mike and Karl she wasn't festooned with them, but she had a couple around her neck. She started to take a small wooden one off, lifting it by the chain.
I shook my head, and raised my T-shirt up under my arms, to show the scars. Jenny recoiled in horror and gasped, and Karl looked around, hand going for his.41 Glock. I couldn't tell whether that was jumpiness or good training. He didn't draw and shoot, which I guess meant good training.
I let the T-shirt fall, but it was up long enough for both of them to see the hackwork tracery of scars that made up a kind of 'T' shape on my chest and stomach. But it wasn't a 'T'. It was a Tau Cross, one of the oldest Christian symbols and still the one that vampires feared the most, though none but the most ancient knew why they fled from it.
'Is that… a cross?' asked Karl.
I nodded.
'That's so hardcore,' said Karl. 'Why didn't you just have it tattooed?'
'It probably wouldn't work so well,' I said. 'And I didn't have it done. It was done to me.'
I didn't mention that there was an equivalent tracery of scars on my back as well. These two Tau Crosses, front and back, never faded, though my other scars always disappeared only a few days after they healed.
'Who would-' Jenny started to ask, but she was interrupted by Mike banging on the rear window of the cab-with the butt of his pistol, reconfirming my original assessment that he was the biggest danger to all of us. Except for the Ancient Vampire. I wasn't worried about the young ones. But I didn't know which Ancient it was, and that was cause for concern. If it had been encysted since the drop it would be in the first flush of its full strength. I hoped it had been around for a long time, lying low and steadily degrading, only recently resuming its mission against humanity.
'We're there,' said Karl, unnecessarily.
The cordon fence was fully established now. Sixteen feet high and lethally electrified, with old-fashioned limelights burning every ten feet along the fence, the sound of the hissing oxygen and hydrogen jets music to my ears. Vampires loathe limelight. Gaslight has a lesser effect, and electric light hardly bothers them at all. It's the intensity of the naked flame they fear.
The fire brigade was standing by because of the limelights, which though modernized were still occasionally prone to massive accidental combustion; and the local police department was there en masse to enforce the cordon. I saw the bright white bulk of the state Vampire Eradication Team's semi-trailer parked off to one side. If we volunteers failed, they would go in, though given the derelict state of the building and the reasonable space between it and the nearest residential area it was more likely they'd just get the Air Force to do a fuel-air explosion dump.
The VET personnel would be out and about already, making sure no vampires managed to get past the cordon. There would be crossbow snipers on the upper floors of the surrounding buildings, ready to shoot fire-hardened oak quarrels into vampire heads. It wasn't advertised by the ammo manufacturers, but a big old vampire could take forty or fifty Wood-N-Death® or equivalent rounds to the head and chest before going down. A good inch-diameter yard-long quarrel or stake worked so much better.
There would be a VET quick response team somewhere close as well, outfitted in the latest metal-mesh armour, carrying the automatic weapons the volunteers were not allowed to use-with good reason, given the frequency with which volunteer vampire hunters killed each other even when only armed with handguns, stakes and knives.
I waved at the window of the three-storey warehouse where I'd caught a glimpse of a crossbow sniper, earning a puzzled glance from Karl and Jenny, then jumped down. A police sergeant was already walking over to us, his long, harsh limelit shadow preceding him. Naturally, Mike intercepted him before he could choose who he wanted to talk to.
'We're the volunteer team.'
'I can see that,' said the sergeant. 'Who's the kid?'
He pointed at me. I frowned. The kid stuff was getting monotonous. I don't look that young. Twenty at least, I would have thought.
'He says his name's Jay. He's got a 'special licence.' That's what he says.'
'Let's see it then,' said the sergeant, with a smile that suggested he was looking forward to arresting me and delivering a three-hour lecture. Or perhaps a beating with a piece of rubber pipe. It isn't always easy to decipher smiles.
'I'll take it from here, Sergeant,' said an officer who came up from behind me, fast and smooth. He was in the new metal-mesh armour, like a wetsuit, with webbing belt and harness over it, to hold stakes, knife, WP grenades (which actually were effective against the vamps, unlike the holy water ones) and handgun. He had an H &K MP5-PDW slung over his shoulder. 'You go and check the cordon.'
'But Lieutenant, don't you want me to take-'
'I said check the cordon.'
The sergeant retreated, smile replaced by a scowl of frustration. The VET lieutenant ignored him.
'Licences, please,' he said. He didn't look at me, and unlike the others I didn't reach for the plasticated, hologrammed, data-chipped card that was the latest version of the volunteer vampire hunter licence.
They held their licences up and the reader that was somewhere in the lieutenant's helmet picked up the data and his earpiece whispered whether they were valid or not. Since he was nodding, we all knew they were valid before he spoke.
'OK, you're good to go whenever you want. Good luck.'
'What about him?' asked Mike, gesturing at me with his thumb.
'Him too,' said the lieutenant. He still didn't look at me. Some of the VET are funny like that. They seem to think I'm like an albatross or something. A sign of bad luck. I suppose it's because wherever the vampire infestations are really bad, then I have a tendency to show up as well. 'He's already been checked in. We'll open the gate in five, if that suits you.'
