He pushed away from the wall and walked along the street a little, pausing again when a tree blocked his line of sight to the police car. He could still see the remains of the house. It didn’t feel as familiar as it should. His bedroom was on the right on the second floor, and he could see from here that the ceiling had fallen in, roof timbers fractured and charred. All his stuff was in there—CDs, books, clothes, photographs, evidence of his life—and now it was forever beyond his reach. But he found that he didn’t care. It was just stuff.
Marty glanced back along the road, to where the rooftop shadow almost cut the road in half lengthwise. The head shadow had vanished.
Time to leave, he thought, turning his back on the remains of his home for the last time. I should have gone straight back to Lee’s. I know where the Bane is now, and walking the streets like this is just—
There was someone at the far end of the street, leaning against the wall of a house that Marty himself had walked past just five minutes before. It was a man, he could tell that much, but he was in shadow, his features uncertain. Jeans, maybe. Jacket of some sort. Short hair. He seemed to be looking at his hands, picking his nails or examining something he was holding.
He glanced up and stared straight at Marty, exposing the blade in his hand.
“Fuck,” Marty muttered. He walked directly across the street and stood beneath a tree, glancing back at the police car. No movement there, just the drift of cigarette smoke. Then he looked up at the rooftops, shielding his eyes from the sunlight and scanning for whatever had caused the shadow. Nothing.
The man along the street had started toward him.
Marty started walking, heading directly for the cordoned-off section of pavement outside his gutted home. And it was only then, fear speeding his blood, that the familiarity of that place became almost overwhelming. He remembered walking along here holding his mother’s hand when he was maybe six years old, head dipped against a powerful hailstorm. Skateboarding along the pavement with Gaz when he was eleven, using the paving slab pushed up by a tree root as a small ramp. Kicking a football alone, apologizing to a little old lady as it ricocheted off her shopping buggy. And walking along with Rose, her shouting, Gimme ten! and Marty closing his eyes for ten seconds as she went to hide, and that memory did not end because he could no longer recall where she had hidden. He’d been happy, she’d been laughing, and he never believed back then that such a memory could be overlaid with darkness.
He realized that the reddish sheen that had coated his vision since leaving the archaeologist’s house had vanished.
“Hey!” a voice said. It wasn’t too loud, but he knew instantly it was directed at him.
He glanced back, but the man over the street was walking with his head down. If he’d been the one to call, he gave no sign. His right arm swung naturally, his left hand remained down by his side, fingers curled up where they clasped the knife handle.
I can’t believe this, Marty thought, and then he uttered a half-mad chuckle. After everything he’d seen and come to learn, a scumbag mugger stalking him along his own street wasn’t too far out.
Except this was no mugger. He knew that, just as he knew the shadow he’d seen on the rooftop didn’t belong to someone adjusting a chimney or fixing a TV aerial. These were men working directly for the vampires, lowlifes who’d been promised something that put whatever they were asked to do in the shade—money, drugs, women… immortality. And, for them, Marty would surely be a fine prize.
“Hey, dickhead!” the voice came again, and Marty was still looking at the man across the street. He was sure the voice hadn’t come from him, though the guy’s lips did seem to break into a smile.
Marty slowed, only three houses away from his taped-off home now. There was a white van between him and the police car, and farther along the street, he could now see the tall woman. She’d emerged from behind a tree and was staring directly at him. He’d have laughed if his situation hadn’t suddenly become so dire: she was dressed just as she should have been for the movies, with black leather trousers, black T-shirt stretched tight over big tits, and hair tied in a ponytail that hung over her left shoulder. She carried a jacket slung over her right shoulder—leather, black—and she was smiling. It was the smile more than anything that prevented his laughter. It was totally without humanity.
“Yeah,” she said, “talking to you, fuckface.”
Where are the cops?
Marty stepped past the parked van, close enough to his house now to smell the stench of wet ash and charred wood. He tried not to look. There was nothing left to see, he shouldn’t have come here, he was a fucking fool, but still he found it hard not to stare at what had become of his old life. A ruin. A memory. Stained with badness, nothing would be the same again.
“What are you meant to be?” he asked the woman. He glanced to the right. The police car was there, the window on this side closed. He could see the cops now, chatting and laughing. They hadn’t even noticed anything was going on.
Several cars passed along the street, their engines masking the woman’s voice. She was standing just the other side of the closed-off stretch of pavement, twenty feet from him.
“I’m someone you’ll be sorry you met, shithead.” He could see the longing in her eyes now, and he’d seen that look before a hundred times in a hundred pubs and clubs: junkie.
He looked her up and down. “You look like my last wet dream.”
The woman brought a hand up to her right breast and squeezed.
“Wank away,” she said. “But after Duval’s finished with you, you won’t have it in you anymore. Where the hell’ve you been, anyway? Got the boss pissed off.”
Duval, Marty thought, and then he sensed someone closing on him from behind. He spun around, and the man from across the street was standing with the white van between him and the police car, brandishing the knife.
“Somewhere safe,” he said. “Finding stuff out, unlike you.”
The leather-clad woman froze, glancing around the street. “Stuff… ? The Bane… ? You know where… ?”
Marty shook his head. What have I said? He wanted to back away but they had him surrounded. Stupid idiot, what have I said? “No, not that, just… stuff.” But his panic and fluster gave him away.
“You’ll come nice and quiet,” she said, excited now. “Don’t want to upset the neighbors, and—”
“The cops. I’ll call them.” His heart sank. Marty felt sick. What a fucking idiot!
“Do that and my friend Stoner—you saw him, didn’t you, up on the roof?—well, you call to the pigs and he’ll gut them. Both of them. The woman he might take his time over.”
Marty found it in himself to laugh. He was terrified, and mad at himself, but they were almost ridiculous.
“What the fucking hell do you think you are?” he asked, and as they both came for him he made the only decision he could. There was no way he could fight these bastards. They’d beat him, cut him, take him to their fucking leader. But he could get away from them.
“Vampires!” he screamed at the top of his voice. “There are vampires trying to kill me!” He darted into the road in front of the white van and ran directly toward the police car. He caught the look of shock and confusion on the woman’s face as she stepped out of sight behind a tree, and then from behind the police car came one of the biggest men he’d ever seen. Almost seven feet tall and almost as wide, this had to be Stoner, and for a second Marty thought he might just have signed the cops’ death warrant.