And that would be impossible. They were physically attached to this house, the last place that Rose had been seen alive, so much so that he thought the end of the world might be just about the only thing that would persuade them to leave.
So, should he tell them? Sit them down with a cup of tea in the morning and tell them everything that had happened? Daytime would be safe, Rose had told him.
Tomorrow night, death would come for him again.
As dawn stained his curtains pink, Marty tried to think of how he could force his parents to flee the city.
People had written books and made movies about these places, and some of them had been close to the truth. But none had quite reached the level of wonder and horror contained in the city below the city.
Francesco had lived in London for over seventy years, but even he admitted to only knowing a small part of the underworld. Tube tunnels and stations, sewers, air raid shelters, nuclear bunkers, storage tunnels, deep basements, culverts, rivers… there was a whole other city below London, much of it uninhabited, but some of it home to a mix of people. Down-and-outs often slept belowground, venturing down from the open streets above to avoid the cruel coolness of night. Criminals found themselves a convenient hidey-hole or two in which they stored stolen goods or sometimes hid themselves away when the upside grew too hot. There were people who had chosen to live down there as an alternative to the bustle up above, some of them going so far as to construct ”homes” in abandoned tube stations, with furniture, pictures, and working electrical goods. Some said that deeper down amongst the roots of the city lived more basic tribes, some of whom had not seen daylight for generations.
But perhaps that legend had evolved from knowledge of the vampires.
They called themselves Humains: vampires that did not prey on humans. Four of them had adopted a deep basement as a home in the months following Rose’s turning. Francesco and Rose spent most of their days there, along with two others. Patrick was an Irishman, turned just after the Second World War, a quiet man who kept to himself but who so obviously needed company to get by. Patrick had come to London in the eighties after spending years hunting across the rural parts of Ireland, growing more and more disillusioned with his lot. He’d only ever taken sick or old people, hating the dealing of death but driven by what he was and what he must have. It was only in London, when Francesco had found him and shown him a different way, that Patrick had found some form of peace. It was an uneasy peace and, Rose believed, one liable to be upset at any time. Out of all the Humains rose knew, Patrick was perhaps the least human.
The other Humain sharing their hideaway was Jane, a middle-aged woman turned by Patrick in the nineties. Jane had never eaten of a living human, and she was proud of that, often using it to justify herself if there were arguments. Because she sought the recently dead, she often found what she wanted belowground, stalking a sickly person and pouncing at the moment of their passing before the blood stopped flowing and took on the taint of death. Sometimes she was too late and the blood had gone bad in the corrupted body; then she would spend days curled in an agonized ball as the bad blood was purged from her system. Other times, Rose and the others believed, Jane was a little too early. But she would never admit to that.
The journey down felt familiar, but this time the world had changed for Rose yet again. As they descended from the tube station platform, passing through maintenance tunnels and gratings, down a forgotten staircase leading to a station that had never been completed, she brought with her knowledge that someone living knew of her and what she was. Francesco would have more to say about that later. Right now he walked ahead of her, moving with a grace and poise that she had never seen in anyone else. She had always felt that his was a conflicted existence: he fit the vampire mold so well, and yet he denied its basic tenet. She wondered what he thought about during his darkest moments, and whether sometimes… but it was wrong of her to think that way. Francesco was stronger and wiser than them all, and if he did take an occasional warm meal, there would be no reason to lie to them about it.
They crossed the uncompleted station platform, bare concrete crumbling beneath their feet, and approached the doorway at the far end. It was one of six entrances into the subterranean room they used, and all of them were kept guarded. They paused at the door, which stood ajar.
“Seal’s gone,” Francesco said. In the darkness he quickly located a small mark on the metal door frame, a smear of saliva from one of the others dried in a particular shape. “Patrick.”
“Good,” Rose said, and Francesco glanced back at her.
“It won’t even know we exist,” he said. “And even if it does, there’s no way it could find us down here. And even if it could…” His shrug said, You’ve beaten it before.
“Maybe there’s more than one,” she said. “You know what’s been happening out there, in the wider world. Lee’s made it all clear to us.”
Francesco raised one eyebrow and the corner of his mouth, the closest he came to a full smile. “And we’ll be seeing Woodhams tonight,” he said. “I’ve already put a call in. If that vampire’s here for anything other than a random hunt, he should have heard something.”
“We put too much trust in him,” Rose said. Francesco shoved the door open and she followed him inside. “He’s a rat. Surfing the internet, listening for whispers. He sees less daylight than we do, and he’s human.”
“And the fact that he hates vampires with a vengeance makes him our greatest ally.”
“Yeah,” Rose said. She had to admit, the irony always amused her. Woodhams wasn’t a very nice man. And one day, when he found out what they were—which was inevitable—they’d have to deal with him. But for now he was their ears and eyes on the wider world, and it was a world in which much had happened and was still happening.
The time when keeping their heads down would keep them safe seemed to be coming to an end.
A curved staircase led down to the large plant room that they called home. Whatever plant it had been intended for had never been installed, and instead they’d brought down a selection of blankets, mattresses, and folding chairs. There was also a large fridge, the power supply snaking back up through the tunnels to where it was spliced into an underground cable. Patrick had been responsible for that; during the war he’d been an electrical engineer working on aircraft and radar installations.
Rose still remembered the first time Francesco had brought her down here. She was still feverish from the change, shaking with ravenous desire, and she’d vomited when she’d seen the fridge in the corner, laughing afterward because what could she possibly want with salad, or milk, or butter? She’d collapsed in the complete darkness, seeing as though it were daylight. And later, cold blood trickling down her throat and Francesco leaning over her with a plastic bag in one hand, she’d realized the truth.
Nodding at Patrick where he sat upright in a folding chair, glancing at where Jane seemed to be sleeping on a double mattress, Rose went straight to the fridge. She’d already fed that day, but the fight and what came after had drained her. She didn’t feel weak, but she did feel challenged. Her new world had crossed with her old that day, more than it ever had in the five years since she’d become Humain. The fridge hissed cool air as it opened, and she plucked out one of the dozen bags left inside.
“Running low,” she muttered, biting the corner of the bag open. Her jaws and teeth ached, tongue swelling with bloodlust. She faced away from the others as she fed. Unlike them, she still felt something that might have been shame, as if to be seen feeding were like being caught masturbating back when she was human. Francesco said it was her age, and that she would learn contentment. As far as Rose was concerned, that all sounded a bit too fucking Zen for her liking.