He turns and shuffles towards the door, grateful and obedient to the Eater of Souls for granting him this brief existence. Then I am alone in the crypt with Iris. Who has begun to recover from her tasering, and tries to squirm aside as I walk past her to the bed. “Hasta la vista,” I tell her: “Give my regards to the Auditors.”
Then I keel over on the dusty black satin sheets, dead to the world.
THERE IS CHAOS IN THE CHAPEL AS THE CULTISTS DESPERATELY prepare to defend the perimeter.
On the roof, the surviving guards-Benjamin is not among them-have taken up positions around the corners, pointing their guns out at the sea of bodies that slowly shuffle towards the building. Below them, the worshipers on the ground mill and rush in near-terror until three of their number, better organized and equipped than the rest, gather them into groups and set the unarmed to dragging pews into position to form an improvised barricade, while those who bear arms prepare to defend against the creeping wave of darkness.
Crouching behind the gargoyle at the southwest corner, Michael Digby (orthodontic technician, from Chelmsford) glances sideways at the cowled head of his principale, the sergeant-at-arms responsible for the coven’s guard. “What are we going to do, sir?” he asks quietly.
“What does it look like, soldier?” Clive Morton (retail manager, from Dorking) studies the darkness with dilated pupils.
Digby looks back to the field of fire in front of the chapel as a brief snap of gunfire knocks over a clump of drunkenly walking figures that have shuffled out of the long shadows cast by the floodlights in the chapel doorway. “Looks like zombies, sir. Thousands of ’em.”
“Right. And we’re going to hold out here until dawn, or until All-Highest figures out how to drive them away, or we run out of ammunition. That answer your question?”
“You mean the only plan is to stand behind a few feet of church benches?”
“Beats having your soul eaten…”
Down below them, the worshipers have dragged the bench seats into position in an arc around the entrance and steps leading up to the chapel. Their fellows inside the building have lifted up the heavy wooden tables and tipped them against the windows, barring entry. They think they’re safe, as long as the armed men on the roof can pick off any shuffling revenants that enter the circle of light. But death is already among them.
Alexei from Novosibirsk idles in the darkness behind the worshipers, lurking in the vestry where a cultist guard now lies beneath a pile of moth-eaten curtains.
Alexei is seriously annoyed, but professionally detached from the cock-up and chaos going on around him. The operation has not gone in accordance with earlier plans. He has, as expected, succeeded in infiltrating the vestibule area; the seething chaos outside, accompanied by a panicking mob erupting from the depths of the chapel, has made things run much more easily than anticipated-up to a point. But the ward around his neck is hot to the touch, smoking faintly with a stench of burned hair. And his radio has clicked three times-panic signals from soldiers unable to take their assigned places. Once is happenstance but twice is enemy action, and thrice is a fuck-up. Something has gone wrong, and he can no longer count on backup from Yuri and Anton. Finally, as if all of that isn’t bad enough, the dead are rising.
This latter item, Alexei thinks, is deeply unfair. He’s a sergeant in Spetsgruppa “V”-a professional, in other words-and when he kills someone professionally he expects them to stay dead. These walking abominations are an insult to his competence. If it wasn’t for their annoying habit of infecting further victims through touch, they’d be a trivial obstacle at best; as it is, with his ward and his full-body insulated clothing, not to mention his Ostblock ballistic knife, AKM/100 assault gun, and other tools of the trade, he’s well-equipped to deal with them. Except that there are too damned many, and they won’t stay dead, and the rest of his team are dispersed and in trouble.
Speaking of trouble, here comes more. Most of the cultists are wearing black robes, or stupidly inappropriate army-surplus camo gear for the guards; if it’s naked and you can count the ribs, it’s probably one of the risen dead. Bonus points for shuffling like a stockbroker on a stag night, and big booby prize if you let it get so close you can see the green luminosity writhing in the depths of its eye sockets…
Alexei melts into the shadows behind the figure climbing the steps from the crypt. It’s wearing a robe and shuffling drunkenly, and he’s about to slide the blade of his knife between its two uppermost cervical vertebrae when he realizes that it is not, in fact, one of the possessed. Which raises some interesting questions. A moment later his gloved hand is covering the climber’s mouth and his knife is at her throat. “Say nothing,” he grunts, tugging her backwards into the vestry. “You want live, yes? Be silent.” The cultist stumbles as he drags her into the shadows, but doesn’t say anything. Alexei rolls her to the ground and has her pinioned in a second. “Where is All-Highest?” he demands, in heavily accented but serviceable English.
“Downstairs-with the Eater of Souls-” The young woman stiffens for a moment, then sags bonelessly. Alexei rises, wraps himself in the cloak that she won’t be needing anymore, and wipes his knife on the back of her dress. Then he tiptoes towards the steps down to the crypt. If the Eater of Souls is lurking downstairs, he reasons, then it’s very probable that what he came for is to be found there. And Alexei doesn’t give up easily.
TO THE NORTH, A RED TRUCK CREEPS ALONG A DARKENED AVENUE. Three figures sit atop its roof. One of them holds a white electric violin. Her two guards watch and wonder, entrenching tools raised and ready to shovel mortal remains off the roof should any such encroach. The truck bumps slowly along in low gear, pushing through a sea of withered bodies that sway and jostle slowly. Occasionally there is a crunch or crackle as the truck rolls over bones that failed to get out of its way in time. The driver doesn’t speed up or slow down; to stop in the middle of this unnatural crowd is to court disaster, although none of the feeders has so far attempted to climb aboard the OCCULUS truck.
Down in the darkened truck cab Major Barnes rides next to the driver, peering into the darkness for any sign of ambush. He talks into his headset: “Two hundred meters in. Dr. O’Brien, do you see any sign of survivors-”
Mo, atop the cab, raises her bow. “Not right here,” she says shortly. The walking dead are undirected; the grounded metal framework of the truck blocks their ability to sense those who ride within, and the warm meat on the cab roof is out of easy reach.
A crack of gunfire sounds. Mo looks round sharply as Howe grabs her shoulder. “Down!” he snaps, and she ducks as he raises his MP5 and squints through its night sights. The gunfire is coming from a chapel, half-concealed by trees and the silent army of walking corpses. There are more shots, followed by shouts and a scream, cut off short. “Shooters on the building roofline,” Howe reports: “Four, no, five bodies. Defenses at ground level, barricades, I can’t see anyone manning them. The crowd’s thickest there. Defenders have-no, wait.”
Cold flesh, bodies that do not show on infrared, have formed an abhuman pyramid to one side of the chapel. The survivors on the roof are shooting, but not at the OCCULUS truck: they have problems that are closer to hand. As one corpse disintegrates another takes its place, and the defenders have fewer banishment rounds than Brookwood has open graves. “Doc, can you do anything about them?” Howe asks. “Because I don’t think we’re going to get in there without-”