Scott Mariani - Uprising

Joel leapt into the operator’s seat, fired up the engine and the headlights. With the cross clamped between his thighs, he drove the machine out across the yard. Its caterpillar tracks ground and crunched on the gravel as he rounded the corner of the house. He took a long sweeping turn at the front entrance, so he could approach head on. Ten yards from the doorway, he gunned the throttle and the diesel roared as the machine scuttled up the steps and smashed into the ornate stonework. Bricks and plaster and chunks of rendering rained on the roof of the cab. With a terrible scraping screech of rending metal, Joel forced the JCB into the entrance hall. He didn’t slow down for the conference room door either. The machine lumbered through like a tank, wrecking everything in its path. The engine was on peak revs by the time it reached the far wall. Joel held it steady on a collision course with the hidden doorway. A second before impact, he leapt out of the cab, hit the rug and rolled clear.

The digger rammed into the wall with a crash that shook the house and brought a large section of decorative coving and ceiling down on top of it. Joel sprang to his feet and ran over to the half-buried machine. He shone the torch through the clouds of masonry dust and saw the battered front of the digger embedded in a great jagged hole. Attached to the remnants of the hidden doorway was a smashed hydraulic arm and an electronic control unit that must have been activated by a remote or a switch somewhere in the house. Beyond it, Joel’s torch beam swept into pure darkness.

It was a secret corridor.

His terror as powerfully intensified as his resolve, Joel clambered over the dusty caterpillar tracks and started making his way through the passage, holding the cross out in front of him as he went.

He found himself in a maze of corridors and stairways that seemed to go on for miles. Just when he thought he was lost, the torch picked out something on the floor. A drop of dried blood. Then another. He followed the trail down and down.

All the way down to the crypt.

‘Where are you?’ said Rumble’s voice on the phone.

‘Still in Italy,’ Alex said. ‘I’m on a train heading for Bologna. Flying back to London from there.’

Her carriage was empty apart from her, a couple of backpackers and a businessman who’d fallen asleep behind his laptop. Quarter to one in the morning, and the train was speeding through the night, chattering softly on its rails. In the distance were the scattered lights of a village.

‘Bologna?’

‘It’s a long story, Harry.’ Since she’d boarded the train in Venice earlier that night, afraid to return to the hotel or fly straight back to London in case she bumped into Joel or found herself on the same plane as him, Alex had been putting a lot of thought into how she was going to explain herself to Rumble. It was hard to think straight with her head full of what had happened between her and Joel. She cursed herself for her weakness.

‘Save it for when I see you,’ Rumble said. ‘Is Solomon with you? Can you talk?’

She bit her lip. ‘I’m alone right now.’

‘You wouldn’t be coming back unless you’d found the cross,’ Rumble said. ‘Am I right?’ He sounded excited. That wasn’t going to last long, Alex thought.

‘Yeah, we found it. It was hidden under an old church. It had been there for centuries.’

‘The legends — they’re true?’

‘You wouldn’t want to get too close, if that’s what you mean.’

‘But the case — the lead lining — it worked? The way you thought it would?’

‘It worked fine.’

‘This is great. Congratulations, Alex. When you land, I want you to bring it straight here to VIA. Then we’ll figure out the next step.’

Alex gritted her teeth. She’d given him the good news. Now for the bit she was dreading.

‘I’m afraid it’s not that simple, Harry. The truth is, I don’t have it any longer.’

Rumble paused a beat, his excitement fading fast. ‘What the hell do you mean, you don’t have it?’

‘We were attacked.’

‘Stone’s people?’

‘Maybe, maybe not. All I know is that they were humans. Nothing I could do, Harry. They took it.’

Rumble was silent for a beat as the news sank in. ‘You let a bunch of humans take the cross from you? How can that be?’

‘You had to be there, Harry. It just happened that way.’ Alex knew she was landing herself in a whole storm of trouble saying it, but it was a better option than telling Rumble the truth. If VIA got wind of the fact that Joel Solomon had the cross and meant to use it — not just against the Federation’s enemies but indiscriminately, against any vampire he could find — his death sentence was as good as written. And she knew all too well that she’d be the field agent chosen to hunt him down and kill him.

She’d bought some time with the lie. Now she had to find a way to find Joel and take the cross back from him. How to do that without either hurting him, or getting herself destroyed in the process, was something she’d have to figure out as she went along. All she knew was that the clock was ticking for her. If he started zapping vampires all over the place and the news got back to the Feds, she had a date with the termination chamber.

‘This is serious, Agent Bishop,’ Rumble said.

It was a bad sign when he called her that. ‘Tell me about it,’ she replied.

‘Here’s what we’re going to do. You’re not flying back to London tonight. I want you to get your arse over to Brussels for the FRC conference tomorrow afternoon, two thirty sharp.’ He paused. ‘And…Agent Bishop?’

She knew what was coming from the change in his tone.

‘You’d better start thinking about how you’re going to explain to the Ruling Council how, with all the other shit that’s hitting the fan, you allowed a weapon that’s been safely hidden away for centuries to fall into the hands of the enemy.’

Midnight

Joel walked on through the dark passage, down and down, deep underneath the mansion. With every step he tensed a little more and the struggle against his instinct to run away became more difficult.

Nobody attacked him. No vampire was lying in wait for him in the many shadows that he desperately swung the torch into, left, right, and left again. The light beam flashed against bare grey stone and thick matted cobwebs.

But something was here. As he walked on in dread, he was aware of a worsening smell. It quickly grew to an overpowering rancid stench that made it hard to breathe and his stomach flip. Then, shining the torch beam upwards, he let out an involuntary cry.

The corpse of what had once been a young woman dangled like a side of meat from a butcher’s hook in the vaulted ceiling. The white silk bridal dress she’d been wearing when she died hung from her in tatters and was caked in dried blood. Her neck had been slashed open to the bone and her chest was ripped apart to expose shattered ribs and internal organs. She’d died with a look of the worst terror Joel had ever seen on a victim’s face.

She hadn’t been hanging here long enough to smell like this. There was something else down here, too, and it couldn’t be far away. He swallowed back the rising nausea and played the light around him. A few feet away was a raised stone block circle in the floor, a yard or so in diameter, that looked like a well. Its mouth was covered with a thick round slab. As Joel shone the beam on it, he noticed finger marks in the dust around its edge. Someone had moved it recently.

Laying down the cross for a moment and gripping the torch under his arm, he grabbed hold of the edge of the slab and tried to move it. It was incredibly heavy. Joel thought of Finch and the uncanny strength that the man had seemed to possess.