Scott Mariani - Uprising

He walked up to the shack and peered in through the gap in the doors. A rusty collection of cars and a couple of trucks were lined up against the back wall. Tools were littered all over the place. An engine stood partly dismantled on a workbench.

‘Hello? Anyone there?’ At the sound of Joel’s voice, the dog jumped to its feet and rushed at him, barking and snapping and baring its fangs, but was jerked short on the end of the chain. Joel repeated ‘Hello?’ There didn’t seem to be anyone around. Joel wondered where the mechanic was. Probably in the bar he’d just come from.

He slipped inside and looked at the vehicles. It was a desperate collection. The only one that still had all its wheels was a corroded old Matra-Simca. Joel lifted the bonnet and found himself looking at an empty hole where the engine used to be.

Outside, the dog was still going crazy on the end of its chain, but the noise didn’t seem to be attracting anyone. This wasn’t helping him. Time was passing too quickly.

That was when he spotted the tarpaulin-draped shape in the corner and walked over to investigate. Under the dusty cover he found a motorcycle. It was a Russian Dnepr mounted to a sidecar, an old Communist-era replica of a wartime Wehrmacht BMW. It was rugged and battered, with tyres that wouldn’t have looked out of place on a tractor. The machine was a far cry from the slick 200mph superbike he’d left behind him, but something like this would be a lot better suited to the kind of harsh terrain he expected to find where he was going. He gave the handlebar a waggle, heard the hollow slosh of fuel in the tank. The key was in the ignition. On the sidecar’s single seat was a scuffed open-face helmet, with a pair of antiquated leather gauntlets stuffed inside, and glass goggles on an elasticated strap.

Joel glanced furtively around him. The dog had finally stopped its noise. No footsteps on the forecourt outside. He twisted the key, clambered on board the machine and tried the kickstart. The old flat-twin 650cc engine rumbled into life.

Everything seemed to work. It was crude, but it was perfect.

After five more frustrating minutes, still nobody had turned up. Opening up his wallet, Joel plucked out a thick wad of the banknotes he’d drawn out back in Britain. He counted out four hundred euros, left them in a curling pile on the bonnet of the old Simca, then chucked his rucksack and the case into the sidecar.

It had been an interminable, numbing wait for something to happen before the sound of footsteps echoed in the passage outside. Suddenly alert, Alex jumped to her feet as a key grated in the lock and her cell door creaked open.

‘Haven’t I seen you somewhere before?’ she said to the man who walked in the low arched doorway. He looked somewhat dishevelled in a rumpled suit and his face was pale, a nervous twitch making one eyebrow jump. In his arms was an oblong box, which he laid on the floor of the cell. Two guards stood behind him, swords at their sides, eyes fixed on Alex.

‘The Master requests the pleasure of your company for dinner in the great hall,’

the familiar-looking man said.

Alex stared at him. ‘I do know you. You’re Jeremy Lonsdale, the politician.’

The man flushed, said nothing, and motioned at the box. Alex shrugged and opened it.

Gabriel Stone was seated luxuriantly in an enormous chair in front of a roaring fire when Alex was ushered into the great hall. The place was something out of a medieval fantasy. Settings for two were laid out intimately close together on the gigantic oak dining table in the middle of the room.

‘So here I am in the hall of the mountain king,’ she said as she walked in. ‘And you must be the great Stone. I remember you from your little presentation.’

‘In the flesh.’ He rose from his chair and gave a stiff, formal bow. ‘The pleasure is all mine, Agent Bishop. And you must call me Gabriel.’

‘What’s the idea of sending this for me to wear?’ she asked, tossing him the long, white dress that had been in the box.

‘I thought you would look fetching in it,’ he said with a twinkle.

‘It’s ridiculous.’

‘A little dated, perhaps. It once belonged to Marie Antoinette. But very elegant, wouldn’t you say? Then again, I imagine when one is compelled to live cheek by jowl with the seething mass of humanity, one must get used to abiding by their strange fashions.’ Stone laid the dress on the back of his chair, walked up to the table and picked up a crystal decanter. ‘Drink?’

‘Some hospitality,’ she said. ‘At last.’

‘You must forgive my having kept you waiting so long.’

‘Only a whole night and most of the next day.’

‘My most humble apologies. I had some things to arrange for later tonight.’ He smiled. ‘All will become clear. I trust the accommodation was to your taste?’

‘Delightful.’

Stone gave a charming smile and poured out two goblets of fresh, sparkling blood from the decanter.

‘Please, have a seat.’ He handed her her drink. ‘Not what you would call ethically procured, I’m afraid. What’s that expression the humans use now? Fairtrade?’ He chuckled. ‘We don’t deal in that up here.’

Alex toyed with the stem of her goblet, then pushed it away from her.

‘Whatever have they done to you?’ he said with a shake of the head. Reaching in the pocket of his silk jacket, he took out the half-empty tube of Solazal tablets that she recognised as the one the guards had taken from her in Brussels. ‘Look at this,’ he sighed, dropping the tube disdainfully down on the table. ‘Vampires on drugs. Really.’

‘I didn’t say I liked taking the stuff. It’s how I was able to do my job, that’s all.’

‘Ah yes — your job. The muscle behind the evil minds of your ruling self-appointed elite. Enforcing the arbitrary rules of tyrants, worming the Federation’s insidious influence ever deeper into the daily lives of your fellow vampires. The incident with the actor is a prime example of just how petty and paranoid these despots are.’

Alex raised her eyebrows in surprise. ‘Baxter Burnett? Wow. Xavier Garrett really has been keeping you informed, hasn’t he?’

‘As if the youthful appearance of a Hollywood star could bring down the whole edifice of your Federation. Absurd.’ Stone gave a contemptuous wave. ‘Merely an exercise in control for its own sake, as anyone can see. And you. Are you not ashamed of what you’ve become? Passing yourself off as a human being? Mimicking the lifestyle of an inferior species? How far can a vampire fall, Agent Bishop?’

‘Some humans are better than others,’ she said.

‘You’re thinking of Solomon,’ he replied, watching her face very closely. ‘There is some special liaison between you, I see. More than a mere collaboration.’

She shrugged. ‘We used him, that’s all.’

‘You’re too used to dealing with rank and file vampires. I have the power to see deeper, and I can tell from the look in your eyes that your feelings are strong for this human.’ He paused. ‘Alex Bishop. Short for Alexandra, I presume? You won’t mind if I call you Alexandra?’

She looked down at her hands. It had been a long time since anyone had called her that.

‘You’re thinking about the past,’ he said. ‘How long has it been?’

‘A little over a century,’ she said after a beat. ‘A hundred and thirteen years, if you have to know.’

‘A mere fledgling. Little more than an infant. Yet you were one of us long before the dark days of the Federation. You must surely remember the way it was before this grubby little hive of bandits introduced their era of tyranny.’ Stone leaned back in his chair, sipped his goblet. The flickering fire cast a glow over his handsome features, and there was a light in his eye as he talked. ‘To cheat the sun, embrace the night. Living dangerously, living free. To hunt, to feed like a real vampire, honouring our sacred heritage and a culture that had reached its pinnacle when human beings were still dragging their knuckles in the dust and grunting like apes. How far have they really come, I wonder?’ Stone smiled. ‘They call us Undead — but it’s the finest, most worthy existence there can be. And this—’ His eyes suddenly burned with rage as he snatched up the tube of Solazal, waved it in the air and then tossed it into the fire. ‘This is how your slavemasters repay countless millennia of hallowed tradition.’