Brian Lumley - Necroscope - Invaders

The other soldier had reached down almost instinctively to lift the girl to her feet. But even in the act of gathering her up he saw his colleague shot, and simultaneously the feral yellow fire in the naked man's eyes as he flowed sinuously upright and drew back his arm to use the speargun as a club.

No further reminder was necessary. The soldier cursed and put the naked girl aside, then opened up with a burst of explosive shells that lifted the vampire from his feet, ripped into him in mid-air, and threw him backward into the shrub. There he hung in a tangle of crushed foliage, until branches snapped and he fell to the ground. And as he sat there — groping among his own intestines and mewling his undead agony — so the gibbering NCO cursed again and put a single shell right between his eyes.

The contents of the vampire's head went every which way as the shrub collapsed on him.

Meanwhile the downed man had stopped writhing and tugging at the spear in his throat; he lay dead still, dead of shock or from choking on his own blood.

And the girl had disappeared into the night…

Fleeing, sobbing, gasping for air — with her sliced feet leaving a trail of blood on the often jagged stones — Julie Lennox somehow managed to avoid the second pair of men from the coastguard vessel, and came across Jake and Lardis instead. With her night eyes, the eyes of a vampire, she saw them before they saw her: an old man and his younger colleague, in the garden, keeping low and making their way silently toward the house. And she remembered some advice that she'd been given:

'When they come, and they will come,' (Martin Trennier had told Jethro Manchester and his small family group just an hour or so ago), 'there won't be any mercy. They'll come to kill you. And while you might not believe it now, you won't want them to! For you have a Great Vampire's blood in you, and in its own way it is alive, too. It wants to live, and it won't let you commit suicide — which means that you can't simply give yourselves up to these men. Ergo, you'll fight. And the more of them that you kill, the longer you'll stay alive.'

With which he had rammed a handful of shells deep into the magazine of an ugly pump-action shotgun, and jerked once on its heavy wooden stock to arm it, before continuing:

'Now, while I know that some of you are still fighting the good fight, the fact is we can grow strong on our enemies — on the blood of our enemies — and the stronger we grow, the better our chances of survival. So that's it, now you know what to do. I have nothing more to say, except that I for one intend to survive. So go on, get busy. Prepare yourselves with whatever grit or cunning your vampire blood has bestowed, arm yourselves with whatever weapons you can find, and wait. It's just as simple as that.'

But in fact it wasn't simple at all. Simple, perhaps, for Martin Trennier, one of the first taken by Aristotle Milan and utterly in thrall to him, but not for Julie; not now that Alan Manchester, Jethro's son, was dead. Julie and Alan… how they had loved each other, and how desperately hard they had fought to cling to their humanity. But all in vain.

Alan had turned first, and now he was dead and gone, taken from her, and these merciless invaders were responsible — weren't they? Deep in her heart, she knew they weren't; and yet, as moment by moment Trennier's words made more sense, so the vampire essence in Julie's system worked on her, turning her, too.

Trennier had done it to her, done it to them all: a simple bite was all it took — and time. For Trennier was barely a lieutenant himself, and a weak one at that. Made by Milan, he had been given a minimum of essence, and so he'd been a thrall for long and long. But as the evil had grown in him, so he'd taken on stature, guile, strength. And thus he'd become Milan's lieutenant, to watch over the Manchesters on their island retreat. Or as it was now, their prison.

When they had known their end was near, Julie and Alan had come out into the night, into the garden, to make love just one last time. They hadn't reckoned on being found so quickly, that was all. Not in their own secret place, in the garden, on their prison island. Their prison, yes… indeed, their death cell.

Or perhaps not. For as the blood is the life, so there was plenty of hot blood in these two men. And without warning, suddenly Julie caught herself licking her lips in anticipation. At which she knew that it was too late for her, and that it always had been. But strangely — and as swiftly as that — she no longer cared, for she was now awake! As for what had awakened her:

Perhaps it had been the sight and salty smell of Alan Manchester's blood, or that of the soldier whom he'd shot with his speargun, or both. Which-, or whatever, it had acted on Julie as a catalyst, and now the 'good fight' was over. She was what she was and would do what she must do. She moved like a wraith towards the two men, got behind them where they crept carefully forward, making for the villa's lights.

She got closer and closer to them, her hands raised, with nails like poisonous claws — indeed, they were poisonous claws — poised and ready to strike…

… But in that same moment Julie found herself betrayed, and by three things:

One, the full moon, emerging from behind fleeting clouds, to sweep a silver swath over the sea and the land. Two, by the sharp stutter of automatic gunfire, sounding from a short distance to the west. And three, by a watchful, dragonfly spy-in-the-sky, hovering on high as it sent an urgent message to Julie's would-be victims:

'Central team. Why are there three of you? Do you have a tail?' Fading in and out, the pilot's words were hard to read.

Lardis didn't understand the message, but Jake, startled by the gunfire and the near-distant cries that accompanied it, turned and saw…

… A girl? A distraught, naked girl?

For seeing him beginning his turn, Julie had drawn back, shrunk down into herself, begun to sob and scream. 'I was in the house,' she sobbed, trying to cover herself as if ashamed of her nakedness. 'They kept me prisoner there. But when they heard your helicopter they stopped watching me, and I… and… I… oh!'

She feigned a swoon, and Jake — forgetting all that he'd seen, all that he'd been told — put up his weapon and stepped forward.

She clung to him for a moment, this beautiful girl, who was naked and frightened and so pale in the flooding light of the moon… so pale and so cold. This girl whose grip on his combat suit was like iron, and whose nose was suddenly wrinkling suspiciously as she smelled garlic, and whose eyes were a reflective yellow, sulphurous in the night!

Julie held the front of his jacket bunched in one hand, drew back the other hand until Jake saw its nails, sharpened and bevelled to gouges that would cut bloody channels in his face as easily as a routing machine! And her awful smile: the way her lips curled back from gleaming teeth.

Jake tried to bring his machine-pistol to bear, to centre its muzzle on Julie's body. But she was faster; she knocked it away, out of his grasp. And now her 'smile' was a fixed, nightmarish grimace — but whether of horror or of pleasure in her own terrible strength, Jake couldn't say. Nor could he do anything about it.

But Lardis could.

An 'old man,' Lardis Lidesci had been ignored and almost forgotten by the girl. A mistake, for he was an old man with a difference. He was the Old Lidesci, and not nearly as naive as Jake. Not in the ways of vampires.

Jake saw that slender, incredibly strong hand lift up before his face, tried to draw back from it and couldn't. He saw the fingers crook, could almost feel their rake, and knew that he was going to feel it. But then, in a moment, the look on her face changed. And she sighed.