Will Hill - The Rising

As the doors to the containers screeched open, terrible sounds began to fill the air. There were cries of fear and misery, screams of pain and terror, and a relentless chorus of sobbing, pleading human voices, many of them speaking languages which were alien to the ears of the listening Operators. Then, through the mist, a small figure appeared at the top of the gangway, silhouetted against the grey canvas of the thickening fog. It took a nervous, shaky step on to the metal walkway, then another, and another. Then it passed through the beam of one of the freighter’s huge running lights, and Kate gasped.

Bathed in the bright white beam stood an Asian girl who could have been no more than five or six years old. Her tiny face was pale, her eyes narrowed against the light. She wore a dress printed with a pattern of flowers that had once been white, but was now the deep grey of dust and dirt. In her small hand she clutched a filthy doll that was missing one of its arms and both of its legs. She took a hesitant step forward on bare, filthy feet, then another, then stumbled backwards, grabbing desperately for the gangway’s metal rail. She sat down hard on the metal panel, looked around with awful confusion on her small face and began to cry.

A second silhouette appeared at the top of the gangway, running down towards the girl. In the light, the shape became a tiny Asian woman, as pale and filthy as the girl, who dropped to her knees beside the sobbing child and began to shush her gently.

On the concrete dock, one of the vampires began to laugh, and suddenly Jamie was full of an anger so intense he had only ever felt anything like it once before in his life, when he saw the terrified face of his mother standing beside Alexandru Rusmanov in the monastery on Lindisfarne.

“Let’s get them,” he growled.

“Negative,” replied Jack Williams, instantly. “Not until everyone clears the ship.”

Jamie gritted his teeth, and forced himself not to reply. Larissa’s hand rested momentarily on his arm, a show of support invisible to everyone else, and he felt his rage subside, just a fraction. He refocused his attention on the freighter, where a steady stream of men and women, emaciated, filthy, with looks of blank terror on their faces, were now making their way down the gangway.

The woman and the little girl had reached the bottom, where they stepped nervously off on to the concrete of the dock. Immediately, one of the vampires grabbed for the girl, who cried out with fear, pressing herself against the woman. There was more laughter, and more boiling, acidic anger spilled into the pit of Jamie’s stomach.

“Let them be,” said the vampire foreman. “Makes no difference if they want to stay together. They’re all going to the same place. Start loading them up.”

The vampire who had grabbed for the girl hissed, but did as he was told. He reached out, and grabbed the woman by her shoulder, sinking his nails into her flesh as he did so. The woman gritted her teeth, but did not cry out; instead, she fixed the vampire with a long look of utter contempt.

Good for you, thought Jamie. Just keep it together for a few more minutes.

The men and women, a dirty, shambling mass of damaged humanity, reached the bottom of the gangway, and began to spill out across the dock. The vampires moved beside them, funnelling the ragged group towards the waiting trucks; the prisoners, weakened and disoriented by their time in the containers, went unprotestingly.

“This is stupid,” breathed Kate. “It’s much easier with them still on the boat. Down here they’re just going to get in the way.”

“Hold your positions,” insisted Jack.

“She’s right,” said Angela. “We need to go now.”

“Angela, I’m warning—”

“Warn me later,” interrupted Angela, and moved.

Angela Darcy slid silently out from behind the wall that was sheltering Squad F-7 from view and brought her T-Bone to her shoulder as though it was the most natural thing in the world. There was a fluidity to the way she moved that was almost feline, and Jamie watched her from the other side of the dock with a feeling that made him almost guilty.

She sighted the vampire who had laughed at the little girl, who was now ordering the woman holding her to climb into the back of the nearest truck. The woman was refusing, shaking her head left and right, spitting torrents of what Jamie thought might be Mandarin. The vampire stared back at her with a lazy smile on his face, the face of someone who is eager to commit violence, and knows his chance is about to arrive.

Angela squeezed the T-Bone’s trigger, and then a loud bang and a rush of escaping gas sounded through the quiet evening air. The smiling vampire was beginning to turn his head towards the source of the noise when the T-Bone’s metal stake smashed into his chest, punching a hole the size of a grapefruit clean through him. His eyes widened, before he exploded in a steaming gout of blood, splashing the back of the truck and the woman and the girl standing beside it.

The freshly spilled blood hit the noses of the other vampires instantly, and their eyes darkened red. The Chinese woman, her face coated with blood, was staring at the space where the vampire had been standing, her eyes wide. The little girl pulled a strand of something red and wet from her hair, held it up before her face and started to scream. In an instant, the rest of the vampires appeared around her, snarling and hissing. The ones who had been unloading the containers on the freighter’s deck swooped down from the air and landed softly beside their colleagues. The foreman muscled his way through the crowd and grabbed the woman by her arm.

“What did you do?” he demanded. “What did you—”

His question was cut off as the stake from Jamie’s T-Bone tore through his throat, spraying his blood across the rest of the vampires, who recoiled, howling with alarm. Jamie hadn’t missed; the foreman’s heart was blocked by the throng of vampires. But he was confident that the rest of them would be a lot easier to deal with if their leader was unable to speak.

“Goddamnit, you two,” snarled Jack Williams. “We are go, repeat, we are go.”

The Operators broke cover and advanced from both sides towards the vampires, who immediately panicked. The foreman, who had sunk to his knees as blood gushed from his throat, was waving his hands and gurgling incomprehensibly, but the rest of the vampires ignored him. Instead, they hurled themselves at the approaching figures.

Kate dropped immediately to one knee, pulled her MP5 submachine gun from her belt and strafed the onrushing vampires at knee height, exactly as she had been trained to do. Bullets ripped through their legs, tearing flesh and shattering bone, and three of them crashed to the ground, screaming in pain.

Three more leapt into the air, where Larissa met them, her eyes red as lava, her teeth bared in a savage grin. She tore into them three metres above the ground, sending sprays of blood arcing high into the night sky, then landed as gracefully as a cat. The three vampires tumbled to the ground behind her, their blood pumping out across the concrete.

Across the dock, Shaun Turner drew his ultraviolet torch from his belt and raked its beam across the vampires who were streaming towards his squad. As the purple light touched their bare skin, five of the vampires burst into flames and immediately abandoned their attack, racing instead towards the cold water of the river.

They didn’t make it.

Angela detached herself from her squad and sprinted after them, firing her MP5 from her shoulder as she ran. Bullets thudded into the backs and legs of the burning vampires, and they crumpled to the ground, screaming and writhing in pain. They tried to crawl towards the water’s edge, but Angela kept firing, her shots calm and precise, and the vampires eventually slumped to a halt, their bodies billowing with purple fire and the revolting smell of cooking meat.