Vampire Apocalypse: Fallout (Book 3) (14 page)

“It is just as well you
fledglings have calmer heads to guide you, sometimes I feel that
you need help finding your own prey in the pens outside.” Von
Richelieu knew he was risking alienating more than just those who
he directed the insult toward, but this was such a perfect
opportunity to push Kavanagh that it was worth the risk. Besides,
he would prefer to remove this threat now rather than have to wait
another few weeks or months with his constant questioning. Anything
could happen in that time and Kavanagh was far too dangerous. “Your
comments have been noted, but you can leave Von Kruger to me. I am
well aware of the situation and have the matter in hand.”

With that, Von Richelieu turned
away from the council in dismissal. He smiled as he heard a number
of them gasp at his arrogance. He wished he could look back and see
Kavanagh’s face. His insult was almost as clear as a physical slap,
and he expected to hear a challenge any second. But he waited and
waited, and when he eventually forced himself to turn back and look
he could see that Kavanagh had left the room silently, without so
much as a grunt of anger.
That vampire is truly far too
dangerous to leave to chance,
he thought as he allowed his gaze
to sweep those that were left.

Although each might be like a
God to humans and could strike fear among their own thrall armies,
they were merely sheep in his presence and he dismissed them with a
snort of derision. There was some small victory in Kavanagh’s
retreat but he would have preferred a challenge. It would have been
so much better to get it over with. He began to wonder if he should
risk letting the serum take its toll on the vampire after all.
Kavanagh could do so much damage in such a short time and Von
Richelieu had no idea how debilitating the serum would be or how
quickly its effects would become obvious. He might have to arrange
something a little more imminent after all.

Kavanagh was furious. Not just
at Von Richelieu but more so at himself. He should have been able
to stay and stare down Von Richelieu’s taunts, but he had felt the
anger begin to take over and he had had to flee. He paled as he
thought about what he had done. He had never run from any man in
his life and it cut him deeply that he had done so now, especially
now that he had become the world’s most powerful predator. But, as
in most things, there was always someone further up the chain than
you and there was no way that he could win in a straight fight
against Von Richelieu.

It wasn’t the physical combat he
feared, though. As a newborn he had few rights among the vampires.
Theirs was a hierarchical structure where seniority and respect
came from longevity and not from deeds. Their society, over the
last few centuries, was based on secrecy and stagnation where
humans were merely food and were rarely allowed into their exalted
ranks.

The war with humanity had
necessitated many changes to their carefully crafted rules. The
fact that they had been forced to increase the number of vampires
so quickly had led to many problems. Their rules and their society
were not capable of handling such an increase in their numbers.
There were problems worldwide, he had heard, though with no formal
communications available, it was difficult to gauge exactly what
was happening elsewhere.

Their society was crumbling from
within. New, technologically savvy vampires were straining against
the archaic systems and laws of those who ruled. There were still
too many powers that the new vampires could not master so any
direct conflict with the master vampires was still too risky. The
rules protected them as well.

Any newborn vampire attacking a
master vampire would be immediately restrained by all other
vampires, whoever they supported, and staked to the ground to be
left for the dawn. This death was feared among all the clans,
regardless of age. Death would be agonising and slow as every cell
would break down individually, causing intense and continuous agony
until death finally claimed them. He had many ideas about what he
would change if he could, but Von Richelieu was too canny. He would
have to beat him with his intellect.

Kavanagh felt a shiver run
through him as he thought back to the meeting. He had never lost
control like that before. Ever since he had become a vampire he had
accepted the urges and hungers that came with it, but this was
something far different. He had lost control in there. In fact, the
only way he had been able to stop himself from flying across the
table and ripping Von Richelieu’s throat apart had been by tearing
into the flesh of his own palms with his nails to distract himself
from the anger which had boiled up from nowhere.

He had never known such raw
emotion before. Even now he was still tempted to go back and rip
Von Richelieu’s head off, regardless of the consequences. What was
happening to him? Even when he had become a vampire and the thirst
had hit him for the first time he had never lost control like that.
He had looked like a pouting adolescent in that meeting and, while
he might only be a young vampire, he should be able to control
himself far better than that.

He continued to consider this as
he strode out into the night. It was strange not to feel the blood
thump through his veins as it had in life and it still took some
getting used to. Blood still flowed, of course, but it did not pump
like it had in life. It was more like a meandering stream that
coursed through his veins, and it was disconcerting, to say the
least.

The vampire body might be
incredibly powerful but it could not produce the blood their bodies
still needed to survive. It was the act of feeding, with the
constant introduction of fresh blood, that forced the blood already
in their systems to travel further through their bodies and keep
their muscles and their flesh oxygenated. Without fresh blood to
keep their blood flowing they would die.

As he walked he continued to
think on his uncharacteristic reaction, and he realised that there
had been more spontaneous fighting among the vampires of late and
this was unusual. Vampires were not “hot-blooded” to use a human
term and did not rule by emotion. They did not feel anger like
humans did, did not feel desire or passion.

At first he had missed that. He
had always thought that being a vampire would be one long orgy of
sex and violence.
Anne Rice really got that part wrong
, he
thought with a wry smile. It was hard to perform sexually when your
blood did not travel with the same wild abandon as a human’s.
However, the feeling of warm, fresh blood singing through your
deflated veins more than made up for the loss of such high emotion.
He had originally put these random acts of violence down to
prolonged inaction but he was beginning to wonder. It was as if
something had changed.

By their nature, vampires were
violent and lived by their instincts. For centuries the older
vampires had had to learn to curb these urges, but the newer
vampires had not had that luxury and there had always been tension
between the two groups, just nothing like it had been of late.
Recently he had witnessed two vampires tear each other apart and,
while they separated before one of them had killed the other, there
was no doubt in Kavanagh’s mind that they would have killed each
other if they had not been left alone. And, if the recent reports
about Von Kruger were to be believed, it was plain that something
had changed. But what?

Von Richelieu did not seem
worried and that in itself made Kavanagh even more suspicious. He
had always come down heavily on such behaviour. It was if he
wanted…

His thoughts were interrupted by
a loud commotion in one of the pens and he found himself heading
over to see what was going on. He felt nothing for his former race
as he approached the huge pens. The squalor they lived in and their
pitiful fate did not move him at all. They had had their chance to
join the ranks of vampires or thralls and had chosen to become
food, so they deserved what happened to them.

He had embraced the vampires
from the first he had heard of them. Of course he had been in
prison at the time and had little to give up when they had stormed
into the prison and offered the inmates the chance to join them.
That was when the vampires were still taking anyone to boost their
numbers. That soon changed, though, and many of those who had
joined from the dregs of humanity had since been weaned out, either
through attrition during the war or afterwards when the older
vampires had decided that not all of those chosen were worthy of
the gift of immortality. Nothing had been proved of course, but he
had enough contacts to have heard of Von Richelieu’s Death
Squads.

Of course, all that was in the
past now that things had settled down, wasn’t it?

He could see a number of the
humans moving about in the pen before him. Von Richelieu had
corralled all the humans a number of months ago for no apparent
reason. Before that the humans had wandered the city relatively
freely, the serum replacing the need for walls. But then he had
ordered these huge pens to be erected and all humans gathered up
and placed inside them. He had given no reason but Kavanagh had had
no interest either way so had not questioned it.

Now, though, he could see that
some of the humans were clearly agitated. The guards were trying to
get them to remain quiet but their usual zombie-like apathy was
replaced by what seemed to be anger and despair. It seemed to be
spreading through the whole pen and the general buzz of moaning was
becoming quite loud in comparison to what he was used to. He looked
over at another pen in the distance and his sharper eyesight had no
difficulty in making out the figures in that pen. They seemed
controlled and quiet.

Strange,
he thought. The
serum was administered at the same time to all humans so there
should not have been such strange behaviour in one batch and not
another. It was possible that the serum was at fault, of course.
Maybe a bad batch had got through somehow. He would have to
investigate.

He did not like
inconsistencies.

Captain William Carter winced as
he pulled himself up into the armoured car’s turret. His shoulder
still pained him, especially in the mornings when the air was still
chilled like it was this morning. He had tried everything to get
rid of the pain, and he had beaten more than one doctor senseless
when they had insisted that the wound had healed perfectly and that
there was no reason for the continuous pain.

He popped another handful of
pills into his palm and closed his eyes as he waited for the
painkillers to do their job. There were fewer and fewer supplies of
these painkillers left and they did not work quite as well on his
new physiology as they had when he was human, but they did take the
edge off the pain. Production had stopped quite some time before
the war during the power crisis and there had been so many wounded
during the war that medical supplies had become very rare indeed.
His men were under orders to search every town in the two states
but this effort had yielded few results up till now.

As soon as he closed his eyes
the scenes of that fateful day played in his head and he saw his
men die over and over, their bodies staggering and pirouetting as
the bullets from his gun pumped into them. He felt no remorse in
killing his men but the images, strangely, would not leave him, and
the pain in his shoulder would not go either. In a brief flash of
insight he wondered if the two were related. Could guilt manifest
itself like this? He forced his eyes open and the images
disappeared immediately, at least until later that night. The pain
in his shoulder began to ease as the painkillers began to take
effect.

He forced his mind to more
urgent matters. It promised to be a busy day. His advance scouts
had discovered tracks of a small patrol heading toward the
neighbouring state where Nero ruled. His men had reported no
sightings of thralls along that border but, of course, that meant
little these days. States did not trade or converse with each other
at any level, so this, in itself, was not unusual. However, he had
a thought as his patrol had relayed their findings, and the more he
considered it the more he was convinced he was right.

It was possible that the rebel
humans were operating from within Nero’s territory. They had
searched so extensively in their own states that it had occurred to
him that the humans could have their base in another state where
they did not cause any trouble and slipped across the border for
their raids. This would leave them relatively free to operate as
they had done and would explain why his patrols, and those of Von
Kruger, had failed to discover any trace of their hiding place.

Of course, he could be wrong,
but, as he looked out at the border between the two states, he was
becoming more and more convinced that he was right. There was a
huge amount of territory to cover, admittedly, but most of the
attacks were within a relatively small area. He had even plotted
all the attacks he knew about and had discovered a few interesting
facts. Many of the attacks were centred around a relatively small
area, in relation to the sheer size of the two states, and he was
pretty certain he knew the area from where they must be
operating.

Not with any accuracy, of
course, but he was able to plot a radius of around two hundred
miles stretching out from Bertrand, where he had been fairly
certain that the humans were operating from. This radius just
happened to include a chunk of Nero’s territory so his new theory
had gained some credibility.

Then, unexpectedly, there had
been another raid, but this one had been far further to the south
and his theory had been shattered. At least until the patrol had
found these latest tracks. This latest raid was an anomaly to every
other raid so he had decided to discount it for now. If there were
more raids later outside his charted radius then he could re-visit
that theory. For now, though, he would run with what he had. After
all, it was the very thing he would have done to draw attention
elsewhere if he had been in their position.