LITMIR.BIZ

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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.

      Shaun Turner watched her for a split second, a huge grin on his face, then he and Jack Williams threw themselves at the four vampires who were still coming. They attacked with deadly precision, and teamwork that bordered on instinct; the vampires, who wore looks of desperation on their faces, desperation born of the realisation that they were outmatched, fought with a panic bordering on mania. They leapt and clawed and bit and spat as Jack and Shaun slid through them like knives through butter; the flashing claws and snapping jaws touched nothing but thin air.

      Shaun pulled the metal stake from his belt, ducked neatly beneath the flailing swing of one of the vampires, a man in a Sunderland football shirt who looked to be about thirty, with a shaved head and arms covered in blotchy blue tattoos, then drove the stake upwards with vicious accuracy. The metal point crunched through the vampire’s breastbone, soaking Shaun’s arm with pumping blood, until it pierced the wildly beating heart and the vampire burst like a balloon, his insides splashing across Shaun’s visor and helmet.

      He wiped them clear, in time to see Jack Williams sling his arm round another of the vampires, and drive his stake through the creature’s back. It exploded into putrid liquid, and Jack staggered backwards as the thing he had been holding tightly in his grip ceased to exist.

      Behind him, a vampire snarled with anticipation, and reached for Jack’s shoulders, its fangs gleaming in the reflected light from the ship. Shaun, whose brain was capable of an icy precision that was at least the equal of his father’s, didn’t hesitate; he drew the Glock 17 from his belt and fired from the hip, like a gunslinger in an old Western. The bullets tore away the vampire’s head above his eyebrows, and the vampire went down to the cold concrete, his eyes rolling, his hands grabbing reflexively at nothing as his brain lay in pieces on the dock. Jack regained his balance, spun round and buried his stake in the chest of the twitching vampire, then leapt clear as it exploded.

      Shaun watched his squad leader with a look of great pride on his face; he and Jack had been through so many fights together, so many battles in dark corners of the world, and there was no one Shaun would rather have at his side. Then he felt the movement of air at his back, and realised that something was behind him.

      He lunged forward, away from it, turning as he did so, and saw the contorted, hate-filled face of a vampire barely an arm’s length away from him. It was a man in his fifties, wearing a dark blue suit and tie, and Shaun had time to crazily think how much he looked like the housemaster he had so hated during his time at boarding school. The vampire was reaching for him, its hand centimetres from his chest, its eyes blazing red, its fangs huge and sharp as razors. Shaun started to swing the Glock up from his side, knowing it was going to be too late to stop the vampire reaching him.

      “Down!”

      It was Angela’s voice, cool and calm through his earpiece. As he heard the word, he also heard a loud bang he knew as well as any sound on earth. He threw his legs out from beneath him, and let himself fall to the

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