Redlaw - 01 Read Free Page B

made a quick mental inventory of his weapons. Ash-wood stakes—six. Allium sativum extract smoke bombs—two. Aqua sancta grenades—five. All clipped to the standard-issue field deployment vest he wore under his overcoat. Plus, of course, his Cindermaker, for which he was carrying an extra twenty-one rounds in three magazines.
    His crucifix was better than any of these, his ultimate deterrent.
    Or so he had always used to think.
    He trod a street littered with trash and detritus. Sunless were anything but proud about the state of their accommodation; badly boarded-up windows, sagging roofs, holes in floorboards, filth lying everywhere, none of it bothered them. The copious vermin the squalor attracted—rats, foxes, pigeons—didn’t bother them either. In fact, vermin were welcome in an SRA. Handy free range snacks.
    A trio of Sunless emerged from the shadows of an overgrown front garden—youths in trainers and hooded tops, sentries whose job it was to see off intruders. Redlaw clocked their presence and kept on walking. They took up position alongside him, matching their pace to his, murmuring taunts in their native language (Romanian, if he didn’t miss his guess). Framed by the hoods, scarlet eyes and sharp white teeth glinted.
    The three kept their distance, though. The unholstered Cindermaker and Redlaw’s evident lack of fear saw to that.
    He headed on towards the noise. It was the kind of racket that could drive an ordinary person to the edge of sanity, a bedlam of inhuman voices wailing sounds that were almost but not quite words. It was shot through with fury, and indignation, and above all a dreadful, aching hunger. A jail full of starving prisoners, slowly losing their minds, might well set up a cacophony like this.
    “The Lord is my shepherd,” Redlaw intoned under his breath. “I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures...”
    He entered a square, still with his three-strong escort. This would have been a highly desirable address once, large old houses on all sides and a small rectangular park in the middle. The houses’ façades were now leprous with pitted plasterwork and peeled paint, while the park was bald earth dotted with the odd clump of grass and a few neglected, wilting trees and shrubs.
    Here stood the BovPlas Logistics refrigerated truck. Like the square, it was in a sorry state. Its tyres were burst. Its radiator grille had been torn off and the engine eviscerated. Its rear doors hung askew, and the cattle blood it had been transporting for the Sunless to distribute among themselves, several hundred plastic pouches of the stuff, was everywhere. Pavements were slick with it. Walls dripped with it. The pouches themselves lay scattered about, deflated, shredded, like so many dead jellyfish washed up by some crimson tide.
    Of the two drivers, Redlaw could see no immediate sign, but the truck’s cab had been broken into, which did not bode well. BovPlas Logistics armoured its fleet. Every vehicle came fitted with heavy-duty dual-layer plexiglass and a tungsten-and-ceramic composite shell. Tough, but nothing that would hold up to a horde of frenzied Sunless.
    And “frenzied” was the only word for it. Vampires thronged the square, scores of them, a mob, surging here and there with looks on their faces that ranged from baleful to deranged. Some were fighting among themselves, engaged in a tug of war over the last few blood pouches still intact. Others were vandalising the already dilapidated houses, ripping off roof slates and kicking in gables and fascia boards, or denuding the trees of the scant branches they had left. Redlaw thought of zoo animals, maddened by captivity, wantonly destroying their cages. Their massed banshee cries reverberated in his ears, deafening.
    The sensible option would have been to retreat. The trio of Sunless behind him were an obstacle to that, but not one that couldn’t be overcome.
    Instead, Redlaw raised his Cindermaker and fired into the