Uprising

Chapter Seventy-Three

Hours passed. Voices in the dark, vibrating space of the cargo hold.

‘Where are they taking us?’ Lerouge sounded agitated and fearful.

‘They must surely let us go,’ said Borowczyk.

‘It is an outrage.’ Goldmund’s voice. ‘An outrage, pure and simple.’

‘The question is, what do we do about it?’ Alex said. ‘We can’t just sit here.’

‘The field agent.’ Olympia Angelopolis’s voice muttered scornfully from the darkness. ‘And what exactly is it you propose to do? As you seem to have so many wonderful ideas as to how we should run our affairs.’

‘For a start, I wouldn’t waste my time trying to bribe these guys,’ Alex answered.

‘You can’t buy your way out of this one so easily.’

‘Then what, Alex?’ Rumble’s voice. He sounded subdued.

‘We have to fight.’

‘With what? They have swords. They might still have Nosferol bullets, too.’

Alex gave a snort. ‘Maybe Gabriel Stone’s right about us, Harry. Seems to me that with all this Federation bullshit, we’ve forgotten who we are. We’re vampires.

Vampires fight. They don’t plead and beg.’

Rumble drew a breath. ‘Alex—’

‘You will please to remember whom you are addressing,’ Hassan said indignantly in his thick accent. ‘You are in the presence of Supremo Angelopolis.’

‘I know exactly whose presence I’m in,’ Alex said, and the conversation settled into a brooding silence. She could feel Harry Rumble frowning at her in the darkness.

The Chinook flew on and on. The night ticked slowly by. There was a landing that Alex guessed was for fuel, and then the chopper took off again. None of the prisoners spoke. Alex began counting the hours since she’d taken her last Solazal. Just before two in the afternoon, she remembered, which meant that the effect would start to wear off sometime in the early hours of the morning. She’d have bet that none of the others had taken any much later than that. None of them would survive the sunrise.

Gabriel Stone was forcing them to remember what it was like to live as real vampires. The thought almost made Alex smile.

As the hours ticked by, she knew that Harry Rumble and the Supremos had the dawn on their mind, too. Gaston Lerouge seemed especially nervous. Then, with still time to spare before the first rays of the sun began to lighten the sky, they felt the chopper begin another descent and then settle on solid ground. The rotors slowed and the hatchway opened abruptly. The same black-clad vampire guards who’d loaded them on board hauled them out one by one into the cold night air.

Alex looked around her. Moonlight shone on distant mountains and the high stone walls around them.

‘We’re in a castle,’ she whispered to Rumble.

They didn’t have much chance to talk as the guards grabbed them and separated them. Alex was shoved at sword-point through a barred doorway and down a narrow arched passage to a cell.

She breathed a sigh of relief. No windows. At least Stone hadn’t devised a little barbecue session when the sun came up in a few hours’ time. He clearly had other plans. The cell walls were about four feet thick, solid rock, and the steel door was too tough even for a vampire to get through. There was little else to do except hang around to find out what Stone’s plans might be.

Alex curled up in the corner of the cell, and the long wait began.