The Cross

Chapter Twelve

Romania

The sleet had given way to a mist of icy drizzle that blanketed the hills and forests as Joel drove the stolen pickup truck through the night. With every mile that passed, he kept glancing at the sinking fuel gauge. The only thing that terrified him more than being stranded in the middle of nowhere, lost, penniless and alone, was the horror of being caught in the open by the rising sun. He kept thinking he could see the first red glow of dawn on the dark eastern horizon.

‘Relax,’ he muttered out loud over the beat of the windscreen wipers. ‘You’ve got hours yet. Everything’s fine.’

Yeah, he thought bitterly. You’re a vampire now, and everything’s just fucking fine.

After the endless empty roads, a sweeping stretch of lights in the distance told him he was approaching a town. He was suddenly gripped with terror at the thought of entering such a dangerous alien environment. Humans would be everywhere. But he fought the urge to shy away from the town, and gripped the steering wheel tightly as he joined the thickening flow of night-time traffic. He was growing dizzy with hunger. He needed to eat. No, not to eat. To feed. The thought made him feel sick.

Driving by the illuminated windows of an all-night supermarket on the edge of town, Joel swerved into the little car park next to it and pulled up in the shadows. There was only a smattering of other vehicles in the car park, and he figured that some of those must belong to the staff.

As he watched from the dark interior of the truck, a woman came out of the supermarket carrying a shopping basket and started heading across the car park towards an old Peugeot estate, picking her way between the puddles that reflected the neon light from the windows.

Joel didn’t need the shop lights to see his target with incredible clarity. She was short and plump, dark-haired, in her late forties or so. Under her raincoat she was wearing a nurse’s uniform; he guessed she must be picking up some provisions on her way home after a late shift at some local hospital.

Joel could smell her blood. Hot and thick and dark, pulsing through her veins. The intensity of his senses was frightening.

Though not as frightening as the thing that was happening inside his mouth. His teeth didn’t feel right. He ground them together, pressed his thumb-tips against his canines and gasped in shock at how elongated and sharp they suddenly felt. Something was taking control of him.

The woman kept walking across the car park. A few more steps and she’d have reached her Peugeot.

Joel opened his door with a trembling hand and stepped out. In the cold night air the scent of her blood was even thicker and more intoxicating.

He shuddered.

Fight it. Fight it.

He could smell something else, too. The pungent odour of the packet of raw meat in the woman’s shopping basket.

She turned to stare at him, curiosity turning quickly to alarm as he stumbled up to her in the darkness.

‘Please,’ he said, aware that she couldn’t understand him. ‘I don’t want to hurt you … I just need …’ Then, with a speed and strength that astonished him even more than it did the frightened woman, he shot out his arm and tore the shopping basket from her hand. Its contents spilled out: two plastic milk containers, a block of processed cheese, a box of eggs that cracked and broke on the concrete; and a plastic-wrapped oblong package that Joel stared at for a split second before scooping up off the ground.

The woman screamed at him in Romanian as he turned and ran back to the truck. Its engine roared into life and he took off out of the car park.

A couple of miles down the road, Joel couldn’t stand it any more. Pulling over to the side, he ripped open the package on his lap. The sharp tang of animal offal made his nostrils flare. Raw livers. He sank his teeth into them and felt the dead flesh rip. Cold, congealed blood and watery fluid ran across his tongue and down his throat, spilled down his chin onto his trousers. He bit deeper, devouring the meat with a ferocious passion that his sense of disgust couldn’t deter.

Before he knew it, he’d wolfed down the entire contents of the pack. He let the empty polystyrene tray fall to his feet, coughing and spluttering through the awful cold, congealed blood that coated the inside of his mouth. An intense surge of self-loathing made him want to put his head through the windscreen. He pounded the steering wheel and moaned and cursed until he’d exhausted himself; then, finally settling down, he numbly put the truck back into gear and drove on.

Hours passed, and Joel was frantic with worry about running out of night by the time he found the stream of lorries heading for the seaport. He followed the heavy freight vehicles through tall gates. Nobody stopped him.

He abandoned the pickup truck in a dark corner of the docks, between two enormous steel containers. His agility, as he sneaked through the shadows, stunned him. He was like a cat, rapidly learning to make use of his new powers of stealth and physical poise. The raw livers seemed to have given him enough energy to keep moving for now, but the hunger still gnawed deep inside and some terrible instinct told him that he couldn’t survive on a diet of animal flesh.

Fine. Then he’d starve. The other option was just too awful to contemplate.

Joel ducked around the corner of a crumbling building and crouched behind a stationary fork-lift truck as he heard steps approaching. He saw a cigarette glow in the dark. The shapes of two men ambling through the dockyards, a hundred yards away. They were talking in low voices, sharing some anecdote that made one of them laugh. As they came nearer, Joel’s acute hearing picked up words of English, and he strained to listen to what they were saying. Once he’d caught enough to realise they were part of a British crew on board a freight vessel setting sail for the Port of Southampton that same night, he slipped out from his hiding place and followed them.

The sailors never once sensed what was pacing along behind them. They cut a path between dockyard buildings, past mounds of scrap and stacks of crates, giant coils of chain and cabling. Finally, they emerged onto a quay and Joel caught sight of the vessel they were heading for.

The container ship was a hulking black mass, the gently swelling tide slapping and sucking at her sides, rocking her almost imperceptibly on her moorings. Light streamed from an open hatch. The two sailors climbed up the gangway and disappeared inside.

Cautiously, glancing left and right, Joel followed. Nobody saw him as he slipped on board and started looking for a place to hide.