The Cross

Chapter Thirty-Two

Blackheath prison

Solitary confinement block

Just under two yards wide and three yards long, the cold concrete floor of the cell was awash with sweat and the bare block walls echoed with the snorts and grunts as the prisoner called Ash pumped out his eightieth press-up in the dim light, wearing only his prison-issue boxer shorts. The muscles of his triceps and forearms were tighter and harder than steel cables. The points of his sharpened teeth ground against each other with the effort, while his eyes remained blank, unfocused.

He had no way to measure time, except for the routine of his meals and his daily muck-out. He knew that it was night. And he knew — had known for the last several minutes — that something unusual was happening inside the prison.

He knew it by the muffled noises he could faintly make out, coming from beyond the thick walls and steel door of his cell. Noises that, as they seemed to grow closer and louder and more intense with every passing moment, sounded like all hell breaking loose.

Ash paused for the merest fraction of a beat as another terrible muted wailing scream, followed by another resounding crash, sounded from somewhere in the bowels of the prison. The corner of his mouth gave a twitch, and he went on pumping out more press-ups. Let them riot. Let war wage outside, let the whole world blast itself apart in a rain of hellfire and destruction. None of it was of any concern to him. When it was over, and he walked out of here into the ruins of a devastated planet, nothing would have changed for him. He would remain Ash. Doing what he did. And nobody would ever be able to stop him.

His muscles pumped faster, pain screaming through him, sweat running off his back and down his arms to his clenched fists and the pool on the concrete floor. He reached a hundred and kept on going. He was a human piston. No, not human. Other. Better. He was—

The door of his cell suddenly buckled with a shriek of rending metal. Not much could startle Ash, but as the door was ripped away from its hinges and slammed down on the cell floor, he had to stop what he was doing and look around.

Framed in the rectangle of smoky, flickering white-orange light where the door had been stood three figures. The man on the left was so massive that he seemed to fill the corridor. A curved Arab scimitar was thrust crossways through his belt. He was clutching something in his fist that Ash couldn’t make out. The figure on the right was lithe and curvaceous — the shape of a woman, her one-piece outfit tight and smooth, the light shining through her wild hair and glittering off the steel scabbard that dangled from her waist.

The figure in the middle was that of another man, not enormous or musclebound like his male companion, and he had no weapon. Ash’s concept of elegance was considerably limited, but that would have been the word he’d have used to describe the way the man held himself. There was something about him — something about all three of them, in fact — some strange and mesmerising energy that Ash had never sensed before.

Ash slowly got to his feet, not taking his wary gaze from the three figures. The sweat was already cooling on his skin as cold air streamed in from the corridor. His nostrils flared at the smell of smoke. From somewhere outside his cell he could hear the soft crackle of fire.

It was the elegant figure in the middle who spoke first. ‘You would be the man named Ash?’

Ash said nothing. He nodded once, imperceptibly.

‘My name is Stone. Gabriel Stone. These are my associates, Lillith and Zachary. We have come for you.’

Ash remained silent; he cocked his head a little to the side, watching them intently.

‘There will be time for explanations later,’ Gabriel told him. ‘Zachary, escort our friend from his chamber.’

Zachary ducked his head to clear the cell doorway. Stepping inside, he tossed away the thing he’d been clutching in his fist. Ash looked down at it. A human arm, ripped off at the elbow. Still wearing the shirt sleeve of the man it had been torn from. The sleeve was the colour of a prison guard’s uniform.

Two vertical frown lines appeared on Ash’s brow.

Zachary towered over him by a good four inches, and where Ash’s muscles were tight and sleek like a leopard’s, the huge man was built more like a Kodiak bear. Gripping him by the shoulder, Zachary propelled him towards the door. Ash disliked anyone touching him, but his protest was quickly cut short as he took in the scene of carnage and destruction outside his cell. The twisted, broken, slashed and dismembered corpses of eight prison guards littered the floor. The familiar stink of death mingled with the acrid smell of smoke. He could hear the groans of the dying echoing down the corridor. Flames and black smoke surged from an electrical box that trailed sword-slashed wires. The security cameras lining the corridor were dead, sightless.

‘What, you think we were gonna dig a tunnel into your cell, asshole?’ Zachary said. ‘Like a bunch of motherfucking rats? No way. We came straight in the front door.’

‘Golden Boy better be worth the trouble,’ Lillith said as they headed back through the maze of corridors, Gabriel silently leading the way, Zachary bringing up the rear steering the human ahead of him. She held up her sword hand. ‘Look at this. I broke a damned nail.’

As they pressed on, they could feel the walls shaking with the roar and the stamping of the thousands of prisoners teeming behind locked doors, clamouring wildly to get out. Ash had stopped trying to shake off the big man’s grip. All he could do was stare as they kept moving. The last time he’d seen these corridors, the way had been barred by thick metal doors that took a ring of keys to pass through. Now, the way was open and the doors hung twisted and limp on their hinges. Every few yards they stepped over another pool of blood, another dead guard. Rounding a corner, they came across one who was still alive and dragging himself pitifully along the floor by a mutilated hand. Lillith tutted, drew her sabre and buried its blade deep into the man’s back. She dabbed a fingertip against the bloody steel and licked it. ‘Want some?’ she asked teasingly, turning to Ash. ‘I mean, you do imbibe, don’t you?’

‘Save it for later, sister,’ Gabriel snapped at her.

‘Who are you people?’ Ash said.

‘It speaks,’ Lillith said. ‘Well, that’s something.’

As they passed through a smashed doorway, the narrow block-built corridor opened up into a high, open space that blazed with bright neon light. Metal walkways and stairways lined the walls. The roar of the prisoners echoed deafeningly from three tiered rows of communal cells, a waving, yearning forest of arms stretching outward through the bars. When they saw the group approaching and the bewildered-looking Ash with them, the prisoners erupted into a wild cheer.

‘We ought to let them all out,’ Lillith shouted over the din, amping up the already enormous volume of noise with a flourish of her bloody sabre and a beaming smile to her audience. ‘A mass breakout of thieves and murderers. Something to spice this dreary old island up a lit—’

Her words and the cheering of the prisoners were drowned out by the sudden blaring whoop of a siren.

‘Shit,’ Zachary mouthed, and he drew the scimitar out of his belt, still keeping a tight grip on Ash. Gabriel looked across to see a barred door flying open and nine prison guards swarming through towards them. It seemed that the survivors of the vampires’ inward journey through Blackheath had regrouped and broken out their anti-riot equipment. Their terrified faces peered over the tops of their shields. Four of the nine men were clutching rubber bullet guns. Without waiting for a command, one let off his weapon with a booming thump.

The heavy cylindrical composite-plastic missile crossed the distance between the guards and the vampires at several hundred feet per second. Just a blur to the human eye, but to a vampire’s senses it might as well have been a gently-thrown beach ball. Lillith slashed out with her sabre and cut the rubber bullet in half before it could reach its target.

The other three panicking guards let rip with their weapons in quick succession. Zachary easily deflected the second bullet with the blade of his scimitar, sending it bouncing away harmlessly across the floor. Gabriel reached out and simply snatched the third and fourth out of the air with his hands, like catching apples falling from a tree. He tossed them over his shoulders, clicked his fingers and said, ‘Kill them.’

Lillith and Zachary charged. The fight was brief, bloody and brutally uneven. The roar of the prisoners rose to a frenzied howl as the two vampires’ blades chopped and hacked. An ear flew. A hand. Lillith decapitated one guard with a single stroke. Zachary sliced another almost in half from shoulder to hip. In moments, nine men had been reduced to a pile of body parts lying scattered in a huge pool of blood.

‘More will be on their way,’ Gabriel said over the whoop of the alarm. ‘Let’s go.’

Before squadrons of armed police and half the British Army could descend on the place, the vampires had retraced their bloody steps back through the rest of the prison and burst out into the misty night. Ash ran hard to keep up as they sprinted to the perimeter fence and climbed out through the hole that Zachary had slashed in the wire earlier.

When Ash sucked in the cold night air, then laid eyes on the helicopter that was waiting for them on the tarmac beyond the fence, the rush of exhilaration at his new found freedom made him want to shout in triumph. Lillith chuckled at his expression. ‘Don’t count your chickens just yet, Golden Boy. You don’t know what’s in store.’

Before the human could reply, Zachary had shoved him through a cargo hatch in the fuselage and slammed it shut. The three vampires piled into the cockpit. Gabriel calmly took the controls, and in seconds the rotors were building up speed.

‘Hey, Gabriel, have you got a licence to fly this thing?’ Lillith yelled over the screech of the turbine as the helicopter lifted off the ground, dipped its nose and accelerated aggressively skywards. Looking down, they could all see the ocean of flashing blue lights illuminating the North Yorkshire hills and hear the sirens as dozens of emergency response vehicles sped towards the prison. But by then, the chopper was already just a rapidly shrinking red twinkle among the stars.