Hellgate London - Exodus Part 4

Saundra didn't back away from him. Instead, to his surprise, she came to him and dropped to her knees. She looked him in the eyes.

"Yes," she said softly. "It was pretty horrible. And if there'd been another way, I wouldn't have wanted you to kill them. But there wasn't another way. I know that. Our clients know that." She paused. "And you know that."

Simon didn't say anything.

She leaned into him and took him into her arms, holding him tightly. "I was afraid for you. I thought they were going to kill you. I didn't know you could do that."

"Honestly, neither did I."I was trained to fight monsters, not men. But he couldn't tell her that, of course.

He remained quiet, leaning into her, feeling her heat against the cooling night and the loneliness around him.

Back in the camp, Simon got out one of the tarps they used to set the tents up on. He placed it on the front of one of the Land Rovers, then grabbed the dead poacher lying in the fire by the feet and dragged him out of the coals.

The fire had burned away the man's hair and his face. Only a grinning blackened skull remained. The stench was stomach-churning and seemed to hang in the air all around the campsite.

Simon used water from the stream to put out the smoldering clothing that had melted to the dead man's upper torso. When he was certain the fire was finished, he dragged the dead man to the tarp. Then he went back for the next one, grabbing him by the boot heels and depositing him with the other.

At first, no one else moved. They only watched in silence. Then Saundra helped him with the third while two of the male clients dragged the fourth over to the tarp.

"What are you going to do with them?" Blaisdell asked. He was an American, working on a book, he'd said.

"Take them back to Cape Town." Simon grabbed one end of the tarp and folded it over the corpses. Saundra took the other end and helped him.

"Why? So they can have a burial?" Anger edged Blaisdell's words. "They don't deserve that. They should be left out here. Let the animals get them."

Simon started to reply, but knew he was going to be heated about it.

"Then those animals might develop a taste for human flesh," Saundra interrupted calmly. "Furthermore, seeing these men come back in this condition might give pause to anyone else who might try something like this. We're not doing them any favors. They're dead. They don't care anymore."

Blaisdell dropped his head and backed away. "I'm sorry. But I liked Dalton. He didn't deserve what happened to him. Neither did Carey."

Simon silently agreed.

When he and Saundra had finished wrapping the dead men, they wrapped them in ropes and secured the grisly bundle to the Land Rover. It was too much like a big-game hunter's trophy kill to suit Simon, but there was nothing to be done about it.

Picking up the remains of Dalton and Carey was worse. Simon and Saundra fired shots into the air to scare off the larger predators that didn't give way to the lights from the Land Rovers. The smaller carnivores ran and hid at once.

Simon took another tarp and a large flashlight. He also wore one of the pistols he'd taken from the poachers. Then he went after the remains.

Carey's body was mostly intact, but Dalton's was scattered. They had to pick it up in pieces. Saundra got sick and finally could no longer help. Simon pushed himself through the queasiness and made himself complete the task.

Dalton had a wife and children. They'd want to bury as much of their father as they could. Finding everything he could took Simon the biggest part of an hour.

At midnight, miles from the campsite and well on their way back to Cape Town, Simon stood guard while Saundra took care of the clients. He kept his hunting rifle across his knees.

Most of the clients were quiet. If left to their own devices, Simon felt certain they would have eventually gone to sleep in the tents. But Saundra had insisted on heating some of the soup stock they'd brought.

After their clients were taken care of, she brought a bowl of soup to him. It was crowded with chunky vegetables and beef, a substantial meal. Despite the scent of death that still hung in Simon's nostrils, the soup smelled divine.

Saundra sat cross-legged across from him with her own bowl of soup. They ate in silence for a while.

"I don't think we can count on any return business with this group," Saundra said. "Nor any good word-of-mouth from any of them. Not even the travel writer."

Simon nodded. She was just talking. He knew that. "You feeling any better?"

Glancing at her, Simon nodded. "I'll feel even better when we get back to Cape Town." "That should be by tomorrow afternoon now that we have the Land Rovers."

Simon shook his head. "I didn't think to check the fuel." He started to set the bowl aside.

"I already did. We've got enough."

Some of the tension unwound from Simon's stomach. Saundra was bright and capable. It felt good that not everything was riding on his shoulders.

"How's our other guest?" Simon referred to the surviving poacher.

"Hurting. Scared. I think the bleeding's finally stopped. I thought we were going to have to cauterize the wounds." Saundra ate some of her soup. "He's worried that he could be crippled for life."

"With the court system, he won't live long enough to get through rehab." Saundra looked at him. "You sound different."

"Different how?"

She hesitated for a moment, then shrugged. "Cold."

Simon thought about that. His father and the other Templar had taught him that about life. When he'd grown up, he'd trusted little outside of the Templar. Most of his life had been spent down inside the Underground in London. For the first few years he'd been homeschooled there. He hadn't gotten out into the real world until he was a teen.

And he'd never been able to make friends. He couldn't bring those people back to the Underground and show them the dojos and training schools that were set up there. He hadn't been able to have fights, either. The first time he had, he'd nearly killed the two boys who had tried to hurt him. He still didn't know what Grand Master Sumerisle had had to do to get him out of trouble. But he hadn't been allowed out of the Underground complex for a month afterward.

"I just want to get back," Simon said finally. But he also wanted to talk to the poacher, to learn more about that supposed invasion of London.

The man was sleeping in back of one of the Land Rovers. He lay atop a pallet of tusks. Simon hadn't gotten rid of those because disposing of them would have been useless. Someone would have claimed them. And they were valuable. The money gleaned from the sale could help pay for Dalton's and Carey's funerals.

"Wake up," Simon growled.

The man opened his eyes and looked groggy. Saundra hadn't mentioned giving him painkillers from the med kit, but Simon suspected that she had.

"What?" Fear and suspicion tightened the man's voice.

"What did you hear about the London invasion?" Simon stood with his arms folded across his chest. "You woke me to ask that?"

Simon reached out like he was going to grab one of the man's heavily bandaged feet. "Don't," the man moaned. He bent his knees and pulled his feet up toward him.

"Tell me about London."

"There's not much to tell. We heard about it in a bar before we left Cape Town. They had some vid, too, but it looked like a bunch of c.r.a.p if you ask me. They showed these images of these...things. I don't know what else to call them."

"What did they look like?"

"I don't know. The vids they had on the news weren't very good. Said that only a few people had made it out of London at the time. Thesethings had some kind of weapons that made it impossible for most people to leave. Either that, or they're all dead. The reports said a lot of people have gotten killed over there."

"How did they get there?"

The poacher pinched his nose. Simon knew it was the painkillers. He'd had to take them in the past for injuries he'd received skateboarding and base-jumping. A lot of them had made his nose feel numb and tingly at the same time.

"Don't rightly know. The newsmen were guessing that they mighta beamed down. Other people guessed that they opened up some kind of dimensional portal and stepped through."

"What about the British Army? Surely they're dealing with this."

"They're dead," the poacher said. "Most of 'em, anyway. I seen lots of footage of them getting killed." Simon stepped away from the poacher and headed back to where he'd left Saundra standing guard.

Things his father had told him kept coming back to haunt him. Thomas Cross had always claimed that when the demon forces came to the earth, no human without special training and weapons would be able to stand against them. "Well?" Saundra asked. Simon shook his head.

"Didn't he tell you anything?"

"Enough that I wish we were in Cape Town right now." "You've got family in London, don't you?"

"My father."

"What about your mother?"

"She died from cancer when I was three. I barely remember her." That was something Simon had never gotten past when he'd learned of it. His mother had died in one of the hospitals where the Templar were cared for. Simon didn't believe the hospital was as sophisticated as the ones in London proper had been.

He didn't see any way that could be true. They'd never taken her anywhere else for treatment.

And because the Templar were so prideful and paranoid, his mother had died without him ever having the chance to get to know her.

"You must be worried about your father," Saundra said.

"Not really." Thomas Cross had always been able to take care of himself.

Simon stretched out on the ground and tried to make his mind be quiet. He didn't know what he would do if the demons had finally returned to the world as the Templar had always claimed they would.

In the end, he suspected he wouldn't have to do anything. After all, his father and men like him had trained all their lives to handle just such an occasion. What could go wrong?

But he couldn't escape the nagging feeling that something had. Hadn't the poacher claimed that the British Army had been destroyed? Or was that the truth being stretched? A last jab at Simon's peace of mind?

After a long time, Simon finally slept, but the dreams were all bad, brought on by all the warnings and fearful stories he'd learned as a child. He kept seeing the Monster, the winged demon, that the Templar kept on display at the school. His father had said that it had been created from what they'd understood of the demons and placed there so no one would ever forget why they were there in the Underground, and what they trained for.

Years ago, the Templar had been ostracized by Philip IV as devil wors.h.i.+ppers because they'd tried to build a demon's skeleton from bones they'd known weren't human. They'd intended to study the bones and get a better understanding of the demons. Instead, the king had used the opportunity to seize Templar lands and fortunes.

Simon had long ago stopped thinking the demon had ever been real. It had just been a prop the Templar had used to scare their children with.

Hadn't it?

Four.

BISHOPSGATETOWER LONDON, ENGLAND.

Don't you think you might come away from the window, sir?"

Detective Chief Superintendent Alfred Hyde lowered his binoculars and turned toward the speaker. The superintendent was actually a little unnerved because he hadn't heard the man enter the dark room. And what with all the...

Hyde sighed. Despite everything he'd seen, he couldn't bring himself to call the improbable beings that had established a beachhead at St. Paul's Cathedral demons. Although it would be fitting, given what he'd seen them do, naming them as such didn't quite seem sane.

The room was black with shadows. Only a sliver of moonlight touched the floor, and the chief superintendent made certain none of it touched him. They were on the fifty-ninth floor of the Bishopsgate Tower, one of the newest buildings in London. During the battles against the invaders, the building had taken several direct hits. So far the enemy hadn't seen fit to destroy it.

"Who are you?" Hyde asked. He knew the man wasn't one of the personal guard that followed him around. Nor was he worried about the man's presence. His team would have verified his identification. More than that, the man looked human. Not like...the others.

The young man snapped to attention in a way that belied his casual dress. All of them had learned not to wear the uniform of the Metropolitan Police Service. The creatures that had invaded the city harbored especial ill will toward anyone in uniforms.

Hyde didn't know if that was because of the attack by the British military forces in the beginning, or because of the knights.

Calling the armored men knights somehow didn't quite seem sane either, but the men who'd survived in the ranks called them that despite edicts from on high. Given the mode of dress those men wore and the heroic way they'd laid down their lives fighting the enemy, there was no way they were going to be called anything less.

"Officer Krebs, sir. William Krebs." The young man saluted smartly.

"No salutes, Krebs," Hyde said. "It's one thing if you go off and get yourself killed, but I don't want you identifying me as a ranking officer to one of those b.l.o.o.d.y...things."

The young man looked embarra.s.sed. "Yes, sir."

"And stop calling me *sir,' confound it." Hyde was in his fifties, a fit, solid man with white hair and mustache. He wore round-lensed gla.s.ses.

Krebs wisely remained silent.

"I suppose you didn't show up here just so I could yell at you." "No, s-. No. Dr. Smithers asked me to fetch you."

"Oh?" Dr. Smithers was one of the coroners that worked for the MPS. He was a good man, and a friend.

"They've identified one of the kn-one of the armored men." "Really? Who is he?"

"Dr. Smithers didn't tell me. He just asked that I bring you to the morgue straightaway."

"All right." Hyde wasn't fond of the idea of traveling anywhere in the city. It wasn't safe. The monsters that had gutted the city hunted almost fearlessly in packs.

For the moment, he and his group-part of the small number of police officers that had survived the initial attacks of the enemy-had taken up residence under Bishopsgate Tower. The building was one of the newer structures in the city and had been built to stand forever. Supposedly.

Personally, Hyde doubted it would last through the month. The enemy was enlarging daily the area they controlled. It reminded Hyde of the stories his grandfather had told about the n.a.z.i occupation of France and the air raids over London.

Turning back to the window, Hyde lifted his binoculars again and looked in the direction of St. Paul's Cathedral. The black, roiling ma.s.s of the h.e.l.lgates-that's what some of the shortwave radio reporters were calling it, and Hyde saw no reason to disagree-glowed and flickered.

The meteorological effects ofwhatever it was were growing more and more every day. Hyde had daily reports of the devastation the manifestation was causing. Over the past few days, since the ma.s.sive attack by the kn-armoredmen on All Hallows' Eve, even the River Thames had become affected. The water level was dropping at an alarming rate.

Night stretched all across London. Hyde doubted the city had ever been so dark since World War II. Back in those turbulent years, the men and women who'd stayed had lived with the darkness at night because it was their greatest defense against German bombers.