Red Eye - 02 Read Online Free

Philadelphia. He is to be doctor. We talk. Nurzhan, he tells me recently there have been bad things happening to my kind in that country. Because he knows what I am, he is interested in vampires. He goes on internet, reads things. I think he hopes to find cure for me, if there is one. He doesn’t find cure yet, but he does find rumours.”
    “That someone’s slaughtering vampires over there.”
    “Yes. Yes.” The vampire nodded animatedly. “As I tell you, killing us. Like these men try to.” He gestured to indicate the Stokers. Redlaw had spotted the two men behaving suspiciously outside a pub in West Ham that was a known Stoker haunt, and had followed them to the lockup. Morons they might be, but they had possessed enough basic cunning to choose to attack the vampire during the daytime, when there was every chance he’d be asleep.
    “But America has hardly any Sunless.”
    “And it is busy destroying the ones it has already got.”
    “What I mean is, there isn’t really an anti-vampire movement there. Not a well mobilised one like here, with cells and meetings and ringleaders.”
    “According to Nurzhan, there is. Or there is something . Two, three nests have been wiped out. So the internet says.”
    “The internet says a lot of things,” said Redlaw.
    “I know. But I tell you because I think you should know. You are John Redlaw. Once we feared you. Now you are vampires’ friend. This is what everyone says, and today I see for myself.”
    “I don’t know about ‘friend’, but I do have a new set of priorities.” Redlaw rubbed his fist. His knuckles still throbbed from cold-cocking the Stokers. “A burden of care.”
    “And I thank you for caring for me,” said the vampire sincerely.
    “You’d be better off, you know, in a Sunless Residential Area. Safer. Then you wouldn’t be vulnerable to attack.”
    “Safer? In SRA?” The vampire gave a gruff, scoffing laugh. “I think not. We do not trust SRA now. We do not trust government. We take our chances out in the city, the countryside. You yourself know what happened when we did trust government. Can you blame us for not wanting to again?”
    Redlaw looked at him. “In all honesty, I can’t.”
     
     
    L ATER, AT AN internet café called the Java Crypt, Redlaw surfed and searched. The content of various US-based forums and chat rooms backed up the vampire’s assertion. People were posting comments suggesting there was some kind of clandestine backlash taking place in the States. The oldest of these dated back to three weeks ago and purportedly came from an actual vampire. Since there were so many wannabes and fantasists out there, it wasn’t difficult for Redlaw to discount the authenticity of that claim. Had the poster chosen a more original username than Dracul12345, he might have stood more of a chance of being taken seriously.
    What he wrote, however, had a distinct ring of plausibility:
     
There were three of them near my place in Trenton, NJ, nosferatu like me, holed up in this old timber mill down by the river. I’ve been watching them come and go at night. This one night, I swear, there was shooting. Saw gun flashes and everything inside the mill. After that, no more nosferatu.
     
    Another poster corroborated his testimony, to some extent:
     
I’m from New Jersey too, Hopewell, just north of Trenton. I don’t know about any timber mill, but I go hiking in the woods round Kuser Mountain County Park and lately I’ve been coming across dead raccoons, woodchucks, this one time even a deer. And when I say dead, I mean no blood in them. Just laying there *empty*, if you know what I mean. Like deflated balloons. I make sure I don’t go in those woods any time near sundown, you can bet on that, not now. But even so, I’ve noticed there’ve not been any dead animals for a week. Seems to have stopped.
     
    A third poster said:
     
Don’t know about you guys, but if it *was* vampires, could some local gun nuts have gotten them? Like a