The Bloody Red Baron: Anno Dracula 1918 Page 29

  The Boche weren't firing either. They would have used up most of their firepower on the dummy balloons. It was often the habit of fliers to get rid of the extra weight of ammunition by emptying guns into enemy trenches on the way home.

  A wing filled his whole field of vision and he squeezed the firing-buttons. White flashes seared his eyes as his guns discharged. The wing was gone and he let up the pressure on the buttons.

  The burst, only a few seconds' worth, jarred his ears. On instinct, he fired again, moments before another wing passed in front of his prop. This time, the shape-shifter flapped into his burst, and was twisted, screeching, in the air. A row of holes appeared in a curtain of wings. He was sure he had sunk a few into the furry barrel of the flier's body.

  He tasted blood in his mouth. His own, mingled with Ball's and Kate's. His teeth were coral razors. This was as near to the vampire condition as he wished to come.

  Another burst. Another miss. The bat-creature executed a perfect Immelmann and swooped towards the slice of moon. Dandridge was on his tail, firing scientific bursts. The Boche came out of his turn and spread wings wide. Dandridge had hit him. Red gobbets dripped in black fur.

  With a sinking motion, the shape-shifter got beneath Dandridge's climb and latched like a lamprey on to the underside of the Camel, wings wrapping upwards, tail lashing. The Camel's frame buckled and its engine stalled. The prop sliced into the Boche's face but jammed.

  Winthrop was appalled.

  The Camel came apart. Dandridge's upper plane ripped off and disappeared like a kite in a storm. The shape-shifter detached from the aircraft. Dandridge's crushed wreck plunged, wind shrieking in the wires. As he went down, Dandridge emptied his guns.

  The creature that had killed Dandridge struggled to stay aloft. He had taken many hits and the propeller slice was severe. His wings were ragged and torn. Ribbons of dark blood flew from wounds.

  Was this the Red Baron?

  Winthrop had the mutilated monster in his sights. He fired, pouring out silver and lead. He swooped down and over the creature, briefly worried that he might latch on to his Camel, repeating the manoeuvre that had defeated Dandridge.

  His blood thrilled. There would be a reckoning. Turning for another pass, he saw Allard diving on the same prey. The monster struggled upwards to meet Allard. With what seemed a single shot, Allard put a lump of silver into the monster's skull. Instantly dead, the flier dwindled to human size, weighted by heavy guns, and fell towards black ground.

  The creatures could be beaten.

  His victory stolen, Winthrop wheeled, searching. He was at the heart of the dog-fight. Shape-shifters and Camels whirled around, firing guns, tearing wings. There was an explosion as a Camel (Rutledge's, Winthrop thought) burst into a fireball. An expanding ball of hot air hit his wings and forced him back.

  Down below was the castle. And above was an immense dark shape that laid a shadow on the land.

  Rutledge had not been killed by one of JG1. There was Archie all around. The Schloss Adler was defended by gun emplacements. Archie exploded below Winthrop, a carpet of fire in the night. Smoke smeared the lenses of his goggles and stung his eyes.

  A bat came at him, and he turned the Camel's nose away. Detaching one hand from the stick, he wrenched off his blinded goggles, unmasking his face to the icy dash of open air.

  Looking up, he realised a Zeppelin hung over the castle like a mammoth balloon, floating in thin atmosphere above the operational ceiling of any heavier-than-air machine. Only real monsters lived in those altitudes, where the cold froze blood in veins and made woolly flight suits into crackling ice chain-mail.

  Allard signalled withdrawal. The shape-shifters were landing on their tower, retreating within stone walls.

  Winthrop had been cheated of his kill. Perhaps the Red Baron was truly dead. Allard's kill. Angered beyond thought, Winthrop approached the Schloss Adler. A shape-shifter on the landing platform was shrugging his flying shape, bending to wriggle into the castle.

  Winthrop fired a burst to get range. He heard his shots whine off stone. Half-way between human shape and bat form, the flier turned, attention caught by the fire, pointed ears swivelling. Winthrop's next burst caught him in the chest, bearing him backwards against the castle wall. Scarlet gouts blurted through thinning fur. A perfect heart-shot.

  A seventh score. One that counted. One of the monsters.

  No, it would not count officially. Winthrop, the killing urge briefly satisfied, realised he had gone against Allard's orders to withdraw. His victory would never be confirmed. Besides, what he had done was strafe a foe on the ground, not meet him in the air. The pitch was not level.

  Still, the kill counted in his system. One of the monsters was gone.

  It had been only seconds. He slid easily back into formation, behind and above Allard.

  There were others. Brandberg, Lockwood, Knight, Lacey.

  They sped away. There was still archie but it was ineffectually distant. The shape-shifters were out of the air. The airship was too high to bring guns to bear.

  Fourteen had approached the castle. Five were returning.

  Winthrop had seen Dandridge and Rutledge killed and known Severin would lose his match. Now, he realised he had for a half- instant glimpsed one of the shape-shifters with a human rag in his mouth, shaking his head as blood-trails whipped. That had been another of the pilots.

  The rest had been killed without his even noticing. Nine men exchanged for two monsters. The dog-fight couldn't have lasted more than two or three minutes.

  The five Camels flew away from the rising sun. Spreading dawn fell heavily on Winthrop, like a blanket, sapping his energy, cooling his blood. They crossed the lines.

  39

  Up at the Front

  "Your bus is wheezing a bit, miss,' said Colonel Wynne-Candy, 'I'll have my driver look it over.'

  Kate, not attuned to the eccentricities of internal combustion, thanked the officer, whose staff car was mired at the side of the road. He had pulled over to let her ambulance past and suffered the consequences of gallantry.

  There had been near-continuous bombardment all day. The enemy had brought up big guns and were hammering the Allied trenches. It would be heads down in the lines.

  She looked up at a slate sky empty of all but cloud. To the east, the gloom was reddened by fire.

  'A boy in the air?'

  The round-faced colonel, cheerfully retained from the Boer war, was not the jolly fool he seemed. Kate shivered as she tried to shrug. She could usually put ideas into words, but was too involved in the business with Edwin to explain it easily.

  The lad'll be a lot safer with Richthofen down.'

  The Red Baron?'

  'Word over the blower this morning. Not official yet. Boche won't admit a thing but our ears in Hunland have picked up a whisper. It seems Allied mastery of the air has been reasserted.'

  Kate wondered if Edwin was disappointed. He had shaped himself into a weapon so he could go after the creature who had nearly killed him. Or maybe he had succeeded? No, he had not bested the Red Baron. In her blood, she would have known.

  'Almost a pity, ain't it?' Wynne-Candy mused. 'The war will seem a spot less colourful. Richthofen gave our fellows something to shoot for.'

  Something to shout at, she thought.

  A projectile whizzed into the mud a couple of hundred yards away and burst. Kate and Wynne-Candy cringed in a light patter of wet dirt.

  'That's an overshot', the Colonel said. 'No harm to anyone.'

  A smoking crater marked the site of the shell-burst. There were more of them dotted about behind the lines than usual.

  'Enough misses like that and our supply lines will be jiggered.'

  'You have a point, miss.'

  Wynne-Candy's driver, a muddy Cockney, reported on the ambulance, grumbling in the colonel's ear.

  'I say, that's not on.'

  Wynne-Candy was shocked.

  'I'm sorry to have to tell you, miss, but some unsp
ortin' type seems to have taken a pot shot at you.'

  The driver put his finger into a hole in the bonnet.

  'Probably an accident. Any proper German officer who found one of his men sniping at an ambulance would have the bounder shot.'

  The driver told her the engine was unharmed. With a good clean, the ambulance would run smooth as silk.

  'Not easy, keeping things clean in this country,' Wynne-Candy said, looking about the plain of mud. 'Now, miss, be on your way. Boys are waiting at the front for a sight of you.'

  With a khaki coat three sizes too big, a nest of hair plastered with mud spatters and a bad case of the distractions, she suspected she would not pass for an angel.

  She bade the colonel farewell and got back into the ambulance. When the army bought these vehicles, the assumption was that drivers would be six-foot-tall men. It had then been inconceivable that all those who fit the description would be required for the front and the position would have to be filled by a tiny vampire woman. She sat on three pillows and leaned forward to reach the steering wheel, which seemed a yard across. Wooden blocks tied to the foot-pedals brought them within range of her short legs.

  Every part of the ambulance rattled. Through the smeared windscreen, she looked at the sky. Even with the Red Baron gone, there were monsters up there. She sensed the tug of Edwin like a toothache. What he had taken from her would take months to recover. She felt she was half a person, fading into ghostliness.

  Like a proper Victorian, she was throwing herself into duty. If it had been possible, she'd have picked up a rifle and fought the war. Genevieve, in her long life, had sometimes passed for a boy and served as a soldier: with Joan against the English, with Drake against the Spanish, with Buonaparte in Russia. Genevieve, of course, had done everything. Without meaning it, she went through life making other women feel inadequate. By 'other women', Kate meant herself.

  In 1918, though she was stronger than most living men, the best Kate could do was drive an ambulance. The next war would be fought by men and women, vampire and warm. If she survived, Kate might be in that one. And the next. And the next.

  Richthofen dead. She should follow the story. It would be news.

  The road sank into the ground, banks rising to either side. She entered the maze of trenches. Corrugated iron grumbled under the weight of the ambulance. The main road was only just wide enough. Every time she made this trip, the route was different, as old avenues were blocked and new ones blasted.

  Another shell exploded, out of her sight, but quite near. Clods pattered on the tin roof of the cabin. It was just earth, not shrapnel.

  She was still a reporter, despite setbacks. She would try to learn more about the Bloody Red Baron. There were always the Musketeers of Maranique: Bertie, Algy and Ginger. They would talk to her. They were so good-natured they'd probably sent Christmas cards to the Kaiser during the truce of'14.

  She could not go much further in the ambulance. There was a station where the wounded were gathered, laid out on stretchers. Casualties had been light recently. The Germans were preparing their offensive. That would be a military hurricane. Rear positions were deserted as every man and gun the Allies had in France was put into the front. It occurred to her today's heavy bombardment was to soften up the Allies. The offensive - Kaiserschlacht, they called it - was very close.

  She wrestled with the brakes and the ambulance lurched to a halt. Hopping down, prepared for horrors, she sank up to her puttees in squelching mud. Under a canvas lean-to, the stretchers were all occupied. She had room for five patients, but there were at least fifteen men ready to be shipped back to Amiens.

  The officer in charge of the post was Captain Tietjens, a decent man eroded by years in the mud. He recognised Kate under her layer of dirt and offered to get her a cup of tea. At the front, vampires took char with a squirt of rat's blood.

  'No thank you,' she said, not wishing to use any of the meagre supplies. 'I've a parcel of scroungings under the seat. Some tea, a chunk of usable bread, a packet of humbugs. A few other things.'

  She handed over the precious goods, which had cost almost the last of her money. She was a vampire, she could forage for herself. Tietjens made the parcel disappear: he would dole it out to the deserving cases.

  Most of the wounded were Americans, a new development. The influx of Yanks was depended upon to block the offensive. Already, fresh troops were seeing action.

  A doughboy, bent like an ancient crone, knelt by a stretcher, holding hands with a fearfully wounded comrade. The boy on the stretcher seemed to be only an upper body: below his hips, the blanket lay flat, soaked with sweet blood. Embarrassingly, her fangs popped.

  The wounded man's friend looked at her, too numb to be afraid. It was Bartlett, the doughboy who had tried to pick her up in Amiens. He was changed. The cocky eagerness was blasted away: he seemed at once a lost child and a mad old man. From his mind, she took impressions. She wished she had been able to shut herself off.

  'Bloody hell,' she said.

  In weeks, Eddie Bartlett had lived through a million years of war. Apart from the half-man on the stretcher, Bartlett was the last of the group of friends who had been at the café in Amiens. He was practically the last of the boys who had come over together on the boat.

  She wanted to offer herself to Bartlett. He could have her body, her blood, anything. She wanted to make things better.

  Tietjens and she were the only personnel spare to lift stretchers into the ambulance. With extreme reluctance, Bartlett let go of his comrade’s white hand to help.

  'Hang on Apperson,' he said. 'Gotta parlay-voo, buddy.'

  Carefully, the three of them got the first casualty - an American sergeant with rag bandages round his eyes - into the ambulance. When they came to Private Apperson, the boy was dead. Tietjens looked to Kate and shrugged.

  The air was full of a whistling that hurt her ears. Tietjens, oddly, reached out and touched her hair.

  She was about to apologise for having left her best bonnet at home when the whistling exploded. A wave of sound shocked Tietjens off his feet and threw him against her. They were both slammed against the ambulance. The sound was followed by heat. Then a great deal of earth. Something had hit very near. She saw a trench wall collapsing, slowly, on to the remaining stretchers, burying wounded men.

  Tietjens was pulling something out from Apperson's bedding, robbing the dead.

  Kate struggled towards the wounded. The next shell burst and she was knocked down again. Her back stung and she knew she was hurt. Tietjens was close behind her.

  The officer jammed Apperson's tin helmet on her head. Seeing the sense in it, she fastened the strap under her chin. The rim rested on her spectacles, pressing them into her nose.

  She dug with her hands, like an animal, trying to shovel the sliding loose earth off the face of a coughing warm doughboy. The more dirt she shifted, the more tumbled down. There was no room to pull the man out of the path of the earthslide.

  As she dug, her claws came out. She scratched the earth. Her mouth was distorted by her fangs. She was reduced to the basest of monsters. The boy looked at her with panic and began to struggle, thinking she was attacking him. When he opened his mouth to scream, dirt fell into it, choking him. She thumped his chest, and he coughed up mud. She tried to tell him she was helping him, but could only snarl and hiss.

  There was more whistling, louder and concentrated. Glancing up at the slice of sky visible from the trenchbed, she saw dozens of trails and sparkles.

  Din, flame and force lifted her off the ground. The ambulance had taken a direct hit. Blood was in her mouth. The vehicle jolted into the air and came apart, screaming metal, spilling dead men. A hundred tons of mud flew up and fell down. Kate shut her eyes and her mouth as the grave-earth closed over her, pressing her down. There was sudden, shocking silence.

  40

  Kill the Dragon

  Winthrop sat in Albert Ball's chair, staring at nothing. The mess was crowded but quiet. The
new-born Cundall hands were playing cards. Some elders were toying with a plump French girl, exciting tiny squeals from her. She called herself Cigarette, and was shared like a smoke in the trenches, passed from mouth to mouth.

  Since Ginger had passed on the rumour that Richthofen was truly dead, Winthrop felt like an exorcised ghost. There was no earthly reason for him to remain with Condor Squadron, but he was bound here. Ball and Kate were with him still, and his red thirst - worse, his red hunger- was rising, making him feel like a drunkard for raw meat.

  His stomach was not improving. He could keep down only small amounts of very undercooked beef, swimming in blood. When sick, he disgorged alarming amounts of ground-up red meat.

  The scabby necks of filles de joie like Cigarette had a fascination for him but he knew he could not drink warm human blood. He wished profoundly to be free of the dizzying taint that swarmed inside him, colouring his mind red.

  If only he could kiss Kate again and set things right.

  A shadow fell on him. Allard had appeared.

  'Confirmation of our victory. The Germans have made an announcement.'

  4Your victory,' Winthrop admitted. 'You finished the Boche.'

  'It was a Richthofen but not the Richthofen.'

  Winthrop's blood leaped.

  'We killed Lothar, Manfred von Richthofen's brother. No insignificant ace. Forty victories.'

  The Bloody Red Baron lived. The job for which he had transformed himself was not finished.

  'I see what lurks in your heart, Winthrop. You are pleased. You want this prize for yourself.'

  Winthrop did not try to blind the American with talk of all for one and one for all and winning the war and seeing it through.

  'You may yet have your chance at the eagle,' said Allard. 'And maybe at greater prey.'

  Winthrop was stricken with shivers.

  Cigarette yelped through giggles. Allard glanced at the girl, not approving. She was in the lap of Alex Brandberg. His mouth was fixed to her breast.