A burst of flame in the sleeping section spurted through the shutters, tearing them off their frames, and then a second, larger fireball expanded from the inside as the gas cylinders in the kitchen caught, rending the chromed walls apart, wrecking the integrity of the vessel.

The light hit her a split-second before the noise.

Then the blast lifted her off her feet and threw her back across the sandy lot.

Everything she owned rained around her in flames.

27.

'Do you know what's the funny side of the whole kit and kaboodle?' said Ernest Gorse. 'I didn't even think it would work. Johnny Alucard has big ideas and he is certainly making something of himself on the coast, but this Elvis Lives nonsense is potty. Then again, you never know with the dear old Count. He's been dead before.'

She was too wrung out to try to get up yet.

Gorse, in a tweed ulster and fisherman's hat, leaned on her car, scratching the finish with the claws of his left hand. A gangrene growth festered in his empty eye-socket. His face was demonised by the firelight.

'You must have said something persuasive, love,' Gorse continued. 'Orson Welles has walked off his comeback picture, shut it down after a single day's shooting. He can't be found. The project's dead. No other genius would dare take over.'

Everything she owned.

That's what it had cost her.

'But, who knows, maybe Fatty wasn't the genius?' suggested Gorse. 'Maybe it was Boris Adrian. Alucard backed all those Dracula pictures equally. Perhaps you haven't thwarted him after all. Perhaps He really is coming back.'

All the fight was out of her. Gorse must be enjoying this.

'You should leave the city, maybe the state,' he said. 'There is nothing here for you, old thing. Be thankful we've left you the motor. Nice roadboat, by the way, but it's not a Jag, is it? Consider the long lines, all the chrome, the ostentatious muscle. D'you think the Yanks are trying to prove something? Don't trouble yourself to answer. It was a rhetorical question.'

She pushed herself up on her knees.

Gorse had a gun. 'Paper wraps stone,' he said. 'With silver foil.'

She got to her feet, not brushing the sand from her clothes. There was ash in her hair. People had come out of the other trailers, fascinated and horrified. Her trailer was a burning shell.

That annoyed her, gave her a spark.

With a swiftness Gorse couldn't match, she took his gun. She broke his wrist and tore off his hat too. He was surprised in a heart-dead British sort of way, raising his eyebrows as far as they would go. His quizzical, ironic expression begged to be scraped off his face, but it would just grow back crooked.

'Jolly well done,' he said, going limp. 'Really super little move. Didn't see it coming at all.'

She could have thrown him into the fire, but just gave his gun to one of the on-lookers, the Dude, with instructions that he was to be turned over to the police when they showed up.

'Watch him, he's a murderer,' she said. Gorse looked hurt. 'A common murderer,' she elaborated.

The Dude understood and held the gun properly. People gathered round the shrinking vampire, holding him fast. He was no threat any more: he was cut, wrapped and blunted.

There were sirens. In situations like this, there were always sirens.

She kissed the Dude goodbye, got into the Plymouth, and drove north away from Hollywood along the winding coast road, without a look back. She wasn't sure whether she was lost or free.

INTERLUDE.

YOU ARE THE WIND BENEATH MY WINGS.

ANNO DRACULA 1986.

1.

Eyes front, pledges,' said Captain Gardner, commanding attention. 'This is Miss Churchward. She will be your etiquette instructress.'

There were grins. This little lot didn't think they needed lessons in manners. They were about to learn they were wrong.

Penelope perched on a desk, arranging herself decorously. She smoothed her immaculate cream skirt over her upper flank, drawing attention to her long, long legs.

All the class stared. Men and women. Penny was inches taller than she'd been when she died. A slight shapeshift, worked over decades. She'd exercised powers of fascination even before turning vampire. Now, she was mistress of sex fu.

Folding chairs noisily aligned. The pledges, sprawling and slobbish a moment ago, sat up straight. This class had been through Purgatory basic and were parade-drilled. They wore casual clothes with no rank or service insignia. Hot shots and cool customers. Pushovers, really.

Slipping off her sunglasses, she shook out her full, heavy hair. She tapped the diamond-sharp nail of her littlest finger against her fang-teeth.

She made a fan gesture in front of her neck. The top two buttons of her watered silk blouse were undone. What was the point of pricey underthings unless they were glimpsable? Though she didn't need to breathe, she did.

After a century of clothing buttoned-to-the-throat, she was experimenting with cleavage. The leech-scars on her breasts and neck - left by quack doctoring in her new-born days - had faded to milky vaccination circles, almost imperceptible.

Some of the guys awkwardly crossed their legs. Others tented clipboards over their laps. The women were as interested, if not uniformly friendly.

Penny had sunk hooks in them all. Without even bleeding them. Just by walking into the room.

She tugged.

As one, the class shuffled forwards, scraping chairs across linoleum.

She put out a hand in a stop sign, then signalled a come-on to one of the pledges. An all-American youth was pulled from his seat, as if on strings. Code Name: Banshee. He wore an eye-abusing Hawaiian shirt over chinos and lace-up combat boots. Instead of regulation shades, he wore a New Wavy mirrored purple visor. He had about forty-eight teeth. She had him pegged as class clown. Did he know banshees were supposed to be women?

He began to sing to her, off-key and loud. Now she gathered how he got his call sign. The others were astonished, mouths open like goldfish.

'I can't li-i-ive,' he warbled, 'if living is without you...'

She laughed and cut him off with a gesture. Outside, a dog howled, presumably bleeding from the ears.

'Elementary glamour,' she announced, letting Banshee fall back in his chair like an unfisted muppet. 'A little show, a little tell, a lot of imagination. If you're to be vampires, you have to learn this. I am not the most seductive, dangerous person in the world. I am rarely the most attractive woman in any given room. But, if I concentrate, I can be. Any questions?'

A woman at the back, in short-sleeved dress whites, raised a cautious hand.

'Can we learn how to do... that?'

Penny looked at her. Code Name: Desire. A fluffy blonde with a crooked smile and a killer body. Her time over the assault course was the best among the women. Third overall.

'By the end of this course,' Penny said, 'you will have learned how to turn it on and off like a tap. A faucet, as you Americans say.'

'Does it work on, ah, babes too, ma'am?' asked Banshee.

She turned it all back on and aimed at him. Full force.

'I am given to understand, pledge, that it does.'

The jock punched the air and whooped, 'All ri-i-ight!'

2.

By the end of her first week, every one of the nine men and three women on the course had propositioned Penelope. Six of the guys and one of the girls wanted to sleep with her as well as get bitten. She took up none of the offers. They told themselves she'd done it to them, that she was working on their minds. But she'd just opened them to the possibilities and let them do the rest.

She'd washed four men and one woman out of her class. Her word alone wasn't enough but other instructors concurred. These pledges didn't have the red stuff. Jedburgh, director of the Program, rubber-stamped the termination orders. They were back on the bus, bound to silence by confidentiality agreements. If they ever talked about Purgatory, they'd end up in court - or Arlington. Would any settle for less and become dhampires? There must be contingency plans. She'd learned not to ask about such things.

She spent time with Captain Gardner, a veteran of the US Bat-Soldier Program. Code Name: America. Turned shortly before America's entry into the Second World War, he'd been maintained ever since. A defence asset. The Pentagon liked to keep its vampires in a glass coffin marked 'In the event of war, break'. Gardner's 1940s swing pace was a contrast with the 1980s MTV zoom of the pledges. He was blond, handsome, plastic. A Muscle Beach body. An Arrow Collar face. Wrapped in a flag. Andy would have loved him.

In his quarters, they drank from purebred army-issue cats. That mellowed her out nicely. Only on active duty would the Captain take human blood.

Gardner was as much out of his time as she was hers: Artie Shaw and Glenn Miller gramophone records filed in a purpose-built cabinet, signed photos of Franklin Roosevelt and Ernie Pyle framed on the wall, Stars and Stripes shield hung over the bedboard. She, at least, made an effort to embrace the new, and had a boxful of ruinously expensive little silver discs by Whitney Houston, Genesis and Bruce Springsteen. After her up-and-down turn-of-the-decade New York adventures (which she associated with spiky, unlistenable punk), mainstream rock suited her mid-'80s mood. It went with the tailored earth-tones suits - sharp shoulders, little skirt to speak of, worn at all times with high-heeled pumps and seamed stockings - and an even tan cultivated by exposing her face and arms to the sun in three-second bursts.

Gardner didn't offer her his vampire blood and hadn't made an effort to get her into his militarily-perfect bed. It was in the corner, blanket-folds as sharp as coffin-corners, tight enough to bounce dimes off.

The folders lay on the table between them.

Seven survivors. Five men and two women.

Tomorrow, Gardner would make them all his sons- and daughters-in-darkness, passing on his bloodline. His code name would mark the group. America. She hadn't volunteered her own perhaps-dubious blood, though she supposed her contract meant the Shop could tap her if they wanted to. The pledges would be test-tube vampires. Their transformation would be passionless. A measured injection of blood direct to the vein. Very unlike the hot confusion of her own turning. Gardner wouldn't even be in the room with his get as they were reborn.

She still had questions.

If the Program was such a success and had been for fifty years, why were there so few Bat-Soldiers? This inter-services training facility (outside Purgatory, New Mexico) had turned out a trickle of graduates over the decades, but nothing like an all-conquering vampire army. No undead legions had been unloosed on the Vietcong, no creature commandos sent in after the Iran hostages.

Word was that the Program was being stepped up. Her own recruitment by the Shop - a government agency she'd never heard of - suggested this was true. Besides the warm pledges, a group of already-established vampires were here in training. They were kept separate from her class. She understood most weren't even American. Some were elders, veterans of Dracula's Carpathian Guard.

Gardner looked through the folders, passing them to Penny for a second glance.

Real names were listed, but came as news to her. On the courses, code names were used: Banshee, Desire, the Confessor, Iceman, Nikita, the Angel, Velcro.

Their pre-course careers were outlined. The class was drawn from different forces: two Marines, a Navy SEAL, two regular army, a transfer from NASA's astronaut programme and a CIA agent. All had home towns, parents, reasons for joining the services, employment histories, school and medical records, a tangle of living relationships and interests.

Tomorrow, at sunset, they would all change.

'Do you ever regret turning?' she asked Gardner. 'Do you miss growing old, having conventional offspring, passing the torch?'

Gardner was firm. 'No, ma'am.'

3.

The class, whom she thought of as in part her get, were mostly coming along.

Nikita was in the infirmary with an unpredictable reaction like the infection which had laid Penelope low nearly a hundred years ago. An undetectable bug carried over from warm life into her new-born vampire state mutated into a dangerous parasite. Unlike Penny, the CIA girl was not treated with leeches. Paul Beecher, the Program's vampire physician, had the patient on a regular drip of 'golden'. Scuttlebutt had it that the high-quality blood was harvested entirely from virgin altar boys the night before their first wet dream. Dr Beecher said the prognosis was encouraging.

Otherwise, the 'America' new-borns took to the night with an enthusiasm it was her job to temper. Banshee, Iceman and the Angel -shapeshifters with flight capability - were often out in the desert, soaring aloft like gliders. She was worried they'd fail to learn the lesson of Icarus. If they stayed in the air past dawn, they'd burn up in sunlight. Desire was a mind-worm: she could put anyone under her spell and had a low-level telepathic link with those she sampled. She could potentially be a skull-walker, capable of projecting herself completely into someone whose blood she'd drunk. With the help of Darryl Revok, a Canadian expert, she was puppeteering cats, taking their minds for a spell and guiding them like remote-control spy-cams. There were obvious intelligence applications. The Confessor, who doubled as the group's chaplain, and Velcro, a Grenada combat veteran, were like Penny, just vampires - with no 'talents' apart from living longer, healing faster, moving swifter and surviving on blood alone.

In 1941, Gardner had been bled to death on an operating table, as vampire blood - smuggled out of Europe - dripped into his veins. His heart stopped and restarted. Back then, it was generally believed turning was impossible without death. These new Bat-Soldiers had been slowly exsanguinated, hearts and brains never flatlining. They ingested Gardner's blood in time-release capsules.

It wasn't really new: Genevieve Dieudonne, with whom Penny had a complicated relationship, had gone through something similar in the fifteenth century. But it was still unusual. No one was sure whether the Bat-Soldiers were proper vampires or highly-evolved dhampires. Dr Beecher let slip that the Program was working on making the process reversible. Surviving grads could serve their fifty-year-hitches and muster out, restored to full warmth (and mortality). He foresaw a surprising percentage would opt for 'normal' life, even with ageing and death included in the package.

If the option were open to her, she would have to seriously consider it.