Fifty meters further and hunger apparently won over annoyance. Vicki felt air currents shift as the snake lunged. She dropped, rolled, came up, and grabbed the nearest limb above the . . . well, fingers given their position, snapping it at the elbow.

Leaping clear of the flailing, she raced down the street and hauled Gavin back up onto his feet. He'd torn his jeans and his palm was bleeding and desperate times . . .

She dragged her tongue across the torn flesh and shoved him toward Ren adding what should have been a redundant, "RUN!"

Pain did not seem to make the creatures of this world cautious. If forced to guess, Vicki'd say the snake thing was p.i.s.sed.

Diving under its charge to the far side of the road, she got a grip on its other arm, braced herself against a piece of broken pavement, and hauled it sideways. There was a wet crack at the point where the arm met the body.

And more flailing.

Ren had shoved Star through the portal and was working on Gavin by the time the snake got moving forward again.

Another time, Vicki might have admired that kind of single-minded determination. But not right now. She grabbed the polished leg bone of the creature she'd killed when they arrived, made it between the snake and the portal just in time, and slammed it as hard as she could on the nose.

"Vicki, come on!"

A glance over her shoulder. The kids were through.

And the portal was about twice as big around as the snake.

The snake didn't seem to know the meaning of the word quit.

She hit it again.

"Vicki! It's closing!"

Mike.

The portal was still bigger than the snake.

And the sun was rising.

She threw the bone. It skittered off the scales. When the snake lunged, she stood her ground and emptied the Glock into its open mouth. Changed magazines, kept firing. Ignored the pain as a fang sliced into her upper arm.

Stumbling back, she could smell burning blood.

A hand grabbed her shirt then she was on her back, on the floor of the mausoleum, still firing into the snake's open mouth.

The portal closed.

The snake head dropped onto her legs.

"Vicki!"

She felt Mike pull the weapon from her hand. Grabbed his hand in turn and sank her teeth into his wrist. Mike swore, she hadn't been particularly careful, but he didn't pull away. One swallow, two, and she had strength enough to tie up a couple of loose ends. "Star, Gavin, forget this night ever happened!"

"I don't . . . " Ren began.

Vicki cut her off. "Your choice."

"I want to remember. Well, I don't really want to remember but . . . "

A raised hand cut her off and Vicki managed to growl, "Sunrise."

"Got it covered."

She was heavier than she had been but Mike lifted her and dropped her into the open crypt. The open occupied crypt.

And then the day claimed her.

"Okay, I'm impressed with your quick thinking . . . " Vicki shimmied into the clean jeans Mike had brought her. " . . . but waking up next to a decomposed body was quite possibly the grossest thing that's ever happened to me."

"At least the body didn't wake up," Mike pointed out handing her a shirt. "Given our lives of late, that's not something you can rule out."

"True." She shrugged into the shirt and moved into his arms, head dropping to rest on his shoulder.

"You need to feed."

The wound in her arm had healed over but was still an ugly red.

"Later." She needed more than he could give and right now, she needed him. "The kids?"

"They're all home. The two you told to forget are . . . " She felt him shrug. "I don't know . . . teenagers. The other girl, Ren, she's something. You're going to have to talk to her."

"I know. Cameron?"

The arms around her tightened. "Teenagers run away all the time."

She could tell he hated saying it. "I was too late to save him."

"Yeah, Ren told me." He sighed, breath parting her hair, warm against her scalp. "There isn't enough c.r.a.p in this world, they had to go looking for another."

Vicki shifted just far enough to press the palm of her right hand over his heart. "There isn't enough love in this world, they had to go looking for another."

Outfangthief.

Conrad Williams.

The t.i.tle of this chilling story is an archaic word meaning "the right of a lord to pursue a thief outside the lord's own jurisdiction and bring him back within his jurisdiction to be punished." But there's nothing medieval about it. The bloodsuckers involved are the ant.i.thesis of benign. If you want "lite bite" fiction-this one is not for you. Of course if you are acquainted with the work of Conrad Williams, you'll not be expecting "lite." The author of six novels, four novellas, and around one hundred short stories, some of which are collected in Use Once Then Destroy, Williams has won the British Fantasy Award three times, most recently for Best Novel (One). He is also a past recipient of the International Horror Guild Award and the Littlewood Arc Prize. His latest novel is Loss of Separation. He has a new collection, Penetralia, forthcoming from PS Publishing, who are also releasing his first foray into editing, with Gutshot, an anthology of weird west stories. Conrad lives in Manchester, UK, with his wife, three sons, and a monster Maine c.o.o.n cat. You can find out more at www.conradwilliams.net At the moment the car slid out of control, Sarah Running had been trying to find a radio station that might carry some news of her crime. She had been driving for hours, risking the M6 all the way from Preston. Though she had seen a number of police vehicles, the traffic had been sufficiently busy to allow her to blend in and anyway, Manser would hardly have guessed she would take her ex-husband's car. Michael was away on business in Stockholm and would not know of the theft for at least another week.

But Manser was not stupid. It would not be long before he latched on to her deceit.

As the traffic thinned, and night closed in on the motorway, Sarah's panic grew. She was convinced that her disappearance had been reported and she would be brought to book. When a police Range Rover tailed her from Walsall to the M42 turn off, she almost sent her own car into the crash barriers at the center of the road.

Desperate for cover, she followed the signs for the A14. Perhaps she could make the one hundred and thirty miles to Felixstowe tonight and sell the car, try to find pa.s.sage on a boat, lose herself and her daughter on the continent. In a day they could be in Dresden, where her grandmother had lived; a battered city that would recognize some of its own and allow them some anonymity.

"Are you all right back there, Laura?"

In the rear view mirror, her daughter might well have been a mannequin. Her features were glacial; her sungla.s.ses formed tiny screens of animation as the sodium lights fizzed off them. A slight flattening of the lips was the only indication that all was well. Sarah bore down on her frustration. Did she understand what she had been rescued from? Sarah tried to remember what things had been like for herself as a child, but reasoned that her own relationship with her mother had not been fraught with the same problems.

"It's all okay, Laura. We'll not have any more worries in this family. I promise you."

All that before she spotted the flashing blue and red lights of three police vehicles blocking her progress east. She turned left on to another A road bound for Leicester. There must have been an accident; they wouldn't go to the lengths of forming a roadblock for her, would they? The road sucked her deep into darkness, on either side wild hedgerows and vast oily swells of countryside muscled into them. Head lamps on full beam, she could pick nothing out beyond the winding road apart from the ghostly dusting of insects attracted by the light. Sarah, though, felt anything but alone. She could see, in the corner of her eye, something blurred by speed, keeping pace with the car as it fled the police cordon. She took occasional glances to her right, but could not define their fellow traveller for the dense tangle of vegetation that bordered the road.

"Can you see that, Laura?" she asked. "What is it?"

It could have been a trick of the light, or something silver reflecting the shape of their car. Maybe it was the police. The needle on the speedometer edged up to eighty. They would have to dump the car somewhere soon, if the police were closing in on them.

"Keep a look out for a B&B, okay?" She checked in the mirror; Laura's hand was splayed against the window, spreading mist from the star her fingers made. She was watching the obliteration of her view intently.

Sarah fumbled with the radio b.u.t.ton. Static filled the car at an excruciating volume. Peering into the dashboard of the unfamiliar car, trying to locate the volume control, she perceived a darkening in the cone of light ahead. When she looked up, the car was drifting off the road, aiming for a tree. Righting the swerve only took the car more violently in the other direction. They were still on the road, but only just, as the wheels began to rise on the pa.s.senger side.

but i wasn't drifting off the road, was i?

Sarah caught sight of Laura, expressionless, as she was jerked from one side of the car to the other and hoped the crack she heard was not caused by her head slamming against the window.

i thought it was a tree big and black it looked just like a tree but but but And then she couldn't see much because the car went into a roll and everything became part of a violent, circular blur and at the centre of it were the misted, friendly eyes of a woman dipping into her field of view.

but but but how can a tree have a face?

She was conscious of the cold and the darkness. There was the hiss of traffic from the motorway, soughing over the fields. Her face was sticky and at first she thought it was blood, but now she smelled a lime tree and knew it was its sap being sweated on to her. Forty meters away, the road she had just left glistened with dew. She tried to move and blacked out.

Fingers sought her face. She tried to bat them away but there were many fingers, many hands. She feared they might try to pluck her eyes out and opened her mouth to scream and that was when a rat was pushed deep into her throat.

Sarah came out of the dream, smothering on the sodden jumper of her daughter, who had tipped over the driver's seat and was pressed against her mother. The flavor of blood filled her mouth. The dead weight of the child carried an inflexibility about it that shocked her. She tried to move away from the crushing bulk and the pain drew gray veils across her eyes. She gritted her teeth, knowing that to succ.u.mb now was to die, and worked at unbuckling the seat belt that had saved her life. Once free, she slumped to her left and her daughter filled the s.p.a.ce she had occupied. Able to breathe again, she was pondering the position in which the car had come to rest, and trying to reach Laura's hand, when she heard footsteps.

When she saw Manser lean over, his big, toothy grin seeming to fill the shattered window frame, she wished she had not dodged the police; they were preferable to this monster. But then she saw how this wasn't Manser after all. She couldn't understand how she had made the mistake. Manser was a stunted, dark man with a face like chewed tobacco. This face was smooth as soapstone and framed by thick, red tresses; a woman's face.

Other faces, less defined, swept across her vision. Everyone seemed to be moving very fast.

She said, falteringly: "Ambulance?" But they ignored her.

They lifted Laura out of the window to a cacophony of whistles and cheers. There must have been a hundred people. At least they had been rescued. Sarah would take her chances with the police. Anything was better than going home.

The faces retreated. Only the night stared in on her now, through the various rents in the car. It was cold, lonely and painful. Her face in the rear view mirror: all smiles.

He closed the door and locked it. c.o.c.ked his head against the jamb, listened for a few seconds. Still breathing.

Downstairs, he read the newspaper, ringing a few horses for the afternoon races. He placed thousand pound bets with his bookies. In the ground floor wash room, he took a scalding shower followed by an ice cold one, just like James Bond. Rolex Oyster, Turnbull & a.s.ser shirt, Armani. He made four more phone calls: Jez Knowlden, his driver, to drop by in the Jag in twenty minutes; Pamela, his wife, to say that he would be away for the weekend; Jade, his mistress, to ask her if she'd meet him in London. And then Chandos, his police mole, to see if that c.u.n.t Sarah Running had been found yet.

Sarah dragged herself out of the car just as dawn was turning the skyline milky. She had drifted in and out of consciousness all night, but the sleet that had arrived within the last half hour was the spur she needed to try to escape. She sat a few feet away from the car, taking care not to make any extreme movements, and began to a.s.sess the damage to herself. A deep wound in her shoulder had caused most of the bleeding. Other than that, which would need st.i.tches, she had got away with pretty superficial injuries. Her head was pounding, and dried blood formed a crust above her left eyebrow, but nothing seemed to be broken.

After quelling a moment of nausea when she tried to stand, Sarah breathed deeply of the chill morning air and looked around her. A farmhouse nestled within a crowd of trees seemed the best bet; it was too early for road users. Cautiously at first, but with gathering confidence, she trudged across the muddy, furrowed field towards the house, staring all the while at its black, arched windows, for all the world like a series of open mouths, shocked by the coming of the sun.

She had met Andrew in 1985, in the Preston library they both shared. A relationship had started, more or less, on their hands b.u.mping each other while reaching for the same book. They had married a year later and Sarah gave birth to Laura then, too. Both of them had steady, if unspectacular work. Andrew was a security guard and she cleaned at the local school and for a few favoured neighbors. They eventually took out a mortgage on their council house on the right-to-buy scheme and bought a car, a washing machine, and a television on the never-never. Then they both lost their jobs within weeks of each other. They owed 17,000. When the law center they depended on heavily for advice lost its funding and closed down, Sarah had to go to hospital when she began laughing so hysterically, she could not catch her breath. It was as Andrew drove her back from the hospital that they met Malcolm Manser for the first time.

His back to them, he stepped out in front of their car at a set of traffic lights and did not move when they changed in Andrew's favor. When Andrew sounded the horn, Manser turned around. He was wearing a long, Nubuck trench coat, black Levi's, black boots and a black T-shirt without an inch of give in it. His hair was black save for wild slashes of gray above his temples. His sungla.s.ses appeared to be sculpted from his face, so seamlessly did they sit on his nose. From the trench coat he pulled a car jack and proceeded to smash every piece of gla.s.s and dent every panel on the car. It took about twenty seconds.

"Mind if I talk to you for a sec ?" he asked, genially, leaning against the crumbled remains of the driver's side window. Andrew was too shocked to say anything. His mouth was very wet. Tiny cubes of gla.s.s glittered in his hair. Sarah was whimpering, trying to open her door, which was sealed shut by the warp of metal.

Manser went on: "You have two-hundred-six pieces of bone in your body, fine sir. If my client, Mr. Anders, does not receive seventeen grand, plus interest at ten per cent a day-which is pretty b.l.o.o.d.y generous if you ask me-by the end of the week, I will guarantee that after half an hour with me, your bone tally will be double that. And that yummy piece of b.i.t.c.h you've got ripening back home-Laura? I'll have her. You test me. I dare you."

He walked away, magicking the car jack in to the jacket and giving them an insouciant wave.

A week later, Andrew set himself on fire in the car which he had locked inside the garage. By the time the fire services got to him, he was a black shape, thrashing in the back seat. Set himself on fire. Sarah refused to believe that. She was sure that Manser had murdered him. Despite their onerous circ.u.mstances, Andrew was not the suicidal type. Laura was everything to him; he'd not leave this world without securing a little piece of it for her.

What then? A nightmare time. A series of safe houses that were anything but. Early morning flits from dingy addresses in Bradford, Cardiff, Bristol, and Walsall. He was stickier than anything Bostik might produce. "Bug out," they'd tell her, these kind old men and women, having settled on a code once used by soldiers in some war or another. "Bug out." Manser had contacts everywhere. Arriving in a town that seemed too sleepy to even acknowledge her presence, she'd notice someone out of whack with the place, someone who patently did not fit in but had been planted to watch out for her. Was she so transparent? Her migrations had been random; there was no pattern to unpick. And yet she had stayed no longer than two days in any of these towns. Sarah had hoped that returning to Preston might work for her in a number of ways. Manser wouldn't be expecting it for one thing; for another, Michael, her ex-husband, might be of some help. When she went to visit him though, he paid her short shrift.

"You still owe me fifteen hundred quid," he barked at her. "Pay that off before you come groveling at my door." She asked if he could use his toilet and pa.s.sed any number of photographs of Gabrielle, his new squeeze. On the way, she stole from a hook on the wall the spare set of keys to his Alfa Romeo.

It took twenty minutes to negotiate the treacherous field. A light frost had hardened some of the furrows while other grooves were boggy. Sarah scuffed and skidded as best she could, clambering over the token fence that bordered an overgrown garden someone had used as an unauthorized tipping area. She picked her way through sofa skeletons, shattered TV sets, collapsed flat-pack wardrobes, and decaying, pungent black bin bags.

It was obvious that n.o.body was living here.

Nevertheless, she stabbed the doorbell with a b.l.o.o.d.y finger. Nothing appeared to ring from within the building. She rapped on the door with her knuckles, but half-heartedly. Already she was scrutinizing the windows, looking for another way in. A narrow path strangled by brambles led around the edge of the house to a woefully neglected rear garden. Scorched colors bled into each other, thorns, and convulvulus savaged her ankles as she pushed her way through the tangle. All of the windows at the back of the house had been broken, probably by thrown stones. A yellow spray of paint on a set of storm doors that presumably led directly into the cellar picked out a word she didn't understand: scheintod. What was that? German? She cursed herself for not knowing the language of her elders, not that it mattered. Someone had tried to obscure the word, scratching it out of the wood with a knife, but the paint was reluctant. She tried the door but it was locked.

Sarah finally gained access via a tiny window that she had to squeeze through. The bruises and gashes on her body cried out as she toppled into a gloomy larder. Mingled into the dust was an acrid, spicy smell; racks of ancient jars and pots were labeled in an extravagant hand: c.u.min, coriander, harissa, chili powder. There were packs of flour and malt that had been ravaged by vermin. Dried herbs dusted her with a strange, slow rain as she brushed past them. Pickling jars held back their pale secrets within dull, l.u.s.terless gla.s.s.

She moved through the larder, arms outstretched, her eyes becoming accustomed to the gloom. Something arrested the door as she swung it outwards. A dead dog, its fur shaved from its body, lay stiffly in the hallway. At first she thought it was covered in insects, but the black beads were unmoving. They were nicks and slashes in the flesh. The poor thing had been drained. Sarah recoiled from the corpse and staggered further along the corridor. Evidence of squatters lay around her in the shape of fast food packets, cigarette ends, beer cans, and names signed in the ceiling by the sooty flames of candles. A rising stairwell vanished into darkness. Her shoes crunched and squealed on plaster fallen from the bare walls.

"h.e.l.lo?" she said, querulously. Her voice made as much impact on the house as a candy-floss mallet. It died on the walls, absorbed so swiftly it was as if the house was sucking her in, having been starved of human company for so long. She ascended to the first floor. The carpet that hugged the risers near the bottom gave way to bare wood. Her heels sent dull echoes ringing through the house. If anyone lived here, they would know they were not alone now. The doors opened on to still bedrooms shrouded by dust. There was nothing up here.

"Laura?" And then more stridently, as if volume alone could lend her more spine: "Laura!"

Downstairs she found a cozy living room with a hearth filled with ashes. She peeled back a dust cover from one of the sofas and lay down. Her head pounded with delayed shock from the crash and the mustiness of her surroundings. She thought of her baby.

It didn't help that Laura seemed to be going off the rails at the time of their crisis. Also, her inability, or reluctance, to talk of her father's death worried Sarah almost as much as the evidence of booze and drug use. At each of the safe houses, it seemed there was a Laura trap in the shape of a young misfit, eager to drag someone down with him or her. Laura gave herself to them all, as if glad of a mate to hasten her downward spiral. There had been one boy in particular, Edgar-a difficult name to forget-whose influence had been particularly invidious. They had been holed up in a Toxteth bedsit. Sarah had been listening to City FM. A talkshow full of languid, catarrhal Liverpool accents that was making her drowsy. The sound of a window smashing had dragged her from slumber. She caught the boy trying to drag her daughter through the gla.s.s. She had shrieked at him and hauled him into the room. He could have been no older than ten or eleven. His eyes were rifle green and would not stay still. They darted around like steel bearings in a bagatelle game. Sarah had drilled him, asking him if he had been sent from Manser. Panicked, she had also been firing off instructions to Laura, that they must pack immediately and be ready to go within the hour. It was no longer safe. And then: Laura, crawling across the floor, holding on to Edgar's leg, pulling herself up, her eyes fogged with what could only be ecstasy. Burying her face in Edgar's crotch. Sarah had shrank from her daughter, horrified. She watched as Laura's free hand traveled beneath her skirt and began to ma.s.sage at the gusset of her knickers while animal sounds came from her throat. Edgar had grinned at her, showing off a range of tiny, brilliant white teeth. Then he had bent low, whispering something in Laura's ear before charging out of the window with a speed that Sarah thought could only end in tragedy. But when she rushed to the opening, she couldn't see him anywhere.

It had been the Devil's own job trying to get her ready to flee Liverpool. She had grown wan and weak and couldn't keep her eyes off the window. Dragging her on to a dawn coach from Mount Pleasant, Laura had been unable to stop crying and as the day wore on, complained of terrible thirst and unbearable pain behind her eyes. She vomited twice and the driver threatened to throw them off the coach unless Laura calmed down. Somehow, Sarah was able to pacify her. She found that shading her from the sunlight helped. A little later, slumped under the seat, Laura fell asleep.

Sarah had begun to question ever leaving Preston in the first place. At least there she had the strength that comes with knowing your environment. Manser had been a problem in Preston but the trouble was that he remained a problem. At least back there, it was just him that she needed to be wary of. Now it seemed Laura's adolescence was going to cause her more of a problem than she believed could be possible. But at the back of her mind, Sarah knew she could never have stayed in her home town. What Manser had proposed, sidling up to her at Andrew's funeral, was that she allow Laura to work for him, whoring. He guaranteed an excellent price for such a perfectly toned, tight bit of girl.

"Men go for that," he'd whispered, as she tossed a fistful of soil on to her husband's coffin. "She's got cracking t.i.ts for a thirteen-year-old. High. Firm. Nipples up top. Quids in, I promise you. You could have your debt sorted out in a couple of years. And I'll break her in for you. Just so's you know it won't be some stranger nicking her cherry."

That night, they were out of their house, a suitcase full of clothes between them.

"You f.u.c.king beauty."

Manser depressed the call end b.u.t.ton on his Motorola and slipped the phone into his jacket. Leaning forward, he tapped his driver on the shoulder. "Jez. Get this. Cops found the b.i.t.c.h's car in a f.u.c.king field outside Leicester. She'd totaled it."

He slumped back in his seat. The radio masts at Rugby swung by on his left, lights glinting through a thin fog. "f.u.c.k London. You want the A5199. Warp Factor two. And when we catch the minging little tart, we'll show her how to have a road accident. Do the job properly for her. Laura though, Laura comes with us. Nothing happens to Laura. Got it?"