The next box was empty, and as Khuv moved on Litve quickly crossed the room to where a box stood on its own on a separate table. It had a lid loosely laid on top, which he lifted down. On Khuv’s side of the room, the next box contained the second soldier. His face was a raw red mess, completely unrecognizable. Two more boxes to go. Khuv made to move on, and –
Across the room Litve drew breath in a shocked gasp. ‘Erich!’ he said.
‘What?’ Khuv strode over to where he stood. Litve seemed frozen in horror; but he was right, the man in the box was the missing KGB agent, Erich Bildarev. He was naked and of course dead; the ribs over his heart were crushed in, as badly as if he’d fallen on a bear trap. Khuv grasped Litve’s arm, more for support than any other reason. His breath came faster, making a string of tiny plumes. At last he managed to gasp: That’s the last bit of proof we needed. Savinkov was right, Agursky’s our man!’
Then, across the room, someone – something – said, ‘Ahhh!’
‘Jesus, Jesus!’ Litve cried out, going into a crouch and whirling to look across the room. Khuv turned with him, his eyes bulging to penetrate the gloom. The last two coffins lay there, their contents as yet uninspected. But even as the two men clung together and stared, so there was movement. A tiny plume of air rose up from the first coffin, and another from the second. And Andrei Roborov and Nikolai Rublev sat up in their boxes and stared back at them!
Their injuries, visible even in the poor light, said that this could not be. But it could be, it was. Rublev’s cheek was absent from the left side of his face, so that the left eye gazed from a bony orbit; the cadaverous Roborov’s skull dripped pus and brain fluid, which crept like wax down his pallid cheeks. They sat there in their coffins, stared, then smiled – and their upper eye-teeth curved down like fangs over their lower lips!
Khuv tried to gasp, ‘Oh God – oh, my God!’ but his tongue had stuck to the roof of his mouth. The eyes of the dead men – no, of the corpses, the undead men -were pits of glowing sulphur cratered with blood, and they continued to smile.
‘Burn them!’ Khuv finally managed to gasp. ‘Quickly, man, burn them!’
‘Oh?’ said a sly, familiar voice from the door. Then you must hope that your flame-thrower is not one of the many which I have emptied!’
They looked that way, saw Vasily Agursky step back out into the corridor and close the door. His key grated in the lock. ‘Agursky, wait!’ Khuv yelled after him.
‘Oh no, Major,’ came Agursky’s faint answer. ‘You’ve found me out, and so there’s no more time for waiting.’ His footsteps rapidly faded.
Meanwhile, Roborov and Rublev had climbed out of their coffins. Khuv saw them, ran for the door. Astonished that his legs obeyed him, he hoped his hands would do the same. As he went he took his keys from a pocket, trying to distinguish the right one from its feel.
At the door, fumbling with the bunch of keys, he glanced back. The two dead men (and for the first time Khuv thought of them as vampires) were advancing on Litve, their hands starting to reach for him. Khuv shouted from a sandpaper throat: ‘What are you waiting for, you idiot? Burn them! Burn the fucking things!’
Litve came out of his trance, aimed his weapon and squeezed the trigger. Nothing! The flame-thrower hissed but that was all. The pilot-light flickered. ‘Jesus.r Litve screamed. He came scrambling, dodged Roborov where he went to grab him.
Khuv had tried half of his keys. In the near-darkness he couldn’t make out which was which. He wrenched the ones he’d tried from the key ring and hurled them down. Litve clawed at him, gasping: ‘Open the door! For God’s sake open the door!’ Khuv shoved him away, thrust his remaining keys at him.
‘You open it!’ he shouted. He cocked his sub-machine gun, turned it toward the vampires where they came almost mincingly forward out of the mortuary’s shadows. Roborov’s smile was malicious as he said: