Vampire on the Orient Express by Shane Carrow

Author:Shane Carrow [Carrow, Shane]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Unknown
Published: 2019-06-25T22:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER XVI: PASSENGERS ALIGHTING

“Wake up. Wake up, damn it!”

Avery stirred. He felt a horrible sensation of both hot and cold. For a moment he thought he was back at his gymnasium in Paris, emerging from the steam room to stroll to the swimming pool.

“Wake up!”

A grating American accent. He wasn’t in the steam room, he wasn’t in the swimming pool, and he most certainly wasn’t in Paris. Avery coughed and shuddered as someone pulled him out of a snowdrift, loose slush sliding in through his collar and trousers. A glimpse of a frozen river, a crescent moon in a starry skyscape above snow-laden conifers – and the sweaty, ash-streaked face of Sam Carter staring at him, holding him by the shoulders.

“You all right? Anything broken?”

Avery coughed again, caught his breath. “No,” he said hoarsely. “No, I’m quite all right.” He looked around them. “Not that it will make much difference.”

The adrenaline had worn off, and the cold was seeping back in. Neither man had been dressed for the outdoors. Carter, gauche American that he was, didn’t even have a waistcoat over his shirt.

“Come on. We need to keep moving.” Carter seized Avery’s arm and jerked him up the railway embankment. “Come on, let’s go!”

Avery glanced back at the landscape as he struggled through the snow after the American. They’d jumped just as the Express crossed a bridge over a river – at the edge of it, fortunately, otherwise they probably would have smashed right through the ice, their waterlogged corpses washing down to the Adriatic in the springtime melt. As it was, they’d luckily landed in the snowdrifts that had built up against the railway embankment. As Carter reached the top, he extended a hand back down for Avery and hauled him up. “Come on! You’re going to need to set a better pace than that if we’re going to catch up.”

Avery had briefly lost consciousness, and was still gathering his wits. The American, on the other hand, still seemed to be operating on sheer adrenaline. “I hate to be the bearer of bad news, Mr Carter,” Avery said, his teeth chattering, shaking wet glop out of his trousers, “but I don’t think I’m capable of setting a pace that will catch up to a moving train.”

“The whole baggage car was on fire,” Carter said sharply. “They’ll have to stop for that.”

“The question is when,” Avery said. It was like a morbid child’s school problem: if it takes so-and-so minutes for the conductors to realise a carriage is on fire, and the train is already travelling at blah-blah miles an hour, how many miles has it covered before two half-dead amateur monster hunters catch up to it when it’s however many degrees below zero at… whatever o’clock in the morning? He took his pocket watch out and checked the time, but it was cracked and stopped at exactly half past three. Probably during the chaos in the baggage car. Well, at least it wasn’t any earlier than that. Although it would only get colder closer to dawn.

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