Even if he was aware of the conversation that had sprang up with his abrupt departure, Lash wouldn't have slowed even a single step. The mere knowledge that his enemy, who had ruthlessly struck at him and those close to him since returning to Europe from North America, was on the same train and within range, was enough to push him forward, a relentless predator on the hunt. Fiadh was right: he would hunt down and kill every Hand agent on the train if he could, leaving their corpses to turn to ash in the daylight behind him.
Passing quickly through the car directly behind the one where his comrades and the lilith had taken position, he stepped into the car where, only thirty minutes before, he had used his powerful machine pistol to cut down over twenty four vampires before they could move. Yet, as he eased past the lavatory where Fiadh had taken refuge while he fought, he could see no sign the bodies had ever been there. Even the blood spilled by each corpse having multiple holes in it, no longer stained the floor.
A hint of ash in his nostrils was all he needed to know how the bodies were taken care of. Each had been marked with a car'dieth, the radiation in each stone blade enough to turn even a cold corpse into ash as it reacted with the hyperactive nerve tissue in a vampire's body. The blood, too, would've gotten a blast of heat and radiation to turn it immediately into dust. If he looked close enough, he could see the scorch marks.
Either way, it told him there were still Hand on the train, willing to expose themselves to eliminate their dead. The question was: where were all the humans? There seemed to be a fair number of them that got on the train in Galway. But, as he passed out of the car where the initial battle had taken place, he had yet to see any trace of human presence, which would make at least four complete passenger cars empty.
Eyes sharp as they looked for the blur of stealth daycloaks, he continued forward in a tactical crouch, the Shanzi up and ready to burn down anything that twitched against his liking. So, where had the humans gone?
There were two possibilities, one more pleasant than the other. First, the Hand had pulled in local familiars to get onto the train with them, to make it seem there was a full load heading to the capital. Then, when they were ready to strike, they had the familiar abandon the train to get them out of the way.
The second, far less pleasant possibility was that the Hand had turned the common humans that were legitimately on the train, into food. Which, if he knew anything about the filth currently called the Hand of the Night Council, seemed the more likely of the two possibilities. He half expected to step into a car and find their bodies piled like firewood against the back wall.
It was as he stepped into the third to last car, that he caught it: a subtle shifting in midair that announced the presence of a stealth daycloak in action. A second motion out of the corner of his eye told him there were more on the ceiling.
Without shifting too much to reveal he knew he was surrounded, he lifted the Shanzi to his mouth.
"Guided, using last sensor parameters."
"Acknowledged," the gun's AI replied. "Targets acquired."
Lash dropped the gun away from his face and pointed it straight at the back of the car.
"Firing."
The little girl, her face bloodied from the long scratch on her cheek, quietly sobbed as she stared at the unmoving bodies of her parents. They, and a handful of other adults, were lying untidily along the aisle where the monsters had attacked, biting their necks and drinking their blood.
Even though they were probably dead, she wanted to stay close in case they weren't and they woke up. So she hid in the seats near their bodies. Unlike the others that cowered against the back of the car, waiting for the monsters to come back and finish them off.
Somewhere inside, she knew the monsters would come back. It wasn't like the stories her father used to tell her before bedtime, where the hero would make sure the monsters were gone forever. And while she knew the monsters under her bed and in her closet weren't real, the ones that had hurt her mother and father and all these other people, were very, very real. So she hugged herself and cried, sad that her parents were gone. And scared that soon she would be, too.
Still, she couldn't help the squeak of dismay and fear that made its way out of her when a monster appeared at the far end of the car. The other people too, began to cry and plead for somebody to help them. But they quickly fell quiet when the monster stopped to fumble at something at his waist before beginning to frantically run towards the back of the car.
He managed to almost reach where the bodies were before he jerked to a halt, a red button appearing on his pale forehead. Then he was topping forward to join the bodies on the floor, unmoving.
Shocked into silence, the little girl could only watch with wide eyes even as a second monster appeared at the door. This one looked even more frantic than the first, his clothing disheveled and his breathing coming quick and panicked. And he too looked as though he was going to try and run.
Only he couldn't, because before he could start, a piece of metal appeared in the center of his chest, pushing out and covered with his blood. The monster shrieked in pain then, before their astonished eyes, began to turn into ash, his pale skin lighting up from within as if somebody had lit his bones on fire. And then, in front of their astonished eyes, his body collapsed into dust and he was gone, the piece of metal revealed as the blade of a strange, glowing dagger. Bereft of the body it had pierced, it dropped to the ground with a 'thud'.
She was still in shock at seeing the second monster die by getting stabbed then turning into dust that she almost didn't register a third person stepping through the door. But, catching the motion out of the corner of her eye between the seats, she looked and felt her heart skip a beat.
This third person looked more normal, like a human. But he was big, bigger than any man she had seen before. And, while there were things about him that were like the monsters, he didn't feel the same. Then she was twitching, startled when his dark eyes fell onto her.
"Hello there," he said in slightly accented English. He then stepped over the first dead monster and, without looking at the bodies of the people on the floor, came to a halt where she was hiding between the seats.
There, he carefully knelt.
"My name is Lash. What's your name?" he asked in a friendly, almost reassuring tone.
"Ciera," she replied in a tiny voice, trembling with fear.
"That's a very pretty name." He paused to look around. "It looked like some very scary things happened here, Ciera."
"Yes," she squeaked. "Monsters came and bit people on the neck and drank their blood." The tears came before she could stop them. "Even my mum and da!"
"Oh no!" Lash replied, a look of concern appearing on his face. "Where are your mom and dad?"
She pointed with a trembling finger at two of the unmoving bodies.
"Is it okay if I check to see if I can help them?"
Tears now pouring down her cheeks, she nodded.
"That's a brave girl," Lash said with a smile. "You hang tight right there. I'll see what I can do for your mom and dad!" Then the very big man was carefully moving over the bodies until he reached the two Ciera had pointed to.
A hand to the throat, and another on their backs, then he was taking something out of his backpack that looked like the needles the nurses at the hospital gave her when she got her shots. He pressed it against their chests above where their hearts were. He then looked at her.
"Your mom and dad are still alive, Ciera," he reported and she started to cry harder, but this time with relief. "But they are not doing well. We need to get them to a doctor as soon as possible."
"But, they'll be okay?" she managed through the sniffles and sobs.
"I think so. We just need to get them help right away." He then reached out and touched the necks of several other bodies, some for a second or two, while others got a bit longer. He then looked up at the huddled people at the back of the train, his expression like her da's when he was thinking hard.
"Stay here and keep an eye on your mom and dad, Ciera," he said, looking over at her. "Okay?"
"Okay," she said.
"Thank you. I'm going to talk to the other people that are still okay, like you, to see if I need to go and help anybody else on the train."
"Are you, are you a policeman, Lash?" she asked with a quavering voice.
"No, Ciera, I'm not a policeman. But I am a soldier. And I'm fighting against the bad men that did this."
"You're fighting the monsters?"
A slight smile touched Lash's lips for a second before he nodded.
"Yes, I'm fighting the monsters. Okay, be safe. I'm going to talk to the others."
Ciera nodded and, with one last reassuring smile, Lash stood and made his way to where the other people were huddled. Then she moved forward to kneel beside her mom. Sniffling and trying not to get tears on her mom's favorite jacket, she leaned forward and gave her mom's head a hug.
"It's going to be okay, mum," she whispered hoarsely. "Lash saved you. And he's going to fight the monsters and save everybody!"
Several of the adults looked up as the big vampire approached, eyes wide and red from fear and crying.
"We ... heard you talking to that little girl," a woman began. "Is it true? You're a soldier here to help us?"
The irony in the situation was almost enough to make Lash snort. On the hunt he had killed women like these, and men, too, drinking their blood to satisfy the thirst. Yet, here he was, acting as their savior instead of their doom. But if it preserved the dark secret, protected the truth about the existence of the People of the Night, then it was the least he could do for his people, even as they turned their back on him and his clan, hunting them like vermin.
"Yes, I'm a soldier," he said with a nod. Now to come up with a good story that had enough of the truth in it to be believable.
"I'm attached to the Special Operations Division of Interpol." Which, if any of them were to check, would've been the truth from the identity he took on to help Mordecai against the Brotherhood in Canada.
"But I'm not part of an operation to free the hostages on this train. I'm a passenger, just like you, heading to Dublin after spending time with friends in Galway."
As he spoke, a number of them slowly rose to their feet, not a few of them giving the dead Hand agent a hard look.
"But you ... took on those monsters. The ones that were biting people."
Lash nodded.
"Interpol has been tracking a number of cults coming out of Eastern Europe that have shown some strange behaviors as part of their rituals. One, was the fetish-like consumption of blood." He twisted his face into a mask of revulsion and disbelief. "I didn't believe it myself, when I read the brief a few months back." He made a gesture at the dead agent.
"But here they are. And you're right to call them monsters. I was up three cars or so when I saw some of them attack a person and, like you said, bite them on the neck and try to drink their blood." He shook his head. "Like they thought they were vampires or something."
"Vampires aren't real," a man near the back said and Lash nodded in agreement.
"Exactly. They're not. But these cultists think that somehow they can channel the legendary powers of the vampires from the stories." He looked back at the dead agent. "It's both sad and horrifying at the same time."
Another looked out at the late afternoon landscape still rushing past the windows. A landscape that was more frequently dotted by small villages and homes as they moved closer to Dublin.
"But they can't be real vampires," he said, pointing at the windows. "It's still daylight outside!"
"Right?" Lash said with a nod. "That just confirms that these cultists are just twisted, but very human, sociopathic monsters! Ones that hurt a lot of people on this train!" Then he was pointing to the group, who, by this point, had all come back to their feet. "Now, are there any other groups like this one that I need to go help? The train was pretty empty when I was working my way back to here. All of those people had to go somewhere!"
The man who had said 'vampires aren't real', pointed over his shoulder.
"The cultists gathered everybody up and stuffed them in the last two cars," he reported. "Us, and those poor souls on the floor there, are all of the remaining passengers."
Lash nodded.
"Okay. I'm going to go back there and see if the cultists are hiding amongst the remaining passengers." He paused there to also glance out the window. "I think we're getting pretty close to Dublin. Some of the people on the ground, like Ciera's parents, are still alive but barely. If any of you has a cellphone, please call 112, or 999 and get first responders to the station. Ambulances and the police!"
"They took our phones," the woman who first spoke, indicated. "So we couldn't call for help."
"Damn it," Lash hissed. Then he patted his pockets. "Wait, I have mine." He pulled it out and swiped to access it before handing it to the woman. "112 or 999. Get these people some help!" Then he was slipping through the group and through the door into the next car.