Free Red Eye - 02 by James Lovegrove

count.”
    “Thanks.”
    “Not like that. You couldn’t be a boyfriend, could you? More like my dad. Or maybe an uncle. Yeah. If Mr Constantinopoulos sees you and asks, you’re my uncle. Uncle John from jolly old England. First Stateside visit in ages. You okay with that?”
    “If you’d only stop talking, there’s every chance we won’t wake him,” said Redlaw.
    Three flights up, without having disturbed the landlord’s repose, Tina ushered Redlaw into a cramped, messy set of rooms with the words, “My luxury condo.” Thin rugs covered not nearly enough of the bare floorboards. Damp-stains dappled the ceilings and walls, a few of them poorly hidden behind tacked-up squares of batik. Icy draughts seeped in through several windows. Outside, the sky was burnt umber—the glare from the airport, reflected on low cloud.
    Tina closed blinds and cranked the thermostat up full, muttering about how rent control was all well and fine but not if it meant the furnace was never serviced regularly. Then she booted up her computer and drew up an extra chair in front of it, sweeping empty cans of Red Bull and Mountain Dew off the seat.
    “All righty, park your ass here and watch this.”
    She clicked open a file, and a dark, grainy image sprang to life on the monitor.
    “Now, I’ve run this through every filter I’ve got, upped the contrast and resolution, unsharp-masked it, edge enhanced, gamma corrected, the works, and it still looks like shit. But I was shooting in ambient light, which there wasn’t much of.”
    Redlaw peered. All he could see were dim irregular blocks of colour, various shades of dark blue, charcoal and black. “What am I looking at?”
    “This is me just doing a bit of preliminary filming, seeing how much I could pick up without switching the camera light on. Didn’t want to use it if I didn’t have to.”
    “No infrared?”
    “Take a look around you. I’m not made of money. So I’m in a subway tunnel. One of a whole bunch that aren’t used any more. Over on the West Side, near Ninth. Used to be where mole people lived.”
    “Mole people?”
    “Homeless. Had themselves a regular little sub-city neighbourhood there. All the comforts of home. Only, they had to leave.”
    “Why?”
    “Why do you think? Somebody else moved in and evicted them.”
    “Vampires?”
    “What I heard,” said Tina. “This bum I met in Tribeca told me about it. I was digging around, making enquiries about vampires, trying to get a fix on where some might be, and who better to ask than hobos? Who knows what’s going on at street level better than them? So this old guy with ratty grey dreads who you sometimes see playing a penny whistle on West Broadway, I talked to him, and he gave me a whole spiel about how he used to have this place in the tunnels. Bed, stove, storm lantern, all that. Somewhere to lay his hat, out of the weather. But then these foreigners—that was what he called them, ‘foreigners’—came along and he knew he wasn’t welcome any more, so he hightailed it out of there, him and all the other moles, and now he’s back on the streets, freezing his ass off, tooting his whistle for spare change, probably not going to make it through the winter, yadda yadda. I gave him five bucks to make him happy.”
    “Did he describe the ‘foreigners’?”
    “Guy drinks past-its-sell-by mouthwash to get loaded. I doubt he could have described his own mother. But I got the impression they weren’t people , you know what I’m saying? Because those moles, normally they’d defend their turf. Tooth and nail, with box cutters and broken Thunderbird bottles and whatever else they’ve got. And they didn’t, they just ran. Anyway, that’s why I went down there. To find out. See for myself.”
    Redlaw regarded her.
    “I know!” she exclaimed. “Brave or crazy, take your pick. In the event, I didn’t find any vamps. This is what I found. Keep watching. Any second now...”
    Sounds first: the tread of feet,