They know, he realised. They know I’ve seen them.

Alan took a deep breath. “In ten seconds’ time,” he said, “we’re going to get up and you’re going to lead me into the kitchen. Walk quickly, but don’t run. Don’t stop if anyone asks what you’re doing. Just keep moving and I’ll be right behind you.”

“OK,” said Cynthia. Her voice was low, but full of determination.

“Good,” he said. “I love you.”

“I love you too, Alan.”

“I know you do,” he said, and gave his wife a fierce smile. “Now go.”

Cynthia got to her feet and slung her bag over her shoulder. Alan pushed back his chair and stood up, trying to keep all eight of the stationary figures in sight as he did so. But as he lifted his coat off the back of his seat, his concentration was broken, and in that brief moment they moved; he searched the crowd frantically, looking for hoods, for deliberate movement.

There.

His eyes found one of the women as she threw back her hood, took hold of a man who had, until a millisecond earlier, been strolling through the square without a care in the world, and sank a pair of gleaming fangs into his face.

The man’s scream was deafening, a piercing screech of pain and terror. Then the rest of the hooded figures tore into the crowd, and it was joined by a chorus of others. Blood sprayed into the air as panic descended over the square; people ran blindly in every direction, crying and screaming as footsteps thundered across the cobblestones. Alan watched, his heart stopped dead in his chest.

On the far side of the square, a female vampire swooped into a wide-eyed group of Japanese tourists, scattering them. They tumbled to the ground as the woman ripped at their necks, her eyes glowing, her face twisted into a vicious grin of delight. Blood began to run between the worn cobblestones, shimmering beneath the yellow street lights.

At the centre of the crowd, people collided with each other and tumbled beneath stampeding feet. Alan saw a woman fall on her shoulder, and heard the dull crack and scream of agony as it dislocated. She tried to sit up, her face ghostly pale, and was driven back down as one of the hooded vampires landed on her like a bird of prey. The man dug his fingers into her neck and tore out her throat with a casual flick of his wrist. Blood jetted above the heads of the running, panicking crowd; the vampire was moving again before it reached the ground, throwing himself into the chaos, hacking and slashing at anything that moved.

“What is this?” asked Cynthia, her voice low. “Alan?”

He barely heard her; he was transfixed by the savagery that had been unleashed around them. Their fellow diners appeared similarly frozen; they were watching the carnage with wide eyes, as though it was a piece of particularly challenging street theatre. Something whistled through the air and landed with a wet thud in the centre of the table to Alan’s left. It was a human head, its eyes blinking rapidly, its mouth twitching as though still trying to form words.

“Alan?”

The occupants of the table screamed and pushed themselves back, upending their chairs and breaking the collective paralysis of their fellow patrons. The restaurant was suddenly full of movement and noise, as men and women flooded blindly out into the cobbled square that had become a slaughterhouse.

“ALAN!” screamed Cynthia.

He jumped, and turned to face his wife, his heart racing. Then he was moving, taking a tight hold of her hand and leading her against the flow of diners, towards the kitchen at the rear of the restaurant. He kicked open the swing door, and ran into a wide room full of metal and steam. Two chefs shouted their objections, but he ignored them, his eyes locked on an open door at the far end of the kitchen. Cynthia kept pace behind him, so much so that she thudded painfully into him when he skidded to a halt beside a low shelf near the back door.

“What is it?” she shouted. “What’s wrong?”

Alan examined the shelf. Its edge was a row of hooks, from which hung blades of every shape and size. He grabbed a long carving knife and held it out to his wife, handle first. Cynthia took it without a word as he lifted down a thick, heavy cleaver, tested the weight in his hand, and grunted with approval. He was about to head for the door when something lying on a counter made him pause.

It was a meat-tenderising hammer, but it was unlike anything Alan had ever seen: almost a metre long, with a spiked head that made it look like it belonged in a medieval torture chamber rather than a kitchen. He transferred the cleaver to his left hand, hefted the hammer in his right, and ran through the back door, Cynthia close behind him. A shape loomed out of the shadows, and he raised the hammer, but the figure stepped into the light of the kitchen door before he swung it, revealing a waiter with tendrils of smoke curling out of his nostrils.

“Ce qu’il se passe?” asked the man.

Alan wasted no time replying. He pushed the waiter aside, ignored a rapid torrent of French insults, and led Cynthia down a metal staircase. They found themselves on a small road, one of the narrow arteries that wound through Carcassonne, hidden from the tourists upon whom the city depended. The road was on a slight incline, and Alan didn’t waste a moment deciding which way to go.

Down, he thought. All the ways out are down.

Their feet clattered over the cobblestones as they ran. The volume of the screams from the square decreased as he led Cynthia round a corner at the bottom of the street, but they were still horribly audible, and seemingly endless.

A growling shape leapt from the shadows, two points of red glowing in the centre of its face, and Alan’s military instincts took over; he swung the meat hammer in a flat arc, slamming it into the vampire’s jaw. The studs ripped through the flesh of its cheek and the impact shuddered painfully up his arm. The vampire crashed to the ground, its head hitting the cobblestones with a sound like a breaking egg, and lay still. Alan didn’t give it a second look; he sprinted forward, Cynthia at his side.

The street narrowed as it passed through a short stone tunnel, then widened as it curved away from the ancient walls and back into the centre of the city. Up ahead, a wide arch opened on to Rue du Grand Puits, one of the roads leading down to the medieval gate that served as Carcassonne’s main entrance and exit. As they neared it, a dull roar reached Alan’s ears: the thunder of footsteps as screaming, howling men and women ran headlong down the hill. He skidded to a halt beneath the arch, put an arm across his wife’s chest, and stared at the flowing mass of humanity before them.

He had been in a number of deadly riots over the course of his career – in Mogadishu, Baghdad and Kosovo, to name just a few – but what was happening in front of him was every bit as terrifying as any of them. Men, women and children were running blindly down the hill, many of them so badly injured that Alan assumed adrenaline was the only thing keeping them on their feet. Blood ran thickly between the cobblestones and pooled at the edges of the street. Motionless bodies lay on the ground, kicked and trodden on by the panicking mass; as Alan watched, a teenage boy tripped over a crumpled figure and fell to the ground, screaming in terror. He was swallowed up by the thundering crowd, trampled and driven to the cobbles, until he too lay still.

“Dear God,” whispered Cynthia.

Within the reeling, pulsing crowd, vampires moved with supernatural speed, rending and tearing. There were now many more than the eight Alan had seen in the square, their eyes blazing with crimson, their faces twisted into grins of sheer joy. One of them grabbed a middle-aged man by his shoulders and hauled him kicking and screaming into the dark night sky; seconds later, bloody lumps of meat began to rain down on the running men and women below.