Author's note: I wrote this largely for a change of pace from Strange Aeons. It was originally intended to be a one-shot, but I've found it taking on a momentum all of its own and should have some more material up soon. And of course, any reviews are gratefully appreciated.

Warning: although the story overall will not contain much in the way of profanity, hence the 'T' rating, this chapter does contain rather a lot of swearing. If you think it should be changed to 'M' to be on the safe side, let me know.

Seras Victoria barely noticed the ghoul until she almost walked into it.

She had been concentrating on a faded photocopy of a Vermessungsämter map of Lower London she had taken at her local library, trying to work out her route home as she made her way though the dark back streets. She had been desperately hoping to avoid any patrols as she came home from work – a low-paying job in a down-at-heel restaurant kitchen in Knightsbridge – and to that end she had been dodging through alleyways and taking the long way round for the past half hour. Sure, she could take the easy route, straight up the brightly lit Holland Road. But there would be cameras and a regular police presence, both quick to recognise her for what she was: a Class-4 citizen with an expired ID card and two previous convictions out way after the curfew.

And it was here of all places, in some dingy street between two decaying shopping centres that still hadn't been rebuilt since the war, that she ran into a patrol.

Fortunately, they didn't seem to have seen her. The ghoul she had almost walked into and its partner were facing away from her, standing motionless just outside the puddle of light cast by a street light and she silently thanked God for her shoes – the worn, thin soles let in a lot of rainwater but they also made almost no sound when she walked. Nevertheless, she crept away from them with exaggerated caution. Ghouls couldn't hear very well, but it paid to play it safe. She backed away, intending to find another way around.

Her foot came down on a small patch of glass – a broken bottle? a needle? – which crunched quietly.

The ghouls' heads snapped round.

Seras swore quietly as both ghouls turned and marched towards her. They moved not with the shambling, broken gait of the ferals she was used to, but with a purposeful, robotic march. If you didn't look at their faces, you could almost be forgiven for thinking they were actual people.

"Good evening...ma'am."

The lead ghoul had come to a halt just in front of her. Seras still had to fight her instinct to scream and try and fight it away from her. Three months in the big city and she was only just beginning to get used to the idea that ghouls were meant to be mindless servants rather than ravenous monsters.

The ghoul stood in front of her was a perfect example of that philosophy. Its eyes had been replaced by two blank, black camera lenses and its mouth forced open in a permanent scream. A speaker protruded from its mouth like the filter of a gas mask and various communications devices nestled in its rotting ears. A preservative slime gave its grey, cracked skin a horrible sheen. It wore – untidily, as if it had been forced into it – the uniform of a constable of the London Metropolitan Police Force, a swastika armband standing out in stark red-white-and-black contrast to its navy blue coat.

She had heard rumours that constable-ghouls like this one had methods of recognising faces and comparing them to the massive computerised databases in the Gestapo headquarters in the Overcity. If that was the case, arrest orders were probably already winging their way back to this one. Nevertheless, she did not run. It was one of the pillars of National Socialism, after all – the innocent have nothing to fear from the Law. Maybe she could bluff her way out of this. Running would confirm her guilt, and make any punishment a lot worse.

The ghoul spoke again, its phrases pre-recorded and stitched together into sentences.

"Are you aware...ma'am...that it is past...Class-3 curfew?"

Seras did her best to look shocked and contrite. "Is it? Oh, I'm terribly sorry, officer. I, ah, I was just heading home. My watch broke yesterday and I haven't had time to get it mended..." Desperate stuff, but it just might work. "I'll get back as quick as I can, don't you worry." She made to walk away.

"Halt."

Seras stopped, turning back to face the two constables.

"I will need to see your ID card please, ma'am."

Shit. If the ghoul saw her card, it'd see that it was out of date, and that she was out past curfew. It would probably also find out pretty quickly about her previous convictions. National Socialism – as her Social Education teacher back home in Cheddar had worked hard to drill into her and the rest of her class – held that for some criminality was endemic. These parasites of the Volk were to be treated with maximum harshness: while rich, successful businessmen could kill their mothers and get five years in jail, people who committed a string of small burglaries were sent to the concentration camps for life.

And if they were unlucky, they were shipped off to the Umbauslager. The conversion camps.

All of this ran through Seras' mind in a moment as the ghoul held out its hand for her ID card. Brown, dead flesh showed in the gap between its navy sleeve and pristine white glove. Its partner, stood a few paces behind it, moved its hand to its belt, where a holster was attached. Two sets of mechanical eyes watched her carefully, clicking and whirring.

"My ID card? Um, yes, yes, of course. I think it's in my handbag..."

In one motion she opened her bag and pulled out a spray can. Aiming it at the ghoul's face, she pressed the button and sprayed a stream of building foam into its eyes.

The ghoul jerked its hands up to try and shield itself but it wasn't fast enough – ghouls rarely were – and the jet caught it full across the lenses, blinding it and setting hard. With one hand it clawed at its face, trying to clear its vision, while the other swung around and made a blind grab for Seras. Off-balance, the ghoul stumbled and Seras delivered a swift kick to its ankle. It toppled to the ground, its head hitting the kerb with a crunch.

The other ghoul was scrabbling at its holster, trying to retrieve its pistol with clumsy fingers. The speaker in its jaws was already blaring a high-pitched distress tone. "Officer requires assistance!" it screeched in English and German as Seras brought the heavy-duty spray can round and clubbed it once, twice, three times in the face. It sank to its knees. Seras reached down and yanked the pistol from its clutching fingers, before putting a bullet through it and its companion's head.

Damned if I'm going to jail for trying to earn a few more Reichsmarks, she though, alive with adrenaline. Tucking the gun into the waistband of her trousers, she turned and ran for home, leaving the bodies of the two constable-ghouls in the gutter.

Half an hour later, Seras sat in the shadow of the Regent's Park Trestle and couldn't believe what she had done.

You stupid, stupid woman, screamed a panicky part of her brain. What the hell did you do that for? Now you're going to be on the wanted list, and when you're caught – because they will find you, you know, they're good at that kind of thing – you'll have 'assaulting an officer' to add to your little list of felonies. It'll be the KZ for you if you're lucky!

KZ was slang for concentration camp, from the German Konzentrationslager.

Seras willed that part of her brain to shut up for a second, trying desperately not to panic. The rush of adrenaline was long gone, whittled down as she fled across Lower London, not knowing or caring where she was or where she was going as long as she put as much distance between her and that Knightsbridge alleyway as possible. Eventually she had flopped down, exhausted, on some dimly-lit bench next to the Trestle. Gasping for breath, she tried to marshal her thoughts as she gazed up at the massive structure.

It dwarfed the surrounding buildings, a colossal lattice of steel girders wrapped around a core of transport lifts and utility pipelines, rearing up into the night sky like a startled beast. Built over the old park, which had been expanded to surround it, it was one of the nine Trestles that supported that great symbol of the power and genius of National Socialism and its patron nation the Greater German Reich: the London Overcity.

Hanging like a great iron cloud about 50 metres above the rooftops of the original city – now referred to as Lower London – the vast metal plate of the Overcity stretched from Hyde Park to Greenwich, 12 kilometres long and almost six wide. It contained a whole other world on its upper side. It was a world of high-class living, expensive shops and glass-fronted skyscrapers. There were no decrepit alleys in the Overcity, no grinding poverty and no curfew. Only Class-1 and 2 citizens were allowed up except on very special occasions. It was here that the cream of the society of Reichsgau Großbritannien lived.

But all Seras could see of the "gift of friendship from the German people" from where she was sat was the dingy underbelly of the Overcity, inscribed with an enormous swastika turned grimy with pollution. The words "The power to move mountains" were inscribed around it in letters that must have been larger than houses. Seras had been told once that it was a quote from the Fuhrer when he personally opened the Overcity to the public in the 1980s – the second one in the world to be built, after (where else?) Berlin.

With one last dirty look at the home of the city's elite, where she had no doubt that puppet king Richard was quaffing some vintage wine with that fat bespectacled little bastard of a Reichsstatthalter, and marvelling at his good fortune as he did so, Seras turned her thoughts to how she was going to get out of this mess.

The important thing, she decided, was to keep moving. Stay in one area too long and she was sure that the police would pick her up – or if not them, one of the thousands of CCTV cameras dotted around the city would surely notice her. The best thing to do would be to get home, get what she needed and try and lie low somewhere else in the city for a few weeks. Easier said than done, of course, but there were some places in London where it was rumoured that even the undead officers feared to tread.

She set off westwards towards her rented flat in Westbourne, feeling reassured by the weight of the gun, which she had transferred to one of her jacket pockets. If it came to it, she supposed, she could always try and sneak onto a train heading north. Cheddar might not exactly welcome her back with open arms, but she doubted her fellow townspeople would slam the door in her face. And if they did, well, it was said that the border crossing to Scotland wasn't as impossible as the Reich Propaganda Ministry made it sound. But if she did that, then what? The same rumours usually went on to detail just what a terrible place Scotland had become after almost fifty years of holding out against the Reich's ghoul brigades.

That was the problem, Seras thought. Rumours on one side, propaganda on the other. For a Class-4 citizen in the Greater German Reich, the truth was hard to come by.

She looked around, trying to get her bearings, comparing where she thought she was to her crumpled map. That was the problem with Lower London – everywhere looked the same. The same dilapidated terraced housing, the same cracked pavements, the same dreary orange sodium lights. Even in the places that were supposed to be more up-market, the decay of the city was obvious. The street where she rented her accommodation had, before the war, been a high-class Edwardian-era suburb, with trees planted on the streets and the houses whitewashed until they gleamed. Now, all the trees were dead and the houses were falling down. Whole families sometimes lived in rooms designed for one person.

There were few street signs, which complicated matters. Seras had heard that they'd all been taken down in the late forties, as Nazi forces massed in Normandy for a second time, in an effort to confuse any German troops who made it into the capital. And after the surrender, no-one had the time or the will to put them back up again. Now, she largely had to guess where she was, as did everyone else who hadn't lived their whole lives in the Lower city.

She set off down another nondescript, tattered street, keeping a watchful eye out for any police patrols.

And above her, she was noticed.

"Do you know what this is, Fuchs?"

The young man with the insignia of Rottenfuhrer on his SS uniform looked up from where he was knelt over the bodies of two constables.

"I beg your pardon, Herr Obersturmfuhrer?" he asked, with a small frown.

"I said, do you know what this is?"

The young man, Ulrich Fuchs, looked around him, as if expecting a trap.

"This is a crime scene, Obersturmfuhrer Valentine," he replied.

The other man threw back his head and laughed a wild, manic cackle. He grinned at the man knelt in front of him, who despite being only two years younger than him was more than six ranks his junior. "The famous Kraut sense of humour, eh?" he asked, with a malicious twinkle in his eye. "You know, Fuchs, sometimes I can't tell if you're cracking a joke or if you're genuinely as thick as pig shit."

Fuchs winced at the verbal blow. His superior carried on speaking. "No, Fuchs," he said, "what this is, what all of this is, is truly and irredeemably fucked."

Obersturmfuhrer Jan Valentine, of the London Kriminalpolizei, looked around at the dingy alley in which he was stood. Police tape was wrapped around both ends of the alley, warning passers-by in two languages not to enter. The two bodies of the constables were sprawled out under powerful arc lamps set up by Kriminalpolizei forensics team, and men dressed in the white of crime scene investigators took photos from every angle. A few human members of the Metropolitan police milled around.

"I mean," continued Valentine, turning back to Fuchs and gesturing at the bodies, "here we have two healthy young ghouls, freshly cooked up, barely a fuckin' maggot on them. They're strong and capable guys with promising careers ahead of them." He laughed at his own joke and continued. "London's fucking finest. And they're staking out this place for us, a known haunt of a drug smuggling ring, nice and quiet like, when suddenly, out of the motherfucking blue, comes some stupid little blonde bitch and caps both of them in the fucking head!" His voice had risen to a shout, and Fuchs took a step back. He was beginning to regret transferring to London – the Obersturmfuhrers he had known in Hamburg hadn't been anything like this foul mouthed, ill-tempered young man.

Then again, they hadn't been vampires, either, or brothers to one of the most powerful men in the Reichsgau.

"Seven months of planning down the fucking drain! Two constables dead, the dealers scared off by the gunshots and three strike teams sitting around on their arses with nothing to do!" raved Jan.

Fuchs decided it would not be a career-enhancing move to point out that the Herr Obersturmfuhrer had done precisely none of the seven months of planning, but had instead sat in his office smoking and berating his subordinates. Instead, he settled on what he thought would be a nice and neutral statement. "A great shame, Herr Obersturmfuhrer."

Jan glowered at him. "Damn fucking right it's a shame, Fuchs. And you know what is an even greater shame, Fuchs? Its that we barely have a sodding clue who did this!" He licked his lips and glanced at his watch, an expensive Swiss model that was probably worth more than six months of the younger man's salary. "I'll tell you what," he went on. "I'm a forgiving man, Fuchs. I can continue to be a forgiving man for the next half hour, but if by then you don't have a name for me I will hold you personally responsible for this mess, you understand?"

Fuchs went pale as Jan grinned, revealing very sharp, very long teeth. He was about to protest – to beg, really – when a constable-ghoul ambled up to the two Kriminalpolizei officers.

"What do you want?" Jan demanded.

"The perpetrator...has been...identified...and...located...sir," came the droned response.

Fuchs breathed an ill-disguised sigh of relief as Jan's face lit up like a child at Christmas. "Really? Where?"

The ghoul handed him a printout. It was the ID card photo of a one Seras Victoria, formerly of Cheddar, now one of the many new immigrants to Lower London. The text below the picture declared her last known location to be close to Marylebone Station, seen there by one of the many autonomous surveillance drones that swooped through the skies of London.

"Oh, she is gonna fuckin' regret this," murmured Jan. He turned to Fuchs. "Put the word out. Seras Victoria, wanted for the 'murder' of two bobbies, found dead in Marylebone Station. No further investigation planned." He smiled, and adjusted his SS uniform. "What do you think, Fuchs? Do I look good for a first date?"

And with a cackle, he sprinted off into the night, faster than any human could.

SS-Rottenfuhrer Ulrich Fuchs had never been a religious man, and Christianity had been outlawed long before he had been born. Nevertheless, when he got home that night, he said a small prayer for the young woman Victoria.

Seras clambered over the siding wall and dropped down onto the tracks of Marylebone station. There would be cameras on the platforms, she knew, but out here where the trains departed she doubted there would be any surveillance. Just my luck to be run over by a train, she thought as she picked her way over rails and around sleepers.

On the other side of the station a massive cargo train sat idling. The wagons at the back, she could see, were being loaded by a large crane that was hoisting pallets of cargo into their open bays. The two engines, one at either end of the train, were jet-black. Each had the swastika emblazoned on the side, along with the symbol of the Reich Main Security Office. It was probably a special operations train, waiting to ferry another platoon of ghouls up to the Antonine Wall.

Hoping her footsteps would be muffled by the growl of the diesel engines and the clatter of the loading crane, Seras crept across the siding, keeping to the shadows. If she could get across, it would only be a short walk to her flat.

"Evening, miss."

Seras gave a small cry and whirled around. Stood behind her was a man in an SS officer's uniform.

"Seras Victoria," the man said, advancing on her as she backed away. "Class-4 citizen, residency: Lower London. Convicted for one case of burglary and one of minor assault. Wanted for the destruction of two constables."

Seras stumbled over a rail and was sent sprawling backwards. In a flash the SS man was on top of her, pinning her down with a terrible strength. He smiled at her, a horrible leer that made it look as if his lower jaw was falling off. Fangs glinted in the light.

"And nowhere in the report did it say what a looker you were!" he beamed. "You know, for a piece of fourth-class gutter trash, you sure look a lot like the Aryan ideal." He paused, inhaling her scent. "Which, I guess, means this is going to be all the fuckin' sweeter. Oh, but where are my manners? I'm Lieutenant Jan-"

He didn't get any further. Seras' hand flew to her throat, and then she slapped the man hard across the face.

The effect, to an observer, would have been surprising. Jan screeched and sprang backwards, his eyes wide with pain. Smoke started to curl from his cheek, and there was a quiet sizzling sound like red-hot metal meeting flesh. He fell to the ground and lay there moaning, clutching at his face with both hands and desperately wiping it with his gloves.

Seras, for her part, scrabbled to her feet and ran as fast as she could. And as she did so, she vividly remembered her fifth birthday, when her mother had given her what had seemed at the time a rather odd present: a thin gold necklace, on which hung a small glass pendant. On closer inspection, the pendant had turned out to be a vial, which her mum had solemnly told her was filled with a mixture of holy water and garlic. It was only later that she would learn what these were for – and the risks her mother must have run to get ahold of two of the most controlled substances in the Reich.

She forced back the bitter memories as she ran on. Behind her, she could hear the clatter of gravel as the SS man (no, not a man) leapt to his feet and charged after her. He was fast, but she was closer to the chain-link fence that separated the siding from the main road. If she could scale that, she might yet have a chance.

She was halfway up the fence when a hand closed around her ankle and twisted violently, yanking her down onto the hard concrete. She gasped in pain as the breath was driven from her, which turned to a scream as her ankle was twisted further with a splintering crack of bones.

"You little fucking bitch," growled the officer as he rolled her around to face him. "Holy water? Garlic?" He shook his head. "You're lucky I'm only going to rape and kill you – I could drag you before a court, you know, and the boys in the Gestapo would just love to get their hands on someone like you.

"But we both know that's not gonna happen, don't we, bitch? Like I said, rape and kill...although which I do first is entirely up to me."

From somewhere behind him, another voice suddenly spoke.

"Pathetic," it sneered.

Seras had the briefest glimpse of a man in a flowing red coat and charcoal suit brandishing an enormous gun at the SS officer. She even thought she saw the flash as the gun fired.

Something cold punched into her gut, and everything went dark.