Department 19: Zero Hour

by Will Hill

  Silence settled over the cell, a silence in which the weight of the past hung palpably in the air. In the distance, Frankenstein heard the airlock door open.

  “Anyway,” said Marie, shaking her head and smiling more genuinely, “I stopped being angry with Julian a long time ago. And I’m sure you didn’t come down here to talk about such gloomy matters?”

  “No,” said Frankenstein, relief at the change of subject clear in his voice. “I didn’t come to talk about your husband. I came to talk about your son.”

  Marie’s smile faded. “I thought as much,” she said. “What has he done now?”

  “He’s not in any trouble,” said Frankenstein, quickly. “I don’t know what he’s told you about me, or about—”

  “He told me about the vow you made,” interrupted Marie, her voice low. “To protect our family. He told me about that, Victor.”

  “I’m glad,” said Frankenstein, feeling rare warmth spread through him. “I didn’t know whether he would have.”

  Marie nodded. “He told me you knew Julian’s father when he was young, which is hard for me to imagine. When Julian and I got married, he already seemed old. Jamie never even met him.”

  “I knew him very well,” said Frankenstein. “And he would be very proud of his grandson, that much I can say for certain.”

  An expression of love, so fierce that it almost made Frankenstein take a step backwards, appeared on Marie’s face.

  “So he should be,” she said, colour rising to her cheeks. “Jamie’s a good boy, and his heart’s in the right place. He means everything to me.”

  “And to me,” said Frankenstein. “I have done my best to protect three generations of Carpenters, and Jamie is at least the equal of the men who went before him. I will protect him till the day I die, from anyone or anything that seeks to do him harm, and from himself, when necessary. But lately …”

  “What?” asked Marie. Tears were standing in the corners of her eyes, the product of Frankenstein’s obvious love for her son. “Go on, please.”

  “Lately, I’ve felt like I’m failing him,” said Frankenstein, and grimaced; the words tasted bitter as he spoke them out loud. “I feel like I’m doing him more harm than good, that I’m hindering him rather than helping. I no longer know whether I’m keeping the promise I made.”

  Marie stared at him, her eyes wide and rimmed with tears. “Don’t say that,” she said. “Don’t ever say that. I know you rescued him from Alexandru the night I was taken, and I know that you threatened to resign if he wasn’t allowed to try and find me. I know you went to Lindisfarne even though Jamie had told you not to, when he had listened to the poison Thomas Morris put in his ear. So don’t you ever say you’re failing him. He and I would both be dead if it wasn’t for you.”

  “Thank you,” said Frankenstein, his voice a low rumble. “I didn’t know how much you knew. It means a lot.”

  “Good,” said Marie, firmly. “Because I meant it. I know what thinking you’ve failed feels like, believe me I do. I felt it every day for two years after Julian died, like I was putting the memory of a dead man above the son who needed me, but I didn’t know how to stop myself. I look at the list of men he’s tried to replace his father with, whether he knows he’s doing it or not, and my heart aches for him. You, Henry Seward, Cal Holmwood, Paul Turner, even Valentin Rusmanov, for God’s sake. It makes me feel like I’m still failing, because why would he try so hard unless I’m not enough for him?”

  Marie’s tears brimmed over and spilled down her cheeks. She made no attempt to hide them; they gleamed under the fluorescent light of the cell as they rolled towards her neck.

  “Jamie knows you love him,” said Frankenstein. “And he went through hell to get you back. He’s a teenage boy in a world full of alpha males, men who are brave and wise and capable, who are everything any child would like their father to be. The tragedy is that his father was one of those men; he just never knew until it was too late. I think he’s trying to understand the man Julian was, and is drawn to men who are like him. I don’t think it’s criticism of you, or rejection.”

  “I’m not so sure,” said Marie. “He was so angry with me after Julian died. We were always at each other’s throats. Sometimes it feels like he’s trying to hurt me, even if he doesn’t realise. Look at him now, with that Larissa creature. Even after what happened to me, to his father, and all the other people he’s seen get hurt, he decides to go out with a vampire. Even though there are normal, human girls like Kate for him to be interested in. Why would he do such a thing?”

  “I think it’s called being a teenager,” said Frankenstein, and smiled. “I never was one, so I can’t speak from personal experience, but there seems to be nothing more boring to a teenager than what is good for them, and nothing more horrifying than parental approval.”

  Marie managed a small smile of her own. “I hope so,” she said. “I hope that’s what it is, I really do. Because I don’t know what I’d do if—”

  She stopped abruptly, tilted her head back, and gasped. Then her eyes flamed scarlet, and a furious expression twisted her features.

  “Don’t you know it’s rude to eavesdrop?” she shouted, turning her head and staring out at the corridor. Frankenstein followed her gaze, and felt cold fingers dance up his misshapen spine as Jamie Carpenter stepped silently out in front of the cell.

  “How long have you been standing there?” he managed.

  Jamie shrugged. “Long enough.”

  “How dare you listen in on a private conversation?” said Marie, her eyes glowing fiercely. “Didn’t I bring you up better than that?”

  “A private conversation?” repeated Jamie, and grunted with laughter. “Is that what this is? Because it sounds to me like two people giving me a psych evaluation without even doing me the courtesy of letting me speak for myself. And trying to let my dad off the hook for being stupid enough to get himself killed.”

  “Jamie!” shrieked Marie. “How dare you speak to Victor and I like that?”

  “Of all the people in the world,” said Frankenstein, trying his hardest to keep his temper, to keep anger and the shame of being caught out of his voice, “surely you understand why he did what he did?”

  “Why he didn’t go to you when Tom Morris framed him?” asked Jamie. “Or to Henry Seward, or Cal Holmwood? Why he ended up lying dead on our drive instead of trusting his friends to help him when he was in trouble? I don’t understand that, no.”

  “He was trying to protect you,” said Frankenstein. “Both of you. If you can’t see that, then—”

  “Then what?” interrupted Jamie. “I know what he went through, I really do. I’ve seen it for myself, and I get why he had to lie to us about what he did for a living. I’ve honestly forgiven him for it. I was furious with him for leaving us for such a long time, but I’m not angry any more. I’m just disappointed.”

  “Don’t you miss him, Jamie?” asked Marie. Scarlet fire still burned in her eyes, but her tone of voice had changed; it sounded horribly close to pleading.

  Jamie met her gaze and shook his head. “The man I miss didn’t exist, Mum. That was just a fiction, a version of himself he invented for me and you.”

  “Don’t you dare say that,” growled Frankenstein. “The man who raised you and loved you was real. He was my friend.”

  “Well, it doesn’t matter now, does it?” said Jamie, turning to face his sworn protector. “Because he’s dead.”

  Silence, icy cold and pregnant with recrimination, descended over the cell. Marie was staring at her son with obvious panic, clearly trying to understand how a simple conversation had turned so quickly into this poisonous stand-off. Frankenstein looked helplessly at her, feeling familiar pangs of shame begin to swirl in his stomach.

  You did this, whispered a voice at the back of his mind. You failed them both. You can’t even protect them from each other.

  A loud beep finally broke the silence. Jamie pulled his console from his belt, thumbed the screen,
and smiled.

  “Well, how about that?” he said, his voice light and cheerful. “Another one of my desperate surrogate father figures wants to see me. I’d better not keep him waiting, in case he grounds me or takes my PlayStation away.”

  Jamie strolled through the barrier without a backward glance and disappeared down the corridor. Frankenstein was too shocked to speak; he simply could not convince his throat to form words. He looked at Marie Carpenter, and felt his heart lurch in his chest. She was staring in the direction her son had gone, the glow in her eyes slowly fading away to nothing. When she did find her voice, it was small and full of sadness.

  “I don’t think that went very well,” she said.

  Click.

  “I’m bored, mate.”

  “Me too. Fag?”

  Click.

  “Just had one. Coffee?”

  “Yeah, why not? I’ll go.”

  “No bother, I’ll get them.”

  Click.

  “I offered first, mate. I’ll be back in ten. Unless the queue is bad, which, you know, this time of day it might be. If it’s bad, I might be half an hour.”

  “I won’t hold my breath then.”

  “Probably for the best.”

  Click.

  Justin Wallace grinned at his colleague, flicked him a casual V with the fingers of his right hand, then returned his attention to his screen as Simon let the door of the computer lab slam shut behind him. They had been cooped up in the small, airless room for almost a month, grinding through the project that was contributing a small amount towards their student debts, and any chance to step outside, even for a minute or two, was grabbed with both hands. They had prepared themselves for boring, perhaps even very boring, but neither of them had been ready for how interminably, soul-destroyingly tedious the job had actually turned out to be.

  A small software start-up was preparing to launch the first iteration of their mapping software, and had employed Justin, Simon and two dozen other students around the country to select and collate the images that were required. They had bought several million from a company that provided photographs to many of the bigger, more established mapping services, taken once a second from a height of three hundred and ninety miles by a satellite called RapidEye 4 as it criss-crossed the globe in a series of orbits that had taken months to complete, and it was the job of Justin and Simon to wade through them all. Neither of them could see any reason why this new software would challenge the established companies in the sector, but the money was half-decent, if nothing else.

  Click.

  Justin was working his way through East Anglia, the swathe of flat farmland and forest that fitted snugly around the Wash, the large estuary that made it look as though some vast creature had taken a bite out of the eastern coastline of England. The satellite images came in sets of three, and Justin’s job was simply to select the best one from each almost identical set and forward it to the compilers, where it would form one minuscule part of the giant high-definition map that was being constructed. He quickly examined three images of a nondescript patch of brown and green, selected one of them, and reached out to load the next set.

  Click.

  Justin frowned. The new images theoretically showed the same section of forest, an area of no notable interest thirty miles from the sea. But whereas the first showed the expected canopy of trees, the second and third were obscured by circles of bright purple light, slightly larger in the third image than the second. Justin pulled up his glitch folder from the toolbar at the bottom of his monitor, intending to select the first image for use and add the others to his error document, a running list of images that were over- or underexposed, or in some cases merely black squares where the image had failed to record. But something made him pause.

  They’re different sizes, he thought. If they’re errors, why are they different sizes?

  He reached out and loaded the next set of images. The first had been taken a second after the third image of the previous set, and the purple light was nowhere to be seen. But there was something in the corner of the photo; something that didn’t look quite right. Justin dragged the image into his photo editor and magnified it, centring on the same area that was obscured in two of the previous set.

  What the hell? he wondered, and leant in closer to the screen.

  At 100× magnification, the canopy of trees appeared insubstantial, as though it had been superimposed over a second image. Beneath it, he could see a faint tracery of curving roads surrounding something long and straight, something that looked an awful lot like a—

  “Who’re you spying on?”

  Justin clutched at his chest as he spun round in his chair. Simon was peering down at the screen, two steaming coffees in his hands and an expression of mild curiosity on his face.

  “Jesus Christ,” said Justin, his heart pounding in his chest. “Creep up on me, why don’t you?”

  “Sorry, mate,” said Simon, without taking his eyes from the magnified image. “What have you got here? Glitch?”

  “I don’t know,” said Justin, leaning back in his chair and rubbing his eyes. “I thought so, but it’s weird. Tell me what you see.”

  Simon set the coffees down on the desk and leant in closer, a frown furrowing his brow. “Looks like there’s something under the trees,” he said, after a second or two. “Double exposure?”

  “Probably,” said Justin. “It’s gone in the next image. But it follows directly on from these two.” He reopened the images containing the purple circles.

  Simon’s frown deepened. “What the hell are they?”

  “I don’t know,” said Justin. “It’s like …”

  Simon turned to look at him. “Spit it out, mate. It’s like what?”

  “Like there’s something wrong with that bit of the forest,” said Justin. He spoke slowly, trying not to let his mouth outrun the idea that was beginning to form in his mind. “Like something happened, whatever that purple light is, and it took a second or two to reset.”

  “Reset what?”

  “I don’t know,” said Justin. “A shield, or some kind of camouflage. I don’t know. But that looks like a runway to me, which means planes. There’s no reason to hide an airport, no reason to even put an airport in the middle of a forest in the first place. So, if it’s not an airport, what else has a runway?”

  “An air-force base,” said Simon.

  “Right,” said Justin. “Most of East Anglia is owned by the government. The RAF fought the Battle of Britain from about thirty miles south of where we’re looking at, and Bomber Command flew from all over this bit of the country. This is British military heartland. So I don’t know what it is. But I don’t think it’s a glitch.”

  “You’re saying this is some secret RAF base?” asked Simon, his voice rising with excitement. “That’s awesome, mate.”

  “I don’t know,” repeated Justin. “Maybe. But if so, what’s that purple light?”

  Simon became very still, and Justin realised with a rush of relief that the possibility blaring insistently in his mind had now occurred to his friend. It was so ludicrous that he had not wanted to say it out loud; instead, he had tried to make his colleague see it for himself. Simon grabbed the mouse and clicked open a new browser window; his fingers sped across the keyboard, finishing with a heavy thump on ENTER. A website burst on to the screen, a primary-coloured collection of images and text that assaulted the eyes.

  UKVAMPIRES.COM

  THE SITE THEY TRIED TO BAN!!!

  THE TRUTH THEY DON’T WANT YOU TO KNOW!!!

  The main panel of the page was a long list of vampire stories, sightings, encounters, rumours and anecdotes. To the right was a black and white photo of a man looking to camera with a serious expression on his face, above two short lines of black text.

  KEVIN McKENNA

  NEVER FORGOTTEN

  After his death, and the publication of the unauthorised copies of The Globe that now stood as his legacy, Kevin McKenna had been atta
cked by the tabloid press with such self-preserving viciousness that a pro-McKenna movement had formed almost immediately. The press accused him of being mentally ill, an attention-seeking fantasist, a dangerous criminal who had terrified an innocent public with a cruel practical joke, then killed himself rather than face the music, and a great many people, almost certainly the majority, were happy to accept that depiction.

  But there were many who refused to believe what they were told, who had come to see McKenna as a hero, a man who had dared to speak truth to power and been murdered for doing so. These were the people who reprinted and reblogged his last words again and again, despite warnings and takedown notices. And there were more of them every day. In death, McKenna had become what he had never been in life: a touchstone, a rallying point.

  A legend.

  Beneath his photo were two prominent links, one in bright dripping red, the other in gleaming metallic silver.

  VAMPIRES – WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW

  THE MEN IN BLACK – THE TRUTH BEHIND THE VISORS

  Simon clicked the second link, filling the screen with a feverish list of alleged facts about the men in black, the classified anti-vampire branch of the military that Kevin McKenna had referred to in his final story as Blacklight. Simon scrolled down, and hovered the cursor over the penultimate line of text.

  “There,” he said, his voice low.

  Justin leant forward and read.

  THE MEN IN BLACK USE ULTRAVIOLET LIGHT TO DESTROY VAMPIRES. THIS LIGHT APPEARS PURPLE WHEN SEEN BY HUMAN EYES.

  “Jesus,” said Justin, his eyes locked on the screen. He took the mouse from Simon’s hand and clicked back to the images he had so nearly dismissed as glitches. The purple circles filled the screen, now seeming sinister, almost menacing.

  “This is big,” said Simon. “If we’re right, then this is huge, mate. It’s the kind of thing we could get in real trouble for.”

  Justin rolled his eyes, trying to show his friend how ridiculous that sounded. But in the centre of his chest, a cold sliver of fear had appeared.

  Will they be monitoring this? he wondered. Can they monitor this? Do they know who I am?