by Will Hill
Frankenstein had taken no pleasure in lying to Holmwood; he had always respected the Interim Director, and that respect had grown with the job Cal had done since Henry Seward had been lost, and leadership of Blacklight had been thrust unceremoniously upon him. But some things went deeper than professional respect, things that were older, and more important.
As the kettle began to bubble again, the monster crouched down in front of his locker. It contained only a small fraction of the possessions he had accumulated over the course of his long life; there were storage units and apartments groaning at the seams in a number of cities around the world, so many that he no longer had a remotely accurate idea of what any of them contained. The locker held the mementoes that meant the most to him, objects he would never have shown to anyone, never dreamt of explaining their importance. There were photographs, letters, three small framed drawings, a thick woollen scarf with the letters HBC sewn into it, a pair of binoculars, a linen bag containing twelve piano keys, a first edition of Frankenstein signed by Mary Shelley, a programme from the 1853 premiere of La Traviata at Teatro La Fenice, a rusted metal can with chemical symbols printed on it, six small squares of coloured glass, a thick bundle of postcards bound with twine, and a black radio handset.
He lifted the radio out carefully, almost reverently, and let his thumb rest against its power button. In all likelihood, the batteries would be flat; it had been more than two and a half years since the handset had been turned on. He didn’t know whether it would still be tuned to the frequency that had been agreed, but it wouldn’t matter; he knew it by heart.
For long seconds that stretched into minutes, Frankenstein wrestled with an overwhelming desire to turn the radio on, just for a little while. He knew with absolute certainty that Julian would try to reach him via the method they had agreed many years before; all he would have to do would be press the power button, and wait.
Matt Browning watched the numbers at the bottom of the screen tick past midnight, sighed deeply, and pushed himself back from the keyboard. The chair wheels squeaked across the floor of the laboratory as he closed his eyes and tried to slow his racing mind, to force it into neutral, even just for a moment.
Two more minutes, he thought. One hundred and twenty seconds. Then we’ll know.
He had been working solidly for six hours, stopping only to get another Diet Coke from the dispensing machine or to pace impatiently back and forth while the university’s computer network processed a new run of data. It was not an unusual workload, certainly not by the standards of the Lazarus Project, where he would regularly look up from his screen to discover that ten or twelve hours had passed, apparently in the blink of an eye.
It was, however, almost unbearably stressful.
The Lazarus Project had a specific goal, but no fixed deliverables, no benchmarks or timeline checkpoints. As a result, it was largely impossible to end each day with any reliable sense of what contribution you had made. Everyone simply worked as hard as they could, for as long as they could, then came back the next morning and did so again.
What he was doing now, on the other hand, was a contained project that was objectively straightforward, involving a clear series of steps and processes, a fixed timeframe, and a group of people who had no idea what he was doing approaching him with infuriating regularity and asking why it was taking so long.
I’m sorry! he wanted to yell. I’ll just rush the most important specimen collection of all time, one that can never, ever be done again if I screw it up. Is that what you want?
He knew it wasn’t; his squad mates were simply desperate to see whether the operation had been a success, as he was himself. Major Simmons had only arrived at the laboratory with Landsman an hour earlier, having spent the evening dealing with the chaos that had been unleashed at the corner of Geary and Third; from what Matt had overheard, it had eventually taken a call from an office inside the Pentagon to placate the Chief of the SFPD and the city controller, so vast had been their outrage. At the same time, an NS9 containment squad had been flown up from Nevada, and was currently in the process of formally informing the dozens of eyewitnesses that they had in fact not seen what had happened in front of their eyes, and making them sign official documents that said so.
Danny Lawrence had driven Matt straight to the lab, leaving the carnage of John Bell’s final act behind them, and he had immediately got to work. The required tasks were not difficult; by Lazarus standards they were, in fact, almost insultingly easy. But their potential implications were so huge that he had found his hands shaking even as he removed the specimens from his bag.
Stay calm, he had told himself. You know you can do this. And Cal wouldn’t have sent you if he didn’t think so too.
Working slowly and carefully, Matt had isolated eight samples of blood and eight small pieces of John Bell’s body. Each sliver of pale flesh was placed into a plastic dish, sealed, and put into a refrigerator to await transportation back to Nevada, where two of them would remain. Four would be returning with him to the Loop, and the other two were backups, redundancies in case anything befell the primary samples. As they cooled in the refrigerator, Matt had turned his attention to his most important task, even though it involved little more than pressing a series of buttons.
First, he placed drops of Bell’s blood on to a pair of slides and fed them into a gene sequencer; the machine would use an enzyme to copy the DNA within the blood millions of times, providing a far larger sample with which to work. That enlarged sample was then sent to Dreamland, where the NS9 supercomputer array would break the whole into manageable chunks and create a hugely simplified map of the genetic code within. It was no substitute for the comprehensive microanalysis that would be carried out back at the Lazarus labs, but it would hopefully provide early indications of exactly what they were dealing with; if there was anything clearly out of the ordinary inside John Bell’s DNA, it would be revealed.
Second, Matt fed a pair of plastic slides into a desktop machine that looked like a laser printer and was unimaginatively called a blood analyser. The slides contained minute squares of photographic film, soaked with a series of different chemicals; when Matt inserted a drop of John Bell’s blood through a tube in the top of the machine, it would be spread out and passed across the slides, causing a series of reactions and providing results for a battery of standard tests. Again, the sample blood would be subjected to every single conceivable test once he got it back to the Loop, but this blunt analysis would highlight anything that was obviously unusual. It was, however, maddeningly slow, at least in comparison to the equivalent machines at Dreamland and at the Loop; the machine, a model which had been superseded by faster, more powerful evolutions, would take two hundred and forty minutes to deliver a result.
Matt had now been waiting for two hundred and thirty-eight.
Two minutes.
Two minutes to go.
He was trying his hardest not to get his hopes up. There were absolutely no guarantees that the process that had cured John Bell of vampirism would have left any permanent evidence within his blood cells and, even if it had, there were no guarantees that it would be recognisable for what it was, especially after such a rudimentary series of tests. But still …
One minute.
Matt’s respect for what Jamie and Larissa did every night was boundless; he admired the bravery required to go out into the darkness searching for monsters, and he knew the world became a fractionally safer place with each vampire they destroyed. But he had come to believe that the wider battle for the future of humanity was not going to be decided at the end of a stake; it was going to be won, if it was won at all, in a laboratory.
Victory would come when a process existed that could undo the genetic changes that had been imposed on vampires; when they could be cured, rather than destroyed.
The blood analyser beeped three times, announcing that it was done.
Matt took a deep breath, and rolled himself back to the desk. The computer screen in
front of him was grey, its rainbow cursor spinning endlessly. He waited, resisting the urge to scream with impatience, until the screen shifted to a white background. Diagrams and graphs and long columns of black text filled it, but he was only interested in the lines of red at the top.
UNIDENTIFIED ABNORMALITY PRESENT IN SAMPLE. SEE SECTION 5 FOR DETAIL. FURTHER TESTING RECOMMENDED.
Matt stared at the words, trying not to burst into tears as a great wave of relief crashed through him.
There’s something there, he thought. Something in the blood.
“Holy shit,” said Danny Lawrence.
Matt jumped and spun round in his chair; the NS9 Operator was standing behind him, staring at the screen with obvious wonder.
“Jesus, Danny!” said Matt, his heart thumping in his chest.
“Sorry, man,” said Danny, and clapped Matt on the shoulder, his eyes still fixed on the screen. “This is real, right? This isn’t a simulation? This is John Bell’s actual blood?”
“It’s real,” said Matt, and pointed at the box labelled Section 5. It was full of long chains of chemical formulas and symbols. “This is it, right here. This is what we were looking for. Something that was in Bell’s blood that shouldn’t have been, that the computer doesn’t recognise.”
“What is it?” asked Danny.
Matt shook his head. “I don’t know,” he said. “Not yet. Those first three lines are enzymes, protein-based at a guess, and some of the rest of it looks like catalytic RNA. But I won’t know what it is or what it does until I get the samples back to the Loop and start unpicking them.”
“Is it a cure, though?” asked Danny, his voice full of hope. “Did we find it?”
“I don’t know,” repeated Matt. He saw his colleague’s face fall and quickly continued. “I’m not saying that it definitely isn’t, I just can’t say for certain that it is. But if I had to guess, I’d say that what we’re looking at is a result of what was done to him. It may be a functioning cure that we just have to extract, or it may be some by-product of the process that we have to take as a starting point and reverse engineer. But either way it’s monumental. It’s huge.”
“I need to tell the others,” said Danny, his face now covered with a wide smile. “They’re going to want to see this.”
“Go get them,” said Matt, returning the smile with a weary one of his own. “I’ll wait here.”
Danny nodded, and marched away towards the laboratory doors. The rest of the squad were waiting for news in the building’s cafeteria, at the other end of a long corridor.
As he waited for them to arrive, Matt remotely accessed the Blacklight server, logged into it, and clicked COMPOSE on the toolbar at the top of the messaging client. He dragged the results from the blood analyser into the empty message as an attachment, then tabbed to the window that displayed the progress of the provisional DNA analysis; the Dreamland computers were grinding through the process, but were still almost thirteen hours away from providing their first results. NS9 would send those results to the Lazarus Project as soon as the analysis was complete, by which time Matt hoped he would be back at his desk, beginning in-depth investigation of the anomaly that the blood analyser had identified.
Matt addressed the message to Professor Karlsson and clicked SEND. He wanted to send them the actual data, rather than just the results page, so they could get to work in his absence, but restrained himself; he would send it as soon as they were back in Nevada, from a server he was sure he could trust. When SENT appeared on his screen, Matt pulled his console from his bag and typed a message to Natalia Lenski, telling her that he would be bringing physical samples of the cured vampire with him to the Loop as soon as was humanly possible. It was past eight o’clock in the morning in England, so he wasn’t worried about the possibility of having woken her up; she would most likely have been at her desk for at least an hour already.
A reply arrived almost instantaneously. Matt thumbed it open.
FROM: Lenski, Natalia (NS304, 11-L)
TO: Browning, Lieutenant Matthew (NS303, 83-C)
Well done. Am so proud of you.
Matt grinned as heat bloomed in his chest. His fingers flew across the console’s screen.
FROM: Browning, Lieutenant Matthew (NS303, 83-C)
TO: Lenski, Natalia (NS304, 11-L)
Thanks :) I’ll be home soon …
The laboratory door flew open and Matt found himself surrounded by his squad mates; they shouted excitedly, and clapped him on the back, and jostled and cheered and celebrated. Major Simmons stood apart from them, watching the commotion with the ghost of a smile on his hard face.
“I didn’t do anything,” protested Matt, grinning widely. “I really didn’t. We just found the right man.”
The NS9 Operators were not interested in such modesty, false or otherwise; they congratulated him over and over, until his back hurt from endless gloved blows and his arm ached from being pumped up and down. When calm finally began to descend once more over the lab, he looked around at his squad mates.
“We should go,” he said. “I need to get the samples back to Nevada.”
Major Simmons nodded, and stepped forward. “All right,” he said. “You heard him. Pack up everything, and I do mean everything. I want it to look like we were never here. Browning, are you still plugged in to anything?”
“The DNA analysis is running at Dreamland,” said Matt. “But there’s no way to access it once I cut the connection.”
Simmons nodded again. “Good,” he said. “We’ll take the computer you’ve been using with us. I want nothing left to chance.”
“Yes, sir,” said Matt.
“All right,” said Simmons. “Then get to it, all of you.”
The men and women scattered across the laboratory, gathering up their equipment, removing empty cans and used mugs, wiping down surfaces and eradicating footprints, as Matt turned his attention back to his screen. He killed the external connections, erased the cache, the IP record and the keylogs from the laboratory server, then shut down and disconnected the computer itself. It went into his bag along with the samples, which he removed from the refrigerator and placed into a vacuum bag that closed with a loud hiss of escaping air. He sealed the bag, wrapped it in three thick layers of protective foam, then took a last look round the lab for anything he might have forgotten.
Major Simmons walked over to him. “All set?” he asked.
“Set,” replied Matt. “Ready to go, sir.”
“Good,” said Simmons, then drew his pistol and pointed it at Matt’s head. “Nobody move a damn muscle.”
Jamie watched Larissa glide easily round a shaft of sunlight, and smiled despite himself.
The light was pale yellow, thick with dust, and fell to the ground from a tiny gap in the canopy overhead as straight and true as a laser beam. The rest of the forest was thick with shadow, dark and cold and gloomy, but the look on Jamie’s girlfriend’s face, as she skirted within millimetres of the light before swooping away, was a reminder that it was still morning; despite the darkness surrounding them, Larissa was clearly relishing the opportunity to fly during the day.
After the tension within the squad had threatened to boil over as they stood in the clearing for what only Tim Albertsson refused to admit was the second time, a palpably dangerous moment in which it had taken every ounce of Jamie’s self-control not to break the stock of his MP7 over the American’s smug, stupid face, they had finally started to make progress. The going was slow, torturously so, but they were now deep in the perpetual twilight of the forest and moving forward. But part of the reason he was so pleased to see the momentary bloom of happiness on Larissa’s face as she evaded the beam of light was because his girlfriend was acting more and more strangely with each hour that passed.
Her eyes were constantly flaring red, and her movement was both incessant and increasingly erratic; she would dart away in one direction, then swoop so low that her outstretched fingers brushed the ground, before disappearing u
p into the darkness near the tops of the trees, all without a word to anyone. When he asked her what was going on, she just shook her head and muttered about the smell, and the noise. Jamie, who knew his senses were painfully dull in comparison to hers, could detect only the earthy aroma of the forest, and could hear nothing out of the ordinary. Telling her this had not helped, however; she had given him a withering look of disappointment, and floated back into the air.
Since the grotesque arrangement of corpses, Jamie had seen no signs of animal life at all among the trees. On several occasions he had heard the faint snap of a branch, or caught the low bushes and shrubs moving in the corners of his eyes, as though something had disturbed them, but he had seen nothing; it had begun to feel like they were the only living things in the forest.
Apart from the man we’re looking for, he told himself. Obviously.
Jamie was a country boy at heart; he had grown up in Kent, the south-eastern county known as the garden of England, and had spent a great many weekends of his childhood stomping through woods with a stick in his hand and his father at his side. Those distant places, copses of oaks and sycamores full of foxes and squirrels and birds, bore no resemblance to where he now found himself; the Teleorman Forest felt like an entirely different world, and not a welcoming one.
“Stop right there.”
Jamie looked up, startled out of his memories. It was Larissa’s voice, raised and urgent, a command not a request. He looked along the path the squad were steadily beating through the thick underbrush and saw her floating in the air ahead of them, her hand out, her eyes fixed on the forest floor. Van Orel, who was on point, did as he was told, stopping where he stood.
The rest of the squad followed suit.
Jamie glanced around, and felt a shiver run up his spine. He had become acutely aware, as they made their way deeper and deeper into the forest, of exactly how isolated they were becoming, of just how far away help would be if something went wrong in this old place.
