Department 19: Zero Hour

by Will Hill

  He swallowed down a deep yawn of exhaustion. The incident with the snake had left him drained; the adrenaline that had flooded his system as he stared at the reptile’s black eyes had long since worn off, and evening was drawing in. The constant gloom was deepening into a darkness that would soon be absolute, and although it was currently going unsaid, he was sure his squad mates were far from pleased at the prospect of making camp among the trees.

  The squad had gradually spaced out as they continued their seemingly endless march; there were now a hundred metres or so between Petrov on point and Jamie at the rear. As a result, the Russian’s voice sounded small and distant when he called for them to stop.

  “All stop,” relayed Tim Albertsson. He was currently third in line, behind Engel and ahead of Van Orel. “What is it, Petrov?”

  “You will want to see this,” said the Russian.

  “What is it?” repeated Tim.

  “I do not know,” said Petrov.

  Great, thought Jamie, as he jogged up to where the SPC Operator was standing. What today has really lacked is something weird and inexplicable.

  He joined his squad mates as they gathered round Petrov. Larissa had floated to the ground and was looking at the Russian with obvious impatience, her eyes flickering red.

  “So?” said Albertsson. “What’s going on?”

  They were standing in a small clearing, no more than five metres in diameter. A huge tree, its trunk as wide as a car, stood at its northern edge, and the floor was covered by the tangle of shrubs and bushes that made travelling through the forest such hard going.

  Petrov looked at Albertsson, then raised his foot and brought it down on the ground, hard. A loud bang echoed through the trees as his boot connected with something solid, making Jamie jump.

  “What the hell?” asked Van Orel.

  Petrov shrugged. “Wood.”

  “Get some light in here,” said Albertsson, drawing his torch from his belt. Jamie and the rest of the squad followed suit as Petrov stepped aside. The torch beams revealed a worn patch of grass, through which the outlines of wooden boards could be clearly seen. “Find the edges,” said their squad leader, spreading his hands through the grass.

  Jamie crouched down and ran his hands over the ground. He could feel the smoothness of the wood beneath his gloved fingers; it felt strange in this overgrown place. He found an edge and began to rip at the foliage, exposing a straight line in the dirt.

  “Here,” he said.

  Van Orel quickly found a corner, half buried by a low bush sprouting between his feet. Engel had found the opposite one, and was brushing torn grass away from it as Albertsson and Petrov worked an edge. Larissa cleared the final corner, her eyes glowing in the last of the fading light.

  “OK,” said Engel, as the shape was revealed.

  It was a wooden square, two metres long on each side. Moss and grass covered most of its surface, and the wood that was visible was stained dark by years of dirt; it looked as though it had been lying there for a great many years.

  Jamie got to his feet and stepped back. His squad mates did likewise, their eyes trained on the strange discovery. Eventually, it was Van Orel who said what they were all thinking.

  “What’s underneath it?”

  Larissa leant down and took hold of one of the edges with a gloved hand. She lifted it with no discernible effort, sending up clouds of dirt and dust as the wood separated from the forest floor, creaking and screaming as it came loose. It was huge, a solid block almost fifteen centimetres thick, but Larissa handled it like a feather. She raised it to shoulder height with one hand, in what Jamie was sure was a deliberate demonstration of her supernatural strength, then tossed it aside. It crashed to the floor, and lay still.

  The squad stepped forward. A pitch-black hole stared up at them, its edges square and neat.

  “Lieutenant Kinley,” said Tim Albertsson, his gaze fixed on the empty space. “How would you feel about finding out how deep this goes?”

  Larissa nodded, stepped effortlessly into the air, pirouetted, and disappeared into the hole.

  “There’s a floor,” she shouted, instantly. “And a tunnel heading north. Wooden boards. Five metres down.”

  “Is there a ladder?” asked Albertsson.

  “No,” said Larissa. “You’ll have to rope down. I’m going to see where this goes.”

  “Stay where you are,” shouted Albertsson. “Is that clear?”

  Silence.

  “Yes, sir,” said Larissa, eventually, her voice dripping with sarcastic obedience. “Perfectly clear, sir.”

  Albertsson grinned, then turned to the rest of his squad. “Petrov,” he said. “Fix a rope. You, Engel, Van Orel, you’re coming down with me. Carpenter, you’re staying up here.”

  Jamie frowned. “Are you serious?” he said.

  Albertsson squared up to him. “I’d have thought that was obvious, Lieutenant. Did you think I was joking?”

  “You don’t want to know what I think,” said Jamie, his eyes locked on the American, familiar angry heat spilling into his stomach.

  Albertsson smiled. “You’re right,” he said. “I genuinely couldn’t care less. Someone has to stay up here and keep watch while the rest of us are underground. I’ve chosen you to be that person. Are you refusing a direct order?”

  Jamie stared at him, fighting the overwhelming urge to sink his thumbs into the Special Operator’s windpipe. “No,” he growled. “Sir.”

  “Good,” said Albertsson. His smile widened, as though they were suddenly the best of friends. “I’m so glad. Thank you.”

  “Rope is ready,” said Petrov.

  Jamie looked over at him. The Russian Operator was staring at Tim Albertsson with what appeared to be his usual neutral expression, but Jamie could see the tiniest downward curl at the corners of the man’s mouth.

  Looks like I’m not the only one who can see that you’re a dick, Tim.

  “All right,” said Albertsson. “Van Orel, you go first. Engel, second, I’ll follow you. Petrov, you bring up the rear. And if anything happens up here, don’t rely on comms, Carpenter. You shout your head off, OK?”

  Jamie nodded, then watched as his squad mates lowered themselves one by one into the hole and disappeared. He stared at the black square for a long moment, trying to work out whether he wanted to burst into tears at the petty, frustrating unfairness of Tim’s behaviour or throw his head back and let the rage that was bubbling inside him out in a primal scream.

  Or throw a grenade down there after them, he thought, then pushed the idea away, disgusted at himself for even having allowed it to cross his mind.

  Larissa watched her squad mates descend the rope hand over hand, wrestling with the urge to break Tim Albertsson’s neck as soon as his feet touched the wooden floor of the tunnel.

  She had heard the conversation between him and Jamie, heard Tim single out her boyfriend to be left behind, and she could feel her vampire side raging with the desire to commit violence; she took a series of slow, deep breaths as Van Orel landed with a thud, followed by the rest of their squad.

  Larissa had obeyed Tim’s instruction not to explore, but the immediate surroundings were already clear to her supernatural eyes. The tunnel was long and straight, with wooden boards for a floor and packed earth for its walls and roof, held in place by thick struts and beams that looked like tree trunks. It reminded her of photos of the battlefields of World War One, where long tunnels had been dug to place mines beneath enemy positions.

  This could be just as old, she realised, as Petrov dropped on to the boards. At least. Maybe older.

  Her four squad mates drew their torches again and shone them down the tunnel towards her. The light was blinding and she narrowed her eyes, a guttural warning growl rising from her throat. The torch beams were instantly lowered, and as she waited for her vision to clear, her squad mates made their way towards her.

  “Shit,” said Van Orel. “Sorry, Larissa.”

  “It’s fine,”
she said. “This way.”

  Tim Albertsson stepped forward. “Larissa, you take point,” he said. “I want to know if there’s anything down here.”

  Larissa reached out, grabbed a handful of the American’s uniform, and pulled him close enough that she could feel the heat rising from the skin of his face.

  “You’re pathetic,” she whispered, her voice so low that only he could hear it.

  She released him, and flew away down the tunnel before he had time to respond. There was a moment’s silence, before heavy footsteps followed her.

  After a length of time that felt unknowable, but was likely no more than two or three minutes, Larissa saw something in the distance. The tunnel was perfectly straight, long and wide, built deep and solidly, and her vision was the only one of her supernatural senses that she still fully trusted. She could smell nothing but damp earth, and her head was fuller than ever with the incessant noise that had been plaguing her since they first set foot inside the forest.

  “Something up ahead,” she said.

  “Hostile?” asked Tim Albertsson.

  “I don’t think so,” said Larissa. “It looks like light. Electric light.”

  “Down here?” said Engel.

  “That’s what it looks like,” said Larissa.

  “Ready One,” said Albertsson.

  Larissa fought back the urge to laugh; given the target they had been sent to Romania to search for, permission to use force seemed somewhat redundant. Instead, she quickened her speed, flying steadily towards the distant glow. When she got within fifty metres of it, she saw that she had only been partly right. Bright white electric light was indeed radiating from a bulb hanging from the roof, but it was contained within something far stranger than she could have expected.

  Filling the height and width of the tunnel was a wall. Its lower half was made of bricks that had been painted white, its upper half of glass. In its centre was a metal door, which, were it not shut, would lead into a space Larissa and her squad mates could see through the panes of glass.

  It looked like a control room.

  Two large metal cabinets stood to one side, their shelves packed with server boards and panels that flashed relentlessly with red and blue lights. Opposite them, a simple desk contained a computer and two racks of complicated-looking machinery. The computer’s screen was dark, although an amber light glowed on its side.

  “This is crazy,” said Van Orel. “What the hell is this?”

  Larissa shook her head. “I don’t know,” she said.

  The room was roughly three metres wide. On its far wall, an identical door stood open, leading into a tunnel that appeared to be a continuation of the one they were standing in.

  “Can we get in?” asked Albertsson.

  “I can open the door,” said Larissa. “But whoever built this place is going to know as soon as I do. Look.” She pointed to two plastic boxes that sat in the upper corners of the room; red light blinked steadily from lenses at their centres.

  “Alarms,” said Petrov.

  “Alarms,” said Larissa. “The door is probably rigged too.”

  “This doesn’t make any sense,” said Albertsson, staring through the glass. “Who builds an IT office under the goddamn forest? And what the hell are those machines doing?”

  “I think the bigger question,” said Van Orel, pointing to the door on the other side of the room, “is where does that tunnel go?”

  “I don’t know,” repeated Larissa. “But I think we’d find the man we’re looking for at the end of it.”

  “The first victim?” said Engel. “You think he built this?”

  “Who else?” asked Larissa. “We know that nobody else comes here. And where we came down didn’t look much like an entrance to me, or at least not one that’s been used in the last fifty years. It looked like an exit. Or an escape route, more likely.”

  “Escape from what?” asked Albertsson.

  “How should I know?” said Larissa.

  “I would like to know what those machines are,” said Petrov.

  You and me both, thought Larissa. Although she had a strong suspicion, one that she wasn’t prepared to share with her squad mates.

  Not yet, at least.

  “All right,” said Albertsson. “If we can’t go through without alerting him to our presence, we head back.”

  “He’s already alerted to our presence,” said Larissa. “Obviously. You saw the dead animals, we all did. We should just go through.”

  “No,” said Albertsson. “We have no idea where that tunnel goes, or whether there are more of them. We’d be like rats in a maze. We’re going back to the surface.”

  Larissa looked at him. “But if we just—”

  “That’s an order,” said Tim Albertsson, his voice like ice.

  “Fine,” said Larissa. “Sir.”

  Jamie watched Van Orel prod at their fire with a branch, and pulled his sleeping bag more tightly round his shoulders. It had been cold in the forest by day, the dense canopy preventing all but the occasional shaft of warming sunlight from reaching the ground.

  By night, it was absolutely freezing.

  He had listened with what he hoped had seemed like professional calm as his squad mates described what they had found in the tunnel, had looked with apparent interest at their photos of the strange white room and its unidentified machines, and listened to their theories about exactly what it might be. Inside, he had been burning with outrage. It felt like his worst days at school, in the months after his father had died; as if he was on the edge of everything, that things were happening, but he wasn’t allowed to be a part of them.

  Larissa was clearly desperate to talk to him alone, most likely to express her solidarity over Tim’s blatantly personal decision to leave him outside the entrance to the tunnel, but the opportunity had so far failed to present itself. The DARKWOODS squad had regrouped and struck out along what they hoped was the same path taken by the underground tunnel; Tim was working on Larissa’s assumption that there was something at the other end, even if none of them knew what it might be.

  But night had fallen, bringing with it a darkness that was quickly total, and they had walked for barely fifteen minutes before Tim Albertsson ordered them to stop and make camp. They had pitched their shelter, built a fire that produced little warmth, and eaten; now they were resting, the exertions of the day clinging heavily to their bones and muscles, and talking in the awkward way of groups of people who feel they ought to get to know one another.

  “Your toughest operation,” said Engel. “The very worst you’ve been on.”

  “Easy,” said Van Orel.

  “Really?” asked Petrov. “For me it is not easy.”

  “Vamps attacked a tourist shark boat called the Quint in False Bay,” said Van Orel. “Just off the coast of Cape Town. The boat’s operator called the coastguard when it didn’t come back in and they couldn’t hail it, and we intercepted a message from another boat saying they’d seen the Quint adrift as the sun went down. Blood in the water, two figures on the deck, one of them seemed to have glowing eyes. You know the drill.”

  The members of the squad nodded in unison; they knew it all too well.

  “So my squad got the op,” continued Van Orel. “The coastguard took us out to the Quint, which looked deserted. We boarded her, and in the cabin we found these two vamps in a blood coma. Have you ever seen that? Where a vamp has drunk so much that it’s overwhelmed them? It looks like an overdose. Anyway. We found the captain dead in the cabin next to them, so we staked the vamps and searched the rest of the boat. No sign of anyone. Then I saw this little camcorder attached to the TV, so I pressed PLAY.”

  Van Orel looked round at his squad mates, who were hanging on his every word.

  “They’d been feeding on the tourists, bleeding them, then throwing them over the side for the sharks. You’ve never seen anything like it, or at least I hope you haven’t. The blood in the water, the froth, the Great Whites breaching and spi
nning and biting. There had been twelve people on board the Quint that day, not counting the captain. All were gone.”

  “Jesus,” said Larissa, her voice low.

  Van Orel nodded. “I’ve had harder operations, much harder. I mean, when it came down to it, this was two vamps who were so out of it they barely knew we were there. But it stays with me like none of the others. It was sport, nothing more. Twelve people murdered and used as shark bait for the sake of a home movie.”

  “Scheisse,” said Engel, her voice barely more than a whisper. “What about you, Jamie?”

  He felt eyes settle on him; his short Blacklight career was already the stuff of legend. Only Tim Albertsson looked disinterested.

  “There are two,” he said. “I can’t choose between them. The first I ever went on, which wasn’t even actually an authorised operation. To get my mother back from Alexandru Rusmanov.”

  There was a series of nods; the story of how a teenage boy with barely any training destroyed the second-oldest vampire in the world had swept through the supernatural Departments like a hurricane.

  “The second was Paris,” he said. “Colonel Frankenstein was being held by an old vampire called Dante, who called himself the king of Paris, and I took a team to rescue him. Dante ran a theatre, a vampire theatre, where they tortured and murdered humans on stage every night for entertainment. We destroyed him and every other vamp in the place, and we got Frankenstein out, even after his lycanthropy took hold of him. I’m still not sure how we managed it, to be honest.”

  “Were you there, Larissa?” asked Van Orel.

  She shook her head. “No,” she said. “Not on that one.”

  Jamie watched her closely, searching her face for signs of anger. The decision not to take either her or Kate Randall to Paris with him had been one of the hardest he had ever had to make, and he had genuinely worried that it might represent the end of him and Larissa before whatever was between them even had a chance to get off the ground. And Larissa had been furious, although she had accepted his almost desperate desire not to see her in danger while he was trying to focus on rescuing Frankenstein.

  Accepted it, but not agreed with it. Not in the slightest.