Battle Lines

by Will Hill

  Beneath his suit, the director’s body was a horror of bruises, burns, and wounds: marks left by simple beatings, by lead pipes and plastic cables, and by pairs of metal clips attached to a car battery. As was appropriate for a man of his standing, Vlad had not inflicted any of this damage himself; instead, he had stood and watched Valeri and two of his servants as they worked, maintaining an air of detached professionalism as the torture was administered. But, beneath his veneer of disinterest, his mind raced with possibilities and his stomach churned with a longing so powerful it was almost physical: a desire to push the others aside, to spill blood and inflict pain with his own bare hands.

  Throughout it all, Seward had told them nothing beyond his name and his Blacklight identification number. Vlad was impressed by the man’s fortitude, though he knew full well there were things he could order done to his guest that he would have no chance of withstanding. But he was in no hurry; there would come a time when he would need to know everything Seward knew, in case there was something of which Valeri was unaware, but it could wait. His recuperation was progressing well, fueled by a constant stream of warm, running blood. He was now draining three or four human beings every day, each drop of their blood contributing to his gradual return to what he had once been. Valeri sent his servants out each night, and each morning they returned before dawn with victims taken from the surrounding towns and villages. Vlad had ordered them to make sure they spread their hunts far and wide; he had no interest in creating a panic or attracting unnecessary attention to this isolated corner of the world, not when he was so close to regaining the power he had once taken so recklessly for granted. He was not there yet, not by any means, but he was getting closer with each passing day, with each swallowed mouthful of blood. And the exquisite reality of the matter was this: there was, in truth, almost nothing Henry Seward could tell him that he didn’t already know.

  The operational frequencies of the various Departments, the access codes to their bases and computer systems, these were things that might once have been extremely useful to Vlad and Valeri. However, both vampires knew full well that they would all have been changed the minute Henry Seward was taken, rendering his knowledge of them useless.

  He must know that, too, thought Dracula, his gaze locked on his guest. Surely he must. Yet he refuses to tell us, regardless. Admirable.

  Until his recovery was complete and he was ready to take direct action, Vlad was content to let Seward believe he was successfully resisting. When the time came, Seward would tell him everything, whether he wanted to or not, at which point Vlad would kill whatever was left of the man and send his head to Blacklight on a spike. But for now, he was content to play Seward’s game. They would continue attempting to get the director to give up the information he didn’t want to reveal, using what he would allow Seward to believe were his most persuasive methods, and his guest would continue to refuse. It afforded Seward a measure of dignity, and it helped to pierce the boredom that Vlad had felt so keenly since he had been reborn, boredom that was slowly beginning to abate as the recovery of his mind and body gathered pace. It also afforded him an agreeable dinner companion, sparing him the stoic silence of Valeri’s company or the embarrassment of dining alone.

  At the other end of the table, the servant had finished refilling Seward’s glass. Vlad raised his own and waited until his guest did likewise.

  “Noroc,” said the ancient vampire.

  * * *

  “Noroc,” replied Henry Seward. He had spoken the Romanian toast many times over the last month, evening after evening, glass after glass; it was now almost second nature.

  He drained half his wine, looking forward to the numbing effect of the alcohol, feeling his arm tremble as he raised the glass to his lips. It was one of a number of shakes and tremors that had appeared over the last month, one result of the tortures inflicted upon him every night. Another was his inability to sleep, even when the torment was over: His body was always wracked with pain and thrumming with adrenaline, and when sleep did eventually come, it was fitful, full of bad dreams and echoed agony.

  Seward was exhausted, in constant pain, and knew his body was beginning to fail him. It wasn’t the result of any one particular torture, but the cumulative effect of them all. He had begun to cough up blood in the mornings and see spots of red in the toilet bowl after he urinated. He coughed steadily, and struggled for breath after climbing only a handful of stairs. It was now clear that he didn’t have long to live, as he knew very well that Dracula was never going to let him leave this place; he had come to terms with the realization that he would never see his family and friends again. He also knew, although he didn’t think Dracula realized that he did, that he was resisting telling them information that was worthless.

  He knew that Dracula believed he was playing with him, letting him be brave and resilient while waiting for the right moment to prize from his head whatever Seward was hiding. But the ancient vampire was wrong: He was holding no secrets, no information that would be of use to them. When the monster unleashed whatever agonies he was holding back, he would tell him everything. When the vampire realized that none of it was useful, Seward would spit blood in his face before he died. In the meantime, he would grit his teeth and take what they gave him and join his captor in this bizarre facsimile of normality each evening, as though they were two old school friends having dinner at their club.

  “What are we having?” he asked, glancing at the hovering vampire servants.

  “Wood pigeon, I believe,” replied Dracula. “Is that agreeable to you?”

  “I’m sure it will be,” replied Seward. The food and wine he had eaten and drunk since he had been taken by Valeri, dragged kicking and screaming into the sky as men and women he had once commanded fought for their lives beneath him, had been uniformly excellent. He supposed he should not be surprised: Dracula had been a prince when he was a man, then a Transylvanian count as a vampire, and had been used to the very best of everything throughout both of his lives.

  The man and the vampire sat in silence as the servants suddenly burst into action, delivering silver trays to the table and placing them before the two diners. The lids were withdrawn to reveal a delicate foie gras parfait and homemade brioche that made Seward’s mouth water despite the steady throbs of pain that coursed through his body. He attacked the food, aware of Dracula’s faintly reproachful expression, and demolished the plate within a minute. He sat back in his chair, feeling the energy being released by the food in his stomach and the endorphins radiating out from his pituitary gland.

  Eating emboldened him. He had allowed the previous dinners to be filled with small talk, with mindless chatter about the modern world, with stories and tales of their pasts—nothing that had any edge, nothing that might cause offense. It was time for that to change.

  “You’re still weak,” he said.

  Dracula tilted his head slightly to one side. “I beg your pardon?”

  “It was a straightforward statement. You’re still weak. Your powers have not fully returned to you.”

  “What makes you say so?”

  Seward looked around the room. “The evidence of my own eyes,” he said. “Why else would you be hiding here, surrounded by servants to protect you?”

  Dracula frowned. “To protect me?” he said. “They are honored that I permit them to serve me. It is the highlight of their tiny lives.”

  Seward smiled. “I’m sure that’s what you tell yourself. It must be hard for you to admit that even the weakest vampire in this building could kill you with one hand if they chose to.”

  Dark red started to bubble in the corners of the first vampire’s eyes, and Seward felt a surge of satisfaction in his chest. Then the ancient eyes cleared and Dracula began to laugh, an awful sound that started small, but went on and on, getting louder and louder.

  “Wonderful,” he said, as his laughter finally stopped. “I understand no
w. You hoped to annoy me with your comment, yes? You believed that I would consider it impertinent. I am extremely sorry to have disappointed you, my dear admiral.”

  Seward swallowed hard. “They’ll find you,” he said, willing his words to be true. “Blacklight will find you and stop you. Your rise will fail.”

  “You are like a child,” said Dracula, his voice warm and friendly. “You understand nothing. My rise has already begun, my dear admiral. I am out there in the darkness, as we speak. I am everywhere. I am legion.”

  “What are you talking about?” asked Seward, cold fingers working their way up his spine.

  Dracula shook his head. “You will find out soon enough,” he said.

  The servants scuttled back into the room, removing the plates and placing new cutlery before the vampire and his guest. Then they were gone, and a second team delivered new plates of food.

  Dracula lifted the silver lid from the plate before him and favored Seward with a wide, contended smile.

  “As I thought,” he said. “Wood pigeon. Bon appétit.”

  7

  SINK OR SWIM

  So where do we start?” asked Patrick Williams.

  “Intelligence is putting together probable location lists,” replied Holmwood. “We’ve had every available satellite working outward from the hospital since early this morning, and we’ve tracked over a hundred heat blooms. They’re where we start.”

  “Okay,” said Dominique Saint-Jacques. “Let’s get going.”

  Holmwood nodded. “I’m sending squads out with lists of five likely target locations. I’m authorizing daylight operations, so destroy them before the sun goes down, if you can. All usual containment protocols remain in place, and I want it made clear to all operators that these targets are significantly more dangerous than the vampires they usually encounter. I’m putting in place a hard window of eight hours, after which you come home. I don’t care whether you’ve destroyed all five of your targets, or two of them, or none of them. Eight hours, then return to base. Having what’s left of this Department exhausted and careless is not an option. Clear?”

  “Clear, sir,” replied Dominique.

  “Excellent. I’m officially activating all operational squads that include rookies until this threat has been eliminated, then they go back to training. Look after them out there and bring them back safe. Clear?”

  “Yes, sir,” chorused the Zero Hour Task Force.

  “Good. Dismissed.”

  * * *

  Jamie stepped out of the elevator and strode along the central corridor of Level B.

  Search and destroy, he thought. Just like that. Search and destroy three hundred superpowerful vampires. No problem at all.

  He had left the Ops Room with his stomach churning uneasily. There was no doubt in his mind that the mass escapes of the previous night had been orchestrated by Dracula, or at the very least by Valeri, and that they had the potential to cause widespread carnage. There was a positive aspect to the move: Such a large action, designed so clearly to occupy Department 19 and its counterparts around the world for a significant amount of time, strongly suggested that Dracula was not far in advance of their Zero Hour timeline, if at all. But that was going to be of little comfort to the men and women who were by now already heading out to hunt down the escapee vampires.

  Jamie pulled the console from his belt and typed as he walked.

  M-3/OP_EXT_L1/LIVEBRIEFING/BR4/ASAP

  He pressed SEND and knew that, far below him, in the circular confines of the Playground, the consoles belonging to John Morton and Lizzy Ellison would now be vibrating into life. He wondered how long it would take them to make their way up to Briefing Room 4 on Level 0, and guessed at ten minutes.

  It’ll probably take them five minutes to find the right room, he thought, smiling to himself. It used to for me.

  Jamie reached his quarters, pressed his ID against the keypad set into the wall, and pushed his door open when the red light turned green. He flopped down on his bed, grateful for a few minutes’ rest. Given the situation that Cal Holmwood had described, he doubted there were going to be many similar opportunities in the next few days. Not that there ever really were; life inside Department 19 was physically and mentally exhausting, a result of the high stakes that were constantly in play. If Jamie and his colleagues failed to do their jobs well, people died; it was as simple as that. Every operator understood this and found a way to process it and carry on, but it was not always easy.

  Jamie felt his eyes begin to close, even though he had woken up only three hours earlier, to find a box in the middle of his console’s screen telling him that he had a message waiting from Larissa. He had pressed OPEN and read the lines of text.

  Hey! Hope you’re okay? Will be awake for the next hour or so, if you’re around and fancy giving me a call . . . x

  Jamie had checked the time stamp on the message. It had arrived at seven thirty A.M., when he had apparently been so soundly asleep that he hadn’t even heard it beep. He had quickly done the time-zone math in his head.

  Half past eleven in Nevada. Late.

  He had considered calling her anyway—he didn’t think she would be too annoyed if he woke her up—but had decided to let her sleep. Now, as he contemplated the scale and horror of what he had just been told in the Ops Room, he wished he had made the call; it would have been good to hear a genuinely friendly voice. For a second, he considered walking around and knocking on the door to the quarters next to his own, the quarters occupied, technically at least, by one of his best friends, but knew it would be a waste of time.

  Matt Browning was almost never in his room these days, unless he was asleep. Jamie knew he had turned down the chance to move into one of the larger quarters inside the Lazarus security perimeter, and while he admired the reasoning behind his friend’s refusal, a spirited attempt to avoid devoting his every waking moment to his work, he thought it had, in fact, been largely pointless. Matt’s life now revolved entirely around the Lazarus Project, and that was that. Jamie missed his friend, but wasn’t annoyed with him—how could he be, when what Matt had devoted himself to was arguably the most important project being carried out in the whole of Blacklight? However, he did think he should try to press Matt into having a drink in the officers’ mess, or at least into sharing a table at lunch; it had been a while since they had talked for longer than a minute or two in a corridor, when both were on their way somewhere else.

  On the other hand, it had been barely seventy-two hours since he had talked to Larissa, but he still missed her terribly. They had spoken for almost an hour over a secure video connection, Jamie battered and bloodied by the operation he had just returned from, Larissa bright and smiling, eight hours behind him, her day just getting under way. The pleasure and excitement in her voice as she told him about Dreamland, the NS9 base, and the men and women who inhabited it, was bittersweet to his ears. He knew she had been furious with Holmwood for selecting her for the NS9 transfer, and he knew she missed him as much as he missed her, but she now had a levity about her that he both relished and feared.

  He was happy that she was happy—God knows she deserved it after what had happened to her over the last few years, and what had been done to her during the attack on the Loop, when she had been burned down to little more than bones. But he was also jealous of her temporary new life, away from the darkness that surrounded Blacklight, that seemed to follow him wherever he went, and jealous that she was meeting new people and experiencing new places, new things. And a tiny piece of him, the vicious, self-loathing part that had been birthed by his father’s death and nourished by years of bullying and loneliness, kept asking the same two questions, whispering them in the darkest recesses of his mind.

  What if she forgets about me? What if she doesn’t want to come back?

  He pushed such miserable thoughts aside and climbed off his bed. He p
ulled a bottle of water out of the small fridge beneath his desk and headed out into the corridor, pulling the door to his quarters closed behind him, trying to focus on nothing more than the task at hand.

  * * *

  Jamie logged in to the terminal at the front of Briefing Room 4 and found his squad’s target list waiting for him. He moved it to the wall screen behind him, and waited for the rest of his newly activated squad to arrive.

  They kept him waiting for less than two minutes. Morton and Ellison burst through the door, clad in their dark blue training uniforms, red-faced from what Jamie knew would have been several minutes of running along the curving corridors of Level 0 in search of the right room. They were caked in sweat and drying blood, but their faces wore identical expressions of determined enthusiasm.

  “Good to see you both,” said Jamie. “Get lost on the way up here?”

  Morton looked about to deny it, but Ellison opened her mouth first. “Yes, sir,” she said. “The corridors all look the same, sir.”

  “You’ll get used to it,” said Jamie, and smiled at his squad mates. “Trust me.”

  The two rookies nodded, clearly relieved.

  “Take a seat,” Jamie said, motioning toward the empty plastic chairs that surrounded the long table in the middle of the room. Morton and Ellison did as they were told as Jamie watched them, wondering if he had been so nervous and eager to please when he first arrived at the Loop.

  I don’t think I was, he thought. I didn’t give a damn about anything apart from my mom. I acted like I owned the place.