Department 19, The Rising, and Battle Lines

by Will Hill

  Frankenstein looked down at Jamie, and the teenager was shocked to see tears pooling in the corners of the monster’s eyes.

  “I don’t feel very safe,” he replied. “I really don’t. If he made a deal with Alexandru, what happened yesterday?”

  Admiral Seward answered him.

  “I think we can assume that Alexandru is no longer honouring it.”

  “But in the tree. The night he died there were—”

  Seward slammed his hand down on the desktop, and everyone jumped.

  “Enough!” shouted the Director. “That’s enough. Documents were found, documents in which Julian very eloquently, and at great length, described his hatred for the founders, for the way he believed his family, your family, had been treated over the years. He betrayed us, and good men died, men who deserved better. So you can see why not everyone in this base is pleased to see you, and why finding your mother is not a high priority.”

  A thick red fog descended over Jamie’s vision, and he was up and out of his chair so quickly that Frankenstein didn’t have time to react. He flew across the room and lunged over the wide desk. The Director shoved his chair backwards and Jamie’s fingers gripped empty air where Seward’s neck had been. Then he was pressed flat to the desktop as Frankenstein tackled him from behind, wrapping his arms tight against his sides. He was hauled upright and stared with blazing hatred into the beetroot face of Admiral Seward, who returned his gaze with one of utter fury.

  “How dare you?” roared the Director. “You little brat, how dare you?”

  “My mother did nothing!” yelled Jamie. “She didn’t even know who my father really was, you said so yourself. And you would just let her die? Then let me die too, trying to help her!”

  “I can’t do that!” Seward shouted. “Much as I might like to at this moment.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because, you angry little child, you are a Carpenter, and no matter how much your father may have done to blacken that name, you are still a descendant and it is still my duty to keep you safe, even from yourself!”

  Jamie slumped in Frankenstein’s bear hug. His head was spinning.

  It can’t be true. I won’t believe it. I won’t. He was my dad. I can’t believe it.

  “What would you do?” continued Admiral Seward. “How would you get your mother back? You have no weapons, no training, and no plan. Did the vampire tell you where they have taken her?”

  Jamie shook his lowered head. Frankenstein cautiously loosened his grip on the boy and he stood unsteadily in front of the desk.

  “No,” he said. “She says she doesn’t know.”

  The Admiral snorted. “Of course she knows,” he replied. “She’s just not telling you. Well, we can make her. Ten minutes, at the most.”

  “I don’t think so. She doesn’t know where they were going. I believe her. I don’t see why she would be loyal to Alexandru after what he did to her.”

  “So she’s useless then?”

  “She says she can take us to someone who will know where they’ve gone.”

  Seward laughed. “What a surprise. Well, she can forget about that. There’s not a chance in hell I’m letting her leave this base.”

  “We could restrict her, sir,” said Frankenstein. “Put a limiter belt on her.”

  “Out of the question,” snapped Seward. “I will not devote the resources of this organisation to a wild goose chase. I have not even given you permission to look for Marie yet.”

  “I’m going to find my mother,” said Jamie, in a voice edged with steel. “With or without your help.”

  Admiral Seward looked at him.

  “You will find it very difficult to find anyone if I decide to have you confined to base.” He smiled at Jamie, a thin line with no humour in it. “For your own safety, of course. One of the oldest and most powerful vampires in the world is looking for you. It wouldn’t even be a lie.”

  “I will look after him,” said Frankenstein, softly.

  “You are a member of this organisation and you will do as you are ordered,” said Admiral Seward, sharply.

  “In which case,” replied Frankenstein. “I resign.”

  Jamie gasped, and Seward’s eyes bulged in his head.

  “You what?” the Director asked.

  “I resign. I swore an oath that I would protect the Carpenter family. If Blacklight prevents me from doing that, then I can no longer be a part of it.”

  Admiral Seward fell silent. He laced his fingers together and lowered his head. Jamie and Frankenstein stood in front of his desk, waiting. Eventually, he looked up at them. The anger on his face was plain to see, but when he spoke his voice was level. Jamie suspected it was taking him a great deal of self-control.

  “Very well,” he said. “You, both of you, may search for Marie Carpenter, under Department 19 jurisdiction. Mr Carpenter, you will be temporarily seconded to the Department. You are not a Blacklight Operator. Do I need to say that again?”

  “No,” replied Jamie. “Good. You may not prevail upon this organisation for resources beyond the minimum, and the vampire does not leave this base. I will not have her destroyed, in case she decides to become more cooperative, but that is the absolute limit of my generosity on the matter. Is that clear?”

  “Yes sir.”

  “Men?” asked Frankenstein.

  “You may requisition a driver, you may apply for air transport as the circumstances require, and you may enlist two men at any one time. Only if they are not required for other duties, and only if they agree to assist you once in full possession of the facts. I will not order anyone to help you, for reasons I hope are obvious.”

  “Thank you, sir,” said Jamie.

  “All right,” said Seward. “Victor, take Mr Carpenter to the Playground and put him through twenty-four hours of basic training.”

  Jamie opened his mouth to protest, but Seward cut him off.

  “Non-negotiable. God knows it will probably do you little good, but it may help me sleep a little easier if the first vampire you come across pulls your throat out.”

  “Thank you, sir,” said Frankenstein. He placed an arm around Jamie and turned him gently away from the desk. As they swung open the heavy metal door, Admiral Seward spoke again.

  “Find her,” he said. “Your family has enough blood on its hands. It doesn’t need any more.”

  Jamie turned back to face the Director.

  “I will, sir,” he said, and the resolve in his own voice surprised him. “I will.”

  Chapter 15

  THE SCHOOL OF HARD KNOCKS

  Jamie Carpenter stared down at the blue mat beneath him. Blood was dripping in a steady stream from his torn bottom lip and pooling on the shiny fabric, mingling with the sweat that was streaming from his head in a soft, salty rain.

  “Get up.”

  The voice had kindness in it, but absolutely no pity, so Jamie raised his head and forced himself up on to trembling legs. In front of him stood a man in a grey tracksuit who was almost as wide as he was tall, peering down at him with small eyes set into a head the size and shape of a bowling ball. Half-moons of sweat were visible under the man’s arms, but he was breathing easily and looking at Jamie in the playful way a lion looks at a wounded wildebeest.

  The man lunged, covering the gap between them in a fraction of a second. Jamie was expecting it, but he was tired, so tired, and all he was able to do was throw his arms up in an exhausted attempt at self-defence. The man slammed his fists down on Jamie’s forearms, sending excruciating pain arrowing up Jamie’s limbs, reached forward with his big, scarred hands, twisted his head sharply to the left, and lunged towards Jamie’s neck.

  The man stopped a centimetre away from the exposed skin of his throat. Jamie stared blankly up at the ceiling of the huge circular room he had spent the last eighteen hours in. He was aware of the man in the tracksuit releasing his head, stepping back and saying something, but it seemed to be happening a long way away.

  A hand shot
out, quick as a snake, and crashed into the side of his head. He snapped out of his daze and gripped the place he had been struck, from where a dull red pain was spreading rapidly.

  “Are you listening now?” the man asked.

  Jamie stared at him with a look of utter hatred, and told him that he was.

  “Good. Be glad you still can. Because if I was a vamp you’d be dead.”

  The man sighed.

  “Take a minute, then come through and get some breakfast,” he said, and walked across the room. When he reached one of the doors that lined the curved wall, he turned back to Jamie and spoke again.

  “You need to concentrate,” he said. “Think about your mother.”

  Frankenstein had led him straight from Admiral Seward’s quarters to one of the nondescript metal lifts. The huge man had said nothing as they had walked, but Jamie didn’t think he was angry with him, not exactly. Even after Jamie had lunged for the Director he had still threatened to abandon his career with Department 19 if Seward had refused to permit a search for Jamie’s mother. And he was sure that even just making the threat had been a much bigger deal than Frankenstein had shown. Seward’s love of this place, his pride in its accomplishments and history, were clear for all to see, but Jamie believed that beneath the glacial grey-green surface of the monster’s face the same feelings burned just as strongly. Jamie was glad that the Admiral had not called Frankenstein’s bluff; he would not have wanted to be responsible for his guardian making good on his threat.

  They had travelled down to Level G and through a series of corridors until they reached an office with a glass door. On it was stencilled PROFESSOR A. E. HARRIS, and Frankenstein had knocked loudly on the letters. The door had been opened by a greying man in his late forties. His hair was swept back from his temples in silver-streaked waves and he wore a prodigious moustache, an unkempt hedge of grey and black above a dark suit, a blue shirt and a lemon-yellow tie; he looked like the slightly eccentric vice-president of a brokerage house.

  He nodded familiarly at Frankenstein, then looked Jamie up and down, mild disdain on his face. Jamie, whose temper was not yet wholly under control after the things Admiral Seward had said about his dad, was about to say something to the Professor when Frankenstein spoke first.

  “Admiral Seward—”

  “Just spoke to me,” interrupted Professor Harris. “He told me I am to oversee twenty-four hours of training for this boy. I told him what I’ll tell you now; I fail to see what I am expected to do in such a short amount of time.”

  “As much as you can,” Frankenstein replied sharply, and the Professor twitched, ever so slightly.

  He’s scared of him. Good. Let’s see if you call me boy again.

  Professor Harris looked as though he wanted to say something, but he cast a quick look at Frankenstein and clearly thought better of it. Instead he sighed extravagantly, pushed his office door wide and motioned Jamie inside.

  The office was small and looked as if it had been transplanted from a university history department. Every available surface was covered in books, journals and hand-written notebooks. A battered wooden desk stood in one corner, disappearing under sheaves of papers and teetering skyscrapers of books. A New History Of The Salem Witch Trials was at the summit; beneath it were volumes about the Dark Ages, the Renaissance, World War One and dozens of other topics.

  “Don’t touch anything,” warned Professor Harris. “Just follow me.”

  He walked carefully between the piles of books and papers, pushed open a door that Jamie hadn’t even noticed, and beckoned to him. Jamie followed the Professor’s path, taking moderate care not to knock anything over, part of him hoping he would just to see the man’s reaction, and stepped through the door.

  Beyond it lay a small classroom. Three rows of plastic and metal chairs stood in front of a pull-down white screen and a blond wood lectern. A projector hung from the ceiling and a low shelf at the rear of the room was covered in neat piles of notebooks, pencils and pens. Professor Harris walked briskly to the front of the room and took a remote control from the top of the lectern.

  “Get some paper and a pen and sit down,” he said, as he adjusted the screen. Jamie did as he was told while Harris walked back to the door. The Professor flicked off the lights, plunging the classroom into darkness, then pointed the remote at the projector and clicked a button.

  “Watch, concentrate, try to understand,” said Harris, then stepped out of the room, slamming the door behind him. The screen flickered into life, and Jamie settled into one of the chairs.

  An hour later the screen returned to white and Jamie flopped back in his seat. He could not remember ever having felt so excited; his stomach was churning like he had just ridden a roller coaster, his arms and spine were tingling, and his heart was pounding at what felt like double its normal rate.

  The first film that had played had been called The Foundation and History of Department 19. It looked to Jamie like every dull Channel 4 documentary his mother had made him watch on Sunday evenings when he was growing up, made even worse by the fact that the voice narrating over the film was clearly that of Professor Harris. So when the Professor began the film by speaking about Dracula, Jamie found his concentration wandering.

  The idea of Dracula was just too ingrained in his consciousness, too deeply linked to Christopher Lee and tuxedos and red-lined capes. And so, as Professor Harris retold the familiar story, he found himself doodling in one of the notebooks. But when the story shifted back to London and Harris began to describe something called the Lyceum Incident, Jamie glanced up at the screen, and froze. Flickering on the wide canvas was a sepia photo from the turn of the century, a photo of a man he recognised instantly, even though he had never seen him before. When the Professor’s voice confirmed that this was his great-grandfather, Henry Carpenter, he pushed the notebook aside and gave the screen his undivided attention.

  For the next twenty minutes he was rapt, and by the time the credits rolled on the film it was abundantly clear to him why Admiral Seward spoke about Blacklight with such obvious pride. Jamie was astonished by the things that the men and women of Department 19 had done over the last hundred years, by their bravery and resourcefulness, by the horrors and dangers they had faced.

  He listened, barely breathing, as Professor Harris described Quincey Harker’s mission into the village of Passchendaele, had felt like cheering when the courageous captain had returned from the front in 1918 and taken over as Director of the Department. A lump had risen in his throat when Stephen Holmwood, perhaps the finest Blacklight Operator of them all, was taken long before his time, and he had found his chest inadvertently swelling with pride every time one of his ancestors played a role in the event that was being described, most notably a mission his grandfather John had undertaken at the very end of 1928. The description of the mission was frustratingly light on detail, as the film attempted to cover more than a century of Blacklight history in just less than half an hour, but it appeared to have been significant, and Jamie resolved to ask Frankenstein if he knew anything about it.

  The second film, again narrated in Professor Harris’s dry, slightly pompous tones, was called The History and Biology of the Vampire. Medical diagrams filled the screen as the Professor theorised that the vampiric condition was passed from one person to another via saliva, usually in the act of biting, how the available evidence suggested that the condition accelerated the infected person’s metabolism and heart rate to incredible levels, stimulated a dormant area of the brain the Professor referred to as the V gland, which caused the incredible strength and agility that most vampires demonstrated, and how a constant supply of fresh blood was required to maintain this elevated state. The film stated in blunt terms that vampires were neither dead, nor undead, nor demonic, but a form of mutation: they were, in the truest sense of the phrase, supernatural.

  Jamie, remembering the hopeless, pitiless terror of falling, utterly lost, into Larissa’s crimson eyes, remembering the way Alex
andru had thundered into the night sky after Frankenstein had confronted him, was not entirely convinced; he believed he had encountered evil, had been exposed to something that was far from human.

  The screen cut to white as the second film reached its end and Jamie heard the classroom door open. Professor Harris flicked on the lights, strode to the lectern at the front of the room and looked impatiently at Jamie.

  “Any questions?” he asked. “No? Good, then let’s get on. I’m sure Terry is itching to get his hands on you.”

  For almost an hour the Professor quizzed Jamie on what he had just been shown, on the strengths and weaknesses of vampires, on the various ways in which they might be killed. He laughed when Jamie slyly suggested garlic and holy water, and struggled to keep his temper when asked in all seriousness whether a crucifix would work. With the final question answered to the Professor’s grudging satisfaction, Harris raised the screen, revealing a door that he pushed open. He instructed Jamie to follow the corridor and go through the door at the end.

  Jamie walked into a huge circular room, lit from all sides by strips of fluorescent light. A series of long wooden benches split the room in half; the floor in front of him was covered by a large blue mat. At the other end of the room was a raised platform facing a curved screen. He was wondering what it was for when a voice spoke from behind him, and he turned.

  The source of the voice was a squat, wide man, his arms and shoulders rippling with muscles beneath a grey tracksuit top. His head was closely shaven and his face wore a calm, inquisitive expression.

  “Mr Carpenter?” he asked, and Jamie nodded. “My name is Terry. Welcome to the Playground.”

  He crossed the space between them so quickly that Jamie had no time to prepare himself. The instructor grabbed his head and lunged his mouth towards the teenager’s neck. Jamie dangled in the man’s grip, taken completely by surprise, and when the pressure was released he fell to the floor, hard.