Department 19, The Rising, and Battle Lines

by Will Hill

  “We found him,” said Jamie. “We brought him home, but…”

  His voice trailed away.

  “What’s wrong?” asked Larissa.

  “It doesn’t matter,” said Jamie. “I’ll tell you later. Where’s Matt? Have you seen him?”

  “I haven’t,” said Larissa, her brow furrowing. “I haven’t seen Kate either. Not since all this started.”

  “I saw her,” said Jamie, and Larissa felt relief flood through her. “She’s on the landing area. She’s not hurt.”

  “Is she OK?”

  “No,” said Jamie, and dropped his eyes to the ground. “Not even close. But she’s safe.”

  “What happened to her?”

  “We have to find Matt,” said Jamie, as though he either hadn’t heard her, or couldn’t bear to answer her. “He might be hurt.”

  “Matt?” asked a voice from beside them. “The civilian boy? Is that who you’re looking for?”

  Jamie and Larissa turned to see a doctor in a white coat standing next to them. The front of the coat was smeared with blood, and his face was pale.

  “Have you seen him?” asked Jamie.

  The doctor nodded. “About twenty minutes ago,” he said. “Downstairs. He was with Professor Talbot, heading towards the lift.”

  “While the base was being attacked?” asked Jack.

  The doctor nodded.

  Larissa looked at Jamie, whose brow had furrowed into a frown.

  Why wouldn’t Talbot have tried to help up here? he thought. If the base fell, then it would have been the end of the Lazarus Project. Why didn’t he come and fight?

  “Let’s go,” said Larissa, and stepped in the air. She hung there for a second, then slumped back to the ground, her arms wrapped round herself. The doctor stepped forward, concern on his face, but she pushed him away. “I’m all right,” she said, angrily. “Jamie, go and find him. I’ll come after you as soon as I can.”

  “Are you sure you’re OK?” asked Jamie.

  “Just go,” said Larissa. “Right now.”

  Jamie looked at her, his face full of open, obvious love. She held his gaze for a long, pregnant moment, then he turned away and sprinted towards the open doors of the hangar. He was accelerating across the tarmac, when he heard a voice say his name, a voice he knew better than any in the world. He skidded to a halt, his heart lurching in his chest, and turned towards it.

  Standing in front of him, her hands clasped tightly together in front of her chest, was Marie Carpenter. She was wearing a T-shirt and a pair of pyjama bottoms, both of which were splattered with blood, and she was looking at her son with an expression of utter wonder on her face.

  “Mum?” said Jamie, his voice choking in his throat. “Mum, what are you—”

  He didn’t get the chance to finish the question. His mother closed the gap between them in a millisecond, and lifted him off the ground in a crushing hug. He wrapped his arms round her, felt her lower her face against his shoulder. He could barely breathe, so tightly was she holding him, but he managed to force himself to speak.

  “Are you OK?” he gasped. “Mum, are you hurt?”

  “I’m OK,” she replied, without lifting her head. “I’m OK. Oh, Jamie, I was so worried about you. Are you all right?”

  “I’m all right,” he managed. “Mum, you’re crushing me; you have to put me down.”

  Marie loosened her grip, and lowered him back to the tarmac. Her eyes were wide and brimming with tears, but he didn’t notice; he was staring at the thick splashes of crimson on his mother’s torso and legs.

  “Mum,” he said. “You’re bleeding, Mum. We have to get you to the infirmary.”

  “It’s not mine,” said Marie, her voice trembling. “The blood. It’s not mine.”

  Jamie raised his head and stared incredulously at his mother.

  “What do you mean?” he asked. “Mum, what are you doing out here?”

  Marie looked at her son. She had clasped her hands back together and was wringing them nervously, without realising it.

  “The vampire in the cells,” she said. “Valentin. He told me what was happening up here, and I told him I wanted to help, and he took me out of my cell and brought me with him. I was looking for you, Jamie, looking for you and Kate, and I couldn’t find you, and then I saw vampires hurting your friends, and I…”

  Her voice trailed off. She suddenly looked profoundly miserable, and Jamie felt his heart break. He reached out and took her gently by the shoulders.

  “Did you fight them?” he asked, softly. “Did you fight the vampires, Mum?”

  Marie nodded, slowly. Jamie felt tears rise in the corners of his eyes, and he stepped forward and hugged his mother tightly. Slowly, she raised her arms and placed them round him, as though she hadn’t been sure how he might respond.

  “People are saying that bombs went off,” she said, her voice shaking. “I was in one of the corridors when it happened. I think I was lucky.”

  That’s an understatement, thought Jamie.

  “I love you, Mum,” he whispered, fiercely. “Thank you.”

  Jamie gently pulled away from her, and after a moment’s resistance, she let him go. He looked at her with fiery pride burning on his face.

  “I have to go and find my friends,” he said. “They might be in trouble. But I’ll come and find you as soon as I’m done. OK?”

  “OK,” said Marie, a smile creeping on to her face. “Do you want me to come with you?”

  Jamie shook his head.

  “I have to do this myself,” he said.

  49

  THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS

  Jamie ran through the grey corridors of the Loop, his heart pounding with adrenaline. The enormity of what had happened on the wide-open grounds of the base above him kept threatening to burst into his mind, but he pushed it away each time.

  Can’t think about that now. Too big. Just find Matt, and then you can worry about everything else.

  He pressed the CALL button on the wall beside the lift, and kept pressing it until he heard the whirring of metal cables. The doors slid open and he stepped into the lift, pressed the button marked F and tried to catch his breath as he descended into the depths of the base.

  The lift slid smoothly to a halt, and he was moving before the doors had even fully opened, sliding out between the narrow gap, and sprinting along the corridor. Around him, the alarms continued to scream, but he barely heard them. His feet pounded the concrete floor as he approached the door that led into the Lazarus Project.

  Jamie skidded to a halt in front of it, and gripped the keypad on the wall.

  I hope this works, he thought, then keyed in Admiral Seward’s override code. For a long second nothing happened, and his heart sank. Then the red light on the panel turned green, and he heard the heavy locks begin to disengage.

  Come on. Come on.

  The door clunked open, and he shoved it aside and stepped into the wide room; he took one look around, and his heart froze in his chest.

  Scattered around the white floor, or slumped at their desks and counters, were the men and women of the Lazarus Project.

  They were all dead.

  Their eyes bulged from their heads, staring up at the ceiling with fear and terrible surprise. The stench in the room was appalling, from where the men and women’s bodies had betrayed them at the last; blood and body fluids ran across the floor, bright against the uniform white of the Lazarus Project nerve centre.

  On the table in the middle of the room, beside the hologram of the double helix which was still revolving slowly in the midst of the foulness that had erupted all around it, was a square metal box that was folded open. Inside it stood an aerosol canister, stamped with black lettering. Jamie stood, staring at the carnage that had befallen the doctors and scientists that had called this room home, and then panic burst through him, and he fumbled the gas mask from its pouch on his belt and fastened it over his nose and mouth.

  Too late, he thought, wildly. It�
�s too late if it hasn’t dispersed, whatever it is.

  Then a second thought occurred to him.

  If it killed them all this quickly, you’re going to know in the next minute or so.

  The realisation broke the paralysis that gripped him, and he ran to the centre of the room. With his gloved hands, he lifted the canister out of the box and read the lettering on the side.

  SARIN (CH3)2CHO]CH3P(O)F

  Nerve gas. Jesus, what happened down here?

  Jamie took a deep breath, and waited to see if he was going to die.

  If there were Sarin residue in the room, if he had ingested it, he would know when his nose began to run. After that, his chest would tighten, his pupils would constrict and he would begin to drool, before he lost control of his body, began to spasm and suffocated. The upside was that at high concentrations, such as would be caused by releasing it in an enclosed room, the whole process would take less than a minute. The downside was that, by all accounts, it was a horrendous, agonising way to die.

  He breathed slowly, in and out, in and out, his eyes glued to the digital watch on his wrist. The seconds ticked past sadistically slowly – 46, 47, 48, 49 – and Jamie held his breath as they crept towards one minute.

  …57, 58, 59, 60, 61, 62.

  Breath burst out of Jamie in a rush, and relief flooded through him.

  Thank God. Oh, thank God.

  He reached for the gas mask and was about to pull it free, then thought again, and left it in place.

  Christ only knows what else they had down here. Take no chances.

  Jamie pulled the MP5 from his belt, and crossed the wide room towards the computer banks. They were all dead; their screens were blank, and pressing the buttons on the keyboards provoked no response. He moved on to the gene sequencers, and found the same thing. The shelves on the opposite wall, which had been full of files and folders, were bare; Jamie glanced at them, then ran across the room to the decontamination portal.

  The heavy airlock door hissed open. Jamie pushed through it, ignoring the NBC suits hanging on the wall and the door that led to the sterilising showers, and waited impatiently at the second door. The first locked back into place, and he threw the gas mask aside as the light above the second door turned green. The robotic female voice warned him that he had not completed the decontamination procedure, but he ignored her; he keyed the Director’s code into the internal door, pushed it open and stepped into the inner sanctum of the Lazarus Project.

  He had never been through the double airlock that protected the secrets of Professor Talbot’s team. He glanced around as he stepped through the airlock, and felt horror rise in his chest as he fought back the urge to vomit.

  The second room of the Lazarus Project was nothing more than a cutting-edge torture chamber.

  In the middle of the long rectangular room stood a row of operating tables: silver frames, and thin white mattresses. Computers and medical monitoring equipment stood beside each bed, as did sleek silver video cameras on heavy tripods. The circular lenses were pointing at the beds, and Jamie felt a horror so huge it was almost physical as his brain contemplated, involuntarily, the possible contents of the cameras’ memory cards.

  Large circular drains sat in the floor beneath each of the operating stations; the drain covers, the floors, and in several cases the distant walls, were splattered with blood. A white curtain on a portable metal rail surrounded the last operating bed, the one furthest away from where Jamie was standing. He stared at it, unable to pretend that he couldn’t see the pale silhouette behind the white material.

  He walked slowly down the room, passing the operating beds one after the other. Out of the corners of his eyes, they teased him with their horrors.

  Jamie found his eye drawn to a silver tray as he passed the second bed; resting in the tray, in about a centimetre of thick, jellied blood, were a series of crimson-streaked implements, that only the most deranged of doctors would have believed belonged anywhere near a medical facility. A hacksaw gleamed under the fluorescent lights, its teeth coated in gore and tiny chips of white bone. Beside it lay a circular power saw, its cable running away to a socket on the trolley that held the monitoring equipment; it seemed to exude overkill, to exude viciousness.

  Jamie couldn’t help himself; he stopped and regarded the rest of the tray. Three scalpels, one of them bent almost to forty-five degrees, by what force Jamie attempted not to speculate about. A long-handled pair of separators, the kind that he had seen used on television to pry ribcages open. Clamps and pins, discarded towels and sheets of gauze, soaked through with blood.

  Jamie stared, frozen, unable to stop his imagination doing its worst. Then his paralysis broke; he turned away, gripped his knees and vomited into the drain beneath the bed.

  What the hell have they been doing down here? he thought, his mind racing as his stomach lurched and spasmed. Then cold, creeping horror spilled through him. Oh God, what happened to all the vampires I sent here? The ones I told were going to be safe?

  Jamie forced himself upright, and gripped the edge of the operating trolley to steady himself. When he pulled his hands away, thick smears of blood covered his skin, making his head swim. He rubbed his palms furiously on his black uniform, and breathed deeply, trying to prevent his teetering system from collapsing completely. As his vision slowly cleared, he brought his hands up before his face. The worst of the blood was gone.

  Unsteadily, he turned back towards the far end of the room, and began to slowly make his way towards the last trolley, the one wrapped in the sheet, the one with the shape lying on it.

  His heart was pounding in his chest as he approached the operating station. The curtain surrounding it was white, suspended from a metal frame and reaching down to the slick, gore-streaked floor. On the trolley beside it, a monitor beeped steadily, a green line peaking rhythmically as it made its way across the screen. The silhouette beyond the curtain was still: a long, dark shape lying on top of the bed.

  Jamie reached out a trembling hand, gripped the material of the curtain, took a deep breath, and pulled it open. He looked down at the bed, and felt the air freeze in his lungs.

  Lying on the operating table, his skin the colour of ash, his body open and empty, was Ted Ellison.

  The elderly man, who had held Kate’s hand as they walked out of the Twilight Care Home, had been butchered. His torso was open to the cool air of the laboratory; it had been sliced from throat to groin and across the width of his ribcage. The four resulting flaps of skin and muscle had been folded back and clamped open. Where Ted’s major organs should have been, there was little more than a crimson cavern; Jamie could see the white pillar of the old man’s spine, and the slowly beating fist of his heart. Everything else had been removed.

  Jamie felt pressure rising in his chest, and forced himself to breathe. His eyes were drawn to a long silver tray beside the table, on which the contents of Ted Ellison’s torso had been carefully laid out. His liver, kidneys, lungs, pancreas, bowels, the long purple ropes of his intestines – all were lying on the tray, ghoulishly colourful against the metal.

  A loud hiss made Jamie jump, and he turned towards the source of it. A bag of bright blue liquid hung on a drip stand beside the table, a pump attached above it. The compression of the pump was what had made the noise. He followed the tube down from the drip to where it disappeared into Ted’s throat.

  As he looked at the stricken face of the old man, who had had such horrendous torture inflicted upon him, he saw the eyes flicker behind their lids, then saw the man’s mouth move as his fangs slid down from his gums. The compressor hissed again, pushing the bright blue liquid down the tube. It disappeared into Ted’s neck and immediately the fangs withdrew, rising back out of sight.

  I don’t understand, thought Jamie, his eyes welling up with tears. Why would anyone do this? Never mind why, how could anyone do this to someone?

  Then another thought struck him.

  Oh God. I brought children here. I brought a m
an and his daughter, only a few days ago. What were their names? Patrick? And the girl, Maggie. Patrick and Maggie Connors.

  A little girl, in this place.

  He tried to push the thought from his mind, to let the instincts that had served him so well over the previous months take over, to focus on the task at hand; the Lazarus Project staff were all dead, what was being done down here was far, far worse than anyone could have imagined and Professor Talbot was nowhere to be seen.

  Nor was Matt.

  But if he was here – if Maggie Connors was here – Jamie was going to find them.

  He pulled his MP5 from his belt, and set it against his shoulder. The door at the end of the room was shut as he approached it, and seemed to exude menace. He didn’t dare imagine what might be beyond it, imagine just how far this chamber of horrors might go, but he was certain of one thing. Whatever was through the door, he would be ready for it.

  The white door swung open silently on its hinges, and Jamie stepped inside. Instantly, he felt the tension gripping his chest relax, ever so slightly; the third room of the Lazarus Project contained none of the stomach-churning horror of the second. It was long and narrow; the two walls were separated into rows of small rooms, the fronts of which were covered by thick plastic. A narrow slot stood in the middle of the clear wall, through which Jamie presumed blood was passed.

  He stepped into the room, his MP5 at his shoulder, peered into the cell nearest to him and saw a familiar face staring wildly back. It was Patrick Connors; he was shouting something that Jamie couldn’t hear, and was pointing frantically back towards one of the cells on the opposite side of the room.

  Jamie followed the direction of his finger, and crossed the wide, cavernous room. The first cell on the other wall was unoccupied, but had clearly only become so recently; a vast spray of blood and meat was dripping thickly down the three white walls and the clear plastic front. A crumbling hole had been punched into the rear wall, a size and shape Jamie recognised well.

  T-Bone shot, he thought. Point blank through the food slot. No chance for whoever was in there.