Department 19, The Rising, and Battle Lines

by Will Hill

  Jamie looked at the Interim Director, his mind brimming with things he wanted to say, but held his tongue. Instead, he walked across the small room, and pulled open the door. He stepped out into the grey corridor, his friends following behind him.

  The four Operators walked silently back to Jamie’s quarters, aware even as they did so that something had changed between them; that their futures no longer lay on a single path.

  They sat on the chair and on his bed, and they tried to discuss the implications of what Cal Holmwood had told them, but they got nowhere; it was all too big, too profound, and all four of them needed time to process what they had heard.

  Kate was the first to leave, telling them she would see them at dinner; she had agreed to visit Major Turner in his quarters. This raised the eyebrows of both Jamie and Larissa, but they said nothing; instead, they let her go without a word.

  Matt went next, saying that he had better get a start on the data from the recovered hard drive if he was going to be able to say anything coherent the following morning. He too promised to see them at dinner, but Jamie wasn’t quite sure he believed his friend; again, though, he said nothing, and neither did Larissa, even after Matt shut the door and left them alone.

  Jamie and Larissa lay on his bed in silence for a long time, their minds racing with thoughts they were not ready, or not willing, to express to each other. Eventually, Larissa’s hand crept across the gap between them and curled gently round Jamie’s own; he held it tightly, holding on to the one thing in his life that still felt the same.

  After a period of time that neither Jamie nor Larissa could have accurately estimated, Jamie asked her if she wanted to come and see Frankenstein with him. She smiled, but told him she thought he should go on his own. Then she released his hand, and floated up into the air. She paused when she reached the door, and smiled at him, a wide, warm smile, full of love.

  “I’ll see you later,” she said.

  Then she was gone.

  Jamie watched the space where she had been floating for a long moment, then hauled himself off his bed. He had no idea what to do about her, or Kate, or Matt; perhaps there was nothing to be done, or nothing that needed doing. He had felt the shift that occurred as Colonel Holmwood spoke, however, as though the world had suddenly tilted a degree or two on its axis. Not enough to cause disaster, but enough to shake foundations.

  He walked slowly out of his quarters, and to the lift at the end of the corridor. Inside the car, he pressed the button marked G, and realised, quite suddenly, that he was about to see Frankenstein again, about to see the man he had believed was dead. A smile crept on to his face, widened into a big grin; when the lift doors slid open, Jamie took off down the corridor at a flat sprint.

  The non-supernatural cells were located on Level H, but were only accessible via a secure lift from Level G. Jamie entered the Director override code into the panel beside the door that sealed the corridor that led to the lift, a corridor that was restricted under normal circumstances to Operators from the Security Division. The door slid open, and Jamie ran down the long curved corridor to the secure lift. He pressed the CALL button, stepped in between the opening doors and waited impatiently for it to take him down.

  On Level H, Jamie signed in with the Duty Operator. Then he was past the small guard desk, and on to the block itself. It was a much smaller version of the supernatural containment block, just four cells on either side of a white corridor, with heavy metal doors instead of ultraviolet walls. Seven of the doors were standing open; the eighth, the last one on the right, was not. He stopped in front of it, and shouted to the Operator. The guard keyed a code into a pad on his desk, and the heavy door unlocked with a series of rumbling clicks and thuds, and the heavy tone of a buzzer. Jamie stood stock still, and watched it swing open.

  Inside the cell, sitting on the floor opposite a narrow bed that could never have possibly held his huge, mangled frame, was Frankenstein’s monster. He looked up as the door opened, his great grey-green head swivelling in Jamie’s direction, where it stopped.

  Jamie stared at his friend, unable to breathe. Then he took a tentative step into the room. Frankenstein lumbered to his feet, his head scraping the ceiling of the cell, and peered at Jamie with wonder on his face.

  “I remember you,” he said, softly. “I know your name. It’s Jamie, isn’t it?”

  Jamie felt tears spill down his cheeks, and then he was running into the cell, and hurling himself against the monster’s broad, uneven chest. He wrapped his arms round the monster’s back, as far as he was able to reach, then felt Frankenstein slowly envelop him in his huge arms. He laid his head on the monster’s chest, and closed his eyes, and they stayed like that for a long time.

  “I forgot myself,” said Frankenstein. He was sitting on the floor again, while Jamie perched on the narrow bed. “I couldn’t remember anything. Who I was, where I’d been. Nothing.”

  “Do you remember what happened after Lindisfarne?” asked Jamie, gently. “After you fell?”

  Frankenstein shook his head. “I remember falling,” he said. “Then I remember waking up aboard a fishing boat. What happened in between is lost to me.”

  “We wondered why you hadn’t contacted us,” said Jamie. “It was the main reason no one believed you had survived. It makes sense now.”

  There was silence for a moment.

  “You saved me,” said Frankenstein. “Like your grandfather did. Saved me from my own past. From myself.”

  “We don’t have to talk about this now,” said Jamie. “You need to rest.”

  “How did you find me?” asked Frankenstein, his voice trembling. “How did you come to be there last night?”

  “That’s a long story,” said Jamie, smiling at his friend.

  Frankenstein looked round at his cell. “I don’t think I’m going anywhere,” he said.

  Jamie smiled, and sat down on the floor beside the monster. “I almost don’t know where to start,” he said.

  “At the beginning is traditional,” replied Frankenstein, the corners of his mouth curling into the faintest of smiles.

  FIRST EPILOGUE: IN THE FLESH

  Deep, empty darkness gave way to a midnight purple shot through with scarlet ribbons of pain. Henry Seward forced his eyes open, and stifled a scream.

  He couldn’t see anything. His field of vision was nothing more than a sheet of inky blackness.

  The Director of Department 19 grabbed for his face, his hands clutching upwards from where they had been dangling at his sides, and he felt soft material covering his skin. The relief that flooded through him was so sweet it made him gasp, but was short-lived. Claustrophobia burst through Seward, and he clawed at the material. It came free easily, sliding up and clear, until light streamed into the Director’s eyes, and he hauled in a deep, aching breath as he waited for them to adjust.

  Not blind. Thank God. Oh, thank God.

  Slowly, the bright motes of light before him began to shrink, and solidify. He breathed deeply, in and out, and watched a large, wood-panelled room take shape before his eyes.

  He was sitting in a chair in the middle of the floor, a worn, comfortable armchair made of green leather. In front of him was a huge, imposing desk, its brown leather surface empty. Beyond it, the wall was wood, stained dark with ancient varnish. Pictures hung on it, oil paintings of ancient-looking battles and medieval encampments. To his right, a large window looked out over dark forest, and he realised he could faintly hear the rustling of the trees.

  Henry Seward gripped the arms of the chair, intending to push himself up on to his feet, and felt pain flare from his right forearm. He looked down at the limb, and saw a neat square of white bandage halfway between his wrist and his elbow. He looked at it, nonplussed, then sank back into his seat as memory and realisation flooded into him.

  He had fought and struggled against Valeri Rusmanov’s grip, every second of the way, but the ancient vampire had not so much as flinched.

  They had already r
eached the Lincolnshire coast when the silent explosion of purple light had filled the sky behind him. Seward, who had been marvelling, even through his panic, at the awesome speed of the old monster, let out an involuntary roar of triumph, a roar that was cut off as he was jerked through the air and lifted to face Valeri.

  “What was that?” growled the vampire. “What did you do?”

  Seward smiled, then spat in the oldest Rusmanov brother’s face.

  Valeri recoiled, raised his hand towards his face to wipe the saliva away, then thought better of it. Faster than Seward could follow, he reversed the course of the hand, and crunched it into the Director’s stomach. A noise like a bursting balloon exploded from his mouth, and he felt his eyes bulge in their sockets as the weight of the impact shuddered through his body. He opened his mouth to gasp in fresh oxygen, but nothing happened; his body was spasming, jerking and flailing in Valeri’s grip.

  As he fought to stay calm, as he tried desperately to open his airways and pull in the cold night air, he felt a hot spike of pain in his forearm. He looked down, panic gathering at the edges of his mind, and saw Valeri had sliced his flesh open with one of his long, pointed fingernails. The old vampire dug his fingers into the wound, sending blood pouring out in thick, dark rivers and fresh agony pulsed through Seward’s reeling system. The vampire’s fingers stopped moving, then pulled sharply at something.

  The Blacklight Director tried to scream as his locator chip was torn from the thick muscle of his forearm, dragging ragged strips of dark red matter with it. Valeri crushed it in his hand, let the pieces fall to the dark waters below, then regarded his captive.

  “You are lucky,” the vampire breathed. “If my master did not want you alive, I would make you watch while I flayed the skin from your bones. Now breathe, damn it.”

  Valeri’s other hand sliced through the air and thumped Seward’s back. The paralysis in his lungs and throat was broken, and with a great quavering shriek, he dragged air back into his lungs. He breathed out, in, then out again, before the damage to his system overwhelmed him, and he sank into unconsciousness.

  Henry Seward let the terror that the memory induced fill him, then took a deep breath and pushed it aside. There was no time for him to be scared; he knew who had him, why he had been taken.

  Then he froze.

  There had been no sound, but something was suddenly obvious to Henry Seward. It was a change in pressure, the softest shift in the still air of the room.

  There was somebody standing behind him.

  Slowly, he pushed himself up to his feet, waiting for a blow to land from behind. When no such assault came, he gritted his teeth, and turned to face whoever was in the room with him, his face set with determination. But when he saw the figure standing less than a metre before him, it took every ounce of his resilience not to cry out.

  Standing in front of him, a warm, welcoming smile on his thin mouth, his eyes shimmering the colour of infected blood, was Count Dracula.

  Seward stumbled backwards, his mind reeling at the reality before him. The world’s first vampire made no move to pursue him; he remained where he was, standing easily, his arms behind his back, his pale face alive with excitement.

  The Director felt the small of his back thud against the edge of the desk, and realised he had nowhere to go. He stared at the original vampire, fighting for control of himself.

  This is where it ends, he thought. At the hands of this monster, far from home. Dear God, I didn’t even tell Jamie his father was alive.

  Dracula stepped lightly round the chair in which Seward had awoken, and crossed the space between them. Seward braced himself for the worst, determined that he would not give this creature the satisfaction of breaking him, that he would die as well as his friend Yuri Petrov, the former General of the SPC, had done, with honour.

  The reborn vampire stopped less than a metre away from the Director. Seward found his gaze drawn to the swirling insanity of the monster’s eyes, and forced himself to look away.

  “Admiral Henry Seward,” said the vampire. “I am Vlad Dracula. It’s a pleasure to make your acquaintance.”

  SECOND EPILOGUE: THREE FATHERS

  Thousands of miles apart, three men who had never met found themselves in three very similar prisons.

  In the town of Staveley, Greg Browning strode down the hallway of his small house, stepped round his wife’s trembling figure and marched up the stairs. He threw open the door to his son’s room, which was exactly how he had left it, right down to the socks on the floor and the half-finished coffee on the desk.

  Mould was sprouting above the rim of the mug, but Matt’s mother had refused to move it. It was as if she believed that touching anything, tidying anything, in any way accepting that life was continuing to move forward, meant admitting that her son was not coming back. He had been returned to her once, and she still believed, in some deep, hopeful part of herself, that if everything stayed exactly as it was, then he would come home to her again.

  When she heard the door open above her, she uttered a plaintive wail and ran up the stairs after her husband. She reached the open doorway, saw him digging through the chest of drawers next to Matt’s bed and shrieked.

  “What are you doing, Greg?”

  He rounded on her, his eyes blazing.

  “I’m doing what we should have done the minute we knew he was gone!” he bellowed. “I’m looking for what made him do it! There has to be something here, Lynne. He was God knows where for more than three months, then he’s home for two and he disappears again? Are you bloody stupid? He didn’t just go for no reason, Lynne. It has something to do with where he was all that time!”

  Across the hallway, Matt’s sister woke in her cot and began to cry.

  “Don’t, Greg!” begged Lynne. “Oh, please don’t!”

  “Go and see to the baby,” Greg said, shoving the drawers closed and sitting down heavily at Matt’s desk. He flicked his son’s computer on and watched the monitor flare into life. He looked round and saw his wife standing in the doorway to the bedroom, staring at him with something that was close to hate.

  “Go and see to the baby!” he roared.

  Lynne recoiled, then fled across the landing. Greg double-clicked on the Internet Explorer icon as he heard his daughter’s cries start to lessen, and opened the browser’s history.

  What the hell was going on with you? There had to be something.

  The screen filled with a list of websites, and a sudden tightness gripped his chest.

  Vampires Among Us. The Crimson Coven. Garlic and Crosses. LifeBlood. They Walk At Night. The Undead Resource. Vampires: The Last Free Spirits.

  Without warning, images flashed into Greg’s mind, images he had worked so hard to suppress.

  The girl in the garden. Matt’s neck, his poor neck. Blood.

  Fear crawled over his skin, and he shook his head, hoping to clear it. The images receded, but they refused to leave entirely; they crowded at the back of his head, just out of reach, whispering darkly. Greg covered his face with his hands and leant back in his son’s chair, away from the screen, away from the list of names and what they meant. He sat that way for a long time, trying to find the courage to face what had happened that night, to truly face it, not just pretend it no longer mattered once his son had come home.

  Eventually, he lowered his hands, and lifted himself up from the chair. He left the computer on; he didn’t want to touch it, or have to look at the screen again. He flicked the light off in Matt’s room and was about to pull the door closed behind him, when a single beep sounded in the darkened bedroom.

  Greg Browning turned back, and saw an instant message flashing in the corner of his son’s monitor. He walked back to the desk, and opened it.

  In his empty house on Lindisfarne, Pete Randall sat waiting for the phone to ring.

  He had been waiting for it to ring for almost three months, since the police had made their way over from the mainland to tell him that although they were sti
ll officially listing his daughter as missing, he should start to come to terms with the fact that she wasn’t coming back, and try to move on with his life.

  “What life?” he had asked, before telling them to leave.

  He was sitting in the tattered armchair by the living room window. On the window sill beside him, a mug of tea had gone cold, and developed a film. Mrs McGarry from three doors down had made it for him, when she had stopped by earlier to see how he was doing. She had started doing this most days, even though his answer, a broken, desultory ‘Fine’ was always the same, even though they invariably sat in silence for the duration of her visits. She came anyway, though, most days. Her husband had been lost on the night Lindisfarne had died, and she was coping with the hole that been opened up in her world by keeping relentlessly, almost manically busy.

  Pete, on the other hand, was not coping.

  Not in the slightest.

  If they had found Kate’s body, he would have killed himself; he knew it with absolute certainty. It would have been a simple decision, a logical equation based on what remained in his life that was worth living for. If Kate’s body had been found, there would be nothing, and he would have gone gladly into the dark.

  But her body had not been found, not by the armies of police divers who had dredged every millimetre of the island’s small coastline, not by the dogs and forensic scientists who had combed through the woods and meadows, millimetre by painstaking millimetre. And that meant he had hope; not much, little more than a pitifully flickering ember, but enough. Enough to keep him breathing in and out, and enough to keep him staring at the phone, waiting for the call that would tell him she had been found, alive and well, and asking for him.

  Today, he thought to himself. Today will be the day she calls. Today she will come home.