by Will Hill
“Good,” said the man. “No harm done, eh? My name is Albert Harker and we have already established that you are Kevin McKenna. We are well met, are we not?”
McKenna nodded again. The tears were slowing and the pain in his shoulder had faded to a dull ache. His shell-shocked mind was still piecing itself back together, but managed to come up with a best course of action.
Do whatever it says. Don’t make it angry. Do whatever it tells you.
“I have clearly startled you somewhat,” said Albert Harker. “For that, I can only apologise. Perhaps a stiff drink is in order?”
“OK,” said McKenna, his voice trembling.
“Excellent,” beamed Harker. “Your place it is.”
26
TOO CLOSE TO HOME
Matt Browning was sitting at his desk in the Lazarus Project when a muffled thud ripped through the Loop, shaking the floors and ceilings. There was an uncomprehending moment of silence before the general alarm screamed into life, its ear-splitting whine echoing through concrete and steel.
Matt clamped his hands over his ears and leapt to his feet. The rest of the Lazarus Project staff did likewise, their faces contorted with pain; they stared desperately around, looking for someone to tell them what to do. Matt empathised; his colleagues were scientists and doctors, with no real understanding of how dangerous the situation beyond the laboratory really was. He had no such illusions; he had almost been killed by a vampire girl he now called his friend, the first director of the Lazarus Project had been about to murder him until Jamie intervened, and he knew from the stories his friends told just how bad it was outside the Loop. As his colleagues began to shout over the din of the alarm, speculating that a generator had blown or a fuel store had been breached, Matt kept what he was sure would turn out to be the truth to himself.
That was an explosion. A big one.
He looked around the room at the frightened men and women, wondering how best to help, and froze.
Natalia Lenski wasn’t there.
Fear trickled through him, chilling his spine like a bucket of ice water. There was no reason to panic; there were any number of reasons why Natalia might not be in the lab at that precise moment. But something, some primal instinct buried deep in his gut, began to insist that something was wrong.
Matt ran across the lab, ignoring the nervous stares of his colleagues, and twisted the handle on the main door.
Nothing happened. The keypad beside it glowed a steady, mocking red.
He shouted with fury and grabbed the handle again, twisting it, hauling on it, beating the surface of the door with his other fist. Hands grabbed at his shoulders, spinning him round, and he found himself facing the worried gaze of Professor Karlsson.
“Calm down!” yelled the Lazarus Project Director, straining to make himself heard over the din of the alarm. “They’re sealed automatically! It’s all right, Matt!”
Matt pushed the Professor’s hands away. “Where’s Natalia?” he yelled.
Professor Karlsson turned then and scanned the room. When he returned his attention to Matt, his forehead was furrowed by a deep frown.
“I don’t know!” he shouted. “Where is she?”
“I don’t know!” yelled Matt, pulling his radio from his belt. His mind was pounding with concern for Natalia, who would be absolutely unprepared if there was an attack taking place above their heads. A single coherent thought made its way to the surface.
Call Jamie. He’ll know what to do.
Matt raised the radio and looked at the screen.
It was blank.
He twisted the power switch backwards and forwards, but nothing brought the handset to life. Matt bellowed again and hurled it against the wall. Karlsson recoiled, shielding his face as shattered plastic and severed metal wire flew through the air, then grabbed hold of Matt.
“You have to calm down!” he shouted. “We’re safe in here, Matt!”
“That’s great!” yelled Matt. “What about Natalia? What about my friends? They’re out there somewhere and we have no idea what the hell is going on!”
Four floors above the Lazarus Project, Jamie Carpenter was in his quarters when the explosion thundered through Level B, shaking the walls of his small room so violently that his desk toppled over, spilling its mountains of files and folders across the floor.
He was lying on his bed, still seething at the humiliating ordeal that had been his ISAT interview. His hatred for Paul Turner, a complex emotion that never lay far below the surface, blazed more potently than ever before. And although he knew the second part of the interview, the unfair, vicious line of questioning that seemed to have been designed specifically to antagonise him, had been the work of the Security Officer, he was struggling to spare Kate the anger and disappointment that was boiling through him.
He knew it wasn’t her fault, but she was part of it; she was the other half of ISAT, and even if she had not been complicit in the ordeal he had been subjected to, her attempt to stop it had been half-hearted at best. When she had told him she was going to volunteer for ISAT, he had told her to think long and hard about it, as it was a decision that was bound to make her unpopular. Now, having been through the invasive, demeaning process himself, he was beginning to think he had been too kind.
They’re going to do more than dislike her, he thought, with a bitter mixture of concern and spite. It’s going to be much worse than that.
Everyone’s going to hate her.
This thought was filling his mind when the deafening roar tore through Level B. Jamie leapt up from his bed as the room shook and rattled, his hand going instinctively to the grip of his Glock 17. A second later he yelled in pain as the alarm screeched into life, but the paralysis that had gripped Matt and his colleagues did not lay a hand on him; he was up and across his quarters and twisting the handle of his door before the first peal had even died away.
Nothing happened.
Jamie turned back into the room and slid to his knees, digging through the spilled contents of his desk, looking for the Director override code that Henry Seward had given to him and Paul Turner, the night that Shaun Turner had died and Seward himself had been taken by Valeri Rusmanov. He found the laminated card, ran back to the door, flipped down the panel that concealed his quarters’ emergency controls and keyed the code into the touchpad. For a long moment the bar at the bottom of the panel glowed yellow, and Jamie allowed himself to believe that it was going to work. Then the panel turned solid red and he hammered on the immovable door in frustration.
He knew without looking that his console and radio would be dead; the protocol for any kind of internal attack on the Loop called for a complete lockdown, which only Paul Turner, as the Security Officer, and certain members of the Security Division would be exempt from. He checked them anyway and saw the blank, lifeless screens he had expected.
Jamie walked back across his room, his heart racing. Surely there was no way that the base could be under attack again? The frontal assault by Valeri and his vampire army had been successful because they had been supplied with information by Christopher Reynolds, the original head of the Lazarus Project who had been working for the eldest Rusmanov his entire life; his information had enabled them to evade the surveillance and warning systems that protected the base. They had all been reset and improved, and access to their specifics was now one of the most heavily guarded secrets that Blacklight possessed; if they had been compromised again, the implications would be unthinkable.
The pounding alarm stopped abruptly and was replaced by a familiar voice, amplified and broadcast via the speakers that sat above the door of every room in the Loop.
“Attention,” said Paul Turner. “There has been a security incident which has resulted in this facility being placed into lockdown. Please do not attempt to leave your location. The Security Division are investigating and the lockdown will be lifted as soon as possible. Thank you.”
Jamie waited for the alarm to begin again; if it did so, he int
ended to put his helmet on and set its exterior volume control to zero. But thirty seconds later the silence in the Loop remained total, so he poured himself a glass of water and sat down on the edge of his bed. His heart was racing, but he tried to ignore it, as he did his best to ignore what the voice at the back of his head was whispering.
It was telling him that the explosion had sounded like it had been on his level, from the far end of the curved corridor.
Where Kate lived.
*
Paul Turner was alone in the ISAT lounge when the explosion shook the floor beneath his feet; he had sent Kate for lunch ten minutes earlier, and was reading through the file of the first of the afternoon’s interviewees. He was on his feet instantly, throwing the file aside, sprinting across the room and grabbing the door handle, which refused to turn.
He swore, pulled his ID card from its slot on his belt, and pressed it against the panel beside the door. His role as Security Officer allowed him to override almost every lock in the Loop; the plastic square turned bright green as the general alarm burst into deafening life, and he hauled the door open. The Operator behind the ISAT reception desk looked at him with wide eyes as he strode across the semicircular space.
“Stay here,” he barked. He ran his card against the panel that controlled the security door, waited impatiently for the heavy locks to disengage, then stepped out into the chaos of the Intelligence Division.
Operators were on their feet beside their desks, shouting and gesturing, trying to make themselves heard over the siren. Their computer monitors had all gone dark, Turner was relieved to see; in the event of a security breach inside the Loop, access to the Blacklight system was instantly cut to everyone apart from the Security Division to protect the terabytes of sensitive information it contained. He pulled his console from his belt and saw its screen light up.
Good. That’s good.
He tapped the screen as he walked, asking the system to pinpoint the location of the explosion and provide a preliminary report, and trying to ignore the shouted questions from the Operators of the Intelligence Division.
“Stay at your desks!” he yelled, as he reached the door. “And stay calm, for God’s sake!”
His console beeped as he stepped out into the Level A corridor. He tapped the screen, opening the information he had requested.
PRELIMINARY INCIDENT REPORT
INITIAL CONCLUSION: DETONATION OF CHEMICAL MATERIALS (SPECTROANALYSIS IN PROGRESS).
CHARACTERISTICS: EXPLOSIVE TEMPERATURE RISE. HIGHEST RECORDED TEMPERATURE 812 DEGREES CELSIUS. CONCUSSIVE BLAST WAVE. DURATION 1.09 SECONDS. RANGE 112.2 METRES.
DAMAGE REPORT: SUPERFICIAL DAMAGE TO LEVEL B CORRIDOR. LEVEL B POWER SYSTEMS INTERRUPTED (BACKUPS ACTIVATED). LEVEL B ATMOSPHERIC CONTROL INTERRUPTED (BACKUPS FAILED). LEVEL B MONITORING SYSTEM INTERRUPTED (BACK-UPS FAILED). LEVEL B FREQUENCY SPECTRUM INTERRUPTED. BACKUPS WORKING AT 46% CAPACITY.
CONTAINMENT: FIRE EXTINGUISHED BY HALON SYSTEM.
LOCATION: LEVEL B, ROOM 261.
Turner read the report, his stomach churning with cold, furious outrage.
A bomb. A bomb inside the Loop. How dare they?
He typed a new request into the console, asking who lived in Level B, room 261. The system returned the information immediately.
OCCUPANT: RANDALL, KATE (LIEUTENANT)/NS303,78-J.
27
DORMANT FOR TOO LONG
KILBURN, LONDON
McKenna walked down the short corridor that connected his kitchen to the living room of his small flat with a four-pack of lager in his hand, flopped down into the armchair beneath the window, and opened a new can.
“So that lot that visited me this morning,” he said, taking a long swig. “They weren’t the police, were they? They were the ones you told Johnny about. The secret department.”
Albert Harker nodded at him from the sofa on the opposite side of the room. “Department 19. Or Blacklight, as they are often called.”
“So how come they came to see me?”
“I presume they visited the last known address of Mr Bathurst, found the same correspondence that I found, and made the same enquiries that I made. And since you are the sole named beneficiary of Mr Bathurst’s estate, they likely assumed that I would attempt to make contact with you.”
“They told me a released prisoner might try to contact me. They said I should phone the police.”
Harker smiled. “Of course they did. That’s what they do, Mr McKenna. They lie.”
“Why?”
“To keep you and everyone else in the dark, under the guise of keeping you safe.”
McKenna drank deeply from his can and levelled his gaze at the vampire. “And what is it that you want, Mr Harker?” he asked. “You’ve got the tape and the transcript, and I give you my word that I won’t tell anyone about you. I don’t have anything else.”
Albert Harker smiled broadly. “Mr McKenna, that is exactly the opposite of what I want from you. I want the world to know about me, and others like me. I want to expose Blacklight and all its lies, and I want you to write the story that pulls back the curtain. How does that sound?”
“It sounds nuts,” said McKenna. “It sounds like the craziest thing I’ve ever heard.”
Harker’s face darkened and a red flicker appeared in the corners of his eyes. “It’s the biggest story in human history,” he said, his voice low. “The greatest exclusive in the history of journalism, and I am giving it to you. I would expect you to be more grateful.”
Grateful, thought McKenna. Sure. There’s a vampire sitting in my living room. An actual real, walking, talking, breathing vampire, who threatened to tear my face off my skull less than an hour ago. And I’m supposed to be grateful?
Then his eyes narrowed.
A vampire. An actual vampire, because they’re real. A real vampire.
Despite himself, his mind started to turn it over.
Forget long-lens tits and cheating celebrities. He’s crazy, but he’s right about one thing. This could be the biggest story ever. And I could be the one to break it.
“It’s a big story,” he said, carefully. “I’m with you there, no argument whatsoever. But you have to see that there’s not a chance in hell anyone would ever print it. You’re sitting right there on my sofa and I only half believe it. My editor is going to laugh his arse off for about a minute and then he’s going to fire me. I’ll never get another byline as long as I live.”
“I understand your concern,” said Harker. “And you’re right, we will need more than the word of one man if we are to be convincing. We need evidence, testimonials from men and women who have encountered my kind, or the men who are supposed to protect them from us.”
“How do we do that?” asked McKenna. “Where are we going to find these people?”
Harker smiled. “We don’t need to find them, Kevin. They’ll come to us, willingly. You have a blog, yes?”
“You know what a blog is?”
“I was in a hospital, Kevin, not on the moon. I am familiar with the internet. Do you have a blog or not?”
“Yeah.”
“Good. You will write a post asking for people who have lost friends and family members, but who have been threatened not to talk about what happened to them. Ask for their stories, of figures dressed all in black, or men and women with sharp teeth and red eyes, and guarantee their anonymity.”
“And you want me to do this when?”
“Immediately. There is no time to lose.”
McKenna considered the vampire’s plan. His initial reaction was that most people would laugh their heads off at him if he wrote the post that Albert Harker had described, and the ones who didn’t laugh would feel sorry for him. Then, for the first time in a very long time, he pushed his self-loathing aside and was honest with himself.
What the hell are you worrying about? People laugh at you now, behind your back. You know they do. You’re a joke. And worst of all, you’re a joke that pretends he isn’t. You’re nothin
g. You’re nobody. Why not go out with a bang, one way or the other?
He finished his beer, opened yet another, and reached for his laptop. It was sitting on the coffee table where he had left it that morning, when the world had been a different place, far smaller and safer than it now seemed.
Then a dreadful thought occurred to him. “So I write this blog,” he said, slowly. “And let’s say you get what you want, and we bring it all down. What happens then? You kill me?”
“Of course not,” said Harker, placing a hand across his chest. “I am not a monster, Kevin. I have no intention of hurting anybody.”
McKenna laughed, a short sound that was little more than a grunt. “It didn’t feel like that when you were throwing me across the garage.”
“I needed to get your attention,” said Harker. “If you refused to help, I had to make sure you were too scared to go to the authorities. I meant you no harm, I assure you.”
“How can you expect me to believe that?” asked McKenna.
“I can do nothing more than give you my word. Whether you believe it or not is up to you.”
“So what would happen if I decided to get up and walk out of here right now?”
“I would attempt to persuade you not to.”
“And if I insisted?”
“I would… prevent you from leaving.”
“How?”
“My friend,” said Harker, spreading his hands wide in a gesture that Kevin felt sure was meant to portray honesty. “Let us not dwell on such things. Can we not just say that we are here, and there is work for us to do? Great work, that future generations will thank us for?”
McKenna stared at Albert Harker for a long moment, trying to shake the feeling of dread that had taken up residence in his chest.
I don’t believe a word you say, he thought. I’ve known violent men, I’ve been around them. They have this look, this aura about them. Just like the one you’ve got.
