“Does that mean I’m now allowed to leave?” David asked, wondering about the rest of his department. “And how long am I going to be staying here? I have a job back home.”
“You are currently on medical leave due to injuries incurred in the line of duty,” Warner informed him. “Your PD was advised that you’d been taken to a state-level facility due to infectious disease concerns. This also helped us cover up the aid we had to give the poor boy they attacked and our sweep of Charlesville to check for more vampires.”
“You lied to my people,” David accused. Now he was angry again. If there were vampires everywhere, then people needed to know.
“Our job is to lie to people, Lieutenant White,” the woman informed him. “You have brushed the edge of a much larger picture—one that, if you would like, I am now authorized to explain to you in somewhat more detail. Interested?”
“In what?” he asked.
“The truth,” she said simply. “You’ll be here for one more day before we send you home. Feel like taking a walk and getting some fresh air?”
David considered for a long moment, looking at the oddly dressed woman and considering everything he’d seen so far. He was still stunned by how fast his injuries had been fixed. He was still angry about these people’s lies and secrets, but he needed to understand. He needed to understand the way the world actually worked—what was being hidden…and why. A cop couldn’t serve and protect without knowing everything he had to protect against.
“All right,” he agreed slowly.
#
The trip out of the hospital itself was silent. Major Warner didn’t speak, and David didn’t feel up to asking any questions. The hospital was well equipped and they ran into a small number of staff, but it otherwise seemed unusually empty. The entire hospital was painted an institutional white, and discreet signs led to all the usual departments—and to odd ones like the lycanthropy naturalization ward.
Finally, they reached the bottom floor, where a concrete-walled security checkpoint marked the exit from the building. Two armed guards, in the same black-jacket-over-bodysuit uniform as the Major were behind a glass pane, and David saw a nasty-looking multi-barrel minigun pointing outwards from the security checkpoint, toward the main doors of the hospital.
David eyed the ugly weapon and the guards’ sleek and odd-looking sidearms, and wondered just what they expected to be showing up at the front door of this hospital.
“Afternoon, Major Warner,” a third guard, in front of the glass, greeted the Major while holding out his hand for her ID. He took the card and ran it through a reader, then gestured her toward a pad. “Thumbprint, please.”
The diminutive woman pressed her thumb against the pad and it beeped confirmation of her identity.
The guard looked at David. “ID, please, sir?”
David half-panicked for a moment. He was sure he had no identification they’d accept, and these guards didn’t look like the type to accept that as an excuse.
“He’s with me, Sergeant Kells,” Warner told the guard, and David remembered who he was with. “Can you boys run him up an Alpha-grade pass with class-three limitations?”
“How soon do you need it?” Sergeant Kells asked immediately.
“By the time we get back,” she told him. “Should be an hour at least.”
“Can do, ma’am!”
Warner led David out of the hospital into the sunlight and looked at him carefully. “Until we get you that pass, don’t go wandering off on your own,” she told him. “ONSET runs with extremely tight security.”
David nodded his acceptance of that obvious fact. Sunlight on his face was enough reason for him to remain quiet as they walked away from the hospital to the neat paved path leading across the perfect greenery.
“Who are you people?” David finally asked, as they passed out of the field of fire of the minigun in the hospital entrance along the path. The grounds of this “Campus” wouldn’t have looked out of place at a corporate R&D or university facility, except for the twenty-foot-high concrete wall he could see surrounding the four large and several dozen smaller buildings.
“ONSET is the Office for the National Supernatural Enforcement Teams,” Warner told him grimly. “We are basically the nation’s SWAT teams as far as supernatural affairs go. Where the police don’t know what’s going on and OSPI doesn’t pack enough heat, we are the United States’ answer to supernatural crime, violence and major incursions.”
“Supernatural,” David said softly. “Like what? Are we talking vampires and wizards and werewolves and the bloody boogeyman?” Part of him still didn’t believe, even after all he’d seen. The part of him that had seen Keller and the girl in the convenience store with their throats ripped out, however, believed all too well.
“Bluntly, yes,” she replied. “Vampires are real. Unlike most supernaturals, they are solely our responsibility. OSPI may find the fangs, but we deal with them. We decided a long time ago to regard them as a disease. We treat those we can and kill the rest. Werewolves can be OK, but we keep an eye on them anyway. Wizards are very real—we call them Mages.” She smiled. “As a matter of fact, I am one.”
“You’re a Mage?” David asked disbelievingly. Somehow, this small but very military woman did not look like a wielder of strange and arcane powers to him.
In answer, Warner made a blue flame appear above the palm of her hand. It rapidly expanded to encase her entire body, but while he could feel the heat of it from where he stood, her uniform and hair were untouched. A moment later, the flame was gone.
“Believe me now?” she asked.
He nodded slowly as he controlled the sudden surge of fear at the inexplicable fire. That casual demonstration and the spark of fear it inspired hinted at why these people kept this secret.
“ONSET supports the operations of OSPI,” she continued calmly, as if her demonstration had been perfectly normal. “That’s the Office of Supernatural Policing and Investigation. They keep an eye on known supernaturals and investigate and punish most crimes, remanding criminals to the Special Supernatural Courts in Washington for trial.”
“OSPI is also our primary information source and keeps an eye on all government communications to catch any burgeoning supernatural activity before it becomes an issue. That’s how we knew to send a team into Charlesville.”
“Just in time to save my ass,” David said softly. “I still don’t understand—why have I never heard of any of this?”
“ONSET and OSPI are the two biggest components of the Omicron Branch, a subsection of the executive, judicial, and legislative branches of the United States government,” Warner told him. “Outside of Omicron-rated documentation, they are only ever referred to as the Omicron Offices. Even in Top Secret documentation, both enforcement Offices are supposedly subdivisions of the FBI, while other Omicron groups are subdivisions of their own portions of the government. In practice, Omicron is an independent branch of the United States government, and we and OSPI recruit personnel from wherever we need to—usually the FBI or the military.”
“Why all the secrecy?” He finally asked the question that was eating at him. “Why keep it all classified at that sort of level?
“To avoid public panic,” she told him. “We keep all supernatural activity very quiet. You were the third-ranking officer of your town police department; you’ve seen some of the best and worst of humanity.” It was a statement on the nature of his job, David realized, not a question. “How do you honestly think,” the ONSET major continued, “people would react to realizing that their neighbor is a werewolf and they might get eaten by a vampire on their way home?”
David thought about it for a very long time as the pair entered a small orchard of apple trees hidden in one corner of the campus. He wanted very much to insist that people had to know. He knew better. Few could understand people’s reaction to fear better than a veteran police officer.
“They’d react badly,” he admitted finally. “They’d either co
mpletely disbelieve or riot.” He stopped, taking a long breath of the smell of the ripening apples under the late summer sun.
“If secrecy is so important to you, why are you telling me this?” he asked.
Warner looked away, surveying the campus they’d been slowly walking along. “Lieutenant David White, you walked into a pitch-black room with six vampires,” she said quietly. “You lived long enough for our team to arrive. You shouldn’t have. You should have been dead in the first thirty seconds.”
“So?” David replied, turning away from her and studying an apple tree so she couldn’t see his face as the memories flashed through his mind.
“Mundanes don’t do that,” she told him bluntly after a few moments. “You have now moved yourself into a special category—the Empowered—a human with supernatural powers.”
“I’m not a supernatural!” he snapped. “I was just lucky.”
The idea of the supernatural even existing was causing his brain to run in circles. He couldn’t possibly accept that he was supernatural. The idea made his hindbrain cringe, with memories of his father and his distaste for “weirdos”.
Major Warner shrugged. “That may be the case, but even if it is, we can use you,” she told him. “You know what’s going on—you already knew; I just gave you some more details. You’re a fully trained veteran police officer, with investigative and tactical training and ten years in the service, which is nothing to sneer at, even for us. Even if it turns out you are just a lucky mundane, OSPI could use you.”
It was clear from her voice that she didn’t believe that at all, and David turned back from the apple tree to meet the strange woman’s gaze.
“What do you mean, can use me?” he asked.
“Haven’t you figured it out yet?” she asked. “This is a recruiting pitch, David. We want you to join ONSET.”
Chapter 3
At least they gave him time to make up his mind, David reflected as the strange black helicopter swept away from the ONSET Campus. They’d agreed to take him to an airport—they hadn’t said which one or how far away—where he’d be flown back to Charlesville. This wasn’t a decision he could make right away, and Major Warner had respected that. She’d sent him away with a phone number to call when he’d made his decision.
They’d blackened the windows in the back part of the helicopter, so David couldn’t see where ONSET HQ was situated. This meant that the four-hour flight was uninterrupted by scenery beyond the utilitarian interior of the chopper, only by his quiet reading of the book Warner had given him: The Cracking of the Seal. An ugly strip of tape across the front cover of the book advised the reader that the contents of the book were Classified Top Secret Omicron-Alpha.
The book delved into the history of something called the Seal of Solomon. Supposedly, the Israeli king from the Bible had made a deal with incredibly powerful supernatural entities and created a spell to seal the supernatural away from the world. For whatever reason, his seal had not held and throughout history had slowly degraded. Every so often, the Seal was restored to complete strength. The book gave the last date for such a restoration as “around the end of the twelfth century CE” but gave no details as to how it had been done. Apparently, the Seal had started to crack again in the late nineteenth century. The cracking had supposedly accelerated in the fifties—when OSPI was founded—and again in the nineties, leading to the foundation of ONSET to deal with the bigger nasties.
Details on the various known supernaturals filled the book’s pages. Vampires, werewolves, Mages and other odd creatures of legend, mixed with the grab-bag of supernatural humans the author referred to as “Empowered”. Perhaps the scariest part of the book was that there was what looked to have been a thirty-page chapter on “demons”—that had been cut out and replaced with a single page stating, “This material is classified Omicron-Charlie.”
Apparently, there were even worse things out there than Warner and her people were willing to tell him about yet. They’d told him about worse things than he’d seen, and what he’d seen had been horrific enough.
Reading the section on vampires, he kept having the image of the punk in the convenience store, lunging toward David even as heavy slugs ripped away chunks of his body.
For all his distaste with Omicron’s secrecy, he wondered, reading the book, if there even was another way.
#
The rest of his journey home passed in an almost eerily ordinary manner. Once he was off the black helicopter at the Salt Lake airport, he was handed an ordinary plane ticket and left to his own devices. The flight back to Maine and then the taxi ride home were normal. Part of him was looking around in the airport and on the street, wondering who in the crowd was actually a supernatural creature.
No vampires leapt out at him on his way home, and the prepaid taxi driver dropped him off at his front door and then took off, heading for another client. He lived in a small subdivision of Charlesville, with about two hundred or so houses. They’d all been built to the traditional stone-and-wood pattern, and only the similarities between the houses gave away the fact that these homes hadn’t been there for hundreds of years like the town’s core.
The small two-bedroom house he called home blended in amongst those other houses. He lived alone, and the house was as empty as ever. He didn’t even bother to check his email before falling into bed.
Even if he’d had the training, he would have been far too tired to notice the electronic bug that had appeared in his front hallway.
#
The next morning, David arrived at the Charlesville Police Station rested and, as far as he was concerned, fit to do his duty. Smiles and ‘hi Boss’s greeted him as he walked through the doors. A week had passed since the last time he’d entered the building, and while the world seemed to have changed for David, nothing had changed here.
He made it about halfway to his office—one of only four private offices in the tiny station house—the familiar sounds and sights of the smoothly functioning police department soothing the troubles in his heart and mind, before a bellow across the office interrupted him.
“WHITE! Get in here!”
Police Chief Darryl Hanson had the voice of the drill sergeant he’d once been, and David paused in mid-step to turn toward the Chief’s office. Hanson stood in the door of his office, thick-bodied, broad-shouldered and a good six inches taller than David.
Wordlessly, David changed direction and walked over to Hanson’s office, where the Chief gestured him in and to sit down. David obeyed, and the door slid closed behind him with a thunk.
“As far as I am concerned, Lieutenant,” Hanson, who was easily twice David’s age, told the younger man gruffly as he crossed back to his own desk, “you are still on medical leave. CDC told me you’d be flying back in last night. I should have known you’d be here in the morning.”
“I feel fine, sir,” David insisted. Part of him had expected this. The rest of him just wanted to get back to work, to try and forget what he’d seen.
“Aside from the fact that an officer under your command died in front of you, you just spent six days in a fine government-run hospital,” Hanson responded, “and I watched CDC burn the body of the bastard you took down. That’s not standard procedure.”
David twitched at the mention of the vampire he’d killed and opened his mouth, but the Chief waved him to silence and spoke more quietly. “I know a cover-up when I see one, David,” he told the younger man bluntly. “I’m also old enough to know when I don’t want or need to know what’s under it. I do know that whatever went down, you got hit hard. So, you are off duty until Monday, no ifs or buts about it. That’s three days. Understood?”
“Yes, sir,” David finally said, surprised at the Chief’s candor.
“I also wrote the letter to Aaron’s family,” the chief said gently. “It couldn’t wait for you to get out of the hospital.”
“Yes, sir,” David said quietly. “Thank you, sir.” He hadn’t quite forgotten about that traditi
on, but he’d spent more time wondering if he could have saved Aaron than thinking about how to tell his family.
“How was your treatment?” Hanson asked. “I’ll light a fire under someone’s ass if it wasn’t the best they can provide.”
“I…don’t think it gets any better, sir,” David told him, thinking back to the nurse’s comments on the antivenom. Antivenom he doubted was in common supply in the world’s hospitals. And then there was the incredible speed with which his shattered forearms and rib had healed. “They took good care of me.”
“Good to hear,” the Chief replied.
“Sir,” David began, but then trailed off. How could he tell this man, his boss and friend, what had happened? Even if he could find the words, Hanson wouldn’t believe him. He hadn’t seen what David had seen.
“What is it, son?” Hanson asked.
“They offered me a job,” David blurted out, then blinked at his own words. That hadn’t been what he’d wanted to talk to Hanson about.
The Chief looked at David in silence for a moment. “I’m not going to ask who ‘they’ are,” he finally replied. “I’m going to say one word, and you’re either going to nod, or stare at me in confusion.”
David stared at his boss in confusion for a moment, and the Chief said his one word: “Omicron.”
For a moment, David continued to stare at his boss in confusion, and then it struck home. Hanson knew. Omicron was the code designation for the branch of government that included ONSET and OSPI. Warner had referred to it as the “Omicron Offices”. Finally, after a moment or two, he slowly nodded, and Hanson breathed a massive sigh.
“This isn’t the place, David,” he said quietly. “The walls aren’t thick enough. Go home,” he instructed, “take your medical leave. But come over for dinner tonight. Marge will love to have you. And then you and I can talk.”
#
ONSET: To Serve and Protect Page 3
