Darkest Hour

by Rob Cornell

They had saved red for any area that might break beyond “high activity” into full-fledged epidemic. If any spot turned red, it meant the vamps had grown so bold and/or numerous as to reveal themselves to the civilian population. In other words, they had traded slinking in the shadows, stalking their prey, to feeding openly and walking among mortals without fear.

  None of them expected to see any red on the map. That, after all, was their mission. To stop the vamps from ever achieving that level of dominance.

  Lockman choked on that last bite of sandwich when he saw what Adam stared at.

  Though small, a section of Alaska had gone red.

  Adam must have heard Lockman come in, or the gagging sound he had made because of the sandwich. The ogre turned around showing a face a shade of green lighter than Lockman had ever seen on him before.

  “Our team in Alaska...” Adam’s voice shook. He swallowed. Tried again. “We’ve lost contact. But our last transmission suggests the vampires discovered them.”

  Lockman managed to choke down the toast and eggs. They left a horrible taste behind. “Why did it go red?”

  “Last report indicates an FBI team sent to investigate the large amounts of missing persons was...confronted...by vampires.”

  Lockman’s stomach roiled. He wished he’d never made that stop at the mess hall. “The vamps openly attacked federal agents?”

  Adam nodded once. “We have no word on how the feds plan to respond or how much they know.”

  “Either way, they’ll send backup. Eventually, they’re going to figure out what they’re dealing with. Then...” He trailed off. Who knew how mainstream law enforcement would react to vamps? There was a reason the Agency had been a secret branch of the government. Mainstream agencies and civilians couldn’t handle this kind of reality. Problem was, the Agency that had been built to deal with these threats, according to his old boss, had been disbanded. Odds were, they would throw more feds at the situation, maybe pull in military support. None of those guys were trained for this. None of them would survive.

  Some of them would become the enemy.

  The whole thing would have to end with the Pentagon somehow justifying a full-scale bombing on American soil. Of course, by the time the politicians finally came to terms with the need for such a thing, it would be too late. Vamp numbers would have swollen beyond containment.

  The whole nightmare scenario played through Lockman’s mind and made him nauseous.

  They had to stomp this out before it grew to that point. Plain and simple. “How long until they get sunlight up there?”

  “Couple of weeks.”

  Too long to wait and hope the vamps disbursed on their own. The constant night gave them a frightening advantage. It certainly changed things tactically.

  “You’re thinking we have to go in there,” Adam said. His voice sounded thick, sleepy.

  “We don’t have much of a choice.”

  “It’s going to take more than a single ops team.”

  “I know,” Lockman said. The aftertaste of his egg sandwich grew rancid. “We’re going to have to send the whole army.”

  Adam and Lockman called together six of their highest ranking members. Two of them—a golem that looked like a clay sculpture of the old cartoon hero, He-Man, and one of the few other humans brought into the fold—had worked on putting together ops for them before. The others had yet to enter the War Room before today.

  They all sat around the central table, but most eyes stared at that red spot on the map.

  One of the newbies, an ogre brother of Adam’s, raised his hand as if in a classroom.

  Lockman tried to remember his name. No matter how much time he had spent with Adam’s brothers, the damn ogres still all looked the same to him.

  Adam saved him the trouble and called on his brother. “Yes, Troy.”

  “What are our estimates on numbers? Can there really be enough vamps to require our full force?”

  Lockman took the question. “Based on intel from the team we lost contact with, we could safely guess that the vamps have either fed on or turned most of Barrow’s population. Depending on how directed they are—”

  “You mean, if they have a new king.” The thing that spoke resembled a man-sized slug with pink legs and two mouths. One mouth looked almost human. The other was circular, more like a hole in its face, and lined with needle teeth in at least a half dozen rows. The creature was one of a number of beings they’d recruited that didn’t have a mythological counterpart, something that would traditionally be referred to as simply a demon. They called it an ally.

  “King, or any kind of leader. Our impression is that the town’s occupation is more recreational, though. Still. To be safe, let’s assume they turn half the population. That’s two-thousand vampires, give or take.”

  The slug thing made a slurping sound through its round, toothy mouth, then spoke with its mortal looking mouth. “That’s more vampires than we have troops.”

  “That’s why we’ve gathered the six of you. We need ideas, strategies. We need to come up with a plan to contain that force in Barrow before the situation gets out of control.”

  “It’s already out of control,” the human, Dixon, said. His square face had a scar than ran around the edges like a frame. Rumor was, some kind of demonic ritualist had removed his face, and that’s where the scar had come from. No one knew how he got his face back on. He didn’t talk about it. “We were supposed to recruit enough to keep this size of gathering from ever happening. They beat us to the punch. Game over, gents.”

  “It’s not game over,” Adam said. “This is not an organized group like we saw in New Orleans. They are also in an extremely remote location. If we play it right, we can thin them out before they realize they’ve got a full assault on their hands.”

  Dixon narrowed his eyes. He absently stroked one line of his scar with a thumb. “Maybe. If they’re not organized.”

  Lockman shifted in his seat. He hated these kinds of meetings. Hating sitting. He wanted to be up and moving. “Like we’ve said. Intel seems pretty solid. This is the vamp version of spring break.”

  The third newbie to the War Room didn’t look a day older than ten. She had black button eyes and wore a red and white checkered dress. She was a shape shifter of some kind, and probably about four-hundred years old. Why she chose to look like a toy doll most of the time was beyond Lockman. He had little doubt of her great power, though. He had once seen her take the form of a mastodon, staking vamps with her tusks while stomping the rest under her massive feet. Those mashed under her feet survived only long enough for the follow-up team to blowtorch them to ashes.

  A creative way to clear a vamp nest, for sure.

  They called her Virginia. Her real name some unpronounceable thing that started with a V sound, so Virginia was close enough. Some called her Ginny for short. She tilted her head back and tittered as if her blood were made of saccharine. “Vamps gone wild,” she said.

  A few around the table forced laughter, but most of them probably felt the creepy vibe as much as Lockman. Ginny definitely qualified as one of those We’re glad she’s on our side kind of supernaturals. Of course, the golem stared blankly from his chiseled face. Stone men neither laughed nor got creeped out.

  The last of the six, the remaining newbie, cleared her throat. This supernatural was classified as a mermaid—or merperson if you wanted to be politically correct. While able to breathe outside of water, unlike how some myths portrayed them, merpeople could not transform their lower bodies from fishtails to legs. This one, who went by Alexia, used a souped-up electric wheelchair to get around on land. Aside from her scaled lower-half, she looked human, and a beautiful one at that. After several meetings, Lockman insisted she begin wearing tops, as she otherwise went about naked, a sight distracting even to some of the non-mortals who recognized human beauty when they saw it.

  Her voice sounded like the chiming of crystal, as beautiful as she was. “What of the Chosen One? Surely she can help u
s.”

  Lockman clenched his jaw. Not everyone had yet heard about what happened with Jessie. He wanted to keep it as contained as possible. The golem and Dixon were the only others at the table besides Adam and Lockman who knew. The golem remained his stoic self, but Dixon snorted. “That pooch has been screwed. We’re on our own, beautiful.”

  Alexia canted her head and looked at Lockman. “Something has happened to your daughter?”

  Interesting how she worded the question, referring to Jessie as his daughter instead of the Chosen One or simply by name. The concern in her voice sounded different to Lockman, too. She wasn’t asking about the loss of an asset. She was asking about an actual person. Something most of these people seemed to forget that Jessie was—a person.

  “I’m afraid so,” Lockman answered. “The soul of Gabriel Dolan somehow managed to overpower her.”

  Alexia reached across the table and touched Lockman’s hand. “I’m sorry.”

  “We’re all going to be real sorry,” Dixon said, “if we can’t contain all this shit. We still haven’t figured out where Gabriel’s headed. Now we got this vamp party in Alaska.”

  A jolt shot up Lockman’s spine. He went rigid. His mind drifted away, chasing the thought that had sneaked around the edge of his consciousness. The conversation continued around the table, but he didn’t hear any of it.

  Not until Adam shouted his name, snapping him back.

  Everyone—everything—stared at him. Even the slug demon that had no visible eyes, had its needle-filled hole aimed in Lockman’s direction. “What?” he asked.

  Adam slouched back in his chair, which groaned under his weight. “You’ve heard nothing we’ve just discussed.”

  “Last I heard was Dixon whining.”

  “Troy came up with a pretty good idea for thinning the herd up there.”

  “Alexia over there made me think of it,” Troy said. Then he leaned his large elbows on the table and said, “Crop dusters.”

  Lockman stared, wondering what in hell Alexia and crop dusters had to do with killing vamps.

  “We fill them with water,” Troy went on. “Have some priests bless the water. Then rain holiness on their vamp asses.”

  A rain of holy water. Lockman smiled. “Nice.”

  Troy did the ogre equivalent of a blush, spots on his cheeks turning a darker green. “Like I said, Alexia inspired me, got me thinking about water, and then it was just like...ping!”

  Lockman turned to Adam. “Feasible?”

  “We have connections that could get us the equipment. It’ll take time putting it together, though. Especially getting it to a location like Barrow.”

  The muscles in Lockman’s neck twinged. Before this day ended, he would probably be chewing on aspirin. “Make it happen as fast as you can. We have less time than we realize.”

  Lockman felt that communal stare at him again. He had the attention of the entire table and he was making them nervous. Good. Because it was time to be nervous. Real nervous if what he’d been thinking about when he had zoned out earlier was right.

  “Last night I told Jessie about the situation in Alaska,” Lockman said. “If Jessie knows, that means Gabriel does, too. The opportunity is too ripe for Gabe to pass up.”

  “Whoa, hold it a sec,” Dixon said. He’d lost some color in his face, accentuating his scar. “You’re saying Gabriel’s headed to Alaska to throw gas on that vamp fire?”

  “I’d bet my life on it.”

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Even without the fatal weakness to it, traveling by daylight was tricky for a vampire. Mortals did not react well to the gray pallor and dark veins, nor the fangs when they accidentally flashed. Going unnoticed proved difficult. Gabriel had filched a makeup kit from a department store and did his best to cover the most obvious indicators of vampirism. Still, when he tried to interact with anyone, they refused to take him seriously because to them he looked like a fifteen year-old girl with a bad makeup job and even worse complexion.

  While he did manage to hitch a ride to the nearest airport, Gabriel had to kill the driver when the driver attempted to rape the girl. Gabriel blamed himself for the attack. He should have known better than to hitchhike in the body of a young teen. However, Gabriel took the opportunity to feed on the failed rapist and drove the old Pontiac himself, with the body in the trunk, the rest of the way to the airport.

  All for naught.

  The woman at the ticket counter refused to sell Gabriel a ticket—which he planned to buy with the cash he had taken from the rapist—insisting he needed parental permission to travel as an unaccompanied minor. Apparently, some airlines had tightened up restrictions since Jessie had flown from Michigan to California to find her father a couple of years earlier.

  Alas, day walking had not been as freeing as Gabriel thought it would.

  You really thought you could just catch a flight north looking the way you do?

  The girl again.

  Gabriel sat at a back table in a fast food restaurant at the airport, contemplating his next move, when her voice interrupted his thoughts. He swallowed his irritation. After all, she was correct. In his haste, he had become short-sighted. Conventional means of travel would not serve. But if a group of average-brained vampires could find their way to a remote city in the middle of the frozen tundra, surely Gabriel could as well.

  After the woman refused to sell him the ticket, he had purchased an atlas from a gift shop. He opened the atlas now to a full map of the United States. He pinpointed his location in Texas and looked at the surrounding areas, not recognizing any of the names outside the big ones like Dallas, Austin, or Fort Worth. He had little knowledge of this state, and no connections to anyone. He knew of no supernatural hotspots, though there had to be some. Such beds of supernatural activity existed in every state.

  Not to worry. He would simply have to make his way out of state. The closest locale he knew that had a strong supernatural presence was in New Mexico. If he pushed, he could make it there by that evening. Of course, he would have to obtain a new vehicle, one without a body in the trunk. Finding and stealing a car added one more annoying step between him and his destiny.

  Embarrassing that he possessed so much power, yet could be stymied by such ridiculous complications.

  Just a common murderer and car thief now, huh?

  Gabriel slapped the atlas shut and stood. Enjoy your laughs now, girl. When darkness reigns, I doubt you’ll find much funny.

  Whatev.

  Ignoring the girl, Gabriel strode out of the restaurant with the atlas tucked under his arm and began the search for his next prey.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  This time they sent the ghost.

  He loomed over Kate as her eyes fluttered open. His glowing face floated only inches from hers. She imagined he meant to scare her, but she managed to close her throat before she screamed and kept as stoic a face as possible while her senses returned after the pixie dust coma Mica put her in...again.

  The ghost named Thom smiled. “Here’s where I say boo.”

  Like with Mica, Kate mentally shoved at the ghost.

  He didn’t budge. That’s when she realized not just his face hovered above her. His whole body floated in the air about six inches over hers. He quirked an eyebrow. “Neat trick, huh?”

  A deep cold oozed through Kate. Goosebumps covered her skin. The memory of another ghost invaded her mind. That was why they sent in Thom. And why he had been the first to interrogate her. They somehow knew about her experience with the ghost who had possessed her. They were using her fear of that encounter against her.

  She wouldn’t let them.

  “I don’t know what you want, but you better back off before I make you.”

  “I’m only here to make sure you don’t put anymore holes in the walls.”

  She tried again to push at him with her mind and got nothing. Her power was gone. Had they somehow taken it? Then why send the ghost. No. She hadn’t lost her power.

/>   She lifted her arm, the one that used to be wounded but now only showed the faintest hint of a scar. While she had slept, someone had removed the tattered bandaged.

  No more blood.

  “You don’t have to fight us,” Thom said. “As Mica tried to explain, we’re on the same team.”

  “A team that kills its own members.”

  He made a face as if she had told the world’s worst joke. “Nobody killed you. Are you dead right now? Are you even a ghost?” He floated away from her, tilted back, and gently eased down so that he stood, or appeared to stand, on the floor beside her bed. “We took you on a trip to the other side. It was the only way to do it.”

  Now that the ghost wasn’t right over her, the cold dissipated some, though she could still feel it emanating from him like winter air through a cracked door. The room smelled like the first hour after a fresh snow. “Do what?”

  “Wake up the stuff that you threw at poor Mica.” He crossed his translucent arms. “You know, I’ve never seen Mica scared like that. And, as a ghost, I know fear.”

  “Is that your sole purpose?” Kate asked. “To scare?”

  He hitched a ghostly shoulder. “If Mr. Kress hadn’t taken me in, probably. He’s given my ‘tween life meaning.”

  Despite the cold and the anger still simmering in her, Kate couldn’t deny her curiosity. She propped herself up on her elbows. “What’s a ‘tween life?”

  “The closest thing to a name my kind of existence has. It’s not life. Not death. Just somewhere in between. ‘Tween.”

  He sounded sad. Kate caught herself feeling sorry for him. Then she remembered where she was and how they’d been treating her. “I want to leave.”

  “Okay.”

  “That’s it?”

  “Can you at least talk to Mr. Kress first? Let him explain some things.”

  “Fine. Take me to him.”

  Thom frowned. “Can you promise not to break the furniture?”

  Kate held her formerly wounded arm up. “All outta blood.”

  The ghost cocked his head, brow furled. “You’re full of blood.”