Department 19: The Rising

by Will Hill

  “He’s here voluntarily!” shouted Jamie. “Hold your fire.”

  Discontent rumbled through the crowd; T-Bones twitched in the cold evening air as gloved fingers rested on their triggers, but the Operators complied, at least for the time being.

  Valentin floated down from the van, the smile on his face still broad, his heels clicking the concrete as he walked briskly over to Admiral Seward. “You are Henry Seward, are you not?” he asked.

  “I am,” the Director replied, his eyes staring directly into the vampire’s.

  “How lovely to meet you,” said Valentin. “Director Seward, my associate and I formally request asylum among the fine men and women of Department 19. I have information I believe you will find useful, and I offer my service in the coming fight against my brother and his master.”

  “Valentin Rusmanov,” replied Seward, “I accept your request for asylum, pending an assessment of the value of the intelligence you claim to be able to provide. You will be remanded into Blacklight custody, while that assessment is carried out. Is that clear to you?”

  Valentin grinned. “It certainly is, my dear Director. And I am ready to begin whenever you are; if you would be so good as to show Lamberton to our rooms and provide me with a pot of coffee, I’ll happily tell you anything you want to know.”

  Jamie stood in Admiral Seward’s office, waiting for the Director to finish his call to the Prime Minister.

  The Loop was buzzing with the news of Valentin’s arrival; Jamie and his squad had been deluged with questions as they tried to make their way through the hangar, and Jamie had been regarded with a level of awe that seemed to border on suspicion.

  There had only ever been four Priority Level 1 vampires; Dracula himself and the three Rusmanov brothers. Jamie had now destroyed one and had a second make a point of surrendering to him personally. He knew that even as he stood, waiting patiently to be debriefed by the Director, his name was once again being whispered through the levels of the Loop, and he knew that not all of what was being said would be complimentary.

  As Valentin and his servant walked casually out of the hangar, surrounded by three squads of Operators looking for the slightest suspicious movement and watched incredulously by almost a hundred men, Admiral Seward had appeared at Jamie’s side and told him he expected to be debriefed in his office in ten minutes. Jamie had asked whether the Director was requesting the presence of the whole of Squad G-17, and was told that only he need attend.

  Admiral Seward hung up his phone, then regarded Jamie with a smile of mild incomprehension.

  “It’s always you, isn’t it?” he said. “Why don’t these things happen to anyone else? Why is it always you?”

  “Just lucky, sir,” replied Jamie.

  “You don’t believe that any more than I do,” said Seward. “Tell me the truth; why do you think Valentin Rusmanov chose you, out of all the Operators from all the Departments in the world, to surrender to?”

  “Honestly, sir,” said Jamie. “I don’t know. When I saw him, I thought he was there to kill me for what I did to Alexandru. But then he mentioned something about my grandfather; he told me they met a long time ago. I think him coming to me had something to do with that, sir.”

  “That makes a certain amount of sense,” said Seward. “John, your grandfather, was officially retired by the time I joined the Department in ’81, but he was still around so much you would never have known it. He used to talk about Valentin with a sort of grudging respect; I always thought it was a worthy adversary sort of thing, but maybe there was more to it.”

  “Maybe, sir,” said Jamie. “My granddad certainly seems to have left an impression on him.”

  “You’d have liked John,” said Seward, nostalgia creeping into his voice. “Everybody did. It’s a shame you never got to meet him; he’d have been incredibly proud of you.”

  A lump leapt into Jamie’s throat.

  “Thank you, sir,” he replied. “I’d like to think that’s true.” He tried to force the lump back down, and struck out for safer ground where his dead ancestors weren’t waiting around every corner to pull at his heartstrings.

  “Who’s going to lead the interrogation of Valentin, sir?” he asked.

  “Major Turner,” replied Seward.

  “Good news,” said Jamie. “Sir, I really need to get some sleep. May I be dismissed?”

  “By all means,” replied Seward. “I’d advise you to get as much as you can. The interrogation is scheduled to begin at 0800 tomorrow, and attendance is mandatory for all Zero Hour Task Force members. Please try not to be late.”

  Jamie’s face fell. “Sir, how long do you think the interrogation is going to last?” he asked.

  Seward laughed. “You mean, how long will it take for Valentin Rusmanov to tell us everything he knows that we don’t?” he replied. “I’d clear your schedule. Indefinitely.”

  Jamie walked along the corridor outside the Director’s quarters, his head pounding.

  The exhilaration of bringing Valentin Rusmanov to the Loop was wearing off, leaving in its place a sticky, bitter-tasting feeling of unease. He had spoken to Kate and Larissa in a way he had never done before, and he had no idea where his words had left them, whether what seemed to be broken between them could be repaired.

  Suddenly he was overcome with an overwhelming wave of grief that he couldn’t talk to Frankenstein about what was happening; the monster’s advice was often not the easiest to hear, but his motives had proved to be beyond question.

  He was the one person who had always been on Jamie’s side.

  Then the nervous, earnest image of his mother appeared in his head, and guilt quickly displaced grief.

  I forget, he thought. Sometimes I forget she’s down there.

  He walked quickly to the lift at the end of the corridor, and pressed the button that would take him down to Level H, the detention level. Despite everything he was, everything the people around him wanted him to be, he was still a teenage boy who sometimes, just sometimes, really needed his mother.

  22

  TINFOIL HATS

  STAVELEY, NORTH DERBYSHIRE TWO HOURS EARLIER

  Matt Browning was almost at the front door when his father called his name from the living room. He cursed silently, dropped his backpack by the umbrella stand and went to see what his dad wanted.

  His mother had taken his sister to visit Matt’s grandparents in Grantham for the weekend, leaving the men of the family alone. The debate had lasted almost a week, as Lynne Browning tried to convince herself it was all right for her to let her son out of her sight for a whole forty-eight hours. She had eventually caught a taxi to the train station the previous evening, casting glances back at the house as the car pulled away, despite Matt and Greg’s endless reassurances that they could look after each other for a single weekend.

  “All right, Dad,” he said, as casually as he was able to manage.

  It had taken him most of the day to work himself up to what he was about to do, and he knew himself well enough to know that if he was delayed too long by his father, he might conceivably lose his nerve.

  “How’s it going?” asked Greg, brightly. “Everything all right?”

  Matt’s father was sitting in his armchair in front of the TV, peering round at his son. On the previous occasions that his wife had gone away for the weekend, the area surrounding the chair would by this point have already become a mountain of empty lager cans and crumpled takeaway trays, but the floor was scrupulously clear. It was one of many small things that changed since Matt had come home.

  “I’m fine, Dad,” replied Matt, forcing a smile. “You OK?”

  Greg nodded. “You heading out?” he asked.

  “Going to Jeff’s,” replied Matt. “We’ve got a project. Is that all right?”

  “Of course,” replied Greg. “Of course it is.” There was a pregnant pause, which Matt resisted the urge to fill. It seemed as though his dad wanted to say something else, but after a few seconds, he simply s
miled at his son. “Have a good time,” he said. “Don’t stay out too late, OK?”

  “I won’t, Dad,” replied Matt. “I promise.”

  His father nodded, then turned back to the TV.

  Matt gratefully backed out of the living room and into the hall. He slung the backpack over his shoulder for the second time, took a quick glance around the house he had lived in his whole life, then opened the front door and stepped outside.

  The backpack contained nothing that would have been any use to Jeff, who Matt knew was playing football in the park at the end of their road, or that would have helped with a school project. Inside his bag were two sandwiches he had bought on his way home from school, a bottle of water and a wooden stake he had carved in the school woodwork shop during his lunch hour.

  He had felt faintly ridiculous carving it, and had kept a close eye on the doors to the technology block; he had no desire to try and explain what he was making to anyone. He doubted that it would be of any real use if he encountered a vampire; he had always gone to great lengths to avoid even the remote possibility of a fight with anyone, let alone a creature like the girl who had landed in his garden. But it made him feel slightly better to have it in his backpack.

  Matt closed the gate to the small front garden behind him, turned to his right and started walking. Behind him, he could hear shouts and whistles from the park at the end of the road, the soundtrack of a dozen ramshackle games of football, of teenage boys and girls furtively smoking and drinking cheap cider and wine. He had never had much interest in that world, filled as it was with pitfalls and dishonesty and insincerity, and since waking up in the infirmary, he had turned his back on it entirely.

  He had barely spoken to anyone at school, a stance that had gone unnoticed for the first day or so, before boys who had no normal desire to talk to him began taking fraudulent offence at his distant demeanour, and began to demand he speak. They had realised he didn’t want to, so now there was sport in making him do so.

  He walked quickly through the fading light of the evening. He passed the small high street, ignored a couple of half-hearted shouted insults from some of the sixth-formers who were congregated round the Chinese takeaway, swigging heartily from brown plastic bottles of cider. At the end of the road, he swung left through a narrow alley between a furniture shop and an empty lot, his heartrate rising momentarily as he remembered the time that Mark Morris had chased him through the alley with a pot of UVA glue, promising Matt that he was going to glue his eyes shut if he caught him. He hadn’t, but the memory still made Matt’s stomach churn.

  At the end of the main road, fifteen minutes’ walk away, was another park, and it was this expanse of green, far enough away from his house and the prying eyes of the small number of people who might recognise him, that was his destination. He adjusted the backpack, and walked quickly towards it.

  Next to the metal gates that led into the park was a public phone box. Matt stepped into it, placed his bag on the ground and lifted the receiver from its cradle. He took a deep breath.

  You know it’s real. You were there. You know.

  He reached out with a hand that trembled slightly in the evening air and dialled 999. A female voice answered instantly.

  “999 emergency, which service do you require?”

  “None of them,” he answered, his voice steady.

  “Pardon me?” asked the voice.

  “I need something else.”

  “Please state your emergency or I will report this as a nuisance call.”

  Matt fished a piece of paper out of his pocket, and held it up in front of his face. On it were written six words.

  “My name is Matt Browning,” he said. “I just saw two vampires attacking a girl in Centenary Park, Staveley, North Derbyshire.”

  “Sir, I don’t have time—”

  “I saw their fangs clearly. I saw blood on the girl’s neck. Then two men showed up and followed the vampires. They were wearing black uniforms. With purple visors.”

  “Sir, I have reported this call. Please clear the line immediately, or there will be serious consequences.”

  “Absolutely,” said Matt. “Thank you.”

  He hung up the phone, slung his bag back over his shoulder and stepped out of the phone box. The gates to the park were still open; he walked steadily through them, then made his way to a small children’s playground not far from the entrance. He sat down on a swing, and began to wait.

  One hundred miles to the north, inside the Department 19 Northern Outpost at RAF Fylingdales, a light began to flash on the wide radio desk, and a console standing beside it began to beep.

  The Duty Operator, a young man named Fitzwilliam, hit a button on the control panel, and a printer whirred into life. The sheet of paper that emerged from the tray was headed ECHELON INTERCEPT, and contained a transcript of the call that Matt had made, only ninety seconds earlier. Fitzwilliam read it, entered it into the electronic logbook on his computer screen and keyed a six-digit code into a panel on the radio desk.

  In the Loop’s Surveillance Division, the message emerged from a bank of printers next to a real-time satellite map of the UK, on which a new red dot had now appeared. An Operator passed the printout to the Divisional Duty Officer, who immediately picked up the telephone on his desk, and told the person on the other end of the line that they had a Condition 6.

  Somewhere else, the transcript of the phone call appeared on the screen of a laptop, the letters glowing green in the darkened room. A hand pressed a series of keys, opening a live VOIP connection.

  “There may be a problem,” said a voice.

  Twenty minutes later Matt was swinging his legs gently beneath him, lost in thought, when a voice called his name. He started, almost overbalanced, then gripped the chains of the swing in his hands and looked towards the source of the sound, a surge of excitement bursting through him.

  It worked. It really worked.

  Then he caught sight of the two men approaching him, and his excitement was swiftly replaced by a cold ripple of fear.

  The men were walking towards him with smiles on their faces, their arms dangling loosely at their sides, but neither was wearing the black uniform that Matt had seen on the soldiers who came into his house, the military overalls and body armour that he had been expecting. Nor was either wearing a helmet with a purple visor. The two men, who were now only fifteen metres away from him, were wearing dark suits, and the smiles on their faces were too wide, like the grins of sharks.

  Matt leapt down from the swing; he could feel adrenaline pouring into his bloodstream, could feel the muscles in his legs tensing, telling him to run, but he forced himself to stand his ground. Then one of the men drew back his lips and grinned at Matt with a mouthful of teeth that looked like carving knives, and he turned and sprinted across the playground.

  He ran hard, his arms and legs pumping, his eyes locked on the copse of trees that stood beyond the low fence that enclosed the children’s area. He didn’t look back, not even when he heard two strange rushes of air, like the noise a foot pump makes if it is not connected to anything; he just ran. Then the air fluttered around him, and the two men dropped casually out of the sky in front of him. They made no sound as they landed, their feet sliding gently to the ground. Matt skidded to a halt, no more than two metres away from them.

  “Where do you think you’re going?”

  It was the one with the mouth full of knives who spoke, his grin now so wide it looked as though it was about to tear his face in half.

  “Little boys who cry wolf need to be punished,” he continued, and this drew a dull, rasping laugh from his partner.

  Matt stared at them, rooted to the ground by fear, the adrenaline in his system already used up and gone.

  “I’ve got an idea,” said the second man, the one who had laughed. “Let’s see if he can still make phone calls without a tongue.”

  From behind him, there came a screech of tyres, but Matt’s brain barely registered it. H
e was going to die, or worse. Vampires were real; he had been right, and it was going to be his undoing.

  Then a voice bellowed for him to get down, and he threw himself to the concrete. Two loud explosions of air burst in the silent park, then two somethings whistled above his head, whining through the air. Two horrible crunching noises sounded, awfully near him. A pair of dull thuds shook the ground beneath him, and something foul and wet pattered down on his hands and the back of his neck, like a thick rain.

  Matt lifted his head. The two vampires were gone; where they had been were wide splashes of crimson, studded with lumps of steaming flesh. His gorge rose in his throat, and he gagged, clamping a hand across his mouth and looking away.

  “Matt Browning?”

  He rolled over on to his back, looked up and saw his reflection in a curved piece of purple plastic. There were two figures standing over him, dressed in black uniforms, their faces covered by visored helmets. Both were carrying a weapon Matt had never seen before, a long wide tube with a handle and a trigger set into the underside. One of the figures, he guessed it was the one who had said his name, was extending a hand down towards him. Then a wave of nausea hit him, and his vision turned grey at the edges.

  “Oh good,” he said, dreamily. “You came. I knew you would.”

  Then he fell back on to the concrete in a dead faint.

  88 DAYS TILL ZERO HOUR

  23

  THE INTERROGATION OF VALENTIN RUSMANOV

  Jamie walked on to Level H ten minutes before the interrogation was due to begin, but still found himself the last to arrive. The rest of the Zero Hour Task Force were already gathered outside the Security Office as he emerged from the double airlock and cast a glance down the corridor, to the last cell on the left where his mother now lived.