Darkest Night

by Will Hill

  The Boeing E-3 was unmistakable, even without eyes as sharp as hers. It was huge and fat-bodied, lumbering through the air without the grace of many of the other planes she had watched come and go over the decades, and on its back spun its distinctive radar dome, a saucer as wide as the plane itself that allowed it to scan thousands of miles of earth and sky. Its running lights blazed, and Janet felt the air swirl around her as it was whipped and churned by the approaching aircraft. It touched down with a deafening screech and hurtled past her, its engines howling, but she watched with a smile on her face. Over the course of a long life that had proved disappointing in so many ways, she had always been able to rely on her planes.

  And, in truth, the E-3s were far from the loudest she had known. RAF Waddington was now home to the Intelligence, Surveillance, Target Acquisition and Reconnaissance programme, flying heavy Sentinels and RC-135s that were every bit as noisy as the Sentrys, and unmanned Reaper drones that were ominously quiet. Even now, after so many years, it was rare for Janet to sleep through a take-off, but on several occasions she had seen a Reaper return that she knew she had not seen depart.

  Always at night, she thought. They always take off at night.

  During the Cold War, before the RAF had begun to scale back its bomber fleet, Waddington had been home to three squadrons of Vulcans, the huge delta-shaped planes that had carried Britain’s nuclear deterrent into the stratosphere, ready to lay waste to the USSR if the order came. When they landed, and particularly when they took off, the noise had been so monstrous that Janet had often been left with blood running from her ears and a ringing in her head that lasted for hours. The Wellingtons and Lancasters that had headed east during the Second World War, their bellies heavy with bombs destined for the Ruhr and the Rhineland, had been quieter, although no less capable of causing pain; she had counted each one out and each one back, her heart aching when, all too often, the numbers didn’t match.

  At least you don’t have to worry about that any more, she reminded herself. If nothing else.

  The noise of the Sentry had faded away, and it was again quiet in the garden, although it was never truly silent. There was always the distant rumble of the vehicles on the base and the steady, relentless thud of the radar tower as it revolved, but Janet was so used to such sounds that she barely heard them; she looked no older than forty-five, but she had been living in the small house on the edge of Waddington for almost eighty years.

  Janet flew back through her garden and into her kitchen. She stirred the saucepan of soup that was simmering on the stove, and poured herself a glass of wine as her supernatural hearing picked up the sound of an engine out on the road. When she had bought the house, cars had been the preserve of only the most well off, and the road that now ran through the woods towards Lincoln had been a rutted track that reached a dead end half a mile to the east. It was still far from being a main thoroughfare, but the cars that did come along it tended to be going much too fast, and were usually driven by teenagers. There were dozens of turnings in the woods where they parked up to drink and smoke with their friends, and do other things with their boyfriends and girlfriends, things that Janet did not remotely approve of. She was sure that the modern generation would consider her ancient and out of touch, but that was perfectly fine with her; she was, after all, more than a hundred and twenty years old.

  She gave her soup another stir, and was raising her glass to her lips when the lights in her house went out.

  Janet swore heartily; for a self-confessed prude, she possessed a remarkably colourful vocabulary, acquired in a munitions factory during the war. One of the downsides of her home’s remoteness was the unreliability of its utilities; the electricity was unpredictable, to say the least, and she rarely went an entire winter without the drains blocking or her phone and television being cut off. She marched across the kitchen and pulled open the door that led down to her cellar. Bolted to the wall on the landing was the fuse box that had been installed ten years earlier; she had rewired the entire house after noticing that one of the plugs in the living room was sparking and fizzing behind plastic that was visibly melting.

  None of the fuses appeared to have blown. She flipped the main breaker to OFF, then back to ON, but the house remained as dark and silent as a mortuary. Janet swore again, and flew to the front door. The overhead electricity wires wound up the road from Waddington village, and regularly got snarled in the branches that loomed out over the road from the trees on both sides.

  Let’s hope it’s that, she thought, as she pulled on her coat. As long as it’s not the bloody substation again. Last time that blew it was a week before they got everything sorted.

  Janet opened the front door and looked up at the telegraph pole that stood at the edge of the road. There was nothing obviously wrong, and she sighed as she trudged down the path; she was going to have to walk the two miles to Waddington, checking it as she went. The last time she rang the electricity company to report a fault the audibly bored operator had questioned why she hadn’t already done so, and she had no intention of giving them the chance to be snippy with her again.

  She unlatched the gate and set off down the road. She walked briskly, her supernaturally powerful eyes raised towards the sky as she followed the electricity wires. As a result, she almost didn’t notice the van parked in the lay-by at the crest of the hill.

  Janet’s first thought was to keep walking. A stationary vehicle was not an unusual sight in this part of the world, where the woods and back roads afforded people the kind of privacy that had become all too rare in the modern world, and she had learnt through bitter experience that people who parked in the darkness were usually not keen on being disturbed.

  But something about the van made her pause. Its internal lights were on, and she could still feel the heat of its engine, which meant it had not been stopped for long, but she could hear neither voices nor the sounds that accompanied other things that might be happening inside the vehicle. She stared at the van for a long moment, then flew slowly across the lay-by and peered through the driver’s side window. The key was in the ignition, but she had been right; there was nobody in the van.

  It was empty.

  Janet frowned. It made no sense; poaching was still prevalent in the woods, as was trapping, and badger baiting, but if whoever owned the van was intent on illegal activity, why would they leave the key in the ignition?

  Somewhere to her left a branch snapped.

  She turned, surprised by the heat that had risen behind her eyes. The woods were full of noise, particularly to ears as sensitive as hers, but the sound had been different from the usual rustling and whispering; it had sounded more solid, more deliberate.

  It had sounded heavy.

  Janet stood in the lay-by, her eyes glowing softly, her senses heightened, her heart accelerating, and made a decision. She would turn back, and sort out the electricity tomorrow. She would walk the road to Waddington as soon as the sun set, and not a minute before. Because all of a sudden, she just wanted to get home. She wanted to get home as quickly as possible.

  Snap.

  She froze. This one had been further away than the last, she was sure of it, but she had heard something else, something that was unmistakably not natural.

  Out in the darkness of the woods, she had heard a muffled laugh.

  Fire roared into Janet’s eyes. She didn’t know why she was suddenly scared; she was old, and strong, and she knew this part of the world better than anyone else alive. But the fear was there, and it was real; it twisted in her stomach like an eel. She backed slowly away from the van, which now seemed somehow malevolent, hulking and dark and out of place. The gravel beneath her feet gave way to the smooth surface of the road, and she turned back the way she had come, towards home.

  Snap.

  Janet leapt into the air and flew along the road, her eyes darting left and right, searching the dark trees for whoever was moving between them. She would never usually display her condition so publicly,
but in that moment, she didn’t care; she wanted to be safe in her kitchen, lighting candles and laughing at herself for being so easily spooked.

  Her house loomed into view. Janet rose higher into the air and flew straight towards it, ignoring the gate and the wall and the path to the front door. She sped round the house, her heart pounding, and wrenched open the back door. She dived through it, and flung it shut behind her. Before it slammed into its frame, she heard a noise that sounded close, so close.

  Snap.

  Janet hauled open the drawer beside the stove, and pulled out a handful of thick candles. She struck a match and lit them; each one took several tries, as her hand was trembling. She could see perfectly well in the dark, but the pale yellow light of the candles calmed her, ever so slightly, as she took the phone down from its cradle on the wall. She lifted the handset to her ear, ready to call the police, knowing it was silly but not caring in the slightest.

  Nothing.

  The line was dead.

  Janet stared at the phone, frozen where she stood. In the distance, she heard a Sentinel rumbling down towards the runway, but for once she paid the approaching plane no attention. She didn’t know what was happening outside her house, but she was now horribly sure that she was at the centre of it.

  Footsteps crunched quietly down the path outside her front door as another branch snapped, so close that it must surely have been inside her garden. And there was something else: a low hissing noise, like gas escaping from a split pipe. Janet stared at the kitchen window, paralysed by terror, in the candlelit gloom.

  Snap.

  The sound unleashed something inside Janet; anger exploded through her, burning away the fear that had gripped her, and she strode through the house, her eyes blazing.

  This is ridiculous, she told herself. Cowering in your own home like a child. You should be ashamed of yourself. You march right out there and you make whoever is doing this regret it.

  She threw the front door open, a growl rising from her throat. The roar of the Sentinel’s engines was rising behind the house, partially deafening her as she strode out on to the path, her glowing eyes searching the darkness.

  “Who’s there?” she shouted. “This is private property! Get away or you’ll be sorry!”

  Nothing moved. Beyond the gate, the road and the woods were silent and still. The Sentinel was almost down, its engines screaming, its landing lights casting bright, artificial daylight across the house and its gardens.

  “No?” she bellowed, her voice barely audible over the thunder of the landing plane. “Not willing to show yourselves? I thought as much!”

  Janet turned back towards her house and felt her heart stop dead in her chest. The door had swung shut as she shouted at nothing, and there was something there, something white and dripping. She took a half-step towards it, the fire in her eyes fading, the Sentinel shaking the ground beneath her.

  It was a wolf’s head, crudely sprayed on to the door with white paint.

  A black-gloved hand pressed something soft and damp over her mouth and nose. Janet’s eyes flared red as panic and a pungent chemical smell filled her; she tried to move, to free herself, but her limbs felt like they were made of lead. Her mouth worked silently against the cloth, screaming for whoever was holding her to let her go, and her head swam as the plane screeched down on to the runway and thundered away into the distance.

  Then her panic disappeared, drifting back into the darkness it had come from, and Janet was suddenly warm and calm and tired, more tired than she had ever been, so tired that she could no longer keep her eyes open.

  Paul Turner stared at the wall screen opposite his desk, and felt for a brief moment like he was going to burst into tears.

  The Blacklight Director could count on the fingers of one hand the times he had cried as an adult; the most recent, and by far the worst, occasion had been when he had carried the dead body of his son into the Loop after Valeri Rusmanov had murdered him. Those had been tears of agony, of insatiable grief, that had risen up from the very depths of his soul; what were threatening to appear in the corners of his eyes now were tears of almost unbearable relief.

  The screen was tuned to the BBC News channel. BREAKING NEWS filled the bottom quarter of the screen as a bright red and white ticker crawled slowly above the headline, six words scrolling from right to left in endless repetition:

  PRIME MINISTER ANNOUNCES VAMPIRE

  CURE, AMNESTY

  The centre of the screen showed a shot of the Prime Minister, as sombre and handsome and sharply dressed as always, standing behind a lectern on Downing Street. In front of him, a tightly packed scrum of journalists jostled behind a rope barrier, waving microphones and voice recorders in the air.

  “For those of you just joining us,” said the disembodied voice of the presenter, “let’s listen again to the statement made by the Prime Minister less than half an hour ago.”

  The sound switched to the excited clamour of the parliamentary press corps, as the Prime Minister gave them a nod and smiled briefly at them.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said. “I am pleased to announce to the people of the United Kingdom, and to everyone listening around the world, that Her Majesty’s government has today received an exemption from the World Health Organisation for the public release of an unprecedented drug treatment. The treatment, which was developed by the security department most commonly referred to as Blacklight, is a genetically engineered virus designed to reverse the effects of the condition known throughout the world as vampirism. I am pleased to announce that, so far, it has proven one hundred per cent effective.”

  There was an explosion of noise as the journalists surged forward against the rope line, bellowing a thousand questions at once.

  “What I am announcing this morning,” continued the Prime Minister, “is that, beginning tonight, this new treatment will be made available on a voluntary basis to any and all sufferers of vampirism. It will be distributed at a number of major hospitals throughout the United Kingdom, under the supervision of qualified physicians and the protection of Blacklight. The names and locations of these hospitals will be released shortly. Following meetings of the Cabinet and COBRA, and discussions with the Attorney General and the Home Secretary, I am also announcing a legal amnesty for all men and women who voluntarily receive this treatment, covering any and all crimes committed while suffering the effects of the vampire virus. This amnesty has received cross-party backing in both houses of Parliament, and will provide a clean slate for those afflicted by this terrible condition, and a new beginning for us all. This is a momentous day.”

  The news channel cut back to the studio, where the presenter was staring into the camera with an expression of professional solemnity.

  “We’re going to leave Downing Street now and get some live reaction to this remarkable announcement,” he said. “In the studio with me are—”

  Turner muted the screen. He knew that footage of the statement would be playing endlessly on every TV channel in the world, and he wondered what reaction it was causing in the homes of vampires, in the halls of power, and in the canteen and Briefing Rooms of his own Department. If nothing else, it had, at least temporarily, put an end to the coverage of Dracula’s second video, which was a great relief. He had been given the heads-up by the Prime Minister barely five minutes before the announcement was made; the message had been short, and to the point.

  Turn a TV On And Pat Yourself

  On The Back.

  He had forwarded the message to Robert Karlsson and Matt Browning, then settled down to watch the world change forever.

  A tone rang out as a comms window opened up on the screen. Turner read the name of the caller, smiled, and clicked ACCEPT.

  “Good morning, Prime Minister,” he said. “And well done, if you don’t mind me saying so.”

  “Thank you, Major,” said the politician. “The credit belongs entirely to you and your Department.”

  “How hard did you have to figh
t for the amnesty?” asked Turner. He had recommended it to the politician the morning after bringing him up to speed on the cure – it had been the key strategic recommendation of both the Security and Intelligence Divisions – and he was delighted to see it announced; he had not been at all confident that it would be.

  “Quite hard,” said the Prime Minister. “There was some … resistance, shall we say, from certain quarters.”

  “I can imagine, sir,” said Turner.

  “It was the right thing to do, though,” said the Prime Minster. “This has been a very good day, Major Turner, for the entire country. For the entire world, no less. Now we need to get to work.”

  “Yes, sir,” said Turner. “What do you need from me?”

  “I’m going to be relying on your Operators to provide security at the hospitals,” said the Prime Minister. “Can I count on your help?”

  “Of course,” said Turner.

  “Good. We should have the location list within the hour.”

  “I’ll have a plan drawn up as soon as I see it, sir.”

  There was a long silence.

  “This really is an incredible achievement, Major,” said the Prime Minister, eventually. “Your scientists have done a remarkable thing, and the people of this country are going to be immensely grateful to you all.”

  “Thank you, sir,” he said. “I’ll make sure the Lazarus staff know that.”

  “Good,” said the Prime Minister. “Thank you, Major. I’ll be in touch later today.”

  “Goodbye, sir.”

  “Goodbye.”

  There was a loud click as the connection was cut. For almost a minute, Paul Turner didn’t move; his mind had been overwhelmed by a wave of emotions that had become unfamiliar in recent months and years.

  Pride. Satisfaction. Optimism.

  Happiness.

  Jamie stared through the window in the infirmary door with a lump in his throat and familiar anger in his stomach.

  He knew that taking the cure had been his mother’s choice, and he knew it was not one she would have made lightly, but the sight of her lying in a hospital bed still hurt his heart. The anger churning through him was due to another decision that had been made: to place the infirmary off-limits to everyone apart from the medical staff and members of the Lazarus Project. He understood the reasoning, but it was nonetheless a source of great frustration; when he had reached the long white room after his awful confrontation with Matt in the Lazarus laboratory, his mother had been sleeping off the surgery to repair her broken arm, and by the time he had tried to see her the next morning, the new order had been given. As a result, he had not been able to see her since she had been cured, more than a week ago.