Darkest Night

by Will Hill

  “What are you saying?” asked Pete. He could hear how thick his own voice sounded, how audibly on the verge of tears. “That SSL was never real? It was all just a cover for this?”

  “I’m sorry,” said Greg. “I really would’ve told you if I thought you could have handled it. I wanted to. We’re making a new world, mate. A better world. I just wish you were going to be there to see it.”

  The gun came up so quickly and smoothly that Pete barely saw it move before it was pointing at his chest. Panic exploded through him, and he hurled himself to the left as Greg pulled the trigger.

  The gunfire was deafening metallic thunder as he crashed to the ground beside the black van. He scrambled to his feet as he heard Greg bellow something incoherent behind him, and took off along the canal bank, sprinting for his life. Dust and shards of tarmac exploded around his feet as the night was shattered by a second burst of gunfire, but he kept running, not risking a look over his shoulder to see if they were coming, his mind empty of anything but the desperate, primal instinct to survive.

  His feet pounded across the concrete as he accelerated; in the gloom ahead of him, a distant wrought-iron bridge led into the towering maze of buildings on the other side of the waterway, and he fixed his gaze on it. If he made it across, he might be able to lose them, double back to his car, and make it out of this alive.

  Gunfire roared behind him for the third time, but he thought it sounded quieter, as though it was coming from ever so slightly further away. He still didn’t risk a backward glance, but his heart surged with sudden, savage hope.

  I’m getting away, he thought.

  Something punched him in the shoulder, harder than he had ever been hit by anything in his life. He spun round, saw blood fly in the dark air, blood that a distant, detached part of his brain understood was his own, and felt his balance fail him. His legs tangled, he pitched to his right, and tumbled over the low rail into the dark canal below.

  The water was shockingly cold, and he sank instantly, his legs slamming painfully into the uneven bottom of the canal. For a terrible moment, one of his feet caught on something and wouldn’t move; Pete thrashed, bubbles erupting from his mouth, and hauled for all he was worth. He hung, suspended below the surface, until slowly, agonisingly slowly, his foot came free, like a cork escaping from a champagne bottle. He dragged himself upwards, clawing at the water with one arm as the other hung uselessly at his side. He broke the surface, took a huge, gasping breath, then was sucked back under again as the current pulled at him, sending him tumbling downstream as his head began to pound and black and red spots swarmed at the edges of his vision.

  He fought with everything he had left, reaching for the surface with his one working hand, his lungs screaming and spasming in his chest. He could see light above him, and knew there were only another thirty centimetres to go, another fifteen, another two, just one more.

  Pete shoved himself up with all his strength, with everything he had left.

  He didn’t make it.

  Darkness crowded in, and everything went black.

  The staff of University College Hospital were used to seeing things that were unusual; their accident and emergency department served a large section of Central London, and regularly received more than three hundred patients a day, with everything from broken fingers and infected insect bites to heart attacks and gunshot wounds. But none of the staff had ever seen anything quite as strange as the convoy of black vans that pulled up outside the hospital’s side entrance, and the men and women who climbed out of them.

  Jamie Carpenter stepped out of the second van, his visor down over his face. Qiang appeared beside him, followed by an Operator that neither of them were familiar with: an American in her early twenties by the name of Laura O’Malley, who had been temporarily added to their squad after Lizzy Ellison had been selected for the first round of PROMETHEUS. O’Malley had not said much on the drive down to London, but she seemed calm and composed, and the fact that Larissa had selected her from the ranks of NS9 meant that Jamie was not worried. If anything, he was more worried about his own mental state than hers; he had tried to push the Zero Hour briefing out of his mind, to focus on the task at hand rather than replay his awful, awkward conversation with Matt over and over again, but was struggling to do so.

  I still can’t believe he would use me like that, or lie to my face so casually, or line his friends and colleagues up to be bitten by Valentin. I can’t believe any of it.

  He surveyed the scene as the other two vans discharged their passengers, ordering himself to concentrate. There would be time to deal with Matt later; right now, there was work to do.

  The side street was long and narrow, running between the hospital and one of the many red-brick buildings that made up University College London. Ambulance bays were marked out on the ground in straight yellow lines, and a wide glass entrance was set back from the sloping kerb, beneath a wide canopy. Standing in front of the doors was a man in a white coat; he was holding a clipboard and looking at the vans with a mixture of curiosity and obvious unease.

  From the lead van, Jamie saw three more Operators step down on to the road. One of them was Jack Williams, who was technically in charge of this Operation, and the others were the usual members of his squad; neither Ben Harris nor Kim Caldwell had been lucky – or unlucky – enough to be selected for PROMETHEUS.

  A member of the Lazarus Project that Jamie didn’t know climbed out of the third van, alongside the same member of the Loop’s medical staff who had looked after him when he went through the turn himself. The man held a large plastic box in his hands, stamped on all sides with HAZARDOUS MATERIAL warnings; he carried it carefully across to where Jamie was standing, and forced a thin smile.

  Jack Williams arrived beside them, raised his visor, and turned to the man standing in the hospital doorway.

  “Doctor Walder?”

  “That’s right,” said the man.

  “Good to meet you,” said Jack. “You’ll pardon me if my colleagues and I don’t introduce ourselves, but this is Doctor Bartholomew of our Department’s medical team, and Professor Van Eich of our Science Division. He was part of the team that developed the cure.”

  “Pleased to meet you both,” said Walder. “You can go inside.”

  “Thank you,” said Bartholomew, and walked towards the entrance, holding the box out before him as though it might explode if not handled with the utmost care. Van Eich followed him, leaving Walder with a small, confused smile on his face.

  “This is crazy,” he said. “We’ve never done anything like this before.”

  “Nobody has,” said Jack. “Do you have everything you need, Doctor?”

  Walder nodded. “We’ve set up like we were told,” he said. “We’ve padded three sealable rooms, we’ve got beds for a hundred and fifty vampires, and the eighth and ninth floors have been placed into isolation.”

  “Great,” said Jack. “Both Bartholomew and Van Eich have radios. They have orders to call us if anything goes wrong.”

  “You’ll be down here?”

  “Correct,” said Jack. “Our understanding is that this is where the action is likely to be.”

  Walder frowned momentarily, then smiled. “You haven’t been to the front yet, have you?”

  “Not yet,” said Jack. “Why?”

  “You’ll see,” said Walder. “We’ll call if we need you. Be careful.”

  He strode into the hospital, leaving the six Operators standing on the tarmac.

  “What did he mean, be careful?” asked Qiang.

  “I don’t know,” said Jack. “Let’s find out.”

  “OK,” said Jamie. “I get it now.”

  The six Operators were standing on the steps in front of the hospital’s main entrance. The area below them, a wide section of Euston Road, had been encircled and sectioned off by a perimeter of metal crowd-control barriers, which wound back and forth on themselves in long snaking lines. Every centimetre of space inside the barriers
was full of vampires; the queue stretched along the front of the hospital, doubled back along its width eight times, and disappeared round the corner on to Gower Street. Qiang had done a rough headcount, and had told them there were at least four hundred men and women already waiting in line.

  This is crazy, thought Jamie. I never expected there to be anything like this many. And I know we only brought a hundred and fifty doses of the cure.

  Beyond the queuing vampires, penned inside a second grid of barriers and separated by a wall of uniformed Metropolitan police officers, two large crowds surged and shouted and sang. The smell of alcohol was thick in the air, and though the mood seemed to be largely jovial at present, there was an undercurrent of menace that Jamie didn’t like. The police were clearly aware of it too; the aggression with which they were pushing people back from the barriers was visibly increasing.

  The group on the left was waving signs and boards that made their position abundantly clear; Jamie could see one that read VAMPIRES ARE NOT A DISEASE and another announcing that HUMAN BEINGS DON’T NEED TO BE CURED. On the other side of the line of police, the signs sent a very different message; NO AMNESTY FOR VAMP KILLERS said one, NO CURE FOR EVIL another. The two groups were chanting and screaming insults at each other; Jamie watched them with a tight knot of tension in his stomach, aware that the faces in both crowds of protesters were becoming angrier with each passing minute.

  This is going to boil over, he thought. This is going to end with somebody getting hurt.

  “What do you reckon?” asked Jack.

  “I’m not sure,” he said. “Let’s see what happens when we start letting people in.”

  Jack nodded. “And when we start turning people away.”

  Jamie grimaced. “Shit. Right.”

  Jack turned to face the rest of the Operators. “Qiang, O’Malley, take position at the far end of the access road,” he said. “Only ambulances come in and out, clear?”

  The two Operators nodded, and jogged back towards the corner of the building.

  “Harris, Caldwell, I want the two of you working the queue,” continued Jack. “Make sure the police understand what they’re dealing with. Jamie and I will monitor from up here. Remember that we’re here to help this run smoothly, not exacerbate the situation. Understood?”

  Jack’s squad mates nodded. They walked down towards the queue and moved away along the line of vampires in opposite directions, their MP7s drawn but lowered at their sides.

  Jamie watched them go. “I’m already wishing there were more than six of us,” he said.

  Jack gave him a tight smile. “Me too.”

  The doors of the hospital’s main entrance slid open behind them, and Jamie turned to see Walder step through them. The doctor looked out across the crowd, then shouted for everyone’s attention. The cacophony dropped, just a little, as every pair of eyes turned towards him.

  “Thank you,” he said. “My name is Doctor Andrew Walder. I’m the clinical director here at University College Hospital. We’re going to start admitting patients now, but I can already tell you just from looking at this queue that not all of you are going to receive the cure this evening. We will treat as many people as is humanly possible, but you’ll need to be patient, and we will shut the programme down at the first sign of any trouble out here. Am I making myself perfectly clear?”

  There was a low rumble of grudging agreement.

  “All right then,” said Walder. “We’ll take the first ten of you now.”

  The police officers at the front of the queue stepped aside. Ten men and women walked up the steps to a chorus of boos and pleading from the protesters on the left and a shouted volley of insults and accusations from those on the right. Jamie watched them; they walked with their heads up, and if they heard the abuse coming from behind them they gave no sign of it.

  The vampires disappeared into the hospital as the protesters started up their songs and chants again. Jamie frowned behind his visor, and realised that his hand had gone to the butt of his MP7.

  That’s ten, he told himself. Only a hundred and forty more to go.

  For the next two hours, Jamie watched group after group of vampires file through the doors to an ever more boisterous response from the crowds beyond the queue.

  There had been a number of small scuffles between the protesters, and the police had dragged maybe half a dozen people into the vans that were lined up at the kerb, but the chaos he had feared would be inevitable when he had first looked out at the mass of vampires and protesters had not occurred. The pungent smell of alcohol was thicker than ever, and the shouted insults – particularly those from the anti-vampire side of the crowd – had become ever more unpleasant, but the police were doing a good job of keeping them separated. It would be stretching things slightly to say that the first distribution of the cure had gone smoothly, but it had happened, and it was nearly finished, and that was ultimately all that mattered.

  Jack had moved halfway down the steps. Jamie joined him, and surveyed the crowds of protesters.

  “All right?” he asked.

  “Yeah,” said Jack. “I’m starting to think we might get away with this.”

  “Don’t get carried away,” said Jamie. “Say that when we’re in the vans on our way home.”

  The hospital doors opened again and Doctor Walder appeared, clipboard in hand.

  “Here we go,” said Jamie, quietly.

  “We’ll now be taking the final ten patients of the evening,” said Walder. “Please can the rest—”

  The doctor’s voice was drowned out by an explosion of noise as the queuing vampires bellowed their objections. They surged against the metal barriers, their eyes filling with red, sending the police staggering backwards. Jamie raised his T-Bone and ran down the steps towards them, twisting the comms dial on his belt with his free hand.

  “Calm down!” he shouted, his amplified voice causing the vampires to recoil with shock. “You were told that you wouldn’t all be seen tonight, but we’ll be running the programme at the same time tomorrow. So just calm down and go home.”

  The vampires swayed, eyes glowing in the darkness, growls and hisses rising from their throats. Jack appeared at Jamie’s side, his own T-Bone set against his shoulder, as Caldwell and Harris trained their MP7s on the queue. Beyond the lines of vampires, both sets of protesters were screaming and yelling, galvanised by the prospect of trouble.

  “We will not tell you again,” said Jack, his voice booming out across the crowd. “Unless you are one of the next ten vampires in line, disperse and go home. Immediately.”

  The red glow faded, as did the rumble of discontent. The police at the head of the queue stepped aside once more, and let the last ten vampires through. They walked up the steps towards the hospital, looks of profound relief on their faces.

  “That was close,” said Jack. “For a moment, I—”

  “Shut up,” said Jamie, and turned his head as heat bloomed behind his eyes. Somewhere in the crowd, inaudible to anyone who did not share his supernatural senses, he could hear a male voice, thick with emotion.

  “What is it?” asked Jack.

  Jamie ignored him; he was scanning the crowd, trying to pinpoint the voice.

  “Scum!” it was yelling. “You’re all bloody scum! One of you killed my brother, you bastards! You should all be put down! Exterminate the lot of you!”

  He found the shouting man’s red, tear-streaked face as he whipped his arm forward. Something glittered under the yellow glare of the street lights as it soared through the air; it was an empty whisky bottle, and as Jamie opened his mouth to form the first syllable of a warning, it crashed into the head of a vampire woman about to walk through the glass doors into the hospital.

  It shattered, sending fragments of glass raining down on to the steps, and the woman staggered, her eyes flaring with involuntary crimson as a plume of blood sprayed out from above her ear. For a long moment, there was silence, as she raised a trembling hand to her head, and sta
red at the blood dripping from her fingers. Then an animal growl rumbled from her throat and the fire in her eyes darkened almost to black; she took a single step forward, then leapt into the air and rocketed towards the crowd.

  Oh shit, Jamie had time to think, before everything turned to chaos.

  The woman hit the anti-vampire protesters like a missile, sending them flying as she tore into the middle of them. Seeing their chance, the pro-vampire group surged forward, taking the police line that had been separating them by surprise and breaking through it. Fighting instantly broke out as the two sets of protesters got their hands on each other; men and women fell to the ground, punching and kicking and clawing, as others backed away, clearly wanting no part of what the protest had suddenly become. The remaining vampires in the queue took to the air; many of them fled into the night, but almost as many followed the injured woman’s lead, and hurtled into the mass of brawling, howling men and women beyond the police line. For a moment, Jamie just stared, frozen to the spot; in what seemed like no more than a second or two, a situation that had been largely under control had exploded into something very close to a full-blown riot.

  Jack Williams sprinted down the stairs, shocking him out of his momentary paralysis. Jamie ran after his friend, holstering his T-Bone and twisting his comms dial as he moved.

  “Qiang, O’Malley!” he shouted. “Front and centre, right now! Ready One!”

  Over to his left he saw Jack’s squad mates wade into the crowd, dragging men and women apart as the police, who now found themselves at the very centre of things, tried desperately to regroup and form a new line. As Jamie reached the crowd, his vampire side roared into life, hungry and gleeful. He hurled himself into the melee, punching and kicking as though his life depended on it.

  The interior of the heaving, swaying crowd was utter bedlam: a frantic landscape of swinging arms and legs accompanied by a cacophony of shouts of fury and screams of pain. Jamie ducked a punch, located the man who had thrown it, and kicked him sharply between the legs. The man folded silently to the ground, the colour draining from his face, and curled into a foetal position, his eyes squeezed shut with pain. Jamie left him where he fell and waded further into the crowd, searching for the woman whose assault had started all this; if she found the man who had thrown the bottle before he found her, he was absolutely sure they were going to have at least one death on their hands.