Darkest Night

by Will Hill

  Then, from somewhere up ahead, came the echo of footsteps.

  Turner stopped dead, as Operators raised T-Bones and MP7s behind him. Bob Allen was stationary beside him, his face tight with unease; the two Directors stared in the same direction, waiting for whatever was about to round the corner. If it was vampires, or – even worse – Dracula himself, he doubted whether the remnants of the Multinational Force had strength enough to fight on.

  Dark shapes appeared in the distance, moving steadily down the hill. Turner’s heart pounded in his chest, then almost burst with relief as the first of the figures passed beneath one of the surviving street lights. It was Larissa Kinley; her face was pale, her eyes dark and empty, but her head was up and she was walking under her own steam.

  Thank God, he thought. Oh, thank God.

  Behind her came Valentin Rusmanov, the gentle smile on his face giving him the appearance of a man taking nothing more than a pleasant evening stroll, Angela Darcy, and a man with grey hair that Turner didn’t recognise.

  That’s three of them, he thought. Now where are the other two?

  Less than a second later, he had his answer.

  Jamie Carpenter rounded the corner, his eyes smouldering with red fire, and walked slowly down the road, holding something large and bulky before him.

  Oh no.

  The members of the strike team noticed the cluster of Operators below them, and raised their hands in gestures of tired recognition. Turner gave no response; he was staring at Jamie Carpenter, at the teenage boy carrying the limp shape of Frankenstein in his arms, as carefully as if the monster’s body was the most precious thing in the world.

  The Blacklight Director walked up the hill to meet his Operators, his footsteps echoing in the night air until the two groups stopped and faced each other. Turner found himself unable to form a single word; whatever had happened up there in the darkness, four of them had lived to walk back down the hill. If nothing else, that was a remarkable achievement.

  “What happened, Operators?” asked Bob Allen. “Did you get him? Is it over?”

  Jamie glanced at his squad mates, then looked directly at Paul Turner.

  “Yes,” he said. “It’s over.”

  Lizzy Ellison joined the growing crowd of Operators below the drawbridge with Jack Williams at her side and a mixture of surprise and confusion filling her mind.

  She had been about to plunge her stake into the chest of a vampire when something had burst across the blackened battlefield, an invisible wall of energy that had slammed into her like razor wire, sending pain coursing through her body and filling her head with agonising white noise. The vampire had leapt into the air, screeching and howling and tearing at its skin, then bolted for the horizon, along with seemingly every single one of Dracula’s followers. Ellison had been overcome by the desire to do the same; the feeling had been so awful, so horribly, painfully wrong, that she hadn’t believed she could bear it.

  Then, as quickly as it had come, it had disappeared.

  Ellison had found herself momentarily incapable of standing and had sunk to her knees, her eyes flaring as she looked round the battlefield. The chaos of movement and noise that had surrounded her for what seemed like longer than she could remember was all gone, leaving behind an eerie silence and the silhouettes of hundreds of Operators as they looked around at each other, clearly unable to understand what had just happened.

  Now, those same men and women were gathered in a deep semicircle below the entrance to the old city. Ellison was heartened by their number, but there was no escaping the reality of their losses; bodies were strewn across the battlefield as far as the eye could see. The crowd of survivors was silent, every pair of eyes trained on the drawbridge, through which Paul Turner and three of his fellow Directors had led a team less than five minutes earlier. Ellison had a hundred questions – the same ones, she was sure, as everyone else who had made it through the roaring nightmare of the battle – and she was trying to stay calm, stay patient, although it was hard; she had no idea where Jamie was or whether he was all right, and she had not seen Qiang since the earliest minutes of the fighting.

  They’ll be fine, she told herself. I’m sure they’ll both be fine.

  A low murmur spread through the crowd as figures began to emerge on to the drawbridge. Ellison held her breath, without realising she was doing so, as a squad of Operators walked quickly across and joined their colleagues in the crowd below. Behind them came the Directors from Blacklight, NS9, PBS6 and the SPC; they stopped near the edge and surveyed the dark, silent mass of Operators, their expressions unreadable. Finally, as the pressure in her chest began to build to painful levels, five men and women walked slowly out of the medieval city.

  Ellison’s eyes found Jamie Carpenter, and she felt her heart swell so rapidly with pride that she wondered whether it might burst; then she saw what he was carrying in his arms, saw the grey-green skin of the fallen monster, and pride was instantly replaced by sorrow.

  “Operators,” said General Allen. “I do not have the words to do justice to what I’m about to tell you, so you’ll have to settle for the simple facts. The mission has been a success. Dracula is dead.”

  There was no elation in the American’s voice; as Ellison watched, his gaze moved beyond the crowd of survivors to the scattered bodies of those who had not been so lucky. For a long moment, nobody moved or made a sound, until Jack Williams silently raised a fist in the air and held it there.

  A second fist rose, far over on the other side of the crowd, then another, and another, until everyone, Ellison included, was holding a clenched hand above their head, a gesture of triumph but also of tribute to the dead. She remained that way for a long time, in silent solidarity with her colleagues, but her attention stayed fixed on the members of the strike team.

  Valentin was grinning widely, Larissa and Angela Darcy and a grey-haired man she didn’t recognise were smiling awkwardly, but Jamie Carpenter was merely staring into the distance, his face pale, the limp body of Frankenstein resting in his arms.

  Sometime later, Jamie sat in the back of one of the convoy of trucks that were slowly returning to the displaced persons camp.

  It had taken a great many minutes, combined with the gentle entreaties of more than half a dozen of his colleagues, to persuade him to let go of Frankenstein’s body; an irrational part of Jamie’s brain had been insisting that it wasn’t final, it wasn’t really real, until he released his hold on his late protector, that time could somehow be wound back if he simply refused to acknowledge what had happened. In the end, he had allowed Jack Williams and Dominique Saint-Jacques, both of whom had accompanied him to Paris to rescue the monster, so long ago now that it felt like it had happened to other people, and four other Operators to carefully carry Frankenstein’s body to one of the jeeps, where they had laid it gently in the vehicle’s bed.

  In the back of the truck, nobody spoke.

  Out of the corner of his eye, Jamie saw Paul Turner staring at him with unmistakable pride, but was unable to meet his Director’s gaze. His heart was cleaved in two by grief, and his mind was still reeling from the horror he had witnessed in the Basilica; he wanted nothing more than to regain the strength to fly back to the Loop and sleep for a week while everybody else dealt with the fallout of the battle.

  After he had finally been persuaded to let go of Frankenstein, he had been hugged half to death by Ellison. Over her shoulder, as he hung unprotestingly in her arms, he had seen Alan Foster and his wife cry tears of joy as they were reunited, had seen Larissa and Angela sitting together in the back of one of the jeeps, their heads lowered as people kept a respectful distance, and had watched Operators who had previously been mortally afraid of Valentin approach the ancient vampire and shake his hand. He had managed to gather himself for long enough to ask Ellison if she had seen Qiang, but his squad mate had shaken her head; there were hundreds of survivors, hundreds of wounded, and many hundreds of bodies lying on the battlefield, and it was going to tak
e a painfully long time to identify them all.

  A thought occurred to him, one that made him feel guilty for it having taken so long to do so, and he looked up.

  “Please can someone send a message to the Loop for me?” he asked. “To let my mother know I’m OK?”

  General Allen nodded. “Of course, son.”

  “Thank you,” said Jamie, and lowered his head again.

  Bob Allen watched as Operators filed out of the trucks and dropped silently from the sky.

  The displaced persons camp was a hive of activity; men and women were being ferried to the hospital and staggering into the mess hall as exhausted Operators patrolled the perimeter and the surviving citizens of Carcassonne milled round their tents, too excited or simply too frightened to go back inside. The early estimate was that around eight hundred men and women had been killed during the vampire attack on the camp; it was another awful number in a day full of pain and loss, but it would have been much worse had the massacre not been ended by whatever had happened inside the Basilica. The trucks and jeeps immediately drove back out to continue the grisly task of collecting the bodies from the battlefield, covered by the handful of helicopters that had not taken part in the original deployment, and had therefore not been blown out of the sky.

  Allen turned to Paul Turner. “When can we get a report from the strike team, Paul?”

  The Blacklight Director shrugged. “When they’re ready,” he said. “I’m not going to rush them.”

  Allen nodded. He wanted to know what had happened, was desperate to know, but he would not push the issue unless it became necessary; the Operators who had made it back down after their showdown with the first vampire deserved at least a few minutes to gather themselves.

  The assessment team he had despatched to the Basilique Saint-Nazaire had already delivered a preliminary report from inside the old church; blood was everywhere, outside the building and in, the walls and floors were broken, the windows were smashed to pieces, and there was no sign of Dracula or what had caused the explosion of black fire and the devastating shock wave. They had so far found no sign of any vampires inside the medieval city; the only living beings they had encountered had been the last of Dracula’s hostages, who were now being escorted back to the camp.

  Allen had no idea how many of his Operators were lying out there on the battlefield, their eyes staring at nothing, their blood soaking the ground. He knew it was wrong to think of his Department’s losses as separate from those suffered by the others, but he couldn’t help it; he would mourn all the dead, regardless of their nationality, but the lost men and women of NS9 would stay with him always.

  Larissa Kinley appeared, managed a momentary smile in his direction, and asked to speak to Paul Turner in private. The Blacklight Director nodded his head, and Allen watched as they stepped out of earshot.

  “I want to go back,” said Larissa.

  Turner frowned. “Back where?”

  “To the Loop,” she said. “I know there must be a thousand things that need doing here, but I’m asking for your permission to leave, sir.”

  “Why are you in such a hurry?”

  “It’s private, sir,” she said. “But I’m sure you can guess.”

  Turner smiled. “Yes,” he said. “I suspect I can.”

  “So?”

  “You can go,” he said. “I would tell you to fly back here when you’ve done what you need to do, but that’s not going to be an option, is it?”

  “No, sir,” she said, and smiled at him. “Thank you, sir.”

  “Fine,” said Turner. “Don’t leave again before the rest of us get back.”

  “I won’t, sir.”

  “All right. Dismissed.”

  Larissa nodded, backed up a few steps, and rose easily into the air. She surveyed the sprawling camp as she climbed, the wide fields full of light and noise and movement, then accelerated north-west, the cold air raising gooseflesh on her arms despite her uniform.

  There was no way for her to process what had occurred inside the Basilica, what she and her colleagues had done; it was too big, too huge, and she suspected it would take days, if not months or even years, to come to terms with. On a rational level, she understood that they had won – Dracula was gone, his vampire army scattered to the winds – but the scale of the carnage, the sheer number of men and women who had lost their lives made it hard to feel triumphant. Instead, she focused her mind on a single manageable thing, a long-held hope that could now become reality.

  She accelerated over the French coast, pushing herself ever faster, trying to let her brain find neutral, to let the sight of Dracula being pulled down into an unnatural, impossible pit drift away, but the black, oily hands would not leave her mind; she wondered how often she would see them again in her nightmares.

  Quite often, I suspect, she thought. For a while, at least.

  Barely twenty minutes later, she descended towards the anonymous-looking patch of forest that hid the Loop from prying eyes. She touched down in the hangar, and strode towards the double doors at its rear, wondering what it must have been like to be here while the battle raged, to be able to do nothing more than watch, and wait for victory or defeat.

  The hangar had been empty, but the Level 0 corridor was both busy and noisy. Men and women were wandering in and out of the open door of the Ops Room, incredulous expressions on their faces as they talked in low voices, clearly barely able to believe the news that was arriving from France. Several of them congratulated her as she passed, shaking her hand and hugging her and asking dozens of questions; she merely smiled, and nodded, and pressed forward towards the lift at the end of the corridor.

  Larissa got out when the doors slid open on Level C and flew down the corridor, more aware of her supernatural abilities than she had been in a long time, full of something that was close to pre-emptive nostalgia as she pushed open the doors of the infirmary.

  One of the medical staff instantly appeared, concern on his face. “Lieutenant Kinley,” he said. “Are you OK? Are you hurt?”

  “No,” she said, and shook her head. “I’m not hurt.”

  “OK,” said the doctor, frowning slightly. “Then what can I do for you?”

  She smiled. “You can cure me,” she said. “Right now, please.”

  The active roster of Department 19 descended out of the darkening sky.

  Blacklight’s own helicopters had been destroyed as the Battle of Carcassonne had turned brutally and seemingly irrevocably against them; their remains were still lying, twisted and blackened, in the ruins of the city, being picked over by the forensic teams that would be investigating the details of the battle for many months to come. As a result, the helicopters lowering themselves towards the wide landing area outside the Loop’s hangar belonged to the RAF, and had been sent to France hours earlier specifically to bring the Operators of Blacklight home; it had seemed, to both the Prime Minister and the Chief of the General Staff, like the least the country could do for the men and women who had saved the world.

  Not all of the survivors were crammed into the helicopter holds, however. More than fifty Operators were still lying in beds inside the displaced persons camp hospital, although none were now listed as critical; they would be shipped home as soon as they were deemed fit to travel, and discharged.

  Doors slid open in the sides of the helicopters as they touched down on the tarmac, and a flood of black-clad figures began to spill out, their arms laden with bags and helmets, their faces pale with exhaustion but full of relief at having made it home in one piece.

  Inside the hangar, those members of the Department who had stayed behind were waiting for those who had fought and survived. As the Operators walked into the cavernous space, there were no cheers, and no applause; just an atmosphere of tangible pride, and a low rumble of noise as their friends and colleagues welcomed them home.

  Jamie walked into the hangar with his colleagues, barely able to keep his head up and his eyes open.

  He had sp
ent the last twenty-four hours alternately trying to sleep for more than half an hour without waking up in a cold sweat with a scream rising in his throat, convinced that oily black liquid was creeping across his body, and going endlessly over what had happened in the Basilica; he had been required to tell the story over and over, to what had started to feel like an endless succession of audiences, each with their own list of questions at the ready. Paul Turner had eventually taken pity and sent him to the camp’s command centre with a stenographer who had transcribed his account of the death of Dracula, producing a detailed document to which all enquiries were now being referred. Not for the first time, he had found himself immensely grateful to his Director.

  Jamie had eventually received the news that Qiang had not survived the battle; by then he had been expecting it, but expectation had not diminished the cold pain of the reality. He knew it was not his fault – his selection for the strike team had rendered him unable to protect either of his squad mates – and he knew, with absolute certainty, that Qiang would have fought as hard as he could, for as long as he could. But that ultimately meant nothing, as did his relief that Ellison had survived, along with Jack Williams and Dominique Saint-Jacques and Paul Turner and dozens of other men and women he cared about; his squad mate was dead, and no amount of soul-searching or self-justification was going to change that unrelenting truth.

  Qiang was dead, and Frankenstein was dead, and Dracula was dead.

  At the macro level, he understood that the loss of two of his friends, along with all the others who had fallen outside Carcassonne, would be considered a price worth paying for the destruction of the first vampire. Jamie didn’t believe that he would ever be able to feel the same way.

  Matt pushed through the throng in the hangar towards him, Natalia close behind, a huge smile on his face. He launched himself at Jamie, almost knocking him over, and wrapped his arms tightly round him; Jamie hugged his friend back, a smile rising unstoppably on to his face, as Natalia looked on with eyes that brimmed with tears.