Darkest Night

by Will Hill

  The young Lieutenant pushed open the door and walked into the room.

  “Good morning, Jamie,” he said.

  “Good morning, sir,” said Jamie. “You wanted to see me?”

  “Yes,” he said. “I have to tell you something that came up yesterday. I don’t know if it’s good news or bad, to be entirely honest with you.”

  “OK, sir,” said Jamie. “What is it?”

  “It’s your father,” he said. “He’s missing.”

  Jamie frowned. “Missing?”

  Turner nodded. “The Surveillance Division noted some discrepancies in their monitoring while we were in France,” he said. “They sent Norfolk police to check on him yesterday, but they reported no sign of him in your grandmother’s cottage. What they did find in the same village was a teenager wearing your father’s locator chip on a rubber band round his wrist.”

  Jamie grunted with laughter. “So he’s gone?”

  Turner nodded. “It looks that way.”

  “Do we have any idea where, sir?”

  “No,” said Turner. “A priority investigation has been opened, but I’d be extremely surprised if your dad left anything for them to find.”

  “So would I,” said Jamie, and nodded. “He’s an expert at disappearing.”

  “The likeliest result of this development is that Julian will eventually try to contact you,” he said. “I’m not going to tell you what to do if that happens.”

  “Thank you, sir,” said Jamie. “And thanks for telling me.”

  Turner nodded. “There’s something else,” he said. “Can I assume that you haven’t taken the cure because other Operators got there first and you have to wait until a bed becomes available?”

  Jamie didn’t respond.

  “You understand that the cure is mandatory for all members of the Department?” he asked.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And you understand that when something is mandatory, that means it applies to you?”

  “Yes, sir,” said Jamie, and grinned. “I understand that.”

  Turner nodded, and smiled at his young Lieutenant. “Good,” he said. “I just wanted to check, given some of the conversations you and I have had in the past. Dismissed.”

  Matt and Natalia stood outside the door of the Loop’s infirmary, watching through the window as dozens of Operators recovered from the cure they had helped to make a reality.

  The programme of undoing PROMETHEUS had begun as soon as the men and women of the active roster arrived back from Carcassonne, but whereas the turn had been orchestrated on a random basis, the cure was being administered first come first served. Matt had been heartened to see that, despite the exhaustion that every Operator must surely be feeling, there was no shortage of volunteers. During one of their many conversations about PROMETHEUS, the Director had considered the idea of keeping a small number of vampire Operational Squads, an idea that Matt, who had devoted every minute of his waking life for many months to finding a cure, had been profoundly uncomfortable with; he was deeply relieved to see that the Director appeared to have abandoned the notion.

  “Let’s go,” said Natalia.

  Matt nodded, and they fell into step as they walked back towards the lift.

  “It is good to see,” said Natalia. “Everything is very good.”

  Matt smiled. “It is.”

  “So what happens now?”

  “What do you mean?” he asked.

  “Soon there will be no more Lazarus Project,” said Natalia. “What then?”

  “I don’t know,” he said, and pressed the CALL button as they reached the lift. “Do you think you’ll go back to Russia when the project officially ends?”

  “No,” said Natalia, instantly, and Matt felt relief flood his system. “I do not want to go back.”

  “That’s great,” he said, and blushed at the enthusiasm in his own voice. “I mean, you shouldn’t go if you don’t want to.”

  She smiled at him, her face pale and beautiful, her eyes sparkling under the fluorescent lights. The doors of the lift slid open, and they stepped through them.

  “What about you?” she asked, as he pressed the button marked B.

  “I don’t know,” he said, and shrugged. “I’ll still be a member of Blacklight when Lazarus is over. I expect they’ll move me to the Science Division.”

  “I do not think Major Turner will make you stay unless you want to,” said Natalia. “So what would you like to do?”

  Matt smiled. “I’d like to go to university,” he said. “If things had been different, I would have been going in a couple of months. I’d been looking forward to it since I was a little boy.”

  “University is a good thing,” said Natalia.

  “You should know,” he said, his smile widening. “You graduated from one when you were fourteen.”

  She smiled, as delicate pale pink rose into her cheeks. “There is still a lot I would like to learn,” she said. “Where would you go? I do not think you will have a shortage of options.”

  “I always liked the sound of Cambridge,” he said, as the lift slowed.

  “I am told Cambridge is nice,” said Natalia, and smiled at him.

  Matt smiled back, and took her hand as they walked down the corridor towards his quarters.

  Jamie sat on the edge of his bed, turning what Paul Turner had told him over and over in his mind.

  On the one hand, the thought of his father being on the loose was unsettling; knowing where he was, and that restrictions were in place to keep him there, had provided a welcome certainty to the situation. But on the other, it made the dilemma he had been struggling with for months – whether or not to tell his mother that her husband was still alive – an awful lot easier to resolve. There was now absolutely nothing to be gained by telling her the truth; if anything, telling her his dad was alive without any idea of where he was would be infinitely crueller than not telling her.

  She’s been through enough, he thought. God knows she has.

  Jamie got up, exited his quarters, and headed for the lift at the end of Level B. As it descended towards the cellblock, he replayed the conversation he and his mother had managed the previous day once they finally stopped crying on each other’s shoulders.

  He had disabled the ultraviolet wall of her cell and flopped down on the sofa as his mother set about making tea. The relief and love on her face had disarmed him completely, and made him realise how much of the determination that had kept him fighting in Carcassonne had come from a desire not to let his mother down, not to put her through the unimaginable misery of losing her son less than five years after her husband.

  “I don’t want to know what happened in France,” she said, as she tipped water into the pot. “I’ve had more than enough darkness to last me a lifetime, so I don’t want to know any of the details. Just tell me one thing. Is all of this over and done with?”

  “I think so,” he said. “I hope so.”

  “Good,” said his mother, and handed him a mug of tea. “I’m very pleased to hear it.”

  “So what are you going to do, Mum?” he said. “Now that you’re free to go?”

  She settled down on the sofa beside him, and sighed. “Oh, I don’t know. I like the idea of sitting in the sun, so I suppose I might go away for a little while. France, maybe, or Italy.” She looked at him, a small, hopeful smile on her face. “You could come with me, you know. I’m sure you deserve some time off.”

  Jamie smiled at her. “I think I probably do,” he said. “Maybe I’ll ask Major Turner for a holiday.”

  “Maybe you should,” she said.

  Silence settled over the cell as they drank their tea. Jamie knew his mother wouldn’t push it, that she likely already believed that he wouldn’t be accompanying her on whatever trip she decided to take, and he didn’t have the heart to tell her that she was probably right.

  “So what now?” she asked, eventually.

  “I don’t know,” he said, and shrugged. “It will take
months to put the Department back together, and I don’t even know for certain whether they’re going to. They might decide that—”

  “That’s not what I meant, Jamie,” she said, gently. “I meant what now for you? Are you going to take the cure?”

  He grimaced. “Not now, Mum,” he said. “Please. I’ve barely had a second to think since we got back from Carcassonne.”

  “What is there to think about?” she asked. “You either want to be a vampire or you don’t.”

  “It’s not that simple,” he said. “The official policy is for everyone who was turned to take the cure, without exception, but I’m not even sure whether I want to be an Operator any more, never mind whether or not I want to take the cure.”

  “What about Larissa?” said his mother. “What does she think?”

  Jamie grunted with laughter. “She’s already cured,” he said. “She never wanted to be a vampire, so she took it the second she got back to the Loop. But she’ll be going home to America any day, so it doesn’t really matter what she thinks. She didn’t come back for me.”

  His mother put down her mug and gave him a gentle smile. “You have to do what you think is right, love,” she said. “That’s all you can do.”

  What you think is right, thought Jamie, as he got out of the lift and stepped into the airlock. That’s great. But what if you don’t know what that is?

  Ellison floated a centimetre above a deep leather armchair in the officers’ mess with a bottle of beer in her hand, and waited for her friends to join her. It was barely lunchtime, early to start drinking, but every Operator who had gone to France had been given forty-eight hours off, and she saw no point in wasting them.

  She had gone to the infirmary when she woke up, but had been told that she would have to wait until tomorrow at the earliest to receive the cure. In truth, she had not been entirely disappointed; she didn’t want to spend the rest of her life as a vampire, but she would be lying to herself if she tried to claim that she would not miss the remarkable power that came with being one. The feeling of floating in the air, completely unshackled from gravity, was utterly intoxicating.

  She had spent much of the last thirty-six hours grieving for Qiang. She did not have the slightest doubt that he had died doing his duty, but she couldn’t help but wonder whether things would have been different if PROMETHEUS had not been suspended before it was complete. If Qiang had been turned, would he still be alive? And if she had not been, would she be dead? There was no way for her to know, but she doubted she would ever stop asking herself the questions.

  The door of the mess swung open, and she managed a smile as Jack Williams and Dominique Saint-Jacques walked through it. It was instantly obvious to her that Dominique was still a vampire, whereas Jack had taken the cure. They smelled different, but there was more to it than that; there was something indescribable, something she could only perceive on an instinctive level that she could not have explained. Dominique seemed somehow brighter than Jack, as though he was simply more alive.

  “Mind if we join you?” asked Jack, as they arrived beside her table.

  “I suppose not,” she said, and smiled at him. “I’m supposed to be meeting a handsome stranger, but the two of you will do until he gets here.”

  “What an honour,” said Dominique, but he was grinning as he lowered himself into one of the empty chairs.

  “Who else is coming?” asked Ellison.

  “Angela,” said Jack. “Laura O’Malley, Ben Harris, Tom Johnson and a bunch of others. Almost everyone who isn’t in the infirmary.”

  “All right,” said Ellison. “Get a drink, you two, quickly.”

  Jack nodded, and strode towards the bar. Ellison and Dominique waited in easy silence until he returned with an armful of beers. He set the bottles down on the table, and settled into his chair.

  “OK,” said Ellison, and lifted a bottle. “Before anyone else arrives. To Qiang, and your brother Patrick, and Frankenstein, and everyone else we’ve lost. To fallen friends.”

  Dominique and Jack sat forward and raised bottles of their own.

  “Fallen friends,” they repeated.

  Kate looked round as the door to her room opened again, an impatient expression on her face. She was still tired, and weak, but she was already bored of lying in bed, and had been silently counting down the minutes until Jamie and Larissa came back to see her again.

  “It’s about time,” she said, as the door swung open. “I was starting to think you weren’t—”

  The words died in her throat.

  Standing in the doorway, being supported by one of the Loop’s doctors, was her father. His face was pale, and he looked older than he ever had, but his eyes were bright, and the smile on his face was wide and shining with love.

  For a long moment, they simply stared at each other. In the end, it was her dad who found his voice first.

  “Hello, love,” he said. “I can’t tell you how pleased I am to see you.”

  Jamie stopped outside the square room that had been home to Valentin Rusmanov for almost a year and looked through the ultraviolet wall.

  The ancient vampire was sitting on his sofa. He lowered the newspaper he was reading, and smiled. “Good afternoon, Jamie,” he said. “Come to say goodbye?”

  He frowned. “Are you going somewhere?”

  “Not right this minute,” said Valentin. “Tomorrow, in all likelihood. Come in, by all means.”

  Jamie entered his override code into the panel on the wall and walked into the cell.

  “Tea?” asked Valentin, getting to his feet.

  Jamie smiled. “No more tea,” he said. “I’ve drunk enough to last a lifetime.”

  “That’s a physical impossibility,” said Valentin. “But as you wish. Do sit down.”

  Jamie nodded, took a seat in one of the plastic chairs, and looked at what was now the second oldest vampire in the world.

  “What’s the plan?” he asked. “Are you going back to New York?”

  “Eventually,” said Valentin. “But there’s no hurry. All this time spent inside a concrete box has given me quite the wanderlust.”

  Jamie smiled. “I can imagine it would. I presume you won’t be taking the cure then?”

  “I suspect not,” said Valentin, and smiled. “I have been a vampire for more than five hundred years. I don’t know how to be anything else.”

  “You could learn?”

  “No,” said Valentin. “I don’t think I could.”

  “Fair enough,” said Jamie. “It’s your life.”

  Valentin nodded, then narrowed his eyes. “What about you, Jamie? Have you made a decision?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I really don’t know.”

  “It’s a simple choice,” said Valentin. “Human or vampire. You’ve been both. So pick one.”

  “If it’s so simple, then you choose for me,” said Jamie, heat flickering behind his eyes. “Tell me what I should do.”

  Valentin looked at him with clear sympathy. “I’m not your father, Jamie,” he said. “You’re a grown man, and you need to do what feels right to you. But if you did want a small piece of advice, it would be this. There is a beauty to living a real life, with its phases and stages, in which you change and you grow. To live like I have is unnatural. Fun? Yes. Exciting? Yes. But in the end, it is not really living.”

  Jamie stared at the old vampire for a long moment, then got up, walked across the cell, and wrapped his arms round him. Valentin frowned, his eyes flaring with momentary red, then hugged him back, his mouth curling into a small smile.

  “You did well, Jamie,” he said, his voice little more than a whisper. “Make sure you find a moment or two to be proud of yourself. It was an honour to fight alongside you.”

  Jamie felt his heart swell, and released his grip. He stepped back and met the ancient vampire’s gaze, refusing to be embarrassed by his display of affection.

  “I have something for you,” said Valentin, his voice still low. “I’v
e thought long and hard about whether I should give it to you, whether it would be better just to destroy it, but I can’t convince myself to do so. So I will do what was asked of me, and let you decide how to proceed.”

  Jamie frowned. “What are you talking about?”

  The old vampire flew across the cell, withdrew something from the pile of books that covered his desk, and held it out; it was an envelope, creased and tattered and stained with patches of dark red. Jamie took it, frowning with confusion, then felt his heart stop dead.

  He recognised the handwriting instantly; he had seen it thousands of times, in Christmas and birthday cards, on notes stuck to the fridge door and scribbled all over the crossword page in the Sunday paper.

  To my wife and son, he read.

  “What is this?” he asked, his voice low and suddenly hoarse.

  “I saw your father,” said Valentin. “Outside Carcassonne, after I defused the missile. He was terribly wounded, but we spoke, and he asked me to give that to you.”

  “He was there?” asked Jamie, forcing himself to tear his gaze from the envelope and look at the old vampire. “He was fighting at Carcassonne?”

  Valentin nodded.

  “Did he make it?” he asked, his throat tightening. “Did he survive?”

  The old vampire met his gaze, then shook his head.

  Jamie stared. “How did he die?” he managed.

  “Well,” said Valentin. “With honour.”

  Jamie grimaced, his face screwing up involuntarily as a cocktail of emotions threatened to overwhelm him; there was grief there, a wide, bitter streak of it, but there was pride too, in the fact that his father had clearly decided to try and do something rather than sit idly by as the end of the world approached. He turned the envelope over, took a deep breath, and ripped it open.

  “Don’t,” said Valentin.

  Jamie looked up. “What?”

  “Don’t read it here, Jamie. It’s a private matter between you and him. I don’t want any part of it.”

  He hesitated, then nodded and put the envelope in his pocket. “Thank you for bringing this to me,” he said. “I appreciate it, probably more than you know.”