Shutter

by Courtney Alameda

  “Sorry, but orders are orders, miss,” Bourne said. We crawled up the street, the crowd no less dense despite the incline.

  “Not your fault.” I sighed and rubbed my eyes. Oliver hurt. We’d all end up with demerits tonight, maybe expelled if not for our last names: Helsing. Stoker. Drake. At least Ryder McCoy was the academy’s golden boy and killboard leader—they wouldn’t dismiss him for anything short of murder.

  The whole hunt, the broken rules, all in vain. The entity was loose in the city. I’d failed to protect my crew from a monster. To top it all off, I owed Jude fifty bucks. Nobody would let me live this down, not in the foreseeable future. Especially not Dad.

  “So what necro was badass enough to go after without backup?” Bourne asked. “You looking for another Embarcadero, miss?”

  I made a pfft noise, but the word Embarcadero conjured a motorcycle pursuit in my memory: Ryder gunning his Harley, weaving through traffic on the Bay Bridge’s lower deck. Me, clinging to him with one arm and aiming a Colt .45 into the wind. A scythe-like shadow slipped between cars, fast enough to outstrip them at sixty-five miles an hour. Horns screamed. Tires shrieked. Somehow, in the frenzy of metal and oil and asphalt, one of my hollow-point bullets found a sweet spot in the necro’s spinal cord.

  It was the last time my father looked at me like I was a hero.

  The Embarcadero Scissorclaw terrorized the wharf for five months of my fifteenth year. It killed out of need, fast and without predilection. This ghost, on the other hand, killed in cold blood with no apparent motive but malice. I’d take the Embarcadero over this new monster any day.

  “Unless it wasn’t a necro,” Bourne said, glancing sideways at me. “You mean that thing was a ghost?”

  “Ring-a-ding-ding, Lieutenant,” I said, not in the mood for conversation. A necro would’ve had a corporeal body, flesh and blood, for the boys to shoot. Bullets hadn’t affected the St. Mary’s killer, photographs had. I took my sunglasses from my bag and slipped them on. The glare from oncoming headlights would’ve split my head open otherwise.

  He chuckled. “Do you get away with talking to your daddy like that?”

  “Maybe if we ever really talked, I would,” I said.

  Bourne’s nostrils flared. That boss you worship, Lieutenant? He’s a jerk in real life. No matter how supportive Helsing PR made our relationship look, Dad and I rarely spent time together. Because every time I looked at my father, I really saw them. I saw death swirling in Ethan’s eyes, reducing them to pearly marbles; I saw Fletcher’s chest cave in and Mom’s spattered face, her teeth as red as pomegranate kernels. In waking moments. In my nightmares.

  I didn’t know what Dad saw when he looked at me, but he showed it through shotgunned slugs of condescension and guilt, with Chinese takeout on Thanksgiving, and by locking himself in his office on his wedding anniversary. I failed to protect my little brothers from our mother, the monster. I could take out a scissorclaw famed for killing one of our top captains, but withered against my own unarmed, undead mother.

  Dad never forgave me for it.

  The city sped past in a blur of stoplights. I spotted one of Helsing’s billboards just off Geary, the one sporting the 611 emergency number and the captain of the Harker Elite—Chris Kennedy—the corps’s poster boy. Pressure built up in my frontal lobe, and my body felt two degrees too cold. A chill emanated from my abdomen. I turned the Humvee’s heat up, absorbing the warmth through outstretched fingers. The sense of being trespassed upon hadn’t faded; it was as if an army of germs wreaked havoc against my cells.

  Despite how off I felt, I still needed to commit the night’s hunt to memory and take stock of my injuries. My ankle would be sore, but it hadn’t swollen. The laceration on the back of my wrist wouldn’t need more than a bandage. My vision remained sharp and unclouded despite my headache, so no concussion. Score. Our doctors med-benched reapers for concussions, sometimes for days. None of my injuries would take me off the streets, and I’d be good as new with a couple aspirin and some gauze. Good, I wanted to go after the entity at sundown tomorrow.

  How could I classify that monster? I’d never seen anything so brutal, so impervious to exorcism. So bright. I left St. Mary’s without a motive or understanding of the ghost’s psychology, which would make it difficult to track. In the least, the boys and I escaped with our lives—Marlowe’s men couldn’t claim so much. I crossed myself in memory of the dead.

  I knew three things about the entity:

  One, it had more energy and brighter ghostlight than any spirit I’d seen before.

  Two, it had terrible taste in nursery rhymes. “Eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth,” what was that, a catechism for serial killers?

  Three—and most frightening—it knew my name. Thanks to the media, a lot of people knew the name Micheline Helsing went with tetro eyes and Sharpie-black hair, just never any dead ones.

  Bourne pulled up to the helipad off Helsing’s Pier 50. A Black Hawk helicopter waited to take me back to Angel Island, its blades spinning the bay fog in whorls. This close to the sea, the air smelled of rot, salt, and exhaust from the ferries that shuttled our vehicles to and from headquarters on the island.

  I trudged after Bourne, cursing when I realized I’d left my monopod at the hospital, ignoring Bourne’s look of watch your mouth, kid. A few members of Helsing’s Port Authority waited by the chopper door, retinal scanners in hand. They greeted Bourne and me with salutes.

  “Evening, Miss Helsing,” one of the guards said. His badge read F. RILEY, and he stepped forward to scan Bourne. “Bounty duty tonight, Lieutenant?”

  Bourne chuckled as the scanner beeped green.

  I pulled off my sunglasses. “Aren’t you the comedian?” Like my father, I wasn’t keen on jokes made at my expense. Assuming anyone had the guts to make jokes about my father, that is. I stood still while Riley set the scanner’s silicone brace on my cheekbone, steadying myself for the scan.

  After Mom’s death, everyone returning to headquarters got scanned—even corps members returning from unofficial capacity or leave. The scanners searched the human eye for polyps of ghostlight, irregularities that appeared minutes after the body contracted a necrotic disease. The infections could metamorphose a healthy man into a fully developed hypernecrotic creature in fourteen days flat. Reanimate zombies took less time to turn—three to four days—which was why the Centers for Disease Control partnered with Helsing to run continual public service announcements with a laundry list of the symptoms.

  The St. Mary’s ghost had done something to me, but I expected the scanner to blink green—disembodied ghosts couldn’t infect a human being with necrosis of any kind.

  The scanner blinked red.

  Riley smacked the device against his palm. “Sorry, Miss Helsing. It’s been misfiring all night.”

  Bourne turned, searching me from head to toe. His gaze rested on my lacerated wrist. I tugged my jacket sleeve down to cover the injury. Living with a father like mine, I had a habit of hiding weaknesses. “Scan her again.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Blood pounded behind my eyes as the scanner’s beams crossed my cornea a second time.

  Red.

  “Call her in,” Bourne said. He hustled me away from the chopper as Riley called in a 1065 to the on-site clinic, which was code for a reaper infected with one of the “big three” necrotic diseases. Dad would go DEFCON when he heard.

  I hadn’t hunted anything necrotic tonight—we’d been on stakeout at the old Potrero Point generating station before Marlowe’s call. As Bourne hurried me toward the clinic, I looked down at the black substance trapped in the coils of my fingerprints. What did that monster do to me?

  The clinic doors slid open, letting us into the minimalist lobby. When the attending nurse looked up and saw me, she leapt from her chair and shouted for the doctor, rushing me into the ER. Nobody wanted to be responsible for the necrosis of Leonard Helsing’s daughter, not after what he’d been through with my mother and brothers. />
  In less than a minute, the nurse had me on a gurney in an operating room. Bright lights chewed into my eyes, peeling back my composure. Honestly, did they need surgery-grade halogens to stick a few needles in my neck?

  The doctor entered the ER, removing a pair of chromoglasses from his coat pocket and sliding them on. Chromoglasses allowed trichromats or even dichromats to see ghostlight, albeit in a weakened form. Constructed from the donated eyes of a tetrachromat, the lenses resembled jeweler’s glasses and cost a small fortune.

  “I’m Dr. Harding,” the man said, snapping a latex glove on before saluting. “How are you feeling, Miss Helsing?”

  “Fine,” I said, tearing half-moons into the gurney’s paper cover with my fingernails.

  He chuckled, checking my eyes with a penlight. “Your father never says it hurts, either, and I’ve stitched him back together a time or twelve.”

  In the periphery of my vision, I watched the nurse prepare the H-three antinecrotic syringes. I’d had the injections once before, on the night Mom died. She’d bitten me, broken the skin, and left two smiling marks on my right trapezius muscle. I’d screamed through the first injection, the antinecrotic blasting the infection out of my bloodstream. Ryder held me until the fire stopped burning in my brain.

  “Your eyes look good,” Harding said. I chewed on a hangnail, barely hearing him, staring at the ceiling. “No visible ghostlight, so we’ve caught it in the first hour. What were you hunting?”

  “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you,” I said.

  “Try me.”

  Suit yourself. “A ghost.”

  He frowned. “A ghost can’t infect you with necrosis, as you know.” Harding glanced at the cut on my arm. “You contracted something from a necrotic creature without noticing, I’m sure.” He looked up at the nurse. “Clean and bandage her wrist, will you, Amelia?”

  I bit back a barb, thinking it wasn’t smart to piss off the people with the painkillers, not with the H-threes about to go all Texas Chainsaw Massacre in my veins. The antinecrotics obliterated the bacteria that turned people into monsters, and were 100 percent effective if administered within an hour of infection. They saved lives, made reaping a more desirable career and the world a safer place to be.

  Oh, and they hurt like hell.

  The doctor accepted a syringe from the nurse. I gripped the gurney’s sides, steeling myself, but I didn’t close my eyes. I wanted fair warning.

  “Do you need a chest restraint, hon?” the nurse asked, prying my injured hand off the gurney.

  “No.” But I nearly said ohgodyes.

  The nurse gave Harding a pointed look. He shook his head, flicking the syringe. I gritted my teeth. Restraint enough.

  “Take a deep breath,” Harding said. The needle pinched my jugular. Pain rushed my veins and scraped my heart, brain, and lungs like I’d been shot full of bleach. I fisted my hands so tight my thumb knuckles popped.

  This first inoculation staved off paranecrotic damage to the nervous system and brain caused by a mutated strain of the Yersinia pestis bacteria, better known as the Black Death. The first paranecrotic creatures emerged from the plague graves in the fifteenth century. Records and diaries show the Van Helsing family established a loose-knit cabal in Holland around that time, with the sole purpose of exterminating the “demons” crawling out of their graves.

  Helsing classified necros by the color of their ghostlight auras. Paranecrotics emitted fire-hydrant-red or tangerine glows; these slow-moving, longer wavelengths of light indicated a lack of spiritual energy, of humanity and intelligence. Hence, paranecrotic zombies glowed like stoplights and moved about as fast as bumper-to-bumper traffic on the Bay Bridge, driven by dull instinct. They didn’t set traps for reapers or exhibit pack behavior, and they “hunted” by sight alone.

  Harding flicked the second syringe. I peeled off a piece of the gurney’s paper skin. “If you knew what scratched you, miss, I’d only give you one of the H-threes,” he said. Screw you, I hadn’t been “scratched” by anything. Not anything corporeal, at least.

  Before I’d recovered from the pain of the first inoculation, Harding injected the second. I wanted to curl up in a ball but didn’t, settling to squeeze my eyes shut and count backward in my head to deal with the pain.

  Ten. The second injection combated hypernecrosis—mutations in the musculoskeletal system resulting in necros straight out of the B-movie horror flicks Jude loved. Nine. Hypernecrotics glowed in earthier tones, in umbers, greens, and blues. Some were smart. Eight. Some were fast. Seven. Quick enough to chase down a car. Six. Some could shear a man in half with their claws. Five. Most were incredibly difficult to kill.

  I didn’t make it to one before the doctor stuck me a third time. The third antinecrotic eliminated vampirism, given only as a precaution since the eighties. The last North American vampire had been staked in 1984, and the condition was extinct in most First World countries.

  Extinct, I suppose, unless I counted the Drakes. (Which I didn’t.) During the development of the H-threes in the 1950s, Stoker researchers infected a group of prison inmates with vampirism, then subjected them to an unfinished antinecrotic serum. Those who survived the test emerged with mutated DNA, an array of extra-normal abilities, and a big, festering bone to pick with the Helsing Corps. The International Council on Necrotic Warfare wanted the men destroyed, as did the United States government and the United Nations. But like any hardheaded Helsing, my great-grandfather went and hired the men, which he nicknamed his “Drakes.”

  When the Drakes drew on their abilities, pale blue ghostlight radiated from their irises. I’d seen light feathering in Jude’s eyes whenever he touched someone skin on skin or when he read blood, and it freaked me out each time. It meant Jude’s psychic abilities weren’t human abilities.

  Harding checked my bandage. “How’s the pain?”

  “Nothing morphine wouldn’t help,” I said, wrinkling my nose. Harding chuckled.

  “Nice try. Do you have any other symptoms?” He motioned at the nurse, who handed over a retinal scanner. “Ones not associated with the H-threes? Headache, nausea, you know the list.”

  I opened my eyes for the scanner. “My stomach feels like a bag of ice, all cold and rocky.”

  He scanned me. Red.

  “Find me another scanner, this one’s defunct,” he said to the nurse. “In the meantime, Miss Helsing, may I examine your abdomen?”

  “Sure, whatever,” I said. He peeled back my shirt far enough to expose the tips of my rib cage. Cool air breathed on my skin, gooseflesh rippling in its wake.

  Harding pushed the chromoglasses higher on his nose. “What is that…” He prodded a cold, hard lump in my flesh. I pushed up to my elbows. The doctor’s hand blocked my view of my abdomen, so I swept it aside. Blinked.

  A network of violet-blue, ghostlit veins fisted inside my skin, twitching like a brainless paramecium.

  Harding glanced at me, his lenses staring me down like gun barrels. “What is it?”

  “I … I…” The words locked up in my throat. Ghostlight. Beneath my skin.

  Impossible.

  Harding’s radio crackled with several 1065s—more infected reapers—but I couldn’t look away from the thing on my stomach. The doctor stepped into the hall with his cell phone, giving me instructions to sit tight. The nurse returned and scanned me a third time.

  Red.

  Red.

  Red.

  I slid off the gurney, tugging my shirt into place and crossing myself. “Miss Helsing?” the nurse asked. I ignored her, not wanting to be rude or anything, but I needed to focus. The leftover dull ache from the H-threes still lingered, but I walked it off.

  I paced the width of the room, back and forth, my thoughts whirling. The light had to be cosmic backwash from the smoke I’d been force-fed. Ghosts were made up of pure energy—they didn’t possess the physical properties necessary to infect someone, not even with their own ghostlight. Was it a sort of possession, then? Some con
duit linking my soul back to the ghost? I shuddered, the idea too horrible to contemplate. Of all the morbid things I’d seen, of all the frightening things I knew, the only one that truly frightened me was loss—the loss of my loved ones, the loss of control. I didn’t want to lose myself or anyone else to the demon I’d fought tonight.

  Voices echoed in the hall. Footsteps, too.

  So the smoke left a physical trace—I still wore the sooty substance on my skin. I rubbed my fingers together, wondering where it had come from. How had the ghost created it, and more importantly, what had it done to me?

  “Hey now, Micheline,” Ryder said, grabbing me by the shoulders. It took my brain a full second to reboot, to see Jude helping Oliver sit on my abandoned gurney, to understand the boys had been the 1065s and oh God, it got them, too.

  “You okay?” Ryder asked. “You’re shaking.”

  “I … I’m fine,” I said, resisting the urge to yank his shirt up and check his stomach for ghostlight. “You?”

  Ryder’s hands slid off my shoulders. “You tell me.”

  “Care to explain why we set the scanners off?” Jude asked, flanking Ryder.

  What was I supposed to say? I had no logical explanation for the ghostlight in my skin, no comfort to give. No doubt they’d been infected if they’d failed the retinal scan. What kind of crap reaper couldn’t protect her crew from a ghost? A first offense might’ve been forgivable, but I’d failed to protect people in the past.

  I had no good news. All I had was the truth.

  “There’s ghostlight inside me,” I said. I watched the impossibility of my words sink in by degrees—Ryder crossed his arms over his chest, scanning my frame as if he’d be able to spot the ghostlight on me. Oliver held up a finger, ready to rebut, lips forming the word impossible. He put his hand down and reached for the pair of chromoglasses on Harding’s surgical table. Jude put on a smirk and windmilled an index finger by his ear, looking at the others.

  Crazy? If only.

  “Where is this ghostlight?” Oliver asked, pain flickering over his face as he slid off the gurney. He almost put a hand to the bulky bandage under his shirt, but stopped himself. Self-conscious around the other boys, as usual—they had some macho code I’d never comprehend. Ryder glanced over his shoulder at the nurse, who spread a new strip of paper on one of the gurneys, pretending not to eavesdrop. Adults were funny like that, helicoptering and pretending to be totally oblivious, like we couldn’t tell. She fussed less with the paper when we got quiet, watching us in her peripheral vision.