by Will Hill
I’m due some good fortune, he thought, and smiled as he put the car into gear. Surely I must be.
Two hours and forty minutes later Julian Carpenter turned the Ford into the driveway of the house he had once shared with his family.
He left it in front of the garage, the same place he had always parked his silver Mercedes when he got home at night. Marie and Jamie had believed he had been returning from a long day spent behind a desk at the Ministry of Defence facility at Manston, sixty miles to the east, which was partly true; he had driven back from Manston each evening, but only after a helicopter had ferried him there from the Loop.
It had been easier to keep his real life a secret in those final years, when he had been spending more and more time devising strategy with Henry Seward and less and less on operations. As a younger man, he had been required to spend so many nights out of the house that Marie had once accused him of having an affair, a charge he had infuriated her by laughing at. He hadn’t been able to help it; he had wanted to tell her how much easier keeping another woman secret would have been than the truth.
It had been a crazy way to live, he saw that now. He should have resigned his commission when he married Marie, or when Jamie was born at the latest, but he had been unwilling to give up the part of his life that gave him purpose, and pride, and excitement. He had not neglected his family; he had been as attentive and loving a husband and father as had been humanly possible, and had regularly pushed Blacklight’s goodwill to the limit in the process. In the subsequent years, he had often wondered whether his increasing prioritisation of his family over the Department had made it easier for his colleagues to believe that he was capable of betraying them, when Thomas Morris’s trap slammed shut on him.
Julian got out of the car and looked around in the cool light of the mid-afternoon. He had driven past the house without slowing, checking to see whether it was occupied; if it was, his task would be that much harder. But it had been obvious, even as he sped past, that it was empty; the windows of the living room and the quartered pane of glass in the front door were boarded up, and a heavy padlock hung from the garage door. The oak tree at the bottom of the garden, from the branches of which Alexandru Rusmanov and his acolytes had been watching the last time he stood on this driveway, had grown even fuller; it cast shadow over more than half the lawn, which was now a patchwork of weeds and fallen leaves. A squirrel stared at him from a low branch, a nut in its mouth; it didn’t seem surprised to see him, or scared of him. Julian looked at the tree for a long time, cold fingers dancing up his spine, then turned towards the house.
And froze as he realised where he was standing.
This is where I died, he thought, looking down at the gravel of the drive. Right here. This is where my life ended.
There was a stain beneath his feet, long faded. Julian stared at it, his heart pounding, until he forced himself to tear his gaze away, and walked unsteadily along the front of the house. Red letters had been sprayed across the boards that covered the living room’s picture window, forming a single word that made him grimace as he read it.
Julian had seen the press reports of the cover story that had been put up after his death, a horribly detailed fabrication that claimed he had been caught in a plot to sell national-security secrets to a Somalian Islamist group. He had not taken the blackening of his name personally, as he would have done exactly the same thing in Henry Seward’s position. But he had hated the thought of what the stories must have done to Marie and Jamie; believing they were the family of a traitor would have been heartbreaking for them and, as the graffiti attested, would not have made them popular.
He tried to put such thoughts out of his mind; torturing himself with the details of how he had hurt his family would not do him, or them, any good. He turned his back on the hateful graffiti and walked round the side of the house, heading for the back garden. The gate was shut and bolted, but the lock had never been strong, and two heavy kicks sent it tumbling. Julian paused for a second, waiting to see whether the noise had alerted any of his neighbours, if indeed the same people still occupied the houses whose roofs were visible above the trees to the right and left.
Silence.
Julian stepped through the gate, and on to the crazy-paving path that had led between two expanses of immaculate lawn in the days when Marie had tended to it. Now it was as overgrown as the front garden, the path looking like some old trail through deep jungle. He made his way along it, taking care not to turn an ankle on one of the uneven slabs of stone, treading down weeds and bending long grass as he passed. At the top of the garden, on a wide patch of bare earth, stood the shed he had built in the first weeks after they had bought the house, when all their belongings had been in storage and Marie and Jamie had still been living with his mother in the cottage that was now once again his home; it was the shed he had driven more than a hundred and fifty miles for.
He had always padlocked the door, but not for the reasons that his family and neighbours believed; the shed had contained valuable tools and expensive garden equipment, but they were not what he had been securing.
Now it was standing ajar.
Julian pulled it open and stepped inside. The shelves on either side of the shed were empty, and they and the floor were covered in a thick layer of dust; his footsteps sent a cloud of it blooming into the air, making him cough as he crouched down and started pulling up the floorboards.
They came easily; they had never been firmly fixed, either to each other or to the ground beneath them, despite how they had appeared. Julian lifted them one at a time and leant them against the wall. When the task was finished, he stepped back and looked at what had lain beneath them for more than fifteen years, unbeknownst to anyone.
The hatch appeared to be intact.
Julian had been confident that it would, despite the length of time that had elapsed. It was made of thick lead, like the rest of the bomb shelter he had installed below the garden; just one of the many secrets he had kept from his family. There was a keypad set into its smooth surface, which was the only thing that gave him cause for concern. If its batteries had failed, there would be no way to open the hatch from the outside.
Which is exactly the point, of course, he thought wryly to himself. Wouldn’t that be a kick in the teeth?
He brushed away a fine layer of dirt, held his breath, and pressed the keypad’s power button. For a horribly long moment, nothing happened. Then, as the tension began to become unbearable, green light flickered beneath the small rectangle and illuminated the numbered keys.
Julian released his breath in a low rush and typed in a nine-digit code. The word OPEN appeared on the screen above the keypad, and from beneath the ground came the muffled sounds of heavy locks disengaging. He gripped the handle and, with a rush of stale air and a rattle of loose dirt and gravel, heaved the hatch up and back. Below him, electric lights flickered into life, illuminating a stainless-steel ladder. Julian took a last look behind him, and climbed down.
It was like stepping back in time. The man who had sold him the shelter had rhapsodised to Julian about the thickness of the walls, the blast that they could withstand, and the levels of radiation they could keep out. He had listened politely, even though it had been clear to him that the man was still living in a time when Soviet missiles might have fallen from the sky at any moment; Julian had no intention of explaining what he was actually going to use the shelter for.
There were two shelves of canned and dried food and a large plastic barrel of distilled water, in case the occasion had ever arisen when he needed to spend a prolonged period of time beneath his garden. But the shelter’s true purpose rested silently on large metal racks standing either side of the ladder he had just climbed down.
One held MP5 submachine guns, Glock 17 pistols, a pair of American M4 carbines, and boxes of ammunition. A T-Bone gleamed on the top shelf of the other, above rows of regular and ultraviolet grenades, three UV beam guns, a pair of canvas holdalls, and a folded
Blacklight uniform. The pungent scent of gun oil hung thickly in the air, a smell that reminded Julian so powerfully of the Loop that it brought tears to his eyes. He blinked them away, and got to work.
In a pale purple hotel room overlooking the sea, Julian set a steaming mug of instant coffee down on the table, briefly regretted destroying his remaining cigarettes, then pushed the thought away.
He had driven back from Brenchley to Great Yarmouth as quickly as he had dared, which, given that the car boot was full to the brim of extremely restricted weaponry, had not been all that fast.
He had retrieved his locator chip from beneath the picnic-table bench, half expecting a squad of Operators to swoop down on him as he did so, ready to bundle him into a van and take him back to his cell. He had transferred the bags from the Ford into his mother’s Mercedes, then walked into the hotel and booked a room.
He didn’t want to spend the night in Great Yarmouth; he wanted to be back at his mother’s cottage, checking his weapons and equipment and considering his next move. But he forced himself to look at the situation from an external perspective; as far as Blacklight knew, he had been sitting on the bench outside the hotel for almost seven hours. If they thought he had been drinking throughout, which would be a perfectly reasonable assumption given the circumstances and the location, then it would not do to arouse their suspicions by being seen to drive home. The sensible thing to do would be wait until the morning.
Twelve more hours, he told himself. That’s nothing. Not after two and a half years.
Julian took another sip of his coffee. He had ordered a sandwich from room service, and he examined the new radio he had bought as he waited for it to arrive. He had installed and charged the battery, and turned the handset on, watching the colour screen bloom into life. Now his fingers moved quickly across the keypad, tuning the handset to a frequency that he and his oldest, closest friend had agreed upon, when they had been younger and the world had seemed much less dark.
There was a crackle as the radio tuned, then silence. Julian had expected nothing else, but he still felt a momentary pang of disappointment as the reality of his exile was hammered home once again. The day had felt good, like he had made progress on a solvable problem; the silence made him wonder, not for the first time, whether there was any point in even trying to change his situation, or whether he should simply do as he had been ordered, and keep his head down.
Julian considered this as he drained his coffee, then raised the radio and broke the explicit promise he had made to Cal Holmwood.
“Come in, Victor,” he said. “Victor, do you copy? Come in.”
“I’m not crazy, right?” asked Van Orel. “Tell me you’re all seeing this too?”
“Yeah,” said Jamie, his voice low. “I see it.”
“Me too,” said Larissa.
“And you can see what it is?” asked Van Orel.
“Yes,” said Petrov. “It is a wall.”
After taking down their camp, the DARKWOODS squad had continued to pick their way through the trees, across streams and impassable deadfalls, heading deeper and deeper into the forest.
There had been little conversation. Arkady Petrov led them silently onwards, Larissa floating at his shoulder, Jamie bringing up the rear of the reduced column. In front of him, Engel and Van Orel carried the body of Tim Albertsson between them on a makeshift stretcher, wrapped in his sleeping bag. The death of the American had soured the atmosphere within the squad from professionally neutral to outright poisonous; the air was thick with suspicion and paranoia. It had also, as far as Jamie was concerned, brought out the worst in two of his squad mates.
The decapitation of their chain of command had revealed a hitherto unseen streak of panic in Kristian Van Orel. The South African’s relief at the election of Petrov as squad leader had been almost desperate, and had placated him momentarily. But now, as the forest swallowed them, he was muttering almost constantly to himself; from what Jamie overheard, he appeared to be saying goodbye to his family, an act of fatalism that worried him deeply. And Greta Engel’s palpable horror at the death of Albertsson had quickly evolved from concern over the treatment of his body into obvious suspicion of Larissa; she was glancing up at his girlfriend every few seconds, clearly unable to help herself.
It was making Jamie, who could see the entire squad from his position, increasingly nervous; he knew how sharp Larissa’s supernatural senses were, and there was no chance she was unaware of Engel’s scrutiny. If the German couldn’t at least manage to make her suspicions less obvious, a confrontation was simply inevitable; he was sure it was already taking a great deal of Larissa’s resolve to resist bringing the situation to a head right now. In the event of such a confrontation, he was not remotely concerned for the safety of his girlfriend; if a physical altercation took place between her and Engel, the result would not be in any doubt whatsoever.
That was what scared him.
Jamie knew there was a struggle taking place inside Larissa, a struggle whose outcome was far from certain. Her vampire side was never far from the surface, and the situation that the squad found themselves in was almost tailor-made to bring it out; the isolation, the constant tension, the effect the forest was having on her senses, the tunnel and its strange control room. If she came to believe that she was genuinely being suspected of murder by at least one, maybe more, of her heavily armed squad mates, it would not be long until her vampire side asserted itself entirely; it was at its most persuasive, its most powerful, when she felt threatened.
It was also the reason why Jamie couldn’t be absolutely certain that she hadn’t killed Tim Albertsson.
He wanted to believe her, and he hated himself for not being entirely able to do so. But the facts as he saw them were straightforward: there had been something between Larissa and Albertsson, something she had never told him about, but which had made the American openly hostile towards him. For almost thirty-six hours, Jamie had thought about little else, which he acknowledged was an awful thing to admit during a Priority 1 operation. With painful thoroughness, his mind had worked its way through every possible scenario.
Had they kissed? Had they slept together? Had they had an affair in Nevada? Was it still going on?
If so, was that why Albertsson had selected him for the operation? To rub his nose in it, to flaunt how stupid, how naive they thought he was? In which case, it would make sense that Larissa wouldn’t want him to find out, and would be angry with Tim if she thought he was on the verge of giving the game away.
Would that have been enough to make her kill him?
It’s possible, he told himself. If he refused to stop, and she felt threatened, then it’s definitely possible. You know it is.
As if on cue, Larissa looked back at him from her position above the squad, and smiled. Jamie returned it as best he could until she turned away, then let the expression fade from his face. He had no idea what to do about the concerns wheeling through his head; all he could think to do was watch, and wait, and hope that if things went wrong, he could stop them before too much blood was spilled.
“I can see something!” shouted Larissa from overhead. “Up ahead. Something big.”
“What is it?” called Petrov.
The wall – the Russian was right, that was exactly what it was – curved away to the east and west. It was a seemingly endless row of trees, their towering trunks pressed against each other without the smallest gap between them, their tops mingling into the distant canopy. The squad stood at the vast wooden barrier’s base, staring up at it.
“There’s no way this is naturally occurring,” said Van Orel, his voice low. “Someone planted them like this.”
“How long would it take for them to grow so big?” asked Engel.
Petrov shook his head. “Many years,” he said. “Perhaps hundreds.”
Centuries, thought Jamie, and shivered. The patience required to do something like this, the sheer bloody-minded resolve. I can’t begin to imagine it.
Petrov looked up at Larissa. “Can you look for a way through?”
The vampire nodded, and flew rapidly away to the east, her supernaturally sharp eyes examining the wall closely.
“I don’t like it,” said Van Orel. “Looks like it’s meant to hold King bloody Kong.”
“Not necessarily,” said Jamie, his voice low. “If the whole wall curves like this section does, then it’s a circle. What if he’s inside, and the wall is to keep everyone else out?”
“That is good sense,” said Petrov. “Everything has been designed to keep people away. The dead animals, the traps, and I am certain the machines in the tunnel as well. Perhaps this is some final barrier.”
“It’s a bloody big one,” said Van Orel.
“He really doesn’t want to be found, does he?” said Engel. “I wonder why?”
“Why don’t we go and ask him?” said Larissa.
The whole squad jumped. Jamie felt his heart accelerate in his chest as he spun round to see his girlfriend hovering five metres away; her return had been absolutely silent.
“Jesus Christ!” shouted Van Orel. “What the hell are you playing at, sneaking up on us like that?”
Larissa rolled her eyes, the tiniest of smiles curling the corners of her mouth. “There’s an entrance,” she said. “Follow me.”
The squad followed the vampire round the base of the wall as she fluttered impatiently above them. Jamie stared up at the towering wooden barrier as they walked, his mind struggling to fully comprehend it. He understood the incredibly long lives that vampires were capable of living, objectively at least; he and Larissa had talked about it at length, and he believed he was sympathetic to the problems it caused even if, deep down, a part of him that his girlfriend hated could not quite get over the idea that it sounded brilliant. The wall was the hypothetical made physical; a structure that had taken an incredible amount of time to grow, and had been planned by someone who had known they would be around to see it complete. It was time measured not in hours and days and weeks, but in decades and centuries.