Battle Lines

by Will Hill

  “Hello?” he shouted. “Who’s there?”

  Silence.

  McKenna felt a chill creep slowly up his spine. He was suddenly scared. The feeling that he was not alone twisted in the center of his gut, cold and determined.

  An awful sensation of vulnerability overcame him, and he ran for his car, his footsteps echoing loudly through the concrete space. Part of his brain, the rational part, shouted at him as he ran, branding him a coward, but he ignored it. He was focused only on getting into his car and locking the doors, shutting out whoever was in the garage with him, crouched low behind one of the cars or standing statue-still behind one of the concrete pillars, listening and watching and waiting.

  McKenna pulled his keys from his pocket as he ran and pressed the button on the plastic fob. The BMW’s locks disengaged with a beep that sounded loud and inviting, an announcement of his location and his intention. He grabbed for the car’s door, felt the reassuring smoothness of its plastic handle, and was about to pull it open and throw himself inside when cold fingers closed on the back of his neck and lifted him into the air.

  He screamed long and loud, his legs kicking beneath him, and felt his bladder let go in a warm rush of shame and terror. Then he was airborne, his body seeming to float momentarily as whatever had grabbed him threw him across the garage. He watched the floor rising up to meet him, his mind paralyzed by crashing waves of terror. He saw white ovals of discarded chewing gum, a small patch of oil, and a discarded paper coffee cup. Then he hit the concrete, his shoulder exploding with agony, and skidded across the ground, the heels of his shoes squeaking.

  McKenna slid to a halt in a crumpled heap beside the emergency door that led to the stairs, his shoulder on fire, the air driven from his lungs. His first thought, the only cogent thought in his reeling, panicking mind, was to drag himself through it and up the stairs toward the office. But he made the mistake of looking behind him; what he saw froze him where he lay.

  Gliding toward him, his feet a clear six inches above the ground, was a man in an elegant navy blue suit. His face was pale, his hair thinning, but his eyes glowed the color of burning coals, and his mouth was open in a wide smile of pleasure.

  Not real, he screamed, silently. Can’t be real. Not real.

  The man cocked his head slightly to one side, then shot forward at a speed that McKenna could not comprehend; one second there was fifteen feet between them, the next hands were gripping the lapels of his suit jacket and lifting him easily into the air. He tried to turn his head away from the terrible red gaze that was now only inches in front of him, then cried out as he was driven into the concrete wall of the garage. The back of his head cracked against it, and his vision grayed. When it cleared, the man was peering at him with an expression that seemed almost curious, the way a spider might regard a fly that has become stuck in its web. The dreadful red eyes roiled and burned, and McKenna felt consciousness start to slip away as his mind shut down, unable to process the horror that confronted it.

  One of the man’s hands appeared from nowhere and slapped him hard across the face. The impact sounded like a rifle shot in the empty garage, reverberating around the thick concrete walls. McKenna’s eyes flew open, and his mouth formed a perfect O of shock.

  “Are you Kevin McKenna?” asked the man.

  He stared, tears gathering in the corners of his eyes, incapable of speech. The man slapped him again, harder, and McKenna tasted his own blood as it spilled from the corner of his mouth, galvanizing his paralyzed brain.

  “Yes,” he gasped. “I’m Kevin McKenna.”

  “A pleasure to meet you,” said the man. “Did you receive an envelope from a lawyer acting on behalf of the late John Bathurst?”

  Dear God. Oh my dear God.

  “Johnny?” asked McKenna, smiling drunkenly. “Johnny’s . . . dead.”

  The man with the red eyes growled, a guttural noise that rose from somewhere deep inside him, and bared his teeth. Two long, razor-sharp fangs emerged from the man’s gums, sliding down over his canines.

  “I’ll ask you once more, Mr. McKenna,” said the man. “Then I’m going to tear your face from your skull. Did you receive a letter?”

  Kevin McKenna fought to clear his reeling mind as terror more profound than anything he had felt in his entire life gripped him. True, whispered a distant voice. What Johnny sent you. All true.

  “Yes,” he said, his voice cracking. “I got . . . a letter. From Johnny.”

  The man broke into a huge, cheerful grin. “Splendid,” he said, his voice suddenly as light and jovial as a daytime newsreader’s. The grip on McKenna’s chest was released. He slid to the ground in a heap and began to cry as the man stepped back and looked down at him.

  “No more lies, Mr. McKenna,” he said. “There should be no lies between friends, which I am sure you and I are to become. May I help you to your feet?”

  McKenna tried to compose himself, to halt the crying that felt on the verge of becoming hysterical; he failed, but managed to force himself to nod. The man strode forward, still smiling broadly, and extended a thin, pale hand. After a long moment, McKenna reached out and took it, his mind screaming warning after warning. But the man merely pulled him gently to his feet. He stood on unsteady legs, his chest heaving up and down from the sobs that had wracked his body, and stared into eyes that glowed far less fiercely than they had only minutes earlier.

  “Good,” said the man. “No harm done, eh? My name is Albert Harker, and we have already established that you are Kevin McKenna. We are well met, are we not?”

  McKenna nodded again. The tears were slowing, and the pain in his shoulder had faded to a dull ache. His shell-shocked mind was still piecing itself back together, but managed to come up with a best course of action.

  Do whatever it says. Don’t make it angry. Do whatever it tells you.

  “I have clearly startled you somewhat,” said Albert Harker. “For that, I can only apologize. Perhaps a stiff drink is in order?”

  “Okay,” said McKenna, his voice trembling.

  “Excellent,” beamed Harker. “Your place it is.”

  26

  TOO CLOSE TO HOME

  Matt Browning was sitting at his desk in the Lazarus Project when a muffled thud ripped through the Loop, shaking the floors and ceilings. There was an uncomprehending moment of silence before the general alarm screamed into life, its ear-splitting whine echoing through concrete and steel.

  Matt clamped his hands over his ears and leaped to his feet. The rest of the Lazarus Project staff did likewise, their faces contorted with pain; they stared desperately around, looking for someone to tell them what to do. Matt empathized; his colleagues were scientists and doctors, with no real understanding of how dangerous the situation beyond the laboratory really was. He had no such illusions—he had almost been killed by a vampire girl he now called his friend, the first director of the Lazarus Project had been about to murder him until Jamie intervened, and he knew from the stories his friends told just how bad it was outside the Loop. As his colleagues began to shout over the din of the alarm, speculating that a generator had blown or a fuel store had been breached, Matt kept what he was sure would turn out to be the truth to himself.

  That was an explosion. A big one.

  He looked around the room at the frightened men and women, wondering how best to help, and froze.

  Natalia Lenski wasn’t there.

  Fear trickled through him, chilling his spine like a bucket of ice water. There was no reason to panic; there were any number of reasons why Natalia might not be in the lab at that precise moment. But something, some primal instinct buried deep in his gut, began to insist that something was wrong.

  Matt ran across the lab, ignoring the nervous stares of his colleagues, and twisted the handle on the main door.

  Nothing happened. The keypad beside it glowed a steady, mock
ing red.

  He shouted with fury and grabbed the handle again, twisting it, hauling on it, beating the surface of the door with his other fist. Hands grabbed at his shoulders, spinning him around, and he found himself facing the worried gaze of Professor Karlsson.

  “Calm down!” yelled the Lazarus Project director, straining to make himself heard over the din of the alarm. “They’re sealed automatically! It’s all right, Matt!”

  Matt pushed the professor’s hands away. “Where’s Natalia?” he yelled.

  Professor Karlsson turned then and scanned the room. When he returned his attention to Matt, his forehead was furrowed by a deep frown.

  “I don’t know!” he shouted. “Where is she?”

  “I don’t know!” yelled Matt, pulling his radio from his belt. His mind was pounding with concern for Natalia, who would be absolutely unprepared if there was an attack taking place above their heads. A single coherent thought made its way to the surface.

  Call Jamie. He’ll know what to do.

  Matt raised the radio and looked at the screen.

  It was blank.

  He twisted the power switch backward and forward, but nothing brought the handset to life. Matt bellowed again and hurled it against the wall. Karlsson recoiled, shielding his face as shattered plastic and severed metal wire flew through the air, then grabbed hold of Matt.

  “You have to calm down!” he shouted. “We’re safe in here, Matt!”

  “That’s great!” yelled Matt. “What about Natalia? What about my friends? They’re out there somewhere, and we have no idea what the hell is going on!”

  * * *

  Four floors above the Lazarus Project, Jamie Carpenter was in his quarters when the explosion thundered through Level B, shaking the walls of his small room so violently that his desk toppled over, spilling its mountains of files and folders across the floor.

  He was lying on his bed, still seething at the humiliating ordeal that had been his ISAT interview. His hatred for Paul Turner, a complex emotion that never lay far below the surface, blazed more potently than ever before. And although he knew the second part of the interview, the unfair, vicious line of questioning that seemed to have been designed specifically to antagonize him, had been the work of the security officer, he was struggling to spare Kate the anger and disappointment that was boiling through him.

  He knew it wasn’t her fault, but she was part of it. She was the other half of ISAT, and even if she had not been complicit in the ordeal he had been subjected to, her attempt to stop it had been half-hearted at best. When she had told him she was going to volunteer for ISAT, he had told her to think long and hard about it, as it was a decision that was bound to make her unpopular. Now, having been through the invasive, demeaning process himself, he was beginning to think he had been too kind.

  They’re going to do more than dislike her, he thought, with a bitter mixture of concern and spite. It’s going to be much worse than that.

  Everyone’s going to hate her.

  This thought was filling his mind when the deafening roar tore through Level B. Jamie leaped up from his bed as the room shook and rattled, his hand going instinctively to the grip of his Glock 17. A second later he yelled in pain as the alarm screeched into life, but the paralysis that had gripped Matt and his colleagues did not lay a hand on him; he was up and across his quarters and twisting the handle of his door before the first peal had even died away.

  Nothing happened.

  Jamie turned back into the room and slid to his knees, digging through the spilled contents of his desk, looking for the director-level override code that Henry Seward had given to him and Paul Turner the night that Shaun Turner had died and Seward himself had been taken by Valeri Rusmanov. He found the laminated card, ran back to the door, flipped down the panel that concealed his quarters’ emergency controls, and keyed the code into the touchpad. For a long moment the bar at the bottom of the panel glowed yellow, and Jamie allowed himself to believe that it was going to work. Then the panel turned solid red, and he hammered on the immovable door in frustration.

  He knew without looking that his console and radio would be dead; the protocol for any kind of internal attack on the Loop called for a complete lockdown, from which only Paul Turner and certain members of the Security Division would be exempt. He checked them anyway and saw the blank, lifeless screens he had expected.

  Jamie walked back across his room, his heart racing. Surely there was no way that the base could be under attack again? The frontal assault by Valeri and his vampire army had been successful because they had been supplied with information by Christopher Reynolds, the original head of the Lazarus Project, who had been working for the eldest Rusmanov his entire life. Reynolds’s information had enabled them to evade the surveillance and warning systems that protected the base. They had all been reset and improved, and access to their specifics was now one of the most heavily guarded secrets that Blacklight possessed. If they had been compromised again, the implications would be unthinkable.

  The pounding alarm stopped abruptly and was replaced by a familiar voice, amplified and broadcast via the speakers that sat above the door of every room in the Loop.

  “Attention,” said Paul Turner. “There has been a security incident that has resulted in this facility being placed into lockdown. Please do not attempt to leave your location. The Security Division is investigating, and the lockdown will be lifted as soon as possible. Thank you.”

  Jamie waited for the alarm to begin again. If it did so, he intended to put his helmet on and set its exterior volume control to zero. But thirty seconds later the silence in the Loop remained total, so he poured himself a glass of water and sat down on the edge of his bed. His heart was racing, but he tried to ignore it, as he tried to ignore what the voice at the back of his head was whispering.

  It was telling him that the explosion had sounded like it had been on his level, from the far end of the curved corridor.

  Where Kate lived.

  * * *

  Paul Turner was alone in the ISAT lounge when the explosion shook the floor beneath his feet; he had sent Kate for lunch ten minutes earlier and was reading through the file of the first of the afternoon’s interviewees. He was on his feet instantly, throwing the file aside, sprinting across the room and grabbing the door handle, which refused to turn.

  He swore, pulled his ID card from its slot on his belt, and pressed it against the panel beside the door. His role as security officer allowed him to override almost every lock in the Loop; the plastic square turned bright green as the general alarm burst into deafening life, and he hauled the door open. The operator behind the ISAT reception desk looked at him with wide eyes as he strode across the semicircular space.

  “Stay here,” he barked. He ran his card against the panel that controlled the security door, waited impatiently for the heavy locks to disengage, then stepped out into the chaos of the Intelligence Division.

  Operators were on their feet beside their desks, shouting and gesturing, trying to make themselves heard over the siren. Their computer monitors had all gone dark, Turner was relieved to see; in the event of a security breach inside the Loop, access to the Blacklight system was instantly cut to everyone apart from the Security Division to protect the terabytes of sensitive information it contained. He pulled his console from his belt and saw its screen light up.

  Good. That’s good.

  He tapped the screen as he walked, asking the system to pinpoint the location of the explosion and provide a preliminary report, and trying to ignore the shouted questions from the operators of the Intelligence Division.

  “Stay at your desks!” he yelled, as he reached the door. “And stay calm, for God’s sake!”

  His console beeped as he stepped out into the Level A corridor. He tapped the screen, opening the information he had requested.

  PRELIMINARY INCIDENT REP
ORT

  INITIAL CONCLUSION: DETONATION OF CHEMICAL MATERIALS (SPECTROANALYSIS IN PROGRESS).

  CHARACTERISTICS: EXPLOSIVE TEMPERATURE RISE. HIGHEST RECORDED TEMPERATURE 812 DEGREES CELSIUS. CONCUSSIVE BLAST WAVE. DURATION 1.09 SECONDS. RANGE 368.1 FEET.

  DAMAGE REPORT: SUPERFICIAL DAMAGE TO LEVEL B CORRIDOR. LEVEL B POWER SYSTEMS INTERRUPTED (BACKUPS ACTIVATED). LEVEL B ATMOSPHERIC CONTROL INTERRUPTED (BACKUPS FAILED). LEVEL B MONITORING SYSTEM INTERRUPTED (BACKUPS FAILED). LEVEL B FREQUENCY SPECTRUM INTERRUPTED. BACKUPS WORKING AT 46% CAPACITY.

  CONTAINMENT: FIRE EXTINGUISHED BY HALON SYSTEM.

  LOCATION: LEVEL B, ROOM 261.

  Turner read the report, his stomach churning with cold, furious outrage.

  A bomb. A bomb inside the Loop. How dare they?

  He typed a new request into the console, asking who lived in Level B, room 261. The system returned the information immediately.

  OCCUPANT: RANDALL, KATE (LIEUTENANT)/NS303, 78-J.

  27

  DORMANT

  FOR TOO LONG

  Kilburn, London

  McKenna walked down the short corridor that connected his kitchen to the living room of his small flat with a four-pack of lager in his hand, flopped down into the armchair beneath the window, and opened a new can.

  “So that lot that visited me this morning,” he said, taking a long swig. “They weren’t the police, were they? They were the ones you told Johnny about. The secret department.”

  Albert Harker nodded at him from the sofa on the opposite side of the room. “Department 19. Or Blacklight, as they are often called.”

  “So how come they came to see me?”