Battle Lines

by Will Hill

  “I presume they visited the last known address of Mr. Bathurst, found the same correspondence that I found, and made the same inquiries that I made. And since you are the sole named beneficiary of Mr. Bathurst’s estate, they likely assumed that I would attempt to make contact with you.”

  “They told me a released prisoner might try to contact me. They said I should phone the police.”

  Harker smiled. “Of course they did. That’s what they do, Mr. McKenna. They lie.”

  “Why?”

  “To keep you and everyone else in the dark, under the guise of keeping you safe.”

  McKenna drank deeply from his can and leveled his gaze at the vampire. “And what is it that you want, Mr. Harker?” he asked. “You’ve got the tape and the transcript, and I give you my word that I won’t tell anyone about you. I don’t have anything else.”

  Albert Harker smiled broadly. “Mr. McKenna, that is exactly the opposite of what I want from you. I want the world to know about me, and others like me. I want to expose Blacklight and all its lies, and I want you to write the story that pulls back the curtain. How does that sound?”

  “It sounds nuts,” said McKenna. “It sounds like the craziest thing I’ve ever heard.”

  Harker’s face darkened, and a red flicker appeared in the corners of his eyes. “It’s the biggest story in human history,” he said, his voice low. “The greatest exclusive in the history of journalism, and I am giving it to you. I would expect you to be more grateful.”

  Grateful, thought McKenna. Sure. There’s a vampire sitting in my living room. An actual real, walking, talking, breathing vampire who threatened to tear my face off my skull less than an hour ago. And I’m supposed be grateful?

  Then his eyes narrowed.

  A vampire. An actual vampire, because they’re real. A real vampire.

  Despite himself, his mind started to turn it over.

  Forget long-lens tits and cheating celebrities. He’s crazy, but he’s right about one thing. This could be the biggest story ever. And I could be the one to break it.

  “It’s a big story,” he said, carefully. “I’m with you there, no argument whatsoever. But you have to see that there’s not a chance in hell anyone would ever print it. You’re sitting right here on my sofa, and I only half believe it. My editor is going to laugh his arse off for about a minute, and then he’s going to fire me. I’ll never get another byline as long as I live.”

  “I understand your concern,” said Harker. “And you’re right, we will need more than the word of one man if we are to be convincing. We need evidence, testimonials from men and women who have encountered my kind, or the operators who are supposed to protect them from us.”

  “How do we do that?” asked McKenna. “Where are we going to find these people?”

  Harker smiled. “We don’t need to find them, Kevin. They’ll come to us, willingly. You have a blog, yes?”

  “You know what a blog is?”

  “I was in a hospital, Kevin, not on the moon. I am familiar with the Internet. Do you have a blog or not?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Good. You will write a post asking for people who have lost friends and family members but have been threatened not to talk about what happened to them. Ask for their stories of figures dressed all in black, or men and women with sharp teeth and red eyes, and guarantee their anonymity.”

  “And you want me to do this when?”

  “Immediately. There is no time to lose.”

  McKenna considered the vampire’s plan. His initial reaction was that most people would laugh their heads off at him if he wrote the post that Albert Harker had described, and the ones who didn’t laugh would feel sorry for him. Then, for the first time in a very long time, he pushed his self-loathing aside and was honest with himself.

  What the hell are you worrying about? People laugh at you now, behind your back. You know they do. You’re a joke. And worst of all, you’re a joke that pretends he isn’t. You’re nothing. You’re nobody. Why not go out with a bang, one way or the other?

  He finished his beer, opened yet another, and reached for his laptop. It was sitting on the coffee table where he had left it that morning, when the world had been a different place, far smaller and safer than it now seemed.

  Then a dreadful thought occurred to him. “So I write this blog,” he said, slowly. “And let’s say you get what you want, and we bring it all down. What happens then? You kill me?”

  “Of course not,” said Harker, placing a hand across his chest. “I am not a monster, Kevin. I have no intention of hurting anybody.”

  McKenna laughed, a short sound that was little more than a grunt. “It didn’t feel like that when you were throwing me across the garage.”

  “I needed to get your attention,” said Harker. “If you refused to help, I had to make sure you were too scared to go to the authorities. I meant you no harm, I assure you.”

  “How can you expect me to believe that?” asked McKenna.

  “I can do nothing more than give you my word. Whether you believe it or not is up to you.”

  “So what would happen if I decided to get up and walk out of here right now?”

  “I would attempt to persuade you not to.”

  “And if I insisted?”

  “I would . . . prevent you from leaving.”

  “How?”

  “My friend,” said Harker, spreading his hands wide in a gesture that Kevin felt sure was meant to portray honesty. “Let us not dwell on such things. Can we not just say that we are here, and there is work for us to do? Great work, that future generations will thank us for?”

  McKenna stared at Albert Harker for a long moment, trying to shake the feeling of dread that had taken up residence in his chest.

  I don’t believe a word you say, he thought. I’ve known violent men, I’ve been around them. They have this look, this aura about them. Just like the one you’ve got.

  “All right,” he said, eventually. “So I post a blog. Then what?”

  Harker smiled. “Then we wait.”

  “What if nobody replies?”

  “Do not worry,” replied Harker. “If we are forced to do this alone, I have a plan for that eventuality. But I think it is remarkably unlikely that we will need to. I have faith that our call will be answered.”

  McKenna opened his laptop, logged in, and accessed the dashboard of his blog. He was about to start typing when he paused, his fingers hovering over the keys.

  “This matters to you, doesn’t it?” he said, looking at the vampire. “This isn’t just about revenge for what they did to you, or getting back at your family. You really want the public to know what’s going on.”

  Albert Harker regarded him with an expression of naked determination. “You are quite correct, my friend,” he said, softly. “I was incarcerated for almost a decade with no hope of release, by people acting with total impunity from the law, but this is not about vengeance. This is nothing less than a crusade against everything that Blacklight has done in the shadows, on behalf of all the men and women who died because they weren’t allowed to know the truth that might have saved them. And I promise you this, Kevin, right here and now. The day will come when you will be proud to tell people that you were there when it began.”

  McKenna nodded, and began to type. As the words began to flow, more easily than they had in a long time, a tiny part of the fear that had filled him ever since he stepped into the garage beneath the Globe’s offices evaporated. It was replaced by something else, something his long-jaded system found unfamiliar.

  Excitement.

  28

  WHERE IT HURTS

  For a terrible moment, Paul Turner was completely unable to breathe. His eyes remained fixed on his console’s screen as his heart froze in his chest and his insides turned momentarily to water. Then his
long years of experience kicked in; his fingers flew across the screen, ordering it to find Kate Randall’s locator chip. The console worked as Turner screamed silently for it to hurry, then returned the result of its search.

  RANDALL, KATE (LIEUTENANT)/NS303, 78-J/LOCATOR CHIP NOT FOUND

  Turner shoved the console into its loop on his belt and took off toward the Level A stairwell at a flat sprint.

  It doesn’t mean anything, he told himself as he ran. Monitoring is down on B. If she’s there, then her chip won’t show up. It doesn’t mean anything.

  As he pounded down the corridor, his boots echoing against the hard concrete floor, Paul Turner pulled his radio from his belt and entered his code onto its screen. The small rectangle lit up, and he tapped a series of commands, activating a Security Division interrupt; this would cause the handsets of his operators to act like speakers, broadcasting his voice whether they were switched on or not.

  “Security breach on Level B,” he said, his voice perfectly steady even as he ran. “Sections A, B, and D, implement security protocol Alpha 7. Section C, convene on Level B, room 261. Full medical and forensic tech. Out.”

  Protocol Alpha 7 would see three-quarters of the Security Division pair up into two-man teams and station themselves outside the most sensitive areas of the Loop: the hangar, the Lazarus Project, the interim director’s quarters, and a long list of others. The remaining quarter of the division would meet him at the site of the explosion.

  Kate’s room. Where the bomb went off. Kate’s room.

  Turner knew he should not be thinking about the situation in such terms; the entire Department could be in danger, the bomb merely the precursor to a larger attack, and the fate of a single operator should not be a priority under such circumstances. But as he skidded to a halt in front of the access door to the emergency stairs and pressed his card against the panel beside it, he found himself unable to view the situation in such objective terms.

  Not her. Anyone else. Just not her.

  The door unlocked, and he pushed it open. The emergency stairs ran down the outer edges of the sprawling base, a seemingly endless column of concrete steps that doubled back on themselves between each level. He leaped down them three at a time, his heart thumping in his chest, and pressed his ID against the door that led to Level B. Turner pushed it open and immediately smelled smoke, along with a bitter chemical undercurrent that made his eyes water.

  The alarm was still sounding its endless two-tone whine. Turner paused, accessed the security override controls on his console, and turned it off. He replaced the console with one hand as he drew out his radio with the other and switched it to the Loop’s global frequency. He walked slowly into the northern Level B corridor, speaking into his radio as he did so, telling everyone in the Loop to remain where they were and wait for further instructions. The security officer knew that there would be panic in certain sections of the base, but that was the unavoidable result of a lockdown. The purpose of containing everyone where they were was to allow Turner and his team to do their job, and to prevent potential enemy operatives or suspects from escaping.

  The damage report had been correct; the fires that the explosion had caused had been extinguished, as it had claimed. But the smoke that had billowed from them had far from dissipated, and it quickly began to burn his nose and throat as he made his way forward. His helmet was in his quarters on Level C, so he pulled his field survival kit from his belt, extracted the air filtration mask and the plastic goggles, and put them on. The goggles did nothing to clear the drifting smoke, but they protected his eyes from the acrid air, and the mask would keep out any toxins that had been let loose in the blast.

  Paul Turner walked slowly through the smoke with his Glock drawn. He doubted that whoever was responsible for the explosion would be nearby—he fully expected to find out that the bomb had been detonated either remotely or automatically. He also had no intention of being unprepared if his assumption turned out to be wrong.

  The numbers on the doors to his left climbed steadily—235, 237, 239, 241—and the smoke thickened as he approached number 261. He walked silently, his breathing shallow, his senses heightened. When the distant thud of boots on concrete became audible behind him, he settled his back against the wall and leveled his Glock in the direction of the sound. Moments later a cluster of ethereal black shapes became visible through the smoke, shapes that seemed to solidify as they neared him, their purple visors lending them a familiar, robotic, anonymous appearance. Turner lowered his pistol and stepped into the middle of the corridor to meet them.

  “Section C reporting, sir,” said the nearest operator, his voice flattened by the filters in his helmet.

  “Is that you, Bennett?” asked Turner.

  “Yes, sir,” replied the operator.

  “Good,” said Turner. “Fall in behind me. Ready One for supernaturals, anyone else I want alive. Anything that moves, anything that shows up hot, I want to know about it immediately. Clear?”

  “Clear, sir.”

  “Then follow me.”

  Less than a minute later Turner began to see the carnage described in the damage report with his own eyes. The corridor had been stained white by the billowing clouds of carbon dioxide released by the fire-suppression system. A blackened piece of wood lay in the middle of the floor, surrounded by chunks of plaster and scraps of twisted metal. The debris mounted up as Turner led Section C past rooms 257 and 259, then stopped.

  The entrance to room 261 was entirely gone.

  The door itself had been blown across the corridor and was lying on the ground beneath a pile of debris. Much of its wooden surface was missing, revealing the metal skeleton beneath. The doorway had been destroyed, leaving a ragged hole where there had once been a rectangular frame. Smoke plumed from the room as thin white foam poured out into the corridor.

  “Jesus,” said Bennett. “I hope there wasn’t anyone in there.”

  The security officer turned his head and stared at him. He wanted to reach out and crush the operator’s throat with his bare hands, as punishment for giving voice to what Turner had already realized: If Kate had been in her room when the bomb went off, there was no chance of finding her alive.

  “Bennett, with me,” he said, summoning all that remained of his legendary self-control. “The rest of you, check the remainder of the corridor and double back. Then seal off a thirty-foot perimeter and see what you can do about getting rid of this damn smoke.”

  “Yes, sir,” said one of the Section C operators, and led the rest away down the corridor. Bennett stood silently at Turner’s side, facing the remains of the entrance to room 261. He appeared to have concluded that the best course of action was to keep his mouth shut.

  Paul Turner took a deep breath. The air in the corridor was slowly beginning to clear, but the dark interior of the room was still thickly clouded with smoke and spent chemicals. He drew his flashlight from his belt and flicked it on; a bright white beam burst from the bulb.

  “Careful,” he said. “Don’t touch anything.”

  “Yes, sir,” replied Bennett.

  Turner nodded, then walked into Kate Randall’s quarters.

  * * *

  The small room had been utterly destroyed.

  The wardrobe, desk, and bedside table had been blown to splinters and blasted against the walls and ceiling, leaving scratches and gouges across the plaster. The bed was ruined, torn to shreds and scorched by both the explosion and the fire that had burned fiercely until the Halon system had activated. A pitch-black depression in the center of the floor suggested the likely location of the bomb; of the device itself, there remained nothing that the naked eye could discern.

  Attached to the door, Turner thought. I’d bet my life on it. Triggered as it opened, then a second or two delay to make sure she was in the room before it fired.

  He looked around the devastated room. The walls
were scorched and blackened, as were the floor and ceiling; it was like standing inside an enormous oven. The residue coating the surfaces was thick and lumpy, and impossible to identify. It could be manufactured or biological; Turner could not tell with any degree of certainty whether what he was looking at were the charred remains of Kate Randall.

  “There’s no one here, sir,” said Bennett. “We need to seal this for forensics.”

  “Wait,” said Turner. He was not ready to leave just yet. If Kate had been in here when the bomb detonated, if she was, in fact, all around him, on the walls and the ceiling, then this would be the last time he was ever close to her. Forensics would analyze the room, then tear it down and send it piece by piece to the labs for chemical and spectral analysis. Whatever was left of Kate would end up in petri dishes and specimen jars.

  “Sir!” shouted a voice from the corridor. It awoke him from his thoughts, and he turned toward the ragged hole where the doorway had stood. The Section C operators had returned and were crouching beside the shattered door of room 261.

  “What is it?” he asked, walking toward them.

  “There’s someone here, sir,” replied the operator. “Under the door.”

  Paul Turner’s heart stopped in his chest. For a moment, he just stared at the pile of rubble atop the ruined door, his eyes wide and uncomprehending. Then his paralysis broke and he ran forward, sliding to his knees beside his men.

  “Are they breathing?” he asked, peering down at the door. Beneath it, through a gap between the frame and a jagged lump of wall plaster, he could see pale human skin.

  “There’s a pulse, sir,” confirmed an operator.

  “Let’s get this off them,” said Turner, and gripped the edge of the door with both hands. One of Section C took hold of the other side, and the two of them hauled the heavy metal frame up and back, sending it clattering to the floor. A cloud of dust billowed up from where the door had lain. Turner waved it away, almost frantically.