Battle Lines

by Will Hill

  Larissa was so lost in thought that she didn’t hear the chorus of voices shouting her name from across the central plaza of the complex. She didn’t become aware that there was anyone near her until a hand dropped onto her shoulder and her vampire side reacted. Her eyes flooded red, her fangs burst into place, and she grabbed the hand and threw whomever it belonged to through the air. Before they had even hit the ground, she had spun around, eyes blazing, teeth bared, to find herself looking at three of her friends.

  “Jesus Christ, Larissa,” said Kara, her eyes wide with shock.

  Larissa looked at Kelly and Danny, who were standing beside their friend, and saw similar expressions on their faces. Then she heard a low groan from behind her. She felt the red disappear from her eyes and her fangs retract as she turned to see what she had done, to see who she had hurt this time.

  “That’s quite an arm you’ve got there,” said Tim Albertsson, a smile rising on his face. He was sitting on the tarmac, rotating one of his shoulders, checking the range of movement. His uniform was covered in dust, but he was looking at her with bemusement, rather than the anger she had been expecting.

  “Jesus,” she breathed, hot shame flooding through her. “Tim, I’m so sorry. I was in a world of my own and then you . . . I’m really, really sorry.”

  “It’s okay,” he said, getting slowly to his feet. “No harm done. My fault anyway, I shouldn’t have surprised you like that. I wasn’t thinking.”

  I’m like a wild animal, thought Larissa, through a dark fog of self-loathing. There are rules for handling me.

  Tim stepped forward, threw an arm around her shoulder, and faced the rest of her friends. Kara’s eyes had returned to normal as Kelly and Danny began to smile, but there was still palpable unease in the air.

  “No harm done,” repeated Tim. “Don’t sneak up on her, that’s my advice to the three of you. You’ll be taking your lives in your hands.” He grinned, and Larissa felt a wave of gratitude crash through her. Kara laughed, Danny’s and Kelly’s smiles turned into grins, and, just like that, everything was all right.

  Thank you, she thought, casting a glance at Tim. His arm was still around her shoulder, but she thought she could tolerate it, for a little while at least.

  “How was Colorado?” she asked.

  “Cold,” replied Kelly, shaking her head. “Full of vampires.”

  “San Diego was sunny and full of barely dressed navy SEALs,” said Kara. “In case that makes you feel any better?”

  Kelly flipped her friend the finger and smiled.

  “So,” said Tim, his attention still focused on Larissa. “Now that we’ve found you, we need to get you back to Dreamland ASAP.”

  “Orders?” she asked.

  Kara shook her head. “We’ve been given a forty-eight-hour furlough.”

  “Furlough?”

  “Forty-eight hours off, Larissa,” said Tim, and checked his watch. “Which officially started seventy-three minutes ago. So we need to hurry. It’s almost a two-hour drive to Vegas.”

  “Vegas?” asked Larissa. “We’re going to Las Vegas?”

  “Well, we are,” said Kelly, looking around at her colleagues. “But we were hoping you might want to come with us. What do you say?”

  Larissa frowned. “Why would General Allen give us two days off? There are still Supermax escapees out there, we’re right in the middle of training the rookie intake, and—”

  “Who cares?” interrupted Kara. “Let’s just get the hell out of here before he changes his mind.”

  “It doesn’t make any sense, though,” persisted Larissa. “We don’t even work together. Why would the five of us get furlough at the same time?”

  “You know why,” said Tim, smiling gently at her. “You’re just not saying it.”

  Larissa thought it through. If Allen had given Tim and his special operations squad time off after Nuevo Laredo, it would still have surprised her, but it would have at least made sense. But there was nothing that united the four people standing in front of her, apart from the fact that they were—

  “This is because we’re friends,” she said, slowly. “Isn’t it?”

  “Of course it is,” said Tim. “You know the director adores you and you’re not going to be here for long. This is a gift, from him to you. We just get to come along. So, as you can imagine, we’re pretty keen for you to agree to our plan.”

  “But there are things that need doing,” said Larissa. “I don’t see how we can—”

  “Look, it’s really simple,” said Kelly, cutting across her. “If the director didn’t think the department could survive without us for two days, he wouldn’t be letting us go. So why don’t you trust him to know what he’s doing, come with us to Vegas, and thank him when we get back. What do you say?”

  A grin emerged on Larissa’s face, huge and happy. “I say yes.”

  34

  THE SUM OF OUR PARTS

  Are you benching me?” asked John Morton. “You are, aren’t you?”

  Jamie shook his head, trying to buy time. He hadn’t expected the rookie to so quickly work out why his squad leader had come up to the Level A dormitory to see him. “No,” he said. “That’s not what’s happening. But you should know, because I wouldn’t want you to hear it from anyone else, that I asked the interim director to place you on the inactive roster. He refused.”

  Morton stared. “You don’t want me on your squad?”

  “That’s not true,” said Jamie. “What I want is you at your best, ready to face what’s out there. And I don’t think that’s where you are.”

  “I’m fine,” said the rookie. He pushed his chair back from his desk and turned it to face his squad leader. “Really, sir. I’m fine.”

  “I don’t think you are,” said Jamie, softly. “I think you’re scared.” He saw color begin to rise in Morton’s cheeks and moved to defuse the situation. “It’s not a criticism, John. It takes people different amounts of time to adjust to being part of Blacklight, to come to terms with the reality you get shown. There’s no shame in it.”

  “I’ve been scared, Jamie,” said Morton. “I know scared. This is something else.”

  But you admit there is something, thought Jamie. That’s a start, at least.

  “What is it then?” he asked. “It will stay between us.”

  Morton looked down at his hands for a long moment. “Afghanistan,” he said, eventually. “Last summer I was attached to a recon marine battalion, working the mountains in Helmand. I saw everything you can imagine and probably stuff you can’t. Dead kids, men who’d been tortured over hearsay, women who’d been gang-raped for teaching girls to read. We came into this village one morning, where three Taliban fighters were supposed to be holed up. We’d pounded the area all night, drone strikes from twenty miles away. I don’t know how many missiles, maybe fifty, maybe a hundred. I don’t know. We had air surveillance at both ends of the valley, and they confirmed that no one had gotten out, in any direction.

  “So, when dawn came, they sent the six of us in. We came over the rise at the head of the valley, and where the village had been there was just rubble and dust. Nothing standing, nothing moving. We just walked right down the middle of the track, because there was no way anything could have lived through what the drones had done, and we found the first body about twenty yards outside the village. It was an old woman, gone below the waist, just a spray of blood. She was facedown in the dust. There was a square in the middle of where the village had been, a little patch of dust not much bigger than this room. Two kids were lying on the ground, holding hands. Both dead. In the ruins of the buildings we found more bodies, bits of bodies really, almost all of them children, some women. Maybe two or three men, old and gray, beards down to their knees.

  “We finished our sweep on the other side of the village, where we found a dead teenage boy and the o
nly thing that had survived, this mangy little dog. It was eating the dead boy, chewing at a hole in his stomach. One of the marines, a guy called Brody, shot the dog, and we headed back to our extraction point. Thirty-four dead was the final count. Thirteen women, four men, counting the teenager, and seventeen kids. No sign of the fighters, and when we got back to Bastion no one could show us the intelligence that had suggested they were there. So it got written up, and the CIA redacted most of it and suppressed what was left, and two days later they gave me a medal, and a week later I came home. That was seven months ago.”

  “Jesus,” said Jamie. “That’s awful.”

  “Right,” said Morton. “I saw other stuff that was almost as bad, but that was the worst. It was like they weren’t people anymore, and I don’t just mean because they were dead. They weren’t whole, they were broken. Do you know what I’m trying to say?”

  Jamie thought of the terrorized, mutilated monks of the Lindisfarne Priory, the men and women who had been abused and tortured for the entertainment of the membership of La Fraternité de la Nuit, and nodded his head. “I know,” he said, softly. “Believe me.”

  Morton stared at him for a long moment, then smiled a thin, painful smile. “I do,” he said. “You can tell when people have seen things they can’t forget. It does something to their eyes. Yours have it. I was scared in Afghanistan, and in Iraq before that. If you weren’t scared, you were either an idiot or you were lying. But that wasn’t the problem yesterday. I can’t explain it.”

  “Try,” said Jamie.

  “The vampires,” said Morton, slowly. “They’re . . . wrong. That’s the best I can do. I’ve faced people who wanted to kill me, and I’ve been in situations where I could have died, more than I can count. I’m not afraid of dying. But with them . . . it’s like they’re not real. Or they shouldn’t be. But they are, and it doesn’t seem right. None of this feels right, sir.”

  “You just need more time,” said Jamie. “You’ll get your head around it, I know you will.”

  “Ellison already has,” said Morton. “She was born to do this, like you. Maybe I wasn’t. Maybe that’s just the truth of it.”

  “No one was born to do this,” said Jamie. “You’re being too hard on yourself, John. You missed a shot, you started beating yourself up about it, and you overthought everything. It happens. It won’t be the last shot you miss, and that’s not what worries me. What worries me is what you said afterward. I can’t have someone on my squad who is conflicted about whether destroying vampires is a good idea.”

  Morton nodded. “I get that,” he said, his voice low.

  The two operators sat for a long moment. Eventually, Jamie broke the silence. “Do you think you should be on the active roster? Be honest with me.”

  Morton looked at him. “I don’t know. What do you think?”

  “You know what I think.”

  “I want to help,” said Morton. “I don’t want to be sitting here while everyone else is out there fighting. That’s not me, sir.”

  “You’re not helping if I have to worry about you every second we’re out there,” said Jamie. “You can see that, can’t you?”

  “I can,” said Morton.

  Jamie stared at the rookie, then rubbed his eyes and sighed. “The director says you stay active,” he said. “So you stay active. That doesn’t mean I won’t leave you in the van if I think it’s necessary.”

  “I understand, sir.”

  “And I’m sending you down to the Science Division for a psych evaluation. Nonnegotiable.”

  “When?”

  “Right now. As soon as we’re done here. They’re expecting you.”

  “Okay,” said Morton. “Anything else?”

  “No,” said Jamie. “We’ll talk again when the psych results come back. As for right now, you’re still on my squad. Is that what you want?”

  “Yes, sir,” said Morton. “Thank you. Sir.”

  * * *

  Jamie was waiting outside the Level A elevator when his console vibrated in his pocket. He fished it out, grateful for the distraction from his own thoughts. He had been expecting Morton to get angry, to threaten him, possibly even to try to attack him. The rookie’s quiet, uncertain demeanor had somehow been far more troubling.

  He saw the message icon glowing on the console’s screen and thumbed the screen into life.

  ALL/OPERATIONAL_SQUADS_REACTIVATED/SCHEDULES_TO_FOLLOW

  About time, thought Jamie. The lockdown already cost us a whole night.

  The console beeped again in his hand, and a second message appeared. His squad’s updated schedule flashed up, and he read through it quickly. The Surveillance Division had identified the second vampire on their list as a middle-aged escapee by the name of Alastair Dempsey, and pinpointed a probable location in central London. Operational Squad M-3 was scheduled to depart at 1600 hours to continue its mission.

  Jamie checked his watch and saw that he had almost five hours to kill. He forwarded the schedule to his squad mates with a note telling them to meet him in the hangar at 1545. He thought about reminding Morton that his involvement was conditional on the results of his psych evaluation, but decided against it. The rookie’s confidence was already shaken, and he didn’t think any good would come of belaboring the point. When the elevator arrived, he pressed the button marked H, leaned against the wall, and closed his eyes.

  A minute later Jamie stepped out of the airlock that controlled access to the Blacklight detention block. He nodded to the operator sitting inside the control station and set off down the long corridor, his boot heels clicking against the smooth surface of the floor.

  He fixed his gaze on the wall at the far end of the block as he passed the cells that held Valentin and his valet, Lamberton. Out of the very corner of his eye, he noticed the youngest Rusmanov watching him as he passed, but forced himself to keep going.

  Not today. Go and see your mom, for God’s sake.

  As he approached the last cell on the left, the sweet smell of raspberry tea floated through the ultraviolet wall and into his nostrils, triggering a wave of nostalgia so sharp it was almost painful. It carried memories of the kitchen in their old house, the table where he had done his homework while he and his mom waited for his dad to come home from a job at the Ministry of Defense that had never actually existed. What his father had actually spent his days doing had been very different, a reality neither he nor his mother had become aware of until long after Julian Carpenter was dead.

  Jamie stepped out in front of the UV wall and smiled. His mother was sitting on the sofa, working on a crossword, and sipping her tea from the cup and saucer he had bought her for Christmas when he was twelve. She looked up before he said a word and smiled at him.

  “Hello, love,” she said. “Come in.”

  Jamie stepped through the barrier, feeling the familiar tingle on his skin as he did so. “How are you, Mom?” he asked. He leaned down and gave her a hug that she returned in her usual careful manner. “You okay?”

  “I’m fine,” she replied, letting go of him and clearing the space beside her on the sofa. “How are you? Is everything all right upstairs?”

  “Just about,” said Jamie, flopping down next to her. “I can’t tell you what happened, but I’m fine. So are Kate and Matt.”

  “The walls shook,” said Marie. Her face was suddenly pale with worry. “It sounded like a bomb going off.”

  “I can’t tell you anything, Mom,” said Jamie, his tone a little sharper than he had intended. “You know that.”

  “I do,” replied Marie. “I thought you might have let me know you were all right, though. I was worried.”

  Jamie felt heat rise in his cheeks, as shame and guilt fought for position in the pit of his stomach.

  The blast shook the entire base, he thought, and she’s been down here on her own wondering what happened. I could h
ave been dead, for all she knew.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t think.”

  “You never do,” replied Marie. Her tone was cool, but not angry—it sounded full of disappointment. “I love you Jamie, more than anything in the world, and I know you’re busy, and I know how important what you do is. But I’m your mom, and I worry about you. I’m sorry if that’s a burden.”

  Jamie felt tears threatening to well up in the corners of his eyes. “It’s not,” he said, in a strangled voice. “I really am sorry, Mom. They locked the base down overnight, but I should have come down first thing this morning. I didn’t mean for you to worry.”

  She smiled at him, an expression so full of love that his heart felt like it would burst from his chest. “I know you didn’t, Jamie,” she said. “I never think that you don’t care, I promise you I don’t. And I’m so proud of you. Just spare me a thought now and again, okay?”

  “I will,” replied Jamie. His insides felt like they were on fire, set ablaze by a volatile combination of shame, self-loathing, and unconditional love. “I’ll try harder, Mom. I promise.”

  35

  GOING UNDERGROUND

  Four hours later

  Jesus,” said Lizzy Ellison. “I wish I hadn’t read that.”

  The van containing Operational Squad M-3 was cruising south, eating up the miles that lay between it and the capital. Ellison and Morton had both finished scanning through copies of their target’s Broadmoor file, their faces turning increasingly pale as they did so. Jamie was still attempting to process both his conversation with his mother and the results of Morton’s psych evaluation, and had been glad of something to keep his squad mates occupied, even something as grisly as the story of Alastair Dempsey.

  * * *

  Eighteen years earlier, Dempsey’s sister and her husband had taken a two-week vacation on Fuerteventura, leaving their eight-year-old daughter in his care. This was a regular occurrence, and both Sharon and Nick counted themselves lucky to have a relative who was not only willing to babysit Beth, but who was also both a primary school teacher and an EMT. They had returned home rested and relaxed, and picked their daughter up from her uncle’s house. She seemed a little quieter than usual, but Sharon put it down to sadness at being made to come home; Alastair had always been his niece’s favorite.