by Will Hill
The man stepped forward and extended his hand. “Kevin McKenna,” he said.
“I know who you are,” he replied, gripping the hand and shaking it vigorously. “I’m Greg Browning. This is Pete Randall. We’re glad to be here.”
“Thanks for coming,” said McKenna. “We weren’t sure if you would.”
“I’m not sure we were,” said Pete, stepping forward and shaking McKenna’s hand. “I was half expecting to find a room full of men in black ready to take me away.”
“I know what you mean,” said McKenna. “I’ve felt the same thing. But we’re still here. And now you are, too.”
“Quite so,” said Albert Harker. He had closed the door and stepped forward into the room. “Gentlemen,” he said, smiling broadly. “The four of us represent the beginnings of a movement that Kevin and I have no doubt will one day number in the thousands. Men and women who are tired of being lied to, tired of watching their government put them in danger by refusing to acknowledge the monsters that walk in their midst.”
Greg felt like his heart was expanding in his chest. This was exactly what he had been hoping to hear.
“Kevin is the bravest of us all,” continued Harker. “He stood up when no one else dared to do so, and all it has got him is derision and mockery. We wanted to bring what we know to the public’s attention by traditional means, but Kevin’s paper has refused to run the story. This was a disappointment, but not an unexpected one. So now we are forced to use other methods, which I would call civil disobedience, but which the courts of this land may well consider industrial sabotage. As a result, we will think no less of you if you choose to walk away now, if this is not what you believed you were signing up for. But if you still want to help, we, and the parents of every missing child, will be in your debt.”
“What about you?” asked Pete. “Why are you doing this?”
“Because of what was done to me,” replied Harker. “Please brace yourselves, gentlemen, and try not to panic.”
Greg frowned, and was opening his mouth to ask Harker what he was talking about when the man’s eyes flooded a dark, glowing red. His heart stopped dead in his chest as terrible memories flooded through him, carrying with them emotions he had tried to suppress: fear, panic, and dreadful, awful helplessness. They galvanized his limbs, and he fled for the door, his eyes wide and staring, his mouth opening and working soundlessly. He was reaching for the door handle when he felt a rush of air above his head, and suddenly Albert Harker was standing in front of him, blocking the door.
“Kevin could not have told you,” he said, his eyes burning. “You would not have come. But I believe there should be no secrets between us. Yes, I am a vampire. I never wished to be one, but I am. I am the victim of a crime for which there can be no justice. And, when our task is complete, I will be the irrefutable proof the public needs. Will you stay and help us? I promise you, there is nothing more you do not know. Please?”
Greg stared at the vampire. It was only the second one he had ever seen in the flesh, after the girl who had landed in his garden months earlier, triggering the collapse of the life he had taken so wastefully for granted. Fear was roaring through him, but something else was making its presence known beneath it: a deep, burning sense of outrage.
This is it. This is what we’re fighting against, in the flesh. This is what we’re trying to stop from happening to anyone else.
“I’m still in,” he heard himself say, and looked over at Pete Randall. His companion looked as though he was reliving his worst nightmare, his eyes bulging, his throat swallowing convulsively. But he managed to force his vocal cords into action and tell Harker that he was still in, too.
“Thank you,” said the vampire. The red was fading from his eyes; it was now little more than a pink glow in the corners. “I promise you that neither one of you will live to regret your decision. Kevin will fill you in on everything that has happened, and then I suggest you both get some rest. We have a busy night ahead of us.”
46
IT NEVER RAINS . . .
Jamie?” asked Kate, her voice full of concern. “What does it say?”
“Show them,” said Jamie, handing the console back to Ellison and grabbing his own from his belt. He slid its screen into life with his thumb and opened the location tracker. As he typed Morton’s name into the search field, he heard Kate gasp as Ellison did as she was told.
“Oh no,” he heard Matt whisper. “That’s awful.”
Jamie didn’t respond. His mind was pounding with a single thought: that they had to go and help Morton, had to go and save him from himself. The console beeped as its screen lit up, displaying the location of the rookie operator’s chip.
It was in the northern outskirts of London, moving south.
Jamie opened the Surveillance Division menu, his fingers flying across the console’s touch screen, and opened the satellite tracking record for Alastair Dempsey. The satellites had followed his heat bloom from the substation near Holborn, where he had escaped their squad the previous day, to a disused warehouse in the middle of Soho. Dempsey had entered it an hour before dawn that morning, and there was nothing to indicate that he had left the building since then.
“He’s nearly in London,” said Jamie, looking up at Ellison. “There’s no way we can get there before he gets to Dempsey.”
Ellison looked absolutely heartbroken. “What do we do, sir?” she asked, her voice cracking. “We can’t leave him out there on his own.”
“Of course not,” said Jamie.
“I’ll come with you,” said Kate, scrambling to her feet.
“Me, too,” said Matt.
“No,” said Jamie. “Thank you both, you know how much that means to me. But we’ll do this ourselves.”
“What happened to sticking together?” asked Kate. There was a ghost of a smile on her face, just enough to let Jamie know that she wasn’t really serious.
“We’ll be fine,” he said, glancing at Ellison, who nodded. “You’re needed here. I’ll let you know as soon as we find him.”
“See that you do,” said Kate. “And be careful. Both of you.”
“We will,” said Jamie, then turned to face his squad mate. “Ready?”
“Ready, sir.”
“Okay then,” he said. “Let’s go.”
* * *
Matt watched his friend stride out of the dining hall, his face a mask of helpless concern.
“Jesus,” whispered Kate. “I can’t believe this.”
“It’ll be okay,” said Matt, trying to sound a lot surer than he felt. “Jamie can handle it. It’ll be okay.”
“Paul showed me the footage of the escapees,” said Kate. “They’re brutal, Matt. Strong and fast and vicious.”
“I know that, Kate,” snapped Matt. “I saw the footage, too. But they’re still just vampires, and Jamie knows what he’s doing.”
“I’m sorry,” said Kate, turning her head and giving him a thin smile. “I’m just worried about him. These new vamps are dangerous. They really are.”
“I know,” said Matt. “I’m sorry, too. I didn’t mean to snap.” He sighed deeply. “Why hasn’t Science come up with anything yet? They’ve had captive escapees for almost four days, and they still have no explanation for why these new vamps all look like they were turned by—”
He stopped dead.
Something had flickered into life in the back of his mind, and Matt knew from long experience to simply shut everything else down and see if his brain could fan the flames. For several agonizing moments, the idea danced out of reach, slippery and elusive, but then it caught and burst into bright, burning life.
“My God,” he whispered, and stood up from his chair.
“What’s going on?” asked Kate. “Matt? Where the hell are you going?”
“I have to check something,” he replied, then
turned and ran off without a backward glance.
47
TIME WAITS
FOR NO MAN
Edwards Air Force Base:
Detachment Groom Lake, Nevada, USA
Five hours later
Larissa had been perched on a stool at the bar in the Groom Lake officers’ mess for almost forty minutes when Lee Ashworth finally made his way into the building. She was practically vibrating with excitement; she was ready to get the answers she was looking for.
The mess was a square building that had been built in the 1950s and expanded continuously over the subsequent decades. At its heart was an ornate dark wood bar, a varnished wooden floor, and a collection of leather chairs and sofas that stood around low tables on which had been played innumerable hands of cards. But it had been added to and decorated with whatever could be scavenged from the surrounding towns and bases: a fluorescent sign announcing WELCOME TO TRINITY, a Dark Shadows pinball machine, a Mercury High School football pennant, photos of atomic bomb tests, the F-117A stealth fighter and the B-2 bomber, and a hundred other curios and mementos.
Senior Airman Ashworth made his way to the bar, nodding at a couple of his colleagues as he did so. He ordered coffee and a breakfast burrito and hauled himself up onto a stool, barely even glancing in her direction.
“You’ve got some nerve,” he hissed. “Some goddamn nerve.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Larissa.
She had ambushed Lee Ashworth in his office an hour earlier and shown him the photographs she had taken in Las Vegas two nights earlier. She had placed her phone alongside the photo of his wife and children, to make sure her meaning was absolutely clear, then suggested that he might now be more inclined to tell her about the day the stranger had arrived at Area 51 than he had been the last time they had talked.
He had unleashed a torrent of swearing and insults of such imagination and volume that Larissa, who had once spent more than a year in the company of Alexandru Rusmanov, one of the most dangerous and abusive creatures ever to walk the earth, was genuinely impressed. Then he had told her to meet him in the mess in an hour and to get the hell out of his office before he called the MPs.
“You know exactly what I’m talking about,” said Ashworth, his face red with anger. “So let’s just get this over with. Sit there, shut the hell up, and listen. All right?”
Larissa smiled. “Fine by me, sir.”
Ashworth gave her one final glare, took a sip of his coffee, and began to talk.
“I pulled guard detail that week because we had eight guys back at Edwards running models, and it was Gold Squadron’s turn in the rotation. So I ended up at the Front Gate. It’s not a bad post, but it’s boring. It’s really, really boring. You get the call sheet for the day, and that’s all you normally see, unless some geek drives past the signs by accident, and even then the grunts normally grab them before they get anywhere near the gate.”
“Grunts?” interrupted Larissa.
“Civilian security,” said Ashworth. “They patrol the perimeter in their pickups and their aviators, acting like they’re the badasses of the world, when all they really do is drink coffee and listen to ESPN. Maybe once a month some hiker will lose track of the markers, and they get to swoop down all big and bad and hold them until the police get out here to take them away. But most of the tourists, ninety-nine percent of them, drive up to the signs, take some pictures, wait for the grunts to park their truck up on the top of the hill, then head home, happy with their Area 51 experience. And on the day you’re interested in, that’s what I assumed was happening. We picked up this crappy little jeep as soon as it turned off 375, and the system tracked it all the way along the road. Nothing out of the ordinary, no unusual speed, no explosives, no weapons.
“It makes its way up to the signs, and it stops, just like all the others. I’m watching it on my screens in the guardhouse, and the grunts are in their usual spot on the hill, and there’s no reason to think anything’s wrong, right? I mean, this happens all the time. All the time. But then a minute or so passes, and the jeep just sits there, and whoever’s driving it doesn’t get out, and I don’t see any camera flashes, and I start to get this weird feeling, you know? Not anything major, not any big thing, just like something is a little bit off.
“I’m about to radio the grunts and tell them to drive down and say hello to this guy, when whoever’s in the jeep floors it. And for a moment I just stand there, staring at the screen, because what the hell is this guy doing? He’s going to invade Area 51 in his jeep? I see the grunts haul their truck around and start down the hill, and that’s when I snap out of it. I grab my M4 down off the wall, radio in that we’ve got an intruder, run outside to the barrier, and wait to see who gets there first.
“The grunts are hauling ass down the ridge, trying to cut him off, but he’s really shifting, whoever he is. I figure he’s going to roll it on the last bend, but he doesn’t. He comes around the corner, going hell for leather, this huge cloud of dust blowing up behind him, and I see the grunt truck in the dust, and a bit of me is like, I want to meet this guy. Because he has balls, you know, if nothing else. And he can drive, no question about that. I raise the stingers and clear out to the side, because they’re going to flip him about thirty feet into the air at the speed he’s going.
“But he doesn’t hit them. At the last minute, and I really mean the last minute, he hits the brakes, and there’s this huge squeal of tires, and the jeep starts to shake from side to side because he’s dumping off the speed too quickly, and then it stops, about three feet in front of the gate and the stingers. The grunt truck screeches to a halt beside it, and I’m running out with my M4 raised when the jeep’s door opens and this guy jumps out, his hands in the air.”
“What did he look like?” asked Larissa. Her heart was thumping in her chest. The prisoner, whoever he was, was real. The man sitting next to her had seen him with his own eyes.
“Tall, middle-aged. Pale, even though he was driving in from the desert. In good shape. Hard eyes, like a soldier. I point my rifle at him and tell him to get down, but he doesn’t move. He keeps his hands in the air and shouts a code at me—”
“Which code?”
“F-357-X. It’s maximum clearance. Old, but still active. Then he shouts that he needs to see General Allen, and that just floors me. This guy drives up to the Front Gate, outruns the grunts, and then gives me a max code and tells me he needs to see the head of NS9? Refers to him by name? I mean, seriously, what the hell, right?”
“How did he speak?” asked Larissa. “Did he have an accent? Anything unusual?”
“English,” replied Ashworth.
“I guessed that much.”
“No, he had an English accent. The guy was English.”
Larissa stared, attempting to process what the senior airman was saying. In the deepest corner of her mind, a thought occurred to her—a ludicrous, impossible thought that she quickly pushed away.
“I understand,” she said, slowly.
“Good,” said Ashworth. “Anyway. He’s looking at me, and I’m looking at him, and then the grunts finally show up, and they grab him and throw him over the hood of the jeep and they’re about to cuff him when I suddenly realize I have to call this in. The guy’s used a max code, regardless of how he arrived, so I tell the grunts to stop, to go back to their post and forget this ever happened.
“The English guy watches them leave, then he thanks me and starts to tell me what he needs, but I tell him to shut up, that I’ll shoot him if he moves, and he kind of shrugs and just stands there with his hands up, and that’s when I start to think that maybe this guy is more than just a soldier, maybe he’s SAS or something, because he doesn’t even look like he’s sweating, even though he’s just raced through the desert and he’s standing outside the most classified facility in the country with a gun pointing a
t his head. He looks like he’s just out for an afternoon stroll in the desert.
“I grab my radio and give Central Control the code he gave me. There’s silence, a long silence, which means you’re getting transferred all over the base, and eventually this voice I don’t recognize comes on the line and tells me they’re sending a vehicle out, that I’m not to engage my prisoner in any way, not to even speak to him, but also not to let him out of my sight until he’s been collected.
“So I keep my gun on the guy, and we just stare at each other for a few minutes, until this NS9 Hummer arrives, and one of you spooks gets out and tells me to stand down. I’m like, no problem, no problem at all, I don’t want any part of this mess, so I head back into the guardhouse. The English guy gets into the Hummer, and it drives off toward the lake. I haven’t seen him since, and I still don’t know who he is. I’ve told you everything I know, and I shouldn’t have told you that. So now you’re going to take your phone out of your pocket and delete those photos, then I’m going to sit here and eat my breakfast while you piss off and leave me alone. I’m all done talking.”
* * *
Larissa pulled the mess door shut behind her and stood beneath the wide central canopy, her head spinning.
She hadn’t expected Lee Ashworth to be able to tell her who the secret prisoner was, and she had believed him when he said he didn’t know. But she had got what she wanted from him, and more. The man was real, that much was now certain. He had driven out of the desert in possession of a maximum-security code, which meant that he was either directly or indirectly involved with the secret apparatus of the US military. He had asked for General Allen by name, which meant that he was aware of the existence of NS9. And he was English, which didn’t in itself mean anything, but strongly suggested some connection to Blacklight.
Larissa wandered slowly back toward Central Control and the tunnel that would take her back to Dreamland. She was starting to think she might just take an elevator down to Level 8 and see if there was any way to see the prisoner with her own eyes. It would land her in serious trouble if she was caught, but at that moment she just didn’t care.