Battle Lines

by Will Hill

  The four of them had piled into the van, and the vampire had given Pete the location that he was to drive them to. It had initially meant nothing to Pete: a nondescript industrial estate in a part of the world that was full of them. But as he had driven the van through the entrance, he had seen a familiar logo on the tall board listing the resident companies, and felt his stomach tighten.

  “This is where they print the Globe, right?” he said.

  “Indeed,” said Harker. “The printing presses that produce Kevin’s former publication each night. This is where we will strike our first blow for truth.”

  Then he leaned forward and explained his plan.

  * * *

  The side door of the van slid open, and four figures emerged. They were dressed in black clothing, one of them carrying a black sports bag over his shoulder.

  They walked quickly across the forecourt toward the printing press’s entrance, Albert Harker in the lead. Through the glass, Pete could see the reception desk and the lone security guard sitting behind it. The man had noticed their approach and was watching them, but his face bore no trace of concern; after-hours visitors were presumably a common occurrence. As they neared the glass door, the guard reached out and pressed a button on his desk. A second later there was a loud buzzing noise, and the door clicked open.

  Albert Harker took hold of the handle and pulled it open.

  “Thank you,” he said, as Pete, Kevin, and Greg followed him inside.

  “No problem,” said the guard. “Sign in—”

  The rest of the sentence died in the guard’s throat, as Albert Harker’s eyes burst a deep, flaming red. He crossed the reception in a blur of black, grabbed the reeling guard by the back of his head, and slammed his face into the desk. There was a loud crunch as the man’s nose broke and blood flew in the fluorescent brightness.

  “Jesus,” shouted Kevin McKenna.

  Harker lifted the guard’s head. His mouth hung open, his eyes rolled back.

  “He’ll be fine,” said the vampire. “He’s going to have a sore head when he wakes up, but we’ll be long gone by then. Greg, tie him and bind his mouth. Make sure you leave his nose clear; we don’t want him to choke.”

  Greg nodded, and shrugged the bag down from his shoulder. He unzipped it and pulled out a roll of black electrical tape and a length of plastic wire. Harker lifted the security guard over the desk with one hand and laid him flat on the floor. Greg quickly tied his hands behind his back and his legs together at the ankles. Then he tore a strip of tape and pressed it firmly over the guard’s mouth.

  “Well done,” said Harker, and carried the man back behind the desk. He placed him on the floor beside his chair, hidden from anyone looking in from outside, then walked back to his companions, his eyes still blazing.

  “That’s it, right?” said McKenna. “No one else gets hurt?”

  “As I promised you, my friend,” replied Harker. “No one else gets hurt.”

  “Okay,” said McKenna, “like you promised.”

  * * *

  At the rear of the reception, a pair of doors led to the printing press floor. Access was controlled by a key-card panel, but Harker simply pushed until their deadbolts gave way with a loud crunch of metal. Deafening noise spilled instantly out into the reception, an unholy cacophony of thundering metal pistons and giant spinning wheels.

  “Follow me,” said the vampire, and walked through the doors.

  The printing press looked like something out of an industrial nightmare. It filled the enormous room from floor to ceiling, a series of innumerable machines connected by conveyor belts that snaked between them. An open area to their right contained a number of desks and computer screens. A sign that read EDITORIAL hung from the ceiling above it.

  Five yards along the wall beside the door stood a large glass cabinet. Harker strode along the edge of the room and stopped before it. His companions followed, Pete scanning the huge room as they did so, his eyes peeled for any of the press’s employees. McKenna had told them that the facility was almost fully automated; once it was running, only a skeleton maintenance crew stayed overnight, their job being to fix the machines if something went wrong. He had estimated that there would be no more than ten men and women in the entire building.

  Beside the editorial department, rolls of paper taller than the average man spun endlessly, feeding the hungry machines. At the far end of the room, Pete could see stacks of finished newspapers being automatically bundled, wrapped in plastic, and stacked onto pallets. Then one of the press’s employees, a man wearing blue overalls, appeared, driving a forklift with a yellow light spinning on its roof. The distant wall contained a number of large rolling doors, most of which were open. These were where the trucks that delivered the Globe to distribution centers throughout the country parked, ready to be filled with brightly colored pages of gossip and sport.

  As Pete watched, the man lifted a pallet into the open trailer of a truck, before a second worker closed its doors and locked them. The truck immediately pulled away from its berth, leaving a rectangular hole in the side of the building. The man reversed the forklift until it disappeared behind the towering machines.

  Harker pulled open the glass front of the cabinet as his companions crowded around him. There were a number of illuminated switches on a metal panel, with a large red button in the middle marked ALL STOP.

  The vampire reached out one thin, pale finger and pressed the button.

  The cessation of noise was so startling it made them all jump. For a long second, all that could be heard was a high hissing as the press ground to a halt. Then a number of alarms began to sound, and shouted voices echoed through the cavernous space.

  “Here we go,” said Harker. “Let me do the talking.”

  The vampire’s eyes bloomed red as his fangs slid into place. A second later two men in blue overalls appeared from between the rows of machinery, their faces red and frowning.

  “Hey!” shouted one of them, pointing at Pete. “What the hell do you—” His voice died away as he caught sight of Albert Harker, a grinning, glowing thing from his worst nightmares. His eyes widened, and he tried to turn back, but it was too late; Harker slid forward and lifted both men off their feet. He threw them almost casually into the editorial department, where they hit the ground hard. They screamed in pain and terror, their eyes wide and staring.

  “Watch them,” growled Harker, then disappeared.

  Pete and Greg ran forward and stood over the cowering, terrified men. Seconds later Harker returned, holding two more workers in his supernatural grasp. After less than two minutes, eight men were huddled together between the desks, trembling with visible terror.

  Albert Harker dropped out of the air and regarded them with his terrible glowing eyes. “Stay calm, gentlemen,” he growled. “You will come to no harm as long as you do as I tell you. Do you understand?”

  The men’s panicked whimpering receded slightly, and three or four of them managed to nod their heads.

  “Good,” said Harker. “We are going to be making a late alteration to tomorrow’s edition, and you fine men are going to help us. You are not going to be blamed for this, and no one will think it was your fault. So please do not do anything stupid.”

  The men stared, uncomprehending.

  “How many of you are required to run this press?” Harker asked.

  There was silence from the huddled mass.

  “I asked you a question,” said the vampire, his voice rumbling with menace. “I expect an answer. You, tell me.”

  He pointed at a skinny, pale man at the front of the cowering group. He was barely more than a boy, and his expression was one of utter terror, but he managed to find his voice.

  “If nothing breaks . . . ,” he whispered.

  “Speak up, for God’s sake,” snapped Harker.

  The man gulped audibly and
tried again. “If nothing breaks,” he said, “you don’t need anyone on the machines. Just loaders at the other end.”

  “How many of you to load the trucks?”

  “Four,” said the man. “Four of us can do it.”

  “Good,” said Harker. “That’s good. Greg, tie four of them up. Quickly, please.”

  Greg Browning stepped forward, enthusiasm radiating from his face. Pete watched, an odd feeling rising in his stomach; a sensation of being in the dark, of not being told all there was to tell. The vampire seemed to be taking unnecessary enjoyment from the fear of the men who were huddled before him.

  I don’t know if this is what we thought it was.

  Greg stepped away from the group of men, leaving four of them tied and gagged. Harker dragged them easily away from their colleagues and laid them in a line against the wall.

  “Watch them, Pete,” he said. “They’re your responsibility.”

  He nodded. “Got it.”

  Harker smiled, then turned to McKenna. “Kevin,” he said, “make us proud.”

  McKenna nodded, his face tight with concentration, and made his way past the bound men into the editorial department. He took a seat at one of the desks and woke up the computer that sat on it. The screen lit up, displaying the file that was currently running through the enormous press: the following day’s edition of the Globe. The front page was a splash photograph of an American singer on a beach in a bikini, with a headline speculating as to whether she had been the recipient of surgical enhancement. The sidebar contained the apparently exclusive news that a Spanish footballer was about to make a multimillion-dollar move to a team from the northwest.

  McKenna pulled a memory stick out of his pocket and slotted it into the side of the monitor. He expanded the folder when it appeared and opened the only document. Working quickly, he deleted the edition’s existing front page and pasted a huge headline and three short columns of text onto page one. He then wiped page two, pasted in the rest of the document, and saved the new version of the print file. He scrolled back to page one before showing it to Harker and his companions.

  It was far from a masterpiece of design: The fonts were boring, the text was small, and the formatting was simple at best. But there was no disputing the blunt power of the page that McKenna had created.

  VAMPIRES

  ARE REAL.

  THE GOVERNMENT

  IS LYING TO YOU.

  “It’s perfect,” said Harker, his hand clasping the journalist’s shoulder. “It’s exactly right. Print it.”

  “I need one of them to do it,” said McKenna, pointing at the four men who had not been tied up.

  Harker nodded. “Who can start the process?” he asked, his eyes flaring red. “Don’t make me ask twice.”

  One of the men put his hand up. “I can,” he said.

  “Then do so,” said Harker. “Quickly.”

  The man nodded and got to his feet. He walked unsteadily over to where Kevin McKenna was sitting, gently taking the computer’s mouse from his hand. Pete watched as the man ran through the preprint checks, recalibrated the system to accommodate the new pages, and set the machine running. A rumble shook the ground beneath the men’s feet, but the machines stayed still.

  “Why is nothing happening?” asked Harker.

  “It takes eight minutes to warm up,” said the man, his voice shaking. “There’s nothing I can do.”

  Harker gave a brief growl, but nodded his head. “So be it,” he said. “Eight minutes will make no difference. Kevin, stay here and carry out the second part of your task. Pete, you know what you’re doing?”

  “Watching them,” he replied, nodding toward the bound men.

  “Correct,” said Harker. “Greg, you’re coming with me, as are you fine gentlemen. As soon as copies start to come off the press, you go back to work. I don’t want the delivery drivers to have the slightest idea that anything out of the ordinary is happening here. If you try to alert one of them, both you and he will wish you hadn’t. Am I making myself clear?”

  The four workers nodded furiously, their eyes full of fear.

  “Good,” said Harker. “Then let’s go. Pete, Kevin, you shout if there are any problems this end. I can hear you quite clearly. Remember that.”

  Pete frowned.

  Remember that? Was that a threat?

  The vampire floated up into the air, provoking a new ripple of panic among the men in the blue overalls. They scrambled to their feet and staggered down the corridor between the machines with Greg Browning behind them, herding them back to the loading bays. Pete watched them go, unable to shake the feeling that something was wrong. He looked over at Kevin McKenna, trying to gauge the man, but the journalist was turned away from him, working rapidly at the computer.

  Pete stared at the back of his head; the feeling in his stomach was getting stronger and more insistent by the minute. He had never been an arrogant man—he had, if anything, tended toward excessive modesty where his attributes and achievements were concerned. He had always known he wasn’t the cleverest, the strongest, the best looking, or the most charming, and that was absolutely fine. The one thing he had always believed about himself, that he had given himself credit for, was that he was a good man, a man of integrity, loyalty, and moral courage. He backed away from the journalist, giving himself distance from the four bound men laid out against the wall, and tried to reconcile what he was doing with the man he had always believed himself to be.

  * * *

  McKenna pushed his chair away from the desk and rubbed his eyes with the heels of his palms.

  “Albert,” he said, barely raising his voice. “Do you want to see this?”

  There was a long moment of silence, before the vampire dropped silently out of the air beside McKenna and peered at the screen.

  “It’s live?” he asked, his eyes smoldering.

  “Yep,” replied McKenna. “It’s up for everyone to see.”

  Harker clapped him on the shoulder. “Well done,” he said. “You have played your part perfectly, Kevin.”

  “Cheers,” he replied. “So what now? The papers go out, then we’re done, right?”

  “Done?”

  “Done,” repeated McKenna. “The public will know everything. That’s what we want.”

  “My dear friend,” said Harker, a smile rising on his face. “This is not the end. Far from it. When we are finished here, you will start work on the follow-up story.”

  McKenna frowned. “What follow-up? What else is there for me to write about?”

  “A personal description of the world we are showing them,” replied the vampire. “The death, the horror, the blood. Families torn apart, innocent men and women caught up in the carnage. A crusade needs rallying points, images too sad and shocking to be ignored, that make people confront a reality that could happen to them. In short, Kevin, it requires martyrs.”

  A chill ran up McKenna’s spine. “What do you mean, martyrs?” he asked, slowly. “You told me nobody was going to be hurt.”

  The smile on the vampire’s face narrowed. “Don’t concern yourself with the details,” he said, softly. “Suffice it to say, you are perfectly safe.”

  “What about the others?” hissed McKenna. “Pete and Greg, and the print workers?”

  “We will honor their memories.”

  McKenna stared at the glowing face of the monster, realization spilling through him, turning his insides to ice.

  “You planned this all along,” he said, slowly. “That’s why you wanted them to come. So they could die for your cause.”

  The red in Harker’s eyes deepened to a swirling crimson. “I told you not to concern yourself with the details. Consider the concept of the greater good, if you must fixate on something.”

  There was a rush of air, and the vampire was gone, swooping up toward the cavernous
roof of the press. McKenna stayed where he was, frozen to his chair, his mind racing.

  OhGod. OhGodohGodohGodohGodohGod.

  His chest felt as though it was made of concrete; he tried to breathe, but couldn’t force air into his lungs. Pressure built in his head, pounding at his temples as he realized what he had done.

  You can’t tell them. He’ll hear you, even if you whisper. Think, for God’s sake. How can you stop this?

  He turned his head slowly and looked at Pete Randall. He was standing by the door, a thoughtful expression on his face as he surveyed the captive workers. McKenna watched him for a long moment, and the solution became suddenly clear.

  He raised his hand and beckoned Pete toward him.

  * * *

  Pete Randall frowned as the journalist gestured at him. He made his way toward him slowly, staying on the balls of his feet; he was beginning to think that somehow the situation had changed, that the landscape had shifted beneath them.

  “What is it?” he asked, drawing close to McKenna.

  “Look,” said Kevin, standing up and pointing at the screen. “I was just showing Albert. I’ve done it.”

  Pete eased himself into the chair and looked. The bar at the top of the screen was displaying the URL of the Globe’s website, but the photos and videos and forums were all gone from the page itself; all the screen contained now was Kevin McKenna’s huge headline and the long text of his story.

  “Holy shit,” said Pete. “Is that live?”

  “It’s live,” confirmed Kevin, from behind him. “Pretty cool, huh?”

  “Pretty cool,” said Pete. He turned his head to smile at McKenna; as a result, the journalist’s fists crashed down on his cheek, rather than on the back of his head, where McKenna had been aiming. Pain burst through Pete, and he slid down onto one knee, his vision graying. McKenna grabbed the side of his head, then slammed him into the surface of the desk. He felt the skin above his ear tear like paper and a gush of blood, shockingly warm, pour down his face. Then his eyes rolled back, and everything turned a deep, empty black.