The Last Line Series One

by David Elias Jenkins

Not much considering.

  He left after his two week’s training feeling like Jason Bourne, with just a hint of geeky swagger. How naive, how ill prepared he really was. His pretensions at being a resilient field operative were fading with each moment that the helicopter approached.

  He needed to remember his tactical parameters, his mission.

  Find out as much as you can about what the Chromium Project is developing. Establish what links, if any, there are between the Chromium Project and the Unseelie Court. Make contact with Isaiah Argent and establish his status.

  Ariel smiled grimly. His status meant establishing whether he was human or not.

  What he had seen aboard this ship had already put the fear of God into him, but it was trying to establish the status of Isaiah Argent that really turned his blood cold.

  If this man was Unseelie, would he be able to see into Ariel’s soul, smell his fear, see his pathetic cover story for the sham it was?

  Within the hallowed halls of the STG science wing, Dr Ariel Speedman was regarded as something of a subject nerd. Once his Veil had been lifted, aside from excelling at his conventional scientific field of expertise, he had become somewhat encyclopaedic on the denizens of the Unseelie court. He had studied their habits, weaknesses, powers and privileges within their strange society to the point of obsessive compulsion. It was Ariel that had discovered that depleted Uranium shells could harm Djinn.

  He could spot details, seemingly innocuous details that others would miss, and find chinks in the armour of the Unseelie that could turn the tide of a battle. He was no fighter though, no battle hardened military man with murder in his heart. Ariel’s brain was his only weapon. The Sherlock Holmes of monsters, they called him back at the lab.

  One of the greatest difficulties of dealing with the Court is that its denizens often integrated themselves within human organizations and societies, where they could cause the most havoc. Although amoral in their approach to the production of bio weapons, it was clear to Ariel that many of the employees aboard this ship were entirely human and almost all of them utterly unaware of the otherworldly connections the company hierarchy may have. Ariel’s job was also to establish who was involved in the inner circle, the clandestine power base that was aware of the larger more sinister motives of the company. Even in the biting wind and freezing rain, Ariel was sweating, his stomach flipping over, his hands shaking.

  He twisted his body and shielded his eyes as the helicopter landed on the helipad in front of them, and engineers ran over to safely extract the passengers.

  Dr Carver turned to Ariel with a smile.

  “You should consider yourself very lucky Ariel. It’s almost unheard of that someone so new in the company is granted an audience with Mr Argent. He must be impressed with your previous work, but he requested you to be in this meeting personally.”

  Ariel felt his guts turn to icy water.

  He knows. Perhaps he already knows. I’m dead. I’m just dead.

  The rotor stopped and the hatch was lowered. Ariel stared into the dark maw of the helicopter, then stepped back as six enormous armed bodyguards jumped out and took up defensive positions. They were at least seven foot in height and covered in tactical gear from head to toe, their faces obscured. Even in his state of fear, Ariel could identify a loping ferocity to their frames, something brutal and primitive, almost simian. Despite them carrying all the technical trappings of human military they were very clearly not human. As they got closer, Ariel could see that their eyes were the only part of their faces visible through their balaclavas. Crimson red and predatory.

  They were the largest, most dangerous looking creatures Ariel had ever seen.

  He had seen the BBC World Service before he left Ny-Alesund. Were these the same creatures that had carried out the horrific attack in London? Were these the horrific product of the Feral? He shuddered at the thought of what an army of such monsters could do.

  He noticed that one of them held a box, walking with it reverentially as if it were filled with delicate bone china.

  There was a pause, and Ariel felt his consciousness sucked into the hold of the helicopter, like a singularity that drew in all hope and happiness.

  A tall, hunched figure stepped uncertainly out onto the gangplank and hobbled down onto the deck. He carried a cane and wore a wide brimmed hat that obscured his face. All Ariel could see as he slowly and uncertainly approached was a long thick chin beard without moustache. There was simplicity to his garb, a plain and sombre functionality from another time.

  The overall initial impression was that of an old Amish preacher, but Ariel felt no sense of the holy or sublime surrounding Isaiah Argent. Quite the opposite. He seemed to draw the weather around him, as if the world was not quite cold enough, not uncomfortable enough for him. He wore the biting rain around him like a cilice.

  Ariel tensed as he approached, but gathered his courage and extended a hand to introduce himself.

  He was certain that if he touched the man’s skin he would pick up some clue about what he was, as he already had no doubt that Argent was Unseelie. His biggest fear was that if he sensed what Argent was from a handshake, would Argent get as much of a measure of him in return?

  Ariel needn’t have concerned himself with such formalities. Isaiah Argent walked right past him without so much as a nod, as if he had not even noticed the welcoming party waiting for him. Glancing to his side, Ariel noticed that even Dr Carver seemed tense.

  As Argent passed, Ariel felt the man’s eyes regarding him from beneath the wide brim of his battered rain hat. He walked on then stopped, and his voice came to them through the rain like the creaking of a badly oiled door.

  “I shall see both of you on the observation deck in thirty minutes. Formal dress. “

  Then the old man shuffled achingly across the deck, flanked by his bodyguards, towards a private lift built into the control tower of the ship.

  Carver wiped the rain from his face.

  “That leads to his private offices and quarters. Come on, I think I have a spare tuxedo somewhere, but it might be a little large for you. I don’t expect you would have thought to bring one aboard.”

  Carver laughed his mirthless laugh and put a hand on Ariel’s shoulder to lead him inside. Ariel looked at the brightly lit lift ascending through the rain. He felt the old man’s eyes glaring down at him beneath the shadows of his hat.

  Ariel shivered and followed Carver to get his borrowed tuxedo fitted. His secret agent fantasy was going downhill by the minute.

  10

  They sat around the campfire, on the cliff top clearing a few miles from town, looking down at the glimmering lights of the hedonistic cluster of bars clubs and restaurants, filled with drunken party goers, decomposing kebabs and decompressing soldiers, the streets peppered with plastic pint glasses, puddles of vomit, and little rivers of backstreet urine. Up here amongst the Mediterranean scrubland, the sea far below, the air was clear.

  Each of them nursed dark glistening bruises, burst lips and sprained joints. The blood on their faces was inky black in the moonlight, as if the soldier’s souls were just crude oil.

  Usher raised a hipflask of Glen Fiddich to his mouth, and winced as the twelve year old antiseptic permeated an open sore on his bottom lip. He raised the flask to his teammates, and then handed it around the circle towards Christi.

  “Where were we? Oh yes, the Fallen.”

  She leaned over and groaned as she held a hand to her side. She thought she may have cracked a rib but Brock assured her it was just bruising.

  “Thanks Boss. I guess if we still hurt it means we’re not dead yet.”

  “Aye, when we stop hurting, that’s when we worry.”

  Usher smiled to himself and looked around at the battered survivors of Empire One. Not dead yet, he thought, but it’s just a matter of time. Forty eight live operations in the seven years they had been working together as a unit. The team had grown and reduced in size over that time, sometimes detached d
uty from other units, sometimes a death. The group had rotated members a lot over the years, and now they needed another two recruits to replace their fallen. Two more people who would be sent in from another tac-team or maybe even two rookies who’d just had the veil lifted.

  Lifting the Veil.

  Everyone remembers their first time. For most, it is an orchestrated initiation, when a recruit is shown captured Unseelie agents in one of the government’s secret prisons, or is brought along to the science department’s lecture theatres for the demonstration of a magical artefact that has been captured.

  Usher smiled to himself, remembering that he was one of those unfortunate individuals who had discovered the Court accidentally. Or rather it had discovered him, one night at his family home when he was on leave as a young solider back from a tour of Iraq. They were called Poppers, people like him, because without warning one day their bubble had been burst.

  The Unseelie Court had flown in to his life like a dark bat and carried all that mattered to him out into the night. He would not rest until every last one of those cockroaches was dead.

  Usher watched Christi scrunch an empty beer can up in her hand then throw it off the edge of the cliff. She winced and rolled her shoulder, discovering fresh bruises, and turned to the team, her stocky frame stark against the moonlit expanse of the Mediterranean.

  “Flight leaves the airbase at 0800 in the morning. Need to go back to the hotel and get some fucking beauty sleep.”

  Kruger spat into the fire. “Better not set your alarm then princess.”

  Christi offered him her middle finger as she walked past him with a slight limp towards her hired scooter. As she got on and started the ignition, she heard a deeper roar from further down the hill, and saw a figure on a large motorcycle riding up towards them. She peered into the dark as it drew closer then turned to Usher.

  “Hey Boss, think your charm offensive worked. That freaky chick from the bar is coming this way.”

  Usher stood up and felt the years in his own body, creaking and groaning as scar tissue and new bruises met for the first time.

  Usher met Isaac’s dark eyes.

  “You know what you’re doing boss? It might, I say might, be female, but it ain’t human. So I ask again, do you know what you’re doing?”

  Usher nodded.

  “As much as I ever have Isaac. If I’m not back in two hours, you know what to do.”

  “Can I have your car?”

  “Sure. All yours.”

  For some reason he couldn’t explain he found himself running his hands down his crumpled, blood-stained shirt and smoothing down his hair. It was such a token gesture from a man who looked like he had just been run over by a car that he heard sniggers from his teammates behind him. He glanced over his shoulder.

  “Fuck off.”

  “Nah Boss, you’re looking good, first impressions are important.”

  “Yeah, but your hair’s sticking up a bit at the back.”

  “Yeah yeah.”

  Despite himself, Usher felt his cheeks flush as the huge motorcycle pulled up at the edge of the road. The six foot woman, Ursula, looked far more at home on this contraption than she did in the bar in town. She wore no helmet, was coated in a fine sheen of dust and grime, and was staring at him with her strange eyes.

  “Hello Thom Usher. I wondered if you might need a ride back into down.”

  Usher heard Charlie whisper behind him. “Think she wants to ride you into town boss, like she stole you.”

  Usher bid goodnight to his comrades with a two finger salute, and then put on his serious voice.

  “Oh eight hundred hours ladies and gentlemen, on the runway and ready to rock, don’t be late.”

  Christi fixed his gaze for a moment.

  “Be careful boss.”

  Usher smiled at her and nodded and then straddled the back of the purring machine, and they sped off into the night, up into the hills. He spoke over the roar of the engine.

  “I was drunk enough that I was almost fooled in the bar. Which is amazing considering how fucking weird you are. It wasn’t my looks, charm of personal grooming that meant you couldn’t stay away. So what are you really, and what do you want?”

  As they leaned and growled around corners, Ursula turned her head, and he was struck by the sharp solidity of her bone structure, like a steel eagle.

  “To watch you fight tonight. I needed to watch you fight.”

  Usher shrugged. He suddenly had the oddest creeping feeling that this woman had somehow arranged for those soldiers to attack Christi and her date, to provoke a fight. He was afraid to ask.

  “So you’re the troublemaker. And?”

  Ursula broke into a waspish grin as she manoeuvred the motorcycle around a bend.

  “You’ll do.”

  “Yeah, but do for what?”

  Ursula veered them around the precarious mountain roads. On one side there was nothing but a sheer drop to the dark ocean far below.

  “Usher we don’t have much time. I’m not supposed to speak with you at all. The Unseelie Court is making plans. The thing you are seeking that you call a bio-weapon. It’s one of ours, and it’s not a plague or a poison. It’s a living thing. It’s a he, and his name is Arrik. The Unseelie Court is holding him prisoner aboard a ship. They are using his blood to create these soldiers you fight.”

  “How do you know what we are working on? How do you know any of this?”

  “You’re not the only living thing who doesn’t want this world to burn, Usher. I think we are working on the same thing. Believe me, I want this creature safely back on our side and out of harm’s way as much as you do.”

  “So what is it? Wait a minute, our side? You’re Court?”

  “If I was Unseelie you’d be under my bike, not on it. Let me park up and we can talk.”

  Usher struggled to make his voice heard above the roar of the motorcycle and the wind whistling through the machine.

  She drove him to a rocky outcrop high in the hills, far from the distant twinkling lights of the town. They passed only two cars on their journey, one an elderly local with a goat in the back of a flatbed truck, the other some late night revellers heading back to town from who knows where.

  When they got off the bike, the only sound was a distant owl and the waves lapping off the rocks far below. Ursula walked calmly to the very edge of the outcrop and sat down, staring out to sea.

  Usher was fine with heights, but had a healthy respect for the amount of alcohol and blows to the head he had taken, so walked more carefully to a seating position next to her.

  He didn’t know how this night would end and he felt a strange cocktail of emotions. Fear, an incomprehensible attraction, recklessness, and plain curiosity coursed through him as he looked at this bizarre woman.

  As they sat there, looking up at the moon and the light reflected off the dark sea, Usher felt he could have been in any century, in a time long ago when belief in the things they fought was more widespread amongst the peoples of the world.

  “So you needed to see me fight. Do you have some weird fetish for blood-stained squaddies?”

  Ursula shook her head but did not look at him.

  “No. There was a kind of man who used to deal with this sort of thing. In your stories, the kind of man they would send out to slay the Grendel, or face the Dragon. It takes a certain type. I wanted to make sure you were that type. The thunder is coming, Thom Usher, and the rain, louder and harder than ever before. There are some who hide from it under any shelter, and some who stand in it and take a soaking. Do you follow me?”

  Usher nodded, despite understanding very little so far.

  “Usher, there were lots of soldiers in that bar, lots of men who had fought and bled for causes. That was not what I needed. I needed a man who had looked monsters in the eye. I needed a dragon killer.”

  Usher glanced sidelong at the tall athletic female. He felt no threat from her. He felt danger, a hard, sharp danger, but no immediate t
hreat. If anything, he felt protected. He knew that he was alone and vulnerable, and felt that if this woman chose to hurl him from the cliff like a ragdoll, there would have been nothing he could have done. So he took a chance on her.

  All the same, he felt it might be a good time to smoke the Monte Christo number four he often kept to celebrate being alive post-mission. Luckily it had been in his jacket, draped over the chair during his recent pugilism.

  He took it out, then brought out his Leatherman and snipped off the end. As he brought it up to his mouth, Ursula produced a match that flared up in front of him. Usher gently inhaled and slowly turned the cigar, feeling the subtle layers of flavour penetrate the mucous membranes of his mouth and throat. Fuck it, he thought, if this freak was going to kill him, he was going to finish things off with a damn good smoke.

  Usher blew out the bluish fug that drifted off the cliff and meandered up towards the moon. The smell was pure Christmas.

  “I take it that if you wanted me gone, I’d be doing a swallow dive right now. So I’m confused. I don’t negotiate with Unseelie. You’re something different, what are you?”

  Ursula stiffened and her mouth tightened. “I’m not what you call Unseelie. They’re from Below, I’m from Above. I thought you were supposed to be an expert on these sorts of matters.”

  Usher took a drag and eyed her statuesque frame up and down. “Ok, so you’re not Court, but you’re not people either. So either you are one crazy Cypriot drag act, or I’m talking to something I haven’t met before.”

  Ursula reached over, gently but firmly wrapped her finger and thumb around the cigar, and plucked it from Usher’s mouth, then took a long drag. Once again, as odd an act as it was, Usher found it deeply attractive.

  “Perhaps your masters only tell you what you need to know. Of course I’m not Unseelie. I’m a soldier like you. This secret war you’re involved in, it has been going on for a very long time before it ever reached your shores. It’s soldiers like me that have been the front line for centuries. Apart from what has escaped over to this side and fought with your kind, how much do you actually know about these things that infiltrate your world?”