Department 19, The Rising, and Battle Lines

by Will Hill

  “Vampires. One vampire in particular.”

  “Don’t know much about vampires,” said Andy. “Know enough to avoid them, but that’s about it.”

  “This one is special. He was cured. Does that ring any bells?”

  “Can’t say that it does.”

  The coffee pot on the stove began to whistle, and Smith felt his temper begin to boil too. His patience was at an end, exhausted by everything that had happened to him in the last year or so, by the cryptic leads he had received from the strange men and women he had met along the way, by his journey west to this scorched, barren landscape that now appeared to hold no more answers than anywhere else. He was about to open his mouth and take it all out on the man called Andy, when he saw something that made him pause.

  In the middle of the collection of photos on top of the chest of drawers was a dull silver frame. There was nothing ornate about it: just four strips of metal arranged into a rectangle. Inside the frame was a black and white photo of Andy and a pretty blonde woman. As Smith quickly surveyed the photos, he saw that almost all of them were of the couple: in front of landmarks, outside theatres and restaurants, wrapped in coats and scarves with snow falling around them.

  The photo that had caught his eye was different, however. It was a souvenir photo, the kind that was sold in booths at county fairs and showgrounds. This one depicted Andy, who looked no more than ten years younger than he did now, and the blonde woman at the New York World’s Fair. They were smiling at the camera, Andy’s arm around the woman’s waist, with the looming steel globe of the Unisphere behind them. Smith leant in and read the date that had been stamped at the bottom of the photo.

  September 19th 1964

  Smith turned and stared at Andy, who was pouring coffee into the mugs on the table, and realisation flooded through him.

  “Let’s drink those outside,” he suggested. “What do you say?”

  Andy nodded. “Sure thing,” he replied. “There’s a bench out back.”

  He opened the door and led Smith round the side of the cabin to where a rough wooden bench, that looked as though it had been nailed together from whatever Andy had been able to find strewn across the desert floor, stood in the shadow cast by the overhanging roof. The two men sat, looking down the canyon at the riverbed. A lizard darted out from underneath a rock and scuttled down the slope, away from the intrusion.

  Smith watched as Andy settled on to the bench and stretched his legs out. His feet extended beyond the wide band of shade cast by the oversized roof, and the sun gleamed on a narrow band of skin between the man’s worn leather shoes and the frayed hems of his jeans.

  “Adam,” Smith said, staring at the strip of skin.

  Andy frowned, then followed his guest’s gaze down to his ankle. When he saw what Smith was looking at, he laughed, briefly. “Knew you’d figure it out eventually,” he said, his voice warm and friendly. “At your service, Mr Smith. So what can I do for you?”

  “Tell me what happened to you,” replied Smith, instantly. “That’s all I need to know, and then I’ll leave you in peace.”

  “You know that’s not why you’re here, don’t you?” asked Adam. “That that’s not what you’ve been searching for?”

  “It’s the only thing I’ve been searching for. The only thing that matters. Please. Just tell me.”

  “OK,” said Adam. “I’ll tell you.”

  “I was turned in 1961,” Adam began. “When I was twenty. I was working in New Mexico, on a cattle ranch near Alamogordo. I was raised in Bakersfield, until my grandmother died, and my grandfather went south looking for work. I was fifteen when he sent me to the ranch, to work for a friend of his from the Marines.

  “The guy who turned me was a drifter named Barratt, who was working his way south towards the border; he came on for a few weeks as a night watchman, and we got friendly. He used to talk about the places he’d been, the things he’d done, horrors he’d seen. I thought he was talking about war; this was the time when the first men were rotating home out of Vietnam, after it had started to go bad. And the country was still full of broken World War Two veterans, men who’d left parts of themselves overseas, and found there was nothing for them when they got home. But that wasn’t what he was talking about.”

  Adam pulled a leather pouch from his jeans pocket, and quickly rolled a cigarette, his fingers moving with well-practised ease. He put the cigarette in his mouth and lit it with a silver Zippo lighter, breathed smoke into the hot, dry desert air and continued.

  “The night Barratt turned me, we got drunk on whisky. We were in a barn at the edge of the ranch, and when he leant for my neck, I thought he was trying to make a move on me, and I tried to push him away. But he was suddenly strong, so strong that I couldn’t move him an inch. I started to get scared, and then I saw his eyes, and the next thing I remember is waking up the next morning, lying in the straw.”

  He looked at Smith, the pain of the memory etched on his face.

  “He meant it as a kindness, I’m sure of that. A lot of what he talked about was not letting your life drift away to nothing, that you only had one chance to do something extraordinary, and I’m sure he thought he was giving me that chance. But he never asked me if I wanted it, he just assumed, and when the hunger hit me ten minutes later, he was gone, and I had no idea what was happening.

  “I remembered just about enough of the things he’d said the night before, things I thought were just stories, like campfire spook tales, that I pulled out the throat of one of the horses, and drank her dry. I ran out of the barn, and as soon as the sun touched my skin, I burst into flames. It was the worst pain I’d ever felt, at least up until then. I made it back into the barn, and rolled out the fire. The last of the horse’s blood repaired me most of the way, and I hid there until nightfall. Then I ran.”

  Adam carefully crushed the remains of the cigarette beneath the heel of his shoe, and stared out across the canyon.

  “I ended up in New York, working on the docks,” he continued. “I kept myself to myself; night shift was quiet, the docks were crawling with rats that I could feed on and my workmates left me alone. Then one night a man came ashore from a freighter out of Indonesia, a man that didn’t look like he had any business on a cargo ship; he was wearing a suit as elegant as any you’d see on Fifth Avenue, but he had no luggage. He took one look at me and knew exactly what I was, because we were the same.

  “I was scared, but a bit of me was relieved, to tell you the truth; I really didn’t know if there was anyone else in the whole world apart from Barratt that was like me. And I was lonely, and I guess that made me weak. He took me to his brother’s apartment on Central Park West, gave me some clothes and a bath, then scolded me for living the way I was, for wasting the gift I had been given.”

  Adam paused, and favoured Smith with a look of incredulity. “That’s what he called it. A gift. Although when I look back, knowing what I know now, I’m not surprised; he was a monster, barely human at all. Over the years I heard stories of the things he had done, the cruelties and the tortures, and I thanked God that I only saw him that one time.”

  “What was his name?” asked Smith, although he was sure he already knew the answer.

  “Alexandru,” replied Adam, and shivered momentarily in the heat of the desert. “Alexandru Rusmanov.”

  “The middle brother,” said Smith, in a low voice. “You were lucky to cross his path and escape with your life. Not many were so fortunate.”

  “So I came to realise,” replied Adam. “It’s been almost fifty years, and the memory of him still scares me.”

  “It needn’t,” replied Smith, with vicious satisfaction in his voice. “He’s dead.”

  “Dead?” replied Adam, his eyes wide. “Are you sure?”

  “I’m sure. He was destroyed in England, three months ago. Destroyed completely.”

  “Thank God for that then. One less monster walks the earth.”

  “Agreed.”

  Adam shook his h
ead, as if to clear it, and continued.

  “His brother was throwing a party the night Alexandru found me, and he insisted that I accompany him, that I allow him to show me how a vampire should live. He took me downstairs and opened the doors to the ballroom and…”

  Pain clouded Adam’s face as memory overwhelmed him.

  “It was a massacre,” he said, flatly. “An orgy of violence. There were at least a hundred vampires in the room, and God knows how many men and women. They were running, trying to hide, screaming for mercy, and the vampires were laughing at them. They were laughing as they tortured and violated and murdered them.

  “There was blood everywhere, and so many screams I couldn’t think, and I looked at Alexandru, who was still standing next to me, and he looked back at me with those red eyes, eyes that were almost black, and I saw what madness looked like, true end-of-the-world, implacable, relentless madness, and I was about to scream as well, but then Alexandru disappeared into the crowd, and I was on my own.

  “I ran for the doors, but they were bolted from the outside, and even my vampire strength wasn’t enough to force them. There was a band playing, I remember it so clearly, playing on a small stage at the back of the room as horror after horror was visited upon innocent men and women, some of them little more than children. Then a hand grabbed my arm, and I screamed.”

  Adam quickly rolled another cigarette, lit it and inhaled hungrily.

  “It was a girl. A beautiful, terrified girl, about my age, looking at me with huge red eyes. I took a step away from her, but she held on to my arm, and her face twisted and she looked like she was going to cry. ‘I’m so scared,’ she said. ‘Can you help me get out of here? Please?’

  “I told her there was no way out, and then she did start to cry, the tears glowing bright red as they rolled away from the light in her eyes. I tried to calm her down, I told her I would stay with her, that I wouldn’t let anything happen to her, and she looked at me with this terrible hope in her eyes, like she wanted to believe me, but didn’t know whether she dared to do so.

  “I led her to the corner of the ballroom, away from the worst of it, and I wrapped my arms round her, hiding her as best I could, even if I couldn’t shield her from the screams and the sounds of violence. We stayed like that all through the night, until there was an hour or so until dawn, and the doors were unlocked. Only vampires walked out of the room; everyone else was dead.

  “I led her out, avoiding the gazes of the other monsters, and for a terrible second, I saw Alexandru looking at me through the crowd as I left his brother’s house. I lowered my head, and forced myself not to run, and then we were outside, on West Eighty-Fifth Street, and I picked the girl up and ran with her into the park and never looked back.”

  Adam stubbed out the cigarette. Smith watched him do so, saw that the man’s fingers were trembling as he pressed the smouldering end against the wood of the bench.

  “We hid in a storm drain on the north side of the park, and waited for the sun to go down. In those few hours, we learnt everything there was to know about each other, and we realised that we loved each other, instantly, and completely.

  “She was twenty, from a little town in the Midwest. She’d been at summer camp in the Catskills that summer, when something had taken her in the woods and turned her. She survived the hunger, although she never told me how – it was the one thing she would never talk about – but her family thought she was dead, and she was too scared to go home and show them what had happened to her. Her father was a Methodist preacher, and she thought he would believe she was possessed by the devil.

  “So she drifted east, and got picked up by an old vampire in Boston, who took her in as his pet. She told me the things he made her do – what she did to survive that first hunger was the only secret she ever kept from me – and for years I swore that I would hunt him down and kill him. But she didn’t want me to, so I never did. And he had brought her down to New York for the party, so in some way I suppose, I ought to be grateful to him; I never would have met her if he hadn’t.

  “We waited until the sun went down, and we started running west. She didn’t know whether the old vampire would try to find her, and I didn’t think Alexandru would give a damn about me, but we couldn’t be sure. We zigzagged all over the Midwest, up and down the Pacific coast, until eventually we settled in San Francisco.”

  Adam paused, and looked at Smith, his face hot and tears gathering in the corners of his eyes. “Her name was Emily,” he said. “And we spent the next twenty years together.”

  Smith sat alone on the bench, staring out over the canyon. Adam had excused himself for a moment, and gone inside the cabin. The effort of telling his story had visibly taken its toll on the man, and Smith had a feeling there was worse to come.

  Part of me doesn’t want to know. I don’t want to know why Emily isn’t here with him. I don’t want to know how he was cured. I just want to leave him in peace, with his memories, with all he has left. But I have to know. I’ve come too far to back out now.

  “I’m sorry,” said Adam, rounding the corner of the cabin and retaking his seat beside Smith. “I’ve never told anyone this story, not willingly at least, and it’s hard. Harder than I thought it would be.”

  “I’m sorry to put you through it,” replied Smith. “Believe me, I wouldn’t unless I was sure it was important.”

  “I believe you,” said Adam, and forced a smile. “And I think you’re right, although I don’t know why. So where was I? San Francisco, right?”

  Smith nodded, and Adam continued.

  “We lived as man and wife for twenty years, in the Mission. Boring night jobs, boring lives really, but we had each other, and we were happy. We fed on blood we bought from a Halal butcher in the Castro, kept ourselves to ourselves, and lived, like any other couple. But over the years, and then the decades, Emily started to change.

  “It was little things at first, like it always is: bad moods, arguments, fights. Nothing I thought meant anything. But she wasn’t happy, and I didn’t realise she wasn’t until it was too late to save her. I thought we had our condition under control; we never used our strength or our speed, we drank only the necessary amount of blood to keep us alive and we lived in every other way like ordinary humans.

  “But we weren’t ageing. We never met our neighbours, never socialised in the same places too often, so there was no chance of detection, which I thought was all that mattered. But it wasn’t. I thought immortality was the only good thing to come out of what had been done to us, because it meant I could spend forever with her. She didn’t feel the same way.”

  “Why not?” asked Smith.

  “She thought it made everything meaningless. That everything, experience, intimacy, even love, was insubstantial, that nothing that had no end could ever mean anything. I tried to convince her otherwise, tried to convince her that our lives had meaning because we loved each other, and for a while she seemed to be placated. But she wasn’t; she was just a much better actress than I had given her credit for. One evening I woke up, and she was gone. There was a note in the kitchen, telling me she loved me, and that she was sorry. And I never saw her again.”

  Adam lowered his head, and tears fell steadily on to the dry desert earth, creating tiny dark craters in the orange sand. Smith watched, his heart breaking for the man sitting beside him. After several minutes, he spoke.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I truly am.”

  Adam raised his head, and forced the kind of smile that is only available to those unlucky people to whom the worst thing that could possibly happen to them has already happened and who are faced with having to somehow find a way to carry on, to simply keep breathing in and out; a smile of utter tragedy and bewilderment, without a flicker of happiness in it.

  “Thanks,” he replied, his voice little more than a whisper. “I appreciate it. It was the worst moment of my life, even after all the ones that followed it. But it still doesn’t justify what I did next.”

>   39

  BACK FROM THE DEAD

  Jamie left Matt arranging the piles of files and folders on his shelves, and opened the door to his own quarters next door.

  Matt had been thrilled to have been given a room of his own, and even more so because it was the one next to Jamie’s. He had no possessions to speak of, merely the small rucksack he had been carrying when he had been rescued in the park near his home. He had only a single change of clothes, which he had dutifully hung in the narrow wardrobe at the foot of his bed, and a small framed photograph of him and his parents and sister, which he placed carefully on his small bedside table. Then he had set about making sense of the great mass of papers he had been sent by Professor Talbot, and Jamie had told him that he would be back in half an hour, ready to show him round the rest of the Loop.

  Inside his room, Jamie flopped down on to his bed and closed his eyes, just for a moment. It had been, even by the standards of life inside Department 19, an exhausting day, and it was barely noon.

  His conversation with Valentin had been a rollercoaster: unsettling, occasionally terrifying, but ultimately thrilling. His conversation afterwards, with Admiral Seward, had been nothing of the sort; the revelation that there was even the slightest possibility that Frankenstein was still alive had destabilised him so completely that he could now understand why it was obvious that the Director had wrestled with the decision of whether to tell him, or leave him in the dark.

  But his time with Matt had made him feel better, as talking to the boy when he was comatose in the infirmary had done, six months earlier. There was something about him that put Jamie’s mind at ease, and he thought he had figured out what it was: Matt was one of those people whose outlook was so positive, so enthusiastic, that it made Jamie feel churlish and spoilt for failing to see the same wonder in everything that Matt saw. He was not naive, or annoying in his positivity; it just radiated out of his pores, infecting those around him.