ONSET: To Serve and Protect

by Glynn Stewart

  The only way into the warehouse was through a metal detector between the two concrete half-walls splitting the room. The detector was off, a silent metal archway leading deeper into the dark building.

  Passing through the silent metal detector, David realized that the door into the warehouse proper had been torn from its hinges. His quarry had given up subtlety by the time they’d made it there.

  The main floor of the warehouse seemed silent and infinitely large as he entered, the beam from his flashlight picking out scattered details of the rows of skids and boxes, and the metal stairs that led up to the offices. The only sound was the thump of his feet on the concrete floor as he walked into the vast concrete cavern, the flashlight beam questing along the aisles.

  The attack came unnaturally silently and scarily fast. Two of the black-clad and silver-studded punks seemed to materialize out of the shadows and lunged toward him. They charged toward him like enraged wolves.

  Somehow, David got the Desert Eagle between him and the monsters. The doubled report of its firing echoed in the warehouse, and one of the things went down in a heap in front of the cop, two slugs through the upper chest. Then the second creature leapt on him.

  The kid ripped the pistol out of his hand in the first second and threw it across the warehouse to clatter to the ground somewhere. The next, David’s arm twisted aside in one of the youth’s hands while the other hand rained a series of impossibly fast, unimaginably strong blows into David’s chest.

  David White was a short but heavily built man. He took his duties as a police officer seriously and worked out religiously. No weedy teenager who looked like he was made out of twigs and black duct tape should have been able to outmuscle him. That, however, was exactly what this skinny, unhealthy-looking youth did.

  For all his training, David could not seem to stop any of the blows. Each time he tried to block, he was too slow. One of his ribs cracked, and then, as fear and pain filled him, he was fast enough, his hand snapping into place to stop the next blow, almost as if he could see it coming. Without thinking, he blocked the next blow, and then the next series of blows, his free hand matching the vampire—for his mind had finally accepted that label for what had killed Keller—motion for motion.

  Then the first vampire—the one he’d shot and hadn’t seen get back up—joined the fray. Somehow, David bent out of the path of his new opponent’s first blow, allowing it to slam into the other vampire. Both the vampires were stunned for a moment, and David tore his arm from the first one’s grip, stepping back to buy space.

  No sooner had he done so, however, then a third vampire arrived out of shadows and swung at his head. Now the liquid-lightning speed of their motions and strikes were so slow. He caught each of the third vampire’s blows easily, his training moving him smoothly from block to block. Finally, he shifted from defense to offense. The vampires’ motions were sluggish, and David calmly, easily evaded his target’s blocks to throw the black-and-silver-clad punk backward into a stack of crates.

  Footsteps echoed behind him, and he dodged as the first two vampires lunged at him again as though stuck in molasses. White easily grabbed one of each of their arms and spun the pair forward, using their own sickening strength to propel them into the same pile of crates as the third.

  For a moment, calm reigned in the dark room; the only motion the twitching of the three stunned vampires, half-lit by the flickering light of the flashlight on the floor. David took a deep breath, and the world seemed to slowly speed up, as if everything around him had been in slow motion.

  Then motion at the top of the stairs caught David’s eye. He saw the girl there—saw her jump off the balcony fifteen feet up and thirty feet away from him and almost fly across the room to hit David in the chest.

  In any other circumstance, the tight leather bodysuit the girl was wearing would have been highly distracting, especially with her sitting on his chest. But the impact drove any notice of her gender from his mind, as did the fangs she drove toward his neck with blinding speed.

  He managed to get up his hands and fend off her teeth despite his shock, but then two more vampires showed up. Shockingly swift kicks shattered both of his forearms, and then sickeningly strong hands pinned him to the floor. He had just enough time to understand how they’d killed Keller so quickly before the vampire on top of him sank her fangs into his neck.

  For a moment, all he could perceive was pain. The next moment, he thought the pain was making him hallucinate as the roof vanished. Not collapsed, not exploded—vanished.

  Figures dropped down from a helicopter hovering above the missing roof. The first let go of the rope halfway down and turned into a giant wolf as he dropped down. Another spun on the rope, showing an athletic female figure he was sure he shouldn’t have been noticing at a time like this, and launched tiny darts of fire from her fingers into the just-recovering heap of vampires he’d originally fought.

  The world around him blurred, and he heard rushing footsteps before a massive paw swung across his vision, massive claws smashing into the vampire at his neck. He felt the fangs jerk out of his neck as the crashing sound of gunfire began to echo through the starlit warehouse.

  David barely comprehended the sound before finally, mercifully blacking out.

  #

  The hacker would never remember what she’d been looking for in the warehouse’s computer system. She hadn’t even been in the surveillance feed intentionally—she’d been trying to get into the inventory files or something like that. But she had been in the security camera feeds when the first bunch of psychos burst in and ripped the door off its hinges in a casual manner.

  She’d spent the next twenty minutes fixated on the feeds, flipping from camera to camera to follow the ensuing fight. It was like something from a bad action movie—vampires and a supposedly normal cop fighting like they were on wires and the tape had been sped up.

  Then the Men—and Woman—in Black had shown up through—dropping through the roof as if it weren’t even there. The vampires had been quickly and efficiently annihilated and they’d loaded the cop up on a stretcher. Then one of them headed toward the warehouse’s server, and the hacker realized they were going to wipe the tapes.

  It was the work of only moments to copy the video files from the surveillance system for the entire time frame. Moments more erased the hacker’s presence as her programs retracted into the rest of cyberspace, their owner wondering just what the hell she’d stumbled across.

  Chapter 2

  O’Brien watched calmly as the forensics team removed the six black body bags they’d stuffed the sliced, bullet-ridden or crisped corpses of the vampires into from the helicopter’s storage bay. At the edge of the helicopter landing pad, a med team was already rushing the unconscious body of the cop who’d got there first across the grass toward the nearby hospital facility.

  The hospital was one of the four major structures inside the walled “corporate” campus that was ONSET Headquarters. All four were apparently stumpy office buildings from the outside, but Michael knew that the glass was a step up from bulletproof, and the rest of the buildings were made of reinforced concrete. Even with that, a good half of HQ’s facilities were underground, hardened to withstand anything short of a direct nuclear hit and concealed beneath the carefully sculpted grounds of the hidden base. Dozens of small structures, three or four stories tall, provided residences for strike teams like his, as well as hangars for the Office of the National Supernatural Enforcement Teams fleet of specialized aircraft and other vehicles.

  “Why’d you bring the cop here?” a voice asked him quietly, and O’Brien turned to look at the slight form of his commanding officer, Major Traci Warner. The Mage made maybe three quarters of O’Brien’s seven-foot frame, but he knew better than to think of the redhead as frail.

  “Two reasons,” Michael rumbled. “First, he was bitten by a vampire. Now, that’s not as much of a ‘you’re dead’ as some pop culture would have us believe, but it’s still so
mething we have to be wary of.”

  “No go, Michael,” Warner told him firmly. “The poor kid at the store this whole mess started at was bitten too, and we left that to the OSPI cleanup team.”

  “How is that kid, anyway?” O’Brien asked.

  “OSPI has a team on site now. They got him tanked on the antivenom and bagged the fang and the two victims’ bodies. Diplomatically,” she added.

  “Which means they lied and said they were from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, I imagine,” Michael replied, a touch of bitterness in his voice. “Diplomacy in our job means we lied our teeth out, deceived them some, and then lied some more.”

  “Yes, it does. Now stop doing it to me and tell me why I have a small-town Maine police Lieutenant in one of the highest-security and most classified hospitals on the planet,” Warner snapped.

  “All right. Two more reasons,” Michael promised. “Reason two-A: that poor bastard went into the warehouse ten minutes before we did, and was still alive and conscious when we arrived. That’s impressive, and it also means he’s going to remember a lot of it—including an ONSET strike team coming in hell for leather. Reason two-B: Morgen!” the team Commander bellowed.

  One of his team members looked up at the bellow and wandered over across the concrete pad in the middle of the grass. With his helmet—its visor modified to work as prescription lenses—removed, Morgen Dilsner had put his glasses back on. This made the fair-haired Mage look like the hacker nerd he had been before stumbling on a hidden site with spells that had actually worked for him.

  “You called, bossman?” the Mage asked.

  “Grab that hotwired iPad of yours and show the Major what you showed me,” O’Brien ordered.

  “It’s not an iPad,” Morgen told him pointedly as he pulled the handheld computer from inside his half-removed gear. He looked at Traci as he plugged it into the suit’s built-in computers.

  “The warehouse had security cameras,” he told Traci. “Night vision–equipped ones, actually—so that even if the lights were down, security would know something was going on. Of course, nobody was watching them last night, but they recorded everything anyway.”

  “You deleted the recordings, of course?” Warner queried.

  “Of course,” Morgen confirmed. “And I threw a quick splice of quiet time from before we showed up in there to cover everything, too. But before I did that, I downloaded the original files.”

  “And?” the Major demanded impatiently.

  “Well, sir, ma’am…watch,” Morgen told her, and then hit play.

  Warner watched the video clip of the appropriate moment from the fight in the warehouse, all the eerier for being shown only in green, in silence. A moment in which a supposedly mundane cop made three vampires look like they were stuck in molasses and then beat the shit out of them.

  “I see,” she said finally. “Your recommendation, Commander O’Brien?” she asked.

  “Even if he walks out of here, we’ll need to keep him under surveillance,” the team leader told her quietly. “We may as well be honest enough to tell him what the hell is going on and give him the choice. I recommend recruitment, sir.”

  “Well, he’ll have the best care in the world until he wakes up,” Traci said. “In the one hospital in the world that knows exactly how to handle vampire bites.”

  #

  The world seemed fuzzy for a very long time. That was about all David remembered afterward. It wasn’t the total blank of normal unconsciousness, but if there were dreams, he couldn’t remember them. It just seemed…fuzzy. Like a sheet of gray fluff stretched over the unconscious blank.

  When he finally woke up, it took him a minute to realize it. The sounds coming in from the outside world were still blurred, but they existed. He couldn’t say how long he lay there with the feeling slowly returning to his body. He recognized that he was on a bed and covered with blankets. Eventually, his brain finally identified the sound of machinery quietly beeping in the background, and the soft rustle of someone turning pages.

  Finally, he opened his eyes. Like his hearing and sense of feel, they were confused at first, and by the time they cleared, the woman who’d been reading had put the book down and stood next to his bed. The uniform was definitely “nurse”, but it was more military in cut than anything he’d expect in Charlesville, and the woman wore a set of insignia David didn’t recognize. The uniform somehow fit with the stark white of the room around him and what he recognized from previous hospital stays as an extraordinarily well-equipped recovery ward.

  “Lieutenant. You’re awake,” she said softly, but David still winced as the words echoed inside his head. He nodded. “How do you feel?” she asked.

  “Fuzzy,” he croaked. “I got…bitten…” His voice trailed off as his mind rebelled against the idea of voicing what his memory—somehow much less fuzzy than his physical senses—insisted had happened.

  “You were bitten by a vampire, yes,” the black-haired nurse said in a businesslike tone. “The fuzziness is normal—a side effect of the antivenom. It will wear off in a day or so now you’ve woken up.”

  “Antivenom?” David repeated, somewhat disturbed by her matter-of-fact approach to the idea of his being gnawed on by a vampire.

  “Yes,” she confirmed briskly. “A vampire’s bite injects a high-powered supernatural infection that attempts to transform the victim into a vampire. One bite usually isn’t enough to cause the effect, but we prefer not to take chances.” She looked at him for a moment, as if remembering something. “Just so you know, this information is classified Omicron-Bravo, but that won’t matter until you leave the Campus.”

  “Campus?” David asked. “What campus?”

  “You’re at ONSET Headquarters,” she told him. “And that’s probably more than I should be telling you. Your body is still recovering, and I have some tests I want to run. Can you sit up?”

  David slowly nodded, and the nurse came over to help him up. Both of his arms were wrapped in casts, so he found himself needing the help. Once he was upright, she pulled a somewhat sinister-looking array of equipment out from under the bed.

  “Now,” she said calmly, pulling out a small shaped hammer, “let me know if this hurts.”

  #

  It turned out, as the nurse told him after she’d finished her battery of tests, that David had been unconscious for two full days since being brought back to this “Campus”—wherever that was! He didn’t know what or where the Campus was, but the capital C was pretty clear when the nurse spoke about it.

  With David still weak from the aftereffects of the vampire’s venom, the nurse refused to let him leave the bed, other than for a short trip to the bathroom. For two more full days, this situation continued, with David’s movements still sharply curtailed even as he began to recover. He recovered quickly—far faster than he should have.

  On the third morning, after having his casts removed, David had had enough. “Am I a prisoner?” he demanded roughly as the nurse entered his room with his breakfast—the first meal he’d been able to eat without help. “I am a police Lieutenant; I have duties and subordinates who rely on me. Why am I being held here?”

  “You are not a prisoner, Lieutenant White,” she replied firmly. “You are weaker than you think. It is not safe for you to be wandering the Campus alone.”

  “Bullshit,” he snarled. “You haven’t even let me out of this damned room in two days!”

  “Do you have any idea what the possible side effects of a vampire bite are?” the nurse snapped back. “Or of the magic that is healing your arms?”

  “Well, I sure as hell am not turning into a vampire!” he replied harshly, his memories of the vampires he’d met very clear in his mind now. Even with that fresh in his mind, his thoughts avoided her mention of magic.

  “Only because of our treatment,” she told him flatly. “We had to keep you quarantined in case it didn’t work!”

  “Oh, right. And if I’m a good little boy, you’ll
let me out?” he snapped.

  A hard female voice interjected. “Not exactly, Lieutenant White,” it told him calmly.

  Still angry, David turned to face the speaker. A short redheaded woman in an unfamiliar black uniform stood just inside the door. The uniform was a jacket over what looked like a full-length bodysuit, all in black except for a long blue stripe down each arm of the jacket and an odd rank insignia of two silver bars vertically crossing a diagonal lightning bolt in a circle.

  “Who are you?” David demanded, still angry.

  “I am Major Traci Warner, commanding officer of this base and executive officer for the entirety of ONSET,” she responded smartly. “That young lady you are busy berating saved your life. You could show her a little more appreciation.”

  The last of David’s frustration slowly drained away, and he looked over at the nurse. “I’m sorry,” he said quietly. “It’s just frustrating to be cooped up in here.”

  He realized, as he apologized, that he was probably angrier about having his entire worldview shattered into a million pieces than at being locked up in the hospital room. That wasn’t the fault of anyone here. The…things whose fault that was were dead.

  “That was mostly at my orders,” Major Warner told him. “This facility’s existence is classified Top Secret Omicron-Alpha. What Nurse Sheldon told you, which is admittedly an unusually low amount of information to give a patient, is all classified at a similar level.”

  “Top Secret Omicron-Alpha?” David repeated. “And what does that mean?” According to his—undeniably limited—knowledge of the United States classification scheme, it ended at “Top Secret”.

  “That’s classified Top Secret,” Warner told him dryly. “For the duration of your stay at this facility, I’ve been authorized to grant you temporary limited Omicron-Alpha clearance. The lack of that clearance was why you were restricted to this ward, as well as the quarantine concern.”