by Mark Henwick
The little apartment was bright and somehow sad. Maybe I needed to get some pictures on the walls. The only things I had out were on my bedside table. Some photos and, of course, Tara’s plaque: my twin sister’s memorial. It was plain, a glossy stone rectangle the size of a desk photograph, jet black, with cursive gold lettering at the bottom, saying simply Tara Farrell. I brushed it with my fingers.
I was delaying. The run-up to every appointment with the colonel was like this: a sick dread that built and built. If I failed any of his tests, answered a question wrong—if he even thought I’d begun to turn—he’d have me hauled back to base without even a chance to say goodbye. He could have a squad waiting right now.
But putting it off wasn’t going to help, and being late was unthinkable. That wasn’t just my military training; I didn’t want to give them any reason to feel they had to come hunting for me. I slipped out, locking the door behind me.
Twenty minutes later I was downtown where the colonel had told me to meet him, in front of the Denver Art Museum.
He was right on time, appearing suddenly around a corner and moving with that deceptively quick stride of his. He was wearing dark pants and shirt, with a pale summer blazer.
“Colonel.” We weren’t in uniform—I wasn’t even in the army now—and I still wanted to salute, damn it.
“Sergeant.” His eyes flickered at my twitchy arm. He was calling me by my old rank. It was a compromise; either Amber or Farrell would have sounded odd. Or maybe it was a subtle reminder of our relationship; I wasn’t in the army, but I sure as hell still worked for him.
To my surprise, he bought tickets and headed inside. I followed him into the museum’s galleries. At that time of the day, there was little chance of being overheard if we kept it down, so maybe it was as good as any other public place.
I’d left school early and joined the army. It wasn’t an impulsive decision, more that a whole bunch of circumstances had pushed me that way. I’d vaguely hoped to get into something exciting, but I hadn’t even heard of the unit that offered to transfer me from my basic training to a special program. That intrigued me. When I got there, the instructors told me they’d watch me walk out within a month, if they hadn’t kicked me out before then. That motivated me.
I loved it. I spent ten years in Ops 4-10, the unit that almost no one, not even the regular army, knew about. We did the high-risk tasks where the US couldn’t be seen to be involved, where other channels had failed. Where there was no hope remaining. We acquired strategic information, extracted people and destroyed organizations in areas where, if we were caught, the US would deny all knowledge of us and leave us to our fate.
There was plausible deniability all right; we didn’t officially exist.
The colonel had been the commanding officer. He was damned good at that. I’d been damned good at my job, too, until one night I wasn’t. I’d lost my entire team, and nearly lost my life. In a way, I had lost my life, and was left with this—a tightrope walk between hunting down creatures people didn’t believe existed, and being locked up as one.
“How have you been feeling?” he asked.
“I’m fine.”
Lie.
I couldn’t say anything else. Anything other than ‘fine,’ and the scientists would start to cover their asses, telling the colonel that I could go crazy and rampage through malls killing children. The colonel must have stuck his neck out to get me out of the cell in the first place, but he would have no choice but to put me back if the scientists got nervous. And once back, they’d never let me out again.
I handed him an envelope of expenses and written reports as a distraction. He slipped it in his folder and passed me back an envelope which would contain a check for my last expenses.
I knew he wouldn’t be happy with my answer. He tried the long silence way of getting me to talk, but I’d been there, done that. I’d walk silently through the whole museum and look at every exhibit until his time was up, if necessary.
“It’s been a year,” he said eventually. “And only a few months since the last job blew up on us. I’m not sure ‘fine’ quite covers it.”
A year. I knew that. I knew it in my bones, in the itch of my throat when I looked at it in the mirror, or in the panic of my nightmares. A year ago, I’d lost my squad, one by one, in the dark jungles of South America. I’d survived. They’d actually bagged me as a corpse—no one could have survived those injuries. Half my throat had been torn out. It must have looked as if there was more blood soaking the dirt around me than remaining in me. But I wasn’t dead, and five days later you could hardly see the scars. I was raving and screaming, but I was alive and physically healed.
The army hadn’t believed in vampires. And if you were talking Hollywood vampires, they still didn’t. Vampires didn’t turn to dust when you killed them—I was still clutching my attacker’s severed head when they found me. Sunlight and religious artifacts had no effect. But they drank human blood all right, and the army wanted to know if I was going to.
I hadn’t yet. I was stable. There were some physical changes: it was harder to injure me, and I healed quickly. My health, strength and stamina had improved. I saw better in the dark than the average person. The army was very, very interested. Or at least, the little part of the army I’d been involved in. No one else knew, and part of the conditions of my ‘release’ was that it had to stay that way. The drawbacks—the nightmares, the paranoia—those the army weren’t so interested in. ‘Just Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. You’ll get over it. Oh, and you can’t go talk to a head doctor, by the way. Security issues.’
“I’m getting along,” I said out loud. “Police work is better than the accounting job.” My voice sounded creaky. “I’m finding my feet, and I’m doing everything you asked as well.”
The colonel flipped his folder open. “Well, as long as the medical team is happy with your answers, you won’t need to come back in for another checkup yet.”
Crap. He had to remind me. I’d do pretty much anything to stay away from them, even answer their questions. I’d never been claustrophobic until they’d strapped me to a bed and left me in that tiny room. The only thing that had kept me from screaming and thrashing till I passed out again was that they’d been watching me. Even when they weren’t there in person, their cameras had focused cold, unblinking eyes on me, 24/7.
‘The subject is distressed…’
One of them had actually said that. The sound of his voice floated out of the maelstrom of memories, cold and detached. I shivered.
I’d found a way to force the reactions back down inside, to show them nothing of what I was feeling. I used that again now, determined not to let the colonel see how rattled I was.
“Nightmares?” he asked abruptly, his pen hovering over a printed list.
“Fewer. The same ones. They’re getting real old now,” I lied.
“Any other sleep problems?”
“No.” That was true. The nightmares didn’t leave time for anything else.
“Anxiety, unexplained physiological changes, sensations of heat, cold, racing heart, arrhythmia?”
Like right now.
“None of them,” I said.
The colonel paused beside an exhibit.
“Outside of the nightmares,” he read from his list, “do you repeatedly visualize or think about events in the army?”
“No,” I lied again. I tried to avoid it. I’d loved my life in Ops 4-10 and now I could never go back. Thinking about it was torturing myself. I had to break this habit. This was the new me. Out here, on my own. Standing strong. Not looking back.
“Blackouts?”
Prickles of cold ran down my back. We were heading off the PTSD track. The medical team had theorized that I would experience psychogenic blackouts if my ‘condition’ progressed.
“No.” Not yet. Not ever, I hoped. There would be no repeal if I turned. I’d spend the rest of my life in restraints, being studied by scientists who would dispassionately note
down how distressed the subject looked.
The colonel folded the pad under his arm and gazed at the Western scene we’d stopped in front of. I wasn’t fooled. There were more questions to answer.
“Are you still running, Sergeant?”
“Yeah. It’s not as regular now because of my hours.”
“Have your fitness or stamina levels improved unexpectedly?”
“Not unexpectedly,” I hedged. “I’ve been doing a lot of workouts at the police gym and I’ve also taken up Kung Fu training again. I found a Kwan here, with a good teacher.”
Colonel Laine raised an eyebrow. “You’re hardly in need of more martial arts training.”
“With respect, Colonel, I don’t agree. And I’m careful with other students.”
He snorted, looked as if he was about to turn away, but came back suddenly, right in my face.
“Cognitive dissonance?” he asked, staring at my eyes. He didn’t blink any more than a camera lens would have.
There it was: The Question. The medics had drummed it into me before I’d been allowed out. In order to be a vampire, I’d have to hold different beliefs. I’d have to be able, not just to do previously unthinkable things, like sucking blood, but to want to do them. And they theorized that the changeover would be relatively slow. There’d be a time when I’d be halfway, wanting to do something and not wanting to do it at the same time. Seriously screwed in my head. That was their warning flag. They’d have to imprison me. Once I turned completely, there was no knowing what I’d do or how it might end.
No way. Just not going to happen.
“No, sir. I’m stable,” I said.
We stayed like that, eyeball to eyeball, for a good minute before he broke away.
Relief flowed through me. I took it I’d passed again and I was still free.
We walked into the next gallery.
“Your searches have all come up blank so far,” he said.
I’d been worrying they’d take the lack of progress as a sign I was hiding something from them. Now I was worrying that if I told them about the body in the dumpster and it turned out to be a false alarm, they’d think I was becoming unstable. That I was imagining things. That I needed to be back under observation.
“Yes, but it’s a big city, there can’t be many of them—”
“And they keep their heads down. We did draw up the projections together.” He frowned. “Maybe the underlying assumptions were wrong. Maybe we’re looking in the wrong place.”
I didn’t like the way this was heading. Searching for evidence of vampires in the USA was a major reason I’d been allowed out. Take it away and there would be an argument for returning me to the base and all that went with that.
“I understood it would take time,” I said. I was their only detector, and what I used wasn’t high tech or reliable. As the vampires had closed in on my squad in the jungle, I’d found I could sense them, in two ways. There was a feeling, like something you knew you’d forgotten as you were about to leave the house, or like the feeling you got when you just knew someone had snuck up and was standing right behind you.
The scientists had rolled their eyes at that. The second way was more to their liking; I could smell vampires. They gave off a sweet, coppery scent. Very few others thought they could smell it—and most of those changed their minds when challenged—but the scientists had been able to measure electrical patterns in my brain when I got a sniff of vampire. They’d used the bodies to provide the smell. They’d been less happy when whatever was causing the smell decayed away and disappeared, but at least they’d managed to verify their results. It was official; I could smell the vampires that had attacked and killed my team.
Smell and spidey-sense had to be the two least reliable methods of detection in a city full of people and its own smells. And I had to support myself with a job; I couldn’t spend all my time wandering around sniffing butts. So we’d applied some more assumptions to narrow down the search. People believed vampires didn’t exist, so vampires must be very secretive. But if they needed blood, they had to come out sometimes. Clubs and raves and fringe society seemed to be the likeliest places. So here I was, the only person in the world being ordered by the army to live it up in Denver’s nightlife. Yay me.
Now, I had my first possible report to make. But my sense of smell had been overwhelmed by the trash, and the rest was inconclusive. I needed more before I raised it with the colonel.
What if I was wrong? Or worse, what if I was right? What would happen once I’d found them their vampires? Would my usefulness be over? Or would I be hauled back to the lab for comparison studies? Either way, I held off.
Instead, he had me go back over my routine reports for the last couple of weeks, just in case there was anything we’d missed. Then he surprised me again.
“I’ve taken on board some help for you,” said the colonel. “An internet specialist is searching the web for places or people in Denver that need to be looked into, so we can become more focused.” He pulled a slip of paper out of the folder and handed it to me. “This place seems to check a lot of boxes on our profile, and there’s a special event going on tonight.”
The paper was a printout from a website for Club Agonia. I’d heard of it, and the images confirmed everything. Whips. Chains. Leather. Handcuffs. Things that I didn’t even want to know the use of. I couldn’t keep the reaction off my face.
“Uh, Colonel—”
“I’m not asking you to join in, Sergeant. Just have a look at the place, and the owner.” He handed me another sheet. “The club is common knowledge; the identity of this person isn’t.”
The owner was apparently called Dominé. There was a blurry image that could have been anybody, and just the one name, with someone’s scrawled instructions on pronunciation—Dom-in-ay.
To hell with the boss. She was hardly likely to be trawling the floor of her club. My problem was with the club itself, and what went on there. How did he expect me to blend in? If he thought I was going to stride in there with a riding crop and a leather bustier, he had another think coming.
I tried again. “Colonel, this is a clique club. You get in by invitation. You get an invitation by joining in.”
“Tonight may be different,” he said. “There’s an event called the Blood Orchid Market. It has a vampire theme.” He had to have been laughing inside at this. He passed me another printout, with emailed invitations to the event that his specialist had managed to copy. “There’ll be a lot of ordinary people dressed up, but from what we’ve seen, we think this is worth a visit. I have absolute faith in your ability to get in and have a look. And get out, without getting caught up in whatever’s going on. Simple, for a person of your capabilities.”
He finished by handing me a slim file, including schematics of the club’s layout inside.
Simple. Right.
My night off had just evaporated. At least I hadn’t planned anything.
Outside, the colonel made a call and a couple of minutes later, a black car pulled up. He opened the door for me.
“I’m having a van converted for our future meetings. It’ll make it more convenient to talk and run the tests,” he said as he joined me in the back seat. “Where would you like to be dropped off?”
I gave the address where I’d left my car.
In the meantime, the colonel had done his commanding officer voodoo on me.
Don’t give me excuses, just get on with it.
My concerns were not important.
I started planning. Success in this kind of op was all a matter of retaining the initiative. However, from his simple requirement, I’d picked up a slew of chores. I’d just have to get around all of them. There wasn’t any slack. But at least being busy would stop me from worrying about Club Agonia.
He pressed a button and a security screen slid up between us and the driver.
From a case at his feet, he took out a small box with straps.
My heart rate spiked. Crap. I’d known it
was coming, but still, crap. I took it, strapped it on my arm and pressed the button.
The colonel had asked the scientists’ questions and I had given answers. I didn’t know if the scientists even bothered to look at my answers. This, I knew, they paid attention to.
They had found chemicals in my body after my recovery: strings of proteins, which they called prions, for want of a better name. Prion was a name for proteins that caused devastating brain diseases. The prions they found in me hadn’t done that, and the working concept was that the prions actually caused vampirism or were an indicator of it. The box measured the level of prions in my blood. If the readout was too high, I wouldn’t be getting back out of this car until we reached the base.
The little readout showed 0.40. Higher than the last one. I stopped breathing.
The colonel took the unit back and carefully jotted down the reading.
“Within acceptable variance,” he murmured.
I kept my face calm, let my breath out silently, and started to carefully relax some of the muscles that had tensed up.
Keep it all hidden.
The colonel packed the unit away as we arrived beside my car.
“Sergeant, the Observation team has no idea whether there is a psychological or biological trigger for finally becoming a vampire.” He sighed. “You’re here in Denver for a reason. Don’t breach the terms, and so long as the reason remains valid, I’m not going to haul you back in for having nightmares or feeling stressed.”
“Thanks, Colonel.” Nice sentiments. I gave a small smile and let my guard down. Like hell.
“You really don’t think about 4-10?” he said.
“I think about the good times, sometimes.”
Another lie. Ops 4-10 was my life for over a third of it. My friends and colleagues, all torn away from me as if they’d all died that night in the jungle. I thought of them a lot.