Department 19: The Rising

by Will Hill

  “Fine,” said Jamie, his chest heaving with exertion and burning with rage. “Let’s find someone who does. Leave him here, and let’s move.”

  “Hold on,” said Angela. “He might know where we should go. Let me talk to him.”

  “Be quick,” said Jamie, and stepped back from the bleeding, terrified vampire.

  “Yes, sir,” Angela replied, watching him move away. Then she walked over, crouched down and raised her visor, so Alain could see her dizzying, dazzling smile.

  “Bonsoir, monsieur,” she said, gently. “Vous parlez Anglais, oui?”

  The vampire nodded, slowly.

  “OK then,” she said. “My name is Angela. What’s yours?”

  “A-Alain,” the vampire replied, hesitantly. “Alain Devaux.”

  “It’s nice to meet you, Alain,” said Angela, brightly. “I’m very sorry for what my friend did to you, but it will heal next time you feed. So no harm done, really. Don’t you agree?”

  Confusion swept across Alain’s face, but he nodded again, even more slowly.

  “Good,” breathed Angela, her voice full of relief. “That’s great. Now, Alain, my friend is very worried about a friend of his. That’s why he hit you, because he’s worried that we might be running out of time, and we need to find him; it’s no excuse, mind you, but that’s why. I hope you can forgive him, and think about helping me?”

  “I don’t know about what he asked,” said Alain, worry rising in his face once more. “I was telling the truth. I wish I could be more help. I’m sorry.”

  “I believe you, Alain,” said Angela, honestly. “I don’t think you know where Latour is. I don’t think you’d ever heard of him until a minute ago, had you?”

  Alain shook his head eagerly.

  “I thought not,” she continued. “But we think that somewhere in Paris is someone who does know about him, and knows where he is. So I need you to think, Alain, and tell me anywhere you know where large numbers of vampires gather. Can you do that for me?”

  “I do not associate with vampires,” said Alain, spitting the last word as though it was poison. “I keep to myself. I never hurt anyone.”

  “I’m sure you don’t,” Angela replied, softly. “This doesn’t need to be a place that you go to yourself, just anywhere you might have been told about, or heard other vampires discussing. Is there anywhere like that you can think of?”

  Alain was silent for a moment, then his brow furrowed, and Angela knew he had an answer for her.

  “There is a place,” he said, slowly. “I have never been there, but my daughter asks about it. It’s for vampires only, down by the river.”

  “What is it called, Alain?” asked Angela, smiling at the bleeding vampire.

  “Spinal Cord,” read Jamie. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

  The five Operators were standing outside a squat concrete building on Port de la Rapée, having followed the directions that Alain had given to Angela. They had left the frightened, injured vampire in the alleyway; he had watched them depart with a relief on his face so great that it made Jamie feel momentarily ashamed.

  Normally, he did not see it as Blacklight’s duty to terrorise or destroy every single vampire in the world; one of the first lessons that Frankenstein had taught him were that there were good and bad vampires, just as there were good and bad humans. But the mission they were on was different; nothing could be allowed to derail their chances of finding Frankenstein, not even Jamie’s own usually strong moral code.

  I told them all before we left, Jamie thought, trying to justify his own behaviour to himself. Frankenstein is the priority; everything else is secondary. And that’s how it stays, until I get him back or someone shows me his body.

  He lowered his visor, and checked the weapons on his belt.

  “Follow my lead,” he said, and started towards the building.

  The door that led into Spinal Cord was heavy industrial metal, covered in a layer of flaked and rusting red paint, beneath the neon sign announcing its name. There was a single button set into the alcove wall; Jamie pressed it, and stepped back.

  “We’re full,” said a voice, from behind the door. “Go away.”

  Jamie pressed the button again, and kept his finger on it. He could hear the bell ringing through the door, and after a few seconds, he heard bolts being withdrawn. He readied himself.

  The door was pulled open with a scream of metal on concrete, and a huge vampire loomed out of the darkness within. The doorman was wearing a battered leather vest over a black T-shirt, and black leather trousers. His eyes were glowing red, and he peered out at the five black-clad figures with anger on his face.

  “What the hell are you five supposed to be?” he asked. “Some kind of—”

  The comparison the vampire was about to make was lost forever, as Jamie pulled the stake from his belt and shoved it into his chest, hard. The vampire’s eyes bulged with surprise, and then he burst like a giant balloon, showering Jamie with steaming blood.

  Jamie replaced the stake on his belt, and turned to his team.

  “Follow me,” he said.

  Beyond the door lay a concrete passage, plastered on all sides with lurid posters for gigs and club nights. They had been pasted across the floor and ceiling as well as the walls, and Jamie had a strange sensation of dizziness as he led them down the corridor; it was as though he wasn’t absolutely sure which way was up. They rounded a corner, and the relentless thud of bass, which had been barely audible as the door opened, intensified. At the end of the corridor before them stood a second door. Jamie didn’t even slow down as he approached it; he pushed the rusting sheet of metal with one gloved hand.

  It swung open without protest, and suddenly the music was deafening, even through the protection offered by his helmet. The club was a large concrete box, square-sided but with a high ceiling from which sweat was dripping like salty rain; the heat emanating from the room was overpowering. One side of the club was a long bar made from concrete breeze blocks topped with old wooden doors from behind which three bartenders were serving drinks: bottles of beer, shots of whisky and vodka, and glasses full of dark red liquid.

  At the rear of the room, a makeshift DJ booth had been erected from three concrete slabs on which a pair of turntables sat precariously; the DJ moved between them faster than the eye could follow, his glowing eyes leaving trails of red light in the neon-soaked darkness of the club.

  The rest of the room was dance floor, upon which hundreds of men, women and vampires were grinding and thrusting and groping. Nobody paid the slightest bit of attention to their arrival, so Jamie watched for a few moments; he saw a vampire man sucking hungrily at a wound on the inside of a girl’s elbow, saw the pain on her face and the unbridled pleasure on his. He saw a vampire girl lean in and snort a line of red powder from the cleavage of another vampire girl; they looked so similar that they could have been twins.

  A thick fug of smoke hung over the dance floor, and Jamie smelt the bitter, telltale scent of Bliss, the vampire drug that he had once helped to make. Strobe lights pounded from the high corners of the room, the music thumped and thudded and thumped again, while sweat and blood and lust mingled in the boiling, smoky air.

  Jamie had seen enough. He lifted an ultraviolet grenade from his belt, and nodded to Angela Darcy. She disappeared into the crowd, then appeared seconds later behind the DJ. Jamie watched her press the tip of her T-Bone into the vampire’s back, then whisper in his ear. A moment later the deafening music cut out.

  The vampires and humans swirling and pounding across the dance floor screeched their displeasure, then spun, as one, in Jamie’s direction when he bellowed for their attention. He held the grenade above his head, and smiled at the crowd.

  “You all know what this is, right?” he shouted. “Who feels like answering some questions?”

  44

  BEHIND EVERY GOOD MAN

  ONE HOUR LATER

  Larissa Kinley stood in the open doors of the Loop’s hangar,
watching the last of the sunlight crawl across the grass to the west. Once it had climbed over the double fences and rippled away into the thick forest that surrounded the Department 19 base, she stepped out on to the tarmac, and breathed fresh air.

  There were many bad things about being a vampire, but the worst of them, the very worst, was the simple fact that for the better part of each day, she could not go outside. Being a Blacklight Operator helped, as the vast majority of their work was done under cover of darkness, and it was not unusual for her to fulfil the oldest vampire cliché, of sleeping all day and emerging after the sun had gone down.

  But there were moments, a great many of them in the years since she had been turned, when she longed for the feel of the sun on her skin, for the scents and smells of the day, so different to those of the night, to fill her nostrils and transport her, away from the darkness and the shadows. She had come to terms with the fact that she was never going to experience those things again, but that did not stop her yearning for them.

  She had said goodbye to Jamie in the Ops Room almost four hours earlier, and she could still not shake the nagging feeling that their parting had been significant. Partly it was the fact that he had gone to Paris on the most important mission of his life, and decided not to take her with him, but there was more to it than that; he had been on missions without her before, and she without him, and never had she felt the need to so explicitly ask him to come back to her as she had in the Ops Room.

  There was no guarantee that Frankenstein was alive, that Jamie and his team would be able to find him if he was, or that there would be any danger attached to doing so; she knew it was extremely likely that he would return home empty-handed, an eventuality she was attempting to prepare herself for. But there was something in the pit of her stomach, something gnawing and clawing, that told her that her boyfriend was in enormous danger.

  She would worry about him until he returned; that much she knew. In the meantime, there was someone else who required her attention, someone whom she had seen walking towards the distant perimeter fence half an hour earlier, someone she had been prevented from following by the slow passage of the setting sun. But now the sun was gone.

  Larissa soared into the air, feeling with a rush of excitement how effortless it had become for her to do so. She rose slowly towards the hologram that shielded the Loop from view from above, marvelling at the liquid complexity of the image when seen up close.

  The field of suspended particles that the image was projected on to was barely a centimetre thick, but the hologrammatic image appeared to rise and fall with the tops of trees and the dark drops of clearings. It was a marvel of technology that Larissa resolved to ask Matt about at some point; she knew he would already have a full understanding of how the effect was achieved, and it would delight him to be able to pass the information on to her.

  From her high vantage point, Larissa’s razor-sharp eyes picked out the tiny figure of Kate Randall, sitting alone in the rose garden at the far edge of the base.

  She swooped through the air, the open sky around her, the soft wind rippling through her hair; it was a sensation of pure joy, and although she would not wish the curse of vampirism on anyone, this was the one aspect of being turned that she would have loved to share with somebody, even just for a few minutes. She banked and spun and looped as she flew across the wide compound, towards the circular garden; her progress was silent, and Kate didn’t look up until Larissa dropped soundlessly on to the bench beside her, and said hello.

  “Jesus!” shouted Kate, leaping to her feet. “You scared the crap out of me!”

  “Sorry,” replied Larissa, grinning at her friend. “Completely accidental, I promise.”

  Kate stared at the vampire girl, trying hard to keep a straight face, and failing miserably. She shook her head in what she hoped was a stern fashion, and smiled back at Larissa.

  “So,” said Larissa. “I saw you head out here about an hour ago. I’m guessing it didn’t go well with Shaun?”

  Kate looked exaggeratedly around. “Do you see him here?”

  “No,” said Larissa.

  “Me neither,” said Kate. “That’s how well it went.”

  She sat back down on the bench beside her friend and sighed, deeply. “He’s blaming me for what happened with the Paris mission,” she said. “He thinks Jamie would have taken him if he and I weren’t together.”

  “That’s bullshit,” said Larissa.

  “Is it?” asked Kate. “Jamie said he didn’t take him because he wanted to know there’d be someone to look after me if something happens to him in Paris. Maybe he would have taken Shaun if we weren’t seeing each other.”

  “You can’t know that, though,” said Larissa. “Jamie and Shaun haven’t exactly seen eye to eye. He still might have left him behind.”

  “Might,” replied Kate. “Might not. Like you say, we don’t know. So I can’t tell Shaun that his being with me didn’t hurt his chances, because I don’t know that’s true.”

  “So what’s he going to do?”

  “I don’t know,” said Kate, softly. “He said he needs time to think about things. One of my two closest friends in the world is out there on some crazy redemption crusade, but he needs time to think about things. Ridiculous.”

  She saw the look on Larissa’s face change as she mentioned Jamie’s mission, saw the worry that she was barely managing to conceal burst to the surface, and felt a stab of pain in her chest. “Jesus, I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m sure Jamie’s fine, Larissa. I’m certain of it. He was born to do this; you know how good an Operator he is.”

  “I know,” said Larissa, fiercely. “I’m so proud of him, even though I hate his stupid guts right now for not letting me go with him and look after him. And I know how important Frankenstein was to him; I totally get it. I just wish he’d let me help.”

  “They’re just boys,” said Kate. “Him and Shaun both. They don’t know how to let anyone help them, much less ask for it.”

  The two girls sat in silence for a moment, looking at the roses in the fading light of the evening. Eventually, Kate spoke again.

  “Do you believe him?” she asked.

  “Believe who?” replied Larissa.

  “Jamie,” said Kate. “Do you think he was really trying to protect us, or do you think he just didn’t want to take us with him?”

  “I have to believe that what he told us was the truth,” replied Larissa. “The alternative is just too awful. You know?”

  Kate nodded her head.

  “Do you believe him?” asked Larissa. “Do you think he meant what he said?”

  “I do,” Kate replied, firmly. “I think it was stupid, and arrogant, but I think he meant it.”

  “Do you think they’ll find him?” asked Larissa. “Frankenstein, I mean.”

  “I don’t think there’s anything to find,” replied Kate. “I would never tell Jamie this, because I know how desperately he wants to believe, but I think he’s dead. I think he’s been dead for three months.”

  “Me too,” sighed Larissa. “It means so much to Jamie; he sees it as this miraculous chance to make up for what happened, and I’m scared it’s just going to crush him all over again. But I guess we’ll know when they get back, one way or the other.”

  “Let’s hope so,” said Kate, then smiled at Larissa. “I’m hungry,” she said. “Do you want to get something to eat? It might take our minds off all this doom and gloom.”

  “Sounds like a plan,” replied Larissa, standing up.

  Kate did the same, and the two girls walked slowly down the wooden path that ran through the heart of the memorial garden. As they passed through the gate, Kate did something that surprised herself; she reached out and took Larissa’s hand. She had never done so before; she had held hands with her girlfriends on Lindisfarne all the time, thinking less than nothing of it, but never with Larissa.

  The muscles in the vampire girl’s neck and shoulders twitched, and for a second, her hand la
y limply in Kate’s grasp. Then she slowly laced her fingers with her friend’s, as they walked towards the low rise of the Loop’s central dome.

  They were three-quarters of the way across the wide grass field when Larissa smelt something on the still evening air. It didn’t smell bad, not exactly; it smelt huge, as though she was only able to perceive a small corner of some gigantic whole. Her eyes flickered red, involuntarily; Kate saw them, and stopped.

  “What is it?” she asked. There was concern in her voice; she knew that Larissa’s senses were many times more acute than her own, and knew that her life had been saved, on more than one occasion, by taking the vampire’s instincts seriously.

  “I don’t know,” said Larissa, pulling free from Kate’s hand. “Something big. It’s coming, though, whatever it is. Coming fast.”

  A sound became audible behind them, a fluttering sound like the wings of a thousand birds. As the two girls looked at each other, their eyes widening with fear, a ragged shadow crept across them, plunging them into darkness. They turned and looked in the direction it was coming from, and Kate made a small involuntary sound deep in her throat, a tiny gasp of utterly unbridled fear.

  “Run,” growled Larissa, her eyes bursting into deep, swirling crimson. “Sound the alarm.”

  “What about you?” cried Kate. “I can’t leave you here.”

  “There’s no time,” said Larissa. “Run, Kate. Go now!”

  Kate turned and sprinted for the open doors of the hangar, shouting at the top of her lungs as she went. The shadow rolled across the grass, keeping pace with her; it was ragged, and shifting, and impossibly wide.

  Larissa stood alone in the middle of the grass, her eyes fixed on what was approaching. Her eyes burned in the darkness as she pulled the radio from her belt, typed four numbers on its small keypad and pressed it to her ear.

  45

  CURTAIN CALL