by Derek Gunn
Danny leapt forward with a huge grin on his face, turned slightly to his side and promptly disappeared through the gap. For a moment it seemed that he had simply disappeared through a portal to another world or dimension and Emma felt her heart drop in her chest. What the hell are we doing? The thought rattled around in her head and she was about to speak when Ricks brushed past her and disappeared through the gap without a word. As the others began to follow and she could hear their hushed voices on the other side and her misgivings began to relent. She sighed and followed them through.
She wasn’t sure what she expected to see on the other side of the wall but she did expect something to be different. Visions of Stargate with a new world behind the shimmering void every week fuelled her imagination and filled her with equal amounts of fear and excitement. As she passed through the gap she saw that the city on this side of the wall was pretty much the same as that on the other side. In fairness, the mist did restrict her visibility to a short distance but still, she felt disappointed and relieved all at the same time. However, she was surprised to realise that she was more disappointed than relieved as she pulled herself through and surveyed the street.
Surely the whole point of having Forbidden Zones was because they were dangerous and different. The last of the group began to filter through and their silence spoke volumes of their own disappointment with this ‘unknown and dangerous’ area.
Ricks put it most eloquently. “Hey man, this sucks. I thought it would be, like, cool - you know.”
She did know and she looked over at Danny with a raised eyebrow.
“Don’t worry; it’s just up the street a little.”
There was a loud grunt followed by a curse behind them and then Seager suddenly fell to the ground as he forced his way through the narrow gap. The others laughed a little but they were far too nervous about being on the other side of the wall so Seager was spared the full brunt of his ungainly entrance. Danny took off up the street and the others followed without a word.
The further they walked the more Emma Logan noticed the differences. They were subtle at first, the buildings were completely devoid of life - they even seemed to have somehow lost their colour and vibrancy. They looked abandoned. In the city, on their side of the wall, buildings might be abandoned but there was a different look to them, almost as if they were just waiting for someone to come along to open their doors, roll up the shutters and breathe new life into them. These buildings, however, looked dead, if a building could be described as such. It was a subtle difference but one which weighed heavily on Emma as she continued walking. There were abandoned, rusted vehicles on the streets, some crashed into each other while others lay crumpled into the sides of buildings where bricks lay scattered around like entrails around a fatal wound.
The low cloud seemed to linger around the cars and the buildings like a magician’s cloak, hiding so much more than it was revealing, and Emma shivered as she strained to see into the distance. She looked back toward the others and saw the same fears etched on their faces and in the way they made their way carefully through the obstacles. Even their footsteps seemed strangely muted on this side of the wall. In fact, only Danny Wilkins seemed to be oblivious to the strange ambience of the area they passed through.
“It’s just down here,” Danny snapped his head back to check they were still following and stumbled yet again as his foot found a loose brick and he was forced to windmill his arms to steady himself. Despite the subdued atmosphere the group managed a light snigger before Danny managed to steady himself and continue on down the street.
When they did finally reach Danny’s big surprise they stopped in awe and with more than a little fear. Danny bounded right up to it with no fear at all and Emma could tell that his standing in the little group had just raised quite a few notches for his courage.
“It’s all right,” he announced as he kicked the form at his feet, “he’s quite dead.”
The others stared at the corpse but no one moved any further. Even in death the Vampires were terrifying and demanded respect.
“Are you sure it’s dead?” Peter Atkins finally managed to ask. Atkins was a small boy of twelve, though he insisted that he was thirteen so as not to be the youngest. He had been in the same group that had been rescued with the rest of them three months ago, but, unlike the others, no one had found any other members of his family. He tried hard to be part of the group but still looked rather shell-shocked at the loss. It hadn’t helped that he had had to look through the unidentified bodies of those who had died on the train.
Peter Harris himself had walked with him with his hand in his as he had gone through the lines of the dead. There had been so many tears in his eyes that, even now, he still wondered if he might have actually seen his parents but had simply not registered their faces. He still wasn’t sure if it was a good thing that he had not found anyone he knew or not. There would at least have been some form of closure if he had found them. At least then he might have been able to grieve and move on; now there would always be uncertainty until he found his parents and brothers one way or the other.
For now, he lived with a family who had lost their own son during the war. But their devastation for their own loss was smothering him and was not at all what the young boy needed. He had been totally lost until he had found the ‘Wolverines’. At twelve, he should still have been in school, the committee had put certain restrictions on the group of youths and an age limit had been one of the first, but, with no one around to prove otherwise, his insistence of being thirteen could not be contested.
“Yep,” Danny laughed and kicked the vampire in the ribs to emphasise his point. Something moved beneath the corpse and caused the body to shift slightly. All of them jumped back, and a few of the smaller ones ran half way down the street before they realised that they weren’t being pursued and returned sheepishly to the group. The vampire’s head had rolled toward them and they could see a stream of dried blood running from both ears down its cheeks and neck. Dried blood also streaked from its eyes and nose and there was a huge pool of blood around the body that had stained the bricks and concrete around it like cancer corrupting flesh.
“What killed it?” Seager asked as he finally raised the courage to join Danny beside the vampire.
“Haven’t a clue.” Danny smiled as he moved aside to let the bigger boy get closer. “I tripped over him last night when I was following my Dad.”
“You mean this isn’t what your Dad was coming out here for?” Emma blurted out.
“God, no.” Danny smiled. “If the adults knew they’d be all over it and we wouldn’t get a chance to see it.”
“Danny,” Emma took a deep breath to help calm herself before continuing. “We have to tell the adults. This might be important.” She snorted and threw her eyes up to heaven. “What am I saying? This is important. My God, it might just be the most important discovery ever.”
“But we’ll get in trouble,” Danny whined as he thought of the punishment he was likely to get.
“Danny,” Ricks moved forward and put his hand on the smaller boy’s shoulder. “Emma’s right. This is huge. Something killed this vampire and if we can figure out what it was then we might just be able to use it against the others. Your discovery might just be the biggest thing that has happened since these bastards came out of the shadows. You’ll be a hero, man.”
“Is that before or after my Dad beats the hell out of me for coming out here?” Danny sighed but was already thinking past his beating to the part where he was credited with making the discovery.
“After, of course,” Ricks laughed and tousled the smaller boy’s hair.
Chapter 1
“But what actually killed it?” Phil Regan asked with more urgency that he had intended. His voice squeaked excitedly and he cringed inwardly as he forced himself to calm down. It was important for him to appear in control, especially now that he was in charge. Such immature outbursts would not help him to cultivate the image of the
competent and calm leader that he was desperately trying to portray.
“We’re not entirely sure,” Adam Wilkins shrugged as he fidgeted with the papers in front of him. Wilkins had never been in the council room before, let alone the sole object of their attention, and he found the experience far from pleasant. He looked over at Pat Smyth for support and Pat winked once and nodded encouragingly.
The whole community was buzzing with the news since his son and his friends had returned with news of their discovery. While he had been outraged at first that Danny had broken such an important rule, he had soon become caught up in the discovery itself. He had been among the last group rescued and had been one of the lucky ones who still had his entire family with him. Both his wife and son had been in the same group and, although they had been in different rail cars, they had all managed to survive the daring rescue of three months earlier. Many others were still missing their partners or children, though whether they had been left behind or were already long dead was anyone’s guess. Others still had had to come to terms with being told that their loved ones had been killed by stray bullets during the rescue itself. There had been a mass burial for all of these as soon as those mourning them had overcome the serum’s effects.
It had been a particularly heart-rending affair. The absence of refrigeration made getting the bodies buried a priority and many of those standing over the mass grave were really too confused to understand fully what was happening. It had been a tough time for many of them over the last few months as they tried to cope with their losses and the new world order. Many hadn’t coped too well and some had even had to be sedated to allow them more time to come to terms with the way things were. It seemed almost criminal to use more chemicals to try and heal them from the serum but their minds were just too fragile at this point.
For such a small community these people were a terrible drain on the resources and already there were grumblings from those who had to shoulder the extra workload. Although Adam was new to the community he could see that there were already too many cracks appearing in their fragile existence. And then on top of that, of course, there was the Harris issue.
It was hard to believe that only three months had passed since Harris and his team had brought them all back to the base. However, there had been so many changes since then, and not all of them had been for the best. He did not fully understand the situation himself, or even what had gone before that had caused it to get so bad within the community, but he really didn’t care too much. He owed Harris and his team his life and the lives of his family and would defend them to the last, but his work was of paramount importance and he couldn’t afford to get involved in the in-fighting that threatened to tear the community apart.
He looked around the table at the faces of the committee and realised suddenly how divorced he was from the workings of the community He realised with a shock that he didn’t even know the names of many of the people before him, except for Regan, of course. He didn’t like Regan, or maybe it was the people who surrounded him - he wasn’t quite sure. Regardless, he wished yet again that he had stood up when it had mattered and added his voice to those others who had tried to stop Harris and his team from being railroaded.
He hadn’t agreed with it at the time but he had been so caught up in his work that he hadn’t spared the time to make a stand. And now it was too late. He could see people looking at him with growing impatience as he blushed and pushed his thoughts to one side. He cleared his throat to try and hide his embarrassment and then continued.
“As you know I have been running tests with Pat around the use of high frequency wireless bands around the outskirts of the city.” He looked around at the people before him and sighed. There wasn’t even a flicker of understanding in any of their faces. They were interested now, of course - now that there had been a result - but none of them really understood what he was trying to do.
“My background is in communications, or was, I should say,” he paused for a moment. It was still difficult to take in the sheer horror of their situation. Before he had been numbed by the serum life had been very different. The vampires had emerged from the shadows, of course, but it had not seemed likely that they would, or even could, take over the world. Communications had not been as instantaneous as they had once been so news travelled slowly in a world without the resources to run many of the technological toys everyone had so relied upon before. But, even so, stories of vampires had still seemed unreal and divorced from their own, very real, problems of survival.
He had been one of the lucky ones. As a communications expert he had managed to ‘transfer’ from his home state to the state of Illinois where a power plant and stockpiled resources made them a very rich state. Some would have called it ‘jumping ship,’ he knew, but he had to think of his family’s future. He had ended up in Chicago, working to try and perfect old technologies to run on new power sources. They had been well protected by the army, in fact, many people in the city had even complained about the army’s presence; seeing it as constrictive to their daily comings and goings. There had seemed no way that such a large and prepared force could possibly be defeated, even if the vampires were as real a threat as some made out. It was entirely possible that would not even make it this far north.
There had been over ten thousand soldiers protecting the city of Chicago. Tanks and artillery lined every hill and elevated mound around the city and they stood ready to pour their terrifying ordinance on any thrall force that approached. Vast excavations had been dug around the city to house even more weapons of incredible power. Precious resources had been poured into these excavations and many of the city’s citizens complained bitterly of such waste. Surely this was an overreaction. He still didn’t really know what had happened. Smyth had mentioned something about the thralls poisoning the water supply with the serum. But the thought of a whole city taken without a shot having being fired was just terrifying.
This new world he had woken up to was even more frightening, though. They didn’t have the numbers for a knock-down one-on-one fight with the vampires so they would have to be cleverer than they had been during the war. To this end he had come to Pat Smyth with his proposal. Pat, to his credit had immediately seen the benefits but the council had refused to fund his ideas, citing limited resources as their main reason for doing so.
This had been around the time when the situation with Harris and his team had come to a head and the council had not paid any further attention to him. It had been Harris, despite the terrible pressure he had been under at the time, who had given him the resources, both in time and manpower, to turn his ideas into a reality. It galled him now that the council would take credit for the efforts of those very people they had abandoned. He shook himself from his reverie again and cleared his throat nervously again before continuing.
“My theory revolved around the fact that if the Vampires had such powerful senses that we might be able to use that against them.” He paused again as he saw confusion on the faces of some of the council and sighed inwardly. How can you run a community in the middle of a war with former accountants, lawyers and sales people?
“Because the vampires’ senses are so acute they rely totally on them and so have become lazy,” he continued. “Now that the vampires know that we exist, we have few choices…”
“We can thank Harris for that,” snorted Patricia Lohan from her position to the right of Regan.
“Miss Lohan.” Wilkins felt his anger grow as embarrassment for his own failure to act when he had the chance suddenly overwhelmed him. “Your comments are neither warranted nor welcome.” Suddenly all of the committee members straightened as Wilkins’ comments hit home. “As you are all well aware, this study would not have received any resources at all if it had been left to you. We would not even be here discussing it at all if Peter Harris hadn’t gone out of his way to ensure the safety of the very community that has shunned him and his team. I am shamed that I did not stand with him in his hour of ne
ed, as he has continued to stand for us all. But that is not the issue here today. I will not, however, tolerate any of these flippant and undeserved comments from people who have had little to do with the continued survival of this community.”
Silence descended over the room and Pat Smyth tried hard not to burst out laughing at the look of shock that was painted on Lohan’s face. Her auburn hair seemed suddenly very dark framing a face that had gone suddenly pale. Her eyes gleamed like flint and she seemed about to reply when Ian Phelps suddenly interrupted.
“I’m sure that was not Miss Lohan’s intention.” Ian Phelps had an annoying habit of licking his lips before he spoke and it meant that there was always an annoying pause between sentences. “Though I do think that your comments are overly harsh in this case. We are all in this together after all.” He smiled as he licked his lips again but his narrow features made him appear more feral than encouraging and Wilkins merely continued to stare at him defiantly. Phelps had lost a lot of weight in the last few months and his skin seemed ill-fitting on him. His face still bore the marks of a long addiction to alcohol, though he had insisted quite openly that he had not touched a drop since being freed from the serum. As the seconds ticked by, Phelps was forced to speak again. “Why don’t you continue, Mr. Wilkins?”
Wilkins shot one more hard look at Patricia Lohan and smiled inwardly as he saw the emotions running across her face like a waterfall before he nodded and continued his report. Pat Smyth wondered briefly whether Wilkins had been wise to antagonise this beautiful but dangerous woman.
“If we merely try to hide here in this city, the vampires’ amazing senses will eventually sniff us out, especially when they might now know what state to look for us in. They, the Vampires that is, are used to covering a vast area by flying overhead and relying on their ability to detect heat sources and their sense of smell to register any community of humans. This worked well for them during the war and in the aftermath. We humans generate quite an amount of heat when collected in one small area, and our scent is quite strong.”