by Will Hill
Jamie smiled. “They’re fine.”
“Thank you,” said the woman, looking at him with eyes that were red and wet with tears. “I don’t know what we would have done if you hadn’t come.”
“That’s what I wanted to ask you,” said Jamie. “Why didn’t you leave when you had the chance?”
“We didn’t think they’d actually do it,” said the man. “We’ve had trouble before, knocks on the door late at night, things shouted through the windows, but we never thought they’d go this far. We never thought they’d try to kill us.”
“Things are crazy at the moment,” said Jamie. “I’m really sorry this happened to you, and I know it’s a lot to take in, but when you’re both ready I need you to come with me.”
The woman frowned. “Come where?”
“Somewhere safe,” said Jamie. “While we sort this all out.”
“Somewhere safe,” repeated the man. “You promise?”
“I promise,” said Jamie, his gut twisting as he spoke. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw a policeman striding across the lawn towards him with wide eyes and a red face. “Excuse me for a moment,” he said, and turned towards the new arrival.
“You’re Blacklight, right?” said the policeman, stopping in front of him and drawing himself up to what Jamie assumed was his full height.
He nodded.
“Then maybe you can tell me what the hell went on here? Who shot that man?”
“My colleague did.”
“On whose bloody authority?” asked the policeman, his face darkening.
“Mine,” said Jamie. “The only authority she needed. Is he going to be all right?”
The policeman glanced over his shoulder to where paramedics were crouched round the bleeding man; his eyes were closed and he had stopped screaming, which was something.
“Apparently, he’ll live.”
“Good,” said Jamie. “Then you can ask him what happened. We’re leaving.”
“Hold on a bloody minute,” said the policeman. “You can’t just leave. I’ve got a house burned half to the ground and a man with a bullet in his belly and half a dozen men and women laid out in the middle of the road. What the hell do you expect me to do with all this?”
“Sort it out,” said Jamie. “Do your job.”
He left the red-faced policeman spluttering on the lawn and led the man and woman, who had listened to the exchange with clear confusion on their faces, towards the open rear door of the van and helped them inside. Ellison handed the box of cats to the man, a look of profound unhappiness on her face, then stepped back as Jamie swung the door shut and faced his squad mates.
“Well done,” he said. “That was an absolute nightmare, but we came through it in one piece, and so did they.” He nodded towards the van. “There’ll be a proper debrief after I write it up for the Director, but there’s something I need to discuss with you first.”
Qiang narrowed his eyes. “What is it?”
“I don’t know for sure why we’ve been told to bring vampires back to the Loop,” he said. “None of us do. But I think Qiang is right, and I’m not going to hand people over to be lab rats against their will. I won’t do it.”
“So what are you suggesting?” asked Ellison. She was frowning, but her eyes were clear, and her voice was steady.
“I’m going to ask them if they want to be cured,” said Jamie. “If they say yes, then great, we’ll take them back. But if they say no, I’m letting them go. I understand that would mean breaking the new SOP about twelve hours after it was changed, but I don’t care. Imprisoning innocent people isn’t what we do. If you don’t want any part of it, I’ll understand, and I’ll take full responsibility when we get back. But this is what’s happening.”
He looked at his squad mates. He dearly hoped they would agree, that they would back his decision, but he knew he couldn’t blame them if they didn’t; asking them to disobey a direct order on the basis of guesswork was hardly fair.
“I am with you,” said Qiang.
“Me too,” said Ellison. “Do it, Jamie.”
He smiled widely. “Thank you,” he said. He pulled the van door open again and looked in at the vampire couple. The woman was rocking their baby gently on her lap, and the man had one hand in the box, stroking the cat as she fed her kittens. They looked round at him, nervous expressions on their faces.
“I have a question for you,” said Jamie. “I need you to answer it honestly, OK?”
“OK,” said the woman.
The man nodded.
“Do you like being vampires?” said Jamie. “And by that I mean, if there was a way that you could go back to normal, is that what you would want, or are you happy as you are?”
The couple looked at each other.
“I know I speak for both of us,” said the woman, “when I say that there is nothing in the world we’d like more than to be normal again.”
“In which case,” said Jamie, “I have a feeling this might just be your lucky day.”
Matt looked down at the stretcher, his heart thumping in his chest.
Beside him were Paul Turner, Professor Karlsson and one of the doctors from the Loop’s infirmary; the four of them were standing silently inside one of the Lazarus Project’s sterile laboratories, wearing paper boiler suits that would be incinerated later. The lab was a long rectangle, with a row of stretchers standing in its centre. Machines and monitors stood either side of them, and the rear wall contained three large plastic windows, revealing small square rooms beyond.
The woman lying on one of the stretchers had already been sedated; her eyes were closed, her heartbeat showing as spikes on a running graph on one of the monitors, in perfect time with the slow beeps ringing out of the speakers. She was middle-aged, her hair dark, her skin pale; she looked peaceful, as though she was enjoying a well-deserved rest.
“I’m going to say this one more time,” said Matt, without taking his eyes off her. “Are we absolutely sure we should do this?”
“She signed the release,” said Turner. “We explained the risks. I say do it.”
“I agree,” said Karlsson.
Matt took a deep breath, and nodded. He walked across to a stainless-steel bench, opened the door of a small fridge sitting on its surface, and took out a plastic bag full of blue liquid with a label stuck to its side. What was printed on the label would have meant nothing to anyone outside the Lazarus Project; if the cure was cleared for release to the public, Matt was sure the tabloids and the TV news would give it a catchy name, but for now it was simply known as Sample Formula 5204R56J. Its blue colour was artificial, the result of a dye that was added to each active sample to provide an additional level of precaution; the rule of thumb inside the Lazarus Project was that anything blue should be handled with the utmost care.
Holding the bag gently in his gloved hand, Matt walked back across the lab and handed it to the doctor, who made a series of notes on his clipboard, attached the bag to an IV drip, and punctured the seal. The four men watched in silence as the blue liquid ran slowly down a plastic tube and disappeared through a needle into the woman’s forearm.
“Let’s move her,” said the doctor. “Quickly.”
Turner nodded. He took hold of the monitoring trolley as the doctor gripped the corners of the stretcher, and together they wheeled the woman and the machines connected to her towards the far end of the room. Matt walked ahead of them, as Professor Karlsson brought up the rear, and pressed the button on the wall beside the window on the left. It slid silently upwards; the Director and the doctor wheeled the woman beneath it and into the room. Turner pushed the trolley into the corner as the doctor clipped the stretcher to the rear wall of the room, locking it in place. The two men exited, and Matt pressed the button again, lowering the thick plastic window back into place. He joined his colleagues, shivering as though he had just got out of a cold shower.
“What will it mean if it doesn’t work?” asked Turner, his eyes fixed on the unconscious
woman.
“It might not mean anything,” said Karlsson. “The dose might need adjusting, or the formula itself. We’ll just have to wait and see.”
“How long?” asked Turner. “How long until—”
The woman on the stretcher opened her eyes and let out a scream of such deafening volume and pitch that Matt physically recoiled; he staggered backwards, his eyes wide with shock. Her eyes boiled with red-black fire, so intense that her features were hidden from view by the roaring glow. She twisted on the stretcher, her scream seeming to go on forever.
“What the hell?” shouted Turner. “What’s happening?”
“I don’t know,” said Karlsson, his voice low. “We have no model for an adult human reaction.”
“We have to stop it,” said Matt, raising his voice to make himself heard over the awful noise of the screaming.
“How?” asked Karlsson.
“She signed the release,” said Turner.
“I don’t care what she signed!” shouted Matt. “We have to stop it now!”
Turner took a half-step towards him. “I can’t let you go in there, Matt. Please don’t try it.”
He stared at the Director, his face full of unbearable, shameful heat. Turner looked back at him with an expression that Matt had never seen before; it was almost as if the Director was silently pleading with him not to make things worse.
He wants to stop this too, he realised. But he can’t. He knows he can’t.
The bloodcurdling scream finally died away, leaving the woman twisting silently on the stretcher.
Maybe it’s over, thought Matt, turning back to the window. Maybe that’s it.
The woman burst up off the stretcher, so fast that she was little more than a blur, and slammed into the ceiling with an impact that Matt felt through the soles of his boots. She hung suspended in the air, screeching and clawing and gibbering, hammered into the ceiling again, then rocketed towards them, thudding into the plastic window; it looked like some huge, invisible hand was hurling her back and forth across the room. She crashed into the rear wall, sending the stretcher and the trolley of machinery flying; sparks and shards of metal exploded into the air, but the woman was already out of range, soaring up towards the ceiling before curving impossibly in mid-air and hitting the plastic window face first. There was a loud snap as her nose broke; bright crimson blood squirted against the plastic and ran towards the floor. Her screeches reached an inhuman pitch, and all four men retreated, holding their hands over their ears as she was flung around the room, leaving trails of blood on the white walls.
“Oh God,” whispered Karlsson, beneath the deafening racket. “Oh Jesus. Oh God.”
Matt ran forward, his only thought that he had to stop this, had to do something, anything to help the woman. He was reaching for the button on the wall when Turner tackled him, wrapping his arms round his waist and driving him to the ground. His teeth came together on his tongue with an audible clunk and Matt tasted blood. He howled, partly in pain and partly from dreadful, guilty misery.
“No!” shouted Turner. “It’s not safe!”
“WE HAVE TO DO SOMETHING!” he screamed.
Matt was dragged to his feet. Arms wrapped round him from behind, pinning his own to his sides and holding him tightly in place.
“There’s nothing we can do,” said Turner, his voice low. “We just have to wait for it to end.”
Matt stared through the window with tears in his eyes. The woman was jerking back and forth, screeching and scratching at her skin, as though she was covered with bugs that only she could see. Her eyes were flaring crimson, and her fangs were sliding in and out, gleaming wetly under the fluorescent light. She spun into the rear wall, and Matt’s stomach lurched as her arm broke with a thick crunch; her elbow was bent back the wrong way and pointed ends of bone were sticking through the skin.
The woman jerked back into the middle of the room and hung in the air, her incoherent ranting and raving stopping as suddenly as if someone had flicked a switch. The veins stood out in her neck, and her back arched alarmingly; any further, and Matt was sure her spine would break. Her throat convulsed, as her limbs vibrated in a blur and her eyes blazed black. A howl rose from the woman’s mouth, a terrible cry that sounded like it was coming from the deepest depths of her soul. Then she went limp, and dropped to the ground like a stone.
“Open the door,” said the doctor. “Open it now, for God’s sake.”
Karlsson looked round, his eyes wide and staring, but didn’t move. Matt felt Turner’s grip on him loosen; he broke free and hammered the button beside the door. The doctor ran under the rising plastic window and slid to his knees beside the woman, his fingers pressed against her neck. For a long moment, there was silence in the wide laboratory, full of the terrible prospect of tragedy.
“She’s breathing,” said the doctor.
Matt let out a gasp of relief. Beside him, Karlsson put his hands on his knees and bent over. Matt was suddenly sure his boss was going to throw up; he was visibly swaying, and his skin had turned pale green. But Karlsson took a series of deep breaths and straightened unsteadily back up, his face a mask of shock. The Professor was a scientist, a theorist, and Matt doubted he had ever seen anything remotely as horrible as the events of the last five minutes.
“I need to get her back on the stretcher,” said the doctor. “Can one of you help me lift her?”
“Neither of you move,” said Turner. “Doctor, come out of there. Now.”
Matt turned to the Director, a deep frown on his face. Karlsson was still staring at the woman, seemingly paralysed by what he had seen.
“She needs to go to the infirmary,” said the doctor. “I need to set her arm immediately.”
“I understand that,” said Turner. “But I want to make sure this is over, and I’d like to have that window between her and us if it isn’t. So come out of there. That’s an order.”
The doctor stared at Turner, then got to his feet and walked out of the room. He pressed the button to lower the plastic barrier, and lined up beside his colleagues. Matt watched the woman’s chest rising and falling, and was surprised at the intensity of the relief that was pulsing through him. He had been sure he could handle the test, that the scientist in him would be able to rationalise it away as being for the greater good, but the reality had been almost too much to bear.
“Was that what you were expecting?” asked Turner.
Professor Karlsson shook his head. “No,” he said. “I don’t think anybody was expecting that.”
“So?” said Turner.
“So what?”
“Did it work?” asked the Director, turning to face the Professor.
“I have absolutely no idea,” said Karlsson. “Doctor?”
The doctor shrugged. “Her pulse is steady,” he said. “But if you’re asking me if she’s still a vampire, I won’t know until she wakes up or I shine a UV light on her.”
“Could you do that?” asked Turner.
The doctor narrowed his eyes. “I could,” he said. “But I really hope you’re not asking me to.”
Matt was watching the exchange when something moved in the corner of his eye. He looked back in time to see the woman open her eyes and roll her head to the side. She stared directly at him, her eyes wide and unfocused.
“Hey,” he said. “She’s awake. Look.”
Turner frowned. “Is that a good sign?” he asked.
“This was the first time this procedure was carried out on a human being, sir,” said the doctor, with a noticeable edge in his voice. “None of us knows what’s a good sign, or a bad sign, or anything in between. It doesn’t matter how many times you ask.”
Turner gave the doctor a brief, narrow-eyed stare, then stepped up to the window. “Can you hear me?” he asked, in a raised voice.
“Yes,” said the woman, her voice hoarse and slightly slurred. “I can hear you.”
“How do you feel?” asked the doctor.
The woman grimaced.
“My arm hurts.”
“I know,” said the doctor. “Try not to move. We’re going to fix that for you in a minute. How do you feel, apart from that?”
“I don’t know,” said the woman. “I don’t …”
“Take your time,” said the doctor.
The woman nodded. She lay on the floor, her body still, her breathing slow and deep, and closed her eyes. A long second later they flew open, and a smile of such staggering beauty broke across her face that it made Matt gasp out loud.
“It’s gone,” she said. “My God. I can’t feel it any more. It’s really gone.”
Marie Carpenter’s smile widened, and she burst into tears.
Jamie found himself distracted as he walked down the cellblock corridor, and as a result he didn’t realise his mother’s cell was empty as soon as he exited the airlock.
The reasons for his distraction were clear. For the entirety of his Blacklight career, the operational SOP had been to destroy vampires on sight, which meant that the cells on Level H were very rarely full. The fourth room on the right was occupied by Valentin, the last on the left by his mother, and that was usually all.
Now, the first room on the left contained a man lying asleep on a bed. Two cells down, a pair of middle-aged women were huddled together on plastic chairs, talking so quietly that even his supernatural hearing could barely make out their words. Halfway along the corridor on the right, a teenage boy stared petulantly at Jamie as he passed, his hands stuffed into the pockets of his jeans, his eyes full of faint red fire. And on the opposite side of the cellblock, three further cells along, he found the family he had rescued the night before.
The man was asleep on the bed, his body rolled towards the wall. The woman was sitting in a chair, gently rocking her daughter in her arms. She looked up as Jamie paused outside the cell’s UV barrier, smiled, and raised a finger to her lips in a message that was abundantly clear.
Don’t wake them up.
He smiled back, and nodded. He glanced round the rest of the cell and saw the box he had carried on the floor at the back; the cat’s black and white head peered over the cardboard lip, and Jamie was pleased to see that someone had found her a bowl of water and a plate of what looked like offcuts of ham.