Darkest Night

by Will Hill

  Matt stared, his mind empty of everything but a rising incredulity. There was just simply no way that what Turner had just told him could be true. It was absolutely ridiculous, surely nothing more than yet another joke at his expense in a lifetime full of them, this one perhaps the cruellest of all. It was so mean, and vicious, and unfair, but when he opened his mouth to tell the Director so, what came out was something entirely different.

  “Kate got shot?” he asked, his voice a barely audible whisper. “Is she all right?”

  Turner shook his head. “No,” he said. “I’m afraid she’s not. The bullet cut her carotid artery. They’ve stabilised her, but her condition is critical.”

  Matt felt tears rise in his eyes. “Does her dad know?” he said. “Do Jamie and Larissa?”

  “Not yet,” said Turner. “I’m telling them shortly.”

  Matt nodded. He could barely breathe; his chest was locked tight with what he was distantly aware was the early stages of shock.

  “You shot my dad?”

  “Yes,” said Turner, and there was an audible tremor in his voice. “After he shot Kate, he turned the gun on himself, but I fired before he could pull the trigger again.”

  “Why?” Matt managed. “Why did he do these things? Why did he kill those vampires?”

  “Someone approached him,” said Turner. “We don’t know who it was, but they came to him and told him that vampires and humans were at war, and offered him a way to do something about it.”

  Matt was pretty sure he nodded, even though he had barely heard the Director’s words and his mind was somewhere else. He was wondering how it was possible to go to sleep in one world and wake up in another, a world of vigilantes and attempted murders and botched suicides with his dad at the heart of it all.

  “Can I see him?” he asked.

  Turner nodded. “Five minutes.”

  Tears sprang instantly into Matt’s eyes as he stepped into Cell D.

  The standard metal bed had been removed to make room for the hospital bed that was now in the centre of the small concrete room. His dad was lying on it, his wrist handcuffed to its frame, his left leg wrapped in layers of white bandages. A trolley of monitoring equipment stood next to the bed, from the top of which a video camera was pointing directly at the bed; it was presumably how the medical staff were monitoring him.

  His dad turned his head towards him as he walked slowly into the cell; he looked pale, and tired, and old. As Matt reached the side of the bed, the man lying on it began to cry.

  “I’m sorry,” said Greg, the words cracking between low sobs. “I’m so sorry, son, I’m so sorry for everything. I always screw everything up. Couldn’t even kill myself properly and spare you the shame of having me as your dad.”

  Matt stared. He had wondered, during the short walk down the cellblock, what he was going to feel when he saw his dad; now he was standing over him, it had become abundantly clear.

  It was raw, blinding fury.

  “Shut up,” he growled. “Shut up, just shut up. You don’t get to feel sorry for yourself, not after what you’ve done. You just can’t help yourself, can you? SSL was bad enough but this? What the hell am I supposed to think about all of this?”

  His dad stared up at him, but didn’t respond; his skin was ashen, and his eyes were wide with shock, but Matt was in no mood to let him off the hook.

  “Did Kate’s dad know that SSL was just a front for the Night Stalkers?” he asked. “Tell me the truth.”

  “No,” said Greg, his voice a hoarse croak. “Pete never knew anything.”

  “Why didn’t you tell him? Because you knew he wouldn’t have gone along with it? Because you knew he would have tried to stop you?”

  His dad grimaced, but nodded.

  “Is that why you tried to kill him?” asked Matt.

  “I wouldn’t have if he hadn’t followed us,” said Greg. “If he hadn’t—”

  “I don’t care,” he interrupted. “Did you try to kill him because he tried to stop you doing what you were doing?”

  Another almost imperceptible nod.

  “You disgust me,” said Matt, his voice hard and thick with anger. “I can barely even look at you. You tried to kill the only friend you’ve got, the one person who’s stood by you since Mum left and tried to help you, because some stupid crusade means more to you than a real person’s life. Kate is one of my best friends in the world, and you tried to kill her too. You tried to murder her. You pathetic, selfish bastard.”

  “I didn’t mean to hurt your friend,” whispered his dad. “I told her not to come any closer, I told her so many times, and the gun just went off. I didn’t mean it.”

  “I don’t believe you,” said Matt. “Not for a single second.”

  His dad didn’t respond. Deep in his eyes, Matt saw a flicker of the anger that had scared him so badly when he was young, but it was faint, crushed down by guilt and failure. He squeezed his eyes shut, as the adrenaline left his system and exhaustion flooded back in, then looked down at the bed.

  “It’s over, Dad,” he said. “You understand that, don’t you? There’s nothing I can do to help you this time. They’re going to lock you up and throw away the key, and you know what? I’m glad. You don’t deserve anything else.”

  “You’re right,” croaked Greg “About everything. I know you hate me, son, and I don’t blame you. I hate myself more than you ever could, and I know I let everyone down. I just wish there was something I could do to make amends.”

  “So do I,” said Matt. “But it’s too late for that. Far too late. Goodbye, Dad.”

  He walked out of the cell without so much as a backwards glance.

  Paul Turner walked through the main Lazarus Project laboratory and pressed his ID card against one of the doors in the rear wall, silently cursing the world’s apparent determination to make his life harder and more complicated.

  We lock the infirmary for PROMETHEUS and within three days we get a critically injured Operator, her recovering father, and a wanted criminal with two bullet holes in his leg, he thought. We’ve got wounded men and women all over the bloody place. We’re going to be stacking them in the corridors if this continues.

  He stepped through the door into a smaller room that had been built as a containment lab, a place where sterile experimentation could be carried out. It had been hurriedly converted into an individual infirmary, filled with state-of-the-art equipment from the main facility on Level C and permanently staffed by rotating members of the Loop’s medical team, all for the purposes of looking after the teenage girl lying unconscious on the bed in the centre of the room.

  The doctor currently on duty was sitting behind a desk in the corner, and looked up as the Director entered.

  “There have been no developments, sir,” she said. “I would have alerted you immediately.”

  “So the prognosis hasn’t changed?” he asked.

  “No, sir,” said the doctor. “She’s stable, but she lost a huge amount of blood and she’s extremely weak. We’ve harvested vampire plasma from the first round of PROMETHEUS Operators so we’ll turn her as soon as she’s strong enough, and hope for the best.”

  “You can’t do it now?” asked Turner.

  “I could,” said the doctor. “But I won’t. I don’t believe she’d survive the process, sir.”

  Turner grimaced. “Fine,” he said. “Give me a minute, please.”

  The doctor got up and left the room. When the door had closed behind her, Turner walked over and looked down at the bed.

  Kate Randall was lying on her back, her eyes closed, her skin ghostly pale. Wires ran from pads on her arms and chest to machines standing beside the bed, and a huge wad of bandages covered the left side of her neck, where Greg Browning’s bullet had sliced through it. Her pulse showed on a monitor, slow, rhythmic spikes of glowing green accompanied by low beeps.

  She’s alive, he told himself. It could have been worse. At least she’s alive.

  Rage burst through him li
ke wildfire, burning everything in its path. He was suddenly full of the desperate, fervent desire to go back to the detention level, open the door of Cell D, draw his Glock, and put a bullet through Greg Browning’s stupid, hateful head. It would be nothing less than he deserved, unlike the girl he had almost killed; Kate had done nothing to warrant lying unconscious on a hospital bed, her body too weak to wake up, her mind adrift in the darkness.

  Calm. Stay calm. STAY CALM.

  But he couldn’t.

  The sight of Kate collapsing to the ground with blood spurting from her neck had been the second worst thing he had ever seen, outdone only by the sight of the lifeless body of his son lying on the landing area outside the hangar. Greg Browning had raised his MP5 towards his own head as Kate fell, and Turner was grateful that his soldier’s instinct had taken over as the human part of him reeled in horror; he had shot Matt’s father twice in the leg, dropping him screaming to the ground, and had run to Kate as the Security Operators had gone to secure Browning. The rest had been a blur of blood and screams and stretchers and desperate, repeated demands for the teenage girl not to die, to not even dare think about dying.

  He stared down at her.

  Wake up! he shouted, silently. Wake up, Goddamnit!

  He squeezed his eyes shut for several seconds, then opened them.

  Nothing.

  I’m going to have to tell Jamie, he realised. And Matt and Larissa. And her father, her poor father. I don’t know if I can do it. This might be the end of him.

  Pull yourself together, ordered a voice in the back of his head; it was cold, and hard, the voice that had kept him alive for so many years. You’ll do what needs to be done. That’s all you can do.

  Turner nodded to himself, and looked down at the teenage girl in the bed.

  “Wake up,” he whispered. “Just wake up, OK? Do you hear me, Kate? You do not have permission to die.”

  He stared at her for a long moment, then headed back towards the door, pulling his radio from his belt as he walked.

  Matt walked slowly towards the canteen on Level G, his heart pounding with misery so great it was threatening to drag him under.

  He had made it out of the cellblock on the level below before the tears had come, great sobs that shook his body and hurt his chest. He had crouched beside the lift for a long time, his arms wrapped round his stomach, his head lowered, unable to do anything but cry: for Kate, for both their fathers, for himself. He could not even begin to process what his dad had done; it was so monstrous, so evil, that he simply could not reconcile it with the man who had raised him. Matt had always been scared of his dad, but he had never really, truly believed that he was a bad person. Unkind? Regularly. Cruel? At times.

  But not bad.

  What had eventually broken the paralysis of his grief had been the beeping of his console. He had fumbled it from his belt, woken up its screen, and read the message that had arrived on it.

  FROM: Carpenter, Lieutenant Jamie (NS303, 67-J)

  TO: Browning, Lieutenant Matthew (NS303, 83-C)

  Just heard about Kate. Breakfast in the canteen. Ten minutes. No excuses.

  Matt pushed open the canteen door and scanned the wide, bustling space for his friend, if that was even what Jamie still was. In the far corner of the room, a black-clad arm shot up into the air and waved at him; he acknowledged it with a nod of his head, then crossed to the food counters and filled a plate with two huge bacon rolls and a scoop of hash browns. He put the plate on a tray along with two large mugs of steaming coffee, and pushed his way through a crowd of Operators gathered round one of the large screens on the walls. Jamie was looking up at him from a table in the corner, a measured expression on his face.

  “Morning,” said Jamie. “You got my message?”

  Matt narrowed his eyes and sat down. “No,” he said. “Me being here at this particular moment is a complete coincidence.”

  Jamie blinked. “OK, I deserved that.”

  Matt sighed. “No,” he said. “You didn’t. I’m sorry.”

  For long moments, the two teenagers looked silently at each other.

  I don’t know, thought Matt. I don’t know if we can fix this. He stared at Jamie, grief and pain coursing through him, and came to a realisation.

  We have to try, though. Because otherwise what’s the point of any of this?

  “I betrayed you,” he said, his voice low. “I let you down, and I’m sorry.”

  Jamie grimaced. “Don’t, Matt,” he said. “It’s all right. You did what you had to do.”

  “That’s right,” he said. “But I could have told you why I was doing it. I should have told you.”

  “Maybe,” said Jamie. “Or maybe there are things going on right now that are more important than keeping secrets from your friends. I overreacted, in the briefing. I was hurt, and I felt like you used me, and I overreacted.”

  “So did I,” said Matt. “I felt like everyone was blaming me for a decision that the Director made. PROMETHEUS was a direct order, and I did protest when Major Turner gave it to me, whether you believe that or not. But I’m the only member of Lazarus who is also technically an Operator, so it was given to me.”

  “It’s the right thing to do,” said Jamie. “It really is. I don’t like it, because I know what the people in the infirmary are going through, but it makes sense. And if we beat Dracula because we turned our Operators then cured them afterwards, nobody’s going to remember that PROMETHEUS was controversial. Nobody’s going to care.”

  “As long as we beat him,” said Matt, his voice low.

  Jamie nodded.

  “Beat who?” asked a familiar voice.

  Matt looked round, and saw Larissa standing beside the table; she was watching them with a curious expression on her face.

  “Hey,” said Jamie. “I’m glad you came.”

  “Your message said no excuses,” said Larissa, and smiled. “What choice did I have? Morning, Matt.”

  “Morning,” he replied. “It’s good to see you. I’m sorry about yesterday.”

  Larissa’s smile faded. “It’s all right,” she said. “It was a bad moment.”

  Jamie frowned. “What happened yesterday?”

  “We found out that someone we knew had died,” said Larissa. “Danny Lawrence. He was NS9. I don’t think you knew him.”

  “I didn’t,” said Jamie. “Shit. I’m sorry to hear that.”

  “It’s all right,” said Larissa, and sat down. “I mean, it isn’t, at all, but thank you.”

  Matt took a sip of his coffee and looked at his two friends. There was no obvious animosity between them, but the atmosphere at the table was strange; it felt guarded, like they were three people getting to know each other and still deciding how much of themselves to reveal, rather than three friends who knew they could rely on each other.

  Not really a surprise, he thought. I don’t know how they bridge a gap that wide. Even though it seems so unimportant this morning.

  The grief that had momentarily receded as he talked to Jamie flooded back into him, sharp and raw.

  “So you heard about Kate?” he said.

  Jamie and Larissa nodded.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, hearing the tremor in his voice. “I’m really sorry.”

  Jamie frowned. “Hey,” he said. “You didn’t do this, Matt. None of this is your fault.”

  “Really?” said Matt. “Because it sort of feels like it.”

  “Jamie’s right,” said Larissa, firmly. “You’re not responsible for what your dad did.”

  Apart from being the reason he started hating vampires in the first place, he thought. Apart from making Mum leave him and starting him down the road that led to the Night Stalkers.

  “Right,” he said. “Sure.”

  “Do we know anything new?” asked Larissa. “Is she going to be all right?”

  “No change,” said Jamie. “I talked to the Director fifteen minutes ago. She’s stable, and they’re going to turn her as soon as they th
ink she’s strong enough, but she’s not there yet. There’s no timetable.”

  “They’re going to turn her?” asked Larissa, her eyes narrowing. “Why?”

  “If they can successfully turn her, enough blood will fix her injuries, no matter how bad they are,” said Matt. “But it’s an enormous strain on a person’s system.”

  Jamie nodded. “She lost a huge amount of blood,” he said. “They transfused her in the hangar, but if it hadn’t happened right outside the gates she would’ve died. That’s what Paul told me, anyway.”

  “So we just have to wait?” asked Larissa. “Until they think she’s strong enough to survive the turn?”

  Matt nodded, his stomach churning with grief and guilt. “That’s all we can do.”

  “She’s in the best place she could possibly be,” said Jamie. “She’ll be all right. I know she will. She has to be.”

  “I haven’t even seen her,” said Larissa. “I looked for her yesterday, after Major Turner told us about Danny, but I couldn’t find her.”

  “So she doesn’t even know you’re back?” asked Jamie.

  “I don’t know,” said Larissa. “I suppose someone else might have told her, but I think she would have sent me a message in that case.”

  “I would think so,” said Jamie. “She’d have been pleased to see you.”

  Silence settled over the table, full of a curious mixture of sympathy and unspoken recrimination.

  “I missed the whole Night Stalker thing,” said Larissa, eventually. “They were vigilantes killing vampires? Is that right?”

  “Basically, yes,” said Matt. “They used the charity helpline that Pete Randall and my dad founded to identify vampires who confessed to having killed people, then executed them.”

  “I met them,” said Jamie, his voice low. “Twice.”

  Matt frowned. “You never mentioned that.”

  Jamie shrugged. “I didn’t know it was important at the time,” he said.

  “What were they like?” asked Larissa.

  Jamie took a sip from a mug of tea. “I don’t know if I met the same people both times, and I don’t know whether any of them were Matt’s dad. But the first time we intercepted a 999 call and found a house with their wolf head painted on the door. We tracked a van, and found two of them about to kill a vampire. He was on his knees.”