First Interview (Necromorphosis Book 1)

by CT Grey

  I somehow knew that was going to be harder than I first believed.

  Jaq was in a state, where the horrors in her mind weren’t going to go away with just a snap of the fingers. After what she’d seen, who could blame her? Alison was dead. Her love had ended, and I knew if we didn’t get out, Jaq would be next.

  But would that be so bad? I saw her backing her way to the broken window, where the wind was bringing in smoke from the streets. The world was dying. Was there any point for her to continue living? Without her lover? Her friends? Or a place to live? Was there anything left worth fighting for?

  *** Henrik ***

  “Those are very good questions,” I said before she went any further, and I could see the pain in her eyes; those small indications in her posture, as she looked down, almost beaten by her own story. “And in your shoes, I wouldn’t have known what to do; how to comfort her or anything like that. As you said, the world we knew had come to an end. In other words it’s theirs now, isn’t it?”

  “You mean it’s ours?” Jane suggested, as she picked up the cigarette case from the table and started fiddling with it as if it had some sort of meaning.

  “Well,” I said hesitantly, even though my mind was racing through all of the upstairs people I’d known who smoked, or who even had a Monet hanging on their wall. But couldn’t think who it was. “I wouldn’t go that far, Mrs McGriffin.”

  “Oh please,” she sighed. “Humour me.”

  “Very well,” I said. “I believe based on your testimony that the dreaded zombies are going to rule both day and the night, while your people disappear from the face of the earth before someone else gets to know there were any other fringe groups. Am I wrong?”

  She said nothing. Jane just stared cigarette case, while her fingers traced the fine engravings on its surface. But I wasn’t as sure about that as according to her story she’d started smoking when she’d crash-landed in the middle of the last intelligence analysis. And the Monet owner might have owned that piece, but it wouldn’t have ever created such a bond to her. Not in the time she’d spent in here with us. But then again I’d seen grieving people doing things they’d never dream of doing, otherwise.

  However, I couldn’t ignore the thought circling my mind that maybe I had struck gold, and by now, she was one of the last of her species. Things weren’t exactly looking massively in their favour … or ours, for that matter. No other species than the undead zombies were winning the war. And the more they expanded their numbers, the harder it was going to become for anyone to survive out there.

  The last of us were going to have really hard times ahead of us especially with the upcoming winter. We would have only a few chances to raise crops before people ran out of non-perishable items. And if the vampires were going to survive, they would probably have to do some unbelievable feats to overcome the odds. Maybe our God was going to give them a chance for redemption, but with every passing minute she spent in silence, the more I wished to be able to tell her she’d done the right thing by taking Jaq’s life and saving her from all that hardship.

  Maybe those same feeling were going in Sergeant Red’s mind as I noticed him getting more restless than ever before. It was almost as if his composite armour had suddenly become itchy as he kept adjusting every once and a while.

  “Sergeant,” I said.

  He looked at me. “Sir?”

  “Would you be so kind and take Mrs McGriffin back to her cell, please? And Sergeant, while you’re at it, will you also see she gets whatever she needs.”

  “Sir.” A smile spread across his face. “Consider it as done. And sir…”

  “Yes sergeant?”

  “Thank you sir.”

  But just as I was about to enter transfer codes, she lifted her eyes and said: “Henrik.”

  “Yes Jane,” I said. “What is it?”

  “Don’t you...?” she looked at me questioningly. “Don’t you want to know?”

  “No dear.” I shook my head. “Not right now. You have revealed more than I could have dreamed of hearing at this stage. So please, go and get some rest.”

  A tear rolled down her cheek. “Could I ask you … a favour?”

  “Go ahead,” I said. “I’ll grant it, if it’s doable.”

  “Could I see Jaq one last time?”

  I glanced at Sergeant Red, but instead of seeing him give me a sullen nod, I saw a flash of terror in his eyes. << Request Denied >> popped in front of my eyes. Jane asked: “Is there a problem?”

  I took a deep breath and said, “I’m afraid your request cannot be granted.”

  “I…” She frowned. “I don’t understand. What…” I wanted to shrug my shoulders while her frown turned to a scowl and she raised her voice. “What kind of harm is there in my saying a farewell to my old friend?”

  << Request Denied!!! >> popped up again, flashing in red, and this time there was no doubt that Harry’s Tank crew had really been busy in the background. And I couldn’t but wonder what the coroners had found that had made not only Harry, but also Sergeant Red, scared about granting this one last thing. But I’d no other choice than to wave my hand. “Sergeant, take her away. Now!”

  “This is not fair.” Jane jumped up and flipped the table. “You cannot do this. Not to me. I’ve done nothing wrong. Do you hear me? Nothing wrong! You—”

  I didn’t get to hear her last words as suddenly the world in front of my eyes pixelated. But before I realised I was in the middle of a telepresence transfer pixels gathered together to show a satisfying smile spreading across Addison’s face just as I understood I wasn’t sitting in normal place at the end of the table, but in one of the holo-drones that the Authorities shadow brokers had used before.

  And what was really interesting was that I was there alone with him. But before I managed to open my mouth and ask what was going on Harry stepped into the Tank.

  “HJ!” he shouted from the door as if he’d not seen me a while. “How are you?”

  I glanced at him and then turned my gaze back to Addison, who’d started loading his pipe. “I’m fine,” I said. “Thank you for asking. But I’m curious to know where you have been all this time.”

  “Of course you are.” Harry laughed. “And I’m really glad to see you alive, as who knows what might had happened, if you’d been in that room when she tore off your drone’s head.”

  “That’s a load of bollocks. You know—”

  “No.” Harry shook his finger and then waved his hand on the screen that showed Jane weeping on her knees next to my headless holo-drone. “You could have died and then I would have had the terrible job of telling Casey that her father had died in the line of duty. Think about it. Would you have liked her to hear that?”

  Oh I did think about it, very hard in fact as I saw a smug smirk spreading across Harry’s face before he winked an eye to Addison. “Was that the only reason you pulled me here?” I asked.

  “Yeah.” Harry laughed. “You can go now.”

  I rolled my eyes while Addison added his barking snorts to the choir of laughter.

  “Really?” I reached the keypad on my right and started entering the disconnect code. “Well, I’ll see you later then. And Harry…?”

  “Yes?”

  “I take it you’re going to tell your monkey to fuck off?”

  “No.” Harry wiped tears from his eyes. “Don’t do that.”

  “Do what?” My finger hovered over the enter key. “You mean this?”

  “YES.” Harry slammed a palm on the table with such force that anything that had been even remotely funny was gone in an instant. “Don’t! Don’t do that! Or I’ll make sure that’s the last action you will ever do.”

  “Seriously?” I looked at him questioningly over the brim of my glasses. “Have you lost your sense of humour? Can’t you take a joke, anymore?”

  Addison snorted, while Harry threw me a dirty look. “The real reason why Addi pulled you here...” he said. “… is her request. You were going to grant it.”
/>
  “Really?” I looked at him curiously. “What’s so wrong in that?”

  Harry rolled his eyes as if it was the most stupid question, and said, “Her friend.”

  “What about her?”

  “Well…” Harry paused for a few seconds. “It turns out she’s alive.”

  “If you can call that thing,” Addison added hastily, “alive.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Show him.” Harry gave a nod to Addison, who poked his screen and sent footage to the main screen to replace the visuals from my interview room. In it I saw impossibility become reality: Jaq, pacing up and down the cell floor shouting - what I imagined to be profanities - to whomever was listening.

  “How is that possible?”

  Harry winked at Addison as if he’d expected me to ask it, before he answered: “Well either our coroners don’t know what they are doing, or your guest hasn’t told us everything, and we just caught her in a major falsehood. She was lying.”

  “Well,” I said. “None of that surprise me, as there’s next to nothing we know about her species other than what the novelists have churned out over the centuries.”

  “Yeah, but still…” Harry leaned forward and looked into my eyes. “That girl was dead. Clinically speaking, she was no more. And if you’d like to check our records, you’d see she had no blood. Not even a drop to propel that necromorfic virus around her body to do its tricks.”

  I scratched my head as I tried to come up with some sort of logical answer to the puzzle, but in the end I’d no other choice but to admit defeat “I believe you, but we are talking about vampires here, are we not?”

  “Indeed we are.” Harry agreed. “But why is it that she didn’t wake up sooner?”

  “I don’t know.” I shrugged. “I’m not exactly a proven scientist, am I?”

  “No,” Harry said. “But at the moment you’re our resident vampire expert.”

  An expert. I shook my head as I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. He’d forced me out of my position, and now it sounded as if he was trying to heap the blame on my shoulders.

  “No Harry,” I said. “I’m not, but I know one who definitely is an expert on this subject.”

  “You mean Mrs McGriffin,” Addison suggested. “Don’t you?” I smiled as he asked the obvious question: “How can we trust her?”

  “Well,” I said. “That’s the thing, isn’t it?”

  “I don’t know.” Addison answered. “What do you reckon?”

  Touché. I should have seen that coming. Harry and Addison had always been two steps ahead of me in this game. And I didn’t have much choice but to admit that. Because I’d conducted the interview I’d become an ‘expert’ on these fringe group species. And even though I liked the idea of how it sounded, I wasn’t embracing the chance as boldly as they would have expected me to.

  “What did I tell you?” Addison nudged Harry. “He’s thinking.”

  “I can see he’s thinking,” Harry said. “But what’s the outcome?”

  “Well.” Addison lit up his pipe and puffed out a small blue cloud from the corner of his mouth. “I reckon he’s going only one way. So be prepared to do some serious negotiation and admit you might have been wrong.”

  “You seriously think he’s going to do that?”

  “Yeah.” Addison pointed the end of his pipe at me. “I’d wager a week rations on the chance that he’s going to put his daughter’s future on the table, aren’t you Mister Jackson?”

  “Go on Addison,” I said. “You seem to be reading my mind.”

  “See?” Addison said. “Boy’s smart and I could say I told you so, but you wouldn’t listen ‘cos you’re sitting in that throne as if you’re some kind of a king.” He leaned back for a few moments to suck on his pipe and wait for Harry to explode on his face, but when that didn’t happen, he continued: “I reckon he’s thinking you made a big mistake, when you forced his hand earlier, and that’s going to count for something, isn’t it? So I’d double my wager on the grounds that you’re going to lose big time, if you don’t yield to his demands.”

  “That’s fair,” Harry said. “And I’ll take you on that bet, and we’ll see what he’s up to.”

  I shifted my gaze from Addison, who was gesturing me to back his claim, while Harry was obviously trying to ride on our long friendship. But there was also the third option…

  “He’s still thinking.” Harry sighed. “Henrik.”

  “Yes sir,” I said calmly.

  “Sir.” Addison snorted. “He called you sir.”

  “HJ.” Harry waved his hand to silence Addison. “I’m sorry about what happened and I shouldn’t, in million years, have done what I did. But, at that point, I didn’t see any other choice. I needed to know. We…” he stretched his arm to include all that other seats in the room. “...needed to know if she was going to open up to any of us.”

  I looked down for a few seconds and then said, “Apology accepted, but I’m going to need to get all my privileges back, and addition to that, I want Casey moved to site A as soon as possible.”

  “Done,” Harry said without hesitation.

  “I’m not finished,” I said sharply. “Because I want you to trust me, and give me the chance to throw in a carrot, if Mrs McGriffin refuses to co-operate.”

  Harry turned to look Addison, and I could see that both of them weren’t exactly happy with the last of my terms. But it was Addison, who opened his mouth first: “What sort of carrot are we talking about here?”

  I wanted to say orange ones with green on the top, but I could see from the look on Harry’s face that he wouldn’t like the joke. So instead I said: “I would start by granting her her own quarters.”

  “And…” Harry gulped. “Then what?”

  “We’ll see what happens, won’t we?”

  “Are you seriously suggesting that we let lose a serial killer in our midst?”

  “Who says there aren’t a couple of them here already?”

  That did silence the room, even though the easiest answer would have been to admit it was possible. But I doubted neither Harry nor Addison were willing to openly acknowledge they might have a security breach in the organisation that had been handpicked from the very beginning.

  “The fact is,” I said, after a little while, “we cannot escape the possibility, no matter how much we would like to. Their kind has lived in absolute secrecy for millennia, if not longer. And who knows what kind of creatures might be among our other party members.”

  Harry looked stunned for a moment. Either, what I’d just said hit the spot, or he hadn’t even thought about the fact that fringe groups might have covered whole earth in the same way we’d colonised the continents. Then just to rub some salt in the wound I asked: “Why else would you have given order to move study subjects to site A?”

  “What study subjects?” Addison asked.

  “Ones, twos and threes,” I answered. “Believe it or not.”

  “We are not talking about that in here,” Harry said.

  “Whoa.” Addison lifted his hands. “What Henrik said is true?”

  “That’s not your concern,” Harry said. “But yes, we have moved some subjects to site A for safekeeping. And before you start to argue about the fine detail, it was a mutual decision from all parties.”

  “Well.” I saw a stunned look spreading across Addison’s face. “Are we going to include vampires in that group or not?”

  “Nope,” Harry said straightaway. “Level one has been locked down.”

  “Since when?” I frowned.

  Addison sighed deeply while Harry answered: “Since she woke up.”

  “So are you telling me that since my drone has been mutilated, I have to go down there and interview my subjects personally?”

  “No,” Harry said. “Besides, why would you want to do that?”

  “It’s not because I want to cut you guys off, but because I think it would be better to show some respect, and close the deal in the fle
sh, rather than using a holo-drone.”

  “I do get your point,” Harry said. “But you are not going there. And that’s final.”

  “Seriously?”

  Addison pursed his lips and nodded as Harry said, “They’ve authorised it.”

  I shook my head. “I don’t want to hear it.” The Authorities were wrong. They’d not even thought this through, as they’d abandoned a large number of their staff just because they’d got scared. But then again they were not scared enough of the zombie threat, or otherwise they wouldn’t have risked us in site A. Unless…. “They are going to sit comfortably in site B and leave us to deal with the trouble if it arises?”

  “Pretty much,” Harry said. “That was the deal.”

  “And we trust them to rule us from all the way over there, where they have no other problem other than how to forget us, while they start civilisation again.”

  “Yep,” Harry said. “But off the records you didn’t hear that from me.”

  “Wait a second.” I shook my head. “Are you saying…?”

  Addison turned to look at me, while he sucked his pipe mind-numbingly. What Harry just said suggested that they were wielding their control over us because we were the biggest suckers in the game. “No wonder you led me to—”

  “Shush,” Harry said. He pushed a hand in his pocket and pulled out a round device that had a red LED blinking on the top. “Be quiet about what happened,” he said quickly. “We don’t have very much time before the loop runs out.”

  “So?” I said.

  Harry nodded and said, “We all know what happened, and the reasons are pretty clear. They are going to execute both subjects. No question about that. They consider vampires in our community as a threat. But like you, I’m not willing to give in and destroy something that we could develop to an asset. So you’ve got my authorization to get out there and talk to her on a personal level. We need her eyes and ears out there to get a better idea of what’s happening.” Then the machine in his hand beeped loudly. “And in the meantime, agree to use Romeo’s drone.”