by William Hill
Admiral Seward fell silent. He laced his fingers together and lowered his head. Jamie and Frankenstein stood in front of his desk, waiting. Eventually, he looked up at them. The anger on his face was plain to see, but when he spoke, his voice was level. Jamie suspected it was taking him a great deal of self-control.
“Very well,” he said. “You, both of you, may search for Marie Carpenter, under Department 19 jurisdiction. Mr. Carpenter, you will be temporarily seconded to the Department. You are not a Blacklight operator. Do I need to say that again?”
“No,” replied Jamie.
“Good. You may not prevail upon this organization for resources beyond the minimum, and the vampire does not leave this base. I will not have her destroyed, in case she decides to become more cooperative, but that is the absolute limit of my generosity on the matter. Is that clear?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Men?” asked Frankenstein.
“You may requisition a driver, you may apply for air transport as the circumstances require, and you may enlist two men at any one time. Only if they are not required for other duties, and only if they agree to assist you once in full possession of the facts. I will not order anyone to help you, for reasons I hope are obvious.”
“Thank you, sir,” said Jamie.
“All right,” said Seward. “Victor, take Mr. Carpenter to the Playground and put him through twenty-four hours of basic training.”
Jamie opened his mouth to protest, but Seward cut him off.
“Nonnegotiable. God knows it will probably do you little good, but it may help me sleep a little easier if the first vampire you come across pulls your throat out.”
“Thank you, sir,” said Frankenstein. He placed an arm around Jamie and turned him gently away from the desk. As they swung open the heavy metal door, Admiral Seward spoke again.
“Find her,” he said. “Your family has enough blood on its hands. It doesn’t need any more.”
Jamie turned back to face the director. “I will, sir,” he said, and the resolve in his own voice surprised him. “I will.”
15
THE SCHOOL OF HARD KNOCKS
Jamie Carpenter stared down at the blue mat beneath him. Blood was dripping in a steady stream from his torn bottom lip and pooling on the shiny fabric, mingling with the sweat that was streaming from his head in a soft, salty rain.
“Get up.”
The voice had kindness in it but absolutely no pity, so Jamie raised his head and forced himself up onto trembling legs. In front of him stood a man in a gray tracksuit who was almost as wide as he was tall, peering down at him with small eyes set into a head the size and shape of a bowling ball. Half-moons of sweat were visible under the man’s arms, but he was breathing easily and looking at Jamie in the playful way a lion looks at a wounded wildebeest.
The man lunged, covering the gap between them in a fraction of a second. Jamie was expecting it, but he was tired, so tired, and all he was able to do was throw his arms up in an exhausted attempt at self-defense. The man slammed his fists down on Jamie’s forearms, sending excruciating pain arrowing up Jamie’s limbs, reached forward with his big, scarred hands, twisted his head sharply to the left, and lunged toward Jamie’s neck.
The man stopped an inch away from the exposed skin of his throat. Jamie stared blankly up at the ceiling of the huge circular room he had spent the last eighteen hours in. He was aware of the man in the tracksuit releasing his head, stepping back and saying something, but it seemed to be happening a long way away.
A hand shot out, quick as a snake, and crashed into the side of his head. He snapped out of his daze and gripped the place he had been struck, from where a dull red pain was spreading rapidly.
“Are you listening now?” the man asked.
Jamie stared at him with a look of utter hatred and told him that he was.
“Good. Be glad you still can. Because if I were a vamp you’d be dead.” The man sighed. “Take a minute, then come through and get some breakfast,” he said, and walked across the room. When he reached one of the doors that lined the curved wall, he turned back to Jamie and spoke again. “You need to concentrate,” he said. “Think about your mother.”
Frankenstein had led him straight from Admiral Seward’s quarters to one of the nondescript metal elevators. The huge man had said nothing as they had walked, but Jamie didn’t think he was angry with him, not exactly. Even after Jamie had lunged for the director, he had still threatened to abandon his career with Department 19 if Seward had refused to permit a search for Jamie’s mother. And he was sure that even just making the threat had been a much bigger deal than Frankenstein had shown. Seward’s love of this place, his pride in its accomplishments and history, were clear for all to see, but Jamie believed that beneath the glacial gray-green surface of the monster’s face, the same feelings burned just as strongly. Jamie was glad that the admiral had not called Frankenstein’s bluff; he would not have wanted to be responsible for his guardian making good on his threat.
They had traveled down to Level G and through a series of corridors until they reached an office with a glass door. On it was stenciled PROFESSOR A. E. HARRIS, and Frankenstein had knocked loudly on the letters. The door had been opened by a graying man in his late forties. His hair was swept back from his temples in silver-streaked waves, and he wore a prodigious moustache, an unkempt hedge of gray and black above a dark suit, a blue shirt and a lemon-yellow tie; he looked like the slightly eccentric vice president of a brokerage house.
He nodded familiarly at Frankenstein, then looked Jamie up and down, mild disdain on his face. Jamie, whose temper was not yet wholly under control after the things Admiral Seward had said about his dad, was about to say something to the professor when Frankenstein spoke first.
“Admiral Seward-”
“Just spoke to me,” interrupted Professor Harris. “He told me I am to oversee forty-eight hours of training for this boy. I told him what I’ll tell you now; I fail to see what I am expected to do in such a short amount of time.”
“As much as you can,” Frankenstein replied sharply, and the professor twitched, ever so slightly.
He’s scared of him. Good. Let’s see if you call me boy again.
Professor Harris looked as though he wanted to say something, but he cast a quick look at Frankenstein and clearly thought better of it. Instead he sighed extravagantly, pushed his office door wide open, and motioned Jamie inside.
The office was small, and looked as if it had been transplanted from a university history department. Every available surface was covered in books, journals, and handwritten notebooks. A battered wooden desk stood in one corner, disappearing under sheaves of papers and teetering skyscrapers of books. A New History of the Salem Witch Trials was at the summit; beneath it were volumes about the Dark Ages, the Renaissance, World War I, and dozens of other topics.
“Don’t touch anything,” warned Professor Harris. “Just follow me.”
He walked carefully between the piles of books and papers, pushed open a door that Jamie hadn’t even noticed, and beckoned to him. Jamie followed the professor’s path, taking moderate care not to knock anything over, part of him hoping he would just to see the man’s reaction, and stepped through the door.
Beyond it lay a small classroom. Three rows of plastic and metal chairs stood in front of a pull-down white screen and a blond-wood lectern. A projector hung from the ceiling, and a low shelf at the rear of the room was covered in neat piles of notebooks, pencils, and pens. Professor Harris walked briskly to the front of the room and took a remote control from the top of the lectern.
“Get some paper and a pen and sit down,” he said, as he adjusted the screen. Jamie did as he was told while Harris walked back to the door. The professor flicked off the lights, plunging the classroom into darkness, then pointed the remote at the projector and clicked a button.
“Watch, concentrate, try to understand,” said Harris, then he stepped out of the room, slamming the door behin
d him. The screen flickered into life, and Jamie settled into one of the chairs.
An hour later the screen returned to white, and Jamie flopped back in his seat. He could not remember ever having felt so excited; his stomach was churning as if he had just ridden a roller coaster, his arms and spine were tingling, and his heart was pounding at what felt like double its normal rate.
The first film that had played had been called The Foundation and History of Department 19. It looked to Jamie like every dull Channel 4 documentary his mother had made him watch on Sunday evenings when he was growing up, made even worse by the fact that the voice narrating the film was clearly that of Professor Harris. So when the professor began the film by speaking about Dracula, Jamie found his concentration wandering.
The idea of Dracula was just too ingrained in his consciousness, too deeply linked to Christopher Lee and tuxedos and red-lined capes. And so, as Professor Harris retold the familiar story, he found himself doodling in one of the notebooks. But when the story shifted back to London and Harris began to describe something called the Lyceum Incident, Jamie glanced up at the screen and froze. Flickering on the wide canvas was a sepia photo from the turn of the century, a photo of a man he recognized instantly, even though he had never seen him before. When the professor’s voice confirmed that this was his great-grandfather, Henry Carpenter, he pushed the notebook aside and gave the screen his undivided attention.
For the next twenty minutes, he was rapt, and by the time the credits rolled on the film, it was abundantly clear to him why Admiral Seward spoke about Blacklight with such obvious pride. Jamie was astonished by the things that the men and women of Department 19 had done over the last hundred years, by their bravery and resourcefulness, by the horrors and dangers they had faced.
He listened, barely breathing, as Professor Harris described Quincey Harker’s mission into the village of Passchendaele, had felt like cheering when the courageous captain had returned from the front in 1918 and taken over as director of the Department. A lump had risen in his throat when Stephen Holmwood, perhaps the finest Blacklight operator of them all, was taken long before his time, and he had found his chest inadvertently swelling with pride every time one of his ancestors played a role in the event that was being described, most notably a mission his grandfather John had undertaken at the very end of 1928. The description of the mission was frustratingly light on detail, as the film attempted to cover more than a century of Blacklight history in just less than half an hour, but it appeared to have been significant, and Jamie resolved to ask Frankenstein if he knew anything about it.
The second film, again narrated in Professor Harris’s dry, slightly pompous tones, was called The History and Biology of the Vampire. Medical diagrams filled the screen as the professor theorized that the vampiric condition was passed from one person to another via saliva, usually in the act of biting, how the available evidence suggested that the condition accelerated the infected person’s metabolism and heart rate to incredible levels, stimulated a dormant area of the brain the professor referred to as the V gland, which caused the incredible strength and agility that most vampires demonstrated, and how a constant supply of fresh blood was required to maintain this elevated state. The film stated in blunt terms that vampires were neither dead, nor undead, nor demonic, but a form of mutation: They were, in the truest sense of the phrase, “supernatural.”
Jamie, remembering the hopeless, pitiless terror of falling, utterly lost, into Larissa’s crimson eyes, remembering the way Alexandru had thundered into the night sky after Frankenstein had confronted him, was not entirely convinced; he believed he had encountered evil, had been exposed to something that was far from human.
The screen cut to white as the second film reached its end, and Jamie heard the classroom door open. Professor Harris flicked on the lights, strode to the lectern at the front of the room, and looked impatiently at Jamie.
“Any questions?” he asked. “No? Good, then let’s get on. I’m sure Terry is itching to get his hands on you.”
For almost an hour the professor quizzed Jamie on what he had just been shown, on the strengths and weaknesses of vampires, on the various ways in which they might be killed. He laughed when Jamie slyly suggested garlic and holy water, and struggled to keep his temper when asked in all seriousness whether a crucifix would work. With the final question answered to the professor’s grudging satisfaction, Harris raised the screen, revealing a door that he pushed open. He instructed Jamie to follow the corridor and go through the door at the end.
Jamie walked into a huge circular room, lit from all sides by strips of fluorescent light. A series of long wooden benches split the room in half; the floor in front of him was covered by a large blue mat. At the other end of the room was a raised platform facing a curved screen. He was wondering what it was for when a voice spoke from behind him, and he turned.
The source of the voice was a squat, wide man, his arms and shoulders rippling with muscles beneath a gray tracksuit top. His head was closely shaven, and his face wore a calm, inquisitive expression.
“Mr. Carpenter?” he asked, and Jamie nodded. “My name is Terry. Welcome to the Playground.”
He crossed the space between them so quickly that Jamie had no time to prepare himself. The instructor grabbed his head and lunged his mouth toward the teenager’s neck. Jamie dangled in the man’s grip, taken completely by surprise, and when the pressure was released, he fell to the floor, hard.
“You’re dead,” said the man. “Or worse. Get up.”
And so it began.
Jamie adopted the stance that Terry showed him and tried to defend himself from the man’s attacks. The instructor wove in toward him, knees bent, hands moving gently from side to side, then he struck. Without making a sound, Terry danced inside Jamie’s defenses and slammed a fist into his stomach. Jamie doubled over, the air rushing out of him with a sound like a bursting balloon, and folded to the floor. Terry backed away, waited for him to catch his breath, then ordered him back to his feet. Jamie hauled himself upright, trembling, then was floored again by a clipped right cross to his chin, a punch that the instructor mercifully pulled at the last second. He spun on his heels and sank back to the floor, his eyes rolling up into his head. He heard Terry order him to get up again, and somehow managed to do so, his eyes struggling to focus, his limbs as heavy as lead. When Terry came for him the third time, he made no attempt whatsoever to resist, and the instructor placed a foot behind his legs and casually swept him over it.
And so it went, for a length of time that Jamie could not have begun to guess at. He was knocked down, hauled himself up, and was flattened again. Some time later, he was sent through one of the doors into a small dormitory and told to get some sleep. He lay down gratefully on the cool sheets of one of the beds and sank into deep, dreamless oblivion. Forty-five minutes later, Terry shook him awake, and it took the last of Jamie’s strength not to cry.
Down he went, again and again.
Blood was running freely from a cut above his eyebrow, his stomach was bruised black and blue, and he was permanently winded, his lungs screaming as they tried to drag enough oxygen in through his battered, swollen mouth.
They carried on this way through the night, Terry displaying not even the slightest hint of tiredness, and by the time they reached morning, Jamie was a zombie, operating on a combination of instinct and the most basic of motor functions. When Terry told him to come through and get some breakfast, he slumped to the floor and stared at the ceiling, his chest heaving, every section of his body in pain. Only one coherent thought pulsed in his mind, over and over, the one thought that kept him going.
Mom.
16
EVERY BOY’S DREAM
Jamie slowly pushed open the door that Terry had walked through. His ribs hurt and his arms were heavy. A loud hum of noise, voices mingled in conversation, greeted him as the door opened.
It was a cafeteria. Down one wall ran a long counter from behind which a
number of men and women were serving piled helpings of breakfast; yogurt, cereals, eggs, bacon, sausage, towers of brown, and white toast. The rest of the room was full of long plastic tables, around which sat groups of black-clad soldiers, doctors and scientists in white coats, and men in suits. A few of them looked up as he entered, but the stares and whispers he was expecting didn’t come. Instead the people turned back to their food, and Jamie joined the end of the line.
He piled a plate as full of eggs, bacon, and toast as was physically possible and stood self-consciously by a cart of empty trays, looking for Terry. A hand shot up in the far corner of the cafeteria, and Jamie headed gratefully toward it. He slid into a plastic seat opposite the instructor and dug hungrily into his breakfast. Terry watched him silently, chewing his way steadily through a bowl of oatmeal, and after a few minutes, he spoke.
“So you’re Julian Carpenter’s son? That must be tough.”
Jamie sighed around a piece of toast. “Looks like it,” he replied.
“Awful thing your dad did,” said Terry.
The teenager was tired, more tired than he had ever been in his life, and his temper was short. He slammed his cutlery down on the table, hard enough that a number of people at the surrounding tables jumped.
“So you have a problem with me as well?” he growled. “Is that what all that crap in there was about? Punishing me for what my dad did?”
Terry stared at him. “All that crap in there,” he replied coolly, “was about trying to keep you alive when they let you out of here. Consider yourself lucky we only have time for the basics. What your dad did, I don’t blame you for. I’ll judge you on your actions, not his.” The instructor took a sip from a cup of coffee. “I can’t promise you everyone here will see it the same way though. Just so you know.”