by Tim O'Rourke
“Oh, please,” I groaned, “Why don’t you take your head from out of your own arse and -”
“And what?” Potter said, grinding out his cigarette with the heel of his boot.
“And kiss me!” I snapped.
Potter almost seemed to lunge at me as he gripped my arms and yanked me close. Covering my mouth with his, we kissed each other and I just wanted to be smothered by him; to be part of him. Raking my fingers through his hair, Potter ran his fingertips down my spine, and I shivered with gooseflesh. I felt consumed by him, and it both thrilled and scared me at the same time, a cocktail of emotions that in some ways I hated, but in others, I passionately enjoyed. I was fearful that I wanted someone so much that in many ways I hated but who had another side to him that I couldn’t help but be drawn to, and that scared me. But to be in his arms, to feel his hands roaming the length of my body, to feel his lips pressed hard over mine, took away the memories of my captivity, the operations that I’d endured, the addiction that I had overcome, the realisation that my mother was lost to the Vampyrus, that Murphy had been murdered and Luke…
I pulled away, gently, but I pulled away all the same.
“What’s wrong?” Potter whispered, trying to keep me close to him.
“We shouldn’t be doing this right now, not while there is so much to do,” I said. “We should be planning on how we’re going to rescue Luke.”
Letting go of me, Potter looked into my eyes and said, “It always comes back to him, doesn’t it?”
“He’s our friend, Potter,” I said, looking away. “We can’t just leave him to rot in that prison.”
“Don’t you think I know that?” he said. “That’s why I’m going back for him.” After a short pause, he added, “And what happens when I bring him back?”
“What do you mean?”
“Is it going to be you and Luke again?” he asked, and he didn’t sound angry, just confused. “What about me? Us? What about what happened between us in the caves?”
“How could I forget?” I whispered, but still couldn’t look at him. “You have no idea how much that time we spent together beneath the mountains meant to me.”
“So it wasn’t just because you thought that you we’re going to die this time?”
“Huh?” I said, looking up at him and hating the hurt that I could see in his eyes.
“You said before that you only kissed me in the summerhouse because you thought you were going to die,” he reminded me, and I felt a stab of pain at the thought that I had actually said that to him.
“I didn’t mean that,” I confessed. “I kissed you that time because I wanted to and that’s the truth. I’ve only ever kissed you because I wanted to.”
“But do you really want me, Kiera, or is it Luke?” he asked me.
Looking at him with tears standing in my eyes, I whispered, “Don’t ask me that, Sean, that’s not fair.”
“Sean?” he whispered back. “Nobody ever calls me Sean, remember?”
By the time I’d looked up to give him the answer that I knew he had the right to know, the door to the cafeteria was swinging closed and he had gone.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
I crept from the cafeteria, and looking in both directions up the corridor, I could see Potter had gone. Half of me wanted to go and find him, to talk to him, but the other half of me thought that it would probably be best if I left him alone for a while. Potter was in a cranky mood, but wasn’t he always? Still, I made my way back to the cells. As soon as I’d turned onto the passageway, I heard Kayla sobbing in the distance. Her cries echoing off the walls, and my heart ached.
Reaching the cell, I went inside to find Isidor holding her in his arms. She had her head rested against his chest, and I hoped that she was okay with the idea of having a brother. In some way, I guessed that it was probably the best news that she had received; after all, he was the only family she had left.
I sat on the edge of the bed and took one of her hands in mine. Looking up at me with her tear-stained face, she said, “Isidor said that you met my dad at the facility.”
Nodding, I said, “Yes, I did.”
“Why did he stop coming to see me?” she asked.
“Perhaps he couldn’t bring himself to see you being treated like that, tested and operated on,” I tried to explain.
“But why did he do those tests?” Kayla asked, cuffing away a silver stream of snot that covered her upper lip. “Did he really help Phillips like Potter said?”
“Phillips and the other Vampyrus thought that your dad was helping them. But really, he was tricking them.”
“Tricking them? How?”
“Doctor Ravenwood and your dad had a plan,” I told her. “They wanted to find the cure so they could help future children that were born like us. But they knew that once they had it all figured out, Phillips and this faceless man would use it to breed a race of half-breeds just like us so they could use them to fight the humans when they invaded above ground. You see, Kayla, me, you, and Isidor are very special with amazing gifts, and if the Vampyrus who want to rule the Earth had a whole army at their disposal with our unique abilities then…well, I don’t even want to think about what might happen.”
“So how did my dad and Doctor Ravenwood trick them?” she asked me, her tears now drying on her cheeks.
“I was bitten on the leg by a wolf, his name is Nik,” I said. “The wound became infected, so your father corrupted the cure that he had designed with the infection. The real DNA code they wrote down. Ravenwood escaped from the facility with one half of the code and your father wrote the other half down in a book that he gave to me.”
“Where’s the book now?” Kayla asked me.
“I don’t have it,” I said. “I tore pages out of it to help me escape from the zoo, and what was left, Phillips took from me.”
“Then he could have half the code?” Isidor cut in.
“I’m not sure,” I told them both. “I mean, I tore a lot of pages from that book. For all I know, I could have destroyed the pages with the code on.”
“But Ravenwood will know the complete code, right?” Kayla asked me.
“I don’t know that either,” I confessed. “I haven’t a clue as to what this code looks like. It could be a few lines or pages and pages of numbers. I’m guessing that it wouldn’t be something you could easily remember or your dad and Ravenwood wouldn’t have written it down. But your father was a good man,” I said looking at them both. “He encouraged me to escape.”
“How?” Kayla asked.
“He read me passages from children’s books, where the characters were escaping. It was almost as if he was afraid that he was being watched and listened to – so he had to give me the idea of escaping in a very subtle way.”
“So we need to find Ravenwood.” Isidor said. “But where is he now?”
“He could be anywhere,” I said.
“He will be hiding out in this town somewhere,” a voice suddenly said, and I turned around to see Jack Seth and Eloisa looming in the cell doorway. I didn’t know how long they had been standing there and how much of our conversation they had overheard.
“What makes you say that?” Isidor asked him.
“This town has been sealed off by Phillips and his special police force. You know, the ones in the black boiler suits, who sprout fangs and wings and stuff,” Seth said.
“What do you mean they’ve sealed it off?” I asked him, and it hurt my neck to look up at him as he towered over us.
“The rest of the country believes that those attacks on the London Underground were committed by some rabid animals that were smuggled into the UK,” Seth explained. “The newspapers have reported that someone who was bitten down on the Tube Train managed to slip through the cordon back in London and get as far as here before they went half mad with the infection and started attacking the good people of Wasp Water. So to contain the virus, they have sealed off the town and destroyed all the animals in the zoo to stop the infectio
n spreading.”
“They can’t do that,” I said. “You can’t just shut down a whole town without anyone asking questions.”
“Oh, no?” Eloisa said. “Remember that outbreak of Foot-and-Mouth disease back in two-thousand-and-one and seven? Towns were sealed off all over the place and nobody asked any questions.”
“But that was different,” I said. “That was a genuine disease that was being spread by cattle.”
“Exactly my point,” Eloisa smiled. “You believed it just like everybody else.”
“What are you saying?” Isidor asked her.
“There was no outbreak of Foot-and-Mouth disease,” she smiled. “It was a series of towns that had…how can I say it? A little problem with vampires.”
“See, the government at the time couldn’t let the rest of the country know that,” Seth continued, “And it was rather fortunate at the time for the Vampyrus that one of their own was Minister for Agriculture and Farming and was invaluable at cleaning the mess up.”
“So you’re telling me that the government knows what’s really going on here?” I asked.
“No, of course not,” Eloisa said, as if I were some dumb first grader. God, I really disliked her. “The Prime Minister is far too concerned about saving Europe from collapsing beneath a pile of debt, he hasn’t got time to concern himself with a tiny little town like this. He leaves that up to others – the Vampyrus who have infiltrated the government. People will believe whatever they are told – just like you did back in two-thousand-and-one and two-thousand-and-seven. The rest of society is happy to wander along with their little lives as long as what’s happening in the sleepy town of Wasp Water doesn’t impact on them.”
“And boy, have they got a surprise coming their way,” Seth half-smiled, and his crazy-looking eyes almost seemed to spin in their hollow sockets. “Anyway, me and my good lady are off to bed,” he said. Then fixing his wild eyes on mine he said, “Perhaps you should get some rest too, Kiera, after all, we have to make a long journey together tomorrow.
Just the thought of spending any time on my own with him made my flesh crawl and I looked away.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
I left Isidor and Kayla alone in the cell, as I guessed that they would have plenty to talk about and would need some time to get to know one another. I didn’t feel tired – I’d spent enough time out of it over the last few days. So, picking my coat up from my cell floor I rummaged in my pocket and fished out my iPod. Sticking in the earphones, I switched it on and started to listen to Grenade by Bruno Mars. Dropping my coat onto my bed, I saw something bright and shiny fall onto the floor. Reaching down, I picked up the disc I had taken from the monastery. I turned it over in my hands and left the cell.
I made my way back past the cafeteria, pushing open doors on each side of the corridor. Some of the rooms still held sights that I’d rather not have been reminded of, so closing the doors I made my way further down the corridor. At the end, I found a door which had the words, Report Writing Room, written neatly across the front of it. I eased the door open. Relieved that there weren’t any corpses strewn about the place, I crept inside and closed the door behind me. With the lights out, I made my way across the room towards a long table that housed a number of computers. Sitting down in front of the first computer I came to, I switched it on. The screen blinked white in the darkness, then came to life. Two boxes appeared on the screen, one for my user name, the second for my password. Knowing what I.T. departments were like in the Force, I hoped that they hadn’t yet removed me from the database. I typed in my details and hit the return key. The screen went black, then lit-up with the Force logo and badge.
“Yes!” I whispered, taking the disc and placing it into the hard drive. I listened to the computer whir to life. Another box appeared on the screen which read ‘View Files’. Clicking onto the box, the screen revealed a series of files. There were hundreds, no thousands. I scanned my eyes over them, not knowing what exactly I was looking for, but hoping that one of them would grab my attention.
I dragged the cursor down the page, and about halfway down, I saw a file that had been named, ‘Facility 1’. Opening up the file the screen became awash with diagrams of what looked like big, glass pods. With Bruno Mars singing in my ears, I scrolled down the page, and was baffled by the series of technical diagrams of what looked like a hangar full of racks, on each one there was row upon row of these glass pods. I had no true idea of what they were, but they looked like a series of glass coffins. Then beneath the diagrams, there was a drawing, similar to something that an architect might draw of the monastery. Then, as I looked at the diagram more carefully, I could see that built into the foundations beneath the monastery was a chamber, which held a mass of these glass-like coffins I’d seen above. I clicked on the image and it increased in size. I continued to zoom in until I gasped at what I could now clearly see.
In each of the coffins lay what looked like a person. It was hard to tell because these were just computer images and not photographs, but each of the people inside the coffins, were featureless. As I sat and stared at the images, I remembered something that one of the monks had said when Potter had been pretending to freak-out for some of the red stuff.
“Brother, take him to the crypt, there is plenty of human flesh for him there,” the monk had said.
Were the images on the screen in front of me what he had been referring to? I wondered. Row upon row of humans, waiting to be fed upon?
At the bottom of the page, in bright red letters as if in warning, the following message had been written.
FACILITY CLOSED
I shut down the file and beneath this there was another which had been named ‘Facility 2’. Just like I had with the first, I clicked on it and the file opened. Again, I was faced with a series of diagrams of the same pods come glass coffins. But this was slightly different and had thick umbilical type cords coming from them. I scrolled down the page until I came across another technical drawing of a building. It looked like a large hangar, the type that you might find on an airfield. Again, the diagram had been drawn in such a way that you could see through it and all the hundreds and hundreds of pods that lined the walls. But there was something else. Beneath the building, there seemed to be a tunnel of some kind. It didn’t show or say where it led to.
I enlarged the image and zoomed in. There was an upper level to this facility and it had been divided into corridors with rooms leading from them. Some of the rooms had been named. There were examination rooms, laboratories, and an operating theatre. As I sat and stared at the picture, I wondered if this wasn’t the facility where Isidor, Kayla, and I had been kept before moving to the zoo. Scrolling to the bottom of the page, I came across a similar message to the one that I had seen before, but this was more of a warning. In bold, red letters it said:
FACILTY CLOSED
BIOHAZARD – NO ADMITTANCE!
Just like I had before, I closed down the file, and was just scanning over the others, curious as to what else I might find on the disc, when a shadow loomed over me, casting the screen in darkness.
Switching off my iPod, I gasped and said, “You nearly scared the hell out of me!”
Without looking at me, Potter leant over the table and switched the computer off.
“I was looking at something,” I said.
“Shhh!” he said, raising a finger to his lips. “There mustn’t be any light. Not even from the screen.”
“What are you talking about?” I whispered.
“Come with me,” he said, and walked towards the windows.
I followed him, and turning to look back at me, he said, “Keep your head down or they might see you.”
Crouching over, I made my way towards the window. Peering over the ledge, I looked out. The window gave a view of the street below, and just opposite I could see the supermarket that I had taken the tins of fruit from. The lights inside were now out. The shop looked in complete darkness, but as I looked into the gloom I coul
d see figures walking about inside amongst the isles and displays.
“Who are they?” I whispered, not taking my eyes off the view below.
“What’s left of the townsfolk,” Potter said. “Yet, they’re not people anymore, they’re vampires.”
I remembered all those dead people in the cars that cluttered the road leading out of town, the bodies in the store and supermarket. My fears had been right; they had woken as vampires, created by the Vampyrus.
“They’ve been coming out every night now, for as long as I’ve been hiding out here with Seth and Eloisa,” Potter whispered.
“What are they doing?” I said, as I watched a group walk into view from further down the street.
“They’re looking for food – blood,” Potter hushed. “I guess they’re thirsty.”
I continued to watch the vampires from the window as they almost seemed to roam the street in packs. Their faces were deathly white, their hair and clothes dishevelled. All of them bore the injuries that had been inflicted upon them by the Vampyrus and Lycanthrope. Some shuffled down the street, their heads resting against their shoulders. Others had limbs missing, and I watched one as he tripped over his own entrails that hung from his guts and fell flat on his face in the middle of the street. Then, something bizarre happened and I leapt back from the window. Seeing the vampire fall onto the road, the other vampires raced over to it and began to feed. With their arms swinging up and down, they ripped and tore the flesh from the fallen vampire. It screamed in pain, and I covered my ears with my hands in an attempt to block out its ear-splitting cries. Peeking over the lip of the window frame, I watched with sickening horror as the vampires in the store raced out onto the street at the smell of blood. Some of them were so eager to feed, that they simply crashed through the widows, sending a shower of glass across the pavement.