by William Hill
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.”
Jamie looked at the instructor for a long moment, then picked up his knife and fork, and carried on with his breakfast. Terry sat back silently in his chair and watched the boy eat.
Stepping back into the Playground, Jamie was unnerved to see that a dozen or so people now stood around the edges of the circular room, silently watching him. In the middle of the line was a man in his fifties, wearing a dark suit on which were pinned row after row of brightly colored medals.
“Who’s that?” whispered Jamie as he and Terry walked toward the benches in the middle of the room.
“That’s Major Harker,” replied Terry. “I would stay away from him if I were you.”
For an hour they worked through the standard Blacklight field equipment. Jamie pulled on one of the black suits, clipping the battle armor into place, and placing one of the helmets with the purple visors onto his head. He flicked the visor down and was astonished to see the room light up into a series of color patterns. The walls and floor were a pale blue that was almost white, the fluorescent lights were rectangles of bright red, and Terry was a stunning mix of every color in the spectrum, from deep red knots at his chest and head to light green at the ends of his limbs. He raised the visor and looked at the instructor.
“This is amazing,” he said. “Does it respond to heat?”
Terry nodded. “The helmet has a cryo-cooled infrared detector built into it. The visor shows heat variance. Vampires show up on it like roman candles, bright red. Useful when you’re in the field, believe me.”
They moved on to weapons, Terry wheeling out a steel table and taking Jamie through the contents. The push of a button raised a thick concrete wall out of the floor and lowered a series of targets from the ceiling.
Under Terry’s supervision, Jamie worked through the weapons on the table. He dry-fired the Glock 17 pistol that every operator carried, loaded and reloaded, then took a stance and fired three clips of bullets into the targets in front of the wall. He shouldered a Heckler & Koch MP5 and moved through the selector switch, firing single rounds, three shot bursts, and finally a thrilling, rattling magazine’s worth of full auto. The targets shredded under the impact of the bullets, and a fine dust of concrete floated in the air.
Jamie’s arms were numb from the recoil and the vibration of the guns, but he felt exhilarated. He had sent a good number of the rounds thudding into the heads and chests of the targets, and he had heard Terry grunt his approval. But he was most excited because the next item on the table was the metal tube he saw hanging from the belt of every Blacklight soldier, the smaller version of the huge weapon Frankenstein had fired at Alexandru.
Terry lifted the tube from the table and told Jamie to come and stand in front of him. He clipped a flat
rectangular gas tank to the teenager’s back and strapped a thick black belt around his waist. The tube sat in a plastic ring that hung from the right side of the belt; it felt heavy and dangerous.
“This is the T-18 pneumatic launcher,” said Terry, his voice solemn. “You can call it the T-Bone—everyone else does. It’s just about the most important thing you will ever own.”
“Why T-Bone?” asked Jamie.
“Because it’s like a stake—but bigger.”
Terry grinned at him, and Jamie grinned right back.
He lifted the T-Bone out of its holster. On the underside of the tube, a thick plastic rubber grip sat snugly in his hand, and his index finger rested lightly against a metal trigger. The weapon was heavy, and he braced the barrel with his left hand, casting a glance at Terry who nodded his approval.
“There’s a button on the top of the tank, behind your neck,” said Terry. “Turn it on. Gently.”
Jamie reached over his shoulder and flicked a metal switch. There was a brief rumble through his back and a low hissing noise. The instructor keyed a series of buttons on the remote control in his hand, and a thick spongy-looking target lowered in front of the concrete wall. It looked like a mattress with concentric circles printed on one side of it. Terry guided him gently to the opposite side of the room, directly in front of it.
“Widen your stance,” he said.
Jamie shuffled his feet an extra couple of inches apart, resisting the urge to look over his shoulder at the line of spectators. He could feel their eyes on him, and he would not give them the satisfaction of a nervous glance.
“Brace it against your shoulder.”
Jamie did so, feeling his arms settle into a comfortable position and the T-Bone lock into place against the ball of his shoulder.
“Aim.”
He looked down the barrel, lining up the two sights along the top of the weapon with the center of the target.
“When you’re ready, squeeze the trigger.”
Jamie waited. For a long moment, he stood motionless, letting his heart rate settle into long, shallow beats, focusing entirely on the target in his sights. He took a deep breath, held it, and then pulled the trigger smoothly toward him.
There was a deafening noise, and the T-Bone jerked hard against his shoulder. The metal stake exploded out of the end of the tube, so fast it was only a blur, and thumped into the middle of the target with a flat bang. There was a millisecond of calm, then the thin wire that had trailed the stake across the room began to whir back into the barrel. There was a moment of resistance as the wire pulled taut, but Jamie braced himself and the stake sucked out of the target, whirring back across the room and thudding into the tube, rocking Jamie back on his heels. He let the weapon drop to his side, and breathed out heavily, looking across the room at the hole the stake had made in the target.
The hole was perfectly round and sat dead center in the middle of the target. Terry walked past him, clapping him lightly on the shoulder and leading him across the room. Behind him there was a murmur from the spectators. Up close the hole was ragged around the edges, but there was no doubt about the accuracy of the shot. It had completely obliterated the dot in the middle of the target. Terry pushed his hand into the hole and whistled softly.
“That’s a hell of a shot,” he said. “A hell of a shot.”
Jamie flushed with pride. He wanted to explain to Terry how easy, how natural it had felt, standing there with the T-Bone against his shoulder, the only things in his mind the target in front of him and the weapon in his hands. He settled for saying “Thank you” in a low voice.
The instructor and the teenager walked back across the room and stopped next to the steel table. Still lying on the metal surface was a small cylinder that looked like a torch with a handle and a trigger, two rows of black spheres, and a large gun that looked to Jamie a lot like the grenade launchers he had used in a dozen computer games. He reached for the table, but Terry stopped him.
“You don’t need to worry about them for now,” he said. Then the instructor lunged for him, and Jamie, caught totally off guard, failed to even get his hands up in front of him. The flat of one of Terry’s palms crunched into his solar plexus and drove him back to the mat, gasping for breath.
“Get up,” said Terry.
Jamie defended himself better than he had during the night, deflecting some of the instructor’s blows and reading his feints, but he still found himself on the ground again and again. The cut on his forehead reopened almost at once, and Terry exploited it, dancing around at the edge of Jamie’s vision, where sticky blood ran into the corner of his left eye. A roundhouse kick appeared from nowhere, and he went down hard. As he pulled himself to his feet, he looked over at the spectators and saw Major Harker smiling. He redoubled his efforts and blocked punches and kicks, twisting his body out of the instructor’s range and launching several counterattacks of his own, clumsy, easily telegraphed blows for the most part, but a couple of punches slipped through Terry’s guard, and one landed flush on the end of the instructor’s nose, snapping his head back and sending a thin trickle of blood running down his upper lip. Terry grinned, smearing crimson across his teeth, and came toward Jamie again.
Jamie stood in the shower, watching tendrils of dark red diffuse in the water that was running down the drain. Every inch of him ached, and his torso was a rapidly darkening rainbow of purple and yellow bruises. He gently washed the blood and sweat from himself, then rested his head against the hard tiles beneath the showerhead and closed his eyes.
His mind was racing. He had been trying to slow it, to shift himself into neutral; Terry had warned him as he dismissed him that he was not done yet, and he was trying to squeeze every possible second of rest out of the break. But his mind was not obeying.
How did I get here? How did I get here? How did I get here?
He was trying not to think about his mother, or his father, or the life it was now becoming clear to him that he had left behind, but he couldn’t help it. The difference between the world of skipping school, avoiding bullies, the gray streets of the estate, and fights with his mom, and the world in which he now found himself was almost incomprehensible. He had no friends to speak of, not anymore, but if he had, they would not have believed him even for a minute if he had told them the events of the last three days. And he had no one to tell him that his mom was going to be OK, that he was going to find her and bring her home.
He climbed out of the shower and dressed himself, wincing in pain. When he pushed open the door that led back into the Playground, he gasped; the large circular room was now crowded with people, lining every inch of the curved walls. There were scores of soldiers in their black uniforms, doctors, scientists, and several older, extremely serious-looking men with at least as many, if not more, medals than Major Harker was wearing. Terry was standing at the end of the room next to the raised platform, his arms folded, his eyes fixed on Jamie, and Jamie walked toward him, trying not to look at anyone apart from the instructor.
He stopped next to Terry, who mouthed, “Don’t be scared” at him as he approached. The instructor helped him into a set of the black armor, then presented him with a series of items; weird plastic versions of the Glock and the MP5 he had fired earlier, a plastic stake with a rubber handle, and a plastic T-Bone that was just an empty tube with a handle beneath it. At Terry’s urging, he stepped up onto the platform and walked out into the middle. It was a large circle of black rubber, at least fifteen feet in diameter, which seemed to be a treadmill that moved in every direction; Jamie took a step forward, and the rubber moved underneath him, returning him to the middle of the circle. He took two quick sidesteps to the right, and the surface moved faster, keeping him again in the middle. He turned back and looked at Terry, who motioned him down toward him. Jamie crouched next to the instructor, who handed him a helmet with a matte-black visor and then spoke to him in a low voice.
“This simulation is extremely advanced,” Terry said. “It’s the
final part of a training program that normally lasts nine months. No one has ever attempted it with as little training as you’ve had—in eleven years, no one has ever finished it on their first run—so no one is expecting anything. So just try not to panic and do your best, all right?”
Jamie nodded, and as he stood up and put the helmet on, he realized he wasn’t scared. He wasn’t even nervous; he was excited. The helmet shut out the Playground entirely; he could no longer see the platform or the screen, or hear the excited whispering of the watching crowd. Then Terry’s voice spoke directly into his ear, telling him that they were starting the simulation, and a second later, he was standing in the cavernous hallway of a stately home. He looked around him, then moved his gloved hands around in front of his face, and voiced a silent “Wow” as they moved in front of his eyes in photo-real high definition, the smallest detail intact. He took a step forward, and he moved a step into the hallway. He turned in a quick circle, and the room rotated smoothly around him. Reaching down, he pulled the T-Bone from his belt and looked at it. The weapon he could see in his hands was identical to the one he had fired earlier; he could see the metal projectile nestled inside the barrel. He placed it back in its holster and drew the Glock from his hip; it also appeared to be fully functional inside the simulation, the barrel clear, the clip full.
“OK, whenever you’re ready,” said Terry, his voice loud in Jamie’s ear.
“What am I supposed to do?” he asked.
“Just explore the house. It’ll all become clear.”
Jamie took a deep breath and started forward. He crossed the grand hallway quickly, heading toward a wide staircase that took up most of one end of the room. As he approached the first step, he heard a snarl above him and jerked his head up. A vampire in an elegant dinner suit had appeared at the top of the staircase and crouched, as though readying itself to leap down on him.