by P W Hillard
"That angel impersonated a police officer and aided the escape of a suspect, who is still at large. I think any goodwill is spent on that. We have no evidence it was Lucille, and that alibi would rule anyone else out. We are police officers after all Curren. Evidence rules all. We drop the Lucille angle on our heavenly visitor unless we can prove otherwise. This really is a pile of junk isn't it?" Florence had stepped into the room, picking up another of the evidence bags before tossing it aside.
"We got this at least," said Mark. He lifted the sole bag he had placed onto the metal shelving they used to store evidence. Within it contained the dated Nokia. "There is a lot of potential leads from this alone. Plus, more than enough evidence to send them all down for a long time."
Florence took the bag from Mark's hand, turning it over to inspect the phone. "God, I had one of these when it came out. Feels like yesterday almost. How long has it been since these were out?"
"Twenty years Ma'am. I looked it up. Nineteen ninety-nine those came out. I can remember everyone having one at the time."
"Twenty years. God that makes me feel old," Florence laughed. "Makes sense though."
"How so?" asked Mark.
"No internet, no G.P.S, nothing aside from phone signal. I would hazard a guess this is a lot harder to track down than a modern smartphone," Florence said, still inspecting the phone.
"That's a good point. I hadn't thought of that," admitted Mark. It was easy to forget that before she was the stern taskmistress of the department, Florence had been one of its most successful detectives.
"That's why they pay me the big bucks. Well, they would if our department had any kind of reasonable budg- "Florence was cut off as the phone in her hands emitted a loud melodic beeping. She lifted it up, two-decade-old muscle memory flooding back. "It's a text message," she said.
"Another target?"
"No," Florence clarified. "It's for us."
Vlad stared at the plate before him. And orderly had delivered to his room, a plain white china disk on a blue plastic tray. Upon the plate was supposedly a beef curry, but the handful of meat chunks had a sauce so thick it was more of a jelly. The rice was the whitest Vlad had ever seen. A heavy sticky mess, flavourless and bland. When he had been made a vampire, Vlad has assumed his days of needing food were over. It had been a harsh truth to discover he still needed everything his human-self had. Adjusting his sleep schedule so that he was awake at night had been particularly difficult. He wondered how many fledgeling vampires had been lost to a mis-set alarm.
Vlad hated this place. More than he ever imagined he would. Something about its cold sterility rankled at him. Like it was designed to drain all energy and personality from a person. There was something else though, that he couldn't quite put his finger on. Maybe it was the smell? As a vampire, his senses were heightened far beyond that of a human, but he hadn't quite expected the smell here. It was familiar somehow? Yet not. It was confusing him slightly. Vlad found it weirdly unsettling.
There was a knock at his door, a short woman more nightgown than person was stood at the threshold. Her hair was wispy white curls like a cloud had been attached to her head. The smell had somehow grown worse. It was overpowering, wafting off the woman in waves. It smelt of sweat and death. She smiled.
"New here dear?" asked the woman. Something seemed off about her smile. It seemed slightly too wide, as though it didn't fit her face.
"Something like that," Vlad replied. He looked back down at his plate and tried to saw his way through a tough chunk beef. At least he had been told it as beef. "Can I help you at all?" he said tersely.
"I do hope so love," the woman continued. She took a deep breath in through her nose, her nostrils twitching. "Do you know Steve at all? Orderly that works here." Vlad looked up with a start, staring directly at the woman. Blood. That was what he could smell. Rancid congealed blood.
"Can't say I do," he lied.
"You…you smell like him. You're like him, aren't you? One of them…" she said, searching for the right words. She looked Vlad up and down, her eyes hungry, almost voracious. "I know you are. Do you have it? Do you have the…stuff?"
Vlad tried his best to look confused. "I don't know what you're talking about."
The old woman rocketed across the room, gripping Vlad by his shoulders. "Please, we need it. You don't understand," she was shouting, her voice hoarse. "I can't go back, not to what I was before. So frail, fragile. I didn't even know my own daughter. Please, please."
Vlad gripped the woman's hands. He lifted them from his shoulders, though they gave surprising resistance. Much more than Vlad had expected them too. "I said, I don't know what you're talking about."
"Everything ok here?" an orderly had appeared in the doorway. A tall burly gentleman with hairy arms like tree trunks. "Not causing any trouble are you Mildred?"
"I think she thinks I'm someone else," said Vlad quickly. "A little bit confused I think." The orderly nodded and took Mildred gently by the shoulders.
"Come on love, let's get you to the rec room. You can sit down and have a nice cup of tea." He led the woman away, leading her through the doorway. As he did, her glance didn't change, craning her neck around as she got further away. Her eyes fixated on Vlad.
"So, tell me, Terrance," said Sandra, leaning on the table in the interview room, "why? Why do any of this? You have a decent home, a family. Your wife is worried about you, did you know that? She reported you missing. Real handy for us trying to identify you, rather than the daft names you gave each other, what was yours?"
"Maximus," said Gemma, answering for him. "All very silly, I think. All that roman nonsense. I think maybe you did it to inflate your senses of worth. Big grand titles for big damn heroes."
The former leader of the maniple stared down at the table, his head dipped as though in shame. "My brother…" he whispered. "When we were kids, we lived in the lake district. We were out in the woods one day, climbing trees. He slipped, didn't hurt himself falling but snapped a big branch off this gnarled old tree. We laughed it off, at first. Then that thing came. It was like it stepped out of the bark. It was a nightmarish mass of bark and twigs, shaped like a person, horrid claws made of splintered wood. It grabbed him, its claws piercing his side, lifting him clear off the ground. It carried him, still screaming over to the tree and sort of, merged back into it, my brother sinking into the wood like it was quicksand. And then he was gone. No-one believed me of course. It wasn't until I was much older at university that I learnt what a hamadryad was. I went back, you know, to that tree. Burnt it to the ground." Terrance smiled to himself. "Watched the whole thing burn. I found fragments of bone afterwards, in the ash. More than there should have been for just my brother. That's what we do. We get vengeance, we save lives. In my years of doing this, I've long since learned it's us or them."
"That's nonsense. Every day supers live amongst us. They walk our streets, shop in our shops, teach our children. We, that is my partner, me, the whole of our department believe it can very much they are us. There is no distinction," said Sandra. She knew that was true. She had seen enough twisted things perpetrated by supposedly normal human beings to know that.
Terrance laughed, a booming reverberating belly laugh. "Really!? Really!? You saw the angel, saw its power, it's sheer otherworldly radiance and you think that is on the same level as us? Some of these things are so far beyond us that our best bet is to try and be beneath their notice."
"You clearly didn't manage that, though did you?" asked Gemma. "Let's move on. Tell us about the vampires."
Terrance leant back in his chair and shrugged his shoulders almost cockily. "What do you want to know?"
"As easy as that?" said Gemma.
"As easy as that. Look, you got us. Well most of us, I'm certain Drusilla made a clean getaway. Those vampires though, they still need to be stopped and I'm certainly in no position to do that. So, ask away." Terrance seemed sincere.
"Who are they, know any names?" asked Sandra.
"Humans," said Gemma.
"Pardon?" replied Terrance, his voice tinged with confusion.
"Humans. Some vamps can charm people to do whatever they want. Like a kind of hypnosis. Sounds like they must have been using charmed humans to run the drugs business," continued Gemma. Her partner nodded in agreement.
"Oh…" said Terrance. "We didn't know. If we had known, we would have tried. We really would. I'll give you the address. Maybe you can still help some of those people."
Sandra slid the notepad and pen she had set in front of her forwards towards Terrance. He quickly scribbled down an address. "Any idea how many vampires there are?" she asked.
"There are at least four, though three of them are definitely dead. I think Vlad is the last one, but I can't be sure."
"How did you find out about them?" Sandra continued.
"The same way as we always do," answered Terrance. "From the oracle."
The phone lay on Florence's desk, still sealed in its clear plastic evidence bag. Mark and Jess were sat on the opposite side of the desk, considering the message they had received.
"I don't like it," said Mark, having finally come to a conclusion. "It's too convenient."
Florence nodded and drummed her fingers on the desk. "I agree, but I also don't think we have much choice. We need to check this out."
"We are the oracle. We would like to meet. Send two officers to 13 Gatwick Road, Crawley. We look forward to meeting them," said Jess, reading the message from her notebook. "You really think this is the supposed oracle. Why would it invite us in like that?"
"It has to be a trap, right?" mused Mark. "Why else even send it?"
Florence continued to drum her fingers. "It's not a very smart trap if it is one. We can surround the area beforehand if we wanted too. No, I think this is a genuine desire to meet us."
Jess chewed the end of her pen for a moment, before removing it to speak. "But why? What can they possibly seek to gain? From what we've been able to gather this supposed oracle is a key part of the organisation. Maybe the key part if there is only the one. It's a big risk, doing something like this."
"Well then," said Florence standing up from her desk. I suggest you go an ask them then. Only real way to find out. I want you two to go meet our mysterious friend. Ideally find a way to shut down this oracle, or the entire legion network. I'm assuming there must be more cells than the one we know about."
"Not a problem Ma'am," came the reply from Mark as he took the hint and stood to his feet. "Before we go, we have anything in the pipeline for the one that got away?"
"Nothing yet, but her face is out there amongst the other departments. We've got her down as being wanted for murder and terrorism charges. Those are at least technically true. We'll find her. She's cut off from her support network now at least."
Linda sat, waist-deep in rubbish and filth. Around her were various bodies in states of slumber or drug-fuelled hazes. On the ground in front of her was every local London newspaper she could steal, a mad dash from newsagent to newsagent. This was it now. She couldn't go home; the police would be watching. She was cut off from the legion, not that they had proven to be any use in the end. No, all that she had left were her wits.
She had run until her head pounded, until her teeth seemed to ache. Linda had spent the night huddled beneath the entrance to a chain-bakery, moved on in the morning by disgruntled staff. Eventually, she had found this squat, a former office, its glass walls and foam partitions repurposed into makeshift rooms. The state of the building infuriated Linda. She had always tried to keep her own home spotless, especially once her son had died. She had scrubbed every surface of the house obsessively in the weeks after he passed. She brushed aside a pile of discarded cans and laid out one of the papers. She began to turn the pages, scanning for anything she might find useful.
The third paper in she grinned, her smile a dark twisted gurn. A small article, no more than a few page inches about a man arrested for stalking and attempting to stab a young woman. A tiny photograph of the man was attached. It was Commodus. He had clearly been caught by the police, but it meant that he wasn't at the warehouse, instead somewhere else on a mission. If he was on a mission, Linda thought, then he was after something in that town.
Chapter Twenty-Four
The area was dilapidated. A run-down grey husk of a building, faded signs and rusted shutters. Mark let out a sigh at the sight of it as he climbed out of the car. His head dropped slightly.
"Another warehouse?" he complained. "Why do they always pick these? I think if we went around, knocking down old warehouses like ninety-five per cent of our job would be done."
Jess slammed the car door on the driver's side shut. "We would be out of work then. I got a family to feed," she said, her cheeks raised in a smile. "Besides where else would you hideout? You've got your warehouses, your run-down house, beneath a bridge or in a caravan. These are the only real places to hide around here. It's not like in America where you can go south of the border and vanish into the desert. You run across a border here and you're just going on a lovely holiday to France." Jess adjusted her navy-blue windbreaker, her bright red ponytail burning brightly against it, like fire in the night's sky. She tossed her errant ponytail off her shoulder and slipped a small notebook from her pocket. "Ok, so this is the right address. Got the rest of the instructions here," she said, tapping her finger against the page. "You ready?"
"Lead the way," replied Mark, stretching his arm out before him.
The pair walked across the deserted carpark that lay before the building. Weeds had forced their way through the concrete. Small islands of plant life reclaiming the harsh stone. They walked slowly, checking doorways and half-broken signs for the one the text message had instructed them to find. After three false starts, they found it. It was an old plexiglass sign, the letters worn from age, the name now only visible from the indentation in the plastic. "Oracle Security Services" it read.
"Must be the place," said Mark, rapping his knuckle on the plastic. He rolled his eyes as he did so. "You think they chose this place on purpose or no?"
"I don't really think it matters?" Jess answered, her hand poised ready on the rusted door handle. She twisted her wrist and the handle turned. The door was unlocked. It creaked open slowly, splinters of wood drifting off its edge. The door was rotten, the wood twisted with age. The layers of paint began to crack as Jess pushed it, the swollen wood rubbing against the floor beyond.
The door pushed open, they could see the hallway beyond it. It was bare. Carpets long ago ripped up to reveal scuffed concrete. The walls at one time had been painted a dark green, but that had faded, its original colour only revealed by large squares. Posters and paintings were conspicuous in their absence. They stepped into the corridor, closing the door behind them, smothering the light from outside. Wordlessly they both switched on the torches they had each placed into their trouser pockets. The text had been very specific to bring them. Slowly and carefully, they stepped onwards into the darkness.
"How far down do you think it goes?" Mark said, leaning over the edge. "I wonder how long this has been here?"
"Can't be that long right? It seems like there was a legit business here at one point." Jess flashed her torch across the tunnel, taking in the scale of it. They were stood in the centre of the warehouse proper. A large hole in the ground took up the bulk of its space. It seemed like a tunnel into the core of the earth itself, a long rocky pathway downwards.
"I'm not a huge fan of this idea if I'm honest," admitted Mark. "Scrabbling around
underground seems like a really bad plan. We should get some specialists in."
"What specialists? We don't have any remember?" Jess picked up a stone and tossed it into the tunnel. It clattered as it bounced out of sight. "Not sure what we would put on that advert. Spelunkers wanted for delve into scary cave. Supernatural entities a strong possibility. I've seen The Descent, that doesn't end well." She laughed nervously.
Mark took a deep breath and held it for a moment. He released it in a long exhale. "Well," he said, as he lowered himself over the edge. "The quicker we get this over with the better." He dropped himself off the concrete edge down onto the rough dirt of the tunnel. "Come on then, down we go. God this is going on my annual self-evaluation."
The tunnel descended slowly downwards, turning frequently as it spiralled into the earth. Jess and Mark advanced in a stooped crouch, the tunnel being not quite large enough to stand in. The walls were smooth, as though some great worm had burrowed deep, carving out a perfect circle. Almost too perfect, the unnaturalness of the tunnel almost as unsettling as its existence. The descent was slow, Mark leading, his torch shining the way. Jess followed close behind, but periodically swivelling around to illuminate behind them, wary of anything sneaking up. They travelled for what seemed like forever, the darkness of the tunnel erasing all sense of time. Eventually, the tunnel began to level out, no longer delving deeper, instead leading onwards towards its destination.
They came to an abrupt stop after some distance, the small claustrophobic walls opening up into a large cavern. Its wall was hewn in the same smooth fashion as the tunnel, save for a lone pipe, a slow trickle of water dribbling from its severed metal. Mark and Jess swung their torches wildly, taking in the entirety of the cavern. As they scanned, something glistened in the light. Slowly, they illuminated its source, both dumbfounded at what they saw.