Henry Seward ducked under the outstretched arms of a vampire woman, and plunged his stake into her chest. He was running again before she exploded, hauling the small panel from his belt and checking the timer, willing the numbers to be low.
0:58…
0:57…
0:56…
Come on,
he screamed to himself.
Come on goddamn you. Another minute, just one more tiny little minute.
Then something barrelled into him from the side, below the waist, and he heard his leg break as he was driven to the ground. The pain was enormous, but bigger, and sharper, was the despair that flooded through him as he thudded to the cool tarmac. He gritted his teeth, and rolled on to his back. Anderson was standing over him, his child’s face alive with excitement. He reached down and picked Seward up by the collar of his uniform, and waved him enthusiastically back and forth, like a child who has won a prize at a funfair.
“Got him!” he bellowed. “Valeri! I’ve got him!”
Shaun Turner looked over from his vantage point at the edge of the runway, and saw the swollen, misshapen vampire holding the Director of Department 19 aloft like a rag doll. Without hesitating,
he leapt to his feet and sprinted back into the battle. Kate was on her feet less than a second later and sprinting after him, calling his name.
Valeri and Valentin looked around at the sound of Anderson’s voice, then returned their attention to each other. Valentin saw his brother’s eyes flick towards the captive Seward, and he circled so that he was between his brother and the stricken Director.
“Forget it, brother,” he said.
Valeri shifted his gaze to Anderson, then back to his brother, and then to the ground beneath his feet. He was standing where the tarmac of the runway ended, and the grass began. A light suddenly came on inside Valeri’s head; he turned away from his brother to where Larissa lay on the grass.
Valentin realised what his brother was going to do a matter of milliseconds too late to prevent it. He screamed a warning at Larissa as he leapt forward, but he was too late. Valeri raced across the grass, covering the gap between himself and Larissa in less than a heartbeat. Without slowing, he reached down with one ancient hand, and pulled her throat out with one quick flick of his wrist.
Larissa felt no pain, just a terrible sensation of being pulled
open
, and then she slid on to her back as blood gushed out into the air above her. Less than a second later Valentin was kneeling at her side, his crimson eyes burning in the darkness. He glanced up and saw Valeri sprinting towards Anderson and Admiral Seward, and then looked down at Larissa. Blood was spraying out of her neck in staggering quantities, and she was already turning pale. He looked again at the fleeing Valeri, felt the rage burning in his chest at the mere thought of letting his brother escape, then made his decision.
Valentin reached into Larissa’s throat with his long, elegant fingers, pinched shut her carotid artery and her jugular vein, and then thrust his other forearm into her mouth. Larissa bit down on pure reflex, and Valentin gave out a gasp that was as full of pleasure as it was of pain. His blood began to run into the girl’s mouth, and he felt the delicate tissue in her neck begin to grow back. He craned his head around as Larissa drank from him, and watched his brother arrive at Anderson’s side.
Valeri screeched to a halt beside Anderson, lifting Henry Seward out of his grip. The Director of Department 19 kicked with his one good leg, and beat at the vampire’s arm, but it was futile.
“I got him,” said Anderson, happily. “I did. Me.”
“Shut up,” snarled Valeri, looking around at the raging battle. “Shut up and let me think.”
The fighting ranging across the landing area was furious, and brutal. There were no elegantly choreographed duels, or miraculous rescues or escapes; the men and women of Blacklight were fighting for their lives, and were fighting hard. Valeri surveyed the scene, saw his brother crouched next to the bleeding vampire girl and made the only decision he could make.
“Home,” he barked at Anderson. “Tell my master I’m bringing him his prize.”
Anderson didn’t reply; instead, he stepped into the air, and disappeared over the thick forest to the east.
Valeri took a last look around at the scene, a final check as to whether it was possible to achieve both the objectives his master had given him. But he saw no way to do so; his men would kill the rest of the Blacklight soldiers, but Valentin was stronger than he remembered, and faster, and the tiny, frightening thought occurred
to him at the very back of his mind that it was possible that he could no longer defeat his younger brother. And Seward was the priority, he reasoned; he was about to step into the air, to leave the remnants of his army to fend for themselves, when he sensed movement behind him.
Shaun Turner drew his stake as he closed on Valeri Rusmanov. Admiral Seward was dangling from the second oldest vampire in the world’s grasp, and the monster himself appeared to be deep in thought. Shaun focused on the spot on Valeri’s wide back, just to the left of the spinal column, where he would plant his stake less than a second from now.
Then Valeri moved.
Shaun tried to stop, but his momentum carried him forward, directly into the arm that Valeri swung with all the power of a tornado. The vampire’s closed fist caught Shaun on the side of his jaw, lifting him off the ground. Kate, who was less than two metres behind her boyfriend, yelling for him to stop, heard the terrible crunch as Shaun’s neck broke under the impact of Valeri’s haymaker swing. He fell to the ground completely limp, his legs and arms tangled over themselves. She slid to the ground beside him, and heard someone screaming; several seconds passed before she realised it was her.
Standing over her, Valeri grunted with satisfaction, then floated easily into the air.
Paul Turner heard Kate scream, and began to run. The pitch of the scream, the absolute horror contained in the long syllable, told him something was wrong, more wrong than everything else that was happening around him. He saw Valeri rising gently into the air, saw Kate on her knees on the tarmac, and saw—
An awful sensation of cold spilled through his body.
He knew he was still running, because he could hear the sound of his feet hitting the tarmac, but the sound seemed to be coming from somewhere else; it was low, and muffled, and unreal.
His mind yawed wildly as the world began to grey at the corners. Then he was stationary, without any memory of having slowed or stopped, and he was looking down at the broken body of his son.
Cal Holmwood saw Valeri rise into the air, and ran towards the fleeing monster. He saw one Operator, he thought it might be Kate Randall, kneeling beside another, but he ignored them. Admiral Seward hung helplessly in Valeri’s huge, ancient hand, and that was all Cal could think about.
He drew his T-Bone as he sprinted across the tarmac, noticing that Paul Turner was running in the same direction as he was.
Of course he is
, he thought, full of admiration for his colleague.
No surprise there.
Cal fired his T-Bone as he ran, and watched the stake whistle past Valeri’s torso. Holmwood engaged the winch immediately, winding the stake back towards the barrel without breaking his stride. He looked over at Turner as he approached, and saw that the Security Officer was standing still, almost directly beneath the rising Valeri.
“Shoot!” he bellowed, as he ran. “For God’s sake, Paul, shoot!”
Henry Seward watched the ground retreating below him, and scrabbled for the metal panel on his belt. His fingers slipped across its smooth surface, then caught one of the corners, and pulled it free. He twisted it in his hand, looked down at the small screen, and felt a surge of savage elation. The screen contained three words.
FIRE?
YES/NO
He felt a grim smile on his face as he pressed his thumb against the word
YES
.
Nothing happened.
He raised the panel again, and felt his heart sink as he read the words on the screen.
RANGE EXCEEDED
Beneath him, he saw Paul Turner standing motionless, his eyes cast towards the ground, and saw Cal Holmwood arriving beneath him at a flat sprint. He flicked his wrist, and sent the metal panel spinning down towards him.
Cal Holmwood felt the thud of the stake returning to the barrel of his T-Bone, and was about to raise it to his shoulder again when something landed at his feet with a metallic
thunk;
he looked down, and saw a small square of metal lying on the tarmac in front of him. His gaze flicked up to the shrinking figure of Admiral Seward, who was rising steadily in Valeri’s grip. They were almost out of reach; if he was going to shoot, it had to be now. But the square of metal on the ground could only have come from Seward, and if he had had the presence of mind to throw it down as he was carried to his likely death, then Holmwood reasoned it must be pretty important.
Swearing heartily, he threw his T-Bone to the ground, darted forward and picked up the metal rectangle. He turned it over, and saw three words of red text glowing on the black screen.
Fire? Fire what?
He pressed his thumb against the
YES
, and the screen changed. A small series of dots lit up and then winked out, over and over again. Cal Holmwood stared at them, wondering what they meant, then suddenly realised that the ground beneath him was rumbling.
Around the perimeter of the Loop, just inside the interior fence, along the length of the long runway, and at wide intervals across the grounds between, circular sections of the ground were opening. Grass, tarmac, concrete; four-metre-wide circles lowered into the ground, then slid aside, revealing dark holes in the surface of the earth. Operators and vampires scattered out of the way of the holes that opened on the landing area where the battle was being fought, and ceased fighting; humans and vampires alike stared, and wondered what was happening.
An almighty thud rattled the entire base, as the lids that had covered the hidden holes reached the end of their tracks, and stopped. Then the rumbling began anew, and shapes began to rise from the dark openings.
Huge circular balls of glass emerged from the holes, glittering in the light spilling from the open hangar doors and the red laser array beyond the fence. The balls were at least three metres in diameter, and resting on thick metal poles. The glass had a purple tint, and Cal Holmwood, with a flash of clarity, realised what they were.
Oh my God,
he had time to think.
“Visors!” he bellowed over the Operational channel. “Everybody, right now!”
He reached up and pulled his own down over his face, as a high-pitched whine suddenly stabbed into his ears. He felt the hair on his body begin to stand up, even through the material of his
uniform; it was as though the air itself was suddenly full of electricity. Around him, Operators retreated from the vampires they were engaging, pulling their visors down over their faces. The whine became a scream, so loud and high that Cal thought his eardrums must be about to burst. Then his visor suddenly turned jet black, completely shutting out the world beyond it.
As a result, he didn’t see the world explode into blinding, brilliant ultraviolet light.
At a distance of 22,245 miles above the surface of the earth, Skynet 6-1 cruised in geostationary orbit.
Its vast solar panel wings, the same width as those of a commercial airliner, reflected the sun’s rays in a glittering kaleidoscope of colours, twinkling and shimmering in the freezing air of the troposphere. They hummed as they gathered solar energy and converted it into the electricity that would fuel the satellite for the duration of its twenty-year lifespan.
Skynet 6-1 was the first of its class, a highly classified Ministry of Defence black project that was a secret to even Britain’s closest allies, equipped with photographic and thermographic capabilities far beyond those known to the public. It was capable of pinpointing a section of the earth’s surface as small as a matchbox, of monitoring and assessing every civilian and encrypted communication frequency currently in use, of detecting heat blooms from further beneath the surface of the earth than the deepest missile silo, or the very limits of the vertical ranges of the latest submarines.
On the underside of the square, gold-coloured body of the satellite, a two-metre-diameter lens pointed towards the distant blue planet. The laser that could be fired from the lens was capable of
striking a single human being, or heating a nuclear reactor to the point of meltdown in less than thirty seconds. The satellite represented the absolute front line of Britain’s national security; it floated silently, watching and listening, far above the men and women it was designed to protect, men and women who were completely oblivious to its existence.
Its hundreds of regular systems and routines were cycling when a tiny corner of the British countryside suddenly erupted into blinding purple light.
There was a conversation taking place in Kabul that had triggered a number of the deep Echelon code words, and the satellite’s processor, a remarkably advanced series of microchips that represented a quantum leap towards the realisation of artificial intelligence, was assessing whether to bring the discussion to the attention of the Security Services. In the Sudan, there was sporadic radio contact between two factions of rebel guerrillas, who were exploring the possibility of a combined assault on a Russian-owned oil refinery in the deep jungles near the ocean. In Washington, a Congressman was confessing to his brother that he had cheated on his wife, and that there were pictures to prove it.
Skynet 6-1 recorded them all, and hundreds more, stacking and analysing and prioritising them, before transmitting a report to the GCHQ in southern England. It sent its reports every fifteen minutes, every day of the year, and would continue to do so until it reached its planned obsolescence, at which point its orbit would gradually begin to degrade, until eventually it tumbled into the earth’s atmosphere, disintegrating entirely in the searing heat below.
The huge bloom of purple light lasted for less than five seconds, but in that time the satellite’s sensors reacted and assessed the situation. Thermodynamic imaging was instantly used to assess the likely nature
of the event, and returned negative results. It was not an explosion; there had been a sharp spike in the ground temperature, but it was already receding. There were a number of tiny fires burning in the area beneath the burst of light, but they were not assessed to be a significant threat to the surrounding area.
The footage of the event, the results of the initial scans, and thermographic and high-definition photographs of the before and after were parcelled together to be sent as an immediate report, as was the protocol for anomalous events. The satellite’s geo-positioning sensors determined the location of the event, and a tiny subroutine, buried deep within the code that powered the satellite’s computer brain, was activated. It triggered a protocol that changed the destination of the report the satellite had prepared, and as soon as the report had been encrypted and despatched, it deleted all trace of the event ever having taken place.
Skynet 6-1 returned to its normal operating mode, all proof that it had witnessed the burst of purple light completely exorcised from its memory banks. But more than 22,000 miles below, only 390 miles above the surface of the earth, RapidEye 4, a commercial imaging satellite, cruised slowly over eastern England, its high-definition cameras silently recording everything below it.
Cal Holmwood’s visor returned to normal, and he found himself looking at a vision of hell.
Purple fire was streaming from what seemed like at least a hundred burning vampires; thick black smoke billowed into the air, as the screaming, pleading vampires stumbled, and crawled, and lay still, their bodies burning. The smell was terrible, a thick fog of roasting meat and boiling blood, and Holmwood gagged.
In among the fires, the surviving Operators were standing around,
dazed expressions on their faces, their weapons hanging limply at their sides. Several of them were staggering, holding their faces, and Cal realised with rising horror that they were not wearing their helmets. He ran to the nearest such man, an Operator he knew was named Potts, and grabbed him by his shoulders.
“I can’t see,” screamed the Operator. “Oh God, I can’t see anything.”
“Let me see,” said Holmwood, gently taking hold of the man’s gloved hands.
Blood was running thickly from the man’s ears, but he responded to the sound of Cal’s voice.
“Colonel Holmwood?” asked Potts, his voice thick with pain.
“That’s right, son,” said Cal. “Let me see now. Move your hands.”
Potts lifted his trembling hands slowly away from his face. Holmwood looked at the young Operator, and forced himself not to cry out.
The skin on his face was a red so dark it was almost black; in several places it had already cracked, and blood was oozing slowly down towards his neck. His eyes were bleeding at the corners; the white sclera had been burned a bright orange, and his blue irises were a virulent purple. The Operator’s pupils had constricted to such a tiny diameter that Holmwood could barely see them; they were little more than tiny black pinpricks in the middle of the young man’s ruined eyes. The corneas, the transparent film that covered the visible part of the eye, were dried out and shredded; it looked like Potts was wearing contact lenses that had been attacked with a razor blade.
“You’re going to be all right,” Cal said, firmly. “You hear me, son? You’re going to be fine.”
“I can’t see anything, sir,” said Potts. The fear in his voice was urgent.
“I know you can’t,” replied Cal. “I have to go and get you some help, so I want you to sit down right here and not move. OK?”
Potts nodded, an expression of misery on his shattered face.
“OK,” said Holmwood. “I’ll be back for you. I promise.”
He helped the Operator lower himself to the ground, then ran towards the hangar, stepping between the burning vampires that littered the wide stretch of tarmac.
“All medical staff to Landing Area 1,” he shouted over his helmet’s comms link. “All staff right now.”
He ran through the wide door of the hangar, his mind racing as he headed towards the row of emergency medical kits that hung on the armoury wall.
What the hell just happened out there? What were those things that came out of the ground? They were like ultraviolet bombs. Who the hell knew about them?
Holmwood hauled four green cases down off the wall, tucked them under his arms, then ran back towards the burning carnage of the landing area. A small group of Operators were waiting for him as he emerged, their faces pale at the scale of the destruction that had taken place around them, their eyes wide with horror and confusion.
“Colonel Holmwood,” said one, as he approached. “What the hell was—”
“No time,” snapped Cal. “We’ve got wounded out there. Take these and start isolating the injured.”
He dropped the green cases to the ground, and ran back into the hangar for the rest. Behind him he heard the running thuds of footsteps as the Operators did as he had ordered. He skidded to a halt in front of the two medical kits that were still hanging on the wall, then noticed the white door next to them. A red refrigeration
triangle was printed on it, and something suddenly clicked in his mind.
“Oh Jesus,” he whispered, and hauled open the white door. Inside it stood twelve plastic litre bottles of O negative blood. He ran across the room, grabbed a black holdall from one of the racks, ran back and threw the bottles into it. Cal swung the bag over his shoulder, and sprinted for the exit.
“Larissa!” he bellowed, surveying the smouldering remnants of Valeri’s vampire army. “Operator Kinley! Where are you?”
Nothing moved.
The purple flames that had leapt so violently from the bodies of the vampires were starting to subside, leaving behind the crackling of burning skin and the groans and growls of the few vampires who were still able to make sound. Around him, he saw Operators kneeling beside their colleagues, applying gauze and bandages to wounds, whispering reassuringly to their injured friends. Kate Randall was still kneeling over Shaun Turner, as his father stood motionless beside them.
Can’t think about that now
, thought Holmwood.
Can’t think about that.
There was a rush of noise and activity behind him, and he heard shouts and exclamations of surprise as the Loop’s medical staff poured out on to the tarmac, carrying trauma kits and wheeling stretchers between them. The white-coated doctors and nurses immediately took charge of the situation, barking orders and shouting for the uninjured Operators to clear the way. Holmwood left them behind, running through the human and vampire wreckage, shouting Larissa’s name as he did so.
He reached the edge of the runway, looking frantically across the blood-soaked tarmac and burning concrete.
“Larissa!” he bellowed, and then the tiniest flicker of movement caught the corner of his eye. He turned, seeing a thin column of smoke rising from the grass at the edge of the runway. He ran towards it, praying he was not too late, and slid to a halt beside a twisted pile of charred flesh and bone.
Larissa was lying on her back, her skin as black as the night sky, her arms and legs burned down to the bone. Her face was destroyed; her eyes and ears were gone, and her lips had burned away to reveal her teeth, giving her an awful skeletal look. In her mouth was the charred remains of an arm, the bones and tendons of which were still clearly visible. Holmwood followed the arm to where it met the white nub of a shoulder bone, and then on to the body of a second vampire. Cal could see the flapping remnants of a white shirt, and clarity burst through him.
It’s Valentin
, he realised.
Why the hell is his arm in her mouth?
He looked more closely at Larissa, and saw empty space where her throat should have been; even with the terrible damage the flames had done to her, it was still obvious. The muscles and tendons that had been laid open to the evening sky by the punishing purple fire were torn and ripped, in a single direction.
He fed her his own blood
, Cal realised.
She was hurt, and he fed her. Dear Jesus.
He looked down at the two smouldering bodies for a long moment, then made a decision. Cal shrugged the holdall off his shoulder, and tore it open. He lifted the first bottle of blood out, twisted the top off and tipped it directly into Larissa’s mouth. The effect was instantaneous; small sections of her flesh immediately turned red, then pink, then white, knitting back together as they did so.
When the first bottle was empty, he threw it aside, and tore open
the second. As it glugged down her savaged throat, her eyes swam back up into their sockets, and her tongue grew back into place. She groaned in agony, and swivelled her eyes to look at him.
The third bottle saw her begin to move, ever so slightly, as she began to resemble the Larissa he knew, and when it was empty, she was able to lift one trembling hand, and push the burnt remnant of Valentin’s arm out of her mouth. She groped for the fourth bottle as he opened it, and he placed it gently in her hand; she raised it to her mouth, and drank, slowly. Holmwood watched until he was sure she could feed herself, then grabbed four of the bottles and leant down next to Valentin.
He paused as he twisted the first one open and lowered it towards the vampire’s mouth.
Valentin Rusmanov had killed and tortured for more than four centuries, and nobody could have blamed Cal if he had sunk his stake into the ancient vampire’s heart, ending him forever. But they had made a deal with him, a deal that it appeared Valentin, when presented with the opportunity to renege, had honoured. Cal had seen him fight Valeri with his own eyes, and it was clear that he had given up his own blood to help Larissa.
Cal Holmwood tipped the bottle, and poured sweet, reviving blood into the mouth of the third oldest vampire in the world, a creature that represented everything that Department 19 stood against. He watched as the vampire’s body responded to the blood, and began the torturous, agonising process of rebuilding itself. There was a long, rattling gasp from beside him, as Larissa pushed herself up into a seated position, and looked at him, gratitude burning in her eyes.
“Thank you,” she croaked, then looked down at Valentin. “He didn’t leave me,” she said, in a voice that was little more than a
whisper. “He was beating his brother, but when Valeri attacked me, he stayed, and gave me his arm. He could have let me bleed out.”
“I know,” replied Cal. “That’s why I’m doing this.”
Holmwood threw the first bottle aside and opened the second. He was tipping it towards Valentin’s mouth when two beams of yellow light burst over the trees at the edge of the Loop, and the steady thump of a helicopter engine thundered through the night air.
“Five minutes,” yelled the pilot.
Jamie Carpenter checked his watch, and swore. Thirty-one minutes had passed since he and his team had emerged from the smouldering darkness of La Fraternité de la Nuit, carrying the unconscious grey wolf between them. Their chopper was idling in the middle of Rue de Sévigné, its side doors standing open.