Battle Lines

Ben shoved the Range Rover’s gear stick into reverse and floored the accelerator. Walsh was thrown forward in his seat and for a terrible second the patient’s fingers closed on his throat. Then momentum hauled him back, and he fell heavily on to the cobblestones of the courtyard. He was on his feet again instantly, bathed in the blinding gleam of the car’s headlights as it hurtled backwards. Ben looked over his shoulder and saw the open gate approaching, dangerously fast. There was no time to correct their course; he could only hope that he had not turned the steering wheel since driving them into this terrible place.

There was a screech of metal as the car shot between the gateposts and a huge shower of sparks on the passenger’s side as the panels tore along the brick wall. Charlie Walsh, who was sobbing between screams, wearing the look of a man who expects to wake up from a nightmare at any moment, leapt in his seat and almost fell on to Ben, who shoved him roughly back. Then the screeching stopped, and they were through the gate. Ben slammed on the brakes and hauled the steering wheel around. The tyres smoked and squealed, until the big car was facing the right way down the road they had driven up, only minutes earlier. There was a thud behind them, and Ben glanced into the rear-view mirror as he shoved the car back into drive and floored the accelerator again.

The blood-soaked patient, who had torn Ben’s neighbour’s lip from his face as though it was nothing, had run headlong into the back of the car. There was a bright spray of blood across the rear window at the point of impact. The car leapt forward and Ben saw the man lying in the road; he seemed to have knocked himself out. But, as he looked at the fallen patient, he caught sight of something else that almost stopped his heart.

Dark shapes were dropping steadily into the courtyard, before moving quickly towards the gate. Ben pressed the window’s button again and, over the howl of the siren, he could hear, very faintly, the crunch of breaking glass and a low, swelling roar, like the noise made by a pack of animals. He was still looking in the rear-view mirror as the car accelerated through the outer gate and down the hill; as a result, he didn’t see the glow of blue and red emerging from around the sharp bend in front of them.

Andy Myers gritted his teeth and pressed his foot down more firmly on the accelerator. The siren was deafening, even from inside the car; the old vehicle’s windows and doors were not as airtight as they had once been, and the sound was so loud the windows might as well have been rolled down. He was looking forward to finding out from the duty nurse exactly what was going on, radioing it in, and getting back to bed. There was a cricket match at noon and he was already glumly aware that very few of the club’s players were going to be rested and at their best.

He turned the wheel gently, sending the car neatly round the bend that would take him on to the final approach to the hospital. Then everything in front of him was blinding light, and he had the briefest of moments to wonder where it was coming from before the Range Rover slammed into his car head-on.

“Look out!” screamed Charlie Walsh, the words mangled by his missing lower lip.

Ben dragged his gaze away from the rear-view mirror, aware that something had moved at the edges of his vision. Then red and blue light filled the windscreen, there was a sickening crunch of metal, and everything went black.

Ben emerged into a world of chaos.

His eyes flickered open and pain shot through his head as the siren pounded into it. Slowly, ever so slowly, he turned to look at Charlie Walsh.

His neighbour hung in his seat belt, his head lowered, his eyes closed. His face was covered in blood and a ridge of swelling was already beginning to rise across his forehead. As Ben watched, a small bubble of blood inflated and popped in Charlie’s ruined mouth, followed by a second, and a third.

He’s alive, he thought. Thank God.

Ben looked down at himself and felt relief wash over him; the big car’s roll cage had held. There was a bulge behind the pedals where the engine block had been forced back by the collision, but it had not broken through; it would have crushed the lower half of his body to jelly if it had. Blood was falling steadily from his nose and he could see the dent in the dashboard where he must have been thrown against it. His head thumped with pain and he found he couldn’t think straight; he tried, but the thoughts drifted away from him, as insubstantial as smoke on the wind. He reached out with a shaking hand and opened the car door. He made to get out, but a sheet of agony bloomed up from his left ankle, and he screamed. Ben looked down, and saw that his foot was twisted almost ninety degrees to one side. The sight was so alien, so terrible, that he vomited into his lap, unable to stop himself.

Ben fumbled his mobile phone out of his pocket and dialled Maggie’s number. He knew he should phone the police, but for some reason he felt unwilling to do so. Something had happened before the crash, although he wasn’t sure what it was. Had there been another car? Had he hit another car? He held the phone to his ear as he peered through the broken windscreen. There were pieces of metal strewn across the road. He leant further forward, dimly aware that the car seemed to be higher than usual, that his view of the road was different, and saw a twisted hunk of metal lying beneath his front wheels. Ben stared at it blankly, until his eyes picked out a smashed pair of lights sticking out of the wreckage, one red, one blue, and everything flooded back to him.

The hospital, the man, Charlie Walsh’s lip, the police car and—

He froze.

Oh God. The patients. The breaking glass. Behind me.

The siren screamed and roared, and he could hear Maggie’s voice shouting down the phone, but could not make his mouth work to answer her. He forced himself to look into the rear-view mirror and saw a red glow descending the hill towards him, a pulsing, shifting mass of crimson that seemed to originate from a hundred pairs of glowing points of light.

“Run,” he croaked into the phone. “Take Isla and run.”

52 DAYS TILL ZERO HOUR

1

THE NEXT GENERATION

Jamie Carpenter was so focused on the violence playing out before him that he didn’t notice his console’s message tone until the third beep.

“Take five,” he called, pulling the metal rectangle from its loop on his belt, and heard two simultaneous groans of relief. Jamie thumbed READ on the console’s touch screen, and read the short message that appeared.

NS303-67-J/LIVE_BRIEFING/OR/ASAP

The message was simple, but it still caused Jamie a momentary pang of sorrow. It was an order for him to immediately attend a briefing in the Ops Room, similar to dozens of other orders that had appeared on his console’s screen in the months since he had arrived in the Loop, the classified base that was the heart of Department 19. But this one had been sent only to him; his Operator number was there on the screen in black and white. The previous orders had almost all been sent with the prefix G-17, the Operational Squad that he had led until a month or so ago, the squad that had comprised himself, Larissa Kinley and Kate Randall.

Their squad had been disbanded in the aftermath of Valeri Rusmanov’s attack on the Loop, so that their combined experience could be put to wider use helping the Department heal and rebuild. It had been one of Interim Director Cal Holmwood’s first commands, and although it was one that Jamie understood, it had still felt like the three of them were being punished for being good at what they did. Holmwood had assured them that that was not the case, but how they felt was ultimately of little importance: it was an order and they would follow it.

“Sir?”

The voice trembled, and Jamie looked up from his console. He was sitting on a bench at the edge of the Playground, the wide circular room on Level F of the Loop in which generations of Operators had been trained, sweating and bleeding on its hard shiny floor. For the last fifteen years or so, the room had been the domain of Terry, the tall, barrel-chested instructor who was standing in the middle of the gleaming floor with his hands folded across his chest. But it was not he who had spoken; the voice belonged to John Morton, who was slumped on the ground and looking over at Jamie with wide eyes.

Morton was breathing heavily and bleeding from half a dozen places, most seriously from where the instructor’s weathered knuckles had split his bottom lip open. He was sat on the floor, his legs crossed, his arms resting on his knees, his face so pale that Jamie thought he might be on the verge of throwing up. The blood from his lip was dripping steadily, pooling between his legs.

“Nothing for you to worry about,” replied Jamie. “I have to head upstairs for a bit.”

“Everything OK, sir?” asked a second voice, and Jamie turned his head towards its source. Sitting apart from Morton was a dark-haired woman whose name was Lizzy Ellison. She was almost as pale as Morton and she too was bleeding, from a wide cut above her left eye and from somewhere inside her mouth, but her voice was steady.

“Fine,” said Jamie, giving them both a quick, narrow smile. “At least, as far as I know it is. Terry?”

“Yes, sir?” replied the instructor. The huge man had taken advantage of the momentary pause in the training to give his mind a moment to clear, and a small smile of pride had emerged on his face as he looked at Jamie Carpenter. It seemed to Terry as though it had been mere days since the boy had arrived in the Playground, nervous and skinny and completely disoriented, but with a streak of bitter determination that had been immediately obvious to Terry, a veteran reader of people. Now he emerged from his thoughts, pushing the smile away as he answered the calm, deadly Operator the boy had so quickly become.

“CQD, please,” said Jamie. “Again.”

Both Morton and Ellison let out low groans, their eyes flickering wildly from Jamie to each other, then up to the imposing figure of the instructor.

“Of course, sir,” replied Terry, and turned towards the two trainees, a wide smile of anticipation on his face.

Jamie strode along the corridor towards the lift that would take him up through the base to the Ops Room.

He felt a momentary pang of guilt as he thought about the brutal physical programme Terry was putting Morton and Ellison through; Close Quarters Defence was a regime of violence and exhaustion that he would in all likelihood remember until the end of his days. But he quickly pushed the feeling aside. Recruits were broken down and rebuilt: that was the way it was done, the way it had always been done, and he knew that the understanding his two new provisional squad members would gain from their ordeal would serve them well out in the world, where violence and danger beyond anything they had known lurked around what often seemed like every corner. The darkness that Blacklight had kept at bay for so long was now threatening to overwhelm them, and there was no time to be wasted on the hurt feelings and bloodied bodies of the new intake of recruits.

Jamie was cautiously hopeful about the two potential Operators who had been thrust into his care, a situation that never ceased to amuse him. Both were older than him and far more experienced in the outside world. Inside the Loop, however, their experience counted for nothing and Jamie was an almost legendary figure; they both looked at him with barely concealed awe.

John Morton was twenty-one years old and had been recruited personally by Major Paul Turner. He had been about to be transferred to the First Battalion of the Parachute Regiment, and had already been marked out as a soldier likely to one day undergo the gruelling selection process that would see him join the SAS, the British Army’s elite special forces unit. Turner had become aware of him through his old colleagues at Hereford and had stepped in quickly to derail the young man’s career path. Less than a day later, Morton had arrived at the Loop with a look of wonder similar to the one that had been a fixture on Jamie’s own face barely six months earlier.

Lizzy Ellison was twenty-three, two years older than her training mate and more than five years older than Jamie. She had been an agent in SIS, the Secret Intelligence Service that had previously been known as MI6, and what she had done there was classified at a level accessible only by the Director General of the SIS and the Chief of the General Staff. Jamie had not asked her, although the time would come when he would do so; he had learnt from personal experience that secrets within a squad could be dangerous. But for the time being, he was content to let her past remain a secret for a single reason: Angela Darcy, the beautiful, fearsome Operator who had accompanied Jamie on his desperate rescue mission to Paris only a month or so earlier, who had also once been SIS and was, he thought, the most deadly and calmly predatory human being he had ever known, knew who Ellison was. He didn’t know how, but it was enough; if she had appeared on the radar of Angela Darcy, who had spent her pre-Blacklight career wading through blood that was often elbow-deep, then he would not push her to reveal her secrets.

Not yet, at least.

The lift doors slid open and Jamie stepped inside, pressing the button marked 0. As the lift began to ascend, he wondered what Cal Holmwood might want this time.

It often felt as though he spent more time in the Ops Room than in the small quarters where he occasionally found the opportunity to sleep. It was an oval room in the centre of the only above-ground level of the Loop, and it was where the Priority Level missions were briefed and despatched. In the month that had followed the attack on the Loop and the abduction of Henry Seward, the Department’s veteran Director, it had become the hub of the entire base, as every mission had become Priority Level. It was exceedingly rare to find good news waiting there.

Jamie leant against the cool metal wall of the lift and let his mind drift; as was so often the case, his thoughts were quickly full of his friends. The catastrophic attack on the Loop by Valeri and his vampire army had affected them all profoundly; Kate was still struggling to come to terms with the death of Shaun, the young Operator who had been her boyfriend, and had made a decision in recent days that Jamie had pleaded with her to reconsider. Matt was buried deep in the bowels of the Loop, spending every waking second staring at a computer screen. And Larissa, the vampire girl who had become the most important thing in the world to Jamie, was gone.

The lift door slid open again, and he walked slowly down the Level 0 corridor. He paused outside the door to the Ops Room, took a deep breath, then stepped inside.

Gathered round the long row of tables in the centre of the room was a group of dark figures.

Cal Holmwood stood at the head, with Jack Williams at his side. Arrayed along the sides of the table, their attention focused on the Interim Director, stood Patrick Williams, Dominique Saint-Jacques, Jacob Scott, Andrew Jarvis, Richard Brennan and a Communications Division Operator called Amy Andrews. She had been recently added to the Task Force, along with Dominique and Angela Darcy, who appeared to be absent; in the aftermath of Valeri’s attack, it had been expanded to include at least one representative from every Division in the Department.

As Jamie sat down, he noted that Paul Turner was also missing, although this no longer qualified as surprising.

“Lieutenant Carpenter,” said Cal Holmwood. “How are your recruits coming along?”

“Pretty well, sir,” replied Jamie. “Terry’s making sure they realise what they’ve signed up for.”

Cal Holmwood smiled grimly. “I’m glad to hear it. They’re going to see for themselves in a few hours.”

Jamie frowned. The Blacklight training programme had once taken thirteen months to complete, on top of the elite-level training that the majority of recruits had already undertaken before they were even made aware of the Department’s existence. But circumstances had made this impossible, and what was being carried out in the Playground now was the very definition of a crash course. It was far from ideal, from anyone’s perspective, but it was unavoidable: the Department had been hurt, and hurt badly.

There were rooms on the residential levels that had been occupied by Operators who were never going to return to them, unused desks in the Surveillance, Security and Intelligence Divisions, Operational Squads that had lost one, two, or in some awful cases, all three of their members. These empty spaces, these holes in the fabric of the Department, would not be filled easily, even by the new men and women who were being recruited specifically to do so. Friends, colleagues, even family members had been lost, and rookies would not take their places, even though they were vital: restoring the Department to something approaching full strength was of paramount importance.

The countdown to Zero Hour would not wait for them to be ready.

Nonetheless, Jamie did not believe the members of his new squad were; he had not been intending to take them out for another week, at least.

“Why, sir?” he asked, looking at the Interim Director. “What’s happened?”

Holmwood glanced over at Jack Williams. “Jack?”

Jamie’s friend nodded. “Thank you, sir,” he said. “In the Security Officer’s absence, I’ve been asked to brief you all on the events of last night.” He tapped a series of commands into the console in front of him, and the Operators turned their attention to the screen set high on the wall. A window opened and grainy CCTV images filled the screen: running figures in white coats, leaping, grasping shapes moving among them, tearing and rending. Blood sprayed on to walls and ceilings, and the panicked, pleading eyes of the victims were wide, even in the low-resolution footage.

“This,” said Jack, “is D ward of Broadmoor Hospital, one of three secure hospitals that house the most dangerously ill men and women in the country. At 1:47 this morning, a group of vampires broke into the facility, killing every member of staff and releasing every patient from their rooms. We’ve confronted twenty-nine of them so far and managed to bring two into custody. Every single one has been turned.”

There was a sharp communal intake of breath.

“All of them?” asked Patrick Williams, his voice low.

“That’s correct,” replied his brother.

“This was an attack on us, not on the patients,” said Dominique Saint-Jacques. “They turned them all and let them out, didn’t they?”

“That appears to be the case,” replied Jack. “However, this was not the only incident of its type to take place last night. Vampires also attacked the Florence Supermax facility in Colorado, the Black Dolphin prison in Sol-Iletsk, the C Max in Pretoria, al-Ha’ir prison in Riyadh, Kamunting Detention Centre in Malaysia, Goulburn Correctional Centre in New South Wales, and the Penitenciária Federal de Catanduvas in southern Brazil. There are now more than four thousand maximum-security prisoners unaccounted for, and in every country, those who have been recovered have all been turned. This appears to have been nothing less than a deliberate, coordinated attack on the supernatural Departments of the world.”

There was silence as the Operators attempted to absorb the scale of what they were hearing. Jamie looked round the table; Patrick Williams and Dominique Saint-Jacques were staring steadily at Jack, their expressions calm and neutral, and he felt admiration rise through his chest.

Nothing fazes them, he thought. Absolutely nothing.

He was about to return his attention to Jack when he caught sight of Jacob Scott; the Australian Colonel was staring down at the desk, his eyes wide, his face deathly pale. The outspoken veteran Operator looked, to Jamie’s untrained eye, as though he was about to have a heart attack; his fists were clenched so tightly that his knuckles had turned bright white.

“This is now this Department’s number-one priority,” said Cal Holmwood. Jamie dragged his gaze away from Colonel Scott, a frown furrowing his brow, and turned back to the Interim Director. “I’m sure you can see that the potential for public exposure and loss of life is extremely significant. I’m calling back the Field Teams—”

“All of them?” interrupted Jamie. “Even the ones that are looking for Admiral Seward? And Dracula?”

“Major Landis’s team will continue to search for Admiral Seward,” replied Holmwood, fixing him with a glacial stare. “The rest are coming home until this situation is resolved.”

“Dracula is gathering strength,” said Jamie. “Right now, while we’re sitting here. Surely he’s the priority.”

“This is about Dracula,” said Holmwood. “Jack, bring up the gatehouse.”

The CCTV footage changed to a view of the arched entry to Broadmoor. Jamie winced. Daubed across the arch, in dripping blood, were two words.

HE RISES

“Even so,” he persisted. “If Dracula and Valeri released the prisoners, then we’re playing right into their hands.”

“Thank you, Lieutenant Carpenter,” said Holmwood drily. “We hadn’t been able to figure that out for ourselves.”

“So why are you doing it then?”

Holmwood looked over at Jack. “Lieutenant Williams? Play the Crowthorne footage, please.”

Jack nodded and pressed a series of keys. A new window opened on the wall screen, filled with a stationary image of a picturesque village street. He pressed PLAY and the image began to move, the black and white footage scrolling smoothly. A row of terraced houses was visible, the gardens neat, the pavement beyond the low walls clean and tidy. A small car was parked in the middle of the frame; its windscreen reflected the light of the street lamp that stood above it.

After a few seconds, there was movement. A middle-aged man ran down the centre of the street, his arms flailing, his feet pounding the tarmac. He reached the car and slid into a crouch beside its radiator, facing the way he had come. Moments later a second man strolled into the shot; he wore a long white hospital gown, his feet were bare, and his eyes glowed ferociously. As he approached the parked car, he appeared to be smiling.

The vampire stopped, and for a long moment nothing happened; the two men seemed to be in conversation, regarding each other from opposite ends of the vehicle. Then the vampire reached down and casually flipped the car across the road. It skidded over the tarmac, sending up showers of sparks, before crashing into a garden wall on the other side and coming to a halt.

Gasps filled the air of the Ops Room; Jamie glanced round the table and saw expressions of shock on the faces of his colleagues. On the screen, the helpless man stood up, entirely exposed, and raised his hands in a futile plea for mercy. The vampire took half a step forward, then blurred across the screen, lifting the man into the air and carrying him out of the frame.

Jack pressed a button and the footage paused, freezing the upturned car where it now lay. The Interim Director turned back to face the Zero Hour Task Force.

“The vampire in that footage had been turned for a maximum of forty-five minutes,” he said. “Does anyone want to tell me what’s wrong with that picture?”

“Jesus,” said Patrick Williams. “He was strong.”

“And fast,” said Dominique. “Too fast.”

“Correct,” said Holmwood. “The vampires who have been destroyed so far all exhibited strength and speed far beyond what would normally be expected of the newly-turned.”

“How come?” asked Amy Andrews.

“We don’t know. Science Division is examining the two inmates we’ve recovered, but they’ve found nothing so far. But there is obviously something different about these vamps, and there are about three hundred of them out there right now. That’s why this is our number-one priority, Lieutenant Carpenter, because this Department’s mission is to protect the public from the supernatural. Do you understand?”