Department 19: Zero Hour Page 8

  Now, at last, it was time; they were armed, equipped, willing and eager to destroy vampires. And their secure connection to the Surveillance Division, which would alert them instantly to any even potentially supernatural incident in their small corner of the country, was as silent as a church congregation on Sunday morning. Jamie stared accusingly at the van’s fold-down screen, trying to will it into life; the green bar at the bottom, the one that showed the connection was active, glowed steadily, as though it was mocking him.

  “This doing nothing is normal?” asked Qiang, slotting the magazine back into the butt of his Glock and replacing the pistol in its holster.

  “No,” said Jamie, a little too quickly. It sounded defensive, as though he was afraid his new squad mate was suggesting that being an Operator in PBS6 was more taxing than being one in Blacklight. “This is not normal. Especially not recently.”

  Qiang nodded. “Unlucky then,” he said, and drew his pistol again.

  It’s more than unlucky, thought Jamie, his eyes still fixed on the screen. It’s bloody unheard of.

  One of the first things Frankenstein had told Jamie, during his earliest days in the Department, was that it was no use thinking in terms of a vampire society, some hidden community where every vampire knows each other and they all work together towards some dastardly goal. The reality was far more banal; there were vampires who were dedicated to violence and murder, just as there were vampires who abhorred such things; some vampires lived in Gothic castles, others in suburban houses and blocks of flats; some were predatory loners, while others were family men and women, their lives indistinguishable from the vast majority of the population, providing you excepted their need to drink blood. During her time with NS9, Larissa had talked to a vampire girl called Chloe in a Las Vegas nightclub; Chloe had never heard of Blacklight, or NS9, and believed that Dracula was nothing more than a character from old horror films.

  Nonetheless, there was unquestionably something stirring up the vampire population. The news of Dracula’s resurrection seemed to have reached even the most isolated of vampire ears and had caused an explosion of brazen activity; attacks had risen sharply, as had encounters between the public and the supernatural, and many of the incidents were punctuated with two words every Operator had come to truly hate.

  They were found sprayed on walls, daubed on front doors, and carved into the flesh of victims, their meaning abundantly clear: he’s coming, and nothing can stop him.

  The screen on the van’s wall burst into life, hauling Jamie from his thoughts. He read the message as it scrolled on to the screen, his heart racing suddenly in his chest.

  ECHELON INTERCEPT REF. 52312/6B

  SOURCE. Emergency call (landline telephone 01572 232973)

  TIME OF INTERCEPT. 20:53

  TRANSCRIPT BEGINS.

  OPERATOR: Emergency, which service do you require?

  CALLER: Police.

  OPERATOR: What is the nature of your emergency?

  CALLER: There’s a bunch of kids in the graveyard behind Our Sister of Grace in Oakham. My husband just walked our dog through there and they threw blood at him.

  OPERATOR: Can you repeat that, please?

  CALLER: They threw blood at him, the little sods. He’s covered in it, all over the shirt I got him for Christmas.

  OPERATOR: Is your husband injured?

  CALLER: No, he’s just shook up. Well, you would be, wouldn’t you? Take the dog out and find a bunch of kids lighting candles and chucking blood about. Bring back national service, that’s what I reckon. In my day we—

  OPERATOR: The police are on their way, ma’am.

  TRANSCRIPT ENDS.

  INTERCEPT REFERENCE LOCATION. Our Sister of Grace Anglican Church, Oakham, Rutland. 52.6705°N, 0.7295°W

  RISK ASSESSMENT. Priority Level 3

  “Level 3?” groaned Ellison. “Jesus. Surveillance might as well have us getting cats out of trees.”

  “I thought you were bored,” said Jamie.

  “I am,” she replied.

  “Shut up then.” He smiled at his squad mate, and pressed the button on the wall that connected the van’s passengers to their driver. “Have you got the coordinates?”

  “Yes, sir,” replied the driver, her voice slightly metallic over the intercom.

  “What’s our ETA?”

  “Eleven minutes, sir.”

  “All right then,” said Jamie, strapping himself into his seat. “Let’s go.”

  Their driver’s estimate had been slightly optimistic; almost thirteen minutes had passed when the van pulled to a halt outside the gate of the graveyard that sprawled behind the small, neat church of Our Sister of Grace. Jamie activated the cameras on the left side of the vehicle and observed their destination on the van’s screen.

  The headstones and mausoleums beyond the gates were well tended, adorned with bright sprays of flowers and surrounded by neatly mown grass. Stone angels loomed over the path that ran through the middle of the cemetery, peering down from slanted roofs and the weathered crossbeams of crucifixes. Further away from the gates, the graveyard was less neat, less well kept; trees huddled together, their shadows intertwining beneath the light of a moon that was three-quarters full, and the paths winding between the headstones were wilder, more overgrown. In the distance, an orange glow flickered in the darkness.

  “See it?” he asked.

  “Uh-huh,” said Ellison. “Looks pretty big, sir. Maybe we should call the fire brigade?”

  Jamie smiled. “Feel free to stay in the van, Operator.”

  “No, sir,” said Ellison, smiling back at him. “I wouldn’t miss something this exciting for the world.”

  Qiang pulled his helmet on to his head and clicked its visor into place. He reached down and twisted a dial on his belt, setting his helmet’s microphone to external.

  “We go?” he asked.

  “We go,” said Jamie, pulling on his own helmet as Ellison did the same. “Ready One as soon as we’re through the gate. Internal comms.”

  “Yes, sir,” said Qiang.

  “Yes, sir,” said Ellison.

  “All right,” said Jamie. “We all know this is probably nothing, but we play the cards we’re dealt. So do your jobs.”

  He pushed open the back of the van, leapt on to the tarmac, and held the door wide. Ellison and Qiang stepped down beside him, their black-clad shapes seeming to absorb the pale moonlight. Jamie swung the door shut and hammered twice on it with his gloved fist. The van pulled away, leaving them standing in the road; their driver would maintain a holding pattern until she was summoned to extract them.

  Jamie stepped up on to the pavement and faced the graveyard. The wrought-iron gate loomed above him, a relic of a grander, more dignified era. It was standing slightly ajar. Jamie pushed it open, grimacing behind his visor as the metal gave out a shrill, echoing shriek, and stepped through it. His squad mates followed, their gloved hands dangling within reach of the weapons that hung from their belts, their faces hidden entirely by their purple visors.

  The central thoroughfare of the graveyard was long and wide, curving gently to the right. Jamie led Operational Squad J-5 along it until they reached a narrower, more overgrown path that branched off to the left. He twisted a dial on his belt, switching his visor’s filter to infrared. The fire stood out as a glowing ball of yellow and red in the centre of a landscape of black and dark blue; it was perhaps fifty metres away, straight ahead.

  “Follow me,” said Jamie, his voice sounding directly in the ears of his squad mates, but inaudible to anyone standing beside him.

  “Yes, sir,” chorused Ellison and Qiang.

  Jamie twisted his visor back to normal and headed towards the flickering orange light. As he stepped carefully over tumbled headstones and fallen statues, he quickly saw that Ellison had been right; it really wasn’t much of a fire. But someone in the graveyard had thrown blood at an old man doing nothing more provocative than taking his dog for a walk, and that was worth checking out, no m
atter whether his squad mates agreed or not.

  The path turned sharply away to the left, setting off on a long curve that Jamie guessed took it back to the main gates. He stepped off it, enjoying the silence that came from grass underfoot, and picked his way between the graves. Thirty seconds later he stopped in the deep shadows of a towering sycamore, and took his first look at what they had been sent to investigate.

  Four teenagers, wearing jet-black clothes and dark make-up around their eyes and lips, were sitting in a circle on top of a fallen gravestone. A pentagram had been marked on it with chalk, and a fire had been built beside it, from piled sticks and fallen tree branches. The teenagers were giggling and whispering to one another; Jamie saw open cans of cheap cider standing between them, alongside two plastic bottles full of dark red liquid.

  Probably got it at the butcher’s, he thought. Just kids, playing vampires.

  Then he remembered that they were, at most, a year or two younger than him, and smiled behind his visor.

  “This is nothing,” he said. “I’m going to scare them and send them home. Circle round in case they try to run.”

  His squad mates voiced their assent. There was an almost inaudible rustle as they did as they were ordered.

  In the clearing, the teenagers took hold of each other’s hands, and one of them, a boy with neat blond hair above his heavily made-up face, began to speak in a deep tone of voice that he doubtless believed sounded ominous.

  “Dark Lords of the Night, hear us. We bring fire and blood, and we call to you in supplication, in the hope of your eternal favour. We call you, Lords, and we offer our souls to you, that we might see the everlasting night. Hear us, oh Lords, hear us, we beg.”

  This is too perfect, thought Jamie. He set his microphone to external, twisted the volume up to full, and stepped silently out of the shadows.

  “Don’t move,” he bellowed. “Stay right where you are.”

  The screams that pierced the quiet of the graveyard were satisfyingly loud and high-pitched.

  Two of the teenagers tipped backwards on to the grass, their eyes and mouths wide, and began to crawl frantically, digging at the dirt with their fingers, dragging themselves away from the dark shape that had roared at them with a voice like something from the depths of Hell. One slumped to the ground in a dead faint, her eyes rolling back in her head, her mouth hanging open, while the last, the blond boy who had spoken, leapt to his feet and fled, his face a wide, gasping picture of unadulterated terror.

  He ran for the cover of the trees, his arms and legs pumping. As he reached them, Qiang stepped silently out from between the trunks, and the teenager skidded to the ground, screaming as he fell. He scrambled to his feet and backtracked, sobbing hysterically, searching desperately for a way out. A last-gasp break for the main path saw him confronted by the moving shadow of Ellison; at the sight of her the teenager screamed again, then slumped to his knees and threw back his head.

  “Do it!” he howled. “Do it then, oh Dark Lords!”

  Jamie grinned behind his visor. He had circled round the fire, cutting off the two crawling teenagers and herding them back as they cried and blubbered and insisted that they hadn’t meant it, they had never thought it would work, they’d changed their minds, oh God, they’d changed their minds. Beside the fallen gravestone, the girl who had fainted was groaning as she slowly returned to consciousness.

  “So you want to be vampires?” asked Jamie, his voice deafening and almost inhuman through his microphone’s distortion filters.

  “No!” screamed the girl. “No, we’re sorry!”

  The blond boy was still on his knees. “Yes!” he cried. “Ignore these weaklings! I want to be a vampire!”

  Jamie walked silently across the clearing. Two of the teenagers whimpered and cowered away as he passed; he didn’t so much as glance at them. He crouched down in front of the kneeling boy and twisted off his microphone’s filters.

  “No,” he said, his voice now a normal tone and volume. “You don’t.”

  The teenager frowned. “What are you?” he said. “You aren’t what we summoned.”

  “You’re right,” said Jamie. “We’re something else. Get off your knees and stand with your friends.”

  The boy got slowly to his feet, his face starting to colour pink. Jamie wasn’t sure whether it was anger or embarrassment, although he suspected the teenager’s friends would not let him forget ‘Do it then, oh Dark Lords’ in a hurry. He staggered across the clearing and hauled the girl who had fainted to her feet. She protested half-heartedly as he dragged her across to the others, and faced the three dark figures.

  “What is this?” asked the teenager, a petulant tone creeping into his voice. “We didn’t do anything wrong.”

  “What’s your name?” asked Jamie.

  “Why should I tell you that?” replied the boy.

  “Because you’ll be arrested if you don’t,” said Jamie. “And you’ll spend at least one night somewhere much worse than a graveyard.”

  The teenager frowned. “I read Kevin McKenna’s story,” he said. “The one he wrote before you killed him. You’re the ones he was talking about.”

  We killed him? thought Jamie. That’s new. I haven’t heard that before.

  “Tell me your name,” he said. “I’m not going to ask you again.”

  “You’re murderers,” said the boy, his voice high and indignant. “You kill people who haven’t done anything wrong.”

  Jamie took a step forward. “Do you really want to be right about that?” he asked. “Think hard.”

  The boy swallowed. “Chris,” he said. “My name is Chris Hollison.”

  “What about the rest of you?”

  “Lauren Johnson.”

  “Wesley Chambers.”

  “Isabel Banks.”

  “Thank you,” said Jamie. “So, Chris Hollison, you assaulted a member of the public. You call that not doing anything wrong?”

  “You see?” hissed Lauren, digging her elbow into Chris’s ribs. “I told you to leave the old man alone.”

  “Shut up,” said Chris, the colour in his face darkening. “I’ll handle this.”

  “No you won’t,” said Jamie. “You’ll do what I tell you. Is that clear?”

  “Yes,” said Lauren, instantly. “We don’t want any trouble.”

  Chris shot her a look of utter contempt, and Jamie suddenly understood the dynamic of the group of teenagers standing before him.

  Chris is the leader, he thought. He tells them what to do, and gets off on their obedience. And I bet he really doesn’t like it when someone does it to him.

  “That’s good,” he said. “Luckily for you, the man you assaulted doesn’t want to give a statement, so no charges are going to be brought. But I’m afraid you have a much bigger problem. You’ve seen the three of us.”

  Wesley and Isabel looked at each with wide-eyed expressions of panic, and Jamie felt his heart soften.

  These aren’t bad kids, he thought. They don’t really want to be vampires. They just went along with something and now they regret it. Maybe next time they’ll tell their friend to piss off.

  “Why is that a problem?” asked Chris. His eyes had narrowed and he was looking coldly at Jamie.

  “Because you can never tell anyone what happened here,” said Jamie. “Ever. And I need to be sure I believe you before I can let you go.”

  “We won’t tell anyone,” said Lauren, quickly. “Will we?” She looked round at the others, who responded with huge, exaggerated nods.

  “I might,” said Chris. “Given that I can’t see how you’re going to stop me. You are the ones McKenna wrote about, aren’t you? The vampire police.”

  “Don’t worry about who we are,” said Jamie. “Worry about what will happen if you don’t do what I tell you.”

  Chris narrowed his eyes even further, then smiled smugly. “You can’t threaten us,” he said. “You’re the police. Our parents pay your salaries.”

  Jamie took a step
towards the teenager and let his gloved hands move fractionally towards his belt. Chris glanced down; his smile faltered as he saw the array of weaponry that was now within reach.

  “Tell me the truth,” said Jamie. “Do I look like a policeman to you?”

  Chris didn’t respond, but nor did he step back.

  Jamie pulled his console from his belt, logged into the population database, and entered the names the teenagers had given. The results appeared, showing four matches: all between fifteen and seventeen years of age, all living within a mile of the graveyard. He patched them across to the Department’s civilian control programme and tapped ENTER. A new window appeared, containing an abridged version of the Official Secrets Act, and the first of the names alphabetically.

  “Isabel Banks,” he said, and held out the console. “Sign this.”

  The girl walked forward, until Chris Hollison called for her to wait. She turned back, her face pale with worry.

  “What is it?” she asked.

  “Are you going to just sign something without even knowing what it is?” asked Chris. “What does it feel like to be so stupid? Describe it to me.”

  Jamie felt familiar anger race through him, and told himself to stay calm. There had been boys like Chris Hollison at every school he had attended: bullies, who got what they wanted by intimidation, who gave the impression of being smarter and cooler than everyone else, even though they always turned out to be full of shit.

  And cowards, thought Jamie. They’re always cowards when someone comes along who’s scarier than them.

  They were the boys who had targeted him after his dad had died, sensing isolation and weakness; the boys, he knew, who had made his friend Matt’s life a misery.

  Maybe this won’t be a complete waste of time, thought Jamie.

  “Watch your mouth, Mr Hollison,” he said. “It’s an amended version of the Official Secrets Act. It states that you will never discuss or in any way acknowledge your interaction with the three of us. Sign it, Isabel.”