William Hill - Department 19

Horror beyond anything Jamie had ever felt ripped through him, dumping ice-cold water down the length of his spine and turning his legs to jelly. He looked at Frankenstein.

Nonononononononononononononononononononononono nononononono.

His throat closed, and he gasped for air, bending over and placing his head between his legs, his hands gripping the thick pads on his knees, as he tried not to collapse.

Think of your mother. Don’t let her down now. Think of your mother.

He forced himself back upright and looked at Frankenstein. The monster was staring at him with a look of utter anguish on his face, and he had extended his hands across the table, as though he was reaching for Jamie.

The sight of the gray-green hands at the end of the monster’s uneven arms broke Jamie’s paralysis, and he recoiled, backpedaling away from the table.

“Jamie-” the monster began, but he was cut off.

“You were there,” said Jamie. “I remember now. You were there when they shot my dad.”

“Jamie, I-”

“Were you there or not?” screamed Jamie. “Don’t lie to me anymore! Were you there?”

Frankenstein shot a look of pure murder at Morris, who was looking at his hands, then returned his gaze to the teenager in front of him.

“I was there,” he said.

Jamie felt numb; as if he might never be able to feel again.

“Don’t you ever come near me again,” he said, his voice trembling. “I swear to God, I’ll kill you if you do.”

He turned his attention to Morris, who stared at him with the look of a man who has just committed a crime he knows he can never atone for.

“Tom,” Jamie said, “if you were willing to come to Lindisfarne with me and Larissa, I’d be very grateful. If you don’t want to, I understand. But I need the code to her cell, either way.”

Morris stood slowly up from the table. He avoided the gaze of Frankenstein, who was staring silently at him with hatred burning in his eyes.

“The code is 908141739,” he said, in a low voice. “Give me five minutes, and I’ll meet you in the hangar.”

“Thank you,” said Jamie. “Thank you very much.”

Then he turned and ran out of the Ops Room, toward the elevator at the end of the corridor.

Larissa was lying on her back in the middle of the floor when he ran down the cellblock. She sat up and smiled at him when he skidded to a halt in front of her cell.

“Back so soon?” she asked.

“I told you I would be,” he replied between deep breaths. He composed himself and looked at her.

“I know where my mother is,” he said. “I’m going to finish this, one way or the other, and I could use your help.”

She stood up slowly and stretched her arms above her head.

“There’s not much I can do from here,” she said.

Jamie reached over and pressed the buttons on the keypad beside her cell. The UV field disappeared.

Larissa walked out of her cell and kissed him quickly on the cheek. “Let’s go,” she said.

SPC Central Command

Kola Peninsula, Russia

The two Blacklight helicopters descended toward the SPC base, their engines roaring in the freezing air, their rotors churning the falling snow into spinning flurries. Their wheels skidded across the icy surface as they touched down, then the doors were flung open and Admiral Seward led the rescue team toward the SPC control room.

Twenty Blacklight operators ran across the snow, dark shapes moving quickly through a landscape of pure white. The men shivered as the Arctic wind whipped through the mesh of their uniforms; snow slid in torrents down their purple visors, obscuring their view.

They reached the entrance to the base, skidding and sliding to a halt in front of a ragged metal hole where the heavy airlock door should have been.

“Christ,” muttered one of the operators.

The door had been ripped out of its frame; it lay to one side, buckled and twisted like an empty drink can. The hinges that had held it in place were eight-inch cylinders of solid steel, more than two inches in diameter, and the vacuum seal that connected it to its housing should have been able to withstand an earthquake almost twice as strong as the Richter scale was able to measure.

“Alert One from here onward,” said Seward, and stepped through the hole.

Snow was piled high on every surface in the control room and lay in deep drifts against the sides of the desks and tables that had until very recently been the work stations of the SPC duty staff. In places it had turned a bright pink, as blood soaked up from beneath it.

Admiral Seward almost tripped over the first corpse.

It lay in front of the empty doorway, the body of a man who could have been no more than nineteen or twenty. He was covered in snow, and Seward ordered the men to clear the man’s body. They knelt and brushed the snow away with their gloved hands, uncovering the dark gray SPC uniform inch by inch.

There was a gagging sound from one of the men working at the man’s waist, and Seward stepped up next to him. The man turned away, his hand over his mouth, and the admiral felt his gorge rise.

The soldier had been pulled in half.

Below his waist there was nothing but an enormous quantity of blood, covering the floor in a thick pool.

Admiral Seward split the rescue team into two groups and addressed the first.

“Clear this room,” he told them. “I want these men taken out of here. The rest of you, come with me.”

He left Major Turner overseeing the recovery of the bodies in the control room and led the rest of the men deeper into the base. They walked slowly along a wide gray corridor and into an elevator that stood open at the end of it. Seward pressed the button for the first underground level.

“Search this building floor by floor for survivors,” he said. “I don’t want anyone left behind.”

There was a ringing noise, and the doors slid open. The operators filed out, split into two-man teams, and started checking the doors that ran along both sides of the corridor. Seward watched them until the elevator doors closed in front of him, and he began to descend again.

The director of Blacklight pulled a triangular key identical to the one General Petrov had used little more than two hours earlier from a chain on his belt and inserted it into the slot below the numbered buttons. The elevator swept past the -7 floor and slowed to a halt. The doors opened, and the long rows of heavy vault doors stopped him momentarily in his tracks. Seward had only been here once before, shortly after he was appointed to the position of director. Yuri Petrov, a man he had fought side by side with on several occasions, in some of the darkest corners of the globe, had escorted him down and taken him through the vaults one by one, a personal guided tour of the most secret artifacts the Russian nation had collected over the course of its long history. For a moment, he was overcome by the loss of the SPC men who had died in the control room, the latest casualties in a long, bloody war that the public could never know was being fought. Then he shook his head to clear it and hurried onward.

The corridor was slick with gore and splattered with chunks of scarlet meat, and Seward held his breath as he stepped around the carnage; the air was thick with the scent of blood and the foul stench of the vampires who had spilled it. He forced himself onward until he was at the door marked 31, where he found General Petrov staring at him from the empty table inside the small metal room.

His severed head had been placed upright, his dead eyes pointing toward the door. Blood had run down the metal pillar and pooled at the base, drying black. The face itself was almost unrecognizable; long ridges of purple bruising crisscrossed the skin, the nose and jaw were broken in several places, and the mouth was swollen to huge proportions. But the eyes were clear and full of defiance.