Читать книгу Department 19 - Will Hill, Will Hill - Страница 15

Chapter 7

IT’S HARD TO BREATHE WITH A HAND AROUND YOUR THROAT

The lighting in the dormitory switched to a purple ultraviolet as the alarm hammered into Jamie’s skull. Frankenstein pulled a radio from his belt and keyed in three numbers. He held the radio to one ear, placed a giant hand over the other, and listened.

“What’s going on?” Jamie yelled. Frankenstein held a hand out towards him and turned away, his ear hunched into his shoulder, trying to hear what was being said on the radio.

Jamie looked around. There was a door in the wall to his left, and he ran towards it, desperate to get away from the noise that was making his head swim and his stomach churn, desperate to get away from this place and find his mother. Frankenstein reached out and grabbed for him but Jamie saw it coming, slipped around the outstretched fingers, shoved the door open and ran through it.

He had just enough time to register that he was in a long grey corridor before something crashed into him and he sprawled across the smooth floor. His head cracked the ground hard, and he saw stars as a voice shouted at him, and he sat up.

“What the hell are you playing at?” A short, overweight man in a white doctor’s coat was standing over him with a look of extreme annoyance on his face. “Who are you? What are you doing here?”

“I’m Jamie Carpenter,” he shouted. “Can you tell me where I am? Please?”

“What did you say your name was?” the doctor yelled, his eyes wide.

Jamie repeated it.

“Christ. Oh Christ.” The doctor looked around, as if he hoped there would be someone to tell him what to do. “You’d better come with me,” he eventually yelled, extending a hand towards Jamie. “Seward’ll skin me alive if anything happens to you. Come on, on your feet.”

Jamie hauled himself upright.

“Where are we going?” he yelled.

“Arrivals,” the doctor yelled back. “Something’s inbound, so it’s the safest place for you to be.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s where the guns are.”

Jamie ran down endless corridors, his head ringing with the relentless wail of the alarm and the thumping strobe of the purple lights. The doctor was short and round but he ran with a grim determination, his jaw clenched, his eyes staring into the middle distance, and Jamie found himself sprinting just to keep up.

The doctor finally stopped running in front of a wide lift platform, little more than a steel frame striped black and yellow. Jamie stepped on to it, the doctor pushed a button set into one of the metal columns, machinery far above them ground into life, and the platform began to ascend. Its passengers doubled over, hands on their knees, trying to catch their breath.

Jamie pulled air into his lungs and stood up straight. As he did so, they passed a cavernous open floor, in the middle of which hulked a vast angular shape, purple track lighting on the walls and floor illuminating tantalising details: three huge sets of wheels, a dark triangular fuselage, and two wide wings that stretched almost to the walls. Jamie crouched down as they rose towards the ceiling, but the shape disappeared below him as the lift continued its ascent.

“What was that?” Jamie asked.

“Don’t you worry about that,” wheezed the scientist in reply. “You keep your eyes in this lift.”

Jamie looked at him, then shrugged and turned away.

Fat idiot. Don’t tell me where I can’t look.

Gears crunched above his head and the lift started to slow. They were rising through a dull grey shaft, which suddenly opened out into a wide room, full of movement and noise.

One whole side of the vast semi-circular room was open on to a wide tarmac area that led out to the middle of the long, brightly lit runway. Inside, two lines of black-clad figures, eight wide, were stood facing the huge open doors, submachine guns set against their shoulder, pointing out into the darkness. A chill ran up Jamie’s spine when he saw them.

I’ve seen people like this before. They look like soldiers, they look like the men who—

He couldn’t let himself finish the thought. He looked away from the dark figures, and saw the round crest he had seen in the white corridor, stencilled high on the huge hangar wall. The same three Latin words were stamped below it, running almost the entire length of the vast surface.

Lux E Tenebris

Behind the rows of soldiers, dozens of white-coated men and women bustled across the vast concrete floor of the room – hangar, it’s a hangar, they don’t make rooms this big – shuttling stretcher trolleys and IV drips back and forth, shouting instructions and questions to one another. A steel shutter door slid upwards to Jamie’s right and four figures in full biochemical hazard suits pushed a pair of metal trolleys covered in plastic oxygen tents into the hangar.

In the distance, Jamie heard the heavy thud-thud-thud of an engine.

“Incoming!” yelled one of the soldiers.

“How much time?” asked a tall, skeletally thin man stood behind a portable computer array on a heavy steel trolley.

“Ninety seconds!”

The activity in the hangar accelerated, doctors and scientists and soldiers running in every direction, the heels of their shoes and boots drumming on the concrete floor.

A huge crash boomed out to Jamie’s left, and he jumped. A heavy metal door had thumped open, slamming against the wall with a deafening clang. Frankenstein thundered through the door, his huge head surveying the room. His eyes locked on Jamie’s; he smiled a smile with absolutely no humour in it, and came towards him.

Jamie stood frozen to the spot as Frankenstein crossed the hangar in a dozen of his giant strides, grabbed him by the neck of his T-shirt and lowered his enormous head down so they were face to face. His mouth was set in a spirit-level-straight line, his jaw clenched, deep breaths blasting out of cavernous nostrils and blowing the hair from Jamie’s forehead.

It’s trying hard not to kill me. Really, really hard.

Frankenstein’s wide misshapen eyes, the pupils slate grey, stared into Jamie’s. Eventually, the monster spoke. “That will be the last time you run away from me,” it said. “Do you understand?”

“I—”

“Say nothing,” Frankenstein roared. “Not a word. Nod if you understand. I don’t want to hear your excuses. Do you understand?”

Jamie nodded, then turned his head away, tears of shame and humiliation coming to the corners of his eyes. Several of the troops and doctors had stopped what they were doing and were watching the confrontation, even as the blinding lights of a helicopter illuminated the wide landing zone beyond the hangar doors; Jamie could no more meet their stares than he could that of the giant in front of him.

Movement in the corner of the hangar caught his eye. A section of the blank concrete wall slid aside, and four black-clad figures emerged. They wore large black machine pistols on their right hips, short black tubes on their left, from which wires ran to shallow square tanks on their backs. Jamie recognised the tubes immediately – they were a smaller version of the weapon he had seen Frankenstein fire in the living room of his mother’s house.

My God, this is all really happening. I’m not going to wake up.

My mother is really gone.

The four soldiers emerging from the hidden corridor took up positions, two on either side of the door, and a figure strode quickly out of the darkness, through their guard, and headed towards the giant open side of the hangar. The newcomer was dressed in the same sleek black gear as the others, but without the deep purple visor. Jamie saw a flash of grey hair, swept back from the man’s forehead. As he strode across the concrete floor he cast his eyes quickly around the hangar, and they met Jamie’s. Surprise rippled across the man’s face. He turned to one of the soldiers, said something, then marched across the hangar towards Jamie.

“Victor!” the old man shouted, crossing the distance rapidly. Frankenstein looked round, saw him coming, and swore under his breath. Then he looked back down at Jamie, his eyes clearing, as though he had forgotten he was holding a teenage boy by the neck of his T-shirt, and swore again, loudly this time.

He’s not really angry with me. It’s something else. He looks scared.

Frankenstein released Jamie and told him to stand up straight. Jamie did so, grudgingly, as the old man arrived before them.

“Victor,” he said again. “Can you explain to me why there is a civilian teenage boy inside the most classified building in the country? I hope you can, for your sake.”

Frankenstein stood straight as a board, towering over both Jamie and the old man.

“Admiral Seward,” he said, from above their heads. “This is Jamie Carpenter. I pulled him out of his house as Alexandru was about to tear out his throat, sir. His mother is missing, sir. And I didn’t know where else to take him, sir.”

Seward did not appear to have heard anything after Jamie’s name. He had recoiled, visibly, when he heard it, and now he was looking at the boy with a look of complete surprise.

“Jamie Carpenter?” he said. “Your name is Jamie Carpenter?”

“Yes,” replied Jamie. He was beyond confusion now, and when Frankenstein barked at him to say sir, he added “Yes, sir” without objection.

Admiral Seward was rallying, his composure returning.

“Ordinarily, I would tell you it was a pleasure to meet you,” he said to Jamie. “But this is not an ordinary night, nor has it been an ordinary day by the sounds of it. And you...” He trailed off, then regrouped. “I would like to see you in my quarters, Mr Carpenter, when this matter is resolved. Victor, will you escort him?”

Frankenstein agreed that he would, and then the helicopter landed outside the hangar doors and everything started to happen very quickly.

*

As its rotors began to wind down a door slid open in the sleek metal side of the chopper and a black-clad figure jumped down on to the concrete and waved an arm, beckoning the scientists forward. As white coats rushed across the landing area, the soldier reached up into the belly of the helicopter and helped a man in a biohazard suit down to the ground. The hood of the suit had been removed, and the arm was torn open. Blood, sickeningly bright under the yellow-white lights of the helicopter, shone through the hole. The soldier threw the man’s other arm around his shoulders and half walked, half dragged him towards the hangar.

Admiral Seward strode out to meet them, his voice loud above the rapidly declining helicopter.

“Report,” he demanded.

“Sir, his pulse is weak, his leukocyte count is through the floor. Sir.”

As the soldier gave his summary the scientists in their biohazard suits arrived beside him, pushing a stretcher. They unwound the injured man’s arm from the soldier’s shoulder and lifted him on to it.

Admiral Seward turned and watched as the scientists, almost running, wheeled the stretcher back across the hangar and through a heavy metal door marked with yellow warning triangles, then turned his attention back to the helicopter, from which more figures were emerging.

A second soldier and a woman in a biohazard suit leapt down from the chopper and pulled a plastic-covered stretcher out after them, extending its wheels and rolling it towards the hangar door. Even from his vantage point at the back of the hangar, Jamie could see that this stretcher wasn’t empty. There was a dark shape lying under the plastic, spotted with red.

“Stand aside,” Seward yelled as the stretcher approached the crowd of gawping men and women. “Clear a path, for God’s sake.”

He strode around in front of the stretcher and led it towards a pair of double doors, directly past Jamie. He stepped forward to take a look, and felt his heart lurch. Lying beneath the plastic sheeting was a teenage boy, his skin pale, his breathing so shallow it was almost nonexistent, a huge wad of bandages pushed gruesomely deep into a wide hole in his throat.

Jesus, he’s my age. What happened to him?

Then the boy was gone, rushed towards the hangar exit by running doctors. Jamie stared after the stretcher, fear crawling up his spine as reality crashed into him.

That could have been me.

There was a commotion out by the helicopter. A second stretcher was being unloaded from the chopper’s belly, and this one was also occupied.

Jamie pushed forward through the crowd of soldiers and scientists, meeting the stretcher as it arrived at the vast open hangar doors. He looked down, then took a stumbling step backwards, his heart in his mouth.

Staring straight up at the distant ceiling of the hangar, her face set in a grimace of pain, was the girl from the park, the girl who had attacked him only hours earlier.

The girl whose face he had seen in the window the night his father died.

He gasped with shock, and she turned and saw him. She smiled. “Jamie... Carpenter,” she said, her voice cracking, but sounding oddly as though she were trying to smile through the pain. The stretcher lurched to a halt, and the scientist pushing it stared at Jamie.

“How does she know you?” he asked, his voice dripping with suspicion, and more than a little fear. “Who the hell are you?”

Jamie looked blankly at him, trying to think of how to answer such a question, but then the girl spoke again, in a voice too low for Jamie to hear.

He leant down towards the plastic tent.

“What did you say?” he asked. Behind him he heard Seward’s voice asking what was happening, and then Frankenstein saying his name, his voice loud and urgent. He didn’t care. There was something beautiful about the girl’s brown eyes, even through the heavy plastic sheeting, and he leant even closer, and repeated his question.

“Your... fault,” the girl said, then broke into a wide smile, all traces of pain suddenly gone from her face.

A hand gripped his shoulder, and he knew without looking that it belonged to Frankenstein. But before he had time to move the girl sat upright, dizzyingly fast, with the plastic tent still covering her, and threw herself at Jamie.

She crashed into him, chest high, and he was knocked flat on his back. His head thudded against the concrete floor, sending a bright pillar of pain shooting into his brain. The girl landed on him, straddling his waist, the awful smile still on her face. Jamie saw Frankenstein grab for her neck with his gloved hands, but she swung a plastic-coated arm and sent the huge man sprawling backwards. The backs of his legs collided with the fallen trolley that had been occupied by the girl and he went over it, his head smacking hard on to the ground.

Jamie saw this happen through a thick fog of pain, his eyes trying to close, a deafening high-pitched sound ringing through his head. The girl lunged forward, still covered in the plastic sheet, opened her mouth, then buried her face in his neck.

Jamie felt the sharp points of her fangs through the plastic sheet, felt her mouth squirming for purchase , and opened his mouth and screamed, until the girl sat up and placed her hands around his throat, cutting off the air supply to his lungs.

I can’t breathe. She’s going to strangle me.

He looked up dimly at the hideous plastic-coated apparition that was killing him. The girl was bleeding again, dark red spots pattering the inside of the sheet, and she was howling and screaming and tightening her grip on his neck with every passing second. He could hear voices yelling from a long way away, and he saw two more figures – he couldn’t make out whether they were soldiers, scientists, or something else – grab the girl and try to pull her off him. Both were sent sprawling by casual flicks of the girl’s left arm, which left his throat for a millisecond before returning to exert its deadly pressure.

“Shoot her,” he heard someone shout in a voice that sounded like it was coming from underwater, and there were a series of loud cracks, like fireworks. The girl bucked and jolted, and blood soaked the inside of the plastic sheet, some of it spraying through the holes the bullets had torn and landing on Jamie’s face in a fine mist. But still she did not release her grip.

Jamie’s head was pounding, his vision darkening, his chest burning. He needed air now, or it would be too late.

As he felt his eyes beginning to close, something huge flew across his narrowing field of vision. There was a loud crunching sound, and suddenly, blissfully, the pressure on his throat was gone. He opened his mouth and took a giant, terrified breath, his chest screaming, his pounding head thrown back as oxygen flooded into his desperate lungs.

There was an incredible commotion in the hangar above and around him, but he barely registered it as he realised with savage, victorious elation that he wasn’t going to die.

Not now, at least.

His vision was clearing, the thumping noise in his head starting to recede, when a dark shadow appeared above him, and knelt down. Jamie looked up at the shape crouching over him; the image came into focus and he stared into the face of Frankenstein.

“Can you sit up?” he asked, his voice surprisingly gentle, and Jamie nodded.

He pushed himself up with his elbows and looked around the vast hangar. Scientists and doctors were clustered around the fallen soldiers, but almost everyone else was staring at him, concern and fear mingled on their faces. A rush of panic shot through him and he looked for the girl that had attacked him.

“Don’t worry about her,” Frankenstein said, as though he could read Jamie’s mind. “They’ve got her.”

He pointed to the left, towards the open doors. Jamie turned his head to look, and smiled weakly at what he saw.

Two soldiers were holding up the girl. The whole left side of her face was swollen, her arms and legs dangling limply above the ground. As Jamie watched, a scientist slid a hypodermic needle into her neck and depressed the plunger, sending a bright blue liquid into her jugular vein. Two doctors picked the stretcher up from the ground, righted it, and wheeled it over to the soldiers, who lowered the girl on to it. The doctors zipped the plastic sheet back into place, as Jamie stared at the figure beneath it. The girl’s chest was slowly rising and falling.

“She’s not dead,” he said, softly. “But they shot her. I saw the bullets hit her.”

“She’s not dead,” confirmed Frankenstein. “She’s something else.”