“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.