Larissa Kinley, Valentin Rusmanov and Cal Holmwood reached the edge of the shuffling, wandering mass of survivors, and moved among them. Several of them nodded in their direction as they walked, one or two said hello, or offered half-hearted hugs and handshakes.
God, there are so few of them, thought Larissa. How badly did Valeri hurt us?
Then she saw Kate, clinging hopelessly to Angela Darcy, and she ran towards her friend. She swept Kate out of Angela’s arms and held her tight.
“Oh God, you’re all right,” she whispered. “I’m so pleased to see you. Are you hurt?”
Kate didn’t respond, and Larissa set her down and looked at her. Her blonde hair was matted and dirty, and her eyes were wide; Larissa took in the entirety of her friend’s face and demeanour, and felt panic rumble in the pit of her stomach.
“What’s wrong?” she asked. “Kate? What is it?”
Kate’s mouth curled down at the edges, and her shoulders heaved.
“Is it Shaun?” asked Larissa. “Did something happen to Shaun?”
Kate looked at her friend, nodded and burst into a fresh bout of tears. Larissa wrapped her arms round her again, and looked over her shuddering shoulders towards Angela, who was watching the scene with obvious distress on her face. Larissa grimaced and caught Angela’s attention; she raised her eyebrows in a silent enquiry, and felt her heart sink as Angela just slowly shook her head.
Please no. Oh, please no.
She felt a hand land on her back, and she craned her neck round to see who it belonged to. Jack Williams was standing behind her, looking at her with an expression of enormous relief.
“Thank God,” he said, and wrapped his arms round the two girls. “Oh, thank God you’re all right.”
“You too,” said Larissa. She hugged him back, tightly, although her attention was not really focused on Jamie’s friend. Her eyes were fixed on Kate. “How’s your brother, Jack? Is he OK?”
“Patrick’s fine,” said Jack, releasing his grip. A brief smile crossed his face. “He’s helping down in the infirmary. He’s OK.”
“That’s good,” said Larissa. “That’s really good.”
“Have you seen Jamie?” asked Jack. “He was looking for you. Did he find you?”
“I saw him,” nodded Larissa. “He’s gone to look for Matt. I need to go and help him.”
“OK,” said Jack. “Do you want me to come with you?”
Larissa shook her head. “I’ve got it,” she said. “But I need to go now.”
She turned away from Jack and put her hand on her friend’s shoulder.
“Kate,” she said, softly. “Can you hear me?”
“I’m not deaf, Larissa,” replied Kate, her voice torn and broken from crying. She took Larissa’s hand and squeezed it, and Larissa smiled at her friend’s resilience.
“I have to go and look for Jamie and Matt,” she said. “Are you going to be all right if I go and do that?”
“I’ll be all right,” replied Kate, but Larissa felt her friend’s grip tighten round her fingers. It was only for a moment, less than a second, but it had been there; Larissa had felt it. “Go,” said Kate, letting go and stepping back. “Go and find them. I can’t lose anyone else today.”
Her face threatened to collapse again, and Larissa took a step towards her. Kate backed away, her hands up before her chest.
“Go,” she said. “Really.”
“I love you, Kate,” said Larissa, suddenly. She had had no idea she was going to say it, but she was instantly glad that she had. Kate smiled at her, a smile so small and weak that it almost broke the vampire girl’s heart. “I love you too,” replied Kate. “I’ll be here when you get back. When all three of you get back.”
Larissa smiled at her friend, then turned and ran towards the hangar and the medical containers of blood that would restore her to her full strength.
Jamie let the door of the infirmary hiss shut, his face pale at what was inside.
He had walked Matt slowly up out of the bowels of the Loop, and into the wide, usually spotless white room that housed the medical department of Department 19. Jamie had pushed open the door and been assaulted by a cacophony of noise, and a vision of something that resembled the First World War hospitals he had seen in the old films he had watched with his dad when he was young.
Every bed, and every spare centimetre of floor was covered in bleeding Blacklight Operators. A flurry of doctors and nurses, their white coats long since soaked red, ran among them, dispensing pain relief, applying bandages and gauze, and in several horrible, desperate instances, administering CPR.
An Operator Jamie had once been on a mission to the Welsh valleys with, a man who was barely five years older than him, lay in the bed nearest the door, blood pumping out of his throat. A doctor was leaning over him, his hand inside the wound up to the wrist, and was futilely trying to pinch the arteries and veins closed with latex-covered fingers.
Jamie watched from just inside the door, Matt leaning against his shoulder, as the Operator’s heartbeat, weakly flickering on the monitor that stood beside the bed, collapsed into a flat, endless line, and a screaming beep from the machines he was attached to. The doctor pulled his fingers out of the man’s neck, and immediately began chest compression, alternating every five presses with a deep breath of oxygen into the stricken Operator’s mouth.
But it did no good. After several agonising minutes, a nurse put her hand on the doctor’s shoulder.
“He’s gone,” she said, softly.
The doctor stepped back and staggered, as though his legs would no longer hold him up. Then he set his jaw in a firm line, and moved on to the next wounded man who needed attention.
Jamie was horrified. He had seen men and women die in battle, had seen innocent victims murdered by vampires, but he had never seen anything as desperately sad as the last minutes of the young Operator’s life, had never seen someone’s body simply unable to cope with the damage that had been done to it, even as the finest doctors in the country fought to keep him alive.
“My God,” whispered Matt. “Jamie, there’s so many of them.”
“I know,” replied Jamie. “It’s really bad.”
Blood was running freely across the white floor of the infirmary, and the air, made hot and sweaty by the presence of so many men and women, was punctured every few seconds by screams and deep groans of pain.
In a bed to the right of the two boys, an Operator stared at the ceiling, grinding his teeth together with a noise like chalk on a blackboard as he tried not to scream. His left arm was gone, pulled clean out at the shoulder. A nurse was cleaning and sterilising the wound; when she slid a large hypodermic needle into the ragged centre of the hole, the Operator lost his battle, and screamed at the ceiling, a howl of pain and anguish.
Black uniforms filled the room; a group of Operators were standing in one corner, staring around at their stricken friends and colleagues with looks of open disbelief on their faces. They were clutching broken arms and wrists, holding wads of bandage over cuts and gouges; they were clearly the Operators who had escaped with minor injuries, and Jamie told Matt to go and stand with them.
“Aren’t you staying with me?” asked Matt, panic in his voice.
“I have to go and help,” Jamie replied, softly. “You understand that, right?”
Matt looked at his friend, then pushed out his chin, his jaw set in a firm, straight line.
“Of course I do,” he said. “I’ll be fine down here. Go and do what you can.”
Jamie hauled his friend into a rough bear hug, then released him.
“Thank you,” he said. “I’ll come and check on you as soon as I can. I promise.”
“I know you will,” said Matt. “Just go, all right?”
Jamie nodded, and pushed open the infirmary door. He ran along the grey corridor, and rattled the CALL button beside the lift. It seemed to take an eternity to arrive, and Jamie had to stop himself hopping from one foot to the other with impatience. Then he heard the lift car slow to a halt, and watched the doors slide open in front of him.
Larissa was standing in the lift.
Her eyes were blazing red, and she had her Glock 17 in her hand; her shoulders were tensed, and she was floating a few centimetres off the ground. It was a look Jamie had seen before, on countless missions, but it had never made him as happy to see it as it did right now.
Larissa’s eyes flared as she saw him. She opened her mouth to say something, but Jamie didn’t give her the chance; he hurtled into the lift and wrapped his arms round her, and held on to her as though his life depended on it.
Sleep, when it eventually came to the Loop, and the survivors of Valeri’s attack, did not come easily. Exhaustion, both physical and mental, finally drove the Operators who had either been uninjured, or had been discharged from the infirmary, to their quarters and into their beds, where nightmares awaited them.
The Loop was alive with rumours of the worst kind; no one knew how many Operators had died in the attack, how many were wounded, or turned. Everyone knew that Admiral Seward had been taken by Valeri Rusmanov, and everyone knew that Jamie and his team had brought Frankenstein home; this was news that on any other day would have been cause for celebration, but the Colonel’s condition had merely added to the sense of fear and desperation that permeated the Department 19 base.
There was one question being asked more than any other, throughout the wide, shockingly quiet corridors of the Loop, a question that everyone who had survived agreed needed answering quickly, and well: who was going to lead them with Henry Seward gone?
Jamie and Larissa slept curled up against each other in Jamie’s narrow bed. It was a violation of Blacklight protocol, and their own rules, but neither of them cared; they had been apart as the world had descended into chaos, each of them fearing they would never see the other again, and they had no intention of being parted again so soon.
Matt slept next door, his head swathed in bandages. He had waited patiently in the infirmary until the early hours, until the doctors had tended to the critically and seriously injured Operators, of which there were a frighteningly large number.
Kate lay awake in her bed, far from the sweet void of sleep, her mind racing with images of Shaun, a cruel slideshow she appeared powerless to stop. She had watched, feeling utterly useless, as Paul Turner had carried his son into the Loop, with Cal Holmwood at his side. She had wanted to offer to help, to offer to share the Security Officer’s grief, but she had not been able to make herself do so; instead, she had merely watched.
Colonel Holmwood sat at the desk in his quarters, working. He had finished video calls with the Chief of the General Staff and the Prime Minister, bringing them up to date on what had happened, and answering their panicked questions as honestly as he was able. He had set a watch on the grounds of the Loop, had scrambled the sensor arrays and kept the entire Department at Ready One. Now he was trying to make sense of what had happened, of how things had fallen apart so completely.
Frankenstein slept heavily in a cell on Level H of the huge base; the heavy sedative that Jamie had injected into his throat had still not worn off, and he had shifted back to his human form without waking, sparing him the agony of transformation. He slept curled in the corner of the heavily locked and guarded room, his grey-green chest rising and falling slowly, his face twisted with the pain of bad dreams.
Out on the grounds of the base, two-man patrols walked slowly round the long perimeter, T-Bones at their shoulders. The men were exhausted, to the point of collapse, but they did not complain. Their thoughts were with their friends, their colleagues, lying injured in the infirmary or cold in the morgue, and they would not let them down by dropping their guard.
Eventually, with incredible, painstaking slowness, the watery yellow sun hauled itself into the sky to the east, and the Loop let out a collective sigh of relief.
The long, seemingly endless night was over.
Now would come the morning after.