Darkest Night

“I think I can handle it,” said Pete. “Let me sort some things out up here. I’ll give you a call in a couple of days.”

Pete roused himself from his memories and returned his attention to his computer. He was reviewing the entire log of calls made to their helpline, aware that it was almost time for him to help Greg welcome the latest batch of volunteers. The public response to SSL had so far been beyond their wildest expectations; the projections they had given to their board had predicted three hundred calls a day by this point.

The previous day, they had taken nine hundred and twelve.

The phone operators were working incessantly, starting early and staying late for no reason other than faith in what they were doing. The blood drives, where SSL volunteers took fresh, clean blood from slaughterhouses into communities and made it available to any vampire that wanted it, were also proving massively popular; in Birmingham two nights earlier, they had run out of blood in less than two hours. Pete was in the process of trying to secure more stocks as Greg worked to bring in new volunteers, both for the main Lincoln office and to run the regional projects; after barely three months, SSL already needed every pair of hands it could find.

What struck Pete most as he scanned through the call logs was how often the same names appeared, time and time again. SSL did not record transcripts of the calls it received – they had promised their callers anonymity, and Pete was adamant that they adhere to it – but each call did have a number of acronyms marked against it. Some were obvious – a capital V for vampire, a capital H for human – whereas others were harder to decipher: SI for suicidal ideation, TTCH for threatening to cause harm, ATHK for admits to having killed, and many, many others. Most callers did not identify themselves in any way, but perhaps as many as fifteen per cent gave their names; it seemed to Pete, from the acronyms beside those particular calls, that they were largely men and women who were dealing with crushing guilt, who were searching for absolution. The phone calls he was looking at represented probably the only chance vampires had to speak openly about the things they had done, about the life that had been thrust upon them.

Pete scrolled through the log list, and paused. A name halfway down the fifth page had caught his eye, a name that seemed familiar. He realised why at the same moment Greg Browning knocked on his office door and stepped through it.

“Morning, mate,” he said. “Ready?”

“Morning,” said Pete. “Come in for a second.”

Greg frowned, but closed the door and walked across the office. “What’s up?” he asked.

Pete pointed at the name on the screen. “Recognise him?”

“Albert Matheson,” read Greg out loud. “Doesn’t ring a bell. Should it?”

“Not really,” said Pete. “He was the vamp the Night Stalker killed a couple of months ago. I read about him at the time.”

“No shit?” said Greg. “ATHK too. I guess he was confessing.”

“He was a convicted child molester,” said Pete. “He probably had a lot to confess.”

Greg shrugged. “Poor bastard,” he said. “Does it bother you, mate? That he’s dead, I mean? Because given what’s going on out there, he probably won’t be the last vamp who calls us and ends up getting killed.”

“I know that,” said Pete. “And no, it doesn’t bother me. It was just weird to see his name on the call log.”

“Weird,” said Greg, and nodded. “Close that down, mate. It’s time to meet the new recruits.”

Pete rolled his eyes and got up from his desk. He followed Greg out into the open-plan centre of SSL, full of people talking into phones and concentrating intently on computer screens. As they made their way across the space, several of the volunteers looked up and nodded; Pete nodded back, smiled, and stepped through the door in the corner of the office that his friend was holding open for him.

Standing at one end of the small boardroom was the latest group of men and women who had volunteered to be a part of SSL. There were eleven of them; they were mostly young, apart from a couple of middle-aged women and one man who looked to be in his sixties, at least. They all appeared nervous, and Pete moved quickly to calm them down.

“Morning, everyone,” he said. “I’m Pete Randall, and you’ve already met Greg Browning. Thank you all for volunteering to help us out here at SSL. We appreciate it more than you can imagine.” He watched smiles rise on to several of the new volunteers’ faces and continued. “I’m not going to go over why Greg and I founded SSL, or what we’re trying to do here, because I’m going to assume you wouldn’t be here unless you already knew what we’re about. What I am going to tell you is that what we do here is really, really important. The existence of the supernatural is the biggest social issue to hit this country in many decades, quite possibly the biggest there has ever been, and everybody’s struggling to keep up with the pace of change. Including us.

“As you know, the second S in our name stands for Survivors. It’s a big word, and to us it means anyone who has been adversely affected by an experience with the supernatural. We’re not just talking about people who have been attacked, or whose family or friends have been killed. We’re also talking about vampires themselves, the majority of whom never wanted to be turned and are simply trying to get through each day without doing any harm. They are survivors too, of a monstrous violation. At SSL, we view everyone equally, we don’t prioritise humans over vampires, and we don’t judge anyone for the things they might have done. Ever. Is that clear?”

The volunteers nodded as one.

“Good,” he said. “Those of you who work the phones are going to hear things that will upset you, that will probably make you angry. You need to be prepared for that. And those of you who work in our outreach teams are going to come face to face with things that are frightening, possibly even terrifying. It’s hard work, and it’s not always popular, I warn you now. There are plenty of people out there who think that there should be no help or sympathy for any vampire, so be careful who you tell that you work here. ‘Vamp sympathiser’ can be a dangerous label to be stuck with. So if you decide that SSL isn’t for you, we won’t think any less of you, I promise. But if you stay, you’ll have not only our gratitude, but the gratitude of everyone who wants the world to be a better place than it is.”

Pete stopped, and surveyed the group. He had given the same speech at least a dozen times in the last fortnight, and was pleased to see it have the same effect it always did; the nervousness on the faces of the volunteers was gone, replaced by clear-eyed determination.

“Any questions?” he asked.

Silence.

“All right then,” said Greg, casting a smile in Pete’s direction. “There’s a six-week probationary period, but I’ve got a good feeling about you all. You’re on the side of the future.”

(#ulink_6b29b0e1-ff5b-5fc1-a0ed-9b26920fccbf)

Matt Browning looked up from his screen and squeezed his eyes shut. Dots of light whirled and spun across his field of vision as a dull ache pulsed down the back of his head and across his shoulders; he had been in the Lazarus Project labs for almost seventeen hours and he was absolutely spent.

He sat back in his chair, stretched his arms above his head in an attempt to lessen the knots in his neck and upper arms, and checked the time. It was just after 10pm, but the lab was almost full; the Lazarus staff were prone to working until they could no longer keep their eyes open. There were perhaps half a dozen desks unoccupied, but Matt knew they would not remain so for long; they belonged to those men and women who had drifted into nocturnal cycles of working and sleeping, and who would likely arrive any minute to start shifts that would go through the night.

Matt glanced to his right and saw Natalia looking at him; she grinned, before turning her attention back to her screen. He stared at her, marvelling, as he always did, at both her very existence and the impact she had had on his life. The talk had happened almost five months ago now, and there was no longer any doubt: she was his girlfriend.

His first girlfriend.

The first girl he had ever kissed. Or done … anything else with.

Matt blushed at memories that were never far from his mind, feeling heat rise into his face. He doubted he would ever understand why the brilliant, beautiful Russian girl was interested in him, but, for one of the very first times in his life, his prodigiously powerful brain had steered him through the ever-present clouds of self-doubt. Its message had been simple: don’t question this, don’t overthink it, just hold tight with both hands and refuse to let go. Because relationships tended not to end well for those who had given their lives over to Blacklight, including those he considered his closest friends, and nothing, absolutely nothing about the future was certain.

Kate and Shaun.

Jamie and Larissa.

In a display of resilience that Matt could still scarcely comprehend, Kate had managed to move on from the terrible sight of her boyfriend lying dead in front of her, his neck broken, his eyes wide and staring up at nothing. But although she had found the strength to keep getting out of bed each morning, Matt didn’t believe for a second that she was really, truly over what had happened to Shaun; he doubted, in all honesty, that she ever would be.

He had similar doubts about his best friend. It was painfully clear to everyone that Jamie still missed Larissa so much that it hurt, despite his protestations to the contrary. Matt had been furious when Kate told him that Larissa was gone, had disappeared into the night without so much as a goodbye, so he could not imagine the depths of anger and misery Jamie must be feeling. In truth, Matt had worried for a while that it might prove the final straw; his friend had been beset by a trio of revelations that would have been hard for anyone to deal with – the truth about his dad, and Frankenstein, and the sudden disappearance of the girl he had relied on far more than he wanted people to know – and it had taken Matt a number of long weeks to truly believe that Jamie was going to be able to carry on.

Be grateful, he told himself. For Natalia, and Jamie, and Kate, and for the simple fact that you’re still breathing in and out. Because the world could literally end at any moment.

Matt looked around the long rectangular space that comprised the Lazarus Project’s central laboratory. There were three more large labs, sealed behind airlocks and disinfectant showers, along with a twenty-four-hour canteen and two corridors of quarters for those men and women who chose to eat and work and sleep without ever setting foot beyond the project’s borders. He briefly considered trying to persuade Natalia to call it a day as well, but saw the lines of data scrolling down her screen and decided not to disturb her. He would send her a message later. With that settled, he reached for his mouse, intending to log out of the Lazarus network, and paused as a window popped open at the bottom of his screen.

He groaned inwardly. The window was an automated notification, informing him that the results of his most recent set of data runs were now available, and for a brief moment he considered pretending he hadn’t seen it and leaving as he’d intended. But he knew he couldn’t; he knew that wondering about the results would prevent him sleeping, regardless of how tired he was. Instead, he clicked the window open, and double-clicked on the secure link that would load the results. While the computer worked, Matt lowered himself back into his chair and waited.

The data he had brought back from San Francisco had allowed Lazarus to take giant leaps forward; it was no exaggeration to claim that it had saved years of research and development. To best handle the huge amount of new data, the project had subsequently been separated into eight smaller teams, each working independently, each focused entirely on one aspect of the search for the cure. Matt’s team had been tasked with analysing the protein coat and envelope of lipids that enclosed the genetic material of the vampire virus itself, and had made rapid progress, to the point that it was widely believed they had learnt all there was to learn.

It was clear that the genetic material inside the virus was responsible for the DNA rewriting that took place in the early stages of the turn, and contained the trigger which began the physical alteration, but Matt had retained a nagging suspicion that the key to undoing the transformation lay in the protein coat rather than what it surrounded, and he had designed structure after structure based on that suspicion. The results that were now loading were the last of what had been officially listed as a dead end, a line of enquiry that the project had moved on from, but which Matt had found himself strangely unwilling to drop.

The screen filled with data, with page after page of equations and genetic analysis. Several lines of text and numbers were purple, and Matt recognised them instantly; they were the protein pairs that had been extracted from the DNA in John Bell’s blood, the first reliable building blocks for what would eventually be the genetic blueprint of a cure for vampirism. Matt scanned the rest of the lines, reaquainting himself with the structure he had built, one of literally thousands that he had sent into the supercomputer array for testing over the last year or so. Forty-three per cent of the structure had been confirmed when he sent it in, which was about normal for a test formula; it didn’t sound like much, but the percentage had been a lot lower before Matt scraped John Bell’s blood and flesh up from the tarmac beneath the wheels of a truck.

Matt tabbed past the structural overview to the preliminary testing results, and sat forward to read them. He skipped the document’s first section, which was the Analysis Team’s assessment of the design he had submitted, confirming that it met all the criteria to be taken forward for testing. The second section detailed the results of their attempts to physically produce the gene itself, hundreds of lines generated by the sequencers and growth managers showing that this particular gene could be provisionally manufactured with ninety-seven per cent reliability. The third and final section showed what had happened when the gene was introduced into cells infected with the vampire virus, and was always the point at which hopes were dashed. Every set of test results had concluded with the word NEGATIVE, eight letters that every member of the Lazarus Project had come to both hate and expect.

But as Matt looked at the screen, he saw that this report was different; there were two words at the bottom of the document, rather than one, and they were words he had never seen before.

VIABLE REACTION

Matt was suddenly aware that his mouth was incredibly dry. He stared at the screen, trying to comprehend what he was seeing, trying not to let his brain go racing ahead of itself, then picked up the phone on his desk and dialled the number for the testing laboratory.

“Analysis,” answered a voice.

“Hey,” said Matt, trying to force himself to at least sound calm. “I sent a sample through three days ago and I’ve just got the results back. Can you tell me if these are simulated findings?”