LITMIR.BIZ

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      Stoker and the valet stepped up into the conductor’s box. In the middle of the floor was a heavy wooden trapdoor.

      Van Helsing turned to the night manager and the valet.

      “Be very, very careful from here on,” he said.

      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.

      

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