Department 19: The Rising (57 page)

Thousands of miles apart, three men who had never met found themselves in three very similar prisons.

In the town of Staveley, Greg Browning strode down the hallway of his small house, stepped round his wife’s trembling figure and marched up the stairs. He threw open the door to his son’s room, which was exactly how he had left it, right down to the socks on the floor and the half-finished coffee on the desk.

Mould was sprouting above the rim of the mug, but Matt’s mother had refused to move it. It was as if she believed that touching anything, tidying anything, in any way accepting that life was continuing to move forward, meant admitting that her son was not coming back. He had been returned to her once, and she still believed, in some deep, hopeful part of herself, that if everything stayed exactly as it was, then he would come home to her again.

When she heard the door open above her, she uttered a plaintive wail and ran up the stairs after her husband. She reached the open doorway, saw him digging through the chest of drawers next to Matt’s bed and shrieked.

“What are you doing, Greg?”

He rounded on her, his eyes blazing.

“I’m doing what we should have done the minute we knew he was gone!” he bellowed. “I’m looking for what made him do it! There has to be something here, Lynne. He was God knows where for more than three months, then he’s home for two and he disappears again? Are you bloody stupid? He didn’t just go for no reason, Lynne. It has something to do with where he was all that time!”

Across the hallway, Matt’s sister woke in her cot and began to cry.

“Don’t, Greg!” begged Lynne. “Oh, please don’t!”

“Go and see to the baby,” Greg said, shoving the drawers closed and sitting down heavily at Matt’s desk. He flicked his son’s computer on and watched the monitor flare into life. He looked round and saw his wife standing in the doorway to the bedroom, staring at him with something that was close to hate.

“Go and see to the baby!” he roared.

Lynne recoiled, then fled across the landing. Greg double-clicked on the Internet Explorer icon as he heard his daughter’s cries start to lessen, and opened the browser’s history.

What the hell was going on with you? There had to be something.

The screen filled with a list of websites, and a sudden tightness gripped his chest.

Vampires Among Us. The Crimson Coven. Garlic and Crosses. LifeBlood. They Walk At Night. The Undead Resource. Vampires: The Last Free Spirits.

Without warning, images flashed into Greg’s mind, images he had worked so hard to suppress.

The girl in the garden. Matt’s neck, his poor neck. Blood.

Fear crawled over his skin, and he shook his head, hoping to
clear it. The images receded, but they refused to leave entirely; they crowded at the back of his head, just out of reach, whispering darkly. Greg covered his face with his hands and leant back in his son’s chair, away from the screen, away from the list of names and what they meant. He sat that way for a long time, trying to find the courage to face what had happened that night, to truly face it, not just pretend it no longer mattered once his son had come home.

Eventually, he lowered his hands, and lifted himself up from the chair. He left the computer on; he didn’t want to touch it, or have to look at the screen again. He flicked the light off in Matt’s room and was about to pull the door closed behind him, when a single beep sounded in the darkened bedroom.

Greg Browning turned back, and saw an instant message flashing in the corner of his son’s monitor. He walked back to the desk, and opened it.

In his empty house on Lindisfarne, Pete Randall sat waiting for the phone to ring.

He had been waiting for it to ring for almost three months, since the police had made their way over from the mainland to tell him that although they were still officially listing his daughter as missing, he should start to come to terms with the fact that she wasn’t coming back, and try to move on with his life.

“What life?” he had asked, before telling them to leave.

He was sitting in the tattered armchair by the living room window. On the window sill beside him, a mug of tea had gone cold, and developed a film. Mrs McGarry from three doors down had made it for him, when she had stopped by earlier to see how he was doing. She had started doing this most days, even though his answer, a broken, desultory ‘Fine’ was always the same, even though they
invariably sat in silence for the duration of her visits. She came anyway, though, most days. Her husband had been lost on the night Lindisfarne had died, and she was coping with the hole that been opened up in her world by keeping relentlessly, almost manically busy.

Pete, on the other hand, was not coping.

Not in the slightest.

If they had found Kate’s body, he would have killed himself; he knew it with absolute certainty. It would have been a simple decision, a logical equation based on what remained in his life that was worth living for. If Kate’s body had been found, there would be nothing, and he would have gone gladly into the dark.

But her body had not been found, not by the armies of police divers who had dredged every millimetre of the island’s small coastline, not by the dogs and forensic scientists who had combed through the woods and meadows, millimetre by painstaking millimetre. And that meant he had hope; not much, little more than a pitifully flickering ember, but enough. Enough to keep him breathing in and out, and enough to keep him staring at the phone, waiting for the call that would tell him she had been found, alive and well, and asking for him.

Today,
he thought to himself.
Today will be the day she calls. Today she will come home.

Far beneath the burning Nevada desert, Julian Carpenter lay on the bed in his cell on National Security Division 9’s detention level.

In one hand he held a small rectangle of paper that had been hidden in his wallet behind one of his many driving licences, this one in the name of John Sullivan of Great Falls, Michigan.

The rectangle was a photograph.

It was creased and torn, battered by time. But the lines and small tears did nothing to diminish the power of the image, power that he sought to draw on yet again, power that had sustained him as he made his long journey through the dark heart of America.

Marie Carpenter sat easily on the stone wall at the bottom of the garden of their old house in Brenchley, Jamie standing beside her. Julian’s wife looked as happy as he could remember seeing her; her face was lit by the bright sunlight that had been shining down when the photo was taken, but also by a wide, beaming smile that filled him with equal amounts of love and pain when he looked at it.

Jamie looked embarrassed, in the way of teenagers everywhere when they are forced to pose for a family photo, but his eyes were bright and clear, and his arm was draped casually round his mother. He was half-smiling at the camera, at his father behind it, his brown hair blowing in the summer breeze.

Julian Carpenter gripped the photo in his hand. Bob Allen had come down personally to give him Henry Seward’s response to his request; he had told Julian he owed him that much at least. When Bob had explained to him that Seward was refusing to let him see his son, he had not screamed, or yelled, or attacked the NS9 Director. He had merely thanked him, and lain back down on his bed.

He had known there was a chance that Admiral Seward would say no, but he had not quite, in the deepest depths of his heart, been able to believe that Henry would stand between him and his family.

He knew that his reappearance would cause shock inside Blacklight, and he knew that they would have every reason to be suspicious of it, suspicious of him; he didn’t begrudge Henry that, not in the slightest. But he had hoped that surrendering himself to
NS9 custody would have given his old friend some confidence that his motives were pure, that all he wanted was what he had asked for, the chance to make sure his only son was all right.

It’s not Henry’s fault
, he thought.
There wasn’t anything else he could do, you old fool. Jamie’s an Operator now: no one is even supposed to know he exists, let alone just turn up out of the blue and ask to speak to him. Stupid. Now you’re stuck in here, no use to Jamie, no use to Marie, no use to anyone. Just a stupid, useless old man in a cell under the ground.

Tears began to flood down his cheeks, and patter softly on to the narrow mattress, but he made no effort to brush them away; his gaze remained fixed on the only two things in the world he still cared about.

Eventually, long hours later, he fell asleep, and dreamt of his family.

My endless thanks and gratitude go, first and foremost, to my agent Charlie Campbell and my editor Nick Lake.
The Rising
is a long novel, and was a long process from first draft to finished book, and their support, creativity and endless patience helped get me through it.

My friend Katherine Wheatley saved my skin by introducing me to Dr Lewis Dartnell of University College London when I was fast approaching the point of scientific despair. Lewis is the reason that the genetic explanation for vampirism makes as much sense as it hopefully does; he answered my (extremely basic) questions about DNA and gene therapy with admirable patience, and very kindly managed not to laugh while doing so. Where the science is accurate it’s thanks to him; where it isn’t it’s unsurprisingly down to me.

My friend Matt Powell and I spent five weeks driving seven thousand miles across the USA, in which time much of the climax of
The Rising
was researched and plotted. For the endless coffees and racks of ribs, for his truly expert map reading and patient willingness to discuss the finer points of how someone would attempt to sneak into Area 51, and above all for
Mysterons
, my love and thanks go to him.

My girlfriend Sarah coped admirably with the mood swings and bouts of manic hyperactivity that characterised the final months of the writing of
The Rising
, my petulant sulking whenever she refused to immediately put down what she was doing and read a new, slightly altered version of a chapter, and my turning our living room into an Armageddon of printouts, spider diagrams and post-it notes. Thanks for always being on my side.

Love and thanks, as always, go to my friends and family – Mum, Peter, Sue, Ken, Joe, Mick, Adam, Paul, Iso, Rich, Clemmie – and the fabulous teams at HarperCollins and Razorbill – Laura, Tom, Alison, Ben, Rebecca, Rosi, Lily, Tom, Sarah, Rachel, Tom, Kate, Geraldine, Mary, Tiffany, Sam, JP, James.

Lastly, my heartfelt thanks to everyone who read
Department 19
. As a debut author, my fingers were crossed that a few people might read the book, and hopefully like it – as a result I’ve been completely overwhelmed by the number of people who have taken the time to send me tweets, Facebook messages, letters, drawings and emails telling me they enjoyed
Department 19
and expressing their excitement about
The Rising
. I hope it lived up to your expectations.

Will Hill
London, January 2012