Jesus, he’s my age. What happened to him?
Then the boy was gone, rushed toward 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 backward, 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 had 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 leaned down toward 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 leaned 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 backward. The backs of his legs collided with the fallen stretcher that had been occupied by the girl, and he went over to 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 own 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.
Jamie’s head was pounding, his vision darkening, his chest burning. He needed air now, or it would be too late.
As he felt his eyes beginning to close, something huge flew across his narrowing field of vision. There was a loud crunching sound, and suddenly, blissfully, the pressure on his throat was gone. He opened his mouth and took a giant, terrified breath, his chest screaming, his pounding head thrown back as oxygen flooded into his desperate lungs.
There was an incredible commotion in the hangar above and around him, but he barely registered it as he realized with savage, victorious elation that he wasn’t going to die.
Not now, at least.
His vision was clearing, the thumping noise in his head starting to recede, when a dark shadow appeared above him and knelt down. Jamie looked up at the shape crouching over him; the image came into focus, and he stared into the face of Frankenstein.
“Can you sit up?” he asked, his voice surprisingly gentle, and Jamie nodded.
He pushed himself up with his elbows and looked around the vast hangar. Scientists and doctors were clustered around the fallen soldiers, but almost everyone else was staring at him, concern and fear mingled on their faces. A rush of panic shot through him, and he looked for the girl that had attacked him.
“Don’t worry about her,” Frankenstein said, as though he could read Jamie’s mind. “They’ve got her.”
He pointed to the left, toward the open doors. Jamie turned his head to look, and smiled weakly at what he saw.
Two soldiers were holding up the girl. The whole left side of her face was swollen, her arms and legs dangling limply above the ground. As Jamie watched, a scientist slid a hypodermic needle into her neck and depressed the plunger, sending a bright blue liquid into her jugular vein.
Two doctors picked the stretcher up from the ground, righted it, and wheeled it over to the soldiers, who lowered the girl on to it. The doctors zipped the plastic sheet back into place, as Jamie stared at the figure beneath it. The girl’s chest was slowly rising and falling.
“She’s not dead,” he said, softly. “But they shot her. I saw the bullets hit her.”
“She’s not dead,” confirmed Frankenstein. “She’s something else.”
8
THE LYCEUM INCIDENT, PART II
Beneath the Lyceum Theatre, London
June 3, 1892
The valet descended first, hand over hand down a rope, a lamp hanging from his belt. The hole was pitch-black, but the flickering gas light was strong enough to pierce the edges of the darkness, and he touched down gently.
“Twelve feet, no more,” he shouted up to his master. He heard the old man instruct Stoker to find fifteen feet of ladder, smiled, then surveyed the area with his lamp.
He was standing in a round chamber, built of large white stones that had been turned a speckled gray by years of dust and darkness. Four arches were set into the walls of the chamber, the stone crumbling in places but holding steady. The same could not be said for the passages that led away from three of the arches; the roofs had long since given way, collapsing into piles of broken masonry that blocked the way completely. The fourth passage was clear, and its stone floor was scuffed with footprints.
The wooden feet of a ladder thudded to the ground behind him, then Van Helsing and Stoker made their way down, one after the other, holding lamps of their own.
“What is this place?” asked Stoker, his eyes widening as they adjusted to the gloom.