Alex Van Helsing (5 page)

Sangster seemed to be aiming for the spaces between the trees as though he were skiing. Alex dared to look again in the infrared. The vampires were still in pursuit.

“They’re coming after us because they want that caravan kept secret,” said Sangster, almost casually considering the danger at hand. “We’re close to HQ. Maybe we can lose them.”

Sangster reached up, tapped a button on his glasses, and now in Alex’s goggle vision—surely also through Sangster’s—a GPS map appeared. The image displayed over the view in front of him, so that the map bounced amid the trees.

“Farmhouse,” Sangster said, swerving hard to avoid a branch. The vampires’ shapes were leaping closer.

“Please repeat your request,” came a singsong sound response.

“FARM-HOUSE.”

The GPS view before Alex’s eyes shifted. First it showed one location, which it indicated with the symbol of a little roofed house, and then the camera rose up into the sky and located the motorcycle moving through the woods. Then the GPS drew a line between the two: their path.

“That’s two miles away.” Sangster adjusted his course, heading north. “But we’re gonna have a problem.”

“What?” Alex asked, incredulous.
Vampires chasing us isn’t problem enough?

Sangster was already speaking rapidly into his mike to someone else. “This is Agent Sangster requesting permission to enter Farmhouse accompanied by non-cleared human.”

A voice came on the line. “Could you repeat…?”

“I have a kid with me, I need in,” Sangster said, swerving again, barely able to speak with the bounce of the motorcycle.

“Denied.”

“I cannot—”

“If you enter the perimeter of Farmhouse with a non-cleared witness, you will be shot.”

Alex saw Sangster glance up at the trees. For a split second Alex glimpsed metallic gray cameras, recessed against the firs. The cameras swiveled as they passed. “We’re coming up on the perimeter,” Sangster said.

Alex looked ahead and saw a tree line coming up fast, a large clearing in the woods, with a small, dilapidated farmhouse a hundred yards beyond, a distant white image bouncing behind the trees.

They were running out of woods. Alex felt the bike brake hard on its front wheel. He was weightless for a second as the rear of the bike lifted off the forest floor, swinging violently around as Sangster ground the bike to a halt. The motorcycle dropped back down and they were facing the pursuers now. Alex noticed that Sangster was shifting his weight to guard him. Sangster started firing the rifle he carried.

Buddabuddabudda.
Alex counted seven, maybe eight vampires ripping through the trees.

“Requesting permission to enter with—”

“Negative, that witness was to be left. Leave him and report; we cannot have—”

“Dammit, he’s a Van Helsing,” Sangster hissed. Alex
turned, startled, and looked at him.

Silence on the other end of the line. Sangster tagged one of the vampires in the head, sending it spinning as it burned and dusted. They were landing close, baring their fangs. And now Alex realized he had miscounted—as these eight drew closer, he saw three or four more ice blue cold shapes in the woods.

Suddenly one of the vamps was hit in the head by a round Sangster didn’t fire, a single shot from somewhere at the house.

The radio crackled. “Granted.”

Sangster shouted, “We’re in,” and the bike leapt, spinning once more and hurtling again through the trees and into the clearing with the vampires close behind. Alex felt the bike pick up speed as they moved onto the smooth grass. They were hurtling straight for the tin wall of a small shack next to the house.

Alex winced as a hot electric pulse shot through his headset.

“We’re blowing out electronic communications,” shouted Sangster. “Just in case those guys are miked. We can’t let them report a thing.”

Another shot rang out from somewhere Alex couldn’t see and Sangster said, “This perimeter has to be a dead zone.”

They were ten yards from the wall of the shack.

Five yards and the side of the shack whipped up with a metallic roar, nearly catching the bike’s front wheel. Sangster gunned the engine and Alex held on tight as they drove under the rising wall and began zooming down a long concrete drive.

The bike roared down the grade and commandos ran up, ten or twenty men and women. Alex looked back for a second, and saw the muzzle of a blond woman’s weapon flashing. She left the tunnel, already firing, laying waste to the vampires in the clearing. For a moment she was silhouetted against the floodlights of the farmhouse clearing as Alex and Sangster moved farther and farther below, then Alex turned his head back to the front.

Down, down into the bowels of the earth they sped, past wooden beams and newer, iron girders, down a full half mile at a 30-degree angle until the motorcycle slowed. They reached a vast, concrete expanse lit by high tracks of lighting. It was an enormous bunker under the woods.

Alex felt his eyes grow wide as he took in countless vehicles, Humvees and trucks and even helicopters.

A man in a suit—older, with a slight paunch—was waiting for them when the bike rolled to a stop. As Alex
slid off the bike and removed the goggles, the man folded his arms.

“Alexander Van Helsing. Son of Charles and Amanda. Whatever are we going to do with you?”

“How do you know who I am?” said Alex, coming to stand on legs that, he was proud to note, were only slightly shaky. “And what is this?” He looked around at the vehicles, noticing that at the end of the “garage” was a set of metal staircases leading up into doors in the rock wall. He had no way of guessing how much more space there might be on the other side of the doors.

He looked back at the ramp they’d come down as the contingent of commandos returned with the heavy, staccato sound of boots on concrete.

“Did you get them all?” Sangster asked.

“We got those around the perimeter,” replied the woman Alex had seen as they’d come through the door.
She strode up and laid down her weapon on a table with a number of other rifles like it. The woman was about half a head shorter than Sangster but all muscle, with shoulder-length, dirty-blond hair and a healthy smattering of freckles. “But you gotta figure one or two made it back to the caravan.”

The older man in the suit frowned. “Either way, the caravan will surely be intrigued that they sent a handful of vampires to kill a human witness and the party never returned.” He was watching Alex now, running his eyes up and down. “Let’s not talk here,” he said, looking around. Besides the commandos, there was a lot of activity in the garage, crews working on vehicles and milling about.

Sangster nodded and they all began to move up a flight of metal stairs to a door. Sangster and the woman kept Alex between them as they came through the door and into a carpeted foyer of the kind you’d find in an office building. They moved swiftly, Alex silently taking it all in as they walked past rooms that even at this late hour were filled with men and women busy at workstations, studying dots on massive maps displayed on glass walls.

They filed into a conference room and Sangster indicated a chair halfway down the length of the table. Alex
took it. Sangster sat across, with the woman at Sangster’s right and the older man at the head.

Alex leaned in for a closer look at the long, black table. There were computer screens inlaid in its slick surface. In the center of the table was a sort of crest or shield, a circular symbol that bore a Latin phrase:
Talia sunt
. Below that a single word:

“‘Polidorium,’” Alex read aloud. He looked up. “Who
are
you people?”

The older man gestured at the other two. “This is Agent Armstrong,” he said, and the blond, freckled woman nodded, not smiling. “You’ve met Agent Sangster. My name is Carerras.” He turned to Sangster. “Do his parents know he’s here?”

Sangster shook his head. “He must have snuck out; I think he followed me.”

“We have to decide what to tell the Van Helsings.”

“Hang on,” Alex interrupted, infuriated. “
Stop
. What do you mean, what to tell the Van Helsings—I’m sorry, I—what is this? I mean, those were—those things on the road were…”

“Technically, modified post-initial-failure humans,” said Sangster. “Vampires. What, you’ve never seen them before?”

Alex paused. He came to a decision. “No, actually
I’m starting to see them a lot. I saw one in the woods. It attacked me. I killed it.”

“Really? How did you kill it?”

“Luck,” Alex said tiredly. “Luck. Those things aren’t supposed to exist. And then there was another one.”

“Where?”

“The school. It was outside my window, looking in at me. It chased me across the roof.”

Sangster folded his arms. “Hmmm.” Alex’s eyes fell again on the crest on the table and he thought back to the snatches of conversation he’d caught at the gate. “What is the Polidorium?”

“I can’t believe you don’t know,” Sangster said. After a moment, looking at Carerras and Armstrong, Sangster went on, “
We
are the Polidorium. Founded by Dr. John Polidori in 1821.”

“John Polidori?” Alex asked, thinking of the introduction to
Frankenstein
and the notes about it. “The guy from the Frankenstein party?”

Armstrong ran her fingers through her hair. Even across the table, Armstrong and Sangster still smelled like gunpowder, and it suddenly made Alex feel like heaving. “We like to think of it as the Polidori party,” said Armstrong.

“So,” said Carerras, pulling out a pouch and a pipe.
As he began to prepare his pipe he summed it up. “You don’t know much about vampires, or about us. What can you tell us about
you
?”

Alex looked up. “What do you mean?”

“How old are you? Where did you live before now? And if you’re not up on
us
, what do you know about the Van Helsing Foundation?”

Alex spoke slowly, wondering this time if the truth were the right answer. He told it anyway. “I’m fourteen, and my parents and my sisters live in Wyoming right now. The Van Helsing Foundation, that’s a charitable organization my dad runs as chairman.”

“Wait a second.” Armstrong leaned forward, taking Alex’s glasses off his face in a quick swipe. She held them up to the light, studying them.

“Hey, I need those,” Alex protested. She was a blur now. He couldn’t even make out her face, and the sudden blindness made him feel trapped and claustrophobic.

“He doesn’t wear those in class,” Sangster said. “I’ve never seen you wear glasses.”

“I wear
contacts
,” Alex snapped.

Armstrong was still peering intently at the pair of glasses. “Why aren’t you wearing contacts now?”

“It’s like three
A.M.
!” he said.

Armstrong pursed her lips, then handed them back. “They’re normal,” she said, satisfied. Alex put the glasses back on, very slowly.

Carerras spoke. “You’re aware, no doubt, of the associations of your family name?”

Alex chewed on this, on the absurdity of all of this, the G.I. Joe figures studying his glasses as though they might be made of kryptonite, a man in a suit a mile underground asking this or any question in the middle of the night. “You mean, ‘vampire hunter’? Like in the movies? There are worse names to have,” Alex said. “But yes, I hear a
lot
about it. My dad gets annoyed every time someone even mentions that character. It’s like running around with the name Hannibal.”

Sangster shook his head in something like wonder and addressed the others. “I did some research when I saw his name on my roster of students. He climbs mountains. He rescues hikers. He’s been taught to survive on little or no rest or food. He can drive a combine and ride a motorbike, and he once survived a snakebite by applying a tourniquet to his own leg, nearly causing him to lose a foot.” Alex felt a tinge of pride and fear as his literature teacher recited a litany of things that, over the years, Alex had indeed been taught to do. His father had encouraged all of his children in these things. Well, not
the tourniquet. “And yet
not a single thing
does he know about the one thing he should know most: vampires. He hasn’t been trained to fight them. As far as I can tell he knows nothing of the business.”

Carerras asked, “Have any of the Van Helsings been active?”

“Charles is inactive. We all know about Amanda,” Sangster said, “and—”

“What does
that
mean?” demanded Alex.

Sangster said evenly, “All it means is that without your mother, your father would probably still be on the payroll.”

“This is crazy,” Alex said, rising and shaking his head.

“Can you give us a minute or two?” Sangster looked at the others.

A moment later Sangster and Alex were alone in the conference room and Sangster was pressing buttons on an invisible keyboard in the table. As a projection screen dropped down from the ceiling, he spoke into the table-top. “Gimme a club soda.” He turned to Alex. “You want a Dr Pepper?”

“What are you trying to say about my mother?” Alex said, frowning.

Sangster had an open expression that Alex took to
be one of peacemaking. “Do you want something to drink?” he asked again.

“Whatever.”

Sangster made the order and turned his attention to the keyboard. He hit a button and a jagged, infrared image filled the screen on the wall: a man leaping toward a camera on a balcony somewhere as a politician’s motorcade rolled in the streets below. The attacker’s nails were sharp and his teeth—fangs—were bared.

“We kill vampires, Alex.” Sangster hit the button again and now showed another infrared image, a different vampire leaping onto a car in the motorcade, ripping back the windshield like paper. “Guys like us, some of us hunt terrorists; some of us fight wars. The Polidorium was founded to hunt vampires.”

“Just vampires?”

“Eh,” Sangster said noncommittally. He tapped the invisible keyboard and now brought up an image of a young Italian man in a painting. “This is Polidori.”

Alex tried to remember details of the lecture on
Frankenstein
. That all seemed like a year ago. “We talked about him in class. Mary Shelley makes him sound like an idiot. You said that guy seemed like a loser.”

“Here is what you must know if we are to go forward,” Sangster said seriously. “There are two Polidoris. The
one we read about and the one we honor by serving this organization.”

Now below the portrait of Polidori appeared two columns—two sets of biographical data points.

The door opened and an agent brought a tray with their drinks. Sangster indicated the Dr Pepper and Alex took it as his mysterious teacher continued.

“According to the accepted literature, John Polidori fell out with his friend Lord Byron in 1816, shortly after they stayed here at Lake Geneva. Broke and depressed, Polidori supposedly died of a drug overdose just a few years later.

“Here is what any agent of the Polidorium will tell you if you have the right to hear it, and God help me, whether your father likes it or not, you do.”

As Sangster spoke, he tapped a button and another screen lit up, flashing images: helicopters and motorcycles, machinery and computers, the screens with GPS coordinates of agents moving across the globe.

“John Polidori was not a fool. He
altered
his life, starting after his book,
The Vampyre
, the first modern book on vampires.

“In 1818, as his book was coming out, Polidori faced his first coven of vampires, a group running an opium den in London. He traced those vampires to a clan run
ning a newspaper and a publishing house. He killed several but the vampires began to turn public opinion against the doctor, who was obliged to keep his activities a secret. Polidori soon found his bad reputation useful. By now, he had a mission. He faked his own death and went underground.

“By 1831, when Mary Shelley wrote her revised
Frankenstein
, everyone remembered Polidori as an idiot—Mary included. She even changed her description of what he was writing about—nowhere does she use the word
vampire
; instead she makes up a story about a skull-headed lady.

“But Polidori made friends. Among other people, in the late 1830s he met the young Abraham Van Helsing, who
was
a real person, despite what you’ve heard. Bram Stoker met him when Van Helsing was an old man and wrote his book
Dracula
based on Van Helsing’s story. A long time before that, Van Helsing had used some of his own considerable wealth to help Polidori create this organization. When Polidori did die—in 1851, thirty years
after
his reported death—the Polidori Society stretched across Europe and the United States and was receiving money from the black budgets of every nation. From time to time they continued to work with the Van Helsing Foundation—your father’s research foundation.”

“The VHF is made up of scholars and doctors,” said Alex. “They make malaria vaccines and run clinics in third-world countries. I don’t see any of those guys chasing vampires through the woods.”

“They do more than that, but the activities you are talking about give them reason to operate across the planet,” said Sangster. “And when they need firepower, they call the Polidorium.”

Alex stared at the image of the Italian doctor who had worked with his—
what would it be?
“So Abraham Van Helsing was my—”

“Great-great-great-grandfather,” said Sangster. “That would be
three
greats.”

“Do you know my father?”

“Not personally.”

“But he was an—he was what you are.”

“He was an agent, yes.”

“He never told me any of this,” Alex said, and now he flashed on the white-fanged creatures pursuing him through the woods.

And then on something else.

“If you did research on me,” Alex asked slowly, “then do you know about…”

“About your old school?” Sangster asked calmly, when Alex found that he couldn’t complete the sentence. Alex nodded.

Back at Frayling Prep, Alex had felt the jagged static for the first time. At the beginning he had put it down to being away from home at boarding school, the ache of homesickness for the six family members he’d left behind. But then he noticed that the static only seemed to occur in the presence of one fellow classmate, a guy named Max Pierce. Pierce seemed harmless enough—sure, he picked on some of the younger students, but he was nowhere near as mean as Merrill & Merrill, despite what Alex had told Paul, Sid, and Minhi in Secheron earlier that day. But Alex couldn’t get over his unease. He’d confided in his father, who told him he probably wasn’t getting enough sleep, and that it was just migraines. “They run in the family,” his father had said.

And then the incident. Studying late one night in the library, Alex had looked up at the window in time to see a figure hurry out of the chapel on the Frayling campus. At that moment Alex felt that static again, pounding in his brain, driving him out onto the grounds.

He had found Pierce, in a tree, peeping into one of the girl’s dorms. Pierce’s shoes were off and he was using his toes to balance, and when Alex called out to him, Pierce had swiveled toward him with a lustful, drooling look. It was as though Pierce were possessed by some animal part of himself. Pierce launched himself at Alex.

Pierce hadn’t fought like a kid; he fought like a
maniac, clawing and biting. Alex defended himself using the techniques he had been taught—and a quickness of reflex that seemed to come out of nowhere. The fight was brutal and fast, and accompanied by a sound that Alex could only define as “snarling”—animal-like snarling, coming from Pierce’s snapping mouth. And at the end of it, Pierce lay there, bleeding from the nose and mouth, unconscious. Horrified at what he had done and unsure of what he had seen, Alex had begun to shudder uncontrollably, and that’s when the dean came out of his office on his way to his car and found them.