“A few days, maybe longer. Once the swelling on his brain has gone down, we’ll wake him up. And then we’ll see.”
The man shook his head quickly, and when he looked at Jamie again he was all business.
“Go on, get out of here,” he said. “Go and find Colonel Frankenstein. And don’t come in here again without permission. This boy is in a very delicate condition, and the next twenty-four hours are vital.”
Jamie backed toward the door, unable to tear his gaze from the teenager’s blank, pale face. There were no lines on his skin, no wrinkles or blemishes; he looked like a mannequin.
“What’s his name?” he asked, as he reached the open door.
“Matt,” said the doctor, who was consulting the chart for a second time. He didn’t look up as he answered. “Matt Browning.”
Jamie walked down the corridor outside the infirmary, keeping his eyes on the gray walls, looking for an elevator. Just before the corridor ended in a flat black screen that stretched from floor to ceiling, he saw a button marked CALL outlined on the wall to his right. He pressed his thumb to the button and waited.
Seconds later the wall in front of him slid open, revealing a metal elevator. He stepped inside and examined the fluorescent yellow buttons set into a black panel at waist height; they were marked 0, A, B, C, D, E, F, G, and H. The C button was glowing red.
Well, at least I know where I am. That’s a start. He looked at the piece of paper the doctor had given him. Level E. Two more floors down.
He was suddenly overcome with the desire for sunlight and fresh air. He didn’t want to go further into the depths of this strange place.
He pressed the 0 button. The door slid closed silently behind him, and the elevator started to rise with a soft whirring noise and a gentle rattling of metal. When the doors opened again, Jamie found himself looking down yet another gray corridor. However, at the end of this new passage were a pair of double doors striped with yellow and black, and he had a feeling that these led back into the hangar where he had been attacked.
He walked toward the doors, noticing as he did so a thin digital ticker set into the wall above them, yellow- green capital letters scrolling right to left, over and over.
0652 / 10.22.09 / SHIFT PATTERN: NORMAL / THREAT LEVEL: 3
Ten to seven. My alarm wouldn’t even go off for another fiftyfive minutes if I were at home.
He crept up to the double doors and inched one of them open. The huge sliding doors that opened onto the runway were now shut, and the hangar was deserted. Jamie walked out into the middle of the huge room, painfully aware of the quiet slapping noise his trainers made on the concrete floor.
He walked across to a door at the right-hand edge of the giant double doors and tried its handle. It turned, and he stepped through it into the cool bright morning air.
Jamie Carpenter jogged across the wide concrete landing area in front of the hangar, then cut onto the grass, heading toward the long runway that sliced through the center of the vast circular base. He sprinted across it, his feet pounding the tarmac, his arms pumping, his mother’s face looming large in his mind, his heart heavy with worry.
He bore right and darted between two of the long metal huts that lined this side of the runway, hit open grass and accelerated, running toward the high wire fence in the distance and the bright red laser net beyond it, the giant projection rippling above him, hanging in the clear sky like a painted cloud.
But as he approached the fence, he saw something that seemed totally out of place. About fifty yards inside the high wire wall, a circular section of the grass, perhaps twenty feet in diameter, had been dug up and replaced by a rose garden.
A waist-high red brick wall ran around the edge, with an opening facing away from the fence and back toward the base. Inside a thin path of wooden boards widened into a semicircular area against the back wall, flanked on both sides by roses of every conceivable color: red, white, pink, yellow, even a purple so dark it was almost black.
Jamie slowed his pace and walked through the gap in the wall. He was immediately overcome by the scent of the flowers, the subtly different aromas of the many varieties mingling into a heady, pungent smell so rich and luxurious that it took his breath away. He wandered down the narrow wooden path, intoxicated by the garden’s incongruous beauty. At the back of the garden, Jamie could see a small bronze plaque set into the brick wall. He crouched down in front of it and read the words that had been engraved on it, in simple, elegant lettering. IN REMEMBRANCE OF JOHN AND GEORGE HARKER WHO DIED AS THEY LIVED: TOGETHER
Jamie sat down next to the plaque, his back to the wall, and closed his eyes. He sat there for a long time, the scent of roses in the air, feeling more alone than he had ever felt in his life, wondering where his mother was, wondering whether she was even still alive.
Some time later, he could not have said how long, he heard the soft crunch of footsteps coming across the grass. From his low vantage point he couldn’t see beyond the walls of the garden, and so he waited for whoever was approaching to present themselves.
The head that appeared above the low brick wall was grayish green, with a shock of black hair combed comically neatly into a side parting and two thick metal bolts emerging from the neck below. Frankenstein stepped through the entrance to the garden, turning his enormous frame sideways so he would fit through the gap, and walked along the wooden path, the thump of his feet against the boards deafeningly loud, an ominous sound at odds with the gentle smile that regarded Jamie as the monster approached.
Frankenstein wore a dark gray suit, the white shirt open at the collar, the huge metal tube that he had fired in Jamie’s living room again hanging from his right hip. He sat down next to Jamie without a word, seemingly perfectly content to enjoy the garden and the morning sun that was bathing it in warm yellow light.
“How did you find me?” Jamie asked quietly, his gaze focused on the roses in front of him, rather than on the man beside him.
“Infrared sensors in the ground,” Frankenstein replied, his voice irritatingly cheerful. “You left a nice red heat trail on the monitors. Wasn’t hard to follow.”
Jamie grunted.
“So you found me. What do you want?”
“I want to talk to you, Jamie. There are things you need to know. Things that are going to be hard for you to accept.”
“Like what?”
The monster looked away, and when he spoke, it was in a soft voice. “A long time ago, I made a promise to protect the Carpenter family. One of your ancestors saved me, and in his memory I’ve kept my word for more than half a century.”
“Saved your life?”
“Yes,” Frankenstein replied, then looked at Jamie. “But that’s not the story I want to tell you now. That one’s for another time.”
“But-”
“Don’t ask me. I’m not going to tell you, so let’s not waste our time.”
Jamie looked at the monster. Frankenstein was regarding the teenager with something that seemed close to love, and he wondered what had happened to provoke such loyalty. Suddenly, Frankenstein’s fury in the hangar made sense; he had let Jamie get away from him, in a place where anything could have happened to him.
“OK,” he said. “So is that it? I’m guessing it isn’t.”
“I’ve concluded that the best way for me to continue to honor that promise is to tell you what I think you need to know. I think it’s too late for your life to ever go back to being normal, if it ever was. Would you agree?”
“Yes,” said Jamie, simply.
Frankenstein nodded and began to talk. “My suspicion would be that your father never really told you very much about your family. Am I correct?”
“He told me I had an uncle who died when he was very young. And that my granddad was a pilot in World War II. That’s about it.”
“Both those things are true. Your uncle Christopher died at birth, when your father was six years old. And John, your grandfather, was a highly decorated pilot. He flew a Hurricane during the Battle of Britain. Did you know that?”
