Chapter Thirteen
Cam tried not to panic, purely for the reason that he couldn’t draw enough air in if he did and then his vision greyed until he knew he was on the brink of passing out. He could feel his pod being moved about and stared up in terror when the lid began to slide open.
“Help.” His voice was barely more than a whisper.
“Get out!” snarled the man peering down at him.
“I c-can’t m—”
“Oh, Christ!” Another face came into view. This one an older woman with a face that looked like it hadn’t smiled in a long time. “Those imbeciles have activated the spinal crush!”
“Wh—”
Again, Cam’s words were cut off by the woman’s words.
“De-activate it then! Don’t just stand there!”
Cam screamed – the sound louder in his head than in reality as his breath was too shallow to create more volume. Sharp pain, worst than he’d ever felt, stabbed at the back of his neck, and ran down his immobile limbs.
“Get a gurney,” ordered the woman. She glared at the retreating figure of the man before leaning forwards and staring at Cam.
“Welcome to the Initiative,” she said with a smirk.
Cam didn’t have the energy left to try to speak.
“We’ll get you on some oxygen,” Maggie Walsh said. “Your lips are looking a little blue.”
A squeaking noise took her attention from Cameron and he found himself being manhandled onto a hospital type gurney. He closed his eyes against the strobe effect of the overhead lights as he was pushed quickly along the corridors.
A team of white coated technician’s efficiently stripped Cam of his clothes and to his horror, inserted a catheter into his penis. He could only imagine how much that should have hurt. A nose-clip was attached and he could feel the flow of oxygen into his nostrils, making breathing a less of a problem.
“What have you done?” he wheezed. “I want to go home.”
Maggie pushed the techs out of the way and looked down at him. “We need to talk to you about hacking into our computer system.”
He moved his head slightly to the side. “Why c-can’t I m-move?”
“Hmm. Now that wasn’t planned. The idiot who put you in the pod activated the spinal clamp we use on the vampires.”
A tear rolled down his cheek. “Will I…is it…?”
“Permanent?” supplied Maggie almost cheerfully. “That is something that I don’t know. In vampires when it’s removed they are active immediately.” She waved a hand over his body. “Whereas you, quite obviously, are not. But it’s your mind I need not your body, so it doesn’t really matter all that much.”
Cameron opened his mouth to speak.
“I know you don’t think of it like that – but since you violated my company’s security, I don’t care what you think.”
“Mom…” whispered Cam, the effort of speaking almost too much for him.
Maggie stroked her fingers down Cam’s cheek and he hated that he couldn’t swat her hand away, that all he could do was move his head an inch or so.
“Will kill you,” he managed to finish.
Maggie lightly slapped his face and laughed. “Oh child, you are so amusing. She will never find you.”
*~*~*~*
The knuckles of Buffy’s hands showed white and the armrests on her seat creaked in protest. She was barely a quarter of the way to England and it felt like it was already too late. The Initiative had the use of supersonic aircraft, and so Cameron could have been there for hours. She hadn’t wanted to kill something so badly in a long time.
She turned to Craig and couldn’t decide if she was pleased or horrified that he flinched away from her, when their eyes met.
“Don’t call us, Mom. Have a great time, Mom. I’ll call you if we need you, Mom,” she said coldly.
“Mom…”
She raised a hand to stop his words and this time a pang of guilt ran through her. Her own son was afraid of her.
“Tell me everything that you know.”
Craig sighed and shifted in his seat. “I’ve told you. I know Jack. Jerry and Cam were working on this. I swear I didn’t know.”
“You should have called me when he cut class.”
“I know.” Craig’s head hung low. “I know, Mom.”
Buffy rested her hand over his and resisted the urge to grind it to a bloody pulp. Instead she squeezed it gently.
“He’ll be all right,” she said, hoping it sounded convincing.
“But what if he’s not?” Craig risked a glance at her.
“If he’s not – I’ll kill whoever hurt him and then we’ll deal.”
“They could be human, you don’t—”
“Like I said. I’ll kill whoever hurt him.” Her eyes bored into Craig’s and he nodded slightly.
“Sound’s good to me.”
She finally allowed her thoughts to turn away from her son’s plight to the knowledge that Spike still existed. To think of him back in the place he feared so much was almost worse than her worry for Cameron’s safety. She loved him but her priority for now had to be her son. Squeezing her eyes shut against the threatening tears, Buffy took several long slow breaths, willing the panic rising inside her to subside. Would she see either of them again?
If anything happened to Cam…
*~*~*~*
Jerry made his way home via a dingy back street bar. He knocked back several shots before finally venturing home, needing to get some sleep before going to work the next day. He put his front door key in the lock and turned.
The explosion was so severe that pieces of the door were found across the street and the police had to cordon off a wide area whilst Jerry’s scattered remains were picked up.
*~*~*~*
Spike came to, with a jolt.
Clawing at his neck, he panicked at the heavy sensation of water in his lungs. He was in total darkness and thrashed wildly to try to get his head above the surface of the water. His leg was caught somehow and although his hand could reach out of the water, his head was still submerged.
“Look! I saw something!” the child, a pretty blonde haired girl of about five years old, cried out pointing to a spot in front of the small boat she was travelling in.
“Oh, Jessica, for goodness sake, sit still. You’ll fall overboard,” chastised her mother, singularly unimpressed at her husband’s choice of a family day out. A damp walk across moorland, where a few depressed looking sheep were grazing and now they were in a small boat as it travelled along a narrow cave.
Their words were indistinct but Spike rapidly brought his hand back to his side and lay still, not daring to move until they had been gone for fifteen minutes. Then he began to try to pull his leg free. His artificial knee joint somehow seemed to be attached to the wall, and it took his probing fingers twenty minutes to free it.
During this time, several other boats had passed overhead – each one causing Spike to freeze. Remaining still was getting more difficult as the icy water chilled him to the bone, making him shiver almost uncontrollably and his thoughts sluggish. Eventually he dared to move and pulled himself along in the direction of the weak current.
*~*~*~*
A technician walked towards Cameron with a couple of syringes in a shallow metal dish. Cam tried to recoil and bit back a sob when his body didn’t respond.
“Please help me.”
The tech smiled at him.
“Now just try to relax,” she said.
Cam watched as she inserted a needle into a vein on the back of his hand, and stitched it into place. Noticing the boy’s eyes on her she explained.
“I’m fixing it so that it doesn’t pull out when you're moved.” She attached a line to the needle and connected it to one of the three bags hanging on a metal stand next to Cameron’s bed.
“Moved…where?” Cam didn’t realise that talking could be physically so hard.
“You don’t need to worry about that.”
Cam disagreed but decided it wasn’t worth the effort.
“This one will help you remember.”
Not long after the tech had administered the drug into Cameron’s vein, Maggie reappeared along with several severe looking older men.
“Hello, Cameron. Or should I call you Cam?” She continued before he could reply. “Now you are going to tell us all about what you and Jerry discovered.”
His eyes widened at the mention of Jerry’s name. He intended on saying that he didn’t know anything but instead he began to recite everything that he had found out. By the end of the session, Maggie knew what he knew and was a lot happier. News had come in from the States that Jerry was no more and even the fact that the former slayer and her other son were on their way to England couldn’t affect her good mood.
Only Cameron and Jerry knew the Initiative’s actions regarding Seventeen and the attack on Craig Evans. One was dead and the other completely at her mercy. The fact that Cameron hadn’t had a chance to speak with Jerry, or anyone else about it was more than she could have hoped for. With one dead and the other completely at her mercy, the leak was well and truly plugged. She glanced upwards. Maybe there is a God, after all!
She stalked out of the room to her office and sat behind the desk. Her index finger activated the button on the intercom.
“Rebecca, get Roger Futter in here right now.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Leaning back in her chair, she decided it was time to test the mettle of the man she’d put in charge of the UK operation.
Five minutes later a visibly flustered Roger was ushered in by the secretary. Maggie indicated that he sat down opposite her and noted that he perched on the edge of it nervously.
With a sigh, she said, “Well, Roger. We have a little problem here don’t we?”
“I’m sure we’ll get him back, Maggie. The Capture Squad is working on it now, admittedly it’s more difficult in daylight hours as we can’t use the trackers or hunters,” the man babbled.
“Get who back?” asked Maggie coldly, leaning forward in her seat.
Roger paled. He knew of Maggie Walsh by reputation and seeing her glare at him was bringing up stories about her that he’d thought were exaggerated.
“Um…” He swallowed hard. “Isn’t that why you wanted to see me?”
“Get who back?” repeated Maggie.
“S-seventeen. We lost him on his last training exercise before being brought back into active service.”
“You what!” Maggie yelled and stood up. “The creature is tagged – how can you lose it?”
“We’ve just found the tracking device. Seventeen must have taken it out.”
“Have you seen the procedure when the transmitter is inserted?”
Shaking his head, Roger replied, “No. No I haven’t. I don’t watch the surgical operations.”
Maggie loomed over the seated man. “You do know that it’s in the vampire’s penis, don’t you? Would you want to try to take it out if you had one?”
Roger blushed crimson. “No, I would not.”
“So how did Seventeen’s transmitter come to be separated from him?”
“We…er…we fear he might have dusted.”
“You don’t know?” Maggie threw her hands in the air. “Just what sort of operation have you been running over here? The cameras are still working, I take it. It shouldn’t be too difficult to track it down from what they can see. They are designed to withstand the vampire dusting.”
The colour drained from Roger’s face once more. “We shut the eyes down, in the hope it would make him stay in one place, and now we can’t reactivate them.”
“You better bring me evidence that he is dust, because if one of our vampires is running about out there, there will be hell to pay! The UK is only adjusting to the use of vampires – this could set the whole program back months!”
“I have been producing a documentary about our work to promote what we’re doing,” said Roger, trying to regain a little respect. “We have some wonderful footage.”
“I’ve seen what you have so far,” said Maggie, taking her seat again. “Which vampire did you use to showcase our operation?”
“Seventeen,” he mumbled.
“Yes, Seventeen. So when this is shown to the public and the talk-shows want you on them with Seventeen beside you – what exactly are you going to tell them?”
Roger decided that looking at the carpet was infinitely less scary.
After a pause, Maggie said, “That wasn’t why I wanted to see you.”
Eyes widening at the thought that Maggie hadn’t known about the fiasco he’d just blurted out, Roger looked up.
“I need you to arrange a little car accident,” she continued.
“What?”
“Two people are heading for London with the intention of attacking the facility. I have their identities and the flight number, and I want you to make sure that they never arrive.”
Roger half stood, before a glare from Maggie made him think better of it. “A terrorist threat sounds like a matter for the police.”
“The police?” Maggie laughed harshly. “And what would the police do when they take them in for questioning and they say we have kidnapped a relative?”
“Well, that just proves how ridiculous their claim is. We have nothing to hide,” said Roger boldly.
“We don’t?” Maggie quirked a brow and nodded in the direction of the bank of monitors on the right hand wall.
As he watched one turned on, revealing the figure of a youth lying naked on a bed. Roger turned his head away with distaste when he saw the catheter in the boy’s penis.
“Oh, and when one of our security men transported him here from America, he accidentally paralysed him from the neck down. What do you think the police will think of that?”
This time Roger did manage to get to his feet. “I’m not a part of this! Why are you showing me this?”
“Sit down!” Maggie slammed her hands on the desk. “You are the head of this branch – if we don’t contain it – you will be held accountable for anything that is discovered. You!”
“Oh, dear God.”
“Now, will you order the hit on the terrorists?”
Roger knew that he was trapped. “I’ll do it at once.”
“Good.”
Maggie watched Roger walk out of her office, before she picked up the phone. She activated the scrambler before she spoke. “I want Roger Futter under twenty-four hour surveillance. If he so much as breathes out of place, take him out of the equation.”
Smiling, she put the telephone receiver back in its cradle and began to go over some papers that she had brought with her from the States.
*~*~*~*
Cam concentrated on breathing in and out, in and out. He was exhausted after the drugs they’d used to get him to tell them everything had worn off, and he struggled to get enough air. A woman in blue hospital scrubs approached and he cringed inwardly as she stared at his naked body. Why hadn’t they covered him up?
He opened his mouth to plead for her help but the effort was too much and as he fell unconscious his breathing arrested.
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