Page 31 of Almost Midnight (Vampire Detective Midnight #8)

CHAPTER 31

THE CITY OF NICE

The scientists inside the research bubble were surprised when Nick told them he wanted to leave right away.

They suggested Nick and his team rest first, build up their strength, eat.

Nick shook all of their suggestions off.

They offered to send a driver with them, but Nick waved that off, too.

He recruited Walker to co-drive the vehicle with him, then asked the science team leader to show them to the specific vehicle they would be using. That same head scientist, a dark-haired, East Indian-looking man by the name of Anand, grudgingly agreed, and led them down an underground passageway and into their site’s garage.

Inside, a slightly larger vehicle than the one they’d taken from the main dome crouched on a cement floor like an armor-plated dinosaur. After the engineering team checked all the shields and tested everything on the panel inside, including the emergency signals, flare guns, comms, and all the sensors, they reluctantly told Nick everything was ready to go.

“It could get dark before you arrive back,” Anand warned him.

Nick nodded. “It’s all right.”

“The sensors could go out. If it’s dark, you won’t be able to see.”

Nick smiled a little wryly. He found the man’s concern strangely touching.

“I’m a vampire,” he reminded the human. “I’ll be able to see just fine.”

The man blinked at that, as if he’d completely forgotten what Nick was, then slowly, but still grudgingly nodded.

“Okay,” he said. “Your friend paid us, and you’re helping us a lot to sustain our dig out here, so I’m not feeling inclined to argue. But I really think you would be better off going when it’s light out. In the morning, preferably.”

“Sorry,” Nick said only, and at that, the other man seemed to give up.

“We’ve got all the maps set to Nice,” he said next, his voice business-only. “If you want to refine that to the specific area of Nice, it programs in just like regular GPS.”

“Got it. Thanks.”

Anand walked away, but Nick couldn’t help noticing the man’s brow never stopped furrowing, and he never stopped looking like he was trying to think up better arguments to persuade him not to go now, but to wait until the next day.

Nick liked the man, but he felt even more certain that they needed to go now.

Something was pushing on him.

He didn’t know what it was, but he trusted the feeling.

It was strange even being back in this part of the world, after all of Nick’s insanely vivid dreams. Even with how completely transformed it was, how totally unrecognizable the land and sky, it was odd to be back where he’d lived the longest, and the happiest.

Dalejem was buried here somewhere.

The thought was more strange now than even sad.

He climbed into the driver’s seat of the dinosaur-like vehicle.

He buckled himself in, and glanced back over his shoulder while one of the engineers instructed the rest of their group to do the same. They warned that this road would be much bumpier than the one they drove to the science dome, and that the belts and cushioned seats would be needed. They buckled Jordan into one of the bucket seats as well, and only cuffed him to the metal poles around his seat once he was completely strapped in, and “couldn’t fly up and slam into the ceiling,” as the man jokingly put it.

Jordan looked a little more awake now.

He stared at the man who buckled him into his seat, almost like he was thinking about biting him.

He didn’t, though. Thank God.

Before they left, Nick handed Damon two bags of synthetic blood out of the cooler they’d given him, just in case. He brought a third bag up to the front seat for himself, figuring it wouldn’t hurt him to feed a bit more, either.

Once everyone had their harnesses on, and knew where their armored suits were located, and once they all understood the different emergency protocols for various problems that might arise, Nick hit the large blue button that started up the armored truck’s engine.

The thing spat and growled and rumbled at him, and when he glanced at Walker, and got a curt nod, Nick threw the massive, ground-chewing thing into gear.

* * *

The dashboard clock ran on a nonstop timer. You couldn’t turn it off, even if you wanted to.

The journey felt slow, although Anand told him it was only about sixteen miles from the driveway of their garage to the water’s edge, which was basically in the center of what had been Nice’s Old Town. It hadn’t been called that in years, of course.

Anyway, where they were going would be a little further.

They had to travel around the cliffs and hills that used to loom over the water, until they reached what had been a small boat harbor.

The grotte was located on the other side of that.

According to the GPS Nick consulted, it was another four miles to there, as compared to just heading straight for the sea.

The first ten miles had been choppy, but mostly flat.

Nick kept expecting to see buildings, to glimpse the hollowed-out husks of landmarks he had known in he and Dalejem’s later years, when Nice first started to resemble the place Nick had visited in his thirties on his home world.

He never saw any buildings, though.

It wasn’t until the three-dimensional map showed him the edge of the sea in the distance that Nick realized that they weren’t going to see any buildings at all.

They were gone.

All of it was gone.

They were driving over the city of Nice even now. The broken, contaminated, irradiated ground was all that remained of the jewel on the water that Nick remembered.

That thought did make him profoundly sad.

The vehicle’s maps led them on a different path than what Nick remembered the last time he’d driven in this part of the world.

Large chunks of the cliffs had been shorn away––by bombs followed by massive landslides, according to Forrest Walker––so they drove along the backside of what remained of the largest of the two mountains.

They eventually made a wide right turn, and after that, they drove directly towards the Mediterranean Sea. They turned again, that time to the left, to avoid a long, narrow bay of yellowish water. From that point, they skirted the eastern edge of a low valley, which was sandwiched between what remained of the massive cliffs.

Much of that valley was flooded now.

Nick guessed he was looking at all that remained of the cute little harbor he remembered.

They had to drive around the flooded zone.

As they did, the all-terrain vehicle gripped the stone and clay and mud and climbed its way up another ridge of land until they were driving right alongside the sea, only on the east side of the cliffs, not the shorn-away faces to the west.

Nick didn’t recognize much of this, either, but from what the map showed him, he knew roughly where he was.

They were just east of what had been the mouth of the old harbor.

The route chosen by the GPS climbed higher than the old road had done, mostly to get them above the water, but they still looked disconcertingly close to the waves on their right side. Nick wondered if they could even get swept out to sea; it was a possibility that hadn’t even occurred to him until now, but one that now struck him as frighteningly plausible.

But the line to their destination had suddenly gotten short.

“We’re almost at the halfway point,” Walker muttered. “With time. That’s including the time needed for the suits.”

Nick nodded, once.

It was still light out, but the orange-brown-gold sun hung lower over the water.

Nick guessed it would be dark by the time they got back to the bubble.

But the idea was not to go back, wasn’t it?

Nick glanced at the gauges.

He looked out the murky window, squinting through the thick, orange and gold air, and realized they’d reached their destination.

That had to be it, didn’t it?

Nick stared at the opening in the side of the mountain.

No building remained there. Whatever had once stood around the opening to the cave had long ago been pulverized in one of the many nuclear blasts. All that remained was that narrow crack visible between two slabs of fallen stone.

Nick stared at it, swallowed.

He looked at the gauges.

Time was being sucked away from them, even just from him staring out the window.

They had forty-nine minutes now, before they had to start heading back.

That included the roughly twenty minutes, each way, in the suits.

If they left it any later than that, they ran the risk of radiation seeping through the shields and through the metal and into them.

Like Walker said, it might not kill them outright, but it could shave years, even decades off the lives of the seers and humans in their group.

The arrows for contaminant levels outside the vehicle were all past the red and into the black part of the gauge. Nick didn’t need an interpreter to tell him what the color chart meant. White was clean, and every color darker than that was less clean. Dark purple came before black, and both of them screamed “death,” but the finality of that black color was clear.

Nick hoped like hell Anand had been right about the suits.

The five-foot-and-change scientist had sounded so confident about the engineering wonder of the armored truck, maybe Nick should have pressed him more about the armored suits they were supposed to wear outside of it.

As he pulled up to the spot indicated on the map and switched the view-screens on all around the inside of the vehicle, he found himself glancing at the stacked bundles that represented the ten armored suits they’d brought with them.

They looked awfully thin to Nick suddenly.

The thought of having only that layer between them and the deadly, irradiated air made him uneasy, to say the least, even before he glanced at the clock.

Then he climbed all the way into the back of the van.

He glanced at Kit and motioned towards the view of the cave wall.

“What do you think?” he asked. “Is it worth sending a drone?”

“We have forty-seven minutes,” she said, pointing at the projection of the time gauge. “Just over thirty-nine to make the loop, and we have to factor in each way. Then we have to head back for the science bubble, or we’re all toast.”

“So no on the drone?” Nick clarified.

“We don’t even know how long it will take us to get into the suits,” Charlie muttered.

Nick agreed.

“Get them on,” he ordered. “Now. We’ll go out and see for ourselves. If we can’t get into the cave, hopefully we can at least get some idea of how unlikely we are to ever get in.”

Everyone had already unbuckled their straps and climbed to their feet.

Morley, who was closest to the stack of suits, began tossing them around to everyone in the back of the armored vehicle. He even tossed one to Jordan, but the vampire was still chained to the wall, and only stared at the folded suit in his lap, his expression annoyed.

Nick was relieved to see a lot more Damon Jordan in that annoyance than he’d seen in his friend in a while. Definitely more than he’d seen since he last tried to talk to the newborn vampire, back on that mountain by the other portal.

Nick shoved his leg into the suit Morley tossed him, jammed his foot into the boot part at the bottom, then repeated the motions on the other side. He zipped up the middle of the suit once he’d finished, got his arms into each side, settled the thick gloves, then zipped the rest of it up to his chin, and hit the button to seal the seam.

He walked over to Jordan only then.

The hood and its mask still hung down the top part of his back.

“I’ll put you down, if you fuck with anyone here,” Nick said, his voice an unambiguous threat. When Jordan glared at him, nostrils flaring, Nick gave him an impatient look. “I don’t mean kill you, stupid… I mean knock you out. And don’t get all hotheaded with me, either. I was a newborn once. I remember how it was. I’m just telling you, you need to control yourself for this. We can’t afford to have you doing anything crazy out here. You open the suit of one of these seers or humans, and you’ll kill them. Possibly instantly.”

Jordan’s expression grew a touch less hard.

Nick gave the other man a meaningful look, anyway.

“You want to do that? You want to kill Charlie? Or the kid?” He pointed at Tai. “You want to have to live with that? Because I promise you, you won’t like it.”

That seemed to get through to the other vampire even more.

Still scowling faintly, Jordan shook his head.

Some of the red in his irises began to lose its brightness.

Nick pulled the key off where they’d hung it on the wall by the vehicle’s main sliding door. He walked over to Jordan, bent down, and pressed it to the lock.

The cuffs opened.

Jordan stood at once.

Everyone but Nick stepped back.

Nick just stood there, measuring the other vampire, while Damon stretched out his limbs, then gingerly picked up the folded suit. He shook it out, and then, with a sudden purpose in his movements, began to pull it on, one leg at a time, just like Nick had done.

Nick, feeling his muscles relax perceptibly, glanced around at the others.

He was relieved to see that most of them were dressed.

Wynter, Charlie, and Tai looked like they’d been helping one another. All of them had their hoods on, too, and had ignited the seals. They looked strangely cartoon-like with their faces made larger and rounder by the green-lit masks.

“The clock’s not running in here,” Nick said, gruff but loud. “Not on the suits, I mean. You can turn on the shielding now. Everyone make sure their suits are working now. I’m not opening that fucking door until everyone is absolutely sure.”

There was a series of sparking, low hums as several in their group turned on their suits.

Tai got hers working first, then Kit, then Wynter, then Charlie.

Walker and Morley followed, then Walker’s mother, Rose, then Malek, and finally Nick yanked up his own hood and turned his suit on, followed by Jordan.

They all examined their own suits, then they examined each other’s.

All of them were working at full power, according to the gauges.

“Okay,” Nick said. “Everybody ready?”

No one nodded.

No one shook their heads, either.

Nick checked the clock.

They now only had eighteen minutes, each way.

Without another word, he walked to the large red button on the side wall of the armored vehicle. He glanced around at everyone a last time.

He found them all looking back at him, eyes waiting, expectant.

Nick lifted the organic safety case with his fingers and punched the button with the edge of a gloved fist.