Battle Lines. Will Hill

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      13

      SOCIAL NETWORKING

      STAVELEY, NORTH DERBYSHIRE

      ONE WEEK EARLIER

      Greg Browning put on his headset and prepared to talk to a man he had never met.

      He was sitting at the desk that had been his son’s, in the room where Matt had slept until he was taken away by the government and their faceless, terrifying men in black. It was now almost a month since Matt had disappeared for the second time, and three weeks since his wife had taken his daughter and left him. If their son returned, he supposed there was a chance that she might come back, but he didn’t really care, one way or the other; something had broken inside his wife when her son went missing for the second time, and he no longer recognised the woman she had become. In truth, Greg had been relieved when she finally packed her bags. With her gone, there was nothing to distract him from the only thing that still interested him: making the government pay for what they had done to his family.

      His boss had tried several times to talk to him about what he referred to as his obsession, but Greg had refused to discuss it. When he had eventually been called into the office and told that he was being let go, he had not been surprised; his work had been slipping for months, since the first time Matt had been taken. He bore his boss no ill will; the man was incapable of seeing the truth of the world around him.

      A mental-health worker from the local authority had visited him several days later, presumably at his former employer’s suggestion, and he had answered her questions with unfailing politeness. Shortly afterwards, a Disability Living Allowance cheque had arrived, followed by another a month later. The cheques were proof that the council had categorised him as mentally ill, but he saw no need to correct them; there was a pleasing symmetry to local government financing his crusade against the government.

      It was like a snake volunteering to eat its own tail.

      Three days after the government had stolen his son away in the night for the second time, Greg had defied his wife’s hysterical protests and started a systematic search through the history on Matt’s computer. He had immediately found a long list of sites about vampires and the supernatural, but nothing he considered out of the ordinary; it was mostly kid’s stuff, about blood and fangs and things that went bump in the night. But, as he had been about to close the machine down, an instant message had appeared in the corner of the screen. He had followed the instructions it contained, not really knowing why he was doing so, and found himself looking at a website that felt like the first genuinely real thing he had ever seen.

      The site, which had no name and a URL that was a seemingly random string of numbers and letters, was devoted to a simple concept: that vampires were real, that the government was aware of their existence and maintained a top-secret force to police them. It contained written accounts, blurry photographs, snippets of crackly audio recording; nothing that would have convinced the casual observer. But Greg Browning was far from a casual observer; he had watched an unmarked helicopter land in the middle of his quiet suburban street, stood aside as men dressed all in black forced their way through his house, pointing submachine guns at him and his son. And in his garden, he had seen a girl whose body was so severely injured that she could not possibly have been alive rear up to bite a man wearing a biohazard suit, before tearing his son’s throat out in front of his eyes.