Chapter 11: 11: The Invisible War

Major Wilson walked me down a corridor to a set of elevator doors. I followed him, noting the flickering overhead lights and faded paint on the walls. From everything I’d observed so far, Section 13 had seen better days.

“I want you to understand a few things, Edward...” Wilson began.

“Ethan.”

“...don’t interrupt me. Section 13, or as the lads sometimes refer to it, the Counter Monster Unit, is an essential part of national security. We are the first, last and only line of defence against all the things that go bump in the night. We hunt them, we find them and we kill them, and we do that to save people’s lives.”

“Okay,” I said, “But if anyone gets in the way, you kill them too, right?”

Back at the school, Wilson had given his men permission to shoot civilians if necessary. Their priority had been to terminate the USE, and ‘collateral damage’ had been acceptable.

Wilson shook his head and let out a mocking scoff.

“You have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“So explain it.”

Wilson cast me a sideways glance, considering. Again, I sensed that change in attitude. He sucked on his teeth and ran a thick thumb and forefinger down his moustache.

“Tell me, Edward. Have you heard of the trolley problem?”

I shook my head.

“What do they teach you in school these days? It’s an ethical conundrum. You are on a trolley and you see it hurtling towards five people tied to the track. There’s a lever next to you and if you pull the lever, the trolley will divert to another track.”

“A trolley? Like in a supermarket?

“As in a tram. Think of a train if that helps. Either way, if you don’t pull the lever, five people are going to die.”

“Okay, so you pull the lever,” I shrugged.

“Except that on the other track, there’s one person tied down, and you’ll hit them instead. By pulling the lever, you’re choosing to kill them. You’re committing murder.”

I frowned.

“So there’s your choice,” Wilson continued, “Save five people, but in doing so you murder one. And that is the exact problem I face every damn day. Would killing civilians have been an ideal outcome? No. But if the creature had escaped, assuming we had got there before Victoria, there would have been potentially hundreds more casualties.”

“So, in the trolley problem, you’d pull the lever?” I hazarded.

Major Wilson looked at me darkly.

“Son, in the trolley problem, I am the lever.”

That took me by surprise.

“There’s a hierarchy here, and it’s not for me to make that decision. That’s for the higher ups to determine, and they have done. They say shoot and off we go, and if we face the trolley problem, one life lost but five lives saved, then that decision has already been made. In a way, I’m fortunate. I don’t have to decide. Someone else has already done that.”

He paused, narrowed his eyes and muttered.

“All I have to do is live with the consequences.”

I thought about all of that, wondering what I would do. Save five people, but kill one to do so? Killing people is wrong, so taking that choice would make me a murderer. But letting five people die instead was surely worse?

I couldn’t get my head wrapped around it.

“The thing you need to understand is this,” Major Wilson’s voice softened as he spoke with a near fanatical conviction, “We’re not the bad guys here. I do what I do because it’s the only way to protect the public from the horrors that lurk in the night. Kill them, with extreme prejudice, and move on.”

“But Victoria…” I said.

“I’m getting to her,” Major Wilson snapped, “Don’t think for a second that capturing that thing has done anyone any favours. It will kill if it can, and the only way to stop that is to kill it first. Victoria Pryce is playing a very dangerous game right now, one that will cost lives.”

The elevator arrived, and we stepped inside.

Wilson instructed the two soldiers to leave us alone. Now I’d eaten something, I could feel my strength returning. For a second I wondered if I could take the Major in a fight, but dismissed the thought. Wilson was a military-trained man in his early fifties. I was just a sixteen-year-old kid who had variable super strength at the best of times.

Another part of me wondered why he was suddenly so concerned with showing me around and explaining things.

What was he really up to?

The elevator stopped on the fifth floor and Major Wilson marched me into a large, open plan office that covered the whole level.

Computer desks operated by around fifty staff filled the space. In the centre of the room was a large operations table with a digital map of Great Britain displayed on it. Above the table, a dozen seventy inch screens were fixed to a rig that hung from the ceiling. Facts and figures ran across them, with areas of the maps pinging alerts on a green to orange to red gradient. Social media feeds from across the country flew by as red flag words appeared; ‘monster’ ‘strange’ ‘wolf’ ‘wild animal’ and more. Grainy camera footage of things that didn’t look human shot by.

Section 13 was tapped into the social media of the whole of Britain.

The room hummed with the murmurs of concentrated activity.

“Central command,” Wilson said, “This is where we monitor everything. Phone calls, emails, text messages,” he gritted his teeth at the next one, “snapchats. We intercept anything suspicious and move on it as swiftly as possible. Then we delete the lot. We have algorithms running full time to detect any unusual activity. Ninety-nine percent of what shows up is nonsense. The one percent that isn’t, that’s when we step in. That’s when we do our job.”

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His voice dropped slightly once more, “Which, and again, I need you to be very, very clear on this, Edward, is saving people’s lives.”

“This can’t be legal,” I said. “This is…this is a complete invasion of privacy.”

I mentally kicked myself, knowing it was exactly the kind of thing Forrest would say.

Major Wilson barked his short, humourless, ‘you know nothing’ laugh.

Me? I was seriously confused. Why was he telling me all this? This was clearly highly classified stuff. What was Wilson playing at?

“It’s necessary for the safety of the public. The things we’re up against, the monsters we fight, they kill, they maim, they murder, they infect and worse. They’re vermin that we put down so the public can sleep at night and no-one is any the wiser. There’s an invisible war being fought that has lasted for hundreds of years. The good news is that we’re winning. Ten years ago, this base had three times the staff we have now. That building over there used to house a science wing, but not anymore. Perils of being too good at our job, I suppose. Budgets get cut as we become obsolete. One day, probably in my lifetime, Section 13 won’t be necessary at all. We’ll have won. The monsters will all be dead, every single last one.”

He snapped his fingers, ordering me to follow.

My legs were like lead and I was having a hard time listening to anything Major Wilson was saying. Every step I took was another one towards the examination and an untimely end.

I kept my face impassive and tried not to think about the fact that I might never see my mum again, or Jess or Dee.

I’ll be honest: I felt like I was about to burst into tears at any second.

Ok, yeah, look, I know that’s not a very macho thing to admit, but there it is. You try being given a guided tour of a top-secret military compound by a professional psychopath who’s about to find out you’re one of the enemy and then put you down like a rabid dog.

See how well you hold up in that situation.

Come on, Ethan, think, I told myself. There has to be a way out of this.

I would have to make a run for it. There was no other choice. None of the soldiers on the base were carrying weapons, so if I got into the open I could move - and fast. I doubted I could outrun a van, but I’d be able to outpace anyone chasing me on foot. I hadn’t seen any helicopters on the base, which meant the only real obstacle was the three-metre high fence.

Would I be able to jump that high and clear the fence in a single bound?

Assuming yes, my only option after that would be to go on the run and try to get in contact with Victoria Pryce somehow. She at least had seemed to be less about shoot to kill and more about capture and study than Section 13.

Plus, there was nowhere else to turn.

“Am I boring you?” Major Wilson asked, snapping me out of my frantic planning.

“No, it’s just a lot to take in.”

The best thing to do for now was play along with the Major’s warped little game.

“The social media, snapchat, all that stuff. It must make things a lot harder to cover up?”

“Much easier, surprisingly. A full eighty percent of our budget goes into this side of things. Our surveillance powers mean we can keep our eye on everything that’s happening and shut it down fast.”

Not that fast if Victoria can get there before you.

Major Wilson indicated that I should follow him out of the command centre, and we walked down another corridor and up four flights of stairs. We bypassed the sixth to ninth floors and exited onto the flat roof of the building.

It was cold outside, the night sky free of clouds. In the distance were the twinkling lights of a town.

“Where is that?”

“Somewhere in England,” Major Wilson replied.

I guessed that was the standard answer for any civilians brought here.

Wilson walked across the roof to the edge, curtly beckoning me to follow. I did so reluctantly, my fear of heights flaring up. The closer I got to the edge of the roof, the worse it got. The worse my fear got, the more I could feel the fire building up in me. Nowhere close to full strength, but once again I considered my chances in a one-to-one fight with Major Wilson. I’d at least have the element of surprise on my side.

Yeah, not much else though, I thought.

Major Wilson saw my hesitation as I approached the thirty-centimetre high wall that lined the edge of the asphalt topped roof. He had one foot confidently placed on the wall, almost as if he was daring me to push him off.

Or perhaps he was planning to push me off.

Did he know what I was? Had all of this explanation just been his way of justifying what he was about to do by throwing me off the building? I wouldn’t have put it past him. For all his reasoned and calm philosophizing earlier, I was under no illusion; the guy was borderline psychotic. Tension and menace rippled beneath every muscle and jaw clench as he moved and spoke. Maybe the choices were out of his hands, as he said.

But I doubted he’d do things any differently if they weren’t. I got the sense that he enjoyed his role.

I felt the asphalt lining of the roof swirl beneath my feet as I realised how high up I was. Nine floors. Would I survive a fall like that? My fear of heights kicked in, my body preparing itself for fight or flight.

Could I take the Major one-on-one? Could I get the hell out of here before the full force of Section 13 caught me?

I might be as fast as a top trained athlete when I was powered up, but outrunning bullets?

No chance.

“Come on, son,” Major Wilson waved me over to the edge, snapping his fingers as he did so. “You’re not scared of heights, are you?”

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