Anthrax Island

by D. L. Marshall

  I couldn’t let that happen. I needed to smoke the killer out, force their hand. Get them into the open before rescue arrived. That’s why I’d asked the Navy to leave us here, keeping their visit from the others, buying time.

  I left the room and went next door, into the lab nearest the HADU to finish my search, rifling through the cupboards. I found what I needed in a drawer under a desk; stacks of unused test tubes, vials like I’d been filling for Alice that afternoon. I stuffed one into my pocket then looked over at the cupboards, thinking. The wheelie chair had been pushed away from the desk, spun round and discarded at the far end of the room. I looked up at the cupboards attached to the wall above it and climbed up onto the chair.

  It was on top of that far cupboard, right in the corner of the room, that I discovered the thing I was looking for, at the back against the wall. I slid it towards me to have a proper look. It was a big piece of the puzzle, but how did it fit?

  The hairs on the back of my neck stood on end, I caught my reflection in the window, froze as I noticed the figure right behind me, an indistinct shape, a shadow of a man. I couldn’t look away, the apparition moved towards me, reaching, imploring. Features swam into focus, its mouth opened. My heart pounded, I gripped the top of the cupboard, closed my eyes, breathed deeply.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  I opened my eyes, turned to see Marie in the doorway. I shrugged. ‘Sorry, miles away.’

  I slid the ominous item I’d found back through the dust on top of the cupboard and jumped down, wiping sweaty palms on my trousers.

  ‘Have a look at this,’ said Marie, holding up an iPad.

  ‘What is it?’ I asked.

  ‘I had a thought. I checked what Ingrid was working on, she signed in a new sample this morning but it’s not in the store.’ She waved the iPad in my face, as if I’d understand.

  ‘Is that odd?’

  ‘Very. Samples are rigorously controlled. It’s a one-off, too.’ She ran a finger down the spreadsheet on screen. ‘Not from one of Alice’s test sites.’

  My sample. Diligently, she’d checked it in. Is that how the killer had known, why she’d had to die? Why they’d stolen it, hiding it under the floor at X-Base?

  Marie continued, but I wasn’t interested. I’d moved on, thinking about something else entirely.

  I was wondering why Eric Gambetta had hidden his silenced Walther PPK on top of a cupboard here in this lab.

  Chapter Forty-seven

  Marie and I were back outside, next to the whirring pump. It spluttered, the huge pipe bucked, shuddered, writhing on the waves. I crouched to run my gloves over it, feeling the rush of water inside, looking out to sea where it disappeared into the void. A couple of floodlights bathed us and the pump in artificial white light, but the surrounding black squeezed it into as small a space as possible, ensuring no light extended beyond a few metres. If you were to step away it’d look like a white canopy of water had somehow been erected against the hut, beyond it, the world ceased to exist. I flicked on the work lamp, running the beam across the hillside to quell the claustrophobia, to prove there was something out there.

  Alice and the others had been busy, the ground was covered with pipes in every direction. The beam reflected off a bright yellow grid stretching up to the cliffs overhanging the cove.

  Marie explained the generator was powering a pump, sucking up seawater from out on the raft. I couldn’t see the barrels floating it, but could picture them twisting up and down in the frigid dark, threatening to tear up whatever it had been anchored to. She gestured to a cluster of huge plastic vats arranged alongside the huts, demonstrating how the seawater was mixed with formaldehyde then pumped through the small pipes across the island. I could see the tiny holes all along the smaller pipes, like garden watering hoses. Apparently it was enough to decontaminate the island, the anthrax being restricted to the top few centimetres of soil, and concentrated mostly in this area. Here the topsoil had already been removed in sealed containers for high-temperature incineration, the rest had been soaking in 5 per cent formaldehyde, 95 per cent saltwater.

  ‘This is the worst affected area?’ I asked, shielding my mask from the driving rain.

  ‘We’re just downwind from where the explosives were set off in the Forties,’ said Marie, shouting above the wind and spluttering pump mechanism.

  This was where the Gruinard strain had grown over eighty years and been eradicated in days, leaving just the sample in the vial in my pocket, the one I’d found under the comms room.

  The pump shuddered and died.

  ‘Why’s it stopped?’ I shouted.

  ‘Probably out of fuel.’

  ‘We need to make sure this whole area is thoroughly decontaminated.’

  No arguments, no questions, thankfully. ‘Make yourself useful, get that restarted.’ She pointed to a small generator sheltering under the base, a rugged Petter single-cylinder that should go on in all weathers, coupled to an inverter huddling under a tarpaulin. ‘Switch the fuel barrel over,’ she shouted.

  I liked Marie more and more. I knocked a few sheets of plywood out of the way then turned to watch her confidently turning valves and flicking switches, probably the most competent person on the island. I rolled the empty fuel cannister out of the way and pulled the hose across to a new one. ‘So, Biarritz. Anyone, erm, special waiting for you back there?’

  ‘Concentrate on the generator, I don’t want to be out here all night.’

  I smiled, flipped the lever, pulled the crank. The Petter fired up again immediately, settling down into a rhythmic ticking, barely audible over the rain. I looked over at the pump, saw a couple of lights had appeared in the darkness. Marie pushed more buttons. The electric pump whirred back into life, sucking seawater up, pushing it through the pipes. They untwisted, straining at the stakes as the pressure hit once more. It was both too dark and too wet to see it spraying. We’d just have to trust it was doing its job.

  I swung the lamp around again, landing on the incinerator, which got me thinking about Demeter. On this island, where could you hide or dispose of a body?

  I walked over to it, resting my gloves against the side. Cold, though it wouldn’t take long to cool in this weather. I hauled myself up onto it again, swung open the lid. Clouds of ash swirled up, gluing themselves across my soaked gas mask. I shuddered at the memory, wiping the muck away, and shone the lamp inside.

  Just those fragments of bones jutting from piles of ash. All too small to be human, and I could still see the warped tea tin where I’d dropped it. I shivered again, fighting a flashback. The beam found the ignitor still swathed in dirty duct tape. It’d been a good theory but no bodies had been disposed of in here, it hadn’t been used since the morning.

  ‘What are you doing?’ shouted Marie. Behind her the pump lurched, spluttered for a few seconds, whined, then went back to pumping water.

  Marie returned to the pump, adjusting the controls, one hand resting on the bucking pipe.

  Where else could Demeter’s body be? I jumped back down, walked to the base and dropped to my knees, shining the beam underneath. Nothing but mud and the small generator.

  The rest of the island was empty space. There were craters, and I guess a shallow grave was always a possibility, but it’d be a pig to dig the stony ground out here, and far too conspicuous. I’d been trying to ignore the obvious, of course, the booming surf on the rocks. Last time anyone had actually seen Demeter – not counting from when we assumed it was him in the corridor – was late afternoon, over this side of the island. Easy enough for Demeter to have gone the same way as Andy Kyle’s body, over the cliffs and into the sea.

  The pump choked again, underscored by a flash of lightning.

  Marie still had a hand on the pipe. ‘There’s something wrong with it.’

  I scanned the break in the bluffs, the cove beyond. The tide was on the turn. It’d been coming in earlier, when I’d last seen Demeter. He’d been headed up onto the cliffs then, with Gambetta.


  Assuming he’d been dumped, if the tide had been coming in when he was killed his body might have been pulled to shore. I skirted the small cove to the bottom of the hill, where the low bluffs morphed into the angular crags that dominated the north-western shore of the island. I shone the beam around the rocks. It illuminated the crashing waves, glowing white geysers spraying the black cliffs, the roar of the surf below blending into the thunder above. There was nowhere the body could be lodged, it’d have been smashed to pieces in no time.

  I spent a good ten minutes walking up the hill and back, one eye on the shore. The other was on Marie – it hadn’t escaped my attention that we were exposed out here, our lights a beacon for anyone wanting us out of the way. No others appeared in the black and Marie never moved. All the time, my hand hovered near my holster, ready to tear open my suit just in case.

  On the way back down the hill I shone the lamp out to sea, watching the waves rise and fall. The waves, the tide, the faltering pump. I ran the rest of the way.

  The pump was still whining and choking. Marie was leaning against it, watching me.

  ‘Stay there,’ I shouted, gesturing in case the wind took the words.

  She tapped her wrist impatiently.

  I scurried down the narrow track between the rocks, splashing into the sea, looking over my shoulder every few steps to check on Marie. She was casting her torch around nervously, scanning the moorland beyond the base. I grabbed the thick pipe, switched my torch onto high beam, and waded deeper. It dipped and rose on the swell. The sea was above my waist now. I pressed on, out of Marie’s torch beam, surrounded on all sides by furious sea, the crests smashing across the gas mask.

  A few metres away the pipe dipped under the waves before reappearing further out. It was weighed down, pulled under the water by something large resting on it. A creature from the deep flapped, wrapping a tentacle around the pipe, pulling it back under, rising and falling with the incoming waves.

  By the time I’d reached the thing, I had to fight to remain upright; my boots were slipping out from under me every time the pipe rose, lifting me up, water spraying above my head and running down my back where the tape had been torn from my hood.

  The thing weighing the pipe down was distorted, broken and bent out of shape, but I could still tell I’d found Demeter.

  Chapter Forty-eight

  Demeter reached out. His glove had been torn off, a sickly blue hand trailing shredded tape in the foam. Buoyed up by air trapped in the suit, body bent double round the pipe, legs wedged somewhere underneath. His other arm had folded round, trapping the pipe under his body, holding him against it.

  I could see why the pump had been faltering. The plastic sections of pipe were tethered with a cable clipped through hoops along its length, and when Demeter’s body had been swept onto the pipe it had dislodged one, splitting the coupling open. The open pipe had been thrown out of the sea on the incoming waves, pumping air instead of water.

  I grabbed handfuls of red plastic suit and heaved. At first he didn’t budge, but with the assistance of a wave I managed to slide my arm under the pipe, wrenching him free. He started to float away but I grabbed his suit again – I didn’t want to lose two bodies to the sea. It was easier heading in, pushed along by the waves, though with both hands on the body I couldn’t see where I was walking, twice slipping to my knees as I dragged it in.

  Marie still huddled in the cone of light from the work lamps. I waved her over.

  First there was disbelief, then argument, finally she pitched in. On top of his considerable bulk, his suit was half full of water, but after a ton of grunting we’d succeeded in dragging Demeter up the pebbles, over the rocks, onto the mud. Only then did we stop for a rest.

  ‘How did he get there?’ Marie asked.

  I turned him over, answering the question. She cried out, scream choked off by her respirator. A lifeless eye stared from behind the shattered visor of his gas mask. I flicked a crab away as lightning illuminated the dark mess of his other eye. 7.65mm lobotomy, just like Gambetta and Ingrid.

  ‘He had some help into the sea.’

  ‘Why did they shoot him?’ she asked. ‘If he was escaping by submarine, why kill him?’

  ‘There never was a sub, or divers. Demeter’s been murdered in cold blood, framed for the others.’

  ‘Could the killer still be here somewhere?’ She spun her torch about wildly.

  ‘They never left. There are six people on this island. One is a murderer.’

  Marie backed away, into the safety of the spotlights, leaving me alone with Demeter. I stood, watching her checking over the pump, then took the anthrax vial from my pocket, the one from the radio room back at base. The raft briefly flashed in the lightning, held high on a wave, then black, as thunder rolled overhead and the waves broke over the rocks. With four people dead and the contents of Ingrid’s note to chew over, the vial in my hand now weighed a hell of a lot more.

  Chapter Forty-nine

  After I waded back out to recouple the pipe, the decontamination spray worked fine, no more protests from the pump. The seawater was in endless supply, and even at the higher dosage of a 10 per cent solution, we reckoned there was enough formaldehyde in the vats to run for a few hours yet. With the amount of fuel in the tank it was a toss-up whether the diesel generator would conk out again before the formaldehyde tanks ran dry, but either way, and despite the rain, the ground around here would be so saturated, no spores could possibly survive.

  I felt a lot safer knowing there was zero chance of any more super-anthrax lying around. Whichever of the team had taken the sample would have been at pains to ensure no one else could get their hands on it. If the underlying personal motive was money – usually a safe bet – then the sample was only worth something if it was unique.

  I’m not religious, dead flesh is dead flesh, but it’d felt undignified to leave poor old Demeter lying on the grass, so we’d dragged him under the huts by the generator. I’d done my best to prop some plywood up to shelter the generator and the body, though I suspected the wind would make a mess of it within minutes.

  Marie’s demeanour had changed since discovering Demeter’s body. Given this and the difficulty communicating, we walked to the north cliffs in silence, my hand close to that holster under my suit. We skirted the top of the hill so as not to be struck by lightning, flinching at every crash of thunder, using every flash to scan our surroundings, then looking back at the ground to avoid going arse over tit.

  I was overthinking it. One minute Demeter was the only person who could possibly have killed Ingrid and Gambetta, the next he had to have been framed. My mind was reeling. By the time we’d rounded the island I wasn’t sure I’d progressed my investigation a great deal, but I was set on Demeter’s innocence. The main thing was, I now had a plan; a solid plan to flush the killer into the open in the morning ready for the Marines’ arrival.

  The darkness up ahead told us we’d arrived at the northern cliffs, the percussion of waves against rocks louder here, facing into the storm. I leaned into the wind, could just about make out the foam smashing over the exposed bones of the island, but beyond that, black.

  Up ahead, two stars wavered in sheets of rain. One floated slightly higher than the other, the only evidence Dauntless was watching, waiting, a jaguar ready to pounce.

  Marie rustled in the bracken behind me, I turned to see her walking backwards, away from the edge.

  ‘You signal the ship, I’ll head back,’ she said.

  I shook my head. ‘Wait for me, it’s not safe.’

  ‘Fine.’

  I turned back to the lights. Somewhere out there a watchman would be on duty. I held the work lamp out and flicked the light on and off, signalling the prosign for attention.

  The answer came back almost immediately, whoever was on watch was keen.

  I flashed my brief message and turned to Marie only to find she’d disappeared. The reply came from the ship, I put the work lamp down and started
jogging for the base.

  After a few minutes I was beginning to think something had happened to her, that she’d got lost or worse. Thankfully, I spotted the dim lights of the base up ahead and, bobbing towards it, Marie’s silhouette. I increased the pace, closing the gap as she launched up the steps. I lost my footing and dropped onto one knee, balancing to avoid falling further, shouting her name. She turned, I expected her to come back and offer a hand but instead she vanished into the HADU. The door quickly slid shut behind her. I brushed myself down and followed, pausing on the platform at the top to complete a slow turn, one last check of that impossible black, before I punched the keypad for the door.

  Nothing.

  I looked down to see the keypad was dark. Power to the HADU had been cut, stranding me outside in the storm.

  Chapter Fifty

  I punched the keypad again but it was definitely dead, it had worked for Marie so no missing fuse this time, this was manual intervention via the control panel inside.

  I sprinted round the side of the base. The lounge windows were dark, furniture piled against them. I kept going to the only other window I hadn’t been able to screw shut, the kitchen, praying I wasn’t too late. My stolen key turned easily in the lock, I placed both hands on the windowsill and pulled. The aluminium track bit deep into the gloves as I hauled myself up and through, onto the worktop. Plates and utensils crashed as I crawled over the sink and dropped to the floor.

  I peeled off my gloves, pushed my mask up onto my head, and tore at the side of my suit, pulling my gun free.

  The lights blazed on, Greenbow appeared, Browning ready, flanked by Dash and Hurley brandishing a chair leg each.

  ‘Stay where you are, Tyler.’

  ‘He’s got a gun,’ hissed Hurley.

  ‘Just let Marie go,’ I said, pistol outstretched to match Greenbow’s. ‘Let her go and we both back out of here.’ I automatically calculated the risk, assessing the most efficient way to dispatch the three of them, where to place the bullets, Greenbow first, then Hurley, then Dash. Acute angles, twenty degrees between them, easy.