“OK,” says agent Lowe. “Let’s do it again. How long have you known Colonel Jackson Stump?”
Five years, I scribble.
“And how long have you known Olivia Vasquez?”
Who?
“The woman in the hut, Frank. The one with weird skin and too much make up.”
Five years.
“Where is your carer, the one you call Dr Babbage?”
I don’t know.
I receive a look of suspicion from agent Sparks for my efforts. But it’s true; I haven’t seen Dr Babbage since he dropped me off at Benny’s house yesterday morning.
“A simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’ for this one, Frank. Are you a zombie?”
Yes.
Sparks and Lowe glance at each other. “Sorry, Frank. Just for confirmation. Is that a ‘yes’. You are a zombie?”
YES.
I hope that putting it in capitals makes it clearer.
Agents Sparks and Lowe glance at each other. “That’ll be all for now, Frank. Sergeant Taylor will look after you and arrange for a comfortable sleep here tonight. I have sent for a medic to look at that leg. We shall be back in the morning. Good night, Frank. Goodnight, Benny.”
“Goodnight John boy” says Benny, picking at the arm of his chair, and smiling at the agents, neither of whom smile back.
*
The following morning, after an awkward sleep in a thin bunk, I find myself back in the office awaiting a person that big-nosed Sergeant Taylor refers to as a ‘special visitor’. Benny is fast asleep, and we’ve decided not to wake him up. It’s not as if he can contribute much in the way of useful information. Nevertheless, Sergeant Taylor assures me that our ‘special visitor’ will want to talk to Benny when he eventually wakes from his slumber.
It comes as a bit of a shock when our visitor finally arrives. It’s Mr Petersen, the bald man from MI6, the one that planted the bug in my teeth back in England.
“Frank Wasdale! Good to see you again,” he pronounces, as if he’s an old friend. “How are you feeling?”
I’m not feeling too good, to be honest. A doctor examined my leg yesterday and told me that it'll take a few months to heal, despite the fact it's only a flesh wound. And I’ve been suffering from waves of shivering and vomiting since I woke at 6 am. It’s been nearly 12 hours since I drained the last of my magic juice from the Mannequin’s flask. I don’t know how long I can last. I've hardly got the energy to write. I try to tell him in my own slow way that I feel bad.
“Eh? What?" he says, with a furrowed brow. "Oh, good. Pleased to hear it. Now let’s get down to business.” Mr Petersen sits in one of the leather armchairs and swivels until he’s facing me. Agent Lowe leans against the wall behind Petersen. I didn’t see him come into the office - it’s as if he’s risen from the carpet.
“Morning Frank,” says Lowe, nodding his big black head.
Petersen coughs to signal my attention.
“Firstly, Frank,” he begins, “We’d like to offer an apology. We screwed up, with the document. We put it together in haste. And it was you who got impaled on the sharp end of our mistakes. A bad business. We’re sorry.”
I’m not quite sure what all this ‘we’ and ‘our’ stuff is about. Does he mean himself and Ruby’s dad? MI6? The British government? The CIA?
“But you got through it without us, didn’t you? From what I’ve heard, you behaved like a hero, up there in the mountains. And you managed to escape, even from us professionals...”
I wish he’d get to the point.
“Some good news first. Since you are currently of no fixed abode, Lieutenant Ramsbottom has kindly offered to take you under his wing for a while. He will house you and feed you at his home in London, whilst we go about the delicate business of tracing your next of kin. You can even return to school, if you like, once we’ve spoken to the authorities.”
I don’t know what to say (not that I would be able to say it, anyway). Living with Ruby, and returning to Cheasley High? That would be a dream come true.
“Remember, this is just an offer, Frank. Nobody’s forcing you to return to London. There are alternatives...”
I fetch a pen from the table and scrawl on the back of one of the maps:
I want to go back to London. But can I ask you some questions first?
“Of course, Frank. Fire away.”
Has Colonel Stump gone to prison?
“Legal procedures have not yet begun, but I think it’s fair to say that he’ll be locked up for a long, long time. You’ll be safe from him, if that's what you're wondering.”
Next question; one that’s been niggling at me since I arrived here at the little airfield:
Stump removed the transmitter from my teeth. So how did you know that I’d been taken up into the mountains, to the hut?
“Ah. Yes, I was coming to that.” Petersen rubs his chin and leans back in his seat. “We received a tip-off yesterday morning. Or, rather, Lieutenant Ramsbottom received a tip-off, back in the UK. Somebody called him and told him what was happening. Somebody who knew the base and the area well, and who even gave us the exact grid coordinates of the hut. I think you know who it was, Frank...”
Dr Babbage?
“The very man. And we received this from him, just two hours ago, from an internet cafe in Fairbanks...”
He takes a folded printout from his jacket pocket and passes it to me. The font is tiny, but I can just about read it; there's an address to a place called "Mendoza Storage" and a list of hand-written instructions regarding the dosage of my magic juice:
“I’ve been giving him 100 mg with his breakfast, 100 mg with lunch, and 200 mg intravenously before bedtime. He always takes his medicine. He’s a good boy.”
It’s daft, I know, but I suddenly feel like crying. Good job my tear ducts are dysfunctional, or I might have embarrassed myself.
"My colleagues have already checked out Mendoza Storage,” Petersen says. “It's a container facility half an hour's drive from Camp Tiger. Grubby place, but my men gained access easily enough. They found a jerry can containing ten litres of your 'medicine'. A goopy blue liquid with a funny smell. One litre is in the hands of our medical analysts, and the rest is on its way here. What's the medicine for, Frank?"
I'm about to reach for my pen when we're interrupted by a loud knock at the door. Agent Lowe opens the door to a young lady wearing big black plastic glasses and a white lab coat and holding a contraption that looks like an old-fashioned camera. She seems out of breath, like she's been for a brisk jog.
"The retinal data?" she asks, more to Petersen than Lowe. "I was told to come up here as soon as possible."
Petersen nods. "If it's OK with you, Frank, we need to photograph both your eyes. For security purposes."
The lady in the lab coat sits down beside me and holds up the contraption, then spends a few moments strapping it to my face. "Keep your head still and don't blink. It won't hurt," she says.
It doesn't hurt. Unbeknown to her, she could have rubbed a cheese grater across my nose and it wouldn't hurt.
When she's done with her weird camera, she tells Petersen and Lowe that the data will be on the system within the hour.
"Good," says Petersen, ushering her out of the door. "We have something important to show you, Frank. Something you might be able to shed light on. Follow me."
*
Half an hour later, I'm standing with Petersen in front of something that looks like a cage. We're at the end of a long corridor, next to a door with a flashing green light.
"This lift will take us down to the laboratories, Frank." He turns a key in the metal frame and the cage door clicks open, allowing us both in. “Careful. It's a tight fit."
The cage begins to drop down into the darkness, making a rattling, clunking sound. Down and down, for what feels like several minutes. We must be deep in the bowels of the Earth when the cage finally judders to a stop, facing a red door with a flashing amber light. Empty trays and trays piled with clothes lie
on the floor to either side of the door. It's warm down here, and noisy with the sound of pumps and machinery.
"You have to take an air shower before going in," Petersen shouts over the din. I don't know what he means, but I soon find out. He asks me to strip to my underpants (or diaper in my case) and to leave the rest of my clothes in one of the empty trays. He does the same, and there's a moment of awkward embarrassment as we try not to look at each other’s pale skinny bodies. Then we're through the red door and into a brightly lit cubicle with hundreds of little holes in the walls and floor. Petersen presses a green button and jets of air squirt out at us from various nozzles. The air makes my cheeks vibrate, and the jets are so strong I begin to worry that they might blow my diaper off. That wouldn't be a pretty sight—I haven't changed my diaper for three days.
"This prevents dust contamination" shouts Petersen, the jets softening now, leaving only the low humming of ventilation. As we step out the other side of the air shower, Petersen leads me into another white cubicle where we change into baggy paper overalls with hoods. There, he instructs me to put on some of the most ridiculous footwear I have ever seen. "Surprising how much skin can come off your feet," he says, pulling up his hood and tightening his overalls at the waist. Next, he asks me to look into a peephole set into the wall. "Retina scan," he explains. "Fingers crossed, the system should recognise you."
There's a loud bleep, then Petersen puts his eye to the scanner. Another bleep, and a narrow hatch opens in the wall.
"Welcome to oil," he says when we're through the hatch. I look around but see no oil. All I see is what looks like the inside of a small aircraft hangar, with four or five people milling around wearing the same crazy paper suits as us.
In the centre of the hangar is a sight that makes my jaw drop. A shiny metal pod, egg-shaped and glimmering and perfectly reflective. At its highest point, the egg looks twice my height, and is perhaps twice as long as that, from end to end. It's perfect. It's beautiful. And I reckon I know what it is.
"Oil," says Petersen again, staring at the pod with the gaze of a proud father. "O.I.L—The Occurrence Investigation Laboratory. There are only twenty people on the whole planet that know about this place, Frank. That know about the occurrence. They've sworn themselves to secrecy, as I know you will. Let's take a closer look."
The only disturbance to the perfect geometry of the shell lies near one end, where various instruments have been strapped onto the metallic surface.
"The hull is surprisingly thick. All our attempts open it failed. But we’re beginning to get a handle on the interior structure using high-intensity ultrasound. That's what this machine does." To illustrate, Petersen taps one of the appendages at the end of the egg with his white-gloved fingers.
"There is machinery inside, Frank. Some form of propulsion mechanism, we think. I'm hoping that the next phase of the project will show us how it works.”
He turns to me, his gaze suddenly serious. “We don’t know what this craft is, or where it came from. I was hoping you might be able to provide me with some answers.”
Petersen looks at me almost accusingly as he says this. As if he's expecting a response. I stare at him with my boggly eyes and shrug my shoulders. The other workers down here have noticed me at last, and some of them are coming over. Petersen waves them off.
"Listen, Frank. Any information about this ship will be regarded as top-grade intelligence of utmost importance. The sort of intelligence that can set a person up for life. Do you know what I'm saying?"
I don't.
"Let me put it to you more directly. What do you know about this ship?"
I'm starting to feel sweaty and bit nauseous. How does he know that I know? Should I tell him everything the Mannequin told me?
"You must know something, Frank. The documents you were asked to steal from Ramsbottom's office were directly related to the existence of this facility. Somebody, one of Stump's clients, is desperately trying to find this ship, and we don't know why. You must have heard something. All those years with Colonel Stump and Dr Babbage. A name, perhaps. Or a motivation."
Neither Stump nor Babbage ever mentioned anything about their clients, other than the suggestion that they might prove a passport to riches. I shake my head, but Petersen doesn't seem convinced.
“For all we know,” he says, “this pod might contain sophisticated weaponry. It could be a danger to us all. The thought of it falling into the wrong hands distresses me greatly.”
Again, he looks at me with a mixture of suspicion and hope.
“Take a few hours to think on this, Frank. We can talk again later."
Petersen's friendly demeanour seems to have gone to the same place as his hair. He is gruff with me as we go back up the lift shaft and is still gruff with me when we step at last out into fresh air. He remains gruff with me as he walks me back to my quarters.
"A few hours," he reminds me as he ushers me back into my little room, where Benny is sitting at the table playing with a fruit bowl. Benny greets me enthusiastically and starts asking me loads of questions about monkeys and bananas.
I'm not in the mood for play. I tell Benny that I need to rest, and that I'll play with him later. He looks disappointed, and I wonder if he's going to burst into tears again. It would be my fault if he did. Gruffness, it seems, is catching.
*
As promised, Petersen pays me a visit a couple of hours later. He's not alone. Agents Sparks and Lowe are with him, and Sergeant Taylor.
"Take Benny to the canteen," Petersen says to agent Sparks. "We need to talk with Frank alone." Benny gives me another sad look as he leaves. I'm not sure if he likes me anymore.
As soon as the door's closed, Petersen claps his hands together. “First,” he says. “Is anybody going to make me some tea? White with two sugars.”
Sergeant Taylor takes the hint, huffing as he strides off into the adjacent kitchen, leaving me alone with the two spooks.
“So,” says Petersen, addressing agent Lowe, “do you want to start by telling Frank what you just told me?"
“I don’t see why not.” Lowe clears his throat, as if preparing for a speech to the masses. "From what we’ve learned so far, Frank, the business that you got yourself caught up in looks like a small operation: Stump; Miss Vasquez the plastic lady; two drill sergeants; Babbage and Benny’s full-time-carer. Everyone else we’ve talked to at the base knew about you but believed you to be Dr Babbage’s grandson. Most seemed oblivious to the nature of your training. Those that knew about it seemed to be under the impression that it was an intense form of physiotherapy.”
I almost cough my teeth up at that one, causing Lowe and Petersen to look at me in alarm.
“You OK, Frank?” says Petersen. “Anything in Lowe’s account so far that doesn’t tie in with your experience?”
I shake my head and try hard not to smile. An intense form of physiotherapy?
Petersen continues. “It seems that outside of this small group, nobody at the base knew you were undead. Stump did all he could to keep his personal project from the U.S. military. His mysterious clients have covered their tracks very well, and my guess is that they’ll fade away like morning mist now that we’ve captured him. We do know how much they’ve paid Stump, though, from his accounts. A million bucks up front. We're guessing he was due more upon successful completion of the project.”
Holy socks! A million dollars, for me?
"Successful completion, from what Stump has told us so far, would have involved the creation of a half-dozen or so more zombies like yourself. These would have been put to mercenary use. A privately-owned elite force. I find this hard to believe. But if there is truth in it, we've really opened a can of worms. As such, we are putting all our efforts into finding Babbage and this plastic lady.”
Petersen shouts for his tea and gets a curt reply from Sergeant Taylor in the kitchen.
“A quick question, Frank. Is it true that you can feel no pain? None whatsoever?”
I nod
, and Petersen stares at the floor for a while, clearly deep in thought. The big-nosed sergeant returns from the kitchen, a tea towel slung over his shoulder, carrying a thin china cup. Petersen takes a sip, closing his eyes for a moment to savour the taste.
"That'll be all, Sergeant Taylor," he shouts. "Now please do us the favour of leaving us alone."
Without a glance at either of us, Taylor leaves, and we listen to his clicking footsteps receding down the corridor.
Petersen leans in closer. "Something else happened out there in the woods, didn't it? After our boys left."
I give him my best blank face. In fact, my usual blank face.
"You see, all this about money changing hands and private zombie armies is interesting enough, but I have a suspicion that there’s more to this. A link, perhaps, to the Occurrence?"
Blank face still set.
Petersen’s gruff persona is back. He leans even closer. I sit up straight and take a deep breath.
"Obviously, we're not going to torture you," he laughs. "We're on the same side, aren't we? But information is power. Surely you know that?"
He pats me on the shoulder, buddy style. A style that doesn't suit him at all.
"I don’t see how the documents Stump sent you after—the only documents outside the USA that refer to this test facility—I just don’t see how they could have helped his own personal cause. Unless, of course, his hand was being forced. Once more, Frank, what do you know about the link with the occurrence? With the pod we have down in the lab? What exactly do you know?"
He hands me a pen and a large ream of paper.
“Write it down for us, Frank. Write what you know about the plastic lady. We know that she accompanied you during your escape from the hut. Our forensic team found fibres from her coat all over your clothing. You must know something about her. Who she is. Where she came from. Write it all down, here on the paper..."
You know what? If Petersen didn't have such a crabby attitude, I might be better inclined to write it all down, to spill it all down on paper, like I did at Ruby's house. But I haven’t figured out who’s good and who’s bad here, so I decide to keep some cards close to my chest. But I need to give him something, don't I? Something to keep him off my back.
Frank Wasdale- First Mission Page 10