by A. T. Avon
She fought off the sickness, struggling to her feet.
‘Missy, what are you doing?’ her father asked, concern in his voice. ‘It’s not over yet, Missy. That’s what we’re trying to explain.’
‘I feel like it is,’ she said, ‘and I’m guessing the rats feel a lot worse than I do.’
She walked around the pen and what she found massed at the base of the airlock revolted her. The rats weren’t dead, but they were close. Their skin had turned a cancerous black, and parts of their bodies had turned to something very like sludge. ‘Enough,’ she said. ‘Open the airlock. We’re leaving. These rats aren’t a threat to anyone – not anymore. Open it.’
She noticed West appear beside her, beaten and bloodied. He was sweating too, but he didn’t look ill – at least, not as ill as she felt. In fact, cuts aside, he looked something close to healthy. ‘You okay?’ he asked. He looked troubled, as if worried by what he saw in her face.
‘Not really, no.’ Missy looked back down at the rats. She had a bad feeling. ‘The rats are infected,’ she said under her breath, ‘I’m infected.’
She didn’t have hallucinations like they did, tormenting her, willing her to escape, but it seemed like she had the same need for Protein Z.
Me versus the rats.
She hammered on the airlock. ‘I’m not going to last much longer in here! If you wait for the rats to die, I’m going to be dead, too.’
She heard Tang’s voice: calm, cold, calculating. ‘Ah. That’s the tone I was waiting for. It sounds like we’re finally ready to negotiate.’
Part 3
Report of the Chief Inspector of Marine Accidents
Report of the Chief Inspector of Marine Accidents into the loss of HMS CARRICK on 21 October 1993.
Part III – Salvage Operations
3.1 CARRICK’s wreck was located on 26 October, 1993, at a depth of 103 meters. The Ministry of Defence decided on 13 November, 1993, that CARRICK would be raised.
3.2 A private consortium formed and was awarded a contract to raise the vessel, excluding the damaged bow. A modified barge raised CARRICK.
3.3. During the recovery of remains, evidence of the virus was detected. It was also discovered three Able Seamen survived the explosions. CARRICK carried a chemical oxygen generator to absorb carbon dioxide and release oxygen during an emergency. However, the cartridge became contaminated with sea water. The resulting chemical reaction caused a flash fire. This consumed all remaining available oxygen, though the men detailed this event in hand-scribbled notes and appear to have lived well beyond it.
3.4 After the discovery of an unknown pathogen, salvage efforts were commandeered by the Department of Health, in cooperation with other government bodies and private agencies.
3.5 Calls for an official inquiry resulted in a forthright acknowledgment of guilt by the Government, stating that inadequate missile training had resulted in explosions which sank CARRICK. The official inquiry did not examine the possibility of a virus contributing to CARRICK’s sinking.
3.6 Recovered bodies indicated advanced, unexplained necrosis. CARRICK also contained evidence of widespread homicide, possibly in conjunction with a mutiny (though no evidence of a coordinated mutiny was documented).
3.7 Under the supervision of the Department of Health, all officers and reports from CARRICK were cremated. To this day, only one remains unaccounted for.
3.8 There is some evidence suggesting individuals involved in salvage operations will be monitored by the Department of Health for a further three years, though this remains unconfirmed.
Chapter 20
Somewhere in the Gobi
Missy didn’t understand. ‘Negotiate?’
‘Because I need your help.’
Missy muttered to herself, ‘That’s why you brought my father back in on things? To calm me, make me cooperate while you turned up the heat and cut my survival time to nothing…’ She laughed at her own stupidity then looked up into one of the CCTV cameras. ‘What did you do to him? To make him help? What, you’ve had a gun to his ribs this whole time? If you hurt him, Tang, I’ll kill you. Do you hear me?’
‘I needed you to sit calmly, to sweat and suffer calmly, and the best way to do that was to distract you, yes.’
‘Why? What do you need from me?’
‘A sample.’
‘Of?’ West asked.
‘Her finger.’
‘I’m not providing anything,’ Missy said, instinctively clenching both hands into fists.
‘Your finger, Missy.’
‘Provide a sample how?’ West asked.
Missy shot him a withering look.
‘I need you to cut off your finger, Missy, and put it in the pen.’
‘And that will accomplish what?’ West asked.
‘For one thing, your freedom, West.’
‘And Missy, too?’ West asked.
Missy spun on him. ‘Will you shut up? I’m not cutting off a finger.’
‘Give me the finger and I’ll let you both out, yes.’
Missy didn’t believe this for one second. ‘You planned this,’ she said. ‘Right from the start. You set me up, didn’t you? You knew the rats would do this, you –’ But she realized she had a more important question. ‘Why? Why do you need a sample from my finger?’
‘Not from,’ said Tang. ‘That would be too small for the pen to collect as a sample.’
‘My entire finger?’
Tang said nothing.
‘How would this work?’ asked West. ‘There a knife in here somewhere?’
Missy shoved him.
‘I want to get out of here,’ he said. ‘I’ll do whatever it takes.’
‘Why, because shooting me wasn’t enough?’
‘The pen,’ said Tang.
Missy looked across at the pen and was horrified to see a robotic arm extending up to level with the broken Perspex – a robotic arm with a pair of heavy-duty robotic scissors on the end.
She was about to tell Tang exactly what she thought of him when she felt West grip her hard behind the neck. She tried to pivot, tried to use his weight to her advantage, but he was too quick. His training exceeded even her own, and before she could puzzle out what he had done she was in a choke hold. She was unable to breathe, let alone move. He dragged her towards the pen, striking her hard in the throat. He was grunting and swearing at her, telling her to give up the fight, cooperate.
Missy didn’t know what fight there was to give up. She was trying to fight, but she was utterly ineffectual. Every move she made, West seemed to anticipate it. His years of military training felt insurmountable. ‘Don’t do this,’ she said, struggling to get the words out, panic in her chest now.
‘I’ll do what it takes to get us out of here,’ said West, ‘to get us both out of here.’
Missy felt him grip her wrist, her strength no match for his. Every time she tried to resist, he would strike her again, either in the throat or the abdomen. She couldn’t speak now; he was utterly ruthless, entirely focused on his goal.
She had assumed he would remove her pinky finger. That seemed logical. Remove the smallest, least important finger. But West had other ideas. With horror, she felt the blades close in on her trigger finger, then heard him say, ‘do it’.
She heard unforgiving hydraulics, felt a searing pain as the blades closed inexorably on her finger. She felt it fall away, severed from her hand, and an instant later West was shoving her, leaving her in a heap on the ground.
She was sobbing. She didn’t want to cry, she didn’t want to give either West or Tang the satisfaction. But she couldn’t help it. She was in shock. She couldn’t believe the brutality of what had just been done to her. She gripped her wounded hand, wet blood covering everything, and the very last thing she heard before passing out was the hiss of the airlock. It was opening.
Chapter 21
Somewhere in the Gobi
Missy woke to find herself back in the same strange hospital ward she had encountered
when first arriving at the facility. She was once again in a hospital bed, once again supine, once again receiving some kind of transfusion via a needle in her arm.
She looked up at the clear liquid in the bag overhead. It was hanging from a stand. She knew what it was, even without asking. Water. Protein Z.
She turned her head to look at the long, inscrutable mirror off to one side of the ward. Who was behind it now? There was only her own reflection, and she was shocked to see black marks on her face. ‘Necrosis?’ she asked.
There was no reply: not from up in the ceiling, nor from behind the glass.
She was seemingly on her own now.
She thought about the terror she’d experienced back with the rats, about the exact sound of the hydraulic scissors removing her finger. It felt like a bad dream, a nightmare. It felt impossible.
And yet she knew it was real.
She didn’t want to look down at her hand. She didn’t want to see the stump where her finger had been. So, in a sort of strange compromise, she felt for it instead. She used her good hand to examine her wounded hand, expecting to find bandaging.
But of course there was no bandaging. There was no need for it. She had once again forgotten her ability to heal, even as she received a transfusion of Protein Z – a substance West didn’t even require. She was different to many here, a fact she was having trouble adapting to, though she was going to need to get used to it.
She ripped out the IV, swung her legs down out of the bed and crossed to the hospital ward’s only door. There was no way to get it open. She turned back to the mirrored wall. ‘Let me out, Tang.’
Still no answer.
She crossed the room, coming to a stop just in front of the reflective glass. There were large black splotches all over her skin, both on her face and on her arms, like melanomas growing out of control. Only, they weren’t growing. Even as she watched, she could see them inching inward, closing back in on themselves.
She heard the door behind her and turned to see it open. Houellebecq entered. He dropped against the frame, chewing lethargically at his nicotine gum. ‘You’re awake,’ he said.
Missy didn’t answer. She simply walked straight out of the hospital ward, like a dog that had been locked up all day and had no interest in anything but escape. The corridor outside was unfamiliar to her, so she picked left. Left’s exactly the same as right, she thought. Just keep moving.
She heard Houellebecq fall in behind her, his chewing audible even over his walking. ‘So what is this?’ he asked, ‘a breakout? You escaped, and now you’re helping me escape? That it? Or did you forget this entire facility is one big prison, Missy? There’s a reason I don’t have a gun. I’m a prisoner, too, you know.’
‘Yep, sure you are.’ She let her sarcasm show plainly in her voice. If Houellebecq was free, it was because Tang had allowed it. And Missy could see no reason for Tang to allow it, unless Houellebecq was helping him. Presumably, her father was rotting in a prison cell somewhere, but not Houellebecq. Never Houellebecq. She’d been a fool to trust him.
‘I heard he told you,’ said Houellebecq.
‘That you’re my brother? Yeah, he mentioned something about it.’
She felt a hand on her shoulder, Houellebecq trying to slow her down, trying to get her to turn around. She kept walking. She still had no idea where she was going. It didn’t matter. ‘Missy, slow down. Look at me for a second. For one thing, your transfusion’s incomplete. You’re inside a dome, close to the center where the effects are worst, and your PZ levels are low. I’ve been there, I know what that feels like. You need to finish the treatment. Walking around like this, you’re just letting the necrosis get a grip again.’
‘You want me to lie in bed and wait for Tang to come in and quietly kill me? No thanks. I’ll take my chances with the black splotches.’
‘Tang could’ve killed you a hundred times over if that was what he wanted.’ She heard Houellebecq sigh. ‘I know you don’t care, Missy, but I did it for you. All of it. When they first came to me, they were more interested in you than me. They wanted me to recruit you. They wanted a pair of us for experimentation. I told them no.’
‘Exactly. And in the process, you told me nothing.’ She paused, spun. ‘You don’t think maybe that was my choice to make, Houellebecq? Do you know how many years I wasted searching for our father? I ruined a relationship, a perfectly good relationship, looking for a man, a father, I thought was missing. And all along you knew where he was. Hell, all along you were alive.’
‘I didn’t know, not exactly. And this doesn’t go back nearly as far as you think.’
Missy resumed walking. ‘All that stuff you told me about your foster father, was any of it true?’
‘All of it. I wasn’t recruited by Tang until 2011. My foster father got sick in 2008, back at the start of the financial crisis. I didn’t really know anything more than you until 2012.’ He caught up so he was walking alongside her. ‘That’s when they planted me in the US government, helping me navigate my way to an organization which officially didn’t even exist. I learned about Daniel as I went. You think I understood at the time why he did that to us? It was years before I understood.’
‘Still years earlier than me.’
‘You’re upset because of what they told you about James?’
She stopped walking again, fixing her eyes on him. ‘What do you know about James? What do you even know about me? You think you’ve been protecting me all this time? Well, you haven’t. All you’ve been doing is keeping me in chains.’
Houellebecq tried to put a hand to her shoulder again. She shrugged him off and resumed her brutal march to nowhere.
‘Missy, where are you going?’
She passed an elevator.
He stopped at it.
‘Wait up,’ he said. ‘Let me show you something.’
She looked back at him. She didn’t know where the elevator led, didn’t know what it was for, but she didn’t care right now. She had to keep moving, and if that meant up then so be it. She cast an eye across the control panel, noting a fingerprint scanner.
Oh to have a fingerprint, she thought bitterly.
She looked down at the stump. There was absolutely no pain. There wasn’t even raw tissue. It had already healed over perfectly, the skin joining, melding.
‘Just let me show you,’ Houellebecq said softly, putting his own fingerprint to the scanner.
The elevator doors opened. Missy walked back and stepped in. There were no windows, or did she have that right? No. The elevator itself was made out of glass, everything glass except for its steel frame. It was the shaft surrounding the elevator that was metal. She could see all the inner workings of the elevator in this shaft, the wheels and cables. She looked up. The elevator ceiling was glass, too. She was at the bottom of a very deep shaft, able to make out a small square of light, hundreds of feet up.
Houellebecq joined her in the elevator. He pressed a button for the topmost level and nodded towards the sky. ‘They gave me West in 2014. I’ve been living with that animal ever since. He always made it very clear. If I told you anything, he’d not only kill me, but you, too. You think I wanted to betray you, Missy? Betray our father? Betray my country?’
‘I’m sure the pay was good.’ There was still a hostile edge to her voice. If anything, she was being meaner as the conversation continued. Internally, however, she was beginning to reassess. She had been quick to judge her father, perhaps too quick. Was she making the same mistake again now?
It was also possible anything short of contempt would be supremely gullible.
The elevator began to climb.
‘It’s not about what you wanted, it’s about what you did, Houellebecq. You couldn’t have said, “hey Missy, by the way, this West guy’s a psychopath”. That alone would’ve been good to know. As it was, he shot me.’
‘Believe me,’ said Houellebecq, ‘I tried to warn you.’
‘And?’
‘You weren’t l
istening.’
It was a state-of-the-art elevator, accelerating so rapidly Missy felt like she was in a plane, taking off. At some point, shortly before she burst out into full sunlight, she felt her ears pop.
Then, as they cleared the facility roof, it was desert in every direction. She suddenly had an incredible view of sand as far as the eye could see, not to mention the entire ARC below. It was exactly as her father had told her it would be. It was in the shape of a plus symbol, a giant Swiss cross. Below her, she could see the clean lines of demarcation for the center square, the square she had been in all this time save for her one expedition into the northern hanger.
They continued rocketing upwards. It was just a steel frame now, a spire, narrowing the higher they climbed. ‘What is this?’ she asked, looking up.
‘It’s a lookout tower,’ said Houellebecq. ‘There’s a permanent guard station up top, with all the latest. This is where they send the drones out from.’
Missy circled the small steel and glass box, refocusing on the facility below. She realized it didn’t end with the hangers. In fact, it went well beyond the hangers. There were trenches dug into the desert, along with coiled barbed wire, like something out of World War I or World War II. She could see tiny weapons, could see vehicles and what might even have been tanks.
‘To deploy the mutant army,’ said Houellebecq, reading her mind. ‘They’re brought into the hanger, gassed in the hanger, then given the situation as a speech from Tang.’
‘And if they refuse to proceed out into the trenches to be slaughtered?’
‘There’s an unspoken ultimatum. Leave the hanger to fight in the trenches, or wait around for more gas.’
‘Different gas? Gas they’ll be less immune to?’
‘Correct. Tang will order them out, and any who refuse to defend the ARC are killed.’ Houellebecq must have seen the look of disgust on her face, because he quickly added: ‘They’re zombies, Missy.’