by Lauren Algeo
The lab was bare apart from the examination table, workbench, and a sink area on the other side of the room. The floors and walls were tiled for easy cleaning, and there were some surgical gowns and masks hanging from the back of the door.
He took the scissors over to the table and cut Greiger’s clothes from his body. He inspected the skin but there were no recently healed stab wounds or bullet marks. There was only the rash, which covered most of his torso and extended along his arms. Curious, he’d never seen one of his children with a rash before.
He fetched a syringe from the table and drew a blood sample from the dead veins in Greiger’s arm, which he could try and analyse later under the microscopic equipment he kept in another room. His science room, as he called it, also had a bookcase that spanned an entire wall and housed the best science textbooks ever written. He took pleasure in dissecting living things and researching how they worked. He was fascinated by death – probably a side effect of being invincible. He glanced at the body on the table. Almost invincible, he reminded himself.
He selected the tools he needed from the workbench and expertly opened up Greiger’s chest. Now came the fun part. He poked around at his organs, looking for clues as to how he’d died. They were everywhere. He’d never seen anything like it in one of his children. Greiger seemed to have suffered total organ failure. How was that possible?
He lifted Greiger’s still eyelids to take a look. His eyes were bloodshot and rolled back in his head. What was the last thing they’d seen? He used the electric bone saw to open the back of Greiger’s skull so he could examine his brain. The damage there was extensive; the swelling had pushed his brain tight against his skull.
The Grand was deeply troubled. What could have done such a thing to someone as powerful as Greiger?
He took the blood sample along to the science room to investigate further. There was a notepad on the long table where he kept the microscope and he wrote down the results he’d seen in Greiger’s body. He would look into his findings in great detail.
The blood didn’t tell him much, only that there was a foreign antibody there. The bad cells mingled with Greiger’s good ones. He would need professional help to have tests run on the blood to find out what it was and that would have to wait a few days. It was Christmas so labs would be closed or have a backlog of samples being dealt with by skeleton staff. He could walk in somewhere and jump to the head of the queue but it would keep for a couple of days. There was more snow forecast and it made leaving the area particularly difficult.
The Grand put the sample away and sat down with some medical textbooks to research. Organ failure, swelling of the brain, something in the blood – it all seemed to point to a virus or disease, however he didn’t have a clue which one. They’d never picked up any contagious diseases before. It was the foreign cells in the blood that concerned him most. Had Greiger used an infected needle or been poisoned or injected with something?
The Grand’s mind kept coming back to the footprints in the dust. Two sets of footprints. His eyes narrowed and his forehead creased into a deep frown. His children were looking for two people. Two interfering people, who knew about what they did and wanted them to stop.
He felt an intense rage bloom in the pit of his stomach. No one could dare stop the way of life they’d become accustomed to. He clenched his fist and sent out the strongest pulse he could muster to make them all stop and listen.
‘Children… we’re going hunting.’
Chapter 35
Brewer and Georgie ditched the hiker’s car in a multi-storey car park a few miles away from the warehouse and took a train and a night bus back to the flat.
It was only when Brewer was back in the living room, staring at the pins on the map, the enormity of what they’d achieved began to sink in. They had killed a hiker. It was what he’d been trying to accomplish for the last couple of years and now they finally had something that worked. Unfortunately, it was something that was hard to get hold of and not anything they could easily mass-produce.
Georgie was over-tired with excitement and went straight to the bedroom for a nap but Brewer stayed up, thinking. Trying to decide what their next move should be.
The Grand would know by now that one of his sons was dead, although he wouldn’t know how yet. Maybe he wouldn’t find out what they had done for a while. It made sense for them to strike again now, while they still had the element of surprise, but that was nearly impossible. They needed a large supply of meningitis-infected blood and time to hunt for hikers. The boy they’d taken the original blood from had been being treated for days so he was no use. The odds of them locating another infected child quickly enough were not in their favour.
He made a strong cup of coffee and sat down in his armchair. He stared at the map again and pressed his fingertips together in front of him. Was it possible to get hold of a decent quantity of meningitis blood? He and Georgie had discussed hitting somewhere that held batches of infections for vaccinations before, maybe that was an option? His tired mind couldn’t process it though.
He should’ve been feeling elated that they could kill hikers, however all he felt was a deep sense of dread. They had shown their hand. The hikers would find out soon enough what they had done then they would be even more dangerous. The hikers would be on edge, watching out for them. They’d be extra careful on jobs, twice as vigilant. It was only a matter of time before they knew exactly what he and Georgie would try to inflict on them.
They had declared war and there was no going back. His eyes started to drift closed and he fell into a fitful dream about a violent battle. It was a fight to the death.
The dulcet tones of Georgie making breakfast in the kitchen woke Brewer up a few hours later. He lay awkwardly in the armchair for a moment, listening to her banging about, before he struggled into a sitting position. The clock told him it was nearly 6am but he felt as though he’d only closed his eyes for a moment.
‘Morning,’ he said pointedly to her.
Georgie glanced at him over her shoulder then turned her attention back to the bacon she was placing on the grill.
‘Sorry, did I wake you? I couldn’t get back to sleep.’ She carried on without waiting for a reply. ‘I still can’t believe we did it! A simple virus can kill them! What’s our plan? Are we going out again after breakfast?’
‘Calm down.’ He finally got a word in. ‘We can’t be too hasty about this.’
She glared at him in disbelief. ‘What?’
‘I’m serious,’ he said. ‘The Grand will know we killed one of them. They’ll be looking for us.’
‘So we find them first!’ she cried.
He’d known this feistiness would be her only reaction. She was hell bent on going after more hikers.
‘You’re forgetting we don’t have any more blood yet. That’s what we need to figure out.’
‘I see.’ Her anger cooled a little. ‘Well, let’s eat and get cracking on sorting that then.’
They ate bacon sandwiches and watched the morning news. There was no sign of any obvious hiker activity.
‘Do you think anyone will have found the body in the warehouse yet?’ Georgie asked. ‘Maybe it’ll be on the news later.’
‘I doubt it. If anyone finds the body, they won’t be able to identify it. I have a feeling the Grand will send a hiker to collect it anyway.’
‘Really?’
‘Well, it’s not very often one dies so I assume he’ll want to know why.’
Georgie slapped her forehead dramatically. ‘We should’ve hidden the body! Or waited around to kill the hiker who came to find it.’
‘With what?’ Brewer pointed out. ‘No, we did the right thing. We’ve struck first, now we need to regroup before attacking again.’
‘You sound like some war general,’ Georgie snorted.
His mind flashed briefly on a fragment of his dream: an army of hikers coming for them, and an acrid smell of burning flesh. He shivered inwardly.
‘I�
��ll start looking for anywhere we can get more infected blood,’ he said and powered up the laptop. ‘You go back to the books on viruses.’
She stifled a sigh. ‘More reading, why?’
‘If meningitis works, there might be a similar virus we can try that’s easier to get hold of.’
‘Ah, gotcha.’ She gave him a mock salute. ‘I’m on it, sir!’
He threw a cushion at her but she dodged it and walked to the bookcase, laughing. He didn’t share her sense of optimism.
They spent the rest of the morning researching again. Brewer looked into medical stores and science labs, trying to find anywhere they could locate large supplies of blood. He kept hitting dead ends. Blood banks stored healthy blood, which was no use to them, and the odds of finding more than one person with untreated meningitis together was practically zero. They’d need an epidemic to get enough to infect all the hikers.
As some relief from the constant brick walls, he checked on some of his old conspiracy sites and blogs. There were still plenty of nutters out there, babbling about alien encounters and things that go bump in the night. These people would have a fit if they ever experienced what he’d been through with hikers. Although, maybe if he told other people about hikers, he’d end up sounding just like another of these loonies.
He was about to click one site closed when a name on the feed caught his eye and his finger hovered over the button. Striker25 – the boy in Philadelphia he and Georgie had read about a couple of months ago.
He opened the chat thread the boy had started. It was more details about his own experiences with hikers, or ‘mind snatchers’ as he referred to them. Apparently they were rife in his state, with suspicious murders and suicides all over the place. The replies on the feed weren’t very useful – people bringing up government conspiracies and other explanations – but everything Striker25 wrote sounded exactly like Brewer’s own experiences.
The boy had tried to track down these mind snatchers by hanging around after suspect murders to find one before a random suicide. Having never been used as a vessel himself though, the boy lacked the vital skill of being able to hear them. Brewer wondered if he should share some of their knowledge.
‘Your friend in America’s back,’ he said to Georgie.
She stared blankly for a second before remembering the boy in the blogs.
‘Really? What’s he saying?’ She got up from the sofa to come and look at the laptop screen.
‘Not that much, he’s just making observations on hiker activity.’
She read through the post quickly. ‘We should send him an email,’ she suggested. ‘Tell him what we know about the blood.’
‘The boy can’t even find them so it wouldn’t do much good yet, not until we get a better plan. Besides, he can’t track them if he can’t even hear them.’
‘I guess,’ she said. ‘But at least he’d know he wasn’t crazy and other people know about them too, that we’re trying to kill them.’
‘Maybe later,’ he said. ‘Right now we’ve got bigger fish to fry.’
Georgie gave him a pitiful shake of her head. ‘You’re so lame.’ She went back to reading a large medical textbook.
Brewer scrolled absentmindedly through a few more sites, only his heart wasn’t in it anymore. His brain had started to contemplate the other option, the one he’d been thinking about before he’d save Georgie – going after the Grand and killing himself with the Grand trapped in his mind.
The plan was flawed of course. For a start, he didn’t actually know where the Grand was, and he had no idea if he was strong enough to keep him trapped until the point of death. It was no more flawed than going after each hiker with meningitis blood though. This was an idea that could wipe out all of the country’s hikers in one go. The Grand was the key to killing them all.
Brewer considered the end of his own life. To him, his old, happy life had ceased the day Karen had died. This new existence wasn’t one he wanted to continue for the rest of his days. If he could go out with a bang and save thousands of lives then the loss of his would be worth it.
He glanced across at Georgie. What would she do after he was gone? He guessed if anyone benefited most from his death it would be her. He could update his will to leave the flat and the rest of his savings to her. Hunting hikers with him was hardly the ideal life for a teenage girl. If he wiped them all out and left her with a place to live and money, she could have the life she deserved. She would be able to go back and finish school, maybe go on to college and university.
One day she’d marry and have children of her own, who would never know the rape and abuse she’d suffered when she was young. Perhaps she’d even tell them about him and what he’d done. He liked the idea of being a hero in some bedtime story about monsters who used to roam the country and a man, not unlike her father, who defeated them. He smiled sadly to himself. His life was a small price to pay for all that.
He thought again of the posts from Striker25. If there were hikers in America, they could be all over the world. Who knew how many were out there? He didn’t know if they were all descendants of the Grand either. If he did kill the Grand, who’s to say the hikers on other continents would instantly drop dead like the ones here? Saving the world was too big of a task for him to guarantee. He could settle with ridding the country of hikers then leaving a legacy for the rest of the world.
When the time came, he could send instructions to Striker25 on how hikers could be destroyed. Before the final showdown with the Grand, he could blog his findings and post the link on as many different forums as possible to spread the word. Then it was up to someone else if necessary. He didn’t want Georgie to have anything more to do with any remaining hikers when he was no longer around to watch out for her. He especially didn’t want her ending up dying alone in a foreign country.
The stable set up she would inherit after his death should see to that. He made a mental note to update his will as soon as possible to name her as his sole heir. This really was the best plan for everyone. Now he just had to work out how to tell…
Georgie was suddenly in his face, grinning and waving a book at him.
‘Rabies!’ she cried triumphantly.
‘Huh?’ Brewer tried to shake off the mental images of his own suicide and focus.
‘Look.’ She put the book over the laptop and pointed to a paragraph halfway down the page. ‘Rabies can affect the nervous system and brain, it could cause some damage like the meningitis. We’d need to use saliva or tissue to infect a hiker with it though, rather than blood.’
Brewer read over the passage. He’d thought about rabies before and had to admit it sounded plausible as a way to kill them. When the symptoms were present, it took less than a week for a person to die. The meningitis had been accelerated in the hiker so the rabies could be too. Maybe it would only take a couple of days to die from it.
‘What do you think?’ Georgie asked eagerly. ‘Can we try it on one and see if it works?’
He looked at the hope on her face and couldn’t bring himself to fill her in on what he’d just been thinking about.
‘I guess there’s no harm in giving it a try,’ he agreed reluctantly.
Georgie whooped and gave him a brief, impulsive hug that took him by surprise. He definitely couldn’t fill her in on his Grand plan yet.
‘We’ll do it carefully, I promise.’ She looked at the book again. ‘No mess-ups or bitching from me, we’ll aim for a swift kill!’
Brewer typed ‘rabies’ in to Google and read up on the virus. There were plenty of pictures of dogs foaming at the mouth. He’d read Stephen King’s Cujo before and knew how dangerous an infected St. Bernard could be. How would a hiker react?
The one good thing the rabies had over meningitis was that it was easier to get hold of. It was still very rare, but they put dogs down who were infected so there would be samples of infected tissue and saliva, or batches of vaccines, at vet surgeries. Wild animals could have it too, like foxes or even cats.
The idea of getting close to a hiker again to infect it made him nervous. They might know what he and Georgie were intending to do, and exactly how they’d killed one of them before. Even if they didn’t, the hiker would be on the look out for them. The best way would be to infect one without getting too near.
He found an answer on a dangerous animals website.
‘Ok, we’ll try out the rabies on one.’ He turned the laptop to face Georgie. ‘And we’ll use this to do it.’
She edged closer to the screen and grinned when she saw what he wanted to do.
‘Awesome!’ she cried. ‘Can I shoot it?’
He looked at the image of the tranquiliser gun again. According to the description, it could fire darts at an animal from a fair distance, enough to give them some safety from the hiker.
‘Have you shot a gun before?’
‘No, but I did archery on a school trip and had a pretty good aim.’
Brewer had done a bit of practicing on a firing range before although he wasn’t very accurate. This looked as if it would be a lot easier to handle than a real gun.
‘Fine,’ he agreed. ‘You can practice in a dry run before we track one with the sample for real.’
They spent the afternoon hashing out a new plan. It had some risky parts but they wanted to implement it as soon as possible. The first step was the tranquiliser gun. There was an American website where they could order one from.
‘You can’t just order a gun online!’ Georgie looked dubiously at the website he’d found.
‘It’s not illegal to order a tranquiliser gun,’ he told her. ‘It’s the drugs for the darts that you’d need to be a registered vet or military person or something to get hold of, but we don’t need any. We’ll be filling them with the virus.’