by Lee Isserow
This wasn't the time to object, and with his hands tied, certainly not the time to fight. Ben sat in silence, listening to the sounds around him. The cooking utensils were picked up, Samuel admonished as he put them into the back of the camper. The tents and sleeping bags were brought in, stacked in a corner. As the others stepped into the back of the van and took their seats, the whole thing shifted dramatically, The camper wasn't built for eight passengers, and the suspension didn't seem happy at the prospect of carrying them.
But, Ben reasoned, it must have carried this load before, if not a heavier load. There were thirty in the group originally. That many people couldn't have fit in this van alone, they would have had to travel in convoy. That must have been how the Squad tracked them originally, four or five vehicles travelling together. When their numbers were almost halved, they must have got smarter, taking separate routes and changing number plates along the way, before they ended up at the last warehouse. And now, with only seven of them left, it was just one van's worth of people. They might be harder to track with sporadically changing plates, but the van itself was unmistakable. If it were flagged somehow, the Squad could track it on cameras, even if the plates were different.
“Everyone been to the toilet?” Martin asked, from a few seats over from Ben. There were murmurs. “Good, strapped in?”
The question garnered responses in the affirmative, alongside groans and grunts of exhaustion.
“Let's get moving,” he said, his voice fainter than it was with the previous statement. Ben imagined he was facing away, the words directed at Rob, or whoever was driving now. “Got 'til sunrise to dump it, no time to bloody lose.”
The van growled to life, and started chugging away through the warehouse. The sounds it made gave the impression that it was reluctant to move, grumbling and grunting laggardly as it slowly rolled out through the shutters.
As soon as the tyres left concrete and kissed tarmac, the van's mood seemed to change. The vehicle's objections dissipated, it was humming along gleefully, as if becoming accustomed to the heavy load as it picked up speed.
“You got our stops on the map?” Martin asked.
“Three of them, yeah?” Ned replied.
“Yeah.”
The van continued to drive through the night, Ben trying his damnedest to listen to those around him. At first, they sat in a taciturn silence. Then a few words were spoken, which turned into moments of faint chatter that was intentionally too quiet for him to hear over the sound of the engine and the tyres rolling on the road. He could make out the sound of soft snores, at least one of those around him had fallen asleep. It still wasn't time to act, not with his hands still bound. He'd have to wait until they stopped, give them an excuse to let his hands free. Going to the bathroom would be the perfect excuse.
“Can I have some water?” he asked, sowing the seeds of the idea that he'd need the bathroom later.
There was some movement around him, then the bag was taken off his head. Samuel in front of him, unsteady on his feet with the movement of the van. He put a bottle up to Ben's lips, the water missing and dribbling down his face before Ben could latch on to it.
“Sorry,” he said, wiping Ben's chin with his sleeve and trying again, this time succeeding in watering their prisoner.
“Thank you,” Ben said, as the bottle was taken away. He looked around at the other occupants at the back of the camper. Martin was looking over his shoulder at the road ahead. Ned and Shauna in the two front passenger seats next to Rob, who was behind the wheel. Kat and Luke were sitting opposite him, his head in her lap, both of them sound asleep.
Ben's gaze lingered on them, then shifted back to Samuel, who was struggling with putting the cap back on the bottle. “What happened to his mother?” he asked.
Samuel dropped the cap. It rolled along the floor of the camper, and disappeared under the bench. He took a short breath before lifting hie eyes to meet Ben's gaze.
“He killed her.”
9
No further explanation was given, and after Samuel found the cap and replaced it on the bottle, the bag was pulled back over Ben's head, and a lugubrious silence hung in the air.
After what felt like hours, the van shunted to a halt, its engine grunting in disapproval. There was movement inside, weight shifting around him. Clunking and thumping as doors were opened, clanks and clangs as number plates were taken from the box, and a high pitched whirr of a drill whining as the plates were changed.
“Can I stretch my legs?” Ben asked, loudly, not certain that anyone was still sitting near him.
He felt the weight shifting again, as hands reached behind him and untied his bonds from the bench. A strong hand wrapped around his arm and tugged him towards the doors. Ben stood up tall, and gritted his teeth just before the loud clang of his head hitting the top of the van's back doors. It hurt, but the temporary pain was worth it, as Martin pulled the hood off for him to be able see where he was going as he stepped down from the back of the camper.
Ben walked around with Martin as his minder, and surveyed the scene. They were under a bridge, it was dead of night. No cars or other people around, no surveillance as far as he could see. The perfect place to change the plates and move on unnoticed.
“Thanks,” he said, trying to make his expression to Martin look as grateful as possible.
The word didn't garner a response. After a minute of walking in circles, he was marched back into the van, his hands tied back up to the bench, Martin leaving to check in with the others, and remind them of their schedule.
The bag wasn't put back on, and with his vision unobscured, Ben could watch Luke sleep with his head on Kat's lap. She looked up and saw his expression, the compassion in his eyes, and took a deep breath.
“She was my sister,” she said. “His mother.”
“And he...” Ben started, he didn't know how to ask.
“It wasn't his fault.”
“I never imagined it was.”
“His father, he left, when he found out she was pregnant.”
Ben didn't know what to say. He found his eyes resting on the sleeping child's face, a face so innocent that even in slumber, he appeared to have an angelic smile on his lips. Blissfully unaware of what was happening around him.
“She moved in with me, a month in. And after he was born, we raised him together, until...” Kat trailed off, and she broke eye contact with Ben, looking down at Luke. “She didn't believe in vaccines, as much as I tried to convince her, so he didn't have the first bunch... but when he was about three, I finally managed to convince her that she should do it. So, we took him in for a shot. You know, MMR?”
Ben nodded, but didn't dare say a word. He didn't want to risk interrupting the frankness of Kat's story. This was the most she had said to him since his capture, and it felt to him like it was almost some kind of therapy for her to say what happened out loud.
“So we went in. Her, me, him, to the GP. He was a sweet old man, ancient really, same GP my sister and I went to when we were kids.” A thin, frail smile came to her lips at the thought of the old man. “Such a sweet guy, great with kids. He had Luke in stitches, giggling like a maniac. But when he produced the needle, Luke was terrified... it took us forever to calm him down, to distract him.” Her lips could no longer keep the smile, it broke, her mouth becoming a thin, straight line. “As soon as he was calm again, the doctor poked the needle in his arm. It was so quick, such a brief little pinch... but it drew blood.”
Ben instantly knew what she was going to tell him, but didn't say a word. He eyes were becoming glassy, tears welling, desperate to fall.
“Just the smallest bead of blood... but you know how that goes. That tiny pinprick grew, poor Luke blacking out as all the blood in his tiny body filled that little bead, turned it into a demonic creature that bit clean through the doctor, tore my sister apart and...”
Tears were streaming down her cheeks. Ben wanted to move, to sit next to her, put an arm around her and comfort her. But his hands w
ere bound, he was latched to the bench, and could only be an observer to her pain.
“It let me live,” she said, through a sniff, wiping the tears from her face.
“Because you were infected,” Ben said.
“Not that I knew it then, but yeah,” she composed herself, breathed deeply, but wouldn't meet his eyeline.
“How did you... y'know, get infected?” Ben asked.
She chuckled and rolled her eyes. “Like anyone bloody knows... as much as people say the do, protest and tell you with conviction and certainty that they know what this thing is, nobody has the faintest damn idea!”
Luke stirred in her lap at her raised voice. She put her fingers through his hair, stroking his head, trying to calm herself down in the process.
After sitting in silence for a few minutes, the others got back in the van, the doors shut behind them, and the hood placed back over his head. They tore off down the street and continued their journey.
Ben couldn't help but replay Kat's story in his head. She didn't know how she was infected, didn't know how Luke was infected. It reminded him that he had no idea how he picked up the infection in the first place, that none of the recruits in the Blood Squad knew either.
But what she said, that nobody knew what the damn thing was, that was going to be his way in. He had suffered through all those boring lectures about the science of the haemogoblins, and knew way more than this group did about what was going on in their bodies. That knowledge, sharing that knowledge, was how he was going to get them to trust him.
10
The van continued to speed through the night, often the only vehicle moving on quiet roads, through backstreets and sleepy suburban neighbourhoods.
After what felt like another hour, or maybe even two, they stopped outside a car repair place. Ned got out and fiddled with the lock for a few minutes, before pulling the shutter up and ushering the van inside. Ben heard the clatter of the shutters rolling down behind them, and was told to get out with the others, whilst the plates were changed again, and Samuel set about putting tape over the windows and lights. Shauna went over to a corner and returned covered in a plastic jumpsuit and face mask, with a spray nozzle in her hand.
The others moved over to the other side of the garage as she started respraying the van black. Ben realised they were smarter than he gave them credit for. Changing number plates was kids stuff, the camper still looked the same, and anyone browsing CCTV would easily keep track of it. This was how they were going to insure the van wasn't tracked by eye.
Whilst they waited for the respray, Ben decided to start sowing the seeds of trust by telling them everything he knew about the goblins. He decided to leave out the parts about them being referred to as 'blood-driven', but gave them all the scientific assumptions he could recall from the classes back at the Squad.
What he told them lined up with what Samuel had assumed. He used to be a researcher at St Barts, which is where he first came into contact with the blood, working at the Blizard Institute. They managed to get a sample under an electron microscope, by putting an open wound that was coalescing under the lens. Their view of the plasma didn't last long, the lab was torn apart by the 'goblin fairly swiftly, but he could swear that he saw clotting factors working alongside carbon nanotubes, the latter of which he was adamant had no natural reason to be in blood.
That was four years ago, he was told that the 'accident' in the lab got his whole staff contaminated. A few of them came with him to join the group, all of them now dead thanks to the Blood Squad. He didn't know what happened to the ones that decided not to join the group, but could only assume they were dead too.
Ben had a pit growing in his gut. If what Samuel was saying was true, the Squad had been hunting people down who were researching the condition. Maybe, he reasoned, those were the people that were designated as capture missions, rather than kill. He thought again about his apprehension to tell them everything, and decided that being entirely open was the only way to get them to have anything close to faith in him.
“They call you blood-driven,” he found himself saying, over a lump in his throat.
“What?” said Kat.
“It's what it sounds like, that the blood is making your decisions for you.”
“That's a load of bull!” Martin shouted.
“I know.” Ben insisted. “I know that now. But that's why I was with them, in the warehouse, when we raided you... when your friends died...”
“When our friends were murdered.” Ned corrected.
“Yes. When your friends were murdered.” Ben took a deep breath. “When your brother was murdered.”
Ned hadn't said anything directly, but Ben knew full well that the anger that Ned harboured towards him was a direct result of the dead man with the same face that he had stumbled over during the raid.
“I'm sorry,” Ben said. “I'm sorry for him, and I'm sorry for everything. If I knew then what I knew now, I wouldn't have been on that raid, I wouldn't have been involved with the Squad in the slightest...”
The others said nothing, but Ben could sense a change in the atmosphere around him. Trust was building, it was almost tactile, he could practically feel it. Which made him start to feel a little bad, because as soon as that trust was gained, he was going to betray it.
11
They were back on the road before the paint was dry, and changed plates en route one last time, pulling over round the back of a council estate. It was getting close to dawn, the first purple and pink glimmers of daybreak on thin wisps of clouds low on the horizon, behind the hard edges of the dark brooding brutalist concrete buildings.
Ben was almost certain they were still in London, but couldn't say where exactly. He thought about asking one of the group, since he had assumed they had been heading to France or Scotland as they had talked of. Deep down he knew they wouldn't tell him, not yet anyway.
As the sun began its lazy ascent, and the dawn chorus began to tune up, the van pulled up outside a terraced house on a quiet street. Definitely still London, Ben was certain now. The street signs had the postcode E3, so they were somewhere in the east of the city. They had driven through the night, and even if they were way on the other side of the capital, the trip shouldn't have taken more than an hour or two. He decided they must have gone a circular route, maybe going double or triple back on themselves. He knew it didn't really matter where they were, whenever he managed to make the call, they'd be able to trace it.
The group entered the house, whilst Martin took the camper off to dispose of it. Ben recalled the petrol containers in the back. He hadn't seen them fill the tank on their trip, and assumed that fire was part of the plan for disposal.
The house they were moving into was dilapidated, long forgotten and vacant. Ben assumed that was the point, nobody would come looking for a group of terrorists in a place like this. The front door stuck fast, and needed to be tugged or shoved hard to even get it to consider opening. The floorboards inside were old and withered, creaked with every step he made as he explored. Wallpaper damp and distressed, bubbling and buckling away from the ceilings, with patches of mould growing from cracks and tears in its surface. He looked around for a phone, or phone sockets, but all of them had been ripped out.
Upstairs he discovered three rooms, one in which the sleeping bags were being laid out, one for cooking and food storage, and the third which was practically a cupboard, where Rob was fixing a lock to the door.
“That's not necessary,” Ben said. “I'm not going anywhere, not any more.”
“Says you,” Rob grunted.
“What do I have to do to prove myself to you?” Ben asked, exasperated that Rob was the last of the group who didn't seem to have even a modicum of trust in him.
“Ain't nothing you can do,” he spat, slamming the door and putting a key in the keyhole to test it out. The latch made a heavy thunk as it locked in place. Rob grabbed the door handle, pulling and pushing it sharply. It rattled as he tugged it. He became mor
e aggressive, the strike plate shaking in place in time with his frantic movements. With a final, hefty tug, the door came completely off its hinges, strike plate coming with it, falling from the rotting woodwork of the door frame. Rob fell back, the door collapsing on top of him. “Dammit!”
“It doesn't matter,” Ben said, pushing the broken door to the side and holding out a hand to help Rob up. “Like I told you, I'm not going anywhere.”
Rob's eyes narrowed. He batted Ben's hand out of the way and picked himself up. “Best not. Ain't gonna lose no more friends to you bastards!”
Ben sighed as Rob stomped down the stairs.
“Just give him time,” Samuel said softly, poking his head out from the makeshift kitchen. “Him and Phil, Ned's brother, they were... y'know, together...”
“I had no idea,” Ben said, his eyes fixed to the floor.
“No reason you should,” Samuel said, his polite smile and tired eyes finding Ben's eyeline. “Want to lend a hand? Need to go out for a supply run, could do with an extra set of hands.”
A smile came to Ben's face without his permission. That was the perfect opportunity to make the call. He tried with all his might to suppress the grin. “That would be good, I'd like to do whatever I can to help.”
As the two of them came down the stairs, they met with instant resistance. Rob's raised voice was the first sign of mistrust. He was told by the others to go walk it off, as loud noises, especially shouting from a formerly abandoned house was going to raise suspicions from the neighbours. Kat wanted to go in his place, but she was reminded that someone needed to watch Luke, which sent her stomping up to the bedroom. Ned and Shauna reluctantly agreed that it was about time Ben pulled his weight, and it was decided that Ned would accompany them to get supplies. After the argument he caused, Ben was surprised they let him go at all, but didn't want to question their decision.
It was a short walk to the corner store, which was only a few blocks from the house. Ben assumed it was chosen over a supermarket with a wider and cheaper selection of goods because of the likelihood of it having fewer, or perhaps no cameras, unlike a bigger shop.