“I don’t know what’s happened but we can do nothing for them,” Lewis said, speaking quickly and quietly. “I hate to go without finding any answers but I think you’re right. They’re dead and I suggest we get out of here fast before the same thing happens to us.”
Bannister nodded a little too enthusiastically. “Abso-bloody-lutely.”
Swiftly they manoeuvred their tight huddle, rifles swinging wildly at every noise as they scurried back to the vehicles. The keys were still in the ignition of the other Land Rover so Bannister and Millington took it. With a remorseful glance towards the supermarket Lewis got in as Straddling started the engine and floored the accelerator, whisking them back to the protection of the base.
Safe.
For the time being at least.
CHAPTER 2
As Captain Lewis and his soldiers sped through the deserted streets towards their safe haven all the devastation was a clear reminder of what had led to their current circumstances. The gruesome proof was all around. Lewis had a rough idea of what had triggered the chain of events - that was inevitable. The name of ‘GVF Laboratories’ was very familiar to them all, as was the ‘Dem-buster’ drug. However he did not know exactly how things had gone so terribly wrong, nor the name of the man chiefly responsible for their precipitous situation now, Dr Boxall.
Several months before and a little distance from RAF Headley Court towards the north west of London, Dr Jason Boxall had finished work and returned home. His daughter Isabelle greeted him at the front door with a kiss. With her freckles and shoulder-length brown hair she was a little carbon-copy of her mother Julia.
As Jason joined his wife in the kitchen he called out, “Mum, dinner,” but there was no answer. “How’s she been today Jules?”
“Same, same,” she replied. “She’s been upstairs most of the day. I got her out of bed around nine and brought her down but she went back just after lunch. She just seemed to want to watch TV in her room.” Julia could see the pain in her husband’s eyes as she spoke and put an arm around his shoulders. “She’s fine, really. She’s happy.”
“Yeah I guess,” he lapsed into silence. Several years before, his mother had been diagnosed with Pick’s disease, a form of dementia similar to Alzheimer’s. Her mental functioning had declined considerably in recent months and she was now becoming a hazard to herself so Julia and Jason had decided to look after her in their own home.
Jason was happy that they were able to do this but it did not assuage his feeling of guilt. He knew his mother would have loved to have visited more often over the previous years but somehow they had not made enough time for her until it was too late. Jason realised now to his cost that those were precious years that he would never get back. Dementia is an insidious fiend that steals into your home when you are not looking, sits down next to you on the sofa and before you realise it, has made itself an unavoidable part of your life, stealing away the person that was once there and leaving nothing more than a husk bearing scant resemblance to whom the person once was. For him the guilt would always be there but at least they could now take care of her.
When he went up to her room she was sat in a faded red armchair in the corner, watching the television. She turned and stared vacantly at him for a long moment before offering a limp smile but he was not sure if that was a sign of recognition or just a reflex action.
“It’s dinner time mum. Are you hungry?” he asked.
“Yes dear,” she replied and made a muted kind of laughing sound like a swan’s hiss.
He looked into her eyes and she returned his glance without any obvious emotion at first but then, as though she could read his mind, she patted his arm.
“It’s okay dear, it’ll be all right,” she smiled. He wasn’t quite sure to what she was referring but her positive reaction gave him a fleeting warm glimmer. He wondered exactly when she had stopped being the woman she once was, when her personality and humanity had died.
When they had all finished dinner Isabelle went to slip off her chair but Jason tapped his water glass with his fork. “Attention, attention, Boxall family meeting in progress.”
“Oh Daddy but I want to go and play.”
“Well, you know the rules - meeting first. There may be something that you want to add. There may even be talk of your birthday if you stick around long enough.”
“I want add something,” Rory piped up.
“Of course you do my love,” Julia grabbed his head and kissed the top of it. “You always want to add something, usually a ruddy great mess.”
“Okay,” Jason continued, “it’s been a pleasure for us to have Nanny Boxall staying with us for the last couple of weeks hasn’t it? How would you like it if she stayed with us for a little longer?”
Rory cheered but Isabelle paused in consideration for a moment before speaking, her six-year-old brain already learning the subtleties of feminine guile. “That’s really great. So she will be here for my birthday?”
“Yes poppet.”
“Does that mean I will get an extra present from her?”
Julia laughed. “Yes, of course you will.” In fact they had already bought her present on behalf of Nanny Boxall, a furry rucksack in the shape of a dog’s face with floppy ears and a big, brown nose.
“Great. I do have one other thing to add,” Isabelle said with a sly look.
“Yes?” Julia arched her eyebrows enquiringly, trying to contain the smirk.
“Now can we talk about my birthday party please?”
After the children had gone to bed, Jason and Julia sat in the living room with a bottle of wine.
Jason took a slow swig and turned to his wife. “That was not the only thing we had to discuss tonight.” Not for the first time that evening she arched her eyebrows but said nothing, waiting for him to proceed.
He cleared his throat. “It seems I am being promoted at work, kind of.”
“Really? That’s fantastic. Kind of? What does that mean?”
“There is a new project that I am going to be involved with, it’s being pushed through as top priority and getting unlimited funding, kind of.” He could not contain his grin and she could tell he was bursting to blurt it all out but was teasing her with the slow drip-feed of information.
“Yes?” Again the eyebrow, this time accompanied with a gentle pinch of his leg. “Well go on then, tell me.”
“As you know I have been involved with neurological synaptic networks, their functionality and connectivity, and…”
“Whoah! Hold your horses there Einstein. Layman’s terms please else you get to do the washing-up for a week.”
She was a smart lady but he was a neurological scientist, and when he started talking about mitochondrial synaptic junctions it left her, like most people, feeling a little lost. She had fond memories of when they first met at a friend’s dinner party. They had been placed together although her friend subsequently swore that there was no intended element of match-making. In fact her friend had hoped to set her up with the man sat on her other side, a TV producer called Gavin, but he had been chatting to the lady on his right all night so Julia and Jason had spent most of the night talking.
When she had found out that he was a brain scientist she had mocked him by yawning and pretending to fall asleep in her dish, poking herself in the face with her spoon in the process and splattering soup on the tablecloth which set them both off giggling. She challenged him to tell her the most interesting fact he could think of about brains.
“Well, did you know that there are more potential pathways to connect the cells in the average human brain than there are molecules in the known universe?”
“Wow!” She had been genuinely amazed, although she did not really know what synaptic pathways were or what function they served, but she was impressed by this statistic nonetheless. “So what do these pathways do then? And why is it so important that there are so many of them?”
As he had started to explain she became a little lost but neverthele
ss found herself desperate to understand and appear intelligent. She remembered thinking how intense and piercingly blue his eyes seemed and she felt herself being drawn in. She had liked this man right from the start although she had no idea why and she found herself laughing a little too readily at his jokes.
Several years and two children later, and she had given up work at least until Rory, their youngest, was old enough to join his sister at primary school in just under a year. Jason was now employed by a small yet esteemed company in the neurological research industry. He himself was also highly regarded in his field and never short of well-paid offers from rivals. He was extremely good at his job. What he was not so good at was describing what he did, in layman’s terms. He tried to explain using more basic terminology.
“I have been investigating how electrical charges flow between cells in the brain, how the patterns of these flows relate to a person’s thought processes, storage of memory etcetera, etcetera.” He paused to ensure she was following him.
“Hmmm,” she gave a faint nod.
“Well, we have always been notoriously under-funded. Compared with companies in the US we work on peanuts. Now however it seems that some wealthy hot-shot called Gautam van Firstenburg has taken an interest and we are going to get an unexpected cash-injection. He’s been bank-rolling a company that researches certain brain diseases including types of dementia. This is what our studies have been dabbling in for a while, only he has been looking at these issues from a genetic point of view. It seems he’s really keen to try to come up with a cure for dementia as soon as possible.”
“Really?” Julia said. “I thought that dementia meant the brain was slowly dying and since dead brain cells can’t be repaired or replaced there’s no cure for it?”
“Not exactly. Yes, dementia does mean that brain cells are, in effect, dying. However, considering the brain is really only three pounds of gelatinous mulch it is the most incredible organ. In the last twenty years our understanding of it has improved drastically but we still have a heck of a lot to learn. We used to think that once the cells of the brain died, through trauma, illness, even alcohol…” he raised his glass and clinked hers, “…then that was it, there was no getting them back. But that is not necessarily the accepted truth any more. Certainly the brain can learn to adapt and other areas can relearn the functions that are lost when one part of the brain is damaged. There is a possibility also that the damaged cells can even be repaired. We are working on both angles but we are encouraging it to do this really quickly, sort of speeding up the metabolism of the brain so the chemical processes operate a lot faster.”
“And how exactly does all this affect you?”
“This Gautam van Firstenburg chap is in the process of buying our company and amalgamating it with his own. He was quoted in the press as saying something about dementia being a war against individual humanity and he intends to develop a ‘neurological nuke’ that will end the war once and for all. He wants to combine our research with his. Once we have introduced the elements of change the brain will continue to adjust itself, evolving even as the damage repairs itself. I mean we’re talking about radical alteration in the DNA of how one’s brain works. With the amount of funding we’re going to have, we’ll be able to do so much more than ever previously.” His eyes were really lighting up now and he was talking a lot faster.
“That’s amazing, really. So who is Gautam van Firstenburg, and what’s his background?”
“He’s a billionaire of Indian-German descent living in London, and his company is called ‘GVF Laboratories’. He isn’t married and has no kids, but wants to do something philanthropic with his money, to leave his legacy for society. I understand that his parents have both recently been diagnosed with different forms of dementia and so he decided to try and help them, hence the need for speed. I guess he wants to go down in history as the man responsible for curing dementia, sort of like a modern day Marie Curie. A cash injection this large, and all in one go, means that we should be able to make huge progress in a really short space of time.”
They both paused, contemplating how this could affect people’s lives, and especially their own and that of Jason’s mother. At that stage they could not possibly have envisaged exactly how everybody’s lives would indeed be altered forever.
There was the sound of light footsteps on the stairs followed by the living room door creaking open and a sleepy, young girl wandered in rubbing her eyes.
Julia rose first. “Are you okay darling?”
“I had a nightmare about Nanny.”
In the ensuing weeks and months Jason’s job at GVF Laboratories was more intense than ever before. Typically when he arrived home at the end of the day he would check on his mother. Slowly her mental state declined.
One evening over another glass of wine the conversation returned to his project.
“How’s work?” Julia asked. “Any developments?”
“Huh? Oh yes, actually we have been making considerable progress. We’ve been hampered a little by some internal politics though.”
“What’s the problem?”
“Van Firstenburg has stated he is not keen on animal testing so we are having to find alternative methods which are making matters more difficult.”
“Wouldn’t that be a good thing though? Not harming innocent animals?”
“This is true,” Jason sighed. This was an issue that he had struggled with, like most people involved with such research. “No one actually likes testing any medical procedures on animals but unfortunately in this business there really is very little substitute. I mean it is possible in some cases to use alternatives such as growing human tissue cultures or computer modelling, and we do both, but unfortunately these methods are just not accurate enough. Doing experiments on animals is almost as realistic as experimenting on humans; almost. So we will be doing some animal testing, just not nearly as much as we would do normally.
“We’ve had a few breakthroughs though. At the moment we’re making some really aggressive DNA modifications that speed up the cell functioning like crazy. I told you before that Gautam van Firstenburg is keen to push this ahead as fast as possible, possibly even too fast. It’s caused a few problems trying to slow things up and performing enough of the correct trials. But anyway, the point is that all the results look promising and he wants to go ahead with human clinical trials.”
“But surely he is not the expert, you are. Do you think it’s too soon for that?”
“No you’re quite right, he’s not the expert but he is the money. Without his backing we would certainly not have made the advances that we have made to date, not in my lifetime anyway. It’s sooner than we would have liked but it is safe.”
“Well that’s incredible. And?”
“Hmmm, well, they’re looking for volunteers, human guinea pigs with advanced dementia of various types. You’d be surprised exactly how few people actually have advanced Pick’s in the UK.”
“Ahh. And you were considering volunteering your mother.” It was not a question, just an uncomfortable realization.
“Yes. With virtually all new drugs or medical procedures there will come a time where you need to test the results on humans. This has just come slightly sooner than we would have liked. Now the life expectancy of a sufferer of Pick’s can be as little as three years from diagnosis to as long as ten years in some. My mother was diagnosed with this, what, six years ago? So we really are living on borrowed time. It’s her best chance, her last chance and I really think it will work.”
“What exactly does it involve?” Julia’s natural sense of caution meant that she did not particularly like the sound of this plan, but then what other options did they have? As with Van Firstenburg’s parents, time was running out.
“There is a long course of drugs to take that may have some unpleasant side-effects for some, such as nausea or headaches. There will be some therapy called trans-cranial, magnetic stimulation, which involves using electro-magnets to ex
cite deep areas of brain tissue, and a little radiography will help with this stimulation. The drugs will be administered over the period of about a week then a couple of weeks off and repeated several times.”
“And are you sure that you are not rushing into this, because of your mother?”
“Absolutely not. Not all research programmes progress at the same rate. This is just one of the faster ones.”
Julia took a deep breath. This really was a big decision to take but, if he was sure… “Well then, I guess it’s the right thing to do for her.”
They both laughed a little nervously.
“Think I need another drink. You?”
Until recently the drug had unofficially been named the Dem-buster, a reference to the Dam Busters squadron of the Second World War, implying its triumph over dementia and alluding to Van Firstenburg’s mention of developing a ‘brain bomb’. Now however it had been given an official brand name, ‘Mnemoloss’, taken from Mnemosyne, the Titaness of Greek mythology, daughter of Gaia and Uranus and the personification of memory.
Jason’s mother was taken for a rigorous screening procedure. The medical research facility of GVF Laboratories was to the north east of London, just outside the city of Cambridge. It had a small unit that provided accommodation for patients. Standing blankly by the front door waiting for Jason to bring her suitcase down she looked lost and afraid. Julia had to go into the kitchen to avoid the children seeing her with tears in her eyes. However the programme went smoothly for her. After just over a week she was released and Jason took her home until the second stage of drugs were to be administered.
Julia and the children were all waiting for her when she arrived back. On seeing her walk unsteadily through the front door Julia burst into tears and flung her arms around her. Jason’s mother stood for a second not reacting then slowly returned a frail hug. Over the next week she seemed to recover quickly but she did experience some side-effects in the form of nausea and terrible headaches. She had always been fairly steady on her feet but now a couple of times she stumbled and fell. Otherwise so far everything seemed well.
The Blood of the Infected (Book 1): Once Bitten, Twice Die Page 3