by Dave Jeffery
That was the sort of thinking got you caught. Or worse.
***
“Talk to me, people!”
Colonel Mark Carpenter walked through the Operations Room. Until an hour ago the room had been part of Birmingham City Council’s Social Care Offices. Now it was home to the MoD rapid response team who had stripped it out and filled it with their own monitors and computers. Ahead, the six personnel operations team took to standing to attention at his approach.
“At ease!”
Carpenter was fifty-five years old and for well over thirty eight of these years had served his country with tours in the Desert Storm Campaign, Bosnia and Afghanistan. Experience and high rank meant that the respect of others came easily to him. He had nothing to prove and no reservations about making sure that the mission was completed with nothing less than total success.
But this current situation was different. It was different because he was reliant on external intelligence networks. Something significant had occurred and information was shady at best. And when Intel was unreliable missions tended to fail. Lives were often lost.
And that would not do.
“I’m listening but hearing nothing, people!” Carpenter said briskly. “I want to know what’s going on and who is responsible! And I want that information now.”
His steel blue eyes pierced the room before locking onto a young Corporal.
“What’s happening, lad?”
“An explosion, Sir,” the corporal replied, shrugging off his nerves. “We believe the source was the Penthouse suite of Dr. Richard Whittington; most likely the result of an extremist cell of the AAL.”
“I could have gotten that from any news channel on the way in,” Carpenter snapped; but he addressed it to the room. “What do we know of Whittington? What’s his current security status?”
“He’s no longer live on the grid, Colonel.” This came from a young woman, her pretty face made severe by the way her dark hair was pulled back and clamped into a bun.
God, thought Carpenter, was I ever that young?
“What was he working on when he was live?”
“Bio-weapons division,” the woman said. “Several projects, all top secret. But one of them is off the grid.”
“Explain,” Carpenter said.
“Codename L.I, Sir,” she continued, un-phased. “Whittington was working on something that got him fired by the MOD and all his access privileges were subsequently rescinded. It appears that he was working outside his brief.”
“He must’ve had a project team,” Carpenter surmised. “We got names?”
“He was operating alone. There are reports - rumours - that all his research disappeared.”
“Stolen?”
“Destroyed,” the woman replied.
“So what was Whittington doing now? Who was funding him?”
“Recent Intel suggests that the doctor was a consultant for Phoenix Industries.”
“Remit?”
“Science technology. Whittington appears to have been on their books since leaving his MoD position in ‘84.”
Carpenter nodded and turned to a large soldier standing to his right.
“Harte, we need a representative of Phoenix Industries here. Get someone. Bring them here naked if you have to.”
“Yes, Sir,” Harte said with a snappy salute, and hurried off.
“So what’s going on in the target zone?” Carpenter asked the room. “And tell me we’ve commandeered CCTV monitoring from civilian access?”
“CCTV monitoring is ours, Sir,” the Corporal piped up. “The city centre is quiet, no sign of activity.”
“That’s an issue in itself,” Carpenter observed. “Where are the people?”
“Probably taking cover,” the Corporal suggested. “Maybe waiting for us to go in and get them.”
“No one’s going anywhere until we know what we’re dealing with,” Carpenter retorted. “What’s giving us concern?”
“This, Sir.”
The female operative sat down at her work station and began typing on the keyboard in front of her. The VDU flickered and an image suddenly appeared. It was grey and grained, the flare of sodium street lights creating deep shadows, the cobbled pavements wet with spring rain.
“This is Brindley Place,” she explained without turning round from the monitor panning left to reveal a canal flanked by a series of bars and eateries. Save for the street lighting all the buildings were dark.
“What am I looking at?” Carpenter said leaning forward.
“Take a look at the tow path, Sir.”
Carpenter was close enough to her shoulder to smell her perfume. Against regulations of course but he was prepared to let it go given what was unfolding on the grey screen in front of him.
On the path separating the restaurants and bars from the canal, bodies lay strewn and still. Many were dressed in suits; the garb of business. Some were men, some were women, but all were twisted, backs arched; arms and legs contorted into implausible shapes.
“They died in agony,” the woman said flatly.
“Indeed,” Carpenter agreed. “But what killed them?”
At this point in time, no-one could offer any answer. And even if someone had any notion, no matter how remote, they would never have had chance to voice it. Because: the next moment the door to the small operations room flew inwards to allow a short, stocky man to march towards the Colonel.
The newcomer was dressed in black fatigues and sported a blonde marine regulation hair cut; shaved to reveal a money box scar on his crown.
The marine stopped short of Carpenter and offered the Colonel a salute almost as smart as the soldier’s appearance.
“At ease, Major,” Carpenter said. “What brings you here?”
“Looks like somebody made a mess, Colonel,” the Major replied as he stood down. “And I’m here to clear it up.”
***
Major Edward Shipman was simply a soldier. As such he saw things in simple terms. It was a doctrine that had served him well in his fifteen year career. Sure he’d navigated Sandhurst with some trepidation. He was, after all, the son of a sheet metal worker, he was never going to have an easy time in such an auspicious institution. But his cunning, resolve and the simple brutality he exhibited to potential antagonists served him well during his forty-four weeks of officer training. Such aptitude for covert practices meant his career in special ops was pretty much sure fire, though he hadn’t sought it out.
It had sought him.
A nameless/faceless operative in the higher echelons had heard “good things” about his work in Bosnia - where he covertly trained Serbian rebels into an effective militia; right under the noses of their Croatian oppressors - and within ten years Shipman was now out of the UK more than he was in it; not that anyone would be able to find his name on any mission or op sheet.
“I presume you have information for me, Major,” Carpenter said.
The two officers were sitting in an office just outside the main operation room. It was small and the air was heavy with the sickly smell of industrial air freshener.
“I have an update from our Intel network, Sir.”
“Drop the “Sir” bullshit, Shipman,” Carpenter said without animosity. “What you got that you can’t show our ops team?”
Shipman fished inside the pocket of his fatigues and removed a data flash-stick. It was bulky, black and hexagonal, and encrypted to the hilt.
He pushed the stick into the USB port on his smart phone. After typing in his password the tiny screen yielded its secrets and he handed the device to the Colonel.
Carpenter scrolled down the digital page, his face grim. Opposite, Shipman watched his superior, his expression impassive. Patient.
“Dr. Whittington has been busy since he left our arms,” the Major said.
“So it seems,” Carpenter conceded.
The screen flickered again and the Colonel read out the heading on the page.
“The Lazarus Initiati
ve,” he said. “Was this one of our projects?”
“It was never on record. It was mooted by Whittington in the eighties,” Shipman confirmed. “But it was deemed too expensive. And morally compromising for the MoD.”
“So save my eyesight, Shipman,” Carpenter said placing the smart phone on the desk.
“Whittington suggested that what he could create was a soldier that couldn’t die.”
“That’s bollocks, isn’t it?” Carpenter said. Shipman’s neutral expression suggested otherwise.
“Whittington hypothesized that if a soldier was killed, how could we make the body continue fighting? Continue killing?”
“It’s hard to believe such a thing is possible.” Carpenter’s skepticism kicked in for a while.
“Click onto the video link at the bottom of the page,” Shipman instructed. “This clip was taken from CCTV footage thirty minutes after the explosion at Whittington’s apartment.”
Carpenter did just that, and couldn’t believe what he was watching. It was footage of Broad Street, the entertainment hub for over a million visitors a year. But there wasn’t any bustle or signs of revelry. As with Brindley place, the bar fronts were dark and uninviting. But there was some movement. A lone figure ambling in the middle of the road: a middle-aged man. His legs were bowed, as though they wouldn’t be able to support his weight, and his right arm was missing above the elbow. The camera suddenly zoomed in on the man’s face and Whittington had seen enough death in his lifetime to recognize it immediately. This was, without question, a dead man walking.
“My God, did Whittington actually do it?” Carpenter muttered in awe.
“Not with our money,” Shipman said coldly
“Meaning?”
“We can assume that Phoenix Industries have funded Whittington’s research. Now the experiment has escaped from the Petri dish.”
“So what are we saying here, Major?”
“Birmingham is infected with the offshoot of Whittington’s Lazarus Initiative,” Shipman explained. “So we can only presume that those inside its radius are infected. The way the Initiative works is academic but the symptoms are a painful, agonizing death. And then -” the Major stopped as though he couldn’t quite bring himself to air his thoughts.
“Then, what?” Carpenter asked looking at the screen as the dismembered man bumped into a lamp post.
“Re-birth,” the Major whispered.
***
The Mastiff slowed before coming to a complete stop; its big engine growling. From his position in the back of the truck O’Connell sensed that this was pre-emptive. He talked into his headset.
“Update, Kunaka?”
“Road block: four hundred metres. Instructions?”
“Let’s go and say ‘hi’,” O’Connell said. “Good luck, people.”
His hands closed upon the SA80 sitting across his lap.
“I thought that was just for show?” said Clarke, his voice trembling slightly.
O’Connell didn’t reply.
***
7
There, my darling. Do you feel my touch? Do you feel my love?”
Crispin Miller’s hand trembled as it moved over Heather Monaghan’s soft linen night dress, his fingers tracing small circles on the milky white skin of her exposed sternum, before nestling under the gown’s neckline and cupping her small breast.
“I love you so much,” Crispin whispered into her ear, his fingers stroking the pert nipple of her left breast; a nipple that was not so much stiff and erect in response to his adept touch, as the fact that Heather Monaghan had been as dead as a nail since the day Crispin Miller had first met her.
She wasn’t as beautiful then as she was now, of course. Then she had been damaged, the result of soft, yielding tissue meeting the harsh plastic of a dash board at sixty miles per hour. Her death had been as instant as his love for her, when he saw the photograph Heather’s grief-stricken husband had brought into Miller’s Funeral Home Ltd several days ago.
Mr. Monaghan was wheel-chair bound; an added penance for driving slightly over the limit on the night of the accident that turned his good natured, fun loving spouse into the rag doll that had hit the windshield with such force twenty of her teeth had exploded. Monaghan’s melancholy - his guilt - was a palpable entity, and he wore his grief like fragile armour.
“Make my lass handsome again,” Monaghan had wept, handing Miller a 4x4 glossy picture of his very beautiful, very dead wife.
It was a portrait, taken during better times; times when she’d been living and breathing and enjoying what life often gave those who embraced it without question. Heather was facing camera, her green eyes framed by doe-lashes, her smile accentuated by white teeth and her skin, flawless porcelain.
Oh yes, Heather Monaghan was a sight to behold, but when the linen covers were thrown back revealing her ballooned black and blue face and eyes pulled into slits by terrible, swollen eyelids, lesser men would have wept along with her grieving spouse.
But Crispin Miller could see beyond the dreadful wounds. He had seen Heather’s potential, vowing to give her back her beauty.
And enjoy a few intimate moments along the way.
Crispin was used to his oddness. When he questioned it (which wasn’t that often) he used the cliché that the blame lay with his parents.
Miller’s mother and father were in their late forties when he came along. As the only son of older parents, his values were often traditional and by default obsolete. This was to become worse when Miller was six years old and his father died of a stroke. His mother’s grief morphed into over protection and dependence. In Georgina Miller’s need for emotional equilibrium, she blunted her son’s emotional and social development
As such, he was always targeted by the local dimwits. His mother laughed off his complaints telling him it would be God’s retribution that such people would ultimately face.
His earliest recollection of bullies was running headlong through a wood in an attempt to evade the three boys who wanted to pass some time by kicking the shit out of him. The memory was still very clear. Because it was the same afternoon that Crispin Miller became fascinated with death.
In those woods, he’d stumbled and fallen, just missing the carcass of a dead badger. It had been there a while, its snout frozen in an endless grimace, its paws pulled taut by rigor mortis. There was little sign as to why the animal lay dead in the wood; there wasn’t any blood or indication of trauma. But the serenity he found in the scene would stay with him for the rest of his life, and somewhere along the way Miller lost the ability to differentiate the desire for life over death.
He was an awkward child, an outsider and as such his relationships with others were often superficial, if they existed at all. Where there were opportunities, Georgina Miller would snuff them out lest it lead to her son leaving her alone. Should Crispin attract any female attention, his mother would place little doubts in his mind.
“Careful, Crispin, that one’s got her eye on you!”
And she would follow this with stories of how no matter how much time, how much love you gave out, people would always leave you alone and desperate in the end.. By the time he went to college, this had become Crispin’s doctrine.
With no inclination to forge relationships, Crispin’s real passion was sculpture, and in his hands clay was under his command. He excelled at creating figures frozen in time, burlesque images of those he often revered but found, in reality, difficult to connect with. All he needed was a photograph, and this is what he often did. But being caught taking clandestine photographs of young women didn’t go down too well at Art College. People just didn’t understand his rationale, not helped by his aloof nature. And after a while he gave up trying, accepting his expulsion as another example of how the world had failed him.
He bummed around for a few years until the death of his mother gave rise to a chance meeting and a subsequent new sense of direction.
He was devastated at her death, this being anot
her reminder at how people always bailed out in the end. It was a skewed view, born from selfish ends, but with no other perspective, Miller lived by its injunction.
Miller had spoken with George Hedges, the funeral director, to fill in the awkward silences often associated with funeral parlors; where grief and remorse ferment with the sickly stench of funeral wreaths. He spoke of loss and his desire to rebuild life from death and Hedges, a reedy man with a kind demeanor that extended beyond his fee, smiled and asked Crispin how he intended to do such a thing.
So Miller told the funeral director of his talent for sculpture, and the potential to marry his skills and the funeral trade began to take shape as easily as a piece of inert clay under Miller’s deft finger tips.
Under Hedge’s tuition, Miller learned the trade. When he saw his first corpse - that of a woman in her mid-thirties who had come off second best when she collided with a garbage truck - this fledgling mortician was overcome with the same sense of peace that had befallen him in the wood near his home, all those years ago. And from that point on, Miller fell in love with death.
It was only a matter of time before this was to develop into something far more sinister.
Mr. Hedges passed away two years ago, but not before imparting his wisdom and knowledge, and Miller had set up his own establishment with his old mentor’s endorsement.
Now Miller was alone with another creation, another lover upon which to lavish his affections. Heather had been painstakingly rebuilt, crafted into the beautiful creature she was in life.
Miller had positioned her in his office, sitting at a table, the flowing nightdress she wore belonged to his mother. Sometimes he wore it himself, on the anniversary of his mother’s death: just to honour her memory.