Guinea Pig

by Curtis, Greg

  Something was happening in the world. Something he didn't understand. But something big. And if it had started with gigantic sink holes opening up and swallowing buildings and then continued with ice storms, there was no reason to assume it would stop. There would be more, and probably worse to come.

  His plans for the day were over though. Seeing the catastrophe unfolding in front of him Will knew that he wouldn't be seeing the doctor today. The practice was going to be rushed off its feet. He wouldn't be driving down to the crater either. Not without a car and in any case the FEMA people were going to be far too busy to speak with him. Worst of all, even if Doctor Millen was alive and FEMA could tell him where he was, the chances were that he'd no longer be there after this. If he had any sense he'd be fleeing the city. In any case it would be some time before Will would risk going outside. When huge chunks of ice could simply start crashing down out of clear blue summer skies, it might be a very long time.

  Another ice bomb crashed down in the flat behind him and made him jump. But it didn't make him turn around. And it certainly didn't make him want to go and see the damage. The roof and the first floor were providing absolutely no protection. The front doorway was the safest part of the house. And it didn't feel all that safe.

  What was happening? It was one disaster after another, and the thought that wouldn't go away was that it was all to do with him. Something to do with the trial.

  He got injected with the stuff and half an hour later the ground opened up and tried to swallow him. The police officer had even told him that the room he was in was the dead centre of the disaster. Now five days later and miles away from the clinic he discovered the first side effect and half an hour later the sky rained killer ice bombs. The timing was shocking. And then there were the dreams. Dreams that he didn't understand but which kept telling him that something big and bad was happening. To him.

  It was crazy. It was pure paranoia. He knew that. But from the moment the doctor had stuck that needle in his vein it had seemed that the world had had only one purpose in mind. To kill him. Maybe that was paranoia and a lack of decent sleep speaking, and it made absolutely no sense. But it was still there in his thoughts, and try as he might he couldn't quite reject it.

  And as they said. Just because you were paranoid didn't mean that there weren't people out there trying to kill you.

  Will stood there watching the ice storm destroy the city in front of him and wondered how the world would try to kill him next.

  Chapter Six.

  The roof was not Will's favourite place to be. Not least because he was no fan of heights. But it had to be done and he was the only one who could do it. Mark had either twisted or broken his ankle during the storm. They didn't know which since he couldn't go and visit a doctor. The doctor's offices had closed and the emergency rooms were understaffed and unable to deal with the casualties they already had. A broken ankle was a small thing in the end.

  So they'd taped his ankle up as best they could and hoped things would come right. But he wasn't going to be climbing any ladders or clambering about a roof. And Richard was simply too large. With his extra weight they were all worried that the already broken roof might not be able to support him. Will was tall and on the slightly heavier side as well, but not that heavy. Not football player heavy. Meanwhile if they were to have even a faint hope of not dying of hypothermia during the night they needed to patch it. In the wake of the ice storm the temperatures had plummeted drastically. They didn't know why, but Will was certain it wasn't global warming.

  The landlord wasn't going to fix their roof. They knew that. Richard had driven out to his place to find it empty, and his car missing. And of course there was no working phone to call him on, even if they'd a working one to call him with. It looked as though he'd fled the city.

  He wouldn't be the only one. Their next door neighbours had also packed up and run. But even if their landlord had been around he would probably have no way of hiring the tradesmen they needed. There was nothing he could do. And the other usual port in a storm – the fire department – wasn't going to cover it with a tarp. Even if they'd had the people and the equipment left, there simply weren't enough tarps in the city to cover all the damaged roofs. There might not be enough in the entire country. Which left the three of them with the task of trying to make the house water tight or freeze to death overnight.

  The plan they'd come up with wasn't one of their best ideas in Will's view. It was simply the only one that they'd been able to come up with in the hours before night fell.

  In essence it was a simple patch, but one done without replacing the iron or nailing something over it. They didn't have the materials for that. Instead they were using an age old method done on small sheds out in the country when they developed little rust holes. The idea was that you got some sacking, drenched it in paint and stuck it over the metal. In essence the paint would become both the glue and the patch. Luckily for them they also had the materials handy thanks to the ancient moth eaten couch they'd finally thrown in the broken back shed and the remains of the pink primer and undercoat that the landlord had also stored there. But while the technique might work on small holes in sheds, the six huge craters in their roof were each at least two feet in diameter. That was a massive hole to patch with a bit of sacking and a bucket of pink paint.

  More worrying though was that while the patches might eventually seal up the roof, they would do nothing to make it more solid. And immediately beneath each hole were broken beams, struts and purlins. They were what remained of the bracing that had held the roof together and which the ice bombs had ripped right through. The chances that the roof would collapse completely underneath him while he was working on it were too high in Will's view. But it had to be done. If they didn't they didn't have a roof at all.

  More nervous than he could even admit to he set about working on the first one, painting a yard wide square of the metal roof with the pink undercoat he'd found in the shed. He wasn't even sure if it was suitable for metal. If it would stick. But it was all they had. Cans and cans of pink undercoat.

  He applied the paint thickly, not worried if it ran in places or if drips started falling down into the roof space. This wasn't about aesthetics. The paint had to be thick to soak the sacking and so form a proper seal. That done Will grabbed the first patch they'd cut out, and laid it over the wet paint, pushing it down firmly into the remains of the roofing irons. Once he was satisfied that the patch was sticking to the remaining metal Will began carefully painting the sacking itself with the pink undercoat. That was the tricky bit. The holes were so wide and the weight of the wet paint as it soaked into the sacking so great, that the patch immediately started sagging over the hole. But they'd expected that. That was why the patch was so much larger than the hole. They needed to have as much material clinging to the metal and holding it in place as possible.

  “Is it working?”

  Mark called up from below where he was busy taping and boarding up the broken windows while hobbling around. With his leg injured that was the best he could do. Meanwhile Richard was out in the car, ferrying their neighbours about. They were good neighbours and he had the only working car in the street. And if they needed to go somewhere – which was mostly to their loved ones, it seemed like the right thing to do. Hopefully he was also buying some emergency supplies and checking on their friends. Assuming he could weave his way around the pot holes, broken cars and rubble filling the streets.

  “Seems to be.”

  And it was though it surprised him more than a little – the hole was so large that he had expected the paint soaked sacking to collapse. But it hadn't. The patch had sagged a little bit, but as he knelt there over it, it didn't seem to be getting any worse. The sagging had stopped.

  “Good.”

  Mark carried on with his hammering as he worked on the windows below and Will decided it was time to start on the next crater in the roof. It wasn't far to go being only ten feet away. But it was tricky sc
rambling over the metal and trying to keep his footing on the sloping roof irons, while all the time he was acutely aware that it was a two story fall if he slipped. To add to his worries, everything was wet after the hail had melted. Things were slippery. How that would affect the paint drying or sticking to the iron he wasn't sure but he knew it wouldn't help.

  The second hole was fixed as easily as the first one. The paint simply flowed on to the metal, wet or not, and the sacking clung to it, and then more paint soaked into it making the material water tight when it dried. If it dried. And as he knelt there over the make shift patch Will began to hope that things were going to go as well for the rest of them. That they might even have a weather tight roof again by morning.

  If it happened they would be one of the few. Just looking down the street from where he was crouched Will could see so many other houses in much worse shape than theirs. While a few had people crawling around on them like him, there was no point in a lot of cases. Half of them would never be able to repaired. The damage was simply too great. And that was only the damage he could see. Inside it might be worse. The six ice missiles that had struck their home had punched holes right through the iron roof, the trusses underneath, then the floor of the first story and the ground floor as well. They'd ended up buried somewhere in the dirt beneath the house. And the force needed to do that was unbelievable.

  The speed with which these things had hit must have been incredible. More than what you would expect from a simple block of ice falling in the air. More than terminal velocity. More than a mere hundred and thirty or so miles an hour. Much more. These things had hit like bullets. How that was possible he didn't know. But when he could see his car almost bent in the middle from the force with which it had been hit, he knew it had happened.

  These things had been sent to kill. It made no sense but as he knelt there staring at the destruction all around, Will was sure of it. It had to be some sort of deliberate act. Murder on a terrible scale. As to how many had been killed no one yet had any idea. The only communication they had with the outside world once the power, phones and television had gone down was a tiny little battery powered transistor radio. And the only radio stations it could play for them were ones from outside the city. The rest had been destroyed.

  But still there was some reporting, and the stations were all saying one thing clearly. Fifty square miles of the city had been devastated in a mere hour and a half. The destruction in places had been complete. And the bodies were so many that it would be days if not weeks before they could all be gathered up. Those of course were just the ones in the street. The ones that they could see in plain sight. But there were many more. Teams would have to search the houses one by one to see who had been killed while taking cover in the safety of their own homes. But that was days if not weeks away.

  More would die in time. The numbers of serious injured had simply overwhelmed the hospitals. And how many more were out there, trapped in their homes, too injured to even make the journey and unable to phone an ambulance, no one knew. All Will knew was that he could see four bodies in their own street. People who had been hit before they had been able to make it to shelter. Not that having shelter had been any guarantee of safety.

  The Governor was calling for calm, though without telecommunications Will had no idea how many would even have heard him. The National Guard was being mobilised but when they would arrive none of them knew. The police were trying to keep order, but of course they had their own homes and families to worry about. The rescue services were completely overwhelmed. And the fear was that when night fell the looting would begin.

  Los Angeles had been hit hard. In fact it looked to him as he crawled about on the roof much like what he imagined Pearl Harbour must have looked after the bombing.

  But who was the enemy? As he kept working, covering the holes over with the make shift patches that question kept running through Will's mind. Who had done this to them? Why? And of course there was another darker question there as well. One that he didn't want to even think about. But he had to. Were they going to strike again?

  Naturally he had no answer. He wasn't even sure that it was a legitimate question. He knew they would, even if he didn’t know who “they” were. So the more correct question was when would they strike? And how? And as he worked, hurriedly trying to make the flat water tight before nightfall, Will had no answer. He only knew that it was coming. He had to wonder how many others were thinking the same thing. And how many would start fleeing the city in the coming days.

  And how that was the one thing he couldn't do. Not until he saw Dr. Millen.

  Chapter Seven.

  The cedar door beckoned him with its promise. But Will knew it was almost certainly a false promise. Just as the last dozen had been before it. And the next dozen probably would be as well. Still, Will got off his bike, laid it against the picket fence and walked up the garden path to it. Automatically he rang the doorbell. Then when that failed, he knocked. For some reason he kept forgetting that doorbells needed power to run.

  Whether anyone would answer it he didn't know. Only six of the houses he'd visited that morning had had someone home. One in two. But then the damage from the ice storm was often extensive and it was everywhere. In all his travels on the bike he didn't think he'd seen a single house that wasn't damaged. Some had been completely destroyed. Many in fact. Some of them were now piles of rubble that here and there had fallen across the road. The owners of the ruined houses were probably with friends or family or had left the city, he hoped. Though some of them could be buried inside their remains.

  It would have been so much easier and faster if he could have phoned them. But the phones were down. Both the land lines and the cellular networks. Not only had the stations and towers taken hits, the lines were gone as well, and there was no word of when or even if they would be repaired. The radio said the damage was extensive, but the truth was it was far worse than that. They were being diplomatic. The same was true of electricity with the substations and lines in ruins. Most of the city was living in a complete blackout. Los Angeles had never been so dark at night, nor so quiet by day.

  Anyone who could was leaving the city, but not many could. As well as killing thousands of people and destroying houses without number, the ice storm had also taken out cars in their hundreds of thousands and damaged the roads as well. Many were so badly damaged that even a four wheel drive couldn't cross the gaping craters that were supposedly potholes according to the radio. Effectively it had trapped millions in their broken homes. That though had been his only piece of luck in his search, and it had come with its own problems. The main one was that it had also meant that he couldn't drive anywhere either. Not that he had a working car left.

  In fact Richard had the only working car they had and he was busy. For two days he'd been driving in and out of the city, buying supplies, finding friends and running errands. It was proving a long, slow and difficult process as he had to find the least damaged roads, crawl around the pile ups and piles of fallen rubble, and then compete with the pedestrians who were everywhere. But he was doing it and as a bonus he was also contacting people through email for them. The car let him escape the destruction and find an email café outside of the city. Through him Will's family now knew he was alive, and they knew not to come and try to bring him home.

  He was sure they wanted to, and each day that went by he worried that he would see his father standing at the front door with a serious look on his face. But he couldn't leave – he had a thesis to finish as he told them. And they seemed to accept his excuse. They could never have accepted the real reason. That he had to stay behind to find the bungling doctor who had stuffed up his drug trial and left him hairless and subject to some intense and seemingly never ending nightmares.

  Still, he had hope. The lack of working cars and the broken roads meant that houses, even wrecked houses, still had people living in them. They were trapped there. And hopefully Doctor Millen was stuck in the city as we
ll. That was all Will had to work with as he hunted him down – and it wasn't a lot. More worrying was that he knew that even if Doctor Millen was stuck in the city he wouldn't be for long. No one would be if they had any sense. And he surely had enough money to buy his way out.

  The army was already arranging a mass evacuation. Their trucks were cruising the streets with loud hailers informing everyone about it while their bulldozers were clearing the roads. It wasn't forced, people could choose to stay or go, but many who no longer had a habitable house were packing up and leaving. Which was why he'd grabbed his ten speed and some pages from the phone book, and started on his hunt first thing that morning. He knew he should have started at least a couple of days before. But there had been so much to do. There still was. So many repairs to make just to make the flat habitable. And then there was the fear. The almost crippling dread of being caught out in the open if the ice should start falling again. He hadn't wanted to wander too far away from the shelter of home. He was far from alone in that. And what was a little hairlessness and a few bad dreams against being pulped by a falling ice bomb so he'd asked himself?