Guinea Pig

by Curtis, Greg

  “We've got news.”

  The double doors were flung open and the bishop walked in unexpectedly, flanked by his aides and simply blurted out his announcement to all of them as if they should have been there simply waiting there to hear it. But they weren't. They were too tired. Neither Nurse Etta nor Doctor Millen even woke up. The others barely looked around.

  “Bishop Benenson?” Elijah responded since no one else seemed to be interested in what the bishop might have to say. And he was only trying to be polite.

  “There's been another sink hole. A private military hospital in northern California that no one seems to know much about. But what they do know is that there was no warning at all. According to the witnesses one moment the hospital was there, the next there was a loud bang and it fell into a gigantic crater.”

  Elijah buried his head in his hands. More death and pain – when would it end? But it still didn't make sense to him. “Northern California? That can't be anything to do with William. It's too far away.”

  “No?” The bishop looked at him strangely, almost pityingly, as if he was wondering why he was so slow. “My guess would be that that's where the stolen samples were taken to. And that someone tried to inject the angelic DNA into a subject.”

  He was right of course. Elijah instantly realised that. It was also more proof that the government had broken its vow. That they were in fact responsible for sending “Doctor Adams” in to steal the samples. And that far from listening to the church's warnings they had immediately done exactly what they had been told not to do. Given that Elijah also knew what their next step would be.

  “The government's going to send the soldiers in.”

  Of course they would. They'd resisted the urge so far because they'd never really believed that the series of catastrophes that had befallen the land had had anything to do with Mr. Simons. They'd thought he was just a simple but amazing freak. A scientific wonder that could be invaluable. But now they suddenly had proof of what the church had been saying all along. Now they would have to act.

  “I know.” The bishop bowed his head a little, perhaps in sorrow. “But I don't know what we can do about it. Or what we should.”

  It was the latter that upset him Elijah guessed. Not knowing where the church's duty lay in the matter. Should they defend William Simons? He was after all a man. An innocent. And it seemed that no matter how he suffered he was determined to survive. Elijah could think of no other way to explain the fact that he wasn't dead long since. That will to live had to be respected. As did the right to life of all people.

  But at the same time he was an abomination, a creature that could not be allowed to walk the Earth. One whose kind had last walked the world thousands of years ago before they had been swept from it by the great flood. Perhaps they were the reason for the flood? It seemed that the world was trying to cleanse itself of him just as it had the others. The only difference now was that instead of water it was using fire, ice, lightning and occasionally just swallowing people up. To add to the misery, more people would die the longer he lived as the world continued to try to cleanse itself of him.

  And then of course there was the practical problem. There were soldiers with guns all around them. Priests didn't usually do too well against soldiers.

  But none of that mattered when he finally knew the answer to the bishop's questions. “We are people of faith. Christians. We follow the teachings of our Lord. We give shelter to the homeless, succour to those in need. And we do not count the cost. William Simons is in need. In the end it is that simple.”

  “And if he is a nephilim? If he should bring about the end of the world by his very existence?”

  “He is still our brother and he is still in need. We will do as we have been commanded and we will leave the rest to God. That is our faith.” And why he wondered, had it taken him so long to realise that simple fact.

  “I agree.”

  But even as he said it Bishop Benenson hung his head as if in shame. Shame because he hadn't understood this before? Or shame because he feared that his actions would endanger many others? Elijah didn't know and he didn't want to ask.

  “So how do we stop the soldiers from coming in?”

  And that was the major problem. Sooner or later the soldiers would come back inside, and they would be armed. They would call William an enemy of some sort and they would kill him. Now that this other hospital had collapsed into a sink hole it was only a matter of time. And there was no way they could stop them. Worse, even if they somehow barricaded the surgical suite off from the outside, the soldiers had already laid charges. They could bring the remains of the hospital down on top of them all. And when the next catastrophe hit they probably would.

  “I think we move him, fast. To somewhere where there aren't a lot of people.” It was the only answer. But how they did it when the only way out was heavily guarded was another question entirely.

  “Well since we can't go out the front we need to start thinking about the back.” But how they could do that when it was nothing but a huge pile of rubble he didn't know.

  “Or we could try the basement.” Nurse Jones suddenly spoke up, surprising them both. But maybe it was a welcome surprise. Maybe she had an idea. They both turned to her in hope.

  “The surgical elevator, it runs down to the underground ambulance bay as well as up to the ruined stories, and it has an emergency power supply. The ambulance bay connects to the underground car park. And the exit to the car park is on the far side of the building. There are no soldiers back there.”

  Of course there were no soldiers back there Elijah realised; the back half of the hospital had collapsed. Which meant they would still be trapped down there. But still it was an interesting idea, and it would have been perfect if not for that last little problem. But maybe they could do something about that, depending on how deep the rubble there was.

  “And how -?”

  “I did some of my training as a student nurse here.”

  “Okay, give me a torch and tell me where to go.” Elijah made the decision immediately, knowing that it was the only chance they had and that it would have to be him that did the exploring. Everyone else had work to do. And maybe it would be a chance to prove that even a priest, someone regarded by many in this twenty first century as obsolete and nearly useless, could be useful.

  Chapter Twenty Eight.

  “I've got something you'll want to see Pastor.” James came to Elijah as he was preparing the ambulance for their escape, and he wondered why. The technician hardly ever spoke a word to him. Or for that matter to anyone else. He seemed to be a fairly self-absorbed sort. Always busy with his work and liking it that way.

  Maybe though he'd had enough of shifting rubble. After nearly two days of digging they were all close to exhaustion. And all of them were wondering what was holding the soldiers back. The only answer they had was that it was bureaucracy in action. Officially sanctioned murder took time to arrange. Maybe those in power were hoping that William would die of his injuries first and save them the trouble of an illegal execution. Or maybe, and Elijah suspected it was the real reason, they were waiting until the next disaster hit. Then they would give the order and say they were protecting the country against a threat.

  Still, none of them were used to heavy manual labour and they were all exhausted. Which was why Elijah was working on the ambulance. His back was aching too much for the moment to carry on. Still it had to be done and the way out of the underground car park was nearly clear. They had been lucky and the depth of the rubble covering the drive way wasn't that great. With some hard work they had been able to clear a narrow path through the two levels of underground parking and up the up ramp all the way to the surface. They just had to hope the ambulance would fit. It was an older oversized model that looked more like an ice cream truck. But it was the only one they could find in working order. The others had all been neatly parked in a row when a beam had fallen on them. They wouldn't be moving very far.


  They'd been lucky in other things as well. The lift had proven to be inoperable since the lift shaft was broken. But the lift had front and back doors and they could both be forced open – and the back door opened on a small, mostly intact foyer with a set of stairs that led down to the ambulance bay. James had worked out how to fake the feeds to the security cameras when the time came so that no one saw them leave. The soldiers had been quickly and easily convinced to keep their distance from the surgical suite – all it had taken was a warning about William potentially carrying a plague and they had retreated all the way to the front entrance. And perhaps most important of all William was healing quickly. Everyone was ready to leave this place – more than ready.

  “James?”

  “You remember yesterday when William told us about his escape from the hospital?” Elijah nodded, not completely sure. William was awake again on and off and speaking, but they'd talked about a lot of things. He didn't really remember everything they'd spoken about. He doubted William did either. He was more alert than he had been since the attack, but not everything he said made sense. The doctor said it was partly due to the trauma he'd endured. The other part was apparently due to the changes taking place in his brain.

  “Something about that bothered me. When he said he was thrown out of the hospital by someone just before it went down.”

  “Yes. The old woman.”

  That Elijah remembered, mainly because it had seemed odd that an old woman he had been helping had suddenly turned around and thrown him to safety. But with everything else that had happened lately it hadn't seemed that odd to him. But William seemed to have developed some sort of fixation with her. He hadn't said why, but sometimes even in his sleep he mumbled about the white haired woman.

  “I did some searching on the web, thinking to see if I could find the woman.”

  “You can go online?” That Elijah hadn't realised he could do. Actually he hadn't known that anyone could. Just the army's setting up their secure external feeds had been a major undertaking. But then again if anyone could find a way it would be James. He might not be a hacker any longer but he still had the knowledge and the skills.

  “Of course.” James nodded quickly. “The power may be down and most of the lines and cables. A lot of the local servers are gone too. But the satellites are still up there. All you need is a satellite phone and a generator.” Both of which Elijah gathered he had.

  “Anyway I did some searching. Videos from the sink hole. People were uploading videos everywhere, and I thought one of them might have caught the moment. I was wrong. Three of them did. This is the best of them.”

  James opened the laptop and pushed a button and instantly Elijah was looking at an image of the clinic before it had collapsed. Or actually just as it was beginning to go down. And in particular he was looking at one window where William could be seen standing, trying to hoist an unconscious man through it while a huge piece of pipework was sticking out of his shoulder.

  “I've slowed it down a bit. Maybe quite a lot.”

  And he had Elijah realised. It was almost frame by frame motion. But that was what he needed to see to understand what the technician was showing him. One moment William was standing there in the window, his face filled with strain as he lifted a man to the window sill, and in the very next frame he was being propelled through the window at terrible speed.

  As his head was pushed back and his arms opened wide in reaction it looked exactly as though he had been hit hard in the back. The look of shock on his face said the same thing. And the fact that he was actually flying through the air almost proved that he had been. But there was no one in the window behind him. That didn't make any sense. He had been hit, hard. So hard he had flown a good dozen feet through the air. But whoever had pushed him just wasn't there. Not in any of the videos.

  “The invisible man hit him?”

  But even as he said it Elijah realised that even if that was true there was still another problem. The invisible man would have to have had perfect timing, because even as William was flying through the air, the building behind was starting to sink into the ground. He was almost the last person to escape the building. Actually he might have been the last person. Was that luck or perfect timing? Given everything else that had happened lately he suspected the latter. There were so many strange coincidences going on that he refused to believe it was just luck in action.

  There was one other thing he knew, that no one else seemed to have put together. If this was the work of the white haired woman as William claimed, then she wasn't working alone. In the army hospital William had told him that a white haired man had dragged the doctor away allowing him to leave freely. Coincidence? He doubted it. And Reginald had said that the reason he hadn't made contact with William earlier was that a white haired woman agent had threatened him with arrest, and he'd had to run. Because of that William hadn't sought medical attention earlier, never realising what was happening to him. Had he done so he would likely have found himself locked away in a government lab somewhere long ago. The obvious conclusion was that the white haired people were involved somehow.

  So who were they? And why had they saved him?

  Then a dark thought grabbed him. The Fallen. If the bishop was right they wanted William to live. To become whatever he was going to become – nephilim, angel or something else. Because then they hoped, when he was strong enough, he would free them. Maybe the white haired old woman he kept imagining was one of them? And the white haired man in the field hospital was another.

  Even if William Simons was an innocent as he seemed to be, he was still a pawn in a game being played by angels. Fallen angels.

  Chapter Twenty Nine.

  “Is everyone ready?” Elijah asked and one by one watched as the others nodded. Even William nodded. The last twenty four hours had been good ones for him and he was able to move about a bit and raise his head. Something that was almost unbelievable. Only six days after being wounded so grievously he was not only awake but moving. Elijah wanted to imagine that it was due to the medical care he was receiving, but he knew the truth. It was due to the part of him that was no longer human. That part was tough and it would not die. It would consume him instead.

  “James.” Elijah gave the word and James did some tapping on his computer. A few moments later he looked up at them.

  “It's done. For the next twenty four hours the cameras will be showing everyone yesterday's activity.” He smiled as if proud of his accomplishment and Elijah guessed he probably was. But he wasn't sure it was something to be proud of. Being able to hack a security system was the sort of skill a criminal needed, not a man of God. It almost seemed to him that James was trying to walk two worlds at once by retaining his old skills. Then again the same might be said for himself in relying on his colleague's criminal skills.

  “Guys.”

  Instantly the two nurses and Doctor Millen rushed to the bed and started undoing the plastic chains holding William down to it. Elijah would be glad when they were gone. They might be light weight plastic so that he could be taken into the MRI with them on, but they were still the mark of a slave or a prisoner, and the man had rights and he had committed no crime. Elijah would have removed them straight after the attack save that it would have given the army outside their door a reason to come in. Doctor Foulks meanwhile was busy working on the various umbilicals connecting him to the various machines. Removing the catheter and the drips, the feeding tube and the leads to the ECG. The ambulance was stocked up with all the saline and drugs they could possibly need, and there was a bed in it for William to rest on. All they needed to do was carry him to it.

  Meanwhile it was time for Elijah to play his part. So he quickly gowned up, put on his gloves and face mask, grabbed several boxes of more disposable gloves and masks and headed out into the corridor. Once there he turned right and then left. It was lucky that the surgical suite wasn't directly in line with the corridor leading to the atrium, or one of the soldiers might have
seen them as they left.

  He headed toward the front entrance, walking quickly to the end of it where it connected with the atrium, which housed the huge entrance, reception and waiting area that had once been the pride of the hospital. It still was, though the rest of the hospital was in pieces. In fact it was a magnificent structure with glass walls standing thirty feet high and a glass roof as well, and all of them supported by giant painted steel beams. It was designed to impress as the atrium looked out over the landscaped grounds and front car park beyond. But what was most impressive to Elijah was the fact that it had somehow survived the ice storm intact.

  In the atrium he quickly found the guards. They were all sitting around, draped haphazardly over the expensive looking furniture that had once been for visitors. They made for a somewhat incongruous sight; army fatigues and weapons, all sprawled out over expensive red reception chairs with gold steel frames. One of them had even pulled several of the chairs together so that they formed a sort of bed, and was laid out on it and snoring contentedly. The rest were looking somewhat bored as they played with a deck of cards. But they didn't look so bored when he approached them, dressed, gloved and masked. They looked alarmed. People approaching them decked out in full whites did not engender calm.