Guinea Pig

by Curtis, Greg

  “People.” Elijah tried to protect confidence. Or more accurately he tried to look as though he was a health professional trying to project confidence. It was the best way to scare them. “Can you all put on the masks and gloves please.”

  The soldiers didn't ask any questions. They just made a rush for the boxes, and fairly soon he watched them struggling desperately to put them on as fast as possible. It was only after that that they desperately asking him questions. Naturally he had the answers for them. The doctors had briefed him quite thoroughly on what to say.

  “Now I don't want you to be alarmed. This is just a precaution, and it may be that what we have is nothing more than a few nasty cases of the flu. A couple of unusual cases perhaps. But still just hopefully the flu.”

  Naturally they didn't believe that. Not when he used words like “unusual” and “hopefully”. It was human nature to believe the worst.

  “Still, we need to be safe. We don't want this bug getting out, whatever it is. So I want you and everyone who stands guard out here to wear these at all times. Touch nothing and no one. No eating or drinking anything either. And if you need to come down to the surgical suite call first and someone will bring you some gowns. We don't want anyone in there without a full barrier suit since we don't know how far this virus might have travelled. And if anyone feels sick in any way, but particularly if they develop a high fever, vomiting and or diarrhoea, call us. And if anyone starts bleeding from the mouth or eyes, we need to see you urgently.” The last made them all stare at him in complete terror, and for a moment Elijah felt guilty for deceiving them. But it had to be done.

  “Bleeding from –.” Elijah held up his hand to stop the frightened soldier and it seemed to work.

  “That's only happened a couple of times and no one's dead yet.”

  Was it cruel of him to add the “yet”? Maybe. But it still left the soldiers in complete terror and determined never to wander down that corridor and that Elijah knew, was critical.

  “As I say it's just a precaution and it could just be the flu. But given everything else that's going on, all the mutations, we have to be careful.”

  He did his best to sound reassuring, knowing that that would be exactly what they would expect, and that it would only help to confirm their worst fears. Doctors were always reassuring when they had bad news to impart. Everyone knew that.

  “Oh and as always no smoking.” He said it when he saw one of the soldiers reaching for a packet of cigarettes. “A mask is completely useless if you're not wearing it because you've got a cigarette in your mouth.” The chastened soldier quickly put his cigarettes away.

  “Anyway, stay out here, keep the doors closed between the atrium and the corridor, and you should be fine. Remember, there's no central air any more, just the portable units we brought with us, so no bugs should have made it past the corridor.” All of which meant that there were bugs in the corridor as far as they knew. That would keep them clear.

  Elijah left them then, thinking that they were properly worried. Worried enough that they wouldn't be coming to annoy them at least for a few hours. And that that would be all the time they would need.

  But walking back down the corridor from the atrium he wasn't completely certain of it. It was always possible that one of the soldiers would risk the journey. Possibly because he had a question or else a worry because he'd developed a tickle in his throat. That was just the gamble they had to take.

  In the surgical suite he quickly discovered that the others had dressed William in a pair of surgical pants that someone had found for him, and got him to his feet. Everything was in place and it was time to go.

  “The soldiers seem suitably frightened,” he told the others.

  “Good.”

  That was enough as there was a sudden rush for all the carry bags they'd brought with them, and then a mass migration for the corridor. The surprising thing was that William, though supported on both sides by the nurses, was able to bear a lot of his own weight and almost walk. Five days after suffering a major set of wounds that should have killed him, his body already ravaged by the wild transformations running through it, and having spent nearly two weeks chained to a mortuary table, that seemed all but impossible.

  Out in the corridor they quickly turned left and headed for the elevator. James was already ahead of them with a chair leg which he inserted into the lift doors to prise them open. It was the only system they'd found as mere human fingers weren't strong enough, and Elijah worried that the marks it left behind would be spotted by the soldiers when they came for them. As would the marks in the back door of the lift, which would tell them where they'd gone. Still, this wasn't the time to worry about that.

  By the time they'd made the lift James already had the front doors open, and they all bundled in. Then he let the doors shut behind them as he went to work on the back doors. It was lucky it was a surgical lift and therefore large enough to hold a patient on a bed with all the attending doctors and nurses, and of course with an emergency power supply to keep the lights on.

  Once he had the back doors open and they were all out, James tossed the chair leg to one side and they turned to follow the stairs down around the outside of the lift. Then they travelled two levels and four flights of stairs down to the ambulance bay in the dark. If there were emergency lights in the stair wells, they'd failed somewhere along the way. But they took it slowly and had a couple of torches, and soon found the bay. There they had light. The emergency lights had failed, but the car park was filled with abandoned cars, and while they might be going nowhere, their batteries still had charge. Enough to run their headlights for a few hours.

  As for the waiting ambulance, it was in position, and by the time they reached it, the back doors were already open and waiting.

  Elijah left them then as he headed for the driver’s door. The next part of this insane escape attempt was his. Driving them out of the ambulance bay, across the divide to the main part of the underground car park, and then up the barely clear ramp to freedom. A long, slow and awkward trip as he had to weave his way through piles of debris. The car park might still be more or less structurally intact according to the engineers, or at least the section of the hospital above it was, but still large chunks of its roof had come down including light fittings, ceiling panels, electrical wiring and big chunks of concrete. They'd cleared what they could, but it kept coming down, and he could see that more had come down during the previous few hours. Enough that someone would have to walk in front of them as they escaped, clearing the path again. It was going to be tight. Sooner or later Elijah thought, even if their escape wasn't noticed, the rest of the building would collapse. He wanted to be gone before that happened.

  Still as he got in the driver's door and James started clearing the path in front of them once more, he couldn't help but give thanks that they were at least under way. Finally. They might even make it – if things went well.

  Chapter Thirty.

  Junior analyst Ian Watkins sat at his desk in the computer services building, slowly growing more confused. He knew something was wrong as he studied the feeds from the Adamson Clinic, but he couldn't quite put his finger on what.

  Maybe it was that there was a certain monotony to them. But then it had been much the same ever since he had started watching them. Day after day the patient lay on his cot, chained to it with stupid plastic chains, and the scientists and medical staff went about their business. The only time it had varied in the previous weeks was when that one mad scientist had started drilling holes in the patient four or five days before, while half a dozen soldiers had kept guard over the others. That had been a sickening thing to watch, even when he could see that the patient wasn't really human. But whatever he was the patient had known pain. And even through the silent images being broadcast to his monitors Ian had seen the rictus of agony all over his face. He was glad he hadn't been able to hear the screaming.

  Now though he knew that the action had been sanctioned,
and that was even more sickening. That the people he worked for could be a part of such a thing was beyond appalling. But he knew they were. The moment he'd alerted his bosses to what was happening they had ordered him not to say anything. In fact they had threatened him with prison if he so much as mentioned it to anyone else. Even while the atrocity was still happening. And later all the records of that half hour or so had vanished from the system. That could only mean that the sick doctor had had help from someone high up. From someone at a guess with a few stars on his shoulder.

  After that Ian had kept his head down, done as he was ordered and tried to put those terrible images out of his mind. And he hadn't mentioned the matter ever again. After all if people that high up wanted that to happen, he could not stand against them. If he was lucky he would be re-posted to somewhere on the Arctic Circle to study penguins or report the weather. If he wasn't it could be much worse.

  Don't make waves, keep your head down and do your job. That was what was expected of him, and even though what he had seen had been both sickening and criminal, it was what he intended to do. Besides, it wasn't as if there was any evidence left. Not any more. There was nothing he could have brought to the authorities or the press. So there was nothing he could do anyway.

  But now there was something new, and while he didn't quite know what was wrong, he knew it was his duty to report it. After he'd worked out what it was. But all he really knew was that everything looked exactly the same as it had before.

  Still, he had the tools to investigate and so after having spent a good twenty minutes sitting there growing more and more confused he decided to use some of them. His supervisor might be annoyed with him for doing it instead of watching the feed, but it had to be done.

  He began by bringing up the metadata about the feed. Most domestic cameras had only some basic metadata that was recorded with whatever else they shot. Things like time and date, and sometimes the make and model of the unit. But these cameras were military spec, and the metadata they contained was extensive. There was everything from the magnification and focal range as the cameras followed the subjects, to the particular filtering programmes they were using to compensate for the various ambient light conditions in the hospital. If necessary he could reproduce the images they took exactly as they took them.

  Ian's first thought was that everything looked exactly the same as it always did. The cameras were working perfectly. System checks showed no problems. There was no corruption in the data being sent – which would have been the first sign of any tampering. That was always the main worry with any military surveillance. The time stamp was correct as well to within a couple of seconds of the time displayed on the clock on the wall in front of him, exactly as it should be.

  So maybe he was imagining it.

  And then he noticed the date stamp. At that moment Ian's heart almost stopped beating as he realised the feed he was looking at was exactly twenty four hours old. That was why the time stamp was perfect. Something was happening in the hospital, and his immediate thought was that it was some sort of attack. But it wasn't. He knew that a moment later as he remembered that when the doctor had so brutally attacked the patient there had not been the slightest attempt to hide his actions from the cameras. There was no need since the same people who had signed off on the attack controlled the cameras. They simply didn't care. When the time came the records would be destroyed. There would be no evidence.

  And it couldn't be an outside hacker. The system was secure. After all, even if someone else had managed to gain access to the encrypted data stream, there was nothing they could do. Even if someone did gain external access, while they might be able to copy it, they couldn't intercept it, unencrypt it, change it and then retransmit it – not in real time.

  Which could only mean that this was coming from inside the hospital. It had to be the doctors and the priests doing this. Ian had no proof but he was certain of it. And that left him in a mess. His duty was to report this immediately. He was an analyst for the military not a civilian. But at the same time he had seen what his own people had done only a few days before. He had seen first-hand the sheer savagery and cold blooded viciousness of the people he worked for. And for day after day he had watched the suffering they had caused unfolding. It was written in the faces of the people he observed. He did not want to add to their misery.

  “What are you doing Watkins?!”

  His supervisor, a ferret like man of middling years suddenly shouted the question at him from a few feet behind him, and Ian jumped in his seat. He was getting tired of that. But his supervisor liked creeping around and doing that to “his people” as he called them. He claimed it kept them on their toes. But really it was all about power in Ian's view. He had it and he liked to flaunt it like any bully.

  “Nothing Sir.”

  The man liked being called Sir Ian knew. Even though he held no rank. It made him feel important. “There's something disturbing me about the feed and I can't quite figure out what. So I was just checking the data.”

  And just like that Ian knew his decision had been made. He wasn't going to report it. He didn't have to. It might be his duty, but in the end there were limits to what he could be expected to do. And in any case it didn't matter. He could only report what he knew, and at this stage he didn't know anything. At least not as far as his bosses could tell. Not until they developed a mind reading machine.

  “And did you find anything?”

  His supervisor was already starting to dress him down, satisfied that he wouldn't have, and that he had breached protocol by even doing what he had.

  “No Sir. Not yet.”

  “And why would you? This is a state of the art system. The security protocols are all tight. And nothing can go wrong with it. The only thing that can go wrong with it is you! When instead of watching the prisoner as you should be you start playing with the computer.”

  “Tell me, are you bored with your work here? Do you want to find another job?”

  There it was, the sarcasm and the not so well veiled threat that Ian had expected. And it wasn't just a threat he knew. The man would fire him and happily. He loved having that sort of power over others. Fortunately Ian knew how to placate him.

  “No Sir.”

  He kept his eyes downcast and his voice low as he caved in to his threat. It was primitive and pathetic, almost high school level submissiveness, and Ian hated doing it. But it usually worked. And this time he was sure it would too. The supervisor would accept his submission as proof of his superiority and power and then all but preen himself as he gloated over his victory for the next hour or so. But that was okay.

  “Well then perhaps you should get back to your work and stop wasting everybody's time!”

  “Yes Sir.”

  “And don't think this will be forgotten. There will be a mention made in your file and you may be put on report.”

  The man started in with his usual barrage of threats while Ian turned off the metadata in front of him and switched back to watching the feeds. He wasn't actually bothered by the threats – he was used to them. And for the moment he was actually quite pleased with himself, for two reasons.

  The first was of course that his supervisor was about to get his own roasting in due course when the breach was discovered. And it would be discovered – soon. The priests and the doctors had maybe another half hour or so at best before someone else did the same checks and found the same problem. And then it would be fun to watch the payback. In fact Ian wondered if the man would suffer all the terrible fates he had threatened him with. He could but hope.

  But there was another reason to feel good. He didn't know what the subjects in the hospital were up to, or why they'd done this. But at least he wasn't going to be a part of the machine that crushed them. That tortured people. He had let them have a little more time. A tiny bit more hope. As little as it was this was his rebellion.

  And no one would ever know that he had done anything at all.

  Chapt
er Thirty One.

  It was peaceful in the morning sun, and most of the men were doing little. Just as they had been doing for the past eight or nine days. Guard duty was monotonous by its very nature. It only got exciting when things went wrong. Thus far as they'd kept watch around the derelict hospital nothing had gone wrong. And given the nature of the prison they guarded, nothing could go wrong. But the peace was shattered by the sound of the alarm and the voice of their captain over the loudspeaker ordering them to gear up.

  As the soldiers heard the alarm sound they panicked. All of them were nervous. They knew only a little of what was happening inside the hospital, less since this disease had broken out, but what they did know was that it was dangerous. And they knew their orders. What lay inside the broken hospital chained to a table could not leave it. Ever. So disease or no disease they would have to go in and sort things out, and pray that their masks were sufficient to protect them from whatever germs were inside.