Bring Him Back

22

Aumeier reacted, but not quickly enough. Before he could draw his Glock clear of its holster, Ben’s elbow caught him square in the throat and crushed his windpipe. The head of security fell to the floor, turning purple and choking for air that would never come. Ben pinned the arm holding the gun to the floor with his foot. In one fluid move, he scooped up the weapon and pointed it at Rascher’s head.

‘Here’s the deal, Doctor,’ he said. ‘Show me where you’re keeping Drew Hunter and maybe I won’t perform a radical brainectomy on you with this thing.’

‘Wh-who are you?’ Rascher boomed.

‘Just think of me as the end of your Indigo Project,’ Ben said.

‘You’ll never succeed. They’ll kill you.’

‘Yeah, maybe,’ Ben said. ‘But not in time to help you.’ He battered Rascher across the face with the butt of the gun. The man fell stunned to the carpet.

‘Fuck it,’ Ben said to himself. If he was going to die, he wasn’t going to die wearing a tweed jacket. He stripped it off and tossed it over Aumeier’s body. Then he bent down, heaved Rascher to his feet and spun him towards the open door. Rascher staggered out into the corridor, blood trickling from his face.

‘You take me to him,’ Ben said, shoving him along with the gun pressed hard up against the back of his head. ‘You take me to Carl. Or should I say, TS-16M? You’ve got seven children captive here. Another had an “accident”. If Carl’s the sixteenth to be forced into the program, what happened to the remaining eight? What did you do to them, Rascher? Put them to sleep like dogs? Did you stick the needle in yourself or get one of your ghouls to do it for you?’

‘Please,’ Rascher moaned. ‘Please don’t shoot me.’

‘No? Maybe I should just strap you inside a CT scanner and let you get fried with radiation for a few hours,’ Ben said, shoving him along. ‘Or how’d you like a pound or two of Valium pills to munch on? Stop your bleating and lead the way.’

‘Isolation room four,’ Rascher panted, sweating heavily and motioning up another flight of steps. ‘This way.’

Ben shoved and wrestled the big man up the steps. At the top, the corridor went left and right. Rascher led him to the right. ‘Along here,’ he groaned, pointing to a bend ahead. ‘Then we take the elevator to the isolation block on the top floor.’

As they rounded the corner, before Ben could stop him Rascher suddenly yelled at the top of his voice, ‘Mir helfen! Alarm! Alarm!’

Ben clubbed him over the head with the gun, but it was too late. A door burst open and three guards emerged into the corridor, looking startled. The one on the left was still clutching the mug of coffee he’d just been drinking.

It had been a trap. Ben realised that Rascher had led him right to a security personnel staff room.

As if in slow motion, the guards reached for their guns. The coffee drinker let his mug drop and spill on the floor as he made a grab for the M4 automatic carbine slung behind his back. The one in the middle was the first to squeeze the trigger. The weapon was set to burst-fire. Ben ducked. A window behind him shattered. He grabbed the struggling Rascher by the collar of his lab coat and yanked him backwards, nearly off his feet, using him as a human shield as another burst of gunfire erupted in the corridor. Ben felt the impacts of the bullets slamming into the doctor’s chest. He ripped the Glock pistol from his belt, aimed it past Rascher’s shoulder and fired twice, taking down the coffee drinker and the middle guard. The one on the right was still getting to grips with his weapon, wild-eyed with panic.

Rascher’s dead body collapsed in Ben’s grip, catching him off balance and making him stumble back a step. It was at that instant that the remaining guard brought his weapon to bear and fired. But in his haste to shoot, the gun jerked off-aim at the last moment and the shots went wide.

Ben had seen it happen before with men who were experiencing real combat for the first time. Training was one thing, but not even the best simulation could fully prepare you for the terror and intensity of the real deal. The extra pressure made some people slower. They fumbled. They lost their focus. This guy was one of those.

Ben wasn’t. Before the guard could touch off another burst, two shots from the Glock snapped out in such quick succession that they sounded like one ragged explosion. The guard tumbled over backwards with a hole between his eyes and another in his chest.

Then, silence. Just the ringing in Ben’s ears and the muffled tinkle of a cartridge case rolling across the tiles. Four dead men in the corridor. Their blood rapidly mingling into a spreading pool.

Ben knew his element of surprise was spent now. The sound of gunfire would have resonated through the whole building, sparking off a red alert. How many more guards were there? Could be five; could be twenty.

Ben stepped over Rascher’s body. ‘Never trust a doctor,’ he muttered under his breath as he thrust the pistol back in his belt, behind the hip. Avoiding the blood so as not to leave a trail of red footprints, he bent over one of the dead guards and picked up his M4. Releasing the magazines from the two other automatic carbines, he slipped one mag in each of his trouser pockets.

‘That’s more like it,’ he said to himself.

Already, he could hear raised voices and racing footsteps echoing through the corridors and getting rapidly closer. It was time to get moving.

As Ben broke into a run, four more guards appeared in the bend of the corridor behind him. Their shouts were drowned in gunfire. Bullets raked the wall inches from him. He reached another bend ahead and kept running.

He crashed through what he thought was another set of fire doors, and skidded to a halt, cursing. Too late to turn back, he realised he was trapped inside a room with no other exits. The guards were close behind.

He glanced about him. The room was huge and white, looking and smelling like a chemistry lab. Long tables stretched across the middle of the tiled floor, and its edges were lined with benches and racks covered with equipment. Wires and tubes, blinking lights, dials and readouts, screens, jars and beakers and trays of implements. Mounted around the walls above were glass cabinets filled with rows of large specimen jars containing what appeared to be chunks of some kind of matter floating in a clear, viscous liquid. It looked like pickled cauliflower.

Footsteps outside. The doors crashed open and the four guards burst into the lab firing their weapons on full automatic and spraying bullets everywhere. Ben barely had time to return fire before he had to dive under cover of one of the long tables. Splinters flew from the tabletop; plaster dust exploded from the walls and showers of sparks from the electrical equipment as dials and readouts shattered. The cabinets on the wall burst into cascading fragments of glass, the jars inside them blown apart, liquid pouring over the benches and the floor.

Crouching under the table, Ben glimpsed the slippery white specimens that had been inside the jars, now sliding over the floor in puddles of strong-smelling surgical preservative — and he realised with a jolt of horror what they were. Not chunks of picked cauliflower, but dissected pieces of human brain.

And in that brief moment, he knew.

Knew he was looking at all that remained of those unaccounted-for eight children.

Knew that this was what the architects of the Indigo Project would ultimately do to Carl, and to all the others, if nobody stopped them.

More sparks spat and fizzed from the damaged electrical equipment; an instant later, there was a whoosh as the spilled preservative burst alight. A sheet of fire covered the bench along its whole length, quickly spreading to the floor. Flames shot up, suddenly filling half the room, hot, aggressive, leaping high. Ben had to scramble away as they licked the underside of the table. Spotting him, one of the guards shouldered his weapon with a cry and let off a string of bullets. Ben dived and rolled for cover under another table. From the floor, he saw the running feet of two of the guards moving round to flank him. He fired. A cry of pain. One of the men went down, writhing. Another burst into the man’s body, and the cries of pain were silenced. Ben rolled again, emerging from under the table.

The fire was spreading alarmingly fast, gaining a purchase on the whole room now and threatening to block the only exit. Firing blind into the thick, black smoke that filled the lab, Ben ran for the door and burst out into the corridor, coughing. A glance through the billowing smoke told him that more guards were coming. Too damn many. This place was even better protected than he’d feared.

Smoke and flame were spreading out of the lab door now. He could hear the screams of the men still trapped inside, but he had little sympathy for them. He ran, keeping low. There was a shout; he’d been spotted again. More shots rang out.

No time to stop and shoot back. He sprinted hard up the corridor, skidded around a corner and came to a junction. He went left. Bounded down a short flight of steps. He was totally without bearings now, just trying to lose his pursuers in the labyrinth.

The fire in the lab could only spread to other rooms, and it would. Fast. He needed to make his way to the isolation block on the upper floor before the whole building started to burn.

Ben ran on. Another set of doors, another upward flight of stairs. Now he really was lost, in a part of the building that looked different from the clinical hospital environment of bright neons, sparkling white corridors and gleaming tiles. Here the floor was bare concrete, the lights dim, the walls unpainted. Where the hell was he going?

He was about to turn back and try another way when he saw the door. It was iron. Heavy deadlocks locks top and bottom. It looked like the door to a dungeon.

There’s no time for this. You’ve got to find Carl.

But he couldn’t leave without knowing what was on the other side of that door. He stepped closer to it and saw with amazement that the locks were undone.

Ben pushed open the door. Stepped through, and stopped in his tracks.

In front of him was another door with tall steel bars, like the entrance to a giant cage. Beyond it was what looked like a high-security prison cell, only much larger. Bunk beds lined the bare block walls, three high.

It was a dormitory.

And it was full of children.