Children of the Cull (14 page)

“Hey,” I shouted, running after him to yank him back.

“What’s your problem?”

“There’s no need to be so rough.”

The girl scrambled across the carpeted floor, putting an occupied bed between us and her, painting herself into a corner. Stupid, but understandable. She was scared.

Looking at the kids in the beds, so was I.

I took a step closer and she flinched, her back against the curtain. “We don’t want to hurt you.”

Fenton thrust his gun in her direction.

“That’s not necessary,” I said. “She’s a nurse or something.”

“Doctor,” she told me. “I’m a doctor.”

“Sorry—Doctor...?”

“Ezogu, Betty Ezogu.”

“Okay, Betty. This is what we’re going to do. My friend here is going to lower his gun—”

“Like hell I am.”

I looked at Fenton. “You don’t need it.”

“Yes, he does,” said Brennan from behind me. She stalked forward, never taking her eyes from Betty. And she had a gun in her hand too, a Glock, pointing straight at the young doctor.

“Not you as well. Listen—”

“Shut up.” Brennan talked across me. And to think I’d been starting to like her. “Doctor Ezegu.”

“Ezogu.”

“What are you doing here?”

Betty wetted her dry lips. “I was checking on the patients. With everything that’s been going on—”

“No,” Brennan interrupted. “I don’t mean now. I mean in general.” She took in the ward with a wave of her gun. “All this. We were told you were conducting experiments. What kind of experiments?”

Betty paused, considering her options. At the moment, with an idiot like Fenton pointing a gun at her, they were limited.

“It’s... classified.”

Brennan laughed. “I need authorisation, is that what you’re saying? This is my authorisation, right here. Seventeen rounds of nine-millimetre Parabellum, pointing at your chest. Who are you working for?”

That I could answer, although I kept my mouth shut for now. I had followed Jasmine here by picking up fragments of communications, mainly from Germany, from an organisation that only seemed to be known as the Cabal. The rumours weren’t great. They weren’t good people, but if the ends perhaps didn’t entirely justify the means, they made them easier to swallow. The Cabal carried out sometimes-dubious research, but their work was making things better for a lot of people. Cleaner water. Better drugs. Could have been worse, a lot worse.

That was glass-half-full stuff, of course, but sometimes you had to believe the world was getting better. It helped you wake up in the mornings.

But this? Nothing about this smelled right. I picked up a board hanging from the end of one of the beds, reading the notes.

“You haven’t been healing these kids,” I said, flicking over a page. “You’ve been killing them.”

“What?” Brennan asked, walking over to snatch the notes from my hands.

I didn’t need to see any more. I looked at the child in the bed, a girl of eight. A girl with malaria.

Before she’d been admitted, she had been fit and healthy. She’d had a future.

I walked to the next cubicle, checking the notes of the boy in the bed. He was nine years old, and had been given anthrax.

I dropped the folder onto the bed.

“Why?” Brennan was asking. It seemed inadequate, considering what we had discovered.

“I can’t—” Betty began.

“You can, and you will,” Brennan insisted, before a thought occurred to her. “Are we in danger here? Are these things contagious?”

Betty shook her head. “No, they’re not. We’re all fine.”

“
They’re
not fine,” I said. “Are they?”

“Last chance,” Brennan warned, taking another step forward, gun half-raised. “Why are you doing this?”

The fight went out of Betty’s eyes. “We’ve been researching immunities, developing... subjects that are immune to diseases.”

“To the Cull?” I asked.

She shook her head. “We’re all immune to the Cull, aren’t we? I mean, immune to
everything
, from the common cold to the deadliest of pathogens.”

“And what about these?” I said, indicating the beds.

“Not all the subjects have been successful.”

I felt sick. Jasmine, what had they made you
do?
This madness would have been anathema to her, against everything she believed.

I was going to find the bastards behind all this.

“What about that?” Fenton was asking, pointing to a sealed room beyond the last cubicle.

“Quarantine.”

“Contagious diseases, too?” Brennan’s lips curled into a grimace. “You people are sick.”

“What kind of diseases?” Fenton asked, panic in his voice.

“Influenza. Cryptoccossis. Ebola.”

Fenton circled around Betty towards the isolation room, his morbid curiosity getting the better of him. “What about this one?”

“That’s Mason. He’s got tuberculosis.”

Finally, someone with a name.

“I don’t even know what that is, but I don’t like the sound of it.” Fenton peered through the glass as if he was at a freak show.

“How many have you got like this?” Brennan demanded.

“Only six. The other subjects are in good health.”

“And where are they?”

Betty hesitated, which would only make Brennan’s trigger finger itchier.

“You might as well tell them,” I told her. “They’ll find out in the end.”

“Tell
them?
” Brennan repeated, a hint of betrayal in her voice. I didn’t get a chance to respond. There was a crunch of boots behind us.

“Drop your weapons!” came the shout. “Right now!”

I spun to see two guards standing in the doorway, weapons raised and ready to fire. I was still reaching for my own gun when Fenton yelled a battle cry from beside the quarantine room and unloaded his shotgun; the guard to the right was hit square in the chest and went down. His partner returned fire and Fenton’s cry became an agonised scream, bullets punching through his chest and arms.

Brennan threw herself behind one of the curtains—as if the soft fabric would somehow shield her. That left me. Before Fenton had even hit the floor, I was crouching behind the bed, my P99 out of its holster and ready to fire. I aimed at the guard’s visor. The impact knocked his head back and he stumbled, losing his footing. I fired twice more as he fell, aiming for the body armour’s weak points. The guard grunted as he hit the floor, the helmet spinning from his head. I waited to see if he was going to get up, but he stayed down, groaning with pain. My arm extended, I crept from behind the bed, noting dark pools spreading out from beneath both guards. The man I’d shot was coughing up gore, a deep wound in his side belching out blood.

I put him out of his misery and trained my gun on his compatriot, but he was beyond mercy, eyes staring blankly from beneath the visor.

“Good work,” said Brennan, emerging from her hiding place. I didn’t answer. I hadn’t done it for her, and I certainly didn’t take pleasure from it. Them or us; that’s what it always came down to.

A wet cough made me turn. Fenton was lying beside the quarantine room, which had taken a bullet to a window, cracks spider-webbing across the not-so-shatterproof glass.

“Get me out of here,” Fenton burbled, writhing on the floor. He needn’t have worried about sickness; it was clear he wouldn’t last long.

A set of doors on the far wall were swinging shut, Betty having got away in the confusion. I ran over to Fenton, not looking at the jagged holes in his chest or the blood flowing freely from a hole in the side of his neck. I snatched his shotgun, reaching inside his vest for spare shells. He grabbed my arm with bloodied hands.

“You’ve got to help me.”

I shook him off, not giving him another glance as I made for the door.

“Hey, where are you going?” Brennan called after me.

“To find that girl,” I replied, not waiting for her permission as I pushed my way through the doors, “before she brings more guards. You check the rest of this floor.”

A quick glance up and down the corridor revealed I was alone.

Of course, Betty could live a long and happy life for all I cared. There was only one person I wanted to find, and until then, I had a job to do.

I ran up the corridor, heading towards a stairwell. Behind me I could still hear Fenton whimpering until a single shot silenced him forever.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CURE

G
UN SHOTS.

There were gun shots in the building.

But who was firing the guns?

I ran out of the lab, racing back to the children, who looked to me with more emotion in their eyes than I had ever seen.

Fear.

“Did you hear that?” Allison asked.

Wright didn’t wait for me to answer. “We need to move.”

He was right. Of course he was. Everything was slotting into place.

He
was here, in the base. He’d come for me, and together we could do this. Together.

Like it was meant to be.

I flashed my best reassuring smile at the children and herded them forward.

“That’s right. Let’s get everyone down to the bunker.”

Allison’s eye fell on the briefcase.

“What’s that?”

“Notes,” I said, surprised at how easy the lies were coming.

“You can do this,” Olive whispered in my ear. “Eyes and teeth. Eyes and teeth.”

Wright looked past me, towards the lab. “What about Eckstein?”

“He’s going to follow us down. We’ve lost contact with Lam. Stefan’s co-ordinating the resistance, at least until we get the children to safety.”

“Are we not safe here?” Ruth asked, the slightest of tremors in her throat.

Allison jumped to my rescue. “You’re safe with us. That’s our job, isn’t it? Keeping you safe.”

“What about the codes?” Wright asked as we shepherded the children along. “If the computer has locked us out...”

My mind whirled. God, he was right. Assuming we got down there, could we even get in?

Olive spoke up beside me. “The bunker works on an isolated system.”

“That’s right,” I chipped in, relieved. “I have the overrides.”

“To what?” Allison asked.

“The bunker’s computer.” The pressure must have been getting to her. She needed to keep up. “It’ll be fine. It’s completely separate to the main network.”

“Allison’s losing it,” warned Olive beneath her breath. “She’s a weak link, like Eckstein was. We should get rid of her.”

I glared at Olive, but luckily Allison hadn’t heard, her arm around Dawn, telling the girl about the games that we kept down in the bunker.

Were there any games? I couldn’t remember—but it didn’t matter. It had strong doors; that was all I cared about. I’d get the children into the bunker and then go and find him. Bring him in safe with us.

I realised I was beaming.

“That’s it,” I called to the front of the group, the two guards leading the way. “Around the corner. The stairs are on the right.”

Wright raised a hand, telling us to stop. The kids obeyed immediately, shrinking closer together, as the sound of running feet filled the corridor. Wright ushered us towards the wall as he and David raised their guns, waiting.

Surely the raiders hadn’t reached this far already? I felt Olive tugging at my sleeve, trying to get me to run the other way. Leave the kids. Forget them. You know what you must do; who you must find.

But the figure that came sprinting around the corner had no weapons. She skidded to a halt, raising her arms in surrender as she saw the guns pointing at her.

“Don’t shoot. It’s me.”

“Bets?” Allison broke from Dawn’s embrace and ran to her girlfriend. “What’s wrong?”

Betty grabbed Allison’s hands, kneading them beneath her fingers. “They’re downstairs. In the ward. I thought they were going to kill me.”

There was no need to ask who she was talking about. “How many?” Wright asked, his voice professionally calm.

“Three, but one of them was shot, I think.”

A fist gripped my heart. “Which one?”

Betty looked confused at my question. “What do you mean?”

“Which one was shot? I saw them on the monitors, two men and a woman—”

“You never said!” Allison turned to me.

“She was trying not to worry you!” Olive protested, aggrieved.

None of that mattered.

“Which of them was shot?” I repeated, more forcibly.

“One of the men,” Bets replied, looking unsure. “The skinny one. I got out as soon as I could.”

The pressure on my chest released. The skinny one. Thank God.

“And our men?” David was asking.

Betty shook her head. “There were two of them. I couldn’t tell who, with all the visors and everything, but...”

She didn’t have to say anymore.

“We’re going to the bunker,” I told Bets, urging everyone on.

“What about the patients in the ward?”

“We can’t help them now.”

Dawn looked up at me, her mouth open. “We’re leaving them behind?”

“We’ll come back for them later,” I lied. “But only after you’re all safe.”

“No! You can’t!”

It was Ruth. I’d never even heard her raise her voice before. She broke from the group, trying to run around the corner. “We’ve got to get them.”