Fever (Flu) (2 page)

He lifted his head, looked towards the door.

Ellis pulled away from the glass. She stood for a moment, her back leaning against the wall. Gingerly, she returned to the window.

Lennon mustn’t have seen her. His face was turned away again, nose buried in some files.

Ellis checked both sides of the corridor. Still empty. She took a deep breath, swiped her card to open the door, slipped inside the room, and then closed the door behind her.

Lennon looked up, face like a deer caught in headlights.

“You’re one of the sales reps, right?” Ellis asked. Lennon swallowed. “Y-yes,” he said.

“So what are you doing in here?”

“Looking for Mr Johnson. I-I need to talk to him about an order he put in last week.”

“Order for what?”

Lennon thought for a moment. “Ethanol,” he said.

“I don’t believe you,” Ellis said. Her voice was firm, confident. “We’ve a storeroom full of ethanol. And it comes straight from the suppliers. You should know that.”

Lennon didn’t move. He stared at Ellis for a second, the corner of his mouth upturned like he was either going to start laughing or crying.

“So, what are you
really
doing here?” Ellis pressed. “Sorry?”

“You overturned Farrow’s office. Now you’re in here. What are you looking for?”

Lennon still held the file in his hands. He set it down, stepped away from it. He smiled uncomfortably. Sweat broke across his orange face. “Nothing,” he said. “I’m looking for nothing.”

“You’re lying. Look, I’m going to have to call security.”

“Please don’t.”

“Sorry,” Ellis said, reaching for the phone on the wall. “I have to.”

She rang through to the front desk. A voice answered. It was Abe, the lab’s head of security.

Ellis opened her mouth to speak, looking at Lennon. But the words didn’t come.

Lennon held a revolver in his hand, aimed right at her.

“I—er—punched the wrong number in,” Ellis said down the phone.

“That you, Ellie?” Abe said, laughing.

“Sure is, Abe,” she said. “I’ll be up to see you later. Need some coffee?”

“That would be great. You’re an angel,” Abe said. “You better believe it,” Ellis said then replaced the receiver.

Her hands were shaking. Her eyes remained fixed on the revolver. “You know, Farrow’s probably called them anyway,” she said to Lennon.

“Doesn’t sound like that to me,” the salesman replied. They stood in silence for a moment. Ellis could hear a clock ticking, keeping time. It seemed slow. Her heart was beating twice as fast.

Lennon turned his attention to another set of drawers. They were locked, but he fumbled in his pocket, pulling out a small, thin wire. He glanced back at Ellis and then leaned down, still holding the gun, his free hand working the lock with the pick.

Once in, he ruffled through each of the drawers. He seemed to find what he was looking for: a set of papers, some memos. He slid them into the inside pocket of his jacket.

“What
is
that?” Ellis dared to ask.

He stood up, looked Ellis in the eye. His face was strained. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to scare you. Please don’t call security when I go.” He held her gaze for a moment and then quietly slipped out the door.

Ellis reached immediately for the phone.

Do it!
her head said.

But her gut told her something different.

She placed the phone back on its receiver then sat down in the nearby office chair, her body shaking.

“Oh boy,” she said.

Ellis grabbed a coffee and took it up to Abe as promised, but she told him nothing about the incident. Abe noticed she wasn’t herself and commented on it, but she fobbed him off with talk of not sleeping well, made her excuses then left.

Her belly was full of nerves. She went to the toilet, threw up, flushed, then lowered the seat and sat for a while.

“Come on,” she whispered to herself. “Keep it together.”

She kept it together. Worked her shift as normal, heading next to the lab’s Animal House. It stood one block over from Admin.

Health and safety was stringent when working with the animals. Ellis needed to dress head-to-toe in protective clothing before she could enter the storage rooms. As ASO, it was part of her job to inject the animals. Monitor the effect of various dosages of SAMPLE A on them. But it killed Ellis to hurt the little darlings. She loved these creatures; the rabbits, the mice—even the rats.

She particularly loved the cats.

“There you go, beautiful,” she said, lowering one of the kittens back into its home.

The cage was labelled C75, but Ellis called the kitten Ginger, due to the auburn fur that covered its small body. Ginger was purring. Despite all the needles Ellis inserted through its skin, the wee kitten still seemed to like her.

She placed the cap back over the syringe, removed the needle and dropped it into the nearby yellow box labelled CONTAMINATED SHARPS. She ditched the syringe into a separate waste bin, also yellow, with the familiar Biohazard sign on its front.

Her eyes fell upon the little bottle on the bench. SAMPLE A19. It came from E Block, Project QT’s restricted area. From the symptoms the animals would present, Ellis guessed the bottles contained various dosages of some sort of flu virus.

Ellis wrote the time and date of Ginger’s injection into the relevant folder, adding some brief notes indicating the kitten was healthy when she’d injected it. She signed her name beside the entry.

Ellis moved along the line of similar-looking cages, going through the same process with each of the other kittens. They were all part of Project QT. And looking at the little beggars, Ellis knew
exactly
why she hadn’t reported Lennon...

In her ASO persona, Ellis was good at following orders. She did what she was told to do. Injected the kittens with SAMPLE A. Some of them died. Others developed sniffles and sticky eyes and then died. A few lived through it, got better. And these were the ones Blake Farrow was interested in. These were the ones that were taken to the restricted area over in E Block..

It wasn’t her business what happened after that.

Only it
was
her business...

Ellis was feeling more and more guilty these days. She couldn’t just say she was following orders. She needed to take responsibility. After all, it was her that was stabbing the poor things with those goddamn needles. Sure, she found it eased her conscience a little when she spent some quality time afterwards with the little moggys, rubbing their legs where she’d injected them, petting them. But God forgive her, some of them wouldn’t see another week, never mind another year...

Damn you, Blake
, Ellis mused.
Damn you for all of this.

She entered the next room. This one also had cages, but where the previous room’s occupants were feline, there were only birds here. Chickens, to be precise. Ellis nodded a quick hello to the two men attending the cages as she passed. She wouldn’t bother them. Birds spooked her. Always had.

As a child, she remembered one day being surrounded by pigeons, her mother running to her aid, shooing them away. Ellis reckoned the incident hadn’t been quite as horrific in reality as it was in her mind. Probably just some people feeding pigeons in the park. But that’s the problem with the things that frightened you as a child: over time, after years of nightmares and phobias, they became something completely different. Something otherworldly.

She left the animal storage rooms, using her card to enter Corridor C1. It ran long and straight, connecting to the next corridor that looked exactly the same, with its pale, metallic walls, the fluorescent lighting along each side and ceiling, reminding Ellis of those little ‘cat’s eyes’ lights she would see on motorways and country roads. The corridors of C Block formed a grid pattern, connected to A, B and D by security doors.
A for Admin. B for Blake. C for Cats
, Ellis thought, remembering the mnemonic she’d taught herself.

Blake again!
Ellis couldn’t get him out of her head.

She knew her relationship with him, this thing they had together, was going nowhere. He had no intention of leaving his wife. Ellis was just a plaything to him. She needed to ditch him for good and move on. Get out of this godforsaken place. Get another job, a job she didn’t feel guilty doing, and put all this behind her.

But she couldn’t help herself. When it came to Blake Farrow, Ellis was like a moth around light.

She remembered the day she’d first met him. Ellis had walked through the glass-fronted entrance of Alturn for her interview. Blake was the first to greet her; he was on the panel. He was older than Ellis, almost twice her age, but the young ASO had been immediately attracted to him.

A lot had happened since then. The girl Ellis used to be all but disappeared. The friends she used to love spending time with, the music she used to listen to, all part of her old life.

She even
looked
different: her once short, spiky hair was now grown out, fashioned into a bob. She dressed differently, more business-like. Worse still, Ellis felt comfortable in these clothes now. She couldn’t see herself wearing what she used to wear. And that scared her. This place: these grey, metallic walls, the needles, the cats, Blake and his storeroom—it had consumed her. It was her whole world.

Ellis entered the washing room in Corridor C3. She pulled the surgical mask from her face, peeled off the cover-all and popped it into the large washer in the middle of the room. She picked up the wooden stick leaning against the washer, using it to dunk her gear firmly into the soapy water. Along the walls, three large dryers spun merrily, humming like drunken old sailors.

Ellis stopped at the mirror on the way out, checking her reflection.

Sex hair.

It was something Blake would say that always made her laugh.
You’ve got sex hair
, he would whisper, pulling her back into his arms. And on retreating to the ladies’ room, Ellis would find out why: her naturally curly hair would be frizzy, standing on end as if she’d been electrocuted.

Ellis tried to flatten the hair as best she could before leaving the wash room. She removed her shoe covers and placed them in the waste disposal by the door. She used her card, leaving the Animal House and entering D Block.

She thought of going home, of taking the lift from D up to the surface, getting in her car and driving away.
Never coming back.

She called the lift.

The lab area itself ran underground, with only a basic shop-front reception and some meeting rooms up top. The lift came three stories down to a fully air-conditioned research area. This was deemed safest for viral work; any of the labs could be contained at the flick of a switch, something the staff tried not to think too much about.

Ellis waited, drumming her fingers on the wall impatiently.

She was disturbed by a clatter of footsteps. Fellow lab workers hurried up the corridor.

Something was happening.

Ellis spotted Dave Lightfoot, a fellow ASO amongst the crowd, and grabbed him.

“What’s going on?” she asked.

Dave didn’t reply, instead taking her by the arm, dragging her along with him.

Ellis couldn’t help but notice the grave look on his face. Dave was normally the lab joker, and Ellis might have thought whatever happening now to be part of some elaborate ruse he’d concocted. But his eyes said otherwise.

She followed him along Corridor D3, towards the security door leading to E, where Blake’s Project QT was based.

Someone produced a card and ran it through the reader.

They were in.

E Block was like Pandora’s Box to those who didn’t work there. Ellis felt her heart skip as she followed the others, finding even more people on the other side, gathered around the small glass pane looking in on room E21.

“Dave, tell me what’s going on,” Ellis said again. Dave shook his head. “You wouldn’t believe it.”

“Try me,” she said.

“They’ve been experimenting on
people
, Ellis.”

“What?!”

“Farrow’s project, QT. It’s not just those fucking cats. He’s been doing something to people. Injecting them with the same shit.”

“You’re not making sense,” Ellis said. “That’s not allowed and you know it.”

“Some bloke called Jenkins showed up around lunchtime, started kicking off at reception. They called security. I was with Abe in the canteen, so I went along for the hell of it.” Dave shook his head. “I wish I hadn’t, Ellie. Jesus, that Jenkins guy was a real fucking mess. Claimed Farrow had done something to him, injected him with some shit. Then Farrow weighed in and took him away. And now—” Dave’s voice suddenly failed him.

“And now
what
?!” Ellis pressed.

Excited voices filled the corridor. Someone shushed them.

Ellis fought for a good vantage point at E21’s door, cursing her small stature. She heard a sharp intake of air: one of the lab assistants pulled away, hand over her mouth, gagging. Ellis fought to take their place. She reached the glass pane, peered through.

It was a typical holding room, but the equipment inside was different to what Ellis would normally see in a lab. It looked more like a hospital, with drips in holders and heart monitors next to gurneys. One of the gurneys was pulled out of its place, now in the middle of the room next to a metal trolley, and it was to here that Ellis’ eye was drawn.

A naked man stood by the gurney. He turned towards the door and Ellis could see immediately what all the fuss was about.

“Christ,” she whispered, her throat suddenly dry.

She stepped away from the door, looked at Dave. “Where’s Farrow?” she said.

“Gone.”

“What about Johnson, then? Anyone told him about this?”

“Not yet,” Dave said, staring at her invitingly.

***

“What!” Johnson barked, minimising his screen. He looked up from his desk, “This had better be–”

His voice trailed off.

A young woman stood by his chair. Although Johnson recognised her, he didn’t know her name. He was terrible with names, much better with faces. Especially a face like hers.