Guinea Pig (25 page)

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.

“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.