Instinct (2010) (17 page)

And now the second wasp was almost upon her.

She tightened her grip around the first one and used it to smack the other, sending them both flying back towards the entrance.

As they regained their senses to attack again, the doors slid closed on both of them, one at the thorax, the other at the abdomen.

A severed head dropped to the floor at Garrett’s feet, then another slid stickily downwards at the point where the doors met.

The rest of the wasps flew against the door, their soft impacts giving her one last moment of fear before she shifted hastily backwards across the corridor.

The emotions rose inside her like poisoned gas. She had no idea what she was supposed to do next. As each breath took her closer to tears, she shut her eyes tight and covered them with her arm.

‘Get out of there, Garrett!’ Bishop shouted into Webster’s mouthpiece. ‘I want you through the other doors so we can seal off the whole area. One thing goes wrong with that entrance and we’re back in the shit!’

She didn’t react.

‘Garrett? Come through the outer doors now,’ coaxed Webster. ‘Garrett?’

She was still staring at the door, ready for more of them to come for her. When she realized she was safe,
she shut her eyes again, then reopened them to gaze with hatred at the camera pointing at her.

They all felt the blame aimed in their direction. Ultimately it was the work of the scientists that had created this situation. Without them, Van Arenn would surely be alive.

Garrett looked through the doors of the lab and saw two wasps picking clean the last of his bones. Then she looked down to study the remains of the insects crushed by the door. With a steady shake of her head, she slowly lifted her boot and brought it down on whatever was left, feeling immense satisfaction at grinding it to nothing but a stain.

To her left she noticed a glob of sloppy innards which had landed a couple of feet into the corridor.

She bent down, scooped it up and smeared it across the camera lens. The four people in the surveillance room recoiled.

‘Well, we will be requiring a sample,’ said Harry.

Garrett then walked to the outer doors, waited for Webster to open them and stomped through without looking back.

In the monitor room, stunned repulsion was all anyone could feel.

‘Jesus Christ,’ said Bishop, searching for a surface to lean on as he retched.

Van Arenn’s skeleton became the fourth to litter the floor of Lab 23. It was impossible to tell where he ended and Roach, Martin or Heath began, especially after Garrett’s boots had scattered the bones from one end of the room to the other. They were now an indistinguishable mess of collagen and calcium, as far from a respectable burial as it was possible to get.

The death had been a horrific tragedy, of that there was no doubt, but that did not mean time could be wasted. They needed to know what was written in that notebook, and that meant asking Garrett very nicely if she wouldn’t mind handing it over.

Webster met her at the security door to the labs. She was walking quickly with apparent purpose.

‘Garrett, I’m truly sorry,’ he said, as she strode past without acknowledging him. ‘Garrett?’ He hurried to catch her up, but was just too far behind to stop her going into one of Harry’s labs. She locked the door behind her and walked towards the gene sequencers. To get to them, she had to walk past two workbenches covered in row upon row of test tubes. Opening her arms wide, she casually swept them all to the floor in a monsoon of smashing glass.

The lab was well insulated, so all they could hear was the muted tinkle that came with each impact.

‘Oh shit.’ Webster was knocking hard on the Perspex window. ‘Garrett! Garrett! Come on, open the door!’

‘What’s she doing?’ asked Harry.

Before Webster could speak, Garrett answered for him. She turned to the thermal cycler that was closest to her, smashing its dial and readout again and again with her big black boots. She kicked the casing, too, but made little impact on the solid steel, so she returned to the glass covering of the display, adding spidery cracks to it with each impact.

As she kicked, she screamed from the pit of her stomach. It was impossible to hear exactly what she was saying, but the explosion of rage ripped open her face and tore through her eyes.

‘Oh dear,’ said Harry quietly. There was nothing he or Webster could do but watch and wait.

Next, Garrett pulled the sample cabinets over, sending them crashing to the floor, their drawers skidding through the broken glass. One after another they hit the ground in a series of rolling booms that made Harry flinch.

Bishop and Laura had come to find out what was taking so long. As Garrett turned her attention to the thermoperiodic chambers, Bishop banged on the glass.

‘Hey! Hey! Garrett! Stop that!’ He turned to Webster. ‘How do we get in there?’

‘We don’t. It’s locked from the inside.’

‘For God’s sake. Garrett! Garrett!’

If she could hear him, she didn’t let it show. Moving on to the examination chambers, she wrenched the fire extinguisher off the wall and laid waste to the tall glass boxes.

‘How long’s this going to set us back?’ muttered Bishop.

‘We’ve got more than enough equipment in the other labs to make sure this won’t be too intrusive,’ replied Harry. ‘I’d have thought the bigger question is how you’re going to explain this to whoever allocates our budget. Those things don’t come cheap.’

‘I’m fully aware of the financial –’

Garrett cut Bishop short by upending a workbench. It supported a large genome sequencer, which landed with a rumble of colliding metalwork backed by an echoing crunch of broken glass.

Garrett gave another scream as she pounded the gene sequencers with her boots. There was nothing left to break, so she returned to the only thing left that could take another bout of her fury.

With little damage now being done, the frequency of her blows subsided. She delivered the last dents to the front panels, then bent over with her hands on her knees, shook her head and looked around at the carnage she had created. It would do for now.

She unlocked the door and rejoined the others.

‘Take it out of my wages,’ she called, as she walked down the corridor towards Bishop’s office.

The others followed.

*

The office was filled with an awkward silence. Despite what she had just done, Garrett was giving off too much anger to be reprimanded. Her best friend, a man who made life down here just about bearable, had been torn to shreds and eaten in front of her. One wrong word from Bishop and she might decide to damage more than just lab equipment.

For a long minute, she stared at the bookcase, her shoulders rising and falling with each hard breath.

Finally, she turned and looked at Laura and Harry, then walked towards Bishop and stood over him as he sat in fear on the other side of his desk. Reaching into her army jacket, she took hold of the notebook, pulled it out and let it drop to the table.

‘There’s the fucking –’

At that moment the door opened and in walked Andrew. Everyone turned round, quickly enough for him to realize something was up and that he might have interrupted that something.

‘Er … we’ve finished playing upstairs,’ he said.

‘Yes, OK, sweetie. Go and find … Mr …’

‘Carter,’ assisted Webster.

‘Yes, Mr Carter, and play a bit of pool with him. Or watch a DVD. We have something important to discuss here.’ Andrew nodded hard and fast and shut the door behind him.

‘As I was saying, there’s the fucking notebook,’ spat Garrett. ‘I hope it was worth David’s life.’

‘Well,’ said Bishop, ‘I’m sure Dr Heath would be pleased to know …’

‘Not that fucking David! David
Van Arenn
.
My
fucking David, you asshole. You don’t even know our names, do you, you piece of shit?’

‘Garrett,’ warned Webster.

‘Now, look, Garrett, calm down, please. I understand you have been through a big, big deal. You have lost …’ he looked at Webster for confirmation that he was saying the right thing ‘… your best friend, but it really has been for the greater good of the people within this facility and beyond. Your bravery …’

‘Don’t talk to me about my fucking bravery, shit-fuck. And know this: I didn’t do it for you, or this
facility
or whatever the fuck you want to call it. I did it for my
friend
, so at least he died for something. I really hope that book’ – she looked at Laura – ‘has got some fucking important shit in it.’ And with that she walked out of the office, slamming the door behind her.

Back in the office, they all stared at the notebook, still unopened on the desk. It had the dimensions of a postcard, and was a hundred pages thick, black and the kind of leather you only found in London’s more discerning stationers. The pages were edged in gold, like an address book, except for the large smear of half-dried wasp guts that encrusted part of the front, side and back.

‘Dr Trent,’ said Bishop in a small voice, ‘I suggest you take a look inside.’

She picked the notebook up and opened it with a soft crack of hardening blood. The first thing she could see, to her relief, was that the pages were crammed
with words and numbers and diagrams that seemed to reflect much of Heath’s thoughts and research.

Bishop, Harry and Webster looked at her expectantly. Seeing this, she flicked through the pages to show them that there was plenty of information. Her action sent a spray of dried wasp over Bishop, who did his best to ignore it.

‘Can we use it?’ he asked.

Laura looked through the pages. ‘Post-integration elimination of transposon sequences … phylogenetic distance … genome sequencing criteria … that’s all language I understand, but it’s the details, how he’s referring to genes and genetic integration and sequencing methods that I’m not familiar with. I think it’ll take a bit of deciphering. I mean, this is all as clear to me as English is to you but with the odd word that I’m going to have to work out through context, maybe with Harry’s help.’

Bishop checked his watch. ‘It’s getting late. Let’s go to the cafeteria, then you can get stuck in after dinner.’

This surprised Laura. ‘What time is it?’

‘Nine thirty,’ replied Webster.

The soldiers, scientists and those in charge were separated into their usual mealtime divisions. Garrett was already seated, picking over a bowl of food she was never going to eat. Jacobs heated up her meal and took the next seat along.

‘Fucking chili again,’ she said, resigned rather than pissed off.

‘Yeah, Jacobs, but this time it’s got a special ingredient. Say … where is Van Arenn?’ As George Estrada chuckled at his own joke, everyone on Bishop’s table went ghost-white. Did the scientists know already? Webster looked across to them for clues. From the continuing laughter, they were sure George had just stumbled upon his remark. However, when Garrett snapped loudly to her feet and left, the other soldiers knew something was up.

The canteen returned to its usual calm, with gloomy silences punctuated by the occasional burst of conversation.

‘What happens to the poo all the way down here, you know, when you go to the
rest room
?’ Andrew loved using Americanisms; there was a coolness to doing it at school.

‘Sweetie, not while we’re eating.’

‘No, I just mean, like you know when you do it in a plane, it falls out in a frozen block that lands on people’s houses, here it must have to be shot up to the surface like in a cannon.’

‘That’s exactly what happens,’ confirmed Webster. ‘Then it fertilizes the jungle. Does it pretty good too. When we arrived there was only one tree, now look at it.’ Andrew smiled.

Between mouthfuls, Laura flicked through the notebook. The early pages were full of Heath’s first stabs at isolating the aggression gene. She found it fascinating to discover how he had succeeded in replacing junk DNA strands with duplicates of the characteristics he wanted more of. The density of his thought slowed her, but she also had to contend with the density of Dr Heath’s incredibly ordered capital-letter handwriting. It was taking several minutes to get through each page.

His advances made her own research feel archaic, like papyrus compared to a computer. He had isolated and adapted genes that were thought to be inextricable and applied thinking from remote areas of biochemistry which advanced the state of the art.

And the creative thinking behind it was indeed an art: he had included perfectly proportioned diagrams of his findings, the work of a man who could have been incredibly successful in many different fields.

For better or worse, however, he had chosen this one.

In the barracks, Garrett was sitting on her bed, unable to think straight. It had all happened so fast, and now she had to deal with varying measures of anger, grief, desperation, despondency and fear.

She thought back to the conversation she had had with Van Arenn when they had returned from the mission. Had she tried hard enough to persuade him that this place was sliding into disaster? If she had been stronger, firmer, less of a pussy, would her friend be alive now?

On the other side of the barracks, Van Arenn’s pine kitbox was jutting out from where he had left it in his capsule. Garrett walked over and shifted it out, sliding open the catches on the lid. As she looked through the photos and keepsakes, she felt an immense feeling of pity. The most recent picture he had was a two-year-old snap of Garrett posing on the chopper with the latest firearms consignment from the Pentagon. Beyond that, he had a beat-up black and white photo of a fat old man with glassy eyes and missing teeth whom Garrett assumed was Van Arenn senior.

To anyone other than their owner, the rest of the objects were a collection of junk: a bullet, two bottle caps, a wooden beaded necklace, a Lincoln penny and a cat’s ID tag. In ten seconds, they had gone from
meaningful to meaningless, and Garrett thought that was about as sad as it got.

There was no one in the room, so she lifted the box up and heaved it across the barracks, sending Van Arenn’s clothes and trinkets flying. The wood was too dense to make much of a noise, but it left a wide triangular gash in the army-issue couch that took most of the impact. Bouncing off, it knocked quietly along the floor before coming to rest at the feet of Jacobs, who had just opened the door. She looked down at the box then up to Garrett, who was staring at the floor trying not to cry.