The Dead Speak Ill Of The Living (The Dead Speak Paranormal Mysteries Book 1) (43 page)

  
“A job well done,” Joe smiled.

  
“I got your machine,” Pohl said entering the room with the bag in her hands.

  
“Excellent.”

  
“Not really, they got me,” and everyone turned to find Malveo and armed men
standing there with a handful of scientists. “Turned out they were having a
meeting about it in the next room.”

  
Pohl might have been unflustered, but a scientist was, as a blonde haired
gentleman ran in, crying ‘you let them out, you let them out, all my work and
training!”

  
“Why didn’t you just run?” Malveo said confused.

  
“He’s got a soul,” Dee said, gesturing to Joe.

  
“Cute.”

  
“The souls are free, the souls are free, we must reacquire them,” the scientist
bleated.

  
“Calm down,” Malveo instructed.

  
“They might escape now their bonds have been broken!”

  
“I said calm down.”

  
“All our work…”

  
“Either shut up or we’ll sedate you.” The scientist did so. “Anyway, it doesn’t
matter.”

  
“What do you mean?” Dee and the scientist both asked.

  
“We don’t need those spirits, they were only useful as test subjects.”

  
“But…I don’t understand. My store of spirits…”

  
“We shall use this opportunity to move onto the second stage of the plan.”

  
As Dee raised an eyebrow the white coated members of the facility were
confused. “What second stage?”

  
“We have proved capable of finding and capturing souls. Now we collect souls
worth acquiring. You tested the process on normal people, idiots, but we will
go after far bigger fish.”

  
“What do you mean?”

  
“This project will acquire assets we can use. The souls of great minds, the
souls of geniuses, we will build an unrivalled knowledge base for a laboratory
covering all realms of key human endeavour.”

  
The quartet was intrigued to see the reactions of Malveo’s scientists, who all
registered shock.

  
“No one’s ever mentioned that before.”

  
“Well they have now, what did you think we were developing? No, no, I know, a
way for people to keep their father around for advice and mealtimes. Quaint,
possibly kind, but it doesn’t save the world. We will start with Einstein, and
go on from there.”

  
“Once again,” Dee pointed out, “you’ve unveiled your plan to us, so I suppose
being let out really is off the cards.”

  
“Don’t think you four aren’t in trouble. You could have seriously damaged our
progress, as it is we have to repair our equipment.”

  
“What shall we do with them?” said a man who’s uniform suggested head of
security.

  
“At the moment I’m thinking you shoot all four and we keep their souls hidden
so no one ever finds out.”

  
“No!” gasped a scientist.

  
“What now?” Malveo asked, “have they really knackered something?”

  
“You can’t kill them!”

  
“Oh, that.”

  
“We’re scientists, running a research centre, we are not murderers, we are not
Mengele.”

  
“You think you’re not, but how will the world see us? Besides, we can’t let
them go, and we can’t keep them in a cell and feed them forever. Something
pragmatic has to happen, and that’s silencing them permanently.”

  
“Doesn’t no one try bribery anymore?” Nazir bemoaned.

  
“We’d have to dispose of the bodies carefully,” the head of security said like
a man with many, long considered ideas on the subject.

  
“Can we wrap them in some way and put them into a storage room?”

  
“Something to consider.”

  
“We are still here,” Dee complained.

  
“If you kill these people then I’ll quit,” the lead scientist threatened, “and
if I quit my whole team will.” He looked defiantly at Malveo, but only for a
moment.

  
“If you quit, we’ll kill you, capture your soul, and you’ll still end up
working for us.” It silenced the scientist, who moved his mouth like a fish a
few times and then looked at the floor.

  
Not every soul had taken the opportunity to leave the building. In fact two had
moved deeper in, entering the lab where the soul controlled arm was stationed.
They looked at it, felt it, and then inveigled themselves into it, making it
slowly bend and the fingers flex. There was a laptop nearby, to help monitor
the arm, and the fingers now began tapping. It was definitely time for some
fun, and for some revenge.

  
“So you lot can go back to the conference room,” Malveo ordered the scientists,
“while security take these four pests…” the light went off, then on again, then
off, and one went on at the far end of the corridor and blinked off as the next
went on and it continued in a cascade all the way along to the other end. Every
turned and looked at it, and Malveo pointed to Nazir’s phone, which was now
held by security.

  
“He’s playing games again, turn that thing off.”

  
“It’s not me,” Nazir protested. The lights started pulsing like a nightclub.

  
“Turn them off or I’ll have you shot right here, right now.”

  
“It really isn’t me.” Nazir insisted.

  
Malveo snorted and stepped out into the corridor, looking up and down it.
Everyone else follow automatically. “Is it a bug or something?” the Chairman
asked.

  
“It must be something in the system” security confirmed, but their faces said
‘we’ve no idea.”

  
“A virus then?”

  
“Could be.”

  
“You don’t know do you.”

  
“No sir.”

  
“Right, we better get to the…what’s that tapping noise.” Everyone looked
around, and soon realised there was a soul controlled arm by the window
tapping. It then waved hello.

  
“We’ve been compromised by the ghosts,” security concluded, unable to believe
they just spoke that.

  
“Well get in there and turn it off!”

 
“Err, the door’s locked sir.”

  
“Then go and turn the power off!”

  
Dee had noticed that everyone was staring at Malveo and the hand, so she turned
to Nazir and mouthed ‘fuck em deep’. Then she dived forward and drove her knee
straight into the head of security’s testicles. His uniform was nice, but there
wasn’t an armoured codpiece, and as he screamed and collapsed his gun literally
fell into Dee’s hand. Nazir went forward to, but stuck to the unspoken man code
and avoided the balls; he just hammered a fist into a solar plexus and disarmed
the man. Pohl and Joe now dived at the last one, who was too confused by the
commotion, and soon got the weapon off him.

  
Dee and Nazir had their guns aimed at the employees and the lab, but Pohl’s was
facing the floor.

  
Dee had something to say about that. “I’m sure your therapist will let you off
considering this is life or death.”

  
“I don’t want to start all that again.”

  
“You won’t, self-defence is fine.”

  
“Why don’t you put the guns down and we’ll talk?” Malveo suggested.

  
“Why don’t you go suck a cunt,” Dee shot back.

  
“I think if we slowly back off we can make a swift exit,” Joe suggested,
looking at the corridor behind them.

  
“Good idea,” and the quartet moved ever further away, guns up, their machine on
Joe’s back. When they reached a door they tried it, found it unlocked itself,
and they went through. The door locked behind them and they broke into a run as
they wove through the building, following Joe who seemed to have remembered the
route. They knew there were armed people between them and an exit, and they
were ready to shoot, but the doors seemed to be locking people away from them,
which they put down to the hand.

  
Finally they broke out into the open air and into the car park, where they
found a large number of police vehicles, the attendant officers, and some armed
policemen who weren’t very happy.

  
“Drop your weapons!” came a sharp cry from the police.

  
The group, which had come to a swift halt, looked at their pistols and dropped
them immediately. “We’re escaping!” Joe shouted. “There’s armed nutters behind
us!”

  
“The report said four were being held captive sir,” an officer noted.

  
“Stay where you are,” and the police advanced to check them and enter the
building.

  
“Your message said you’d been abducted at gunpoint and held in this lab where
unethical and illegal experiments take place?” This came from a tall man with
no hair.

  
“Our message?” Pohl asked.

  
“The arm sent it,” Joe explained, guessing correctly, and he gave the police a
quick summary of recent events.

  
“You expect me to believe that?” the detective asked. “It sounds like an
episode of Ghostbusters.”

  
“Three things,” Dee said ticking off her fingers, “One, we have a contact at
MI5 who we can ring and who’ll clue you in on science bullshit. Two, if we were
making it up where would we have got guns from? And Three, you just revealed
your age.”

  
The police penetrated the laboratory complex and arrested everyone they found,
which included a security detail who were embarrassed, whose commanders were
limping, and who were illegally tooled up to go hunting for escaped amateurs.
They also found scientists trying to hide what they’d been doing, lots of odd
machines, and Chairman Malveo standing in his office with a hard drive trying
to work out how to destroy it. He knew a suicide switch would have come in
handy.

  
Peters arrived within the hour with a full team, and they went straight to
work. Firstly Peters interviewed the quartet while his people examined what was
inside, and once it was established what the tech did it was confiscated, from
both Malveo and the police, and the Chairman, his scientists and the devices
were driven away in vans to an undisclosed location.

  
Finally he went over to the quartet and leant on a police car’s bonnet. “We
ought to pay you to find this stuff, you’re better than a bloodhound.”

  
“You can certainly pay us,” Nazir grinned.

  
“You need to sort your intelligence gathering out,” Dee reprimanded him, “this
lot were sat right in Britain.”

  
“Most of our efforts are on terrorism, you know how it is. Asking to monitor
communications about souls would be right down the list.”

  
“You really do need to pay us. We could add this to our list of jobs.” Joe
envisaged a working income.

  
“Actually Joe, you sure you haven’t changed your mind about working for us full
time?”

  
“Don’t poach our staff while we’re standing in front of you,” but Dee’s grin
showed she was joking.

  
“I’ve made a decision,” Joe replied to Peters, “but I won’t be joining you.”

  
“I understand, and to be honest you’re more useful finding all these people.”

  
Dee nearly said ‘well they found us’, but decided not to dwell on that.

  
There were other people who wanted to dwell on that. Maquire had come round
soon after the quartet had been returned to Dee’s house, and he’d done so
because he had news: he’d been promoted, would Dee like to come for a
celebratory meal. Then the group had narrated recent events, and Maquire didn’t
look happy at all.

  
“Can we speak on our own?” he asked, and Pohl had raised an eyebrow as he and
Dee walked into the garden, each with their bottle of lager.

  
“What is it?”

  
“When I rang you, to tell you I was a D.I., you were in this van, a prisoner?”

  
“Yes, but…”

  
“You have to stop this Dee, you really have to stop this.”

  
“What?”

  
“This investigating. I can’t cope. I can’t do my job worrying about you all
day, and you get in such danger.”

  
“You want me to quit?”

  
“Yes, please.”

  
“No. I love this, it’s a really good thing to do. I’m not stopping.”

  
“Dee, I said I can’t cope. I can’t worry like this. If you don’t stop I don’t
want us to carry on being together.”

  
“You’re giving me an ultimatum?” she said stunned.

  
“Yes.”

  
“But you’re in the police, you’re out all hours, threatened all the time. I’m
supposed to be alright with that?”

  
“I have the law Dee, I’m never in the danger you have been.”

  
“You’re making that up. You can’t expect me to stop and sit waiting while you
carry on. That’s fucking hypocrisy.”