Hounds of the Underworld (The Path of Ra Book 1)

by Dan Rabarts

  Still, Tanner wasn’t kidding when he said the bodies were piling up. Four cadavers, all of them mutilated, and Fletcher’s own death looking ever more likely.

  Taking down a couple of mugs, she sets them on the bench as Matiu emerges from the bathroom, one of Penny’s white towels around his hips, and another being used to dry his hair. Penny notes the bluish smudge under his ribs on the left. Ouch. That’s going to hurt tomorrow.

  “Find anything?” he says, slinging the towel over his shoulder.

  Penny shakes her head. “I haven’t looked yet. But I’ve been thinking: maybe Buchanan wasn’t involved at all. Maybe, like us, the arsonist went there looking for information, and Buchanan accidentally got in the way.”

  “Yep, that’s good thinking, Penny,” Matiu says, one hand still grasping the towel. “So how do you explain his eyes? Wouldn’t it make sense to bash him over the head, set fire to the medical centre, and leave it at that? Why bother with all the unnecessary blood and gore?”

  “Could be the mutilation was intended as a message for someone. A deterrent.”

  “It hardly seems worth going to all the effort to make a statement like that, only to obliterate it immediately afterwards by burning the body. Besides, you’re assuming that the person sending the message and the person doing the killing are one and the same.”

  Matiu’s comment gives Penny pause. She hadn’t thought of that. Sandi Kerr is implicated somehow, Penny’s sure of it. And Hanson’s gang. But someone else involved? Who? Penny’s brain is too tired. She can hardly think.

  The kettle pings. Penny pours the water and hands Matiu a mug of green tea, the string of the tea bag dangling over the side. Matiu winces as his fingers curl around the handle. He hangs the wet towel over a door handle.

  “Hey, there’s a basket in the bathroom for those.”

  Matiu shrugs. “It’s not doing any harm there.”

  “Matiu, I’m happy for you to stay over, but there are some basic rules.”

  “Tell me about it. No dogs on the furniture. Use the blue razor, not the pink one. Rinse the sink after you use it. No wet towels lying about. Lighten up, Pen. There are more rules here than at Mount Eden.”

  Penny glowers at the mention of the resurrected gaol. How dare Matiu insinuate her place is like a prison?

  Matiu picks up the discarded towel and wraps it around his shoulders. “There,” he says. “Happy now?”

  Penny thumps him on the arm. “You have to have an answer for everything, don’t you—?”

  But, sitting down at a kitchen stool, Matiu slips the stick into the computer, the machine’s hum blending with the ebb and flow of Cerberus’ gentle snores. Quiet moments pass while Matiu flicks through the files, Penny reading over his shoulder, her mug clasped in her hands.

  “Stop. What’s that? See there. That folder called Osiris.”

  “Osiris.” Matiu twists to look at her. “Egyptian god of the underworld. Responsible for resurrection…”

  “Matiu, please. Don’t start with that mumbo-jumbo again. Researchers often give their trials names in order to distinguish one from another, and usually on a theme. A pharmaceutical company I know of, working on contraceptives, uses a new Disney heroine for each successive trial.”

  “But Osiris?”

  “You said it yourself: Osiris was the god of resurrection and renewal. Buchanan was hoping to give his patients another chance at life. It’s just a file name. You’re reading too much into it.”

  “Penny,” Matiu whispers. “You need to open your eyes.”

  Penny shakes her head. “Nuh-uh. Don’t start.”

  “You can be so blinkered, you know that, sis? So wrapped up in your formulas and your rules that you can’t see your hand in front of your face. You need to wake up and see what’s going on here. Science and logic don’t always apply. Admit it, you don’t have all the answers.”

  “I never said I had all the answers,” Penny blusters.

  Matiu snorts.

  “I’m prepared to believe that someone dying from cancer might get it in their head to try an untested alternative treatment.”

  A sigh this time.

  “They might even go so far as to undergo some kind of ceremonial cleansing—”

  “Sacrifice,” Matiu interjects.

  “Yes, all right, they might even offer up a poor dog as a sacrifice with the misguided idea that some all-powerful being will cure their cancer and offer them a new life. I’m sure there are people out there sick enough and desperate enough to believe that. But there are no actual demons. No bogey monsters. No portals into dark and twisted netherworlds. Because they do not exist.”

  “Pen—”

  “Just open the damn folder.”

  Shaking his head, Matiu clicks on the folder. A list of file names appears. Matiu scrolls down the list. Anne Hillsden. Plato Potaka. Darius Fletcher.

  Buchanan’s private patients.

  “Click on that one.”

  “Which one?”

  Penny points her mug over his shoulder in the direction of the screen. “That one at the bottom, labelled Metadata.”

  Matiu opens the file.

  “Scroll down.” The numbers whizz past in a blur. “Not so fast. Slower.”

  Finally, he gets it right.

  “Interesting.”

  “What?”

  “Well, it’s not my field, of course, but looking at these numbers, Buchanan’s protocol appears to be reasonably successful for certain types of isolated cancers, providing those cancers are detected early. This table shows that, in the main, tumours treated using his protocol either regressed or were eliminated. See here, patients’ bloodwork came back clean of cancer cells. But in patients with systemic cancers, blood cancers for example, Buchanan’s results were spurious.” She peers over Matiu’s shoulder, straining to see the footnotes in smaller print at the bottom of the screen. “The nanobots don’t always behave the way they’re expected to.”

  Matiu turns to Penny, waiting for an explanation.

  She takes a moment to circle the bench and top up her mug from the kettle.

  “I’d have to pull up Buchanan’s papers to get a fuller picture, but from what I read at the medical centre, Buchanan uses nanobots in a specialised form of chemotherapy. Nanobots are teeny, tiny robots. About a micrometre across.”

  Matiu rolls his eyes. “I know what a nanobot is.”

  “OK, good.” Penny bobs the teabag in her mug. “So anyway, Buchanan has developed a way of pre-programming nanobots to recognise certain cancer cells, and these are infused into a patient to eradicate, or at least slow down, cancers. Effectively, the bots digest cancer cells, leaving the patients’ own cells intact. Unfortunately, as a treatment, it can be extremely painful with all the symptoms of traditional chemotherapy—nausea, weight loss, cramps, lethargy—only those symptoms are exaggerated. A bit of a living hell, really.”

  “But if it means surviving cancer, then it’s worth attempting, surely?”

  “I imagine some patients might wonder about that once they’ve started the treatment,” Penny says wistfully. “In certain circumstances, death can be a kinder option.”

  Matiu picks up his tea, but puts it down again without taking so much as a sip.

  He says, “We should check out Darius’ file.” Pulling up the document, he reads from Buchanan’s handwritten notes: “Leukaemia. It’s followed by some sort of code.” Matiu reads it aloud.

  “That’s the TNM classification. It indicates where the primary tumour occurred, if it’s reached the nodes, and the extent of metastasis—it gives an idea of how advanced the cancer is.”

  “So was Fletcher’s cancer advanced?”

  Penny nods.

  Matiu goes on: “First treatment in the last week of Augu
st. Reported significant pain. Prescribed painkillers. Pain increased. Patient developed depression. Referred to a counsellor specialising in terminal illness… Bingo. There’s a number here.”

  Matiu scoots into the bathroom and returns with his jeans. Pulling his tablet from the back pocket, he drops the jeans on the floor and punches the number into the device. After just a few seconds, he hangs up.

  Penny steps over the slumbering Lab, picks up the jeans and hangs them on the door handle. “Well?”

  “That number is no longer attributed,” Matiu says, mimicking the standardised operator voice on the end of the line. “I’ll get Scour to chase it up. See what he can find.” Head down, he bangs out a quick text. That done, he slips back onto the kitchen stool and takes a swig from his mug.

  He pulls a face. “Yick. Cold.” He hands the mug to Penny. “Make me another one, will you?” Then, turning to the screen, he says, “So, what else have we got here?”

  While Matiu mutters to himself, Penny empties the mug of cold tea in the sink, refills the kettle and turns it on.

  “Hillsden. Looks like she was suffering from depression, too,” Matiu says, engrossed. “She was talking about pulling herself from the trial. Buchanan referred her to the same counsellor.” There’s more clicking, and he resumes his reading. “Potaka: another mention of depression. Do you reckon depression could be the link?”

  “I hardly think so. Terminal illness is a pretty depressing business.”

  Matiu nods. “Treating them must have been depressing, too. Buchanan’s doodled his supermarket list on Potaka’s patient notes. Bitter almonds, ten.”

  “What? Let me look at that.” Abandoning the kettle, Penny crosses the kitchen. “Move over.” She pushes her brother off the stool, slipping into the space he’s just vacated to scrutinise the notes on the screen.

  “This is bad.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it’s illegal to sell bitter almonds in this country.”

  “That’s rubbish. Mum and Dad always have almonds. Bituin gets them at the supermarket.”

  “Those are sweet almonds. The notation here is for ten bitter almonds.”

  Matiu shrugs. “So it’s a serving size. I don’t get it.”

  “Eaten raw, ten bitter almonds will provide a lethal dose of cyanide.”

  “Ah.” Matiu swings away. He sits on a sofa, leaning forward and stroking the dog with his fingers. Cerberus rolls over in his sleep.

  Penny stares at the notation. Could Buchanan have been helping his patients to kill themselves? He wouldn’t be the first doctor to help a patient hasten the process. They were in pain. Dying. No, it’s too much risk. He could have lost his licence. But there was that case she worked for LysisCo, the one Buchanan was involved in, his patient so depressed that he took his own life.

  Closing the computer, Penny moves to the sofa opposite Matiu, sitting down and tucking her feet under her.

  “The doctor is involved, Penny,” Matiu says.

  “He’s dead, though.”

  “Doesn’t change anything.”

  She twiddles with the tie on her dressing gown. “By the time those patients got to Buchanan—Hillsden, Potaka, Fletcher—there really wasn’t much hope for any of them. Riddled with cancer, they would’ve died eventually. Perhaps Buchanan was trying to be humane. If it turns out he helped them to kill themselves, then at least they were able to end their lives the way they wanted. With dignity. We might not agree, but we should respect their right to choose how, and when they die.”

  “You know you’re sounding like a shave foam commercial, don’t you? Euthanasia’s against the law.”

  Penny sighs. “Homosexuality was against the law once.”

  Matiu’s voice is quiet. “Buchanan isn’t just some innocent victim here. He was involved.”

  Penny hugs her knees, nods.

  Matiu stops patting Cerberus. He wipes his chin with the edge of the towel. “Whatever it is we’re dealing with, I think Buchanan saw it. I think he saw it, and what he saw terrified him—”

  Penny jumps up, her face hot. “That’s enough, Matiu! No more talk of other worlds.”

  “People don’t strike out their own eyes to make a point, Penny. His own eyes. To do that he had to go without anaesthetic. There had to be something he couldn’t bear to see.”

  “Stop. Stop it right now. This isn’t funny. I’ve been scared shitless as it is these past couple of days. Dead bodies. Explosions. Packs of marauding dogs. That’s plenty enough to give me nightmares without you telling me ghost stories, too.”

  Matiu opens his mouth, then closes it again. He takes a slow breath.

  “You forgot Craig Tong,” he says, cracking a tiny smile. “You know, seeing as we’re making a list of nightmares.”

  Penny stares at him. Suddenly, she can’t help herself. She breaks into exhausted, hysterical laughter.

  CHAPTER 24

  - Matiu -

  The buzz of his phone jolts Matiu awake. He barely remembers falling asleep. He shut his eyes here on the couch and then, just like that, it’s morning. He shakes his head and realises he’s covered with a duvet, and he has a cushion under his head. Penny must’ve done that.

  And he hurts. Goddamn, he hurts all over. Wincing, he feels about for his phone, finds it lying on the floor beside him. Swipes it unlocked.

  BURN PHONE

  Matiu frowns, and the movement makes his head hurt. It’s like he was in the biggest whiskey-drinking, drunk-fighting, car-crashing bender ever, but with none of the hilarious reminiscing to make it worthwhile. What the hell does Scour mean? He wants him to burn his phone?

  Aching, Matiu sits up, finds a glass of water and a small saucer holding four little white pills and one brown one on the table beside him. Ibuprofen, paracetamol and B-vitamins. For all her foibles, Penny’s a good sister. He knocks back the pills with the water and finds his clothes from the night before. They’ve been folded carefully and laid on the floor by the end of the couch. They still smell rather powerfully of smoke. Shrugging, he tugs them on and stumbles towards Penny’s kitchenette to make coffee. Back on the side table, his phone buzzes again.

  “What the fuck, Scour?” he mutters to himself, his voice ragged as an ashtray full of broken glass. “Don’t you know what time it is?”

  According to the clock on Penny’s microwave, it’s nearly 9:30 am. He raises an eyebrow as he fills the kettle. “OK, maybe this isn’t such a bad time to message me, then.”

  9:30. So he was asleep for almost ten hours. That might be some kind of record. His memories of the night before are hazy, full of dust and smoke and pain. Somewhere, another phone is ringing.

  Shaking his head, he tips coffee grounds into the plunger and swills it with cold water. Penny has her little rituals, he has his own. And one thing he can’t stand is the taste of burnt coffee. He finds cups and sugar, checks the fridge for milk while the kettle grumbles and bubbles on the bench, and in fairly short order is sitting back down on the couch balancing the full coffee pot and two cups. The smell of the hot brew permeates the fug of his brain, and even before the first taste of it is on his lips, the world is looking sharper.

  BURN PHONE

  He nods and pours the second cup for Penny. He can hear her moving about in her room. Knocking things over. Oh great, she’s in a panic already. Why is she in a panic? Were they meant to be somewhere this morning? It’ll come to him.

  He looks back at the next message. Scour again.

  NO USERID BUT GPS TAGS LOGGED. YOU WANT EM?

  Ah. Burn Phone, of course. See, everything is better with coffee. The world makes more sense.

  CHUR, he replies, also in all caps, because that’s how Scour rolls. Don’t message him in all caps, and it’s like the fucker can’t even hear you. He be all like WOT? YOU TALKI
N TO ME? I CANT HEAR YOU BEEATCH. SPEAK UP!!!1!

  A moment later a file drops into Matiu’s inbox, but before he can open it, Penny bursts from her room, hopping as she pulls on her socks. “Christ Matiu, have you seen the time? We’re meant to be going up to Hanson’s farm to collect evidence. We should’ve been there by now. I just had Clark on the phone, screaming at me. Get dressed!”

  Matiu slowly stands, muscles howling in protest, and presents her with the steaming mug of coffee. “See,” he says, more to himself than to her. “I knew it’d come to me.”

  Penny doesn’t bother engaging his cryptic wit but nor does she refuse the proffered cup. “Hurry up.”

  He sips his coffee. “First thing, darling sister, I am dressed, though fuck knows I could do with a change of boxer shorts. Second thing is, I don’t think we’re going to make it to the farm, not straight away anyway.”

  Penny is in the kitchen, hunting through the cupboards for, he presumes, something she can eat on the run. “Don’t piss around, Matiu. We need to hit the road.”

  “Scour tracked the phone number. He just sent me a list of GPS tag points. So we’ll know where it was used.”

  “No time, Matiu,” she says, ripping open what appears to be a healthy nut bar of some kind. “We can check it out after we get back from the farm. Put your shoes on.”

  Matiu nods, shrugging, and scopes out his shoes, while his thumb travels across the screen of his phone. “Got another one of those?”

  Penny throws him a cereal bar and shoves one in her pocket.

  “Ta. Just need to take a leak. Won’t be a minute,” he says, and vanishes into the bathroom.

  “Hurry up,” she yells. “And you shouldn’t take food into the toilet. It’s unhygienic.”

  “Why don’t you take the dog out for a pee?” he yells, and grins to himself as something heavy, maybe a shoe, hits the wall. She is so easy to wind up.