“Terrorism.” Don sits back down in his chair, clutching his armrests.
“I’m not sure I understand you. I’m a scientist. A geneticist. I’m involved in clinical trials, specifically to do with the immune system. I’ve done quite a bit of work for the government even, surely you know that. As far as I know, everything we do now in the regulated zone is perfectly safe, and anything even potentially risky is carried out in the de-reg zone. I thought the government wasn’t interested in what goes on there.”
“We’re not, unless it threatens people here.”
“It’s not in your jurisdiction.”
“We tend to look at it the same way as we do another country,” Don says, as if explaining something to a child. “We have very little control over it, but if someone there starts doing something which threatens our safety here then we’ll do what we can to stop them.”
“And how do you think I’m doing that?”
“I think you know the answer to that question already, Michael.” Don stands up and heads towards the door. “So, I’ll tell you what I’m going to do. I’m going to give you a few days to think about it, and to write down everything you can remember about your activities over the last few years. Let’s meet again on Wednesday and you can tell me if you’re ready to cooperate or not.”
Don walks out and a few minutes later, a guard comes in and takes Michael to a small, artificially lit room where he is made to strip and change into an orange jumpsuit. He is led down another corridor lined with doors. Each door has a tiny window in it. Faces are pressed up against some. Gaunt eyes stare out at him, desperate, it seems, for even the sight of another human being. The guard presses his hand against a screen on the wall and, with a metallic click and a beep, the door to a cell opens, and he is guided inside. The guard removes his handcuffs then leaves.
The room is two meters by three, with nothing but a bed, a toilet and a basin in it. The only window is the one in the door looking back out into the corridor. The ceiling is high, nearly three meters, probably to stop people hanging themselves from the single, bare light globe that hangs down on a brown cord. The walls are made of concrete blocks, painted matte white. A tiny vent in the ceiling lets off a whiff of stale air.
After a complete inspection of the room, which takes less than ten seconds, he gulps some water from the basin, brushes it over his face and through his hair, rubs it against the back of his neck and sits down on the mattress. It’s bare apart from a thin blanket and a pillow. They obviously don’t want their prisoners getting too comfortable. He lies down on his back, pulls the blanket over himself, and stares at the ceiling, but all he can see is Annie climbing out of their car and screaming after him.
CHAPTER TWO
THAT NIGHT MICHAEL can’t sleep. Paranoia starts playing tricks on his mind. He is no longer even sure where he is. His breathing is heavy but he still feels as if he can’t get enough oxygen into his lungs. He stands up and paces around the room and then lies down again but it does no good. All he can think about is Annie. What she’s doing. If she’s okay. To distract himself, he thinks back to the time when they met. He forces himself to imagine every detail, and as he does he feels his breathing slow, his mind start to relax.
It was the first day of Year Ten. He was sitting in class, doodling in the margins of his English exercise book, when their teacher brought Annie in and introduced her to the class. She stood there quietly, dark eyes to the floor. He felt himself starting to warm as he glanced over her slender body, already mature, in a summer school uniform. Between the top of her socks and the hem of her dress he caught sight of the smooth white skin of her thighs. Being virtually friendless, the only spare seat in the room was next to him and his heart pounded as he waited for her to be seated in it.
Sure enough, a moment later, her black eyes were staring at him.
“Hi,” he whispered.
“Hi,” she whispered back. “I’m Annie.” She gave him a smile the likes of which no girl had ever given him before.
“I’m Michael.”
He spent the next hour and a half of class not daring to look across at her in case she disappeared, or he caught a look on her face which told him that she had suddenly become infected with the same opinion of him that most other girls in the school seemed to have.
After class it was Annie who spoke to him. He was even less articulate with girls than usual, but somehow she managed to get out of him where the school library was and, on the way there, the fact that his parents had died eleven years earlier and that he was now living with his maternal grandparents. It was this piece of information that brought them together and cemented their friendship, at least for a while.
“That makes two of us,” Annie said, pawing through the novel section looking for the prescribed reading texts for English class: Robinson Crusoe and The Chocolate War.
Michael was just hanging around by then, not quite sure if he should stay or go.
“Your parents died too?” he said.
“No, silly.” She turned to him and gave him another one of her smiles. “My Dad left. That’s why we’re in this shit hole, if you’ll excuse his French. My grandparents live here and my mum wanted to be close to them.” She spoke with a mild English accent and was sophisticated in a way other girls in town weren’t. From that first day on he found himself obsessed with her in a way he’d never been obsessed with anyone else before.
By the following Friday, she was still talking to him, and after school she asked him if he wanted to do something with her on the weekend. Michael knew that what most other kids did when they went on a date was to go to the local cinema where they could grope and kiss one another in the dark. It seemed too soon for such a daring plan, though. Michael wasn’t at all certain of his groping and kissing abilities, and the only movie which was playing was a re-run of an old Terminator movie which he thought probably wouldn’t interest her. Instead, he invited her to go swimming at the local lake, which was probably the single worst decision he had ever made in his life. There was a reason, he discovered, that young lovers sought the anonymity that the darkness of the cinema provided them with, rather than going to public places full of mocking rivals.
That Saturday morning, he took along an old bike, that he had found at his grandparent’s house, to Annie’s house, and gave it to her to ride. As it turned out, she wasn’t used to riding bikes, and the ten kilometer ride to the lake, which he did quite easily, almost killed her.
Eventually they made it, but when they arrived a brown Ford was parked next to the lake; it’s owners a group of boys in the year above him who often teased him for being a geek. Michael tried to sneak past them to the next swimming spot along, but they spotted him, and Annie by his side, and started calling out to them.
“Hey, lover boy, who’s your woman?”
Annie and Michael ignored the boys and walked on. They swam together, splashing around in the water, and he admired the water glistening and dripping off her pale skin. They sat on the bank and talked about their parents, and about Annie’s life in Sydney, where she used to live.
“Hopefully, I’m only going to be here for a few months,” she told him. “My mother’s trying to find a private school for me in Melbourne.”
After a few hours they were tired and they had forgotten to bring sunscreen and Annie, who was very pale, was starting to go red. Michael was afraid to walk past the boys again but there was no other way out of there.
Two of the boys stood up and approached them as they came near. One of them, Nick, was considered the most attractive guy in school.
“Hi, I’m Nick,” Nick said to Annie.
“I’m Annie,” she replied.
“You’re not going to make her ride all the way back into town are you Michael?” Nick pronounced his name as if it created a sour taste in his mouth.
“I’m okay,” Annie said, although he detected hesitation in her voice.
“Why don’t you let us take you back?” Nick said.
“It’s okay,” Michael said. “Go on.”
“What about the bike?” Annie looked down at the bike he had given her.
“It won’t fit in the car,” Nick said.
“Don’t worry about it. I’ll take it,” Michael said.
When they all left together, Michael sat down and stared at the lake for a long time.
As he’d suspected, Annie started hanging around with Nick’s gang after that. Then, a few months later, he heard she’d moved to a private school in Melbourne.
Michael didn’t see her for nearly four years after that. Then, one night, he was at a party, sitting down on the steps outside someone’s parents’ country house, staring at the star-speckled night, when a voice next to him said, “Michael?”
Michael turned to find Annie staring at him. Her dark eyes glowed out at him like two orbs in the night.
“Annie?” he said, his heart suddenly pounding. She was as gorgeous as ever, even more so.
“How have you been?” she said.
“Okay. How about you?”
“Pretty well. What are you doing here?”
“I’m friends with Dylan, who apparently knows the host of this party, although with Dylan you never know. How about you?”
“I came with a friend as well. Can I sit down?”
“Of course.”
They chatted for a while about how terrible secondary school had been and what they’d been up to since then. She was studying medicine and he was studying science. He felt more comfortable with her than he had with anyone else in a long time. Even with Dylan he always felt like he was in some kind of a test of coolness or intelligence or superiority. Not necessarily superiority over Dylan himself, but superiority over other people in general. Michael could never feel completely at ease. With Annie it was different.
“Here you are!” A blonde girl in a short white tennis skirt with two pony tails came out onto the terrace.
“Michael, this is Jane. Jane, Michael,” Annie introduced them.
“Can I borrow her for a minute?” Jane said.
“Sure.” He remembered for a moment that deep feeling of loss he’d felt that day at the lake.
“Back in a minute.” Annie rested her hand on his forearm, gave him a conspiratorial smile, then stood up and went inside.
Michael sat there for a few minutes feeling sorry for himself, then he wandered back inside to the kitchen and glanced over at Annie and Jane who were talking excitedly to two boys.
Michael poured himself a glass of champagne, then saw Caroline, Dylan’s girlfriend, coming towards him.
“Can I have some of that?” Caroline held out her glass.
“Sure.”
“So, who was that girl I saw you talking to?” Caroline said with mock jealousy.
“Annie. We went to high school together.”
“She’s hot,” Caroline said.
“Isn’t she?”
“So what happened?”
“Either her friend came and took her away from me, or she wanted her friend to come and rescue her from me, I’m not sure which.”
“What did she say to you?”
“When?”
“When her friend came?”
“She said she’d be back in a minute.”
“Nothing to worry about.”
“What do you mean?”
“If she’d wanted to escape she would have said “nice to meet you”.”
“What makes you think that?”
“That’s what women say. It would get you off her back. Give you the message that she didn’t want to continue talking to you. Men are pretty thick witted sometimes, so women have had to adapt fairly explicit signals. And besides, she looked like she was interested in you.”
“How could you tell?” Michael was secretly delighted that Caroline had been keeping an eye on him.
“A girl’s intuition. What did she say to you? Tell me everything.” She wrapped her hand around his upper arm. “Look. I think she’s looking your way. Go and take her a glass of champagne.”
Michael looked over and Annie was looking at him. Jane and the two boys were talking amongst themselves and Annie was looking lost.
“Go on, quick,” Caroline said, holding out her glass for him to take.
Michael walked over to Annie and held the glass out for her, hoping he could somehow sneak off with her without the other three noticing. Annie thanked him and huddled in close. Excitement made his body rush.
“Who was that girl you were just talking to? Is she your girlfriend?” Annie said.
“No, no, that’s Caroline. Dylan’s girlfriend. An old friend.” Michael felt thrilled that she thought Caroline could be his girlfriend.
“Do you want to go outside again?”
“Sure.”
“Those two were so boring,” she said, as they walked out into the cool air. “Thank you for saving me.”
Michael wondered if that meant she didn’t find him boring.
“Who were they?”
“I don’t know. Some guys Jane met. She always goes after those boring sporty types.”
“Well, you can rest assured that I’m totally incapable of playing any type of sport at all.”
Annie let out a husky laugh, which Michael took to mean that she liked him.
Three years later, sitting on the steps of the Natural History Museum in London, just under the statue of Darwin, Michael asked her to marry him.
CHAPTER THREE
FOR THE NEXT few days Michael doesn’t see Don. He spends each day in his room, writing down everything he can remember about his work over the past couple of years, omitting not only the most condemning information, but anything else he can leave out without looking guilty for doing so. The cell is quiet except for the occasional scream of another inmate.
When he’s not writing, he tries to exercise or meditate. Anything that will help keep his mind, body and emotions healthy. He thinks about Annie all the time. He wonders where she is now: at home still, or safely on the New Church island they had planned to move to?
At night, instead of placing his head on the pillow, he lays the pillow alongside himself and hugs it. He tucks his hands in his groin, where it is warm, and sleeps fitfully. On a number of occasions he wakes in the middle of the night, in total darkness, gasping for breath. Each time he remembers the dream preceding his awakening: someone was trying to keep him quiet by holding their hand over his mouth.
Michael’s interview with Don resumes a few days later.
“So, there are just a few other things in your statement that I’m not quite sure about,” Don says.
“Yes?”
“It appears that the people at HGM Industries were introduced to Geneus through you.”
“Yes, that’s right.” HGM industries was the dummy corporation that Gendigm had created in order to invest in Geneus.
“How did you come into contact with HGM?”
They never worked out an alibi for this one, so Michael tells the truth. “I was introduced to them by another scientist, Bruno Salacio, who read an article I published in Genetics Today. He apparently knew Jan from HGM, and after being impressed with my research, introduced us.”
“Hmm,” Don says. “Interesting.”
“Why’s that?”
“Bruno Salacio was found dead in his apartment three weeks ago.”
For a moment Michael is stunned. Maybe he has been set up as a scapegoat for Gendigm. Maybe Bruno was too. Then Michael realizes that Don is possibly lying to him, and Bruno is not dead at all. Maybe they’re just trying to frighten him, to get him to talk.
That nigh
t, he wakes up in the middle of the night gasping again. In his dream, his cell was slowly filling up with water. His whole body and bed are drenched in sweat and he is freezing. He stands up in the light coming through from the passage and tries to dry himself with the hand towel next to his basin. He runs some warm water and splashes it on his face and runs it over his hands, then turns the blanket around and tries to huddle underneath it again.
He can’t get back to sleep. All he can think about is being trapped inside this cell for the rest of his life and dying here. He can’t stop himself from shaking. He wants to smash himself against the door, try to break out of there even though he knows he can’t. He tries to breathe slowly, tell himself it is going to be alright, but he knows it isn’t.
Then he thinks about Annie, and the first time he woke in the middle of the night to find her sweating and feverish, just as he is now.
“Annie, what is it?” he said, feeling wet sheets around her. “You’re soaked.”
He switched the bedside light on and put a hand on her forehead but it was pretty obvious she had a fever.
“Let me get a towel,” he said, standing up and heading for the bathroom. He came back a minute later with a dry towel and a wet face cloth which he used to wipe her face down. Annie tried to roll over, to get out of bed, but she couldn’t get up.
“We’re going to have to get you to the hospital.”
“No, I’ll be fine,” she said.
“You won’t be fine. Now come on, get up and I’ll take you to the Royal Melbourne.”
Royal Melbourne hospital was a fifteen minute drive away. It had been privatized since the flooding, but at least it was still open.
“No, please. Let’s wait until morning at least. Just bring me some aspirin.”
Conception: A Post Apocalyptic Thriller (Perfectible Animals Book 1) Page 2
