by Ian Woodhead
Alison remembered watching him take Diane back to his big, black car, after he’d given Alison £300. Despite the fact that the girl really was a whiny little bitch, Alison’s conscience still informed her that she just sold that girl to Satan.
She never saw the girl again and despite vowing never to help the handsome but creepy man, three weeks later she repeated her shameful actions. This time it was a terrified twelve year old girl whom she’d found hiding behind in bus station toilets.
He’d made contact again, two nights ago. Alison’s mind changed when he gave her over £500 and promised another of the same after the delivery. It was only after he’d climbed back into his flash car when she’d broke down in tears, knowing that if she didn’t end this now, she may as well take her own life.
They’d agreed to meet here tonight, she had watched him walk into the alley; gingerly stepping over discarded takeaway wrappers and dog shit, no doubt desperately trying not to get his ultra expensive shoes dirty. The smile on his face slipped off when he saw that Alison was alone.
She could still picture that horrible sneer, telling Alison that if she didn’t have the guts to bring him anymore fresh bait then he’s just have her instead. He then pulled down the zip on his trousers.
Glen’s leer turned into a snarl when she shook her head, he told her that it wasn’t a fucking request but an order. When he lunged for her, trying to grab Alison’s hair, she just snapped. Alison growled and pushed him back.
Alison watched the car’s headlights disappear; knowing that she’d just made a huge mistake. She still could have used him and bedded down for the night. Nobody’s going to be looking for her until tomorrow, anyway. It’s not like she could get out of town at this time in the morning. A few rough grunts and a bit of mess would have more than compensated for a good night’s sleep in a comfortable bed.
“Oh, bloody hell. What did I go do that for?”
Maybe she could get a room at a bed and breakfast? It’s not like she couldn’t afford one. Alison glanced around, making sure that she was still alone then pulled out a large wad of notes from her back pocket. She had no idea how much was here but she knew that it was more than enough to allow her to make a new life somewhere else, somewhere clean and quiet and away from all this urban sickness. She quickly stuffed the money back, knowing that there was more than enough there to get her killed if somebody else saw it.
The downpour and now turned into a light shower and the traffic and increased, it was time for her to depart before anyone else saw her.
“But I don’t know where to go.”
Alison hurried across the road, heading for nowhere in particular, it was best to just keep moving. It was best to get as far away from that body as possible.
She passed a baker’s shop and her stomach growled when the enticing scent of baking bread reached her nostrils. When was the last time she had anything substantial to eat? It wasn’t open yet anyway; she passed the shop, telling herself that it was still too close to the body.
Alison then saw a sign to the railway station. A grin slowly formed. “Oh, god ain’t you a dizzy mare. There’s everything you need in there. One of the station kiosks is bound to be open.”
She ducked into a shop’s alcove as a patrol car drove past; Alison didn’t think they saw her. After getting some food down her, she decided to board the next train out of this shit hole, she decided it was time to go back home and confront her demons.
Chapter Three
He thrust his hand up to block his nostrils when a scruffy young girl, stuffing her face with a chocolate muffin passed his seat. Dean Kasnovski could almost taste the stench rolling off that girl. This was just unbelievable, who the bloody hell had let that dirty tramp on the train? Chances were that the conductor didn’t even know she was on. More than likely, she sneaked on at the last stop and been hiding in the toilets.
The middle-aged woman on the opposite seat casually slid her hand over her green hand-bag and placed it between her legs. The scruffy girl abruptly stopped in mid pace and turned to look at Dean, he wasn’t quick enough to remove his hand.
“What’s wrong with your face, mate?” she snapped. “Don’t you like my perfume or something?” her voice increased in volume with each sentence. She leaned closer and grinned at him she then wiped her chin, noticing the chocolate crumbs she licked them off.
“Are you trying to suggest that I fucking smell bad?”
Oh, this was so not good. Dean’s eyes flicked past the loud girl and to his horror, the other passengers were staring at him instead of the foul smelling girl.
“Sorry,” he muttered, “I’ve got an itchy nose.”
He turned and stared out of the window. The last thing he needed right now was a load of unwanted attention. Dean watched the girl give him the single digit via her reflection. He breathed a sigh of relief when she must have realised that he wasn’t going to rise to her aggravation. She muttered something under her breath. He didn’t catch the word but he guessed that they weren’t going to be flattering. She passed into the next carriage. A few moments later, her body odour followed her.
Dean closed his eyes. He pushed the obnoxious girl’s antics to the back of his mind and attempted to calm down.
For the moment, Dean was safe. Even if they discovered that he was missing, they’d be too tied up in dealing with the accident to be concerned about one missing researcher. His eyes snapped open, Dean bolted upright. Oh, bloody hell! What if they did find him missing and assumed that he was infected just like all his other colleagues?
He stole a glance at the grey haired woman opposite him. She had wrapped her thin fingers into the threads of her multicoloured bag. She probably figured that the girl would have spun around and make off with all her possessions once she had finished chewing Dean out. Her eyes were shut tight; she must have decided that now the immediate threat was over, it was safe to have a little snooze. Dean placed his hand on top of the headrest and stood up. He saw nobody else. Dean sat back down and sighed.
Even if they did think the worst, they were hardly likely to look outside the city, never mind think that he’d boarded a fucking train. A freezing chill shot along the length of his spine at the thought of just how close he’d been to joining the fate of his other colleagues in his laboratory.
It all started with him noticing that Gertrude’s cage hadn’t been shut correctly. This oversight had happened a few times in the last few weeks, it had never been that much of a big deal. For a laboratory rat, she was rather placid and quite friendly. Dean had forgotten which of his colleagues had come up with Gertrude, not that it mattered, the name just stuck.
Dean dragged a hand across his face, a little startled to find tears had collected in the creases.
“It’s all my fault.” He whispered. “I should have noticed it earlier.”
The new batch had completed preliminary tests a couple of days ago. This time, they really believed the enzyme molecules would stay bonded. After three years and countless failures, this time his team thought they’d cracked it.
Their group leader and head researcher, Graham, had even ordered in a dozen bottles of champagne. For when the final test results showed the team what everybody already knew. Confidence was that high.
For the last few years, He’d been part of a select group involved in trying to crack the human longevity problem. Although government backed, only a few officials knew of their existence. The group’s research and experiments in banned genetic science would have caused uproar if any of it became known. Although he knew for a fact that the U.S. and a few of the more advanced European countries were involved in the same field, their governments would have immediately labelled the U.K. as a pariah state if their work got out into the open.
Dean also knew that no other country had achieved positive results. They were on the verge of cracking the code, only the live animal testing remained.
They’d chosen several rats, including Gertrude because of their advanced age; they
only had months at the most to live. A few week s to study the side effects sounded ideal. Graham believed that the rodents would now live for at least another eighty years. Of course, the team had no plans to wait for that long. Human testing was due to begin in under two year’s time.
Gertrude was the first rat to start showing signs of abnormal behaviour. Dean watched Graham rush over to the cage whilst the rat was squealing in agony and attempting to gnaw her way through the bars. As soon as the man got closer to the cage, the rat threw herself at the door. Before anyone knew what was happening, Graham lay on the floor, his agonizing screams muffled by the rat’s body stretched across his face.
The bio-containment procedures activated automatically. The room sealed but nobody thought to check on the other infected animals. Dean watched in horror as Gertrude chewed through the man’s cheek. He almost passed out when Graham then got off the floor, pulled the rat off him and threw it across the room. He then shambled towards the glass partition.
Alarm after alarm went off throughout the complex; he took one last look at Graham’s mutilated face before running towards the exit. Watching his normally placid colleagues behaving like a herd of stampeding cattle brought out his own helpless panic, exacerbated when a young girl fell to the floor screaming and shrieking as another white rat scurried over her body and bit into the poor girl’s neck. Dean pushed passed several people, not caring about anything else but getting out of here. He looked towards the main exit, he saw the steel shutters getting ready to drop down and ran faster then he’d ever ran in his life to reach that door before the shutter dropped.
Dean jumped at the sound of the uniformed guard requesting to see the woman’s ticket; he fumbled through his trouser pockets while watching the old woman return from wherever the sandman had taken her. He could guarantee that it would be certainly a lot better place from where he’d come from.
The inspector exchanged pleasantries with the woman while punching her ticket. The woman may have been old enough to be the inspector’s mother but it didn’t stop her from flirting with him. Dean felt a strange pang of jealousy; she hadn’t even looked at him. He pushed the odd thought to the back of his mind as the inspector punched his own ticket before exiting the carriage. He wondered if he was emitting some sort of pheromone that caused women to either ignore him or try to pick a fight. Speaking of which, he vaguely wondered how long it would be before that inspector came back this way with that homeless girl trapped in a headlock. He shook his head, she’d be too streetwise to get caught; she was probably already hiding in the toilets, waiting for him to go past.
The older woman had already fallen back to sleep. Dean envied her, he wasn’t sure if he’d ever be able to sleep again. He waited for a couple of minutes, watching a globule of drool try to escape from the corner of the woman’s mouth. If that inspector did come back this way and saw her saliva laying along the seat like a narrow slug trail, that woman would have scuppered her chance of getting off with him.
As soon as the first muffled snore escaped, Dean judged it would be safe enough to get out his laptop; Dean just had to find out what the current situation was. He gave the carriage one more glance before he unzipped his black leather case and placed the computer on the table before him. He’d placed the bag beside his leg as soon as he’s boarded the train; this was one piece of equipment that he couldn’t afford to lose. Dean shuddered to think what the consequences would have been if that girl had seen the bag and ran off with it.
He logged in and waited impatiently while a connection was established. He should still be able to patch into the building’s security cameras without tripping any alarms. The authorities shouldn’t have cut the servers just yet. Thankfully, they’d housed the main computer systems in another institute somewhere on the south coast.
A soft beep informed Dean that his connection to the institute was now secure, that took a huge weight off his shoulders. Christ knows what he could have accomplished if he hadn’t been granted access. He typed in Graham’s old user ID and password. He now had access to every camera in the building. Dean tapped in a random number on the virtual keypad on his monitor screen and within moments the view of a deserted corridor greeted him. He didn’t have the facility to zoom or pan, which was a bloody annoyance. Hopefully he wouldn’t need it.
Dean stared at the grainy black and white image for a couple of seconds, it didn’t make sense; nothing appeared to be out of place. Then he looked closer. Spread across the floor tiles at the far end of the corridor, next to an open door, Dean noticed what looked like a lake of fluid. It looked too dark to be water.
“Could it be blood?” he whispered.
Why the hell had they installed these archaic devices in the first place? It beggared belief that they spent more than some third world countries in their research but they could even install a few colour cameras.
The more he stared, the more reluctant he became to view the rest of the cameras. He took a deep breath then tapped in the camera number for the main lab. Dean gasped in shock and almost dropped the laptop on the floor when the cameras switched view. Dean spun his head away from the bloody carnage and looked at the woman sleeping like a fucking baby.
If he had witnessed that in glorious Technicolor, Dean knew that he’d have lost his breakfast. He forced himself back to the screen, despite every cell in his body ordering him to turn this bloody thing off; he knew he had to finish this.
Dark liquid covered the tiled floor, severed body parts were piled up in one corner, next to an overturned computer chair. Despite the devastation, Dean noticed a couple of his colleagues still in the room, seemingly unharmed. Oh, this was a welcome break, there were survivors; maybe this wasn’t as bad as he initially feared. Dean wished that there was a way to communicate with them. If there were two in the main labs, then there were bound to be others scattered around the building.
He watched an older man approach the armoured window and gaze into the testing area. His body blocked Dean’s view so he couldn’t see if Graham was still inside. There was something not quite right about that man, he moved as though he was still asleep, like an automaton. Dean watched him press both his hands against the glass; it was as if he needed something in that room.
One more figure caught Dean’s attention, he saw sat, cross legged in the middle of the floor, oblivious of the lake of blood surrounding him. The man was holding a club or thick stick of some kind, Dean couldn’t tell.
“Oh, Jesus.”
The man brought it to his mouth and bit into it. Dean leaned closer to the screen; not believing what the camera was showing him. He moved his head and Dean clearly saw three fingers and a thumb attached to a mutilated hand.
He slammed the lid down and bit the inside of his cheek. “Oh shit, oh shit. What the hell is going on?”
Dean then noticed the old woman staring at him, she gathered her bags, gave him a single backward glance and hurried out of the carriage, leaving him alone, shocked and very confused.
Chapter Four
A seemingly endless collection of bright green and yellow fields hurtled past Alison’s window. She’d forgotten just how vivid and colourful, the countryside was. In the city, dull greys and browns had filled her day.
When the train had stopped at the last station, Alison leaned out of the open door for just a few seconds to breath in the fresh air, with every breath she took, Alison could almost believe that the pure air stripped away the city’s grime layer by layer. Of course, she knew that this was so much bullshit but it was nice to think that it was true. One aspect that did ring true was that her sense of smell was returning to normal and the first thing she discovered was that she wasn’t as clean as she believed herself to be, probably why she snapped at that man earlier.
As soon as she reached her destination, Alison made a promise that her first job would be to find a bed and breakfast and take a long hot bath. She’d attempted to wash herself in the toilets on the train, but those taps were about as useful as
a chocolate teapot.
Alison stared at the grime under her fingernails, wondering just how long that had been there, odd how she’d never noticed it before now. She picked up the last half of her sandwich and took a huge bite, wondering just how much dirt and crap she’d unknowingly ingested since she’d been sleeping rough. Her irrelevant musing went straight out of the window as soon as the sandwich contents hit her taste buds. Along with her sense of smell, they’d began to operate properly too. She swallowed the mushy mess and bit out another chunk of sandwich.
She jumped and almost choked on her food when the phone in her pocket vibrated. Alison dug it out of her back pocket, waited for it to stop vibrating then placed it on the back seat ledge, next to her empty sandwich wrapper. The number was an unknown, there was no way Alison should answer that. Perhaps she ought to turn it off or even better, throw it in the bin. She stared at the phone for another couple of seconds before the lure of food brought her back to the sandwich; chances are that it was just a wrong number.
She’d almost eaten this one. When Alison stood by the counter in the buffet coach, earlier on, contemplating on which type of sandwich to buy, her eyes caught sight of a single sausage roll. It had only been a few minutes so the chances were that it should still be there. A chocolate bar would also go down a treat, maybe two, after that lot, a large cup of hot coffee with plenty of sugar.
The sight of her phone still bothered her. Only two other people knew the number and they were listed as Danielle and Maggie. Alison had befriended the pair of them the same night she’d arrived in the city. Three young girls all from different parts of the country had arrived on the same night, within minutes of each other.
Looking back, her life could have been so much different if she’d befriended a local girl instead of those two shivering strangers who were in the same boat as her. Somebody like who’d Alison had turned into for example.
