Holy Terror

by Graham Masterton

  After fifteen minutes, a bright streak of blood suddenly ran from Evelyn’s nose. Within twenty minutes she was trembling wildly. Her face darkened until it was the color of raw calves’ liver and her feet turned almost black. She coughed, and covered her T-shirt in a livid bib of blood.

  Dennis stood rigidly behind Conor’s chair and stared, scarcely blinking, at every grotesque minute of his twin sister’s dying. Magda had left the laboratory. She said she couldn’t bear to watch. But three lab assistants stayed behind to monitor Evelyn’s vital signs. The door to the quarantine room remained sealed; except at 2:48 a.m. when a fully suited assistant took Evelyn a plastic bottle of water and a shot of morphine to ease her pain.

  Her end came at 3:11 a.m., with horrifying suddenness, in the same way that the victims of the Spanish influenza had died in 1918. She began to choke and clutch at her throat. One of the assistants came up to Dennis and said, ‘She’s going, sir. I’m sorry. There’s nothing else we can do.’

  Dennis jabbed Conor in the shoulders again. ‘Watch this, Mr O’Neil, because this is the way that you’re going to go.’

  Then he raised both arms, and said, ‘Now hear this, all you who forget God, lest I tear you in pieces, and there be none to deliver. He who offers a sacrifice of thanksgiving honors me; and to him who orders his way aright, I shall show the salvation of God.’

  Evelyn coughed one more cough. Then – over the intercom – like a locust struggling to escape from a glass jar – they heard her death-rattle.

  Dennis lowered his arms and wrapped them tight around his chest. He let out a howl of anguish that was barely human. Then he sank to his knees and pressed his forehead against the floor, sobbing. One of the assistants laid a hand on his shoulder and tried to help him onto his feet, but he twisted himself away.

  ‘Come on,’ said another assistant. ‘We’d better get the body bagged up.’

  Conor tried to stand up but the assistant warned him, ‘Stay where you are. I don’t think that Mr Branch has finished with you yet.’ Another assistant went to stand in front of the door, just in case Conor got any ideas about trying to escape. Conor looked around him. There was nothing in reach that he could see to cut the cords around his wrists, only flasks and test-tubes and bottles of chemicals. He could break one, he supposed, but it would take him far too long to saw through the cord.

  Two of the assistants put on helmets and went into the quarantine room, carrying a body bag with them. Dennis Branch stayed on the floor, still weeping, but much more quietly now, with occasional rib-racking gasps for breath.

  ‘“O God in the greatness of thy loving kindness deliver me from the mire and do not let me sink. May the flood of water not overwhelm me and may the pit not shut its mouth on me.”’

  The two assistants lifted Evelyn’s bagged-up body onto a stretcher and one of them opened the inner door. He was having trouble opening the outer door, however, so the third assistant came to help him.

  But Conor had been reading the labels on the chemicals close by. He suddenly heaved himself out of his chair and snatched a triangular flask of concentrated sulfuric acid from the laboratory bench beside him. Dennis Branch said, ‘What—?’ and looked up to see what was happening. As he did so, Conor swung his arms over his head so that the bottle of acid was directly in front of his face. With both thumbs, Conor pried off the stopper, which dropped to the floor and smashed.

  ‘Up!’ Conor demanded. ‘Up on your feet or you get a faceful!’

  Dennis stayed where he was, his eyes rimmed with red, his cheeks streaked with tears.

  ‘Up!’ Conor repeated; and to make his point he jerked his hands up and splashed a few drops of the acid on Dennis’s chin.

  ‘Jesus Christ!’ shouted Dennis. ‘Jesus Christ, are you crazy?’ There was a strong smell of scorched flesh and wisps of smoke curled around his chin.

  ‘Just get up and you won’t have to find out how crazy.’

  ‘Christ that hurts,’ said Dennis. ‘No – don’t do it again. I’ll get up. God, you don’t know how much that hurts.’

  The laboratory assistants stood uncertainly in the doorway of the quarantine room, still holding Evelyn’s body. Conor said, ‘All of you – get back inside.’

  ‘But I don’t have my helmet,’ protested the third assistant.

  ‘Get back inside, unless you want to be personally responsible for Mr Branch losing his face.’

  The assistants shuffled back into the quarantine room. Conor nudged Dennis in front of him until they reached the door. ‘Lock it,’ he ordered. Dennis, reluctantly, locked it. ‘Right, now you lead the way.’

  Together they edged their way out of the laboratory and along the corridor toward the reception area. The sulfuric acid wallowed from side to side in its bottle and Dennis said, ‘Don’t spill it, O’Neil. If you spill it, then I swear that God will wreak His vengeance on you for all eternity.’

  ‘Don’t tell me you’re prepared to sacrifice the human race, but not your own face.’

  ‘I need my face for my mission. My congregation has to look at my face and believe that it’s a likeness of the Lord.’

  ‘The Lord comes in many different likenesses, Mr Branch. Black, white, yellow and red. Who’s to say that a man with a burned-off face doesn’t resemble the Lord?’

  They reached the front doors. Conor said, ‘Open them. We’re leaving.’

  Dennis did as he was told, but as they awkwardly maneuvered their way through the doors into the freezing cold wind, Dennis swung up his right arm. He knocked the flask of acid from underneath. The acid splattered onto the steps, and some of it splashed against Conor’s wrists, burning him like fire. Instinctively, he wrenched his hands upward, striking Dennis on the side of the jaw. Dennis staggered sideways, missed his footing on the icy steps and hit his head against the brickwork. He tried to get up, but Conor kicked him just behind the right ear, and he rolled down the last three steps into the snow.

  The doors opened again. It was Magda, staring at him in amazement. ‘What’s happened? What are you doing?’

  ‘I’m getting the hell out of here, and I’m taking Mr Branch here with me. Are you coming?’

  ‘Wait – I’ll get the keys to the car.’

  She went back into the building and she seemed to be gone forever. Conor stood in the biting cold, shivering, occasionally glancing down at Dennis to make sure that he was still unconscious. Eventually Magda reappeared, swinging the keys. ‘I had to get the spare set out of the laboratory. You’ve locked them in! They were shouting at me like wild animals!’

  Magda unlocked the blue Volvo 440 parked directly outside the building. Conor took hold of Dennis’s coat collar and dragged him across to the open door. ‘Here!’ he said. ‘Give me a hand to lift him onto the back seat!’

  Just as Magda was walking around the car, however, the doors to the laboratory building opened and an unshaven man came barging out, holding a gun.

  ‘What do you think you’re doing?’ he shouted. ‘Stop! Put up your hands!’

  ‘Mr Branch wasn’t feeling too good,’ said Conor. ‘We were trying to get him to the hospital.’

  The man came down the steps. ‘What do you mean? What are you doing? What the hell’s happened to him?’

  He knelt down beside Dennis and lifted his head. Blood dripped glutinously out of his ear and made a spotted red pattern on the snow. ‘He’s been hurt. You’ve knocked him out.’

  Conor said, ‘You’re right. Why don’t you join the club?’ and swung the Volvo’s rear door so that it collided with the man’s shoulder and sent him sprawling. The man lifted himself up, but slipped on the ice. He lifted himself again and fired at them twice. One bullet shattered the Volvo’s rear window and the second banged into the door. Conor shouted to Magda: ‘Into the car! Go!’

  He managed to heave himself into the passenger seat. Magda climbed in next to him and started the engine. The man fired again and Conor felt a thump in the Volvo’s trunk. They backed up with whinnying tires
and then slewed off into the darkness with the man still shouting at them.

  They drove for almost ten minutes before either of them spoke. Conor kept pushing in the car’s cigar lighter so that he could bum away the cords around his wrists.

  ‘How are we going to get Ms Gambit’s money back now?’ asked Magda.

  ‘Plan C.’

  ‘Oh, yes? And what is Plan C?’

  ‘Plan C is we go back to Oslo and inform the Norwegian police what Dennis Branch and his people are trying to pull. Up until the time he dug up those graves at Longyearbyen he hadn’t committed any criminal offense on Norwegian soil; but now he has – and a pretty damned serious one, too. From what I’ve been reading, the Norwegian conservation people go ape if you pick up some old bone from the beach, let alone seven whole bodies.’

  ‘So then what?’

  ‘They’ll arrest him and sequester his funds. The Norwegian police will contact the NYPD and eventually everybody will get their money back.’

  ‘And what about me? What about my money? Why do you think I came all the way to this Godforsaken country? Why do you think I’ve been eating nothing but fish every day? Breakfast, lunch, dinner – fish! I’m turning into a mermaid!’

  ‘Was that really all that you came for? The money?’

  ‘Of course. Why else should I come?’

  ‘I don’t know. You change your allegiances so quickly.’ Conor pushed in the cigar lighter again.

  ‘I never had allegiance to Dennis Branch. I only had allegiance to myself. What was the point of being loyal to you, if you were dead?’

  Conor glanced at her. ‘You did hypnotize Evelyn, didn’t you?’

  Magda didn’t answer, but pulled down the sun-visor and inspected her eye make-up in the vanity mirror.

  They drove toward the sparkling lights of Tromso, their snow chains whirring on the frozen road. On their left was the inky blackness of Tromsoysundet; on their right the snow-blanketed mountains which formed the backbone of Tromsoya island, threaded with kilometer after kilometer of floodlit ski-trails. The snow itself was blowing quite lightly from the east.

  Strangely – after having traveled so far north to Longyearbyen – Conor felt as if he were returning to civilization.

  There was a Braathens SAFE flight to Oslo at 6:30 a.m. Both Conor and Magda slept as the 737 flew southward, leaving the Arctic Circle behind them. They didn’t see the ghostly greenish flicker of the Northern Lights, over the land where seven young men had been buried for so long.

  The story was already in the International Herald Tribune by the time they reached Oslo airport. Conor read it in the back of the taxi on the way to their apartment on Helgesens Gate.

  The bodies of seven victims of the Spanish influenza pandemic of 1918 were stolen from their graves on Spitsbergen in a robbery that was described by the authorities as ‘an obscene act of vandalism with potentially catastrophic consequences’.

  Sysselmannen, the Governor of the Svalbard archipelago, said that his office had agreed last year to an exhumation of the bodies by a leading Canadian scientist, Dr Kirsty Duncan. Since the bodies had been frozen solid since their death, it was thought that they might contain samples of the deadly influenza virus, which killed more than 22 million people worldwide.

  When a number of well-equipped technicians and engineers arrived at Longyearbyen last week the Governor was deceived by forged papers and e-mail messages into thinking that it was an advance party of the official expedition.

  ‘They observed all of the safety criteria that had been agreed between myself, Dr Duncan and the health authorities,’ said the Governor. ‘They seemed to behave very responsibly. They were very careful to follow all the regulations regarding driving their vehicles on thawed ground, and to do as little damage to the environment as possible. They stole the bodies but they left the cemetery exactly as they found it, with all the grave markers returned to their original positions, so at first our suspicions were not aroused. It was only when Dr Duncan called us to confirm her arrival that we realized something was wrong.’

  It turned out that the so-called ‘advance party’ had no connection at all with Dr Duncan, who says that she is ‘devastated and deeply alarmed’ by the grave-robbery. What worries her most of all is that every body was removed in its entirety, which her expedition was specifically prohibited from doing.

  ‘There is potentially a terrible risk if infected tissue is not kept under category-4 control. Not only that, we now have no way of obtaining samples of the whole virus ourselves, so that we can find a way of vaccinating ourselves against it.’

  At the moment, police and military intelligence have no idea who might have stolen the bodies or why. One suggestion is that the expedition was planned and financed by Saddam Hussein in order to extend his biological arsenal. A less apocalyptic explanation is that it was set up by a team of rival scientists, since the whole Spanish virus is the flu researcher’s ‘holy grail’ and there is not only great scientific kudos attached to finding it but huge financial rewards for anybody who can develop an effective vaccine.

  In 1997, Dr Johan Hultin, a 77-year-old pathologist from San Francisco, single-handedly recovered tissue from a mass grave in Alaska which enabled government laboratories to isolate parts of the 1918 flu virus. Dr Hultin had been trying to recover the live virus from a mission station in Alaska which had been wiped out in 1918 after a flu-infected postman on a dog sledge visited the community. Eighty per cent of the population died within a week and by the time help was sent out to them, huskies were eating their bodies.

  There is no suggestion that Dr Hultin was involved in the Longyearbyen exhumation, but there are several other flu researchers who might have been tempted to pre-empt Dr Duncan’s project. The cost of the expedition must have run into millions of dollars – so the choice of possible perpetrator is limited.

  Police are contacting government laboratories and microbiological research centers all round the world to see if they can shed any light on the most ghoulish grave-robbery since the tomb of Tutankhamen.

  ‘Definitely time to blow the whistle,’ said Conor.

  Magda said, ‘I hope you don’t regret it. You shouldn’t think that Dennis Branch is insane, you know. You’re dealing with a man who believes that he can really save the world. What is the moral difference between him and the Spanish missionaries who forced your religion on the Incas, and wiped them out with their diseases?’

  ‘I’m not interested in ethics, Magda. I just want to stop this man from exterminating half the world.’

  Magda leaned across the taxi’s back seat and kissed him on the lips. She tasted of Chanel lip color. Afterward, she didn’t move back, but continued to stare at him from less than two or three inches away, so that he found it impossible to focus on her. ‘You’re growing older,’ she said. ‘The world is changing faster and faster. Wouldn’t you like to make love to me?’

  ‘Magda, I need your help, not your body.’

  ‘You know what I have found out, in life? You never know what you need, until you try it.’

  They had called Eleanor from Tromso and she was waiting for them when they arrived back at their apartment at Helgesens Gate. Candles were twinkling in every room and there was a strong savory smell coming from the kitchen. ‘Chicken casserole,’ said Eleanor. ‘I thought you’d probably be sick of all that elk.’

  Conor put his arms around her and held her close.

  ‘I was so scared,’ she told him. ‘I thought you were never going to come back to me.’

  ‘Eleanor, I can never be James.’

  ‘I know that,’ she said, and kissed him, and patted his arm. ‘I know that now.’

  They sat around the kitchen table that night and Conor told Eleanor about the grave-robbery in Longyearbyen; and the way that Evelyn Branch had died. Eleanor said, ‘He’s serious, isn’t he? He’d rather wipe out the world than allow anybody to think differently. I’ve met a whole lot of people like that. Usually they don’t have the mean
s to exert their power – not like Dennis Branch and his virus. But they would do, given the chance. Absolute belief in yourself isn’t a virtue, no matter what rewards it may bring you. It’s a disease.’

  ‘I suppose you have some evidence to back that up?’ said Magda, pushing away her plate of half-eaten casserole.

  ‘Oh, sure,’ said Eleanor. ‘I was married to some, once.’

  Conor called Oslo police headquarters. They kept him waiting for almost five minutes, listening to a selection of unfamiliar ringing tones. Eventually a brisk detective came on the line. He sounded as if he had just brushed his teeth.

  ‘This is Captain Ingstad. How can I help you, sir?’

  ‘I believe that I can help you. I have some information regarding the exhumation of bodies at Longyearbyen.’

  ‘Oh, yes? You must tell me who you are.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter who I am. I know who dug them up and I know where they took them. The rest is up to you.’

  ‘You’re American, yes? I don’t understand how you are involved in this matter.’

  ‘Just take it from me that I am,’ said Conor. He tried to put himself in the Norwegian detective’s position: he would have been equally suspicious if some anonymous foreigner had called up and told him that he knew his business better than he did. He explained about Dennis and Evelyn Branch and the Global Message Movement. He told him about the laboratory at Breivika Havnegata. ‘I don’t know how much you’re going to find there. The birds have probably flown the nest. But, believe me, it’s true.’

  ‘You must tell me who you are. If what you are saying is true, then I am sure that we can come to some arrangement.’

  How many times have I said those selfsame words, thought Conor. ‘I’m sorry, detective,’ he said, and broke the connection.