WHERE THEY FALL, page 15
There wasn’t one.
He walked around the cab and repeated the process on the passenger, an elderly, grey-haired woman.
“Great,” he said, looking at Sebastian. “Accidents happen out here from time to time. When someone stumbles across this, that’s all anyone will think it is.”
“Will it bring heat down on Project Alpha?”
“Nah, mate. We’re over two hundred kilometres from the lab. Crashes happen, especially old people out on remote roads. This won’t raise suspicion at all. It would raise more suspicion if they just disappeared, I reckon. Now come on, let’s go find this Landcruiser. We’re running out of daylight.”
Jake pushed his Landcruiser to the brink.
He hadn’t lifted his foot from the accelerator in two hours. The engine groaned at three thousand revs. Almost in a semi-conscious state of shock, Jake had lost a sense of time and reality. Nothing outside the blurred vision of the track existed. He tried his hardest to forget that Larry leaked blood all over the backseat behind him. He tried to forget that Annie was gone.
The corrugated dirt smoothed off, becoming a well-maintained graded road. Jake sighted the silhouette of dwellings in the distance, just visible in front of the low, orange, setting sun. The graded road became bitumen and Jake took the corner at high speed, pulling into the town of Lyndhurst well above the eighty kilometres per hour speed limit.
Jake’s Landcruiser screeched to a stop outside the roadhouse he had stopped at the day before. The purplish light of sunset cast an eerie glow over the deserted town. Leaving his door wide open, Jake dashed across the parking lot towards the service centre.
He tried the door. Locked! Darkness swallowed the convenience store inside. A black spider busied itself as it weaved a thick web beside the doorframe.
“Allan!” Jake yelled, bashing on the door with a clenched fist. “Open the door! Hurry! We need the bloody cops.”
Silence.
He looked in both directions and continued to knock on the door. He noticed a run-down house behind the service station, the corrugated roof red with rust. The front sandstone façade looked older than Lyndhurst itself, the building’s veranda drooping on aged timber supports. A light was on. He considered going there for help. Just as he stepped away from the service station door, a light flicked on inside the convenience store.
Jake watched the silhouette of someone approach from the other side of the frosted glass.
Allan.
He wore the same clothing he had worn the day before. The rabbit-felt hat clung to his head. His flannelette shirt hung open, revealing a stained white singlet underneath.
“Who is it?” He called from inside. “We’re shut.”
“Shut! Allan, you need to open this door. I’ve got my best friend’s dead fucking body out here. There are killers out there in the desert. We need the fucking police!”
Jake saw Allan place his hand on the door handle through the glass. His hand seemed to rest there for a few seconds longer than it should have. Then the lock disengaged, and Allan pulled the door open. It hit Jake with the musty stench of cigarette smoke. Given Jake’s heightened sense of despair, he found it odd that Allan greeted him with a smile.
“It’s okay, boy,” he said, showcasing his crooked and brown teeth. “I’ve called the police. They should be here any minute. Now let’s get you a glass of water.”
“What about Larry? He’s in the back of the cruiser.”
Allan looked past Jake. The Landcruiser idled in the parking lot, its headlights still on.
“I don’t think the poor fella is going anywhere,” Allan said. “Now come, you need to sit down. You’re in shock. You need something to drink.”
Jake hesitated, and then followed Allan through the dim store.
“How long did they say they’d be?”
“No officers in Leigh Creek,” Allan lied. “They’ve gotta come from Hawker. Now come, take a seat in here while we wait. I’ll get Sheila to make some coffee for us.”
Allan ushered Jake into a small, windowless reading room and continued down a dim, musty corridor. The brown carpet and olive green walls in the reading room showed its age. The seventies coffee table suited the space. Stained pine with a pattern of brown ceramic tiles glued to the tabletop. Jake smelt the ashtray on the table before he saw it, the butts of a dozen cigarettes crowding the metal bowl. Jake noticed a pile of newspapers mounded up beside the sofa. He sat down and the sofa creaked under his weight. A stained pine bookcase loomed over him, each shelf stacked with tattered old books.
Allan returned with a coffee mug filled with tap water.
“Here, have a drink. I’ll be right back with coffee,” he said, placing the mug on the ceramic tiles. “Everything will be okay.”
Allan took off again, turning down the corridor and disappearing from view. Jake snatched up the mug and emptied it in three quick swallows, realising he had had nothing to drink since seeing Annie get taken midmorning.
He lay back and closed his eyes. Nausea stung his aching body, amplified by each movement. He just couldn’t believe this was all real. He’d known Larry since he was a teenager. Jake couldn’t accept that he would never share banter with him again. Never share a beer. Never go to a football game and never share another adventure.
Five minutes passed.
He felt himself drift off, fatigue claiming his fractured mind. He jolted alert at the sound of creaking floorboards down the hall. Jake sat up, waiting for Allan to return with a mug of hot coffee. But he didn’t. Jake watched the thick hardwood door swing closed, slamming shut and concealing him in the small room. He heard a lock engage through the door, trapping Jake inside the musty reading room.
“Hey,” he yelled. “What the hell are you doing?”
TWENTY-FOUR
“Sorry, Jake.”
Although muffled behind the door, the voice was clearly Allan’s.
“Open this door.”
“You just stay put, mate. There are a couple of people that need to speak with you.”
The floorboards creaked, and then silence enveloped the hallway.
Jake leapt up and tried to open the door. It didn’t budge. He kicked it. He slammed it with his shoulder. Nothing. Made of solid wood, Jake accepted, almost right away, that breaking it down would be impossible.
The small room shrunk around him.
Exhaustion rose from the pits of his empty stomach. Traumatised and dehydrated, he had very little energy left in the tank. But he knew he needed to keep his wits about him if he intended to survive. He owed it to Larry. He owed it to Annabelle.
“You redneck piece of shit!” Jake roared from within the smoky room. “Open this fucking door now! You can’t do this to me. This is madness!”
Nothing.
Silence crippled Jake, his own heavy breathing the only thing audible in the stale room. He replayed the image in his mind of the man in black uniform raising a rifle at Larry and pulling the trigger. He knew he now faced the same twisted fate.
“Not today,” Jake said aloud.
He flipped the old coffee table over and kicked at the closest leg. It gave way at the join and separated from the table base. Jake gripped the table leg, swinging it like a baseball bat. It was better than nothing, but it wasn’t good enough. He placed the freed leg under another leg, still attached to the table, and stomped down, splitting the leg along its shaft. He stomped again, separating the sharp length of wood from the table.
Jake picked it up, this time gripping a ten inch-length of leg with a sharpened spike-like end. He felt sick. The idea of what he planned on doing almost brought him to vomiting. But he wouldn’t go out without a fight. He couldn’t.
He needed to piss. His hands shook uncontrollably. He flinched at any little sound he heard. A fly was stuck in the confined room with him, buzzing from wall to wall without purpose. He watched the insect land on the wall, only to move almost immediately in search of somewhere better. Jake pressed the sharpened tip against his stomach, testing the sharpness of his makeshift weapon.
It would work.
He felt numb, dirty, cold, yet he felt completely alive as he stood behind the door and waited. Reality had taken such a crooked turn into the dark unknown that he had let go of sanity. Vengeance and survival were all that mattered.
Noise came from somewhere out in the hall. Muffled voices whispered. If it was Allan, he was no longer alone. Jake passed the wooden weapon from one hand to the other, wiping the sweat from his palm, to grip it again with vice-like intensity.
The floorboards outside the door creaked. The lock disengaged.
Jake jolted as the door swung open, almost getting flattened between the hardwood and the plastered wall. He saw the barrel of a black assault rifle appear through the doorway first. Then arms covered in a black combat jacket.
He swung himself around the door, driving the sharpened table leg where he estimated the face of his attacker would be. The man pulled the trigger in shock, the deafening sound amplified by the acoustics of the small room. A bullet lodged into the wall beside the bookshelf at the same time Jake drove the spike into the unsuspecting assailant’s eye. The spike went in almost two inches. The man dropped his gun as Jake roared with primal rage. He ripped the sharpened table leg from the man’s face as his body slumped to the floor, blocking the narrow doorway. He died before he hit the ground.
Another black-clad mercenary stood in the narrow hall beside Allan. It took him a second to register that his superior, Marc, lay dead in the doorway with plasma leaking from what remained of his right eye. He reached for the pistol strapped to his belt.
Too late.
Jake’s survival instinct had taken control. He roared with retribution, hatred, hurt, and longing. He leaped over the lifeless body in the doorway at the same time he drove the blood-covered table leg up and under the startled man’s jaw. The spike pierced his neck but wasn’t fatal. He shrieked and grabbed his throat as blood poured down his chest. Jake kicked the man. He swung wild punches, none of them making an impact. While the mercenary clutched his own throat, Jake dived on him and they both toppled to the floor. Allan stood frozen in the hall behind them, incapable of processing the scene.
Jake grabbed the mercenary by the face, and as hard as his fatigued muscles allowed he buried his thumbs in the man’s eyes. Jake screamed, the rising energy surging through him as he pushed down with everything left within him. The mercenary pleaded for Jake to stop. He didn’t. Jake’s thumbs crushed the man’s eyes, a horrific squelching noise silencing his desperate screams. He kept pushing until he had buried the entire length of his thumbs into the eye sockets of his lifeless assailant.
Allan dropped to his knees in pale-faced shock.
Jake ripped the pistol from the lifeless mercenary’s belt with a blood covered, shaking grip. He had never fired a gun before. He had seen enough movies to get the picture.
“Wait,” Allan protested. “They made me. I didn’t have a choice.”
Vengeance burned in Jake’s wild eyes. His ears rang from the close range gunshot. He didn’t process what Allan had said. Instead, he cocked the slide back on the small black weapon and clenched the trigger. The impact of the bullet ripped Allan off his feet, hurtling him across the brown carpet. He hit the floor beside the linoleum at the entrance to the storefront as blood stained his dirty white singlet.
The hallway spun. Jake took a deep breath and vomited on the floor, adrenalin reaching a toxic and unsustainable level. His legs gave way as he dropped to the carpet between the two lifeless mercenaries. He cried, uncontrollably wailing, as it all caught up to him. The violence. The death. The will to survive.
Jake wiped drool from his chin and forced himself to his shaky feet. The guy in the doorway was dead, that much was sure. The guy in the hall wasn’t. He lay in a semi-conscious state, blind and leaking blood from the hole in his throat. Jake stood over him.
“Where are the girls?” he said, pressing the weapon against the man’s sweaty temple.
“Somewhere… you’ll never… find,” the man forced through laboured wincing.
Jake hit him across the face with the pistol’s barrel.
“Where did you take Annabelle? I won’t ask again.”
The man forced a smile. With no eyes and a face covered in blood, it was demonic. Blood-curdling. “She’s in hell now,” he said. “And you’ll be next.”
Something possessed Jake. Something more powerful than himself. He pushed the barrel of the gun to the man’s temple and pulled the trigger. Only afterwards, as he forced himself out of the blood-covered hallway, did he have time to process what had just happened.
Three dead bodies lay on the faded brown carpet.
“One each for Larry, Jules and Annie,” he said aloud.
Jake had reached the point of no return. He had passed it with intoxicating viciousness. Now, as he lingered on the precipice between vengeance and insanity, he knew there was no way back. These black-clad soldiers had messed with the wrong guy.
The overwhelming cloud of shock and trauma passed over him as he realised that anybody in close vicinity would have heard the gunshots. He thought of the house nearby with the drooping veranda. He thought about Sheila, wherever she may be. Jake didn’t trust anybody. There could be other locals involved. He wouldn’t go racing to the house next door for help in case they too were in bed with whoever these black-clad mercenaries were. He had to do it all alone.
There was one problem with that. He had no idea what he was doing.
TWENTY-FIVE
Annabelle sat alone in an empty cell.
Men in uniform had stripped her and hosed her down. They had thrown her naked into a cramped holding cell. She shook uncontrollably. She cried defeated tears. They had taken Jules down another corridor after they hosed her down. She had screamed the entire way through the ordeal. Annabelle had heard the quiet whispers of the men in white lab coats. Something about sedation. Annabelle had kept her head down and her mouth shut. She wondered if she would ever see her friend again. The thought was too much of a burden to carry. She sobbed as she curled into the foetal position on the cold concrete.
Annabelle turned her head at the sound of a faint beep, followed by the dull clunking of a lock. The door swung open and she instinctively covered her groin with one hand and her breasts with the other.
“Please,” she said, before even seeing who entered. “Please don’t hurt me.”
It was the woman. Alana. She entered and stood beside the door, her posture impeccable.
“Don’t be so dramatic,” Alana said. “If we wanted to hurt you, you wouldn’t be sitting here right now. You’d be dead.”
Annabelle wailed.
“Enough crying. You won’t be going anywhere, so crying won’t help you.”
Annabelle sat up, still covering her breasts with her left forearm.
“May I have some clothes?”
“In time. First, we need to run some tests. The more compliant you are, the more freedom you will get here. Do you understand that?”
“What have you done with Jules?”
Alana stared at Annabelle. Her eyes lacked compassion.
“Your friend was hysterical. She had reached an unsafe level of post-traumatic stress. We have sedated her to let her rest. Now please, stay still while I take some blood.”
“What for?”
“For our own reasons. Don’t worry about the why. Just know this. There are three men standing in the hallway with AR-15 assault rifles. They will shoot you in the face and not lose a second’s sleep over it. So no funny business.”
Annabelle nodded. “What are you going to do with us? What is this place?”
“Don’t move,” Alana said, ignoring Annabelle’s questions. She pulled a syringe and needle from a deep pocket in the front of her white coat and grabbed Annabelle by the wrist. “Hold still.”
With a doctor’s confidence, Alana placed the needle’s tip against a vein in Annabelle’s upper forearm and slid the needle in. She drew back on the plunger flange and watched the syringe fill with dark red blood. Once filled, Alana pulled the needle from Annabelle’s arm and stood. A trickle of red blood ran down Annabelle’s shaking arm and dripped onto the spotless concrete. Alana covered the needle with a cap and turned to leave.
“Wait,” Annabelle pleaded. “What now?”
“Now you wait, young lady. We didn’t ask for this. You ventured across private land. You brought this upon yourselves.”
“Please, just let me go.”
Alana sighed. “What’s happening here is bigger than you. It’s bigger than your friend. Right now you need to accept it and be thankful that I don’t just leave you in the desert to die. Someone will come shortly with food and clothing. Until then, let’s hope for your sake you’re fertile.”
Alana didn’t wait for a reply. She left the room, pulled the thick door shut and engaged the lock. Annabelle watched her own blood run down her arm and collect in little droplets on her elbow.
Fertile?
Lachlan spent the better half of the day in the control room in Area B.
Lawrence and Stephen had accompanied him in the morning, bringing him up to speed on the formulas used in the production process. Despite the captivity, Lachlan found himself immersed in the project, and had periods of such in-depth fascination, that he forgot where he was. He forgot that eight naked, man-made human subjects surrounded him in glass cages. He forgot that his wife and kid were at home, probably by this point, assuming he was dead.
After Lachlan familiarised himself with the compartmentalisation and Alana’s algorithms, he looked for inconsistencies. He looked for flaws. It didn’t take him long to find a few areas of concern, mainly in the information being coded.
