Five More Days With The Dead (Lanherne Chronicles Book 2) (32 page)

Reaching behind her, she pulled from the back of her blood soaked trousers a small handgun and pointed it at Alice.

‘Drop it!’ she said. ‘Believe me bitch. I can just as easily get that brat out of you if you’re dead’

Alice looked at the blood covered woman and knew what she was saying was true. She would happily kill her to get to her unborn son, so with an over
-whelming sense of defeat Alice let the scalpel blade drop from her fingers to land in a puddle of the late Dr Morris’s blood. Stepping round Dr Morris’s body, Dr Chambers moved over to retrieve the full syringe of Pitocin that Dr Morris had left on a cabinet.

‘Now, I’m going to give you this injection,’ she
said, placing the gun back in her waistband. ‘It will induce labour and if you struggle, I’ll shoot you… you piss me off and I’ll shoot you… Do we understand each other?’

Alice just looked at the woman with barely concealed hatred.

‘Give me your arm,’ said Dr Chambers coldly.

Reluctantly,
Alice thrust her arm forward.  She had her chance and blown it, and now her baby would die. Dr Chambers stepped forward, roughly grabbing hold of Alice’s arm with one hand.

‘Wait!’ Dr Avery’s voice
came from the other side of the lab. ‘We don’t have to do this, Helen. The results from the blood work alone are conclusive… this is just madness.’

With a sneer on her face,
Dr Chambers snapped her head round to look at Dr Avery.

‘You always were weak!’ S
he spat and turned back to lower the needle to Alice’s arm.

‘I’d listen to him if I were you,’ s
aid Matt, placing the cold muzzle of his gun against the back of her skull. ‘Now, drop it!’

Slowly, Dr Chambers held up her hands in surrender and then made a show of placing the hypodermic down on the counter.

‘You’re making a big mistake, soldier,’ she said calmly.

‘Yeah, well that seems
to be happening a lot lately,’ he replied, nudging Dr Chambers over to a seat.

Suddenly,
there was a small popping sound, as the timer on the late Dr Morris’s pulse detector ran out, sending its bolt up into his brain. Dr Chambers looked down at the forever still form of her colleague and shook her head.

‘Such a waste
,’ she said to herself.

‘Yeah, well forgive me if I don’t send flowers
,’ Alice said, finally unbuckling her final restraint so she could ease herself down from the bed.

‘So what now?’ asked Dr Avery, looking from Alice to the soldier.

‘Now we wait until the convoy stops for camp tonight and then think of a way out of here that doesn’t involve getting shot or eaten,’ replied Matt. ‘You two just sit tight and no one will get hurt, okay?’

Dr Avery
slumped back in his chair and then with his head in his hands, he looked up at Matt.

‘Take me with you,’ he asked, his voice full of sadness
. ‘Please, I don’t want to go back to the base….it’s… it’s like being in hell… all the rumours are true, you know. Cardin gives Farrell the troublemakers for research, he…’

‘Avery!’ snapped Dr Chambers, glaring at the man who had broken their unholy pact of secrecy.

‘It’s over, Helen,’ Dr Avery said, trying to rub the tiredness from his face. ‘What’s going on at that base is wrong and we all know it. Just how long did you think we could keep treating people like lab rats. It was bad enough when we used the Dead ones, but what Farrell has made us do is… is horrific.’

‘Sacrifices had to be made, Avery
,’ she replied, with conviction adding strength to her words. ‘For the greater good of the human race, some had to be sacrificed.’

Dr Avery looked up and stared back at Dr Chambers, trying to read something in her face.

‘You really believe that, don’t you?’ he said, his voice full of pity and regret. ‘Don’t you see… we’ve sacrificed the very humanity we were trying to save.’

However,
Dr Chambers simply shook her head and looked back at Dr Avery as if he was a small child unable to understand the conversation of adults. Like any zealot, her truth was the only truth and because of that, she was simply unable to comprehend anything outside the world she had created for herself. In fact, Dr Avery might as well have been speaking Mandarin to her, for all the impact his words made on her. Seeing there was no reaching the woman who had been his colleague and friend for the last eight years, Dr Avery let out a weary sigh and turned back to Alice and the solider.

‘So will you take me with you?’ he asked
. ‘Please, I need to make amends for what I’ve done.’

‘If you’re planning some sort of
double-cross, you’ll be sorry,’ Matt said coldly.

‘No, please
. You’ve got to believe me,’ Dr Avery added. ‘I can help you. I can buy us some time.’

‘How?’ asked Alice, discarding the hospital gown
and pulling on her own clothes.

‘When the convoy stops, Sergeant Blackmore will expect a report from Dr Morris,’ he replied
. ‘I’ll go to him saying that Alice has begun labour and he doesn’t want to leave her. He knows how important the Foetus... the baby is… so it could buy us a few hours.’

Matt looked at Dr Avery, trying to gauge the sincerity of the man. In just a few exchanged
words, Matt was being forced to pass judgement on him in order to measure his worth and reliability, and ultimately, whether he could place Alice’s and his own life in his hands. Seconds after Dr Avery had confirmed that the horrific rumours that, they had all heard whispering through the corridors of the base were true a terrible realisation hit him. His sister, Karen was still there and no matter what happened here, he would have to find a way back to her. In that moment, Matt realised he would need the doctor’s help if he wanted to get Alice and her baby away from these monsters and he simply had no option but to trust the man and hope his contrition was genuine.

‘
Okay,’ Matt said, with a nod, sealing his fate one way or another. 

‘But what about her
... and him?’ Alice asked, gesturing to Dr Chambers and the other still unconscious solider. ‘What’s to stop her from calling out for help as soon as we stop?’

‘
Well, he’s not a problem,’ Dr Avery began, nodding toward the solider. ‘He was hit pretty hard. We think he may have already had a minor underlying physical defect. The knock has caused some bleeding on the brain, so I doubt he’ll come round for a long time… if at all. As for her, well, I think we’ll just have to sedate her.’

‘What!’ Dr Chambers snapped.

‘Come on, Helen, I’ll only give you enough to keep you under for a few hours,’ said Dr Avery looking from Matt to his irate colleague. ‘You’ll be perfectly safe.’

‘Screw this!’ she replied, jumping from her seat.

‘I wouldn’t if I were you,’ Matt said, swiftly grabbing her arm to pushing her back down and pointing his gun at her. ‘Up to you which type of shot you’d prefer, lady.’

Looking from Dr Avery to the soldier, Dr Helen Chambers knew she was beaten.

‘If you think Blackmore is just going to let you waltz out of here with her, you’re crazy,’ she said, already rolling up her sleeve. ‘He’s going to feed you to those walking corpses out there when he catches up with you.’

Dr Avery went to a drawer and pulled out a bottle of clear liquid and a
vacuum-sealed new hypodermic.

‘
If you think you’ll get any better treatment, you’re as deluded as they are,’ she continued, turning to Alice while Dr Avery wiped her forearm with an antiseptic swab. ‘Blackmore will catch you and you’ll be back on that bunk soon enough. I’ll get to rip that thing out of you yet, so you’re just delaying the inevitable.’

‘Excuse me, Doc,’ Alice said, stepping around Dr Avery to land a hefty punch on the woman’s jaw, knocking her out cold
. ‘Some people just don’t know when to shut up.’

Dr Avery looked from the unconscious Helen Chambers to Alice and back again.

‘Remind me not to piss you off,’ he said to himself, as he inserted the needle into Dr Chambers’ arm and depressed the plunger.

‘I don’t suppose that can be taken orally?’ Matt asked, after he had helped Dr Avery move the prone form of Dr Chambers over to one of the beds.

‘The Propofol? No, why?’ Dr Avery replied.

‘Well, I thought if I could get enough into the water
tank, we could knock out most the squadron when we park up for the night. They’re bound to want coffee or at the very least they’ll need water to rehydrate the MRE packs.’

Dr Avery thought for a minute before walking over to a cabinet and pulling about a box.

‘Thiopentol,’ he said with a smile, ‘is a handy little barbiturate that, although will take longer to take effect than if it was intravenous, it can be given orally. Not too great if someone has liver problems, but it’s all I can think of that we’ve got enough of.’

‘Right, so that’s the plan then
,’ said Matt. ‘When we stop for the night, you’ll go fob off Blackmore while I dope the water’

‘And then what?’ Alice asked, easing herself awkwardly down into a chair.

‘Then we wait,’ Matt replied, ‘and just hope enough get knocked out for us to get away.’

***

Now that the rope had been removed from his cracked ribs, Steve was finding it easier to breathe and as he looked at the expectant faces of his rescuers, he knew that they wanted answers.

‘What can I say?’ he began, taking a gulp of cold water from the bottle passed to him by the pregnant woman who had shadowed the convoy since leaving Lanherne
. ‘It was meeting Penny and Mr Sorenson… sorry, I mean Lars, again after all these years that made my mind up for me. Coming face to face with someone from the past reminded me that life didn’t used to be like this… that it wasn’t meant to be like this. They were meant to be doing something good with the base. That was the whole point, but after a while it changed… we changed. Living all those years, not knowing who you could trust or who was going to disappear next was unbearable. We were constantly living on a knife’s edge and in the end, you just do what you needed to not be noticed, and not rock the boat… but… but I couldn’t do that anymore, not when I found Penny and Lars again.’   

‘People have died while you didn’t rock that boat,’ Leon said sternly, thinking of Sally and Jen’s
brother, knowing there must have been other nameless men and women who had fallen afoul of the soldiers. ‘It’s not going to be so easy to wipe the slate clean with a few words.’

‘Don’t know but you might’ve missed the part where my own father strung me up as a meal for some corpse to chow down on
. I almost paid with my life to put things right, so don’t fucking give me this ‘just words’ crap, okay!’ Steve said angrily, wincing as he pushed himself up from the cramped floor of the cart.

There was silence in the cart as Steve’s words were taken on board,
but finally Phil spoke.

‘Well, I guess we do owe you the benefit of the doubt,’ he began
. ‘From what Liz told me, you’ve known she was following from the moment the convoy left the Convent… and you did try to get as many away as you could.’

‘Yeah, you do, and I did
,’ said Steve.

‘Even if you did botch it
,’ Phil continued, shaking his head.

Steve was about to point out he got a good kicking when he was caught when he noticed Phil was chuckling.

‘Oh, I see you’re the funny man of the group,’ said Steve.

‘I try,’ Phil replied, smiling
. ‘Now, how are we going to get everybody else back, any ideas?’       

With one more body now in the cart, space was non-existent and if they were to collect any more
escapees, they would definitely need some other method of transport.  They soon decided they would have to try to liberate not only their stolen friends, but also the truck that they were being held captive in. However, getting in and out of the camp without being noticed was not going to be easy and all of them were under no illusion. This was not a simple rescue exercise; this was war. Their weapons, which until that point had only been used on the Dead, could soon be used to take the lives of their foe. They could be responsible for ending the existence of other living beings, beings that were in very short supply these days.

‘Until they make camp for the night, we can’t make any concrete plans,’ said Patrick quietly
, ‘but I agree with Steve. We’ll have to deal with the armoured vehicles first if we want to have a chance of getting away with the holding truck.’

‘Last thing we want is one of them firing on us
,’ Steve added, his volume mirroring Patrick.

He hadn’t spent a lot of time on the mainland among the Dead and certainly no time at all traveling the countryside with only the wooden walls of a cart for protection. The whole situation seemed insane to him. Every so
often, they would hear the distant moans of the Dead and each time, Steve’s hand would subconsciously move to grab a rifle that was no longer there.

‘How on earth do you get used to this?’ he whispered to Liz, who had the two dozing children wedged
on either side of her.