Flesh and Blood (14 page)

Without a moment’s thought, all three of us raced up to the second floor. The sound of our boots pounded on the stairs.

“Where are you?” shouted Liam.

“We’re in here,” came the voice, from a room to our right.

“We?” I said.

Liam was the first one to enter the room. Jo and I almost collided with him, as he stopped in mid-step.

The room was very large, although there was little furniture. A TV was fixed to a wall. It showed that morning’s
Daily Telegraph
on an internet feed. There was a soft, rhythmic sound of mechanical apparatus.

Two figures turned towards us. Two very old people, a man and a woman. The woman’s face was narrow, but filled out with mechanical implants that gave it a lopsided shape. I realized, with utter dismay, that
hers
was the one I’d seen at the window.
The man was rounder, fleshier, but equally shrivelled and folded.

They moved towards us, their mobile life support systems carried on little wheels at the base of their frames. The movement must have been controlled directly from their brains. Short electrical connections pierced the upper parts of their heads. Neither of them moved their hands.

They weren’t entirely human any more. Both were fixed in sitting positions, their backs bolt upright in steel frames that extended from their necks, round their sides to the floor. Inside the frames, machines similar to those in the basement pumped fluids and regulated organs. A set of plastic bellows functioned as the woman’s lungs. The man’s heart pulsed inside a glass container underneath his seat. Both of them were enmeshed in narrow tubes and electronics that weaved in and out of neatly cut holes in their smart clothes. Both the man’s arms, and one of the woman’s legs, had clearly belonged to someone else.

The woman drew closer to us and I noticed that her eyes didn’t match each other. She had an e-reader mounted in front of her at shoulder height. As her lips moved, her voice emerged from a speaker
built into her shoulder. It was the high, young voice we’d heard downstairs.

“Hello, dears. Are you friends of Emma’s?” She gave us a toothy, lopsided grin.

I heard myself say, “Yes.”

“I’m so glad you’re here,” she said. “I knocked my lady off the window sill, and I can’t pick her up.”

She wheeled back a little. There was a hefty, bronze figurine, a sylph in a languid pose, lying face down on the carpet by the window.

“It’s a silly place to put her,” said the woman, “because I’m always looking out at the park. She ought to be on the sideboard, really.”

“W-Who are you?” said Jo.

“Dear me,” said the man, his voice generated by a less realistic system, “we’re forgetting our manners. My name is Godfrey, this is my wife Martha, and over there is my mother, Helga.”

I hadn’t even noticed anyone else. She was confined to a corner, where most of the mechanical sounds in the room were coming from. Helga was little more than a shell, a husk of skin and bone in the middle of a bank of externalized organs. Her brain was fixed into a glass tube that blossomed
from the back of her head, and she watched us with someone else’s eyes, tapping with a young but frail hand at a touchscreen beside her. She slowly nodded a greeting.

Words fell quietly from my lips, dredged up from my research. “Gottfried and Marta. Born 1902, 1903. Helga, 1877.”

“Did Emma call you from the car?” said Marta. “Last-minute changes of plan are always so tedious. Are you with us for lunch? I’m afraid we don’t partake ourselves these days, but it’s always lovely to meet new people.”

“I wasn’t aware they were back from the airport yet,” said Gottfried. “So disappointing about the flight being cancelled like that. You can’t rely on anything today, can you?”

My blood turned to ice.

Liam seemed to crumple. He dropped to his knees, shaking his head, emitting a sound that was half laugh, half sobbing wail.

“Oh dear,” said Marta. “I’m so sorry, was it something I said?”

“I think I’d better give Byron a call,” said Gottfried. A dialling tone suddenly burred from his
speaker, and a numeric pad flicked up on the TV screen.

“Got to get out of here,” muttered Jo. “Sam, help me.”

Quickly, she took hold under one of Liam’s arms, and I took the other. We couldn’t haul him to his feet, so we more or less dragged him out of the room and along the corridor.

“Would one of you replace my lady?” called Marta. “By the window? If you’d be so kind?”

“How rude,” called Gottfried. “Young people today.”

We dragged Liam out of the room and to the top of the staircase. He was shaking with semi-laughter, letting himself flop like a dead weight.

“Liam!” I shouted. “Snap out of it!”

“Liam!” cried Jo.

No response.

“We can’t get him downstairs like this,” I shuddered, “we’ll bloody well fall and break our necks.”

I scrambled in my coat for my phone.

“Do that when we get
out
!” screeched Jo. “They’re coming back! We have to get
out
! Lift him!”

We tucked our heads under his arms this time, and awkwardly pulled ourselves upright.

“Liam!” yelled Jo. “Walk!”

He placed his feet flat on the floor. It was all we were going to get.

We staggered down the stairs carefully, one step at a time, terror screaming in our ears to hurry, hurry, hurry, get away, get out and run. I could feel my knees begin to shake, both with fear and with Liam’s weight.

At the bottom of the staircase, we hurried for the front door. Quickest way out. We’d got about halfway there before Jo’s grip on Liam slackened and he slumped down again. We were right beside the hidden archive. The concealed door was firmly shut, exactly as we’d left it.

Sounds of movement came from upstairs. Slow, mechanical.

Panic suddenly rushed through me like a flash flood. My hands shaking uncontrollably, I took a grip on Liam again. “Get up! Come on!
Come on!
They could be here any minute!” Sheer adrenaline allowed us to haul him up again. We staggered across the hall and into a darkened entrance lobby.

The front door was big and hefty, with a tall shoe rack to one side, and an antique umbrella stand to the other. I hung on to Liam while Jo scrambled with the door’s two deadlocks. There were no small windows here, or lights.

“I can’t see! I can’t see!” wailed Jo.

Liam shook his head slowly. I heaved him upright. The deadlocks clicked uselessly as Jo fumbled. “How do you work these?” she squealed in panic. “How?”

I let Liam slide to the floor. His head rested against the shoe rack. He was still keeping up a steady stream of sobs.

Jo stood aside. I squeezed my hands into fists for a moment to help them stop trembling. I flipped the catch on the first deadlock off, then the second. I operated both at once, while Jo turned the fat, black door knob.

“Let’s go!”

I flung the front door open. A rush of daylight and biting cold air hit us in the face.

The Greenhills were about to reach the front step.

All four of them.

Byron Greenhill had his house keys in his hand. Caroline and Emma were right behind him. Emma’s
grandfather, Ken, had a rifle resting in the crook of his arm. As soon as I swung the door open, he raised it to his shoulder.

I was so shocked, there was a fraction of a second when I couldn’t move. Then I turned back into the house, a yell escaping my throat. Jo screamed.

Where I was going, I have no idea. There was no way I could have got away from them.

I hadn’t taken more than two or three paces before I heard a loud crack behind me. Then there was a sharp pain between my shoulder blades.

I thought – I know I specifically thought – that I was going to die. It’s wrong, what they say, about your life flashing before your eyes. All that went through my head was a cry for help, selfish and bleating.

I heard Ken Greenhill’s voice. “Aha! You never lose the knack! Good thing I’d left this in the boot, eh?”

I could feel a buzzing numbness rush through my limbs, a sudden loss of feeling. I couldn’t tell if my feet were on the ground any more, or even if I had feet.

The polished wooden floor of the big hallway
appeared to spring up at me. It hit my arm first. I didn’t feel it. My face cannoned into the sleeve of my coat. Suddenly, the world was sideways. I could see the hallway, and Jo running across it. I think she was trying to reach the steps down to the back door.

Another loud crack. She cried out. I thought the dash of red at her collar was blood, but it wasn’t. It was a little dart. It stuck out of the side of her neck. She made a half-hearted grab for it, but her legs buckled beneath her and she toppled, sprawling across the floor.

“Bullseye!” Ken Greenhill shouted.

Everything went black.

I didn’t dream. There was no sensation of time passing at all.

Everything went black in the hall and, an instant later, my mind was swimming into consciousness again. I was sitting on something cold. My stomach hurt. I could hear voices, the clatter of metal, a slight echo.

My eyes were gunged up and heavy. The first thing I saw was those tiles. The white tiles of the basement. I was on the floor, propped against a wall, my ankles tied with cord and my wrists tied behind my back. Slowly, I raised my head. I was in the main area, near the animals.

“Daddy, he’s awake,” said Emma.

She was standing a couple of metres from her father, on the opposite side of the room. They were sorting through trays full of medical instruments. They wore white lab coats that were patterned all
over the front in a faint pink, where blood had been washed out of them over and over again. Byron turned to face me. The lab coat he was wearing looked like the one he’d worn at the Halloween party. Underneath it was a dark blue suit and silk tie. His shoes were polished to a perfect shine.

“Ah!” he said. “Jolly good.”

There was a movement beside me, and I suddenly noticed that Jo was tied up on the floor, too. However, unlike me she had a gag pulled tightly round her mouth. Her eyes shone with terror, roving around the room.

“Yes, we had to gag her,” said Byron, who had turned towards me. “I couldn’t stand the hysterics.
You’re
not going to make a fuss, now, are you, Sam?”

I just stared at him. “Why?” I said at last.

“What’s that? Speak up, young man.”

“Why?” I said loudly. “Why are you doing this?”

Byron tut-tutted, like a teacher answering a stupid question. “You’ve got a whole file full of research, which we’ll have to confiscate later, and now you’ve also had a good snoop around our home. I would have thought the answer was obvious.”

“You’d better not have gone into my room,”
muttered Emma, busy at the metal worktop.

I talked to occupy my mind, to stop myself from collapsing into despair. “Is all this to keep members of your family alive? Those mobile corpses upstairs? Transplants? Life support systems?”

Byron snorted. “You’re disappointing me, Sam. Emma said you were a bright boy. Of course, naturally we do want to keep our loved ones with us, although in the case of a blustering old windbag like Grandpa Godfrey it’s not always clear why.”

Emma laughed.

“It’s far more than that,” said Byron. “We’re seeking, if you like, the holy grail of medicine. We’re working towards a fundamental understanding of the human condition, the human body, so that we can transcend nature, so that we can triumph over it and cheat death forever.”

“Eternal life?” I breathed.

“I can hear the scepticism in your voice,” grinned Byron, his fleshy jaw spreading. “Good for you, there’s a spark of intelligence after all. It’s very early days, yet. We’ve barely begun our work.”

“Over a hundred years?” I spat. Fear was clouding my judgement again, making me angry and gobby.
“You can’t be very good at it.”

“Oh, nonsense, we’ve made enormous progress, but we’re dependent on so many aspects of technology,” said Byron. “Plus, of course, we’re forced to do our valuable work in secret.”

“That’s a shame for you, huh?” I raged bitterly.

“Yes, it is,” said Byron, without any hint of irony. “Are you ready, Emma?”

She dropped a scalpel into a tray, then spun on her heels and saluted. “Aye aye, cap’n.”

“Wheel him in, then.”

She vanished for a moment, then returned pushing one of the large metal trolleys ahead of her. She positioned it in the middle of the room, and locked its wheels with the toe of her trainer. From the angle I was at, I didn’t have a clear view of what was on the trolley, but poking-up feet and a shock of hair was enough to tell me that it was Liam.

“What are you going to do to him?” I cried.

Byron tutted again. “I’m not even going to answer that one,” he muttered.

“He’s a playground,” said Emma brightly, excitement dancing in her eyes. “Practice makes perfect. At the moment, I’m learning how much
of the human body can be cut away before vital functions cease. You’d be amazed. You can remove a
lot
of stuff.”

“Learning?” I gasped.

“Of course, learning,” said Byron, checking through the instruments on the worktop. “Emma is of an age, now, when her training is well under way. She’s worked her way up from simple projects to more advanced techniques. Eventually she’ll take over the running of the family firm, just as I took over from my father, and he took over from his father before him, that lovable old windbag.”

“The recent murders,” I said. “The missing people, the deaths. They were part of your training?”

“Yup,” said Emma. “There’s lots to learn. I mistimed the man in the park. I had to leave the body or I’d have been seen by that dog walker. The training period is a thrilling time for the family. You know, a tradition, one generation handing over to the next.”

“A baptism, if you will,” said Byron. “A short, concentrated spate of projects to kick off a new member of the clan. She’s already very good indeed at covering her tracks. The park incident aside,
that is. Even so, she’s better than I was at her age. I made the odd mistake twenty-odd years ago, I can tell you. Did you see the report last week about the man in the rat-infested house? That was all her idea.”

She smiled. “Thank you, Daddy.”

“Credit where credit’s due, darling,” said Byron. “Take a box of young rats with you, then let them loose when you’ve harvested the organs you want, and there’s a ready-made story for the press and Mr Plod the policeman. Simple, and effective. You’ve even got a box ready to take your stuff home with you. Why didn’t we think of that one before?”

Behind my back, I pulled and twisted at the thin cord that was tied round my wrists. My hands and arms were sweating so profusely that I was gradually loosening its grip. It pinched my skin painfully, but I was beginning to shift it a little further towards my fingers.

“The trick is,” said Emma, her expression alive with glee as she looked at me, “to mix and match your methods. Bodies sliced up in the park are a thrill, but more than a couple are too much to hush up completely. You need to fit the story to the
person. So, you make kids involved in gangs look like they’ve run away, or dads look like they’ve deserted their families, or mums apparently die of unexpected complications at the hospital, blah blah blah. Just snatching lost souls off the street, that’s the ideal scenario, the easiest, but it takes a while to identify one. Sometimes you just have to settle for a drunk or a squatter. We choose carefully. We would never take anyone who’s worth anything.”

I tried desperately to think of something that might stall them. “People know we’re here,” I cried. “We told people we were coming here today. You’d better get out, they’ll be here soon. We told them.”

“No, you didn’t,” said Byron casually, without so much as glancing up from the surgical instruments he was checking. “However, the three of you have made quite a mess for us to clear up, haven’t you. Your parents are already under my wife’s care, so that won’t be an issue, but explaining the absence of the other two will take some careful thought. Any ideas on that score yet, darling?”

“No, not really,” said Emma.

“Well, I’ll leave it in your capable hands.”

Emma suddenly perked up, as if something had
occurred to her. “You know, I’ve never had a personal connection with a specimen before. And now, here are three all at once. It’s going to be facinating.”

“Yes,” said Byron, “it’s very unusual. We did have to deal with an accountant about ten years ago, who’d been overcharging your mother. She had a whale of a time with him. You were only little, darling, you probably won’t remember.”

“I do, I was six,” said Emma. “Was he the one we put the extra legs on?”

“That’s right, well done. Honestly, the look on his face. It still makes me laugh.”

By now, Emma was placing broad straps across the trolley, holding Liam tightly in place at his head, chest, waist and feet. Byron was cutting at Liam’s hair with a large pair of scissors.

I fought back the feeling of hopelessness that was beginning to drown me. I had to keep talking, delay them starting work on Liam, do something, give myself time to think of a way out, a way to save us.

“You’re wrong,” I cried. “We’ve left notes at home, all of us, saying where we’ve gone.”

“No, you haven’t,” drawled Byron. “Although, as I say, clearing up will pose a challenge. We may
need to create the odd item of evidence, or have a word in an ear or two. Inconvenient, but can’t be helped, I suppose.”

The cords tying my wrists behind my back were definitely looser. Not by much, but maybe enough. I had to keep them talking, distract them as best I could.

“But,” I said, “you surely don’t just kill a few people once a generation. That can’t account for what we saw in that sick archive of yours. What about the rest of the time?”

“Oh yes,” said Byron, “we take specimens fairly regularly, as we need things. Or as the mood takes us, I suppose. Sometimes, one simply fancies a rummage around.”

“It’s insane, how can you not be found out?” I cried.

Byron sighed. “As Emma has already explained, young man, more than one or two bodies in one place looks peculiar, but many bodies spread across the whole country, or other countries… Well, that’s just life, isn’t it? When we need something, we normally take a long drive.”

“How the hell can you bring bits of people back from abroad?” I cried. “How can people not notice
the deaths?”

“Think, boy,” said Byron. “With my credentials and connections, do you actually believe that I can’t send back vital scientific research materials from overseas? And as for murders, these things are commonplace. Do you have any idea how many people are reported missing in this country? Hmm? There were over 300,000 in 2012 alone. That’s a fact. Nearly all of them are accounted for, in one way or another, but about two per cent stay missing. Around six thousand. And can you guess how many unidentified body parts were found in that same year? No? Nearly ninety. Ninety different people, chopped up but unaccounted for. People don’t notice, and don’t care.”

“Are you trying to tell me you experiment on six thousand people a year?”

Byron laughed. “For goodness’ sake, of course not! We do have
lives
outside work, you know! The government takes quite a few, for their own purposes, various companies take some, on licence, assorted oddballs and perverts soak up most of the remainder. There are relatively few scientific studies like ours. I’d estimate we account for … ooh, around
a dozen or so, on average. It’ll come to rather more than that this year, of course.”

“That can’t be true,” I scoffed. “It’s
impossible
.”

“I’ll just get the bone saws, Daddy,” said Emma. She left the room again.

Byron called after her. “They’re in the top drawer, don’t forget!” There was no answer.

“You’re all insane,” I babbled. “Out of your minds.”

He stared at me for a moment, his round eyes turning my flesh cold. He put down the scissors and walked round the trolley to stand over me. His perfect shoes clacked on the white tiles. The hems of his dark blue trousers hung exactly level.

“There’s something that people like you never seem to appreciate,” he said, “and that’s the fact that people like me and my family have a right to do what we do.”

“What?”

He crouched down beside me. I could smell a woody cologne on him.

“The underclass are simply resources,” he said. “That’s what they’re for. The hoi polloi, the ‘Great Unwashed’ as Bulwer-Lytton put it. The poorest,
the struggling and the needy. We shepherd them. We, the select few, must direct them as we see fit. That is how it has always been, throughout human history, and that is how it will always be. Show me one society, one nation, anywhere on this earth where money and power is not concentrated in the hands of the elite. It’s the natural order. A few politicians have tried to turn things on their head over the centuries – Russia, China, for example – and look what a disaster that’s always turned out to be.”

“Your kind of insanity is a disaster, too,” I said. The cords behind me were almost over my knuckles. My hands were almost free.

“Dear me, have you learned nothing?” said Byron in a tone heavy with condescension. “For all except the few, freedom is an illusion, just like its silly friend ‘democracy’. These things are inventions to pacify the masses. You’re free to choose! Free to vote! It’s a nonsense. You’re free to choose only what you can afford. What you do, how you spend your time, where you go, everything depends on how much
money
someone else will give you, in exchange for the ticking clock of your short life. The average yokel’s
only choice is between one form of imprisonment and another. Money is the only freedom, power is the only politics. The masses can’t be given decisions to make, or problems to solve – there’d be chaos. They’re not qualified for the job. Economies and governments may rise and fall, Sam, but the richest remain rich and the poorest remain poor, and everyone else fights to the death for cash and status. Only the properly educated and responsible can lead. The rest must do as they’re told, whether they realize it or not, otherwise our civilization will simply crumble.”

“I’ve never heard such shit in all my life!” I spat.

Byron spread his hands. “There you are, you’re making my point for me. Faced with an opinion you don’t share, you resort to coarse language. You come from an impoverished background, Sam, and it shows. You people want fairness, justice and equality? You can’t even look after yourselves. You eat junk, you think junk, you watch junk, you’re vulgar and you’re lazy. If one of you people was given a garden to tend, all you’d do is dump a fridge in it! The function of your sort is to consume, and to work, to keep the wheels turning for the benefit of
your betters. It’s as simple as that.”

“The poor can still have morals,” I said. “Something you clearly don’t have. I think that’s worth more than money!”