Flesh and Blood (19 page)

I’ve been here, in the basement, for two weeks now, I think. It’s hard to tell.

I’m feeling so much better. The injections mean I don’t feel any pain.

I’m inside one of the glass booths. I’m where Kat Brennan used to be. Byron and Emma brought this little desk down for me to use. It’s a really nice piece of furniture.

I’ve filled three notebooks, writing all this down. Once I’ve recorded what’s happened, they want me to keep notes on my forthcoming operations. There are going to be quite a lot of them. They want me to note down how I’m feeling, my impressions as my body is changed.

After the experiments are over, the notebooks I’ve filled will become part of the official family archive. A very important part, Byron says, because they don’t have many records as detailed as mine.

The notebook I stole is back in the archive. The rain had caused some damage. Byron wasn’t at all pleased. Emma was very angry with me, too, because I nearly killed her, but I think she’s forgiven me now. At first she talked a great deal about revenge, and about making me suffer, but Byron pointed out to her that I, with my journalistic skills, represented an unusual opportunity, and that I should be considered a long-term subject for study. He told her she still had a lot to learn, that she hadn’t made full use of Liam and Jo, which was wasteful.

Jo lived for three days. Her liver was transplanted into Gottfried Hugelgrun, who’d been in need of a new one for a while. Most of the rest of her ended up incinerated.

Liam was taken apart, too, piece by piece. Emma made three living specimens from him, using various grafting techniques and artificial organs. Part of him is still in the next room. I hear it cry out from time to time.

The disappearance of all three of us was neatly accounted for. They hadn’t reported me as an escaped psychiatric patient, as I’d assumed at first. What the rest of the world believed was this: the day
we claimed to be around town doing our geography project was the day I killed them both, then burned their bodies to dust. I’d been off my head on drugs. Later, filled with remorse, I stabbed myself to death using a knife, following an escape from police custody outside the supermarket. So mad, it had to be true.

The story was all Emma’s idea. She’s full of ideas.

The first time I escaped, when I got out of this basement, was a big surprise for the Greenhills. I showed up a loophole in their security. It’s a loophole that’s now been closed.

The second time I escaped, from the police car, was exactly the reverse. It had been expected. Chief Constable Leonard Greenhill had deliberately distracted his two constables, knowing that I’d have an opportunity to make a run for it. The reason? Partly to back up the story Emma had invented, but mostly to give Emma a treat. I’d caused the family a certain amount of trouble. They wanted something back. I was an evening’s entertainment.

The truth will come out. One day. Someone will read these words.

I’m feeling better. The pain has been taken away, so that I can write.

I am part of Emma’s apprenticeship. The last part, her final supervised project. She’s already removed my stomach. A machine does that work now. It’s functioning well, I’m told. Later, my shaved head is to be mapped out, ready for surgery. I’m going to have an extra brain, an external one. As I sit here at the desk, I can see a glass jar. Inside it, something pulses and grows. That will be part of me, too. I don’t know what part yet.

Emma is coming towards me. Time to stop writing for the day.

Following the sudden death of her best friend, Sophie hopes that spending the summer with family on a remote Scottish island will be just what she needs. But the old schoolhouse, with its tragic history, is anything but an escape. History is about to repeat itself. And Sophie is in terrible danger…

The pressure of exams leads Izzy and her friends to take a new study drug they find online. But one by one they succumb to hallucinations, nightmares and psychosis. The only way to survive is to stay awake…

Gabe makes a discovery that could be the answer to all his problems. But taking the Aztec gold disturbs the spirit of an evil Spanish priest hell-bent on revenge. Can Gabe escape the demon he’s unleashed?

Read on for the opening
chapter of
Bad Bones…

An extract from
Bad Bones
by Graham Marks

‘Dope will get you through a time of no money better than money will get you through a time of no dope.’ Gabe had read that in one of his dad’s old underground, hippy comic books, he didn’t remember which one. That was before his dad sold all his comics and his vinyl record collection and old-school stereo system. Before he lost his job and things started to get shitty.

That really wasn’t so long ago, although it seemed like they’d been in a Time Of No Money forever. Everything had changed, and none of it for the better. Not one single damn bit.

Gabe sat on the street bench, his bike propped up next to him, watching the late-afternoon traffic go by on Ventura. Thousands of people, all with a destination, a purpose. All with money in their
wallets and purses, driving on to the next stage in their sweet lives, or their neat homes, or their great jobs. None of which applied to him, his mom, dad or little sister, Remy. They were all stuck in a house he knew for a fact was worth way less than what was owed on it, and with, so far as he could see, no chance of putting that to rights.

His mother cut coupons to save money at the supermarket like it was her religion, and everything they ate was either ‘no brand’, or had about ten seconds left on the ‘eat by’ date, or both. His dad tried to keep a brave face, but didn’t always succeed, and only his sister appeared not to have a care in the world. But then Remy was nine years old. Gabe remembered being that age – when the future was always a cartoon-bright tomorrow and your life was a game. He looked down at his scuffed, frayed sneakers; it was a lot harder to think like that when you were sixteen and tomorrow did not look like it was going to be promising anything any time soon.

He stood up, stretching. He could feel the tension building in his muscles, the frustration at his total inability to figure out a way in which he could solve
his family’s problems; even fixing
something
would be better than doing nothing.

“Maybe…” Gabe muttered to himself, grabbing his backpack, then getting on his bike, “…it’ll have to be the dope.”

He was about to move off when his phone chirruped: his mom’s ringtone. He let the call go to voicemail, not ready to listen to whatever it was she had to say in her often tired-to-the-bone voice; it was hardly likely to be good news. No, he was not going to go home just yet, to the wired undercurrent of resentment that there was between him and his dad nowadays.

Gabe watched for a suitable gap in the unending stream of cars and slipped neatly into place. He had nowhere to go, but at least he might shift the dark cloud that seemed to be sitting right on top of him if he rode until it hurt. And while he rode he could think about Benny’s offer.

What took him off Ventura and up towards the canyon Gabe didn’t know. He’d been there before, any number of times. Generally either with friends,
to get a beer buzz on, or with a girlfriend, when he had a girlfriend, for some time alone. Right now, though, with the sun beginning to set, the canyon – empty, serene, somewhere completely elsewhere – felt like the perfect place to be.

He had hybrid Nutrak tyres on the bike, old now, though still with a few more miles left in them yet. Best of both worlds, good on and off the road, the salesman had said, back when Gabe had had spare cash to splash, and the man hadn’t been bullshitting. He took to the pathway, well beaten by dog walkers and hikers, and rode into this small piece of wilderness, surrounded by the endless sprawl of LA.

He knew exactly where he wanted to be, and some ten minutes later he was up on top of a huge, smooth rock, his bike left at its graffiti-covered base. Lying down, using his backpack for a pillow, he felt the warmth the rock had soaked up during the day and was now giving off as the temperature began to drop. He was tired; tired of worrying and tired of thinking too hard about how bad things were. And they had to be bad for him to even consider working for dope-dealing Benny as an option.

Gabe closed his eyes, shutting out the world, and
let the quiet chatter, hum and drone of the canyon wash over him…

He didn’t know what had woken him; probably it had been the chill in the air, because he was only wearing a T-shirt and jeans. The sky, dark as it ever got in LA, had no moon yet and only a scattering of stars. Gabe sat up, scrambled around in his backpack and found his phone: 7:23. He’d slept for ages, out for the count too, as there was another missed call from his mom. It was late, so she’d no doubt be worried, and he was hungry now – hungry enough not to care about the mood round the dinner table. Time to go home.

Gabe slid down the rock, now cooler to the touch, most of its heat given back to the night, and got his bike. Standing for a moment he debated what to do, finally admitting there was no way it would be a good idea to ride out. He was going to have to walk the twisting path, which clung like ivy to the steep hillsides.

As he set off, Gabe thought about calling his mom, but decided not to. She’d only ask what he
was doing, who he was with and where he was. “Well, Ma, I just woke up, alone in the canyon,” wasn’t what she’d want to hear. He’d figure out a better story by the time he got home.

And, kind of like the way life often is, everything went fine until it didn’t.

Even when you’re trying hard to be careful, if nothing goes wrong for long enough you get cocky and the lazy part of your brain stops paying as much attention as it should. That was how Gabe failed to notice how unstable the pathway was. The next step he took, the ground unexpectedly gave way, he lost his balance and, arms flailing, he fell.

It wasn’t all bad. The drop turned out to be not so steep or so very far down, and also he let go of his bike and it didn’t come tumbling after him. Gabe, who was fit enough and good enough to be in the school athletics team, managed the fall pretty well, skidding down the side of the narrow arroyo, arms and legs held close in. He came to a stop, slightly winded, a bit bruised but with nothing broken, in a bed of dried-up mud.

There’d been a short, sharp late-summer storm, a pretty spectacular one, the previous week. The sky
had turned coal-tar black in the middle of the day, there was thunder and it seemed like a ton of water per square metre had fallen in about two minutes flat. Drains had blocked, gutters overflowed, dogs went crazy, traffic snarled up and then, as quick as it had started, it was over. All that water had had to go somewhere, and in the canyon a deluge hurtled downwards, finding any exit it could; it ripped out small trees and dislodged rocks and earth from the arroyo – brick-dry from the long, hot summer – as it raced towards the San Fernando valley.

Picking himself up, Gabe found he was in a two-maybe three-metre deep, four-metre wide cut that wouldn’t have been there before the storm. As he looked around for the best way to get back up to his bike, the moon peeked over the ragged treeline behind him. Its soft, monochrome light made it seem like he was standing in an old grainy photographic negative; it gave everything a weird, spooky look.

A metre or so away from him it also picked out the distinctive shape of a human skull.