Blood Junction (25 page)

From the shadows Mikey watched the second guard try to rouse his mate. He was slapping the unconscious man’s face. “Wake up,
you sod, or you’ll get us into trouble.”

His friend didn’t move.

“One-pot pisspot,” the guard complained. “Not even half a bottle and you’re bloody comatose.” He hooked his arms beneath his
friend’s armpits and attempted to pull him around the gatehouse. He managed to jerk his friend about a meter, then gave up.
“Sleep it off where you bloody are, then,” he muttered, and turned back for his post.

Only then did Mikey launch himself at the man.

“Are you sure?” Mikey demanded for the second time.

“Yes! I’d like to walk through the gate too, but unless you’ve got the code to the key pad we’re climbing the fence, okay?”

They were at the rear of the building, and he’d thrown dust and leaves and stones at the fence without a single warning fizz
in response, but he still had his doubts. Big ones.

“What if the fence is on another circuit, like the gate?” he asked.

“Mikey, I did my best in there, but I didn’t
know
.”

“Christ!” he muttered, and hefted the bolt cutter.

India stood still as rock, watching him.

Mikey mustered his courage. Ignored the nausea in the pit of his stomach. He stretched out his hand, so the bolt cutter was
a centimeter from the mesh. Do or die, he thought. And screwed his eyes tight shut as he jabbed the cutter against the fence.

Nothing happened.

He felt his knees weaken. “Christ,” he said again as India murmured, “Thank God.”

Mikey gripped the cutter with both hands and bit through the wire without difficulty. He made sure he cut a wide hole, about
five feet square. He didn’t want to get fried should the fence be reactivated.

They slipped through, heading straight for the fire door. India put a hand on his arm. They both stilled. She jerked her head,
indicating she’d heard something. He motioned her to wait and crept to the corner of the building, peered around. Nothing,
aside from a domestic tabby walking across the car park. India couldn’t have heard
that
, surely?

He waited a few more minutes. Nothing. He returned to the fire door and took out his leather pouch of tools. During his stakeouts
he hadn’t seen any indication of a security system but they wouldn’t know until they broke in. The scrape of metal made him
sweat. It seemed painfully loud in the dense silence. He breathed shallowly as he worked, applying constant pressure to the
cylinder. Suddenly the lock clicked back. The door cracked open. He held his breath. No sound. No alarm. India had told him
she’d yanked every wire free from two circuit boxes in the gatehouse, but he still didn’t like it. He wondered if there was
a silent alarm, separate from the main system, perhaps more guards inside. No way to tell.

He slid inside and listened. A minute passed, then he gestured at India to wait by the fence.

“No,” she hissed. “I’m coming with you.”

“But I want you as my lookout.”

“Don’t fob me off—”

“I’m not sodding fobbing you off!” he retorted through clenched teeth. “I need a lookout and you’ll be as much use as a flat
battery if you come with me.”

She gave him a hard look. “If I find out you’re bullshitting—”

“Shut up, India, and go and keep an eye out.”

He waited until she’d gone, and crept inside. He left the door open a crack behind him, felt his way along the corridor, listened,
crept to the central stairwell, listened again. He slipped up the stairs to the first floor and approached the row of offices.
He tried the first door, marked with a little brass plate:
IAN TURNER, HEAD OF RESEARCH
. Locked. The second too was locked, and Mikey prowled quickly along the corridor, ticking off each plate as he went until
he came to the one marked
GORDON T. A. WILLIS, DIRECTOR
, opposite the lift. Automatically, he glanced at the panel above the lift to check it wasn’t in use, and paused.

There were four floors.

He’d thought there were only three. Two above ground, and a possible storage basement. But there was another floor below that:
B2.

He’d check it out later; first things first. He tried Willis’s door, also locked. He quickly freed the lock and entered, shutting
the door behind him. Mikey crossed to the windows and pulled the blinds shut. Then he switched on his penlight and scanned
the room. His heart gave a bump at the hammerhead shark jaws, and settled to a steady pounding as he moved the beam around.
Lots of chrome and black, and trophies of fish and photographs of more fish on the walls. There were four shelves filled with
technical books and journals, a three-tier filing cabinet and a computer on the desk. He crossed the room to the desk and
turned on the computer. Sweat pooled in the small of his back; the hum of the machine seemed overly loud. He searched the
desk while the computer booted. Internal memos, a handful of checks needing a countersignature. Nothing startling there. A
book on big game fishing. Another on sharks.

He shut the last drawer and leaned over and clicked the mouse. The screen lit into blue and demanded a password. Mikey cursed
softly. He tried Willis’s name, his initials and a handful of words including
Hammerhead
and
Great White
. Deciding not to waste any more time he shut down the computer and went to the filing cabinet. Locked. He broke it open easily.
Swiftly, he started his search.

It took him twenty minutes before he fell upon a register of testers that told him when they had answered an advertisement,
what tests they’d undertaken and when, and what they’d been paid. He saw Debs’s name and Roxy’s. He pulled out the next register
and immediately his attention sharped because, while the previous register showed white testers, this register listed blacks—including
the Mullett family.

He frowned. This register revealed the date when an Aborigine arrived at the Institute, but not what they were testing. None
of them seemed to have been paid. Mikey folded both registers in half and pulled out his shirt. He stuffed the sheets in the
back of his jeans and tucked his shirt over them.

A noise made him stiffen. He thought he could hear a low rumble coming from the corridor, like a distant engine. He hastened
to the door, put his ear against it. Silence.

Cautiously, he opened it a crack. He peered up and down the corridor. Nothing. He stepped outside, shut the door and headed
to the lift, pressed the button. The ping when it arrived made him flinch. He stepped inside, pressed B2. The lift doors closed.
The lift dropped downwards, stopped at B1. Mikey pressed B2 again. The lift didn’t move. He scanned the lift’s panel. His
pulse leapt. There was a tiny camera set above the panel. A camera with
EYE TECH
etched onto its bodywork. A camera that zoomed in to examine your iris for identification. He jerked his gaze away. His body
streamed with sweat. He pressed G and the lift ascended. He decided to push his luck and try another route to B2.

The lift doors opened.

A low growl greeted him.

He looked down.

A pair of yellow eyes stared into his.

Oh, shit.

The dog was big, at least a hundred pounds, and jet black. Its ears and tail were cropped, and its teeth gleamed white in
a dripping snarl. Its hackles were raised. Its massive chest emanated a deep continual growl.

Mikey started desperately stabbing the lift button. The dog’s muscles bunched at his movements and the growl turned into a
roar. Tortuously slowly, the lift doors started to close. To his surprise, the dog immediately stopped snarling, spun around
and raced off.

Shit, shit,
shit!

The lift rose silently, stopped.

Ping. 1.

The doors opened. Mikey craned his head into the corridor, listened hard, took one step, heard something moving. Put his finger
on the lift button. The dog came charging around the corner, head low, ears flat against its skull.

Mikey stabbed G.

The doors were half closed when the dog appeared. It made no effort to spring inside, simply raced off again. Mikey’s adrenaline
was pumping. He slipped the hunting knife from its sheath, held it hard.

Ping. G.

He sprang outside and ran for the fire exit. He was two-thirds along the corridor when he heard something behind him. He ran
harder. A rhythmic panting reached him. He pumped his legs faster, willing himself to reach the door before the dog reached
him. The panting grew louder and louder, until it seemed to match his own frantic breaths.

Mikey hit the door with the full force of his left shoulder. He flew outside, spinning in midair, knife poised. The dog piled
on top of him, snapping and snarling. Mikey tried to stab the dog but it was too close and trying to bite his face. He rolled
onto his front, felt the jaws close on his shoulder. He tried to wrench free, but the dog had a good grip and was biting hard,
shaking its head furiously. Mikey heaved himself off the ground in an attempt to pass the knife under his body and into the
dog’s stomach but there was no room so he jabbed the dog as hard as he could with his elbow. It simply bit harder, enraged.

Suddenly the animal went still, stopped snarling. Its body slumped, a dead weight on Mikey’s back.

He pushed it off, scrambled to his feet. India stood there, Whitelaw’s cosh in both hands. She was trembling.

“It wouldn’t stop,” she said. “I kept hitting it, but it wouldn’t stop.”

“It’s okay, it’s okay,” was all he managed between gasps. His chest was heaving, his body shaking and sweat-soaked.

“It wouldn’t stop,” she repeated.

He grabbed her wrist and pulled her away. “Let’s get out of here.”

Something kicked up dust next to him. He heard the muffled
phut
from a gun with a silencer. “They’re shooting!” he yelled to India. Another bullet whizzed between them. India veered away
sharply. Mikey raced for the hole in the fence. He slowed abruptly, scrambled as carefully as he could through the hole, straightened
up and sprinted dead ahead. A third bullet sang past his right shoulder and he started to zigzag, attempting to head for the
rocky slope.

“Over here!” a man shouted behind him.

Mikey sprinted through the bush, dodging trees and shrubs. He risked a glance over his shoulder, expecting India to be hot
on his heels. She was nowhere to be seen. Instead, three men were right behind him. Maybe more.

A bullet walloped into the tree ahead of him and Mikey dived left. More bullets slapped into the ground and snapped twigs.
He ran in the opposite direction, trying to stoop, keeping his silhouette low.

The moon slid behind a bank of clouds. It was as though a light had been switched off. Mikey crashed into a rock, losing his
balance and hitting the ground. He surged upward and kept running, straining to see obstacles ahead. He could hear men behind
him, shouting urgently.

Mikey charged down a hill, bumping painfully against stumps and rocks and overbalancing, sometimes falling to his knees, but
he continued his charge, moving fast and hard as he could. He tried to figure out where he was. He had started out by heading
for the rocky slope but in the darkness had lost his sense of direction. He had to find the slope, and then he could locate
the car. Go and get help. Help India, wherever she was. He came to the bottom of the hill and pelted along the valley for
several minutes before climbing the next hill. His legs were tiring when he reached the top, and his breath burned in his
throat, but when a flashlight bobbed into view in the valley he accelerated downwards and then up for the next ridge, the
thought of India keeping his body moving at a crippling rate.

He was going so fast he nearly fell when he got to the top of the ridge. He paused and looked back, panting. Flashlights bobbed
below, hard on his trail. Men shouted. A dog barked.

A bloody dog! He could never outrun a dog. He hoped it wasn’t the same black bastard. It was fucking
huge
.

“Over here!”

“This way!”

To his surprise, the flashlights changed direction. Moved directly away from him. He watched them for several minutes, his
legs weary, his lungs aching. He couldn’t see the Institute anywhere. Or anything, for that matter. Murky bush stretched endlessly
in every direction. He saw the flashlights dwindle into tiny yellow dots, and eventually vanish. He sank to his knees and
knelt there, gasping. When his breathing slowed and his heart rate steadied, he shuffled into a more comfortable position.
He felt his sweat drying cold. His shoulder started to throb where the dog had gripped him. There was a deep ache at the back
of his neck as well, and both his forearms and wrists, and his right knee. In the dark he couldn’t tell how badly he had been
bitten, just that his jeans and jacket were sticky with blood. He was aware that the sooner he treated the wounds the better.
He looked around him again. Nothing but dark gray bush, as far as he could see.

And silence.

Dense bush silence. Nothing moved, not a bird or bat or a leaf on a tree. He looked into the sky. Nothing but thick clouds
roiling in weighty slow motion across the moon.