Hell's Teeth (Phoebe Harkness Book 1)
Read Hell's Teeth (Phoebe Harkness Book 1) Online
Authors: James Fahy
Tags: #Literature & Fiction, #Genre Fiction, #Gothic, #Science Fiction & Fantasy, #Fantasy, #Paranormal & Urban, #Science Fiction, #Genetic Engineering
© James Fahy 2016
James Fahy has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.
First published by Venture Press, an imprint of Endeavour Press Ltd in 2016.
For Laura
I fell out of bed in my efforts to reach the phone. Not the most graceful thing I’ve ever done, I admit, but in my defence it was pitch black in the room, and when the phone rings at 3.30am, the body reacts automatically. At that godless hour, it’s only ever one of two things. Somebody’s dead, or somebody’s drunk.
Unfortunately for me it was the former.
“Dr Harkness?” a hesitant, almost apologetic, male voice stuttered down the phone line as I fought my way out of the disorientation of being rudely awoken. Griff, my assistant. I made a kind of gurgling half growl in reply as I picked myself up off the floor and clambered back onto the bed, phone in hand. I had meant for the growl to convey the irritation and obscenity of being rudely awoken in the middle of the night, but in truth my tongue was asleep in my mouth and, in my dramatic tumble from the tangle of bedcovers, I had managed to inhale my own hair.
“Griff?” I managed, trying again and sounding slightly more human. What the hell was my lab assistant calling me for at home? He had never called me before. No one ever called me. I squinted, bleary-eyed, at the glowing red numerals of the alarm clock on the bedside table. “Griff, it’s stupid o clock. What do you want?”
“I know … erm … sorry,” he said, sounding it. “Trevelyan needs you in the lab, now.”
Great. Vyvienne Trevelyan, my supervisor. A woman utterly devoid of charm, compassion or social skills, and the person karma had seen fit to have direct power and authority over me. My boss is the only woman I’ve ever met who I’m fairly certain has molecular acid for blood. She quite possibly showers in liquid nitrogen and considers it too warm. Most tellingly, however, she has far too many ‘V’s and ‘Y’s in her name. It sounds like a bag of razor blades falling down a flight of stairs. That’s never trustworthy.
“Trevelyan can wait until morning like normal people,” I muttered, pressing the heel of my free hand against my eyes wearily. “So can you. Why are you even at the lab?”
“I’m not, Doc,” Griff replied. “I’m outside your place freezing my arse off. Figured you’d need a ride in.”
This woke me up slightly. Griff, while talented and hardworking, clocked in and out of the lab strictly on business hours. He wasn’t paid enough to care out of hours –unlike yours truly, who still wasn’t paid enough to care – but due to my position, I’m apparently on twenty-four hour call.
“Trevelyan called you in too?” I asked. This was unlikely. I don’t think I’d ever seen my boss speak to any of my small team except myself, and that was only grudgingly when she had to. Lesser grunts and drones were usually beneath her contempt. People like Griff, however easy on the eye he might be, were of no interest to ambitious women like her. They didn’t offer any advancement, therefore why bother even learning their names?
“She had to call me, she doesn’t have your home number,” Griff explained. “No one at the lab does. You know what you’re like about that. I’ve only got it ‘cause you legally have to have a work contact in case you contaminate yourself and need collecting. But yeah, we’re all going in. I’m on strict orders to get your backside out of bed and get you there now. I’ve never heard her sound so angry.” He took a weary breath down the phone line. “It’s bad news.”
All going in? That would be me, Griff, our sweet-natured graduate dogsbody, Lucy, and Trevelyan herself. In the middle of the night? This was unprecedented bad news.
“Tell me.” I braced myself.
“It’s Angelina,” he said, his disembodied voice oddly intimate in my ear in the still-darkened room. “We just lost her … She’s … she’s dead, Doc.”
I was already up and hunting around the floor for socks. My face felt unconscionably hot and numb.
“How?” I demanded, curt in my attempt to remain businesslike and detached.
“She … she … exploded.” Griff sounded hopelessly apologetic.
I paused in the darkness, phone clutched in one hand, a pair of thick woolly socks in the other, and sat down heavily on the creaking bed in my pants and vest.
“Bollocks,” I replied.
I’m not a very good morning person. Especially not a good three in the morning person. So the drive from my modest flat, which is roughly the size of a postage stamp and located over a late night cyber-cafe, over to the lab on the other side of Oxford in Griff’s beat up blue Kia Picanto was filled mainly with a grumpy and uncomfortable silence. I tried desperately to wake myself up, and he tried heroically not to mention the fact that I hadn’t taken any time to fix my hair. It was mercilessly restrained under a rather festive wool cap like pale candyfloss. I usually try at least to appear like a professional, well-turned-out bloodwork paratoxicologist when I’m at work, even if I don’t feel it, but lack of sleep and the news of Angelina’s death had soured my mood even further. I don’t usually socialise with my work colleagues, or anyone for that matter. I took heart in the fact that it was early November, so at least my hat was seasonal, if not sombre.
The dark and deserted New Oxford streets slid by as we drove, gloomy and ice cold, wet cobbles and venerable grey stone lit at intervals by dim sodium vapour streetlamps. There was no one at large at this ungodly hour, not in this district of town anyway, and the world looked like a shadowy and frosty stage set – unreal and empty. The ancient buildings reared around us. The only signs of our brave new world having any impact in the last few hundred years were the searchlights which nestled like alien tripods in the roof-scapes and the occasional DataStream screen affixed to the side of a building – great television screens which daily brought the message of our noble leaders to the people in the streets. At this hour of the night they were uniformly blank, emblazoned only with a scrolling message repeating like a screensaver, the motto of our people:
ex umbra in lucem
. The Kia’s headlights cut two yellowish beams ahead of us through a thin fog laced with ice crystals. The car rattled around like a bean can on the rough roads. I considered it an old wreck, but my lab assistant was very proud and called it ‘vintage’. There were only a hundred or so left in all Britannia, he had told me once. Griff, God bless his cotton socks, had at least had the foresight to bring coffee to appease me somewhat for dragging me out of bed in the early hours, and I hugged the piping hot Styrofoam cup with my gloved hands like a lifeboat as we juddered towards the campus.
Griff was sweet and thoughtful by nature, and probably deserves someone more patient and pleasant as a boss. If I worked for me, I certainly wouldn’t bring me coffee, or if I did it would be decaf. I don’t know why he bothered making the effort half the time. He wasn’t uneasy on the eye either, in a hopeless, eternal student kind of way. Square-jawed and always carelessly unshaven, his hair was a mop of knotty dark curls and his large eyes a pale caramel behind glasses that just managed to land on the cool side of the nerd spectrum. He always gave the impression he had just stumbled out of bed, late for a lecture somewhere. It was an odd combination of clumsy geek and public schoolboy yumminess. Quite the contradiction. You never knew whether you would prefer to jump his bones or tuck his shirt in properly and give him a hot meal. I’m not much of a cougar for younger men, so he was thankfully quite safe with me. Our relationship was strictly professional. He did what I told him to do, and he did all my maths for me.
Not all scientists are good at maths, incidentally. Don’t tell anyone though; it’s a closely guarded secret in the scientific community. It helps to have reliable flunkies.
“Thanks for the coffee,” I muttered as we chugged along, my breath making a cloud in front of me. Griff’s salary did not, evidently, stretch to car heating, vintage or otherwise “So do we know what’s happened? Between you and me, I’m not sure I want to be going in there blind if Trevelyan is going to be spitting acid.”
I saw Griff shrug from the corner of my eye, hunched over the steering wheel in that comical way of all tall men in small cars. “I only know as much as you do, Doc,” he said. “Just that Angelina’s dead, and there’s an issue, and that you better get there yesterday and clean up the mess.” He risked tearing his eyes off the road to glance over at me sympathetically. “Trevelyan’s words. I don’t know if she meant the potential political mess or … you know … the actual mess.” He made a squelch noise with his cheek, which was in fairly poor taste. I chose to put it down to nerves.
I glowered and sunk deeper into the passenger seat, disappearing into the folds of my winter coat until I was just a pair of eyes frowning out between collar and woolly hat. When precisely it became part of my job description to deal with death by spontaneous explosion, I don’t recall.
Blue Lab One, the place where dreams are made (bearing in mind not all dreams are pleasant) is the glamorous headquarters of the Para-Toxicology-and-Applied-Genetic-Research-and-Development team, of which I am but one humble cog. There is no good acronym. Trust me, I’ve tried PTAGRD. It sounds like some kind of Dwarven swear word or a raven coughing into a spittoon. The facility lies in, or rather beneath, part of the hallowed and ancient New Oxford University Campus. I had only left the lab a few hours earlier, after a seventeen hour stint working on the latest refinements of the para-vaccine, Epsilon strain. It had been a long day, I had been tired. I had been looking forward to at least eight hours sleep.
It was beyond grim to be back at work so soon.
Griff parked the Kia expertly in the quad car park, gravel crunching deafeningly beneath the tyres in the silent night, and we made our way briskly through the misty campus – dreaming spires, vaulted arches and ancient towers stark and dark around us. The place looks like Hogwarts writ large, at least until you get to the BL1 entrance.
Griff scanned us through the automatic doors with his security pass. From the outside, facing across the campus green towards the distant river, they look like ancient oak, banded with curly black iron hinges. From within however, they are a foot thick and reinforced steel. They open with a vacuumed whoosh and hissed closed behind us like an airlock.
Blue Lab One within is nothing like Hogwarts. A long wide corridor of plain white tiles, looking more like a tube station, and unflatteringly lit with harsh strip lighting leads to a circular atrium, surrounded by several elevators and a semicircular reception desk. There is nothing magical, ancient or whimsical here. The place is as modern and bright as a space station, all glass surfaces and brushed steel.
“Hey Mattie.” I nodded to the night security sitting behind a row of thirty or so CCTV monitors. Mattie nodded back in greeting as he got to his feet. Mid forties and heavyset, he looked like every night security person I have ever seen anywhere.
“Doctor Harkness, Doctor Grace,” he said amiably, one hand on his hip where his gun sat in its holster. Our security at Blue Lab are all heavily armed. I find it reassuring rather than intimidating, considering what we deal with here. “You two working late tonight?”
“Not by choice,” I replied, crossing to the desk and offering my right hand which he took unceremoniously in his.
To an outsider this might look like an odd gesture, oddly genteel, as though he were about to bend and kiss the back of my hand like some kind of Southern gentleman. But it was merely routine and not nearly as romantic.
Mattie took a small hollow cylinder of pale brushed metal from his pocket and slid it over my finger. He pressed a tiny button beneath the tube and I felt the familiar prick of the needle inside the tube jab my flesh, so quick and deft it barely hurt. There was slight pressure as a vacuum formed around my finger tip, and then a cool spray as antiseptic was released. I withdrew my finger as he released my hand, shaking my hand at the wrist to dry it off.
Mattie turned and slid the hollow tube, now containing a sample of my blood, into a receptacle on the desk. A second later a tiny green light pinged on one of the many monitors.
“You’re all good,” Mattie told me. He turned to Griff, withdrawing an identical tube to repeat the procedure.
“Good to know I’m still human,” I managed to half smile. “Even if I don’t feel that way right now.”
While Griff was getting his DNA scanned for abnormalities, or ‘signing in’ as we called it, I crossed the lobby and swiped my clearance pass to call the elevator. There are seven elevators radiating off the circular lobby. They all only go down from here. Blue Lab is subterranean. Makes sense really. The college campus is above, and we burrow under it, our various departments spread out around a central hub like spokes on an underground wheel.
I heard Griff hiss under his breath as the cylinder took his blood – he’s such a baby about needles – then the familiar reassuring ping which told us that he hadn’t been replaced by a Genetic Other during the night. I often wondered what would happen if the light ever pinged red one day. I didn’t think it had ever happened. Sure, we’d had ‘visitors’ before, but only with lots of red tape and chaperoning. And they never got lower than level one.
Mattie told us both to have a nice night, which I found increasingly unlikely, and we stepped into the elevator, the doors closing swiftly and silently as we began our descent. Griff sucked his finger absently, which I avoided doing every day as the antiseptic tasted foul. He was a wuss. A pretty one, but still, I rolled my eyes. Not everyone at Blue Lab seems as impervious to Griff’s innocent charms and winning calculus skills as me though. He seemed to be rather popular with the girls up in applied sciences on level B-10. Poor thing. Those women can be intense. They don’t get out much. Sending Griff up there to beg, steal or borrow data supplies was like throwing a kitten in a shark tank. It could only be worse if I went up myself half an hour earlier and sloshed a bucket of chum in there to get the bloodlust going.
The floor indicators on the lift display panel told us we were descending rapidly, although the elevator was so smooth we couldn’t feel a thing. At level B-14 we slid gently to a halt and were ejected into Blue Lab.
You don’t get in here easily. The DNA testing in the lobby is routine, it merely tests to see if you are human. Down here on level 14 I was faced with the usual iris scanner, fingerprint reader and security pass combination before the doors finally gave me access. Griff and I eventually strode into the corridor beyond.
It’s an odd sight, this entrance corridor. As long as a city street, it is narrow and covered entirely with bright blue ultraviolet strip lighting. It’s like walking through a nightmarishly long sunbed, turning your lab coat hi-glow blue instead of white. It makes my hair look bright and ghostly instead of blond, and tints the whites of your eyes and your teeth, oddly. It’s the reason Blue Lab is called Blue Lab, and its purpose is functional not decorative. The Pale cannot stand sunlight. They suffer from extreme Xeroderma Pigmentosum. It’s an autosomal recessive genetic disorder of DNA repair in which the ability to heal damage caused by ultraviolet light is deficient. Some humans have suffered from it in rare cases, but the Pale, as a species, have a fatal level of reaction. Sunlight burns them to a crisp.
We don’t use the word ‘vampire’ down here. Pedantic, I know, but them’s the rules. It’s not considered a valid scientific classification. I would argue that ‘the Pale’ sounds like an emo band from way back when, but I wasn’t on the political committee who decides such things. I’m just a lowly drone from B-14. Besides, nobody gets my references anyway. I’m a geek for pre-apocalypse culture. I practically lap up anything pre-wars. Music, movies, shows they used to have for entertainment, way before our DataStream. It gets me a look of polite but blank looks. The Pale and vampires are different creatures anyway. They’re both Genetic Others. Neither of them human. But we shouldn’t lump every GO together. They’re as different as, well, not chalk and cheese perhaps. Maybe Brie and Emmental.
If one of the Pale ever did manage to infiltrate BL1, get past the DNA scan, bypass elevator security, fool a palm and iris scan, and make it to the corridor, they would be in flames before they made it halfway along and would arrive at the other end as a charred microwave meal.
The doors at the far end led into the lab proper where Lucy, our 19 year old medical intern, was waiting for us with my supervisor, Trevelyan. Lucy looked monumentally relieved to see us. The poor girl had no doubt been getting the sharp end of Vyvienne’s tongue while they waited for us to show. Lucy was a kind and gentle soul, and didn’t deserve that. No one did. I nodded a hello as I shrugged out of my jacket and grabbed a lab coat. “Where is she?” I asked, not bothering with further pleasantries.
Trevelyan, standing with her arms folded, glared at Griff and me murderously. She was a large, heavy-set woman, expensively dressed in what she would no doubt consider a power-suit. She looked like the kind of no-nonsense woman who would have been head girl and captain of her school’s hockey team, and who wouldn’t have thought twice about breaking both your legs with the stick if occasion arose.
“Your experiment?” she snorted humourlessly. “She’s everywhere. That’s the issue, Harkness.”
“Poor Angelina,” Lucy murmured, looking genuinely downcast.
I followed them to the glass-walled cubicle which served as a holding pen, or less frequently, as a mortuary. The usually pristine and clear white tabletop was a bloodbath. I have a strong stomach, but even I was momentarily taken aback. It looked for all the world as though someone had filled a large water balloon with chunky tomato sauce and lobbed it joyfully into the space. Spatters arced across the walls and soiled the floor. The work surfaces were smeared and painted gloopy red. In the centre of the chaos stood a wire cage, roughly twice the size of a shoebox. It was twisted out of shape and convulsed, like some kind of grotesque modern art.
“Good God,” I muttered, surveying the carnage. I grabbed a spatula from a nearby tray and gingerly picked through what could only be described as the remaining chunks of Angelina littering the blood-sodden desk. “When did this happen?”
“About an hour ago,” Lucy said from behind me. Unlike Trevelyan, old iron stomach, and Griff, whose duties included far more stomach-churning things than this, she hadn’t entered the gory cubicle, but stood at the threshold in her plastic covered lab shoes as though afraid to enter. She was hugging herself and looked a little wild-eyed, clear signs of trauma – though whether from witnessing this scene or having to talk to my supervisor on her own for the last half an hour, it was impossible to tell. “I was finishing up the data reports from the Epsilon we ran yesterday afternoon, and then … bang!” Her eyes were wide. “It was so loud, like when a baked potato explodes in a microwave, you know? I screamed.”
My spatula had found something solid in the goop. I held it up. It looked like a forkful of over-tomato-sauced pot noodle. Griff leaned over to peer past my shoulder.
“What are we going to tell Brad?” he whispered. “He’s going to be heartbroken. They’ve been a couple since they got here.”
The object on my spatula was a tiny severed bloody paw. I sighed. “I told you and I told Lucy,” I said patiently. “If we name the lab rats, we only end up getting attached to them.”