Noble Conflict (16 page)

‘There are a lot of worthwhile targets here, my uninformed friend. It’s full of damaged Guardians like me. Plus Insurgents get treated and held in the detention cells here until they can be shipped off to maximum security. Plus it’s a major bio-medical research facility. Plus this is where they bring sick Council members. Remember last month when Sister Kepple had a suspected heart attack? Treated right here, she was, in the new cardio unit. Plus  . . . plus—’

‘Yeah, thanks, I get it,’ Kaspar interrupted now that Russell was finally running out of steam.

‘They also step up the security when there’s a High Councillor in residence, so that must be the case. Am I right, or am I right?’ asked Russell. ‘Or am I right?’

Kaspar sighed. When they came to a halt, he helped Russell onto the travelator that led to the main entrance, then went to Reception to book him in.

The receptionist scanned their IDs yet again. ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘Normally you could go straight in, but today we’ve had three major incidents so we’ve got lots of casualties to process. I’m afraid there might be quite a delay before we get to you, Guardian Russell.’

‘That’s OK,’ shrugged Russell. ‘I’m good, as long as I don’t have to walk or stand for too long. Plus’ – Russell leaned in further towards the receptionist and lowered his
voice to that of a stage whisper – ‘plus, don’t tell anyone but I can’t walk or stand for too long.’

At the receptionist’s bemused look, Kaspar explained. ‘Painkillers.’

As they headed back to their seats, Russell said, ‘Kas, you may as well go.’

‘It’s all right. I’ll stay until you’re done. Besides, you’ll probably need help getting back to base,’ replied Kas. ‘But I wouldn’t mind taking a look around. I didn’t get to see much when I was a patient here.’

‘OK. I’ll comm you when I get seen by a doctor.’

Kas didn’t need to be told twice. ‘See you later then.’

The new part of the Clinic was ultramodern with a Major Trauma centre, a High-Dependency unit, a state-of-the-art Nuclear Medicine department with Imaging Laboratory, and a whole host of other specialist departments with names that Kaspar had never heard of – like LaserBaro Therapy. He wandered around for a while, reading the user-friendly info screens at the entrance to each section that described what they did, and a lot of it was truly amazing cutting-edge stuff.

Eventually, he reached a door marked
NORTH WING – ANNEXE
. Kaspar could see through the window that it led to the old, disused building that used to house the Clinic before the new building had been built. The door was chained shut and a sign across it read:
NO ENTRY
.
DANGER OF DEATH
. A smaller notice underneath explained that a combination of dilapidation, hazardous building materials and low-level nuclear contamination from antique
medical equipment made the old building unsafe, and that no one should enter without protective clothing and the permission of the Clinic’s Administrator.

Kaspar turned right, strolled past the immaculate dining room, on through the kitchen and out into the gardens. They were beautifully kept, and the smell of the wild melon plants reminded him strongly of the farm. He tried to identify the species. It was definitely a wild type, but the variegated leaf looked like it belonged on the genetically engineered varieties that only grew in the vast hydroponic towers on farms. His inner farmer wondered how they had made that work, so he stepped off the path, ducked under the lowest branches and cleared away some bark chips and topsoil to reveal the graft point. As he stooped down to examine the roots more closely, he could see through to the old building beyond – the North Wing.

That was odd  . . . One of the side doors was open and two men were moving in and out. But what was weird was that they weren’t construction workers or clean-up guys. They weren’t wearing protective overalls, respirators, masks, hard hats or even gloves. They were doctors. And the open door didn’t reveal the dingy, unlit interior of a derelict building but the bright clean interior of a functioning unit.

What was going on? Why would anyone be working there?

Maybe the warning notices were out of date? Or maybe they never related to the whole North Wing building?

But as a Guardian, Kaspar always had to consider less innocent explanations. Criminals using the building as a hideout? Or a drugs lab? Or terrorists scavenging nuclear waste in order to build a dirty bomb? Hell! What if there was something bad going on over there, this close to Council members?

Kaspar needed to get closer, to get a good look inside before he informed anyone else. He really didn’t need the embarrassment of calling for another full Guardian raid only to discover two amorous doctors enjoying a private moment. He scraped out some more soil from around the roots of the melon plant, then lay down and wriggled his way through the plants until he cleared them and was on the other side. The two doctors had gone but they had left the door open. It wouldn’t stay that way for long. Kaspar sprinted over to the old building, covering one hundred metres in less than twelve seconds. He caught the heavy door just before it swung shut, pausing for a moment to catch his breath. Until he found out what was going on, he couldn’t afford to be seen. Strange. He noticed that although the door was old, the digital keypad on it was fairly new. Sliding past it into the building, he immediately felt and heard the industrial air conditioning.

So much for the North Wing being abandoned.

Senses on high alert, Kaspar peered through the glass panel in the first door on the left. The vast room was empty of both people and standard hospital furniture. Instead, it had a whole wall filled floor to ceiling with large drawers, each of which looked big enough to store a body.

A morgue.

Kaspar shuddered. He’d never liked morgues, and after getting Dillon’s take on post-mortem romance, he liked them even less. The door had a datapad beside it, set into the wall. Kaspar swiped his fingers across it, only to be confronted by a series of numbers and names that meant nothing to him. He made his way to the second room. He peered through the glass panel again but had to duck down quickly. The two doctors were in there. Fortunately they were too busy to spot him, but this room seemed to be the same as the first. One of the drawers was open and the two were peering in. Kaspar ducked beneath the glass panel in the door and headed down the corridor. The third room was the same, as was the fourth, and the fifth. Each room was full of body cabinets, some against the walls while the majority were placed back to back in columns throughout the room. Each door had a datapad beside it, filled with virtual page after page of numbers and names or – more often than not – the word ‘Unknown’.

How many bodies do they have here? thought Kaspar.

This old building wasn’t derelict at all. It was air-conditioned, spotlessly clean and full to the rafters with neatly filed corpses. So why all the secrecy? He flicked through the datapad outside the room at the end of the long corridor. The numbers  . . . were they dates? Yes, they had to be. All the dates on this datapad were recent, within the last three months. He needed to get a closer look  . . .

Only just suppressing his natural instinct to avoid dead bodies, Kaspar slipped into the room, carefully shutting the
door behind him. Apart from a faint but constant buzzing noise, it was quiet inside. And at least it didn’t smell like a morgue. Just a standard hospital smell. He approached the wall of drawers and peered at the closest one. Near the handle there were a cluster of LEDs, presumably to show the status of the refrigeration. Under them was a digital label with a long central filing index reference. Kaspar pulled tentatively at the handle and the drawer slid out smoothly to its full extent with barely a sound.

He was right. There was a body inside.

But it wasn’t dead.

The occupant of the drawer wasn’t a corpse but a patient. This one was a man, naked and fully plumbed in with tubes, catheters, drips and electrodes attached to various parts of his body. He was motionless apart from the slow rise and fall of his chest, but his eyes were open and his eyeballs were scanning rapidly back and forth – like someone in a dream. But there was something strange about his eyes. Kaspar bent down for a closer look, only to recoil, shocked. The man’s eyes were open and would remain so, permanently. He had no eyelids.

Looking down the body, there were numerous fresh scars where there had obviously been major surgery. Kaspar was about to close the drawer again when something made him walk down to the man’s feet and look at him the right way up.

A shock of recognition made Kaspar gasp. This was the black guy he’d encountered outside the level three comms node in Wissant Avenue. What had happened to him? Why was he in such a state?

During the attack, Kaspar had knocked the guy out cold. But he would have sworn that the man was
completely uninjured when the medics picked him up. Now he had scars everywhere.

And what the hell had happened to his eyelids?

Kaspar slid the drawer closed and looked at the long number. Now it made some sense. The first bit of the number consisted of a date and a time – about an hour after his encounter with the Insurgent. And the rest of the number? Kaspar had a hunch. He activated his CommLink, switched it to data mode and said, ‘864 Wissant Avenue.’

The screen of his HUD immediately displayed the quickest route for getting there and also displayed its exact coordinates. The coordinates matched the rest of the digits on the drawer.

Kaspar checked the labels on the front of the other drawers surrounding him. One had almost the same numbers on it. Kaspar opened the drawer. It was the second guy from Wissant Avenue that he’d knocked out but he was the same state. Tubes everywhere, scars all over his body and no eyelids. Kaspar checked some of the other drawers. A number had earlier dates. Quite a few were from the date of the Academy’s graduation ceremony. These drawers contained the Insurgents from the attack on the Academy. But why were they all in medical stasis? Why hadn’t they been shipped off to the maximum security holding facility?

Curious, he pulled open another drawer. A woman this time, but apart from the gender it was exactly the same story. Tubes, multiple scars, rapid eye movements and no eyelids.

What is it with the eyelids? Kas wondered. Could it be some kind of secret side effect of being zapped?

Kaspar thought back to the attack. Gina and Mikey had caught a guy who had tried to escape by jumping in the lake, and rather than risk him drowning when they zapped him they had jumped in after him and wrestled him out of the water next to the statue of Virtue Triumphant.

Kaspar used the zoom facility on his CommLink to locate the statue, and its coordinates appeared. He scanned the room for a drawer with the appropriate date, time and location.

‘Eureka!’ He found the drawer he wanted and pulled it open. But his elation turned to confusion as he looked at the man. Kaspar shut the drawer slowly. He knew from his friends that not only had this man been uninjured when he was picked up, but he’d been conscious too.

So how the hell did he end up here, scarred, on life support, and with no eyelids?

On his way out, Kaspar looked into a couple of the other rooms. They were all the same. Insurgents neatly stacked from floor to ceiling. Some of them had dates going back thirty years, and not one eyelid between them.

Kaspar was sitting on bone-dry grass. He stared off into the distance. He loved it up here so much – it provided the best view in the whole world. A stream meandered past the back of the cottage. To the far north lay more glens and hills, but a turn of his head and beyond the horizon  . . .

That was where
they
resided.

He made no attempt to dampen down the burning hatred gnawing away at him.

It shouldn’t’ve been this easy to feel like this about people he didn’t know, but with each passing moment the feeling grew rather than lessened. They didn’t understand peace and they certainly didn’t understand compromise. Theirs was an ‘if you’re not one of us, to hell with you’ philosophy. Children, women, newborn babes, it made no difference.

Kaspar deliberately turned away to try and drink in the serenity of the cottage and the surrounding greenery. But his eyes were constantly drawn back towards the horizon. And like a fire being stoked, his hatred flared and grew. Moments passed before he realized what he was doing,
clutching at the grass beneath his hands and pulling it out of the ground in clumps.

His hands  . . .

Those weren’t his hands.

The hands he was looking down at were smaller, more feminine and considerably paler than his own brown skin. But Kaspar barely had time to notice and wonder before a tremor shook the ground beneath him. This one was bad, worse than any of the others that had gone before.

And it was getting worse.

Kaspar leaped up. He had to get off this hill. Get away. But to where?

He raced down towards the cottage. Nowhere was safe once they started running their experiments. Sometimes, if they were lucky, the ground only shook for a few hours. But sometimes, and more often than not of late, the aftershocks lasted for days. Crops, dwellings, people had all disappeared once the fissures in the earth opened wide to roar in protest. And the strength of the last few tremors had shaken the cottage to its foundations, causing plaster and chunks of the wall to fall. The thatch of the roof had split in places and no longer sat true on the cottage walls. The numerous cracks and gaps in the walls and roof meant the wind howled around the cottage like a banshee, and when it rained they had precious little protection.

Lost homes, lost lives, lost souls – all thanks to
them
.

One day  . . . one day, he would make them pay  . . .

Kaspar had never been one for dreaming. While his schoolmates had enjoyed or endured vivid dreams of surreal intensity, he had never been able to remember anything in the morning. Once or twice he had had the standard naked-in-public nightmare when a big exam or something stressful was coming up, but for the most part, nothing. All that had changed with Dillon’s death. Every night now, he had vivid dreams that employed every one of his senses. Intense, three-dimensional, surround-sound dreams. And the dreams weren’t just about Grandma and the cottage.