Trauma (41 page)

'Good God,' said Sarah.

A sudden whirring noise startled them. 'What is it.' asked Sarah, her voice betraying panic.

'A lift!' replied Lafferty, suddenly realising what the
sound was. He caught a glimpse of light coming from a
slight crack in one of the wall panels. Pulling Sarah out
of the way, he indicated that she get under the bench.
As soon as she was hidden, he joined her. A few seconds
later they heard the lift come to a halt and the wall panel
slide back.

Lafferty couldn't see who got out, only that it was a
man, and he was wearing white surgical trousers and short,
white rubber boots. The man crossed the lab and let out
an oath when he reached the door to the corridor and
saw the burst lock. 'Jesus H. Christ!' he exclaimed and
then started running along the corridor.

'We're trapped!' said Sarah.

'Come on!' said Lafferty.

'But where?'

Lafferty indicated the lift and pulled Sarah towards it.

'If he's going to search the basement we can beat him to
the front door!'

He slid open the door to the lift and they got in. The
lift was long and narrow. Lafferty didn't have to be a
genius to work out why. He pressed the 'up' button and
nothing happened. He pressed it again and then four times rapidly in succession. Still nothing. He looked around for
some kind of brake switch or emergency button that might
have been holding the car, but there was none. There was
only one other button. It had a down arrow on it. In desperation, he pressed it and the lift door slid shut. He
looked at Sarah with amazement on his face as they both
realised that they were going down. They had got on in the basement but they were definitely going down!

Sarah let her head slump forward on to Lafferty's chest
and he shared her dejection.

Lafferty broke away from Sarah and bunched his fists
in readiness. He had no idea what to expect when the
lift doors opened, but he was going to go down fighting. The doors slid back to reveal nothing more sinister than a
plain, green-painted wall. They stepped out into a narrow
corridor leading to two swing doors. There was no point in
going back up in the lift. It did not reach the upper floors. It simply connected the Sigma lab to this sub-basement. The long narrow car had been designed to carry coffins.
The missing bodies did not go off to some fancy private
clinic; they obviously came here.

Sarah looked first through the glass in the swing doors
and let out her breath in a low whistle. Lafferty took a
look and saw what seemed to him a unit very much like
HTU. It was lit with low green lighting and each bed
was surrounded with life-support machinery. The patients
were enclosed by inflated plastic bubbles.

There did not seem to be any staff around, so Lafferty
and Sarah went in through the doors and approached the
nearest bubble. 'Oh my God,' said Sarah, putting her hand
to her mouth. 'It's John's son! It's Simon Main!'

'But he's dead!' exclaimed Lafferty. 'What's he doing
here?'

'They're all dead,' said Sarah, looking up the line.
'Brain dead. But their bodies are still being kept ventilated
and nourished.'

They moved on to the next bubble and found Martin Keegan. Pumps and relays clicked and hissed perpetual life into him.

'I don't understand,' said Lafferty. 'What's the point of
it all? If they are all brain dead, why keep them on the
machines?'

'I'm not sure,' whispered Sarah. 'Maybe this will tell us
something.' She had seen a plastic clip-board hanging on
the wall between the two bays. She lifted it off its hook and read,
'MAIN. CHALLENGE DOSE
5, VARICELLA ZOSTER, 10.7 PFU
per ml.'

'Mean anything?' asked Lafferty.

Sarah nodded thoughtfully and turned the page.
'KEEGAN,
PROTECTION I, PRIMARY COMPLETE
,
SECONDARY +2, CHALLENGE 1 DUE +14. H.
SIMPLEX.'

'Well?' prompted Lafferty.

They are using these people as human cell cultures,'
said Sarah, not hiding her distaste. 'Their bodies are being
used as laboratory animals.'

'What do you mean?'

'Viruses won't grow outside living cells,' said Sarah.
'To work with them in the lab you need some kind
of cell culture system to keep them alive. This usually
takes the form of a tissue culture system - usually animal
cells growing artificially in glass bottles with some kind
of liquid nutrient. It's not as good as using human cells but the availability of human cells is, of course, limited
- and they don't survive well in artificial culture anyway.
They tend to die off after a few days.'

'But if you use a whole person
..."
said Lafferty, looking
down at Martin Keegan.

'Precisely,' said Sarah. 'They're using whole bodies as
living tissue cultures for viruses.'

'But what for?' asked Lafferty.

'The record cards suggest that Simon Main's body
has been immunised with the
Herpes
vaccine and been
challenged five times with the virus, the last time with
Varicella zoster.'

'And Martin Keegan?'

'I think the code means that he has just been given
his primary dose of vaccine. He still has to get a second
injection in two days and then he will be challenged with
Herpes simplex
virus in fourteen days' time.'

'My God,' said Lafferty, his voice betraying the revul
sion he felt. 'This is repulsive.'

'This must be how they developed and tested their
vaccine so quickly,' said Sarah. They were using a human model from the beginning, so there was no need for small animal tests followed by time-consuming, expensive tests
on primates.'

'But surely the Department of Health must have asked
questions?' asked Lafferty. 'If they granted a licence for
the vaccine they must have known how it was developed
and tested?
^’

'You would think so,' said Sarah.

There must have been paperwork, surely?'

Sarah said quietly, ‘The government put up half the
money for the Head Trauma Unit.'

'Good God,' whispered Lafferty as he saw what she was
suggesting. 'They knew all along what was happening to
these people.'

'Just another case of the end justifying the means.'

'It's incredible!'

'I remember my father telling me of the anguish that
ran through the medical profession after the full extent
of the Nazi medical experiments became known after the war. All that pain and suffering with people in the camps
being subjected to nightmarish experiments. And all in
the cause of advancing medical science. But the worst
thing, he said, was not the fact that people who called
themselves doctors had carried out such atrocities, it
was the awful fact that they
had
advanced medical
knowledge. In doing the unspeakable they achieved
what normal researchers would have taken ten times
as long to accomplish. It seemed somehow like a
..."

'Triumph of evil,' said Lafferty.

'Yes,' agreed Sarah.

'Evil does triumph sometimes,' said Lafferty. 'The
important thing is to continue recognising it as evil,
and not to start crediting it as being anything else. And
this,' he said looking around him, 'is evil.'

The sound of raised voices coming from the far end
of the room interrupted them and brought home the
hopelessness of their position. Lafferty looked around
then pointed to the bed on which Martin Keegan lay.
'Get under!' he whispered.

Sarah slid under the bed and Lafferty followed with a
great deal more awkwardness. He found his face pressed up
against a glass tank that was receiving the waste products
from Keegan's body. The voices were getting louder and
they could now hear what was being said.

Murdoch Tyndall's voice said angrily, ‘This can't go
on, Sotillo. We'll have to delay introduction of the
vaccine.'

'Nonsense!' replied Sotillo. 'It's a chance in a million
reaction. We can't let just one isolated case ruin the whole
project. There's too much at stake.'

'But we don't know that it's just one case, Sotillo,'
protested Tyndall. 'We don't have enough figures.'

The two men had stopped in front of Martin Keegan's
bed. Lafferty could see by their feet that they were facing
each other.

'Look!' said Sotillo. ‘This is no time to get cold feet.
There's always a risk with any kind of vaccination. We've
just had a bit of bad luck, that's all.'

'And what happens if it isn't just a bit of bad luck?'
argued Tyndall. 'I say we call a halt until we know
for sure.'

'No!' said Sotillo. 'We go ahead as planned.'

Lafferty saw one pair of feet turn and head for the lift
corridor. The other pair followed, Tyndall continuing
to argue.

'What was all that about?' whispered Lafferty to Sarah.

'Sounds like something has gone wrong with the
vaccine,' replied Sarah. 'Did you see where they came
from?'

'Somewhere up the top end,' replied Lafferty, moving
his head in the direction of the far end of the room.

'Maybe there's a way out up there?' suggested Sarah.

'Let's see.'

They slid out from under the bed and hurried up to
the head of the room which was in deep shadow. They
found a narrow passage to their left where they deduced Tyndall and Sotillo must have come from. Lafferty led the way cautiously along it, keeping his back against the wall
and peering out slowly when they came to a right-angled turning. His heart sank when he saw the passage end in a
door marked, ISOLATION SUITE. He straightened up and Sarah joined him at his side. 'No way out,' he said.

‘
Try the door,' said Sarah.

Lafferty nodded, recognising that they had nothing to
lose by going on. There was no way out behind them save
for the lift. The thought made him realise that Tyndall
and Sotillo must have been told of the break-in by now. He pushed the door in front of him and it clicked open. The room was in darkness, but he could hear the now
familiar sound of a life-support machine and could see
the coloured LEDs blinking on the control panels. He
felt along the wall to his right with an open palm and
found the light switch.

The room contained one life-support bay, similar to
the ones outside, but before Lafferty or Sarah could take
a look at the patient lying there, they heard the sound
of loud voices and Lafferty turned out the light again.

'They must know we're down here!' whispered Sarah
urgently.

'Maybe not,' replied Lafferty. 'Maybe they're checking
just in case. Get under the bed!'

Sarah got down on the floor in the darkness and crawled
across to where she remembered the end of the bed was.
Lafferty followed and urged her to hurry as the voices
grew louder.

'I can't!' said Sarah. 'There are some boxes in the way!
There's no room!

'Try going in from the side!' urged Lafferty.