Hell's Teeth (Phoebe Harkness Book 1) (2 page)

4

I left Griff and Lucy the glamorous job of mopping up the gore while Trevelyan all but picked me up by my ear and dragged me to the other end of the lab like a bad-tempered PE teacher.

“What the hell is going on, Harkness?” she demanded to know in a stage whisper hiss that I knew full well my team would be listening to. “Cabal is going live with these results tomorrow, and we have test subjects exploding all over the fucking place? Jesus!”

I leaned backwards out of her coffee breath. “Servant Trevelyan, Epsilon has tested stable at every level for the last four months,” I began, trying to sound reassuring. “This is clearly an anomaly, but I’m really not going to have an answer for you until I get a chance to run some samples. I’m not sure what else you want me to say.”

Trevelyan’s nostrils flared. “Stable?” she repeated. “Stable? You think your vaccine is stable? In case you’re confused about what has happened here tonight, Doctor, you have just painted the walls of this room red with your miracle cure. How is that in any way stable? And I think exploding bodies and organs are more than a bloody ‘anomaly’!”

I held up my hands in frustration. “Epsilon is not a cure. It’s not even a vaccine, it’s … or rather it will be, when we figure it out … a retardant. An inhibitor. The idea is to control the genetic branching, not reverse it. There’s no bioscience in the world that can turn a monkey into a fish, and you’re not going to turn the Pale back into people either…” Sometimes my supervisor’s shaky grasp on what my research actually entailed terrified me.

Trevelyan pinched the bridge of her nose. “Harkness, I don’t care if it’s a cure, an inhibitor, or magical snake oil. What I care about is that Cabal have ploughed a huge budget into your pet side project here at Blue Lab, and so far, the only decent results we have are Gamma strain, which seems to paralyse the fuckers temporarily, and Epsilon, which was supposed to have significant results in time for tomorrow’s meeting.”

“Gamma was abandoned,” I argued. “It didn’t work. It’s not a very effective inhibitor if it causes prolonged spasms followed by bouts of catatonic immobility. My work here is supposed to stop further mutation and enable some level of reintegration into society. I don’t appreciate the fact that you seem to think that weaponising its negative side effects is a good plan.”

I pushed away from the table and crossed to my databank, logging onto my files with a swipe of my hand across the screen. God bless whichever tech-wizards fitted out the computer systems at Blue Lab – I think they may previously have worked on Star Trek. At home I have trouble operating the TV timed-recorder, but here in the lab I can totally Captain Janeway my way through the day.

Then I noticed Trevelyan was following me. Pursuing might be a more accurate term.

“And Epsilon?” she pressed.

“Well, clearly not as stable as we’d hoped,” I admitted grudgingly, flicking a glance over her shoulder to where Griff was on his knees with a blood-soaked mini mop. “If I can’t get it to level out, I’m sure you can pass it off to the military as another bio-weapon gem. I can see the marketing now: ‘We can’t help or aid the afflicted, but we can blow them to pieces. All thanks to Blue Lab’.” I flicked through my electronic file notes from the previous day’s testing. Graphs and figures flew across the screen in rapid succession. There must be something in here to explain such a reaction.

“Maybe if you give me a week … I need to run further tests, bloodwork on what remains of Angelina, find out what caused the exothermic combustion.”

“You don’t have a week,” my boss told me, looming over the screen. “The presentation is tomorrow. I am going to have to go into a hall filled not only with the Cabal representatives but also face the press and the public. I need something to tell them.”

My eyes flicked up from my screen. Tomorrow’s meeting was public? Well, this was news. “Why are Cabal going public already?” I asked. “We don’t have any definitive results yet.”

“They trust we do,” Trevelyan growled. She gave me a significant look from beneath her beetling brow. Her arse was on the line, it said. Which implied that my own was dangling precariously over the edge.

“Then they are going to be disappointed,” I said, mustering my best sympathetic face. “I mean, we can be honest and tell them research is ongoing, that we are making progress…”

“Explosive progress,” Griff’s voice called out from across the lab, safely hidden as he was behind the cubicle of gore. I hated him slightly for a moment.

“Cabal don’t want to see a report card for Blue Lab saying that we are all doing well in class and playing well with others, Harkness,” Trevelyan snapped. “They want updates, they want successful animal tests. They want positive and measurable results. And the public want to know that Cabal is looking after them, and making the world a safer place.”

Making the world a safer place? Please. I work for a government bio-chemistry unit, not Disney. My job is not PR. Cabal have their own spin-doctors for that. My urge to say this out loud was only just drowned out by my urge not to get fired and starve homeless on the streets.

Instead I hit a button on my touch screen, causing my DataStream report for the last 48 hours to print out swiftly and silently elsewhere at the other end of the office. Star Trek-inspired techno-wizards can do a lot of impressive things with lab computers, but no power on earth can ever put a printer conveniently near the workstation you are actually sat at. “I can give you what we’ve got so far. I can look into this … incident … and have the results on your desk by nine.”

“By seven.” Trevelyan turned and stormed out of the lab. “I want real results and hard data, because if I don’t have anything to take to them tomorrow night at this review, then your little vaccine project will have every penny of funding cut. Do you understand that, Harkness? It’s not my decision. They will close you down.” She clomped out of the vacuum doors with a resounding swoosh.

“It’s not a vaccine,” I muttered under my breath through gritted teeth.

Griff and Lucy both appeared after Trevelyan had gone, their heads poking out of the blood-spattered cubicle like nervous meerkats emerging tentatively in the calm after a thunderstorm.

“She was pissed off,” Griff said observantly.

“Would she really shut us down?” Lucy asked, looking worried.

“Ignore her,” I said rebelliously. “She’s annoyed because she has to go before the board tomorrow and she is going to be humiliated if all she can say is that we’ve figured out new and exciting ways to stun and kill rats. She doesn’t give a damn about the actual work we do here, she only cares if it reflects well on her in Cabal meetings.”

“I guess rats exploding don’t reflect well on anyone,” Griff said, peeling off his plastic apron, which was so red with gore it made him look like a modern day Jack the Ripper. “I think your boss believes advances in science are made by shouting loudly enough at scientists to make advances happen. Was she ever in the military?”

I smirked despite my mood. “Not as far as I know. Powerful family though. She’s a bureaucrat, not a scientist. She does make sure the money gets thrown our way though, so we need her to keep loving us as much as she does.”

Lucy, being an actual angel from heaven rather than a squeamish intern, had made coffee and brought me a steaming cup. “Is it true what she said about the aborted strains of the inhibitor?” she asked, concerned. “Gamma I mean. Do they really have plans to make that into a weapon against the Pale?”

I shook my head. “Only in her Rambo fantasies. Gamma isn’t stable enough to be weaponised, even if you could get that through the ethics committee. And besides, it’s my formula, and I wouldn’t release it anyway. Blue Lab isn’t military.” I took a sip of my coffee, picking up my printouts. Eighty nine pages of them. Oh happy, happy day. “Forget about Gamma anyway, that was a dead end. We need to go over everything and figure out where Epsilon is going wrong. And we need to do it by seven. Trevelyan needs to be able to tell the board some good news.”

Griff looked at his watch. “That’s three hours from now.”

Fuck
, I thought genteelly to myself. “I’ll throw in a lot of extra-sciencey words in my report. They’ll lap it up,” I said briskly. “Maybe a pie chart. Board members love pie charts.”

“Griff, I’m going to need your brain on these.” I handed him a sheaf of papers. “Run the numbers again, see what we missed, cross it with the DNA bank for subjects T1 to T11. All the rats, even Jennifer.”

He groaned, but quietly. I looked up to Lucy, who stared back at me wide-eyed and expectant.

“We will be needing a lot more coffee,” I told her.

5

It was close to midday when I stumbled back into my tiny flat on the other side of town. I had thrown together everything we could find on Epsilon, and had managed to find a reason behind the extreme reaction suffered by subject T10, otherwise known as Angelina, which handily could only be coherently expressed in pure maths. My boss couldn’t argue with that, and neither could the board members. The report had been on Trevelyan’s desk by 7.30. Oddly, she hadn’t been in her office. Her assistant, a dangerously-efficient woman called Melanie, whose pristine and immaculate appearance always managed to make me feel a slovenly helpless mess despite the fact that she was briskly pleasant, informed me that she hadn’t been in all day. I was slightly pissed by this, as I had been bracing myself in the elevator all the way up for the screaming and spittle. I’d planned and practised all of my rebuttals.

Now I discover that she must have gone straight home after leaving us in the lab, probably to go back to bed, leaving us all to sweat through the wee hours of the morning getting together a report which she wasn’t even here to look at, and didn’t actually need until the meeting this evening.

I’d left the report with the immaculately coiffed Melanie, trying my best not to hate the fact that she looked well-rested and stylishly turned out, unlike myself who hadn’t had time to brush my teeth before being dragged out of bed at three am. I resisted the urge to suggest she file it up Trevelyan’s arse, and politely complimented her brooch instead. She tried to compliment me in return, but the only adornments I was wearing were my swipe pass, on which I look like a washed out Russian figure skater turned crack whore (my own interpretation), and a biro in my hair.

Back home, after a mercifully long shower, and reassuring myself that, while I may not be a twenty year old PA with a tiny, gravity-defying arse and elfin smile, I at least have a double doctorate and a PHD, I had collapsed back into bed. The plan being to sleep the rest of the day away. With any luck I could sleep through the entire review tonight. Thank God I didn’t have to be there – that was Trevelyan’s problem. Griff and Lucy had been given the rest of the day off too. We would work on Epsilon tomorrow. Right now, I was freshly washed, smelling of mango soap, and drifting into blessed salacious daytime sleep. I had no plans to wake up again unless there was another exploding rat drama.

As things turned out, what happened was worse.

6

Good news in my life always seems to come by phone.

“Dr Harkness? It’s Melanie Potts again. Sorry to disturb your evening, but I’ve been instructed by the board to advise you that due to Director Trevelyan’s unwarranted absence, you are to give the Blue Lab report this evening at the college.”

Great. This is what I get for being the head of the bloodwork department. Just so we’re clear, even having ‘happy birthday’ sung to me by work colleagues makes me want to disappear into a hole in the ground, so this was hardly my idea of a calm and relaxing evening. I’m not a fan of the public eye. I mentally made notes to find inventive ways to make my boss suffer when she resurfaced from wherever the hell she had dropped off the map.

A couple of hours later, I stood in the wings of the oak panelled and venerable lecture theatre of the Pepys Library, waiting to go and face roughly a hundred expectant faces with a report which I had invented only hours earlier and which was mainly theoretical supposition. I should have just brought a rat and made it explode. Show and tell is always more entertaining.

“Why am I here again?” I asked Lucy, who was darting around in what I had mentally dubbed ‘backstage’, carrying my notes and reports. “I mean, I know why I’m here, that’s not a philosophical question; what I mean is, why specifically me?”

“Well, I guess until Director Trevelyan turns up, you’re the authority, Doc,” Lucy said. “Do you want me to get you a drink of water before you go on?” She looked genuinely worried for me, or possibly for herself. I was representing the entire department after all, whether I wanted to or not. I shook my head. “No, thanks. Vodka might have swayed me, for courage, but water, I will just need to pee halfway through.”

“You’ll do fine.” Lucy straightened my papers in my hand. “You look great, Doc. Very chic.” She smiled at me encouragingly. I thought for a moment she might punch me in the arm like a football coach.

We were in the Second Court at Magdalene College, in the lecture hall situated in the large lower ground floor of the Pepys. It was 7.30pm and I was about to deliver the Blue Lab findings and development to an audience of Cabal board members, fellow scientists, academics, the press and the public. Trevelyan had never gone AWOL before. I wondered if she were punishing me for being smart-mouthed earlier. I never did know when to know my place.

I had tried to look a little more professional that I had appeared this morning. I was wearing my most serious pantsuit in pale charcoal, and had swept my hair up into a sleek style I saw on some late night NBC show and now refer to as my ‘ice queen lady lawyer hair’. I looked every inch the professional and well turned out scientist, right down to the frameless glasses.

“Let’s just get this over with, and we can make the voodoo doll of Trevelyan when I get back,” I said.

I waited for my cue, being introduced by some professor of the college whose name had been told to me but which I had now completely forgotten. He was explaining Director Trevelyan’s sad absence this evening due to ill health, but reassuring the crowd that to present the findings he was honoured, truly honoured, to have the illustrious paratoxicologist currently spearheading the Blue Lab’s R&D program, Doctor Fiona Harkness.

I entered to applause, shook his hand on stage and took my place behind the podium, staring out at the lecture hall. It was packed. Tiers of seats like an amphitheatre rose around me on three sides. I had no idea who was who in the sea of faces which stared expectantly back up at me. I could tell where the press were, as they stood at the back of the lecture hall, up near the doors. TV had been given limited access, I saw. Channel Seven and the official Cabal network. I waited for the applause to die down, which it did very quickly, and leaned into the microphone.

“Phoebe,” I said quietly. It echoed and bellowed around the room, followed by a harpy like screech of feedback, which had several people wincing, including me.

Some invisible sound engineer made an adjustment somewhere, and I tried again.

“Sorry about that. It’s Phoebe, that’s all, not Fiona. Phoebe Harkness,” I clarified. Someone coughed in the audience. I shuffled my papers on the podium slightly.

“Thank you all for coming. Please bear with me as due to the … um … ill health of the good Servant Trevelyan, tonight’s report is coming straight from the horse’s mouth, as it were. It isn’t often that us lab rats have the chance to get out and face to face with our funding bodies, our academic peers and of course the public, so I will try to attempt to keep things as brief and as clear as possible for you all. No complicated and impenetrable paratoxicology terminology, I promise.”

There was a polite murmur of laughter at this, especially from the press at the back, which gave me a slight confidence boost.

I’d planned to begin with a little background on the Pepys Building itself. As I’ve said, I’m a history geek for anything pre-wars. I had a whole anecdote about Samuel Pepys and the Bibliotheca Pepysiana, but it withered under the expectant stares of the audience.

I skipped ahead in my notes. “We’re here in the Pepys,” I began. “A building which like so many others started off in a different city and ended up here, salvaged by New Oxford, saved from the wars. It’s a fitting place for our subject really, as included in the design of this great and accomplished place was the eminent architect and polymath Robert Hooke, whom I’m sure all of you, and indeed anyone connected with science, has heard of.”

Some nods. Good, I wasn’t the only person with an interest in humanity’s back-story then. Most folk in our brave new world only knew as much as the last hours DataStream told them.

“Robert Hooke was known for many things,” I continued, “… but he was perhaps best known for coining the idea of a biological cell. He discovered this back in 1665. Of course, discovery, while impressive, is not everything. The cell theory itself was developed from Hooke’s initial discovery much later in 1839 by Schleiden and Schwann, and it’s a remarkably simple theory.”

I pushed my glasses up the bridge of my nose and cleared my throat. “Cell theory states that all organisms are composed of one or more cells; that all cells come from pre-existing cells; that vital functions of an organism occur within cells, and that all cells contain the hereditary information necessary for regulating cell functions and for transmitting information to the next generation of cells. This we know. This we have known since the nineteen hundreds. It’s impressive, and it’s elegant in its simplicity, but it’s not what brings us here tonight.

“What we also know,” I continued, “… is that the more complex the organism, the more impressive and complicated the cell count. The cell is the basic structural and functional unit of all known living organisms. It is the smallest unit of life that is classified as a living thing – except of course a virus, which consists only from DNA and RNA covered by protein and lipids, so for the sake of expediency, we will skip viruses. The cell is often called the building block of life. Organisms can be classified as unicellular which means they basically consist of a single cell, bacteria for example, or else multicellular, which pretty much covered all plants and animals. Human beings contain about ten trillion cells. Just to put this in perspective for the work we are doing at Blue Lab, samples we have been able to take from the Pale indicate that their average cell count is roughly fifteen trillion.”

This got murmurs from certain parts of the audience. “I understand the immediate question is going to be, does this mean the Pale more evolved than us? More advanced? Are they perhaps the next stage of evolution? The simple answer is no … and yes.”

I seemed to have their attention. I wondered if there were any Church representatives in the audience. They were often rather vocal when it came to any public discussion of the Genetic Others.

“The Pale are certainly more complex structurally than we are, as are almost all of the Genetic Others we are working to understand,” I continued. “But to fully understand the Pale, perhaps it would be useful to remember why they exist in the first place. Where they came from. They did not evolve from humans. They were made, engineered, by humans. We created the Pale genetically, as a weapon. We manipulated their cells, we tampered with their DNA, their RNA, and we grew them, in layman’s terms, the first generation at any rate, in tubes. This is public knowledge. This is our history.”

The room was uncomfortable now. Hundreds of eyes trained on me. We all knew our history. Mankind’s legacy, how we created our own worst enemy by playing God.

I pressed on against the sea of silence. “And just as those who first used nuclear weapons back in the twentieth century had no idea they would be dealing with the radiation and the fallout for a great deal of time to come, so too those who came before us here today could not have known that their decision to create this breed of other would have far reaching implications for our own society.”

“Dr Harkness?”

The voice came from a woman in the third row. She was expensively middle aged, with a severe black bob of hair and wearing a plum-coloured suit, a choker of black jet like a net around her throat, and a mildly bemused expression.

“Veronica Cloves. I have a question from the board of Cabal,” she said crisply, lowering a gloved hand. “Forgive my seeming impudence, I am aware that this presentation has been somewhat thrust upon you at the last moment due to the Servant being indisposed, but usually the purpose of this meeting is to present the current research and development findings of your area.” She toyed with her choker with a polite smile that did not remotely reach her eyes. “It would seem that, though entertaining, Dr Harkness, you are presenting a history lecture.”

I knew her face of course, everyone did. Cabal may be our overlords and government, but they ensure they keep a very open and public face. No accusations of secrecy, no cloak and dagger nonsense. Cloves was their favourite figurehead. The PR queen. The people loved her like a celebrity.

“I thought that it would be useful to put our findings in context,” I explained. “Especially for the benefit of the wider public present here.”

“I understand your motivation, Dr Harkness,” the member of Cabal replied, again in a soft and polite voice which somehow managed to carry throughout the hall. “However, I think it fair to assume that we are aware of our history and of the issues surrounding the Pale and the Genetic Others, and the threats posed by them. Perhaps it would be more scientific for you to stick to the relevant facts at hand?”

As usual with the all-powerful Cabal, it was an instruction presented as a suggestion. Veronica Cloves’ make up was too pale, her skin just ever so slightly too tight on her face. But she smiled like the nation’s sweetheart.

Usually, I would have been cowed merely by being under the scrutiny of someone so much higher in the food chain that Trevelyan. Maybe it was the lack of sleep that made me argumentative, but her words riled me.

“I feel I should make a distinction on your comment regarding the Pale and the Genetic Others, before I continue in any fashion,” I said. “You cannot simply lump them all together as a ‘threat’.”

I made quotation marks in the air … God help me. “The Pale are creatures we created. They carry the condition we seek to cure. The bloodlust, the inherent violent tendencies, the danger they pose to society – they are all our doing. The others, the group we have deemed to class together as Genetic Others, are not of our making.”

Veronica Cloves’ expression had frozen in a tight smile. Her eyes were murderous. “We are here to discuss the Pale, Dr Harkness. Not the current issues with … other things.”

“But it is exactly the mentality you just exhibited which is counter-productive to the work we are trying to achieve,” I replied, trying not to sound exasperated. I addressed the room at large, part of my mind half-expecting Cabal to take me out right there and then with a well-placed sniper.

“When the wars came, and we created the Pale, we lost control of them. We had literally created a monster, and it turned on us. A new war began which humanity almost lost, let’s not forget that. Almost a third of our population was lost in the thirty years which followed. Our society was very nearly not here at all. It was only then, when our total dominion over the world was no longer so certain, that the Genetic Others came forward. When they came into the light, as it were, and for the most part, they came to our aid.”

“Can you elaborate, Doctor?” came a question from one of the press officers at the rear of the hall. “You’re talking about the vampires, right?”

A ripple of noise rolled through the crowd. I raised my hands. “This is the distinction I am trying to make clear,” I said. “We do not call them vampires. But … yes, all of the … others, who had always lived hidden within our human society came forward. Many types of Genetic Other, not just the ones the media have called vampires, types of being we had no idea we had been sharing our planet with, they all made themselves known – to combat a common enemy, an enemy we had created, the Pale.” I looked back to Veronica Cloves, who was still staring at me tight lipped. I think if she could have stood up and shot me dead right there and then, she wouldn’t have hesitated. I had a giddy mental image of her standing and pulling a silver pistol from a stocking garter. “These Genetic Others, the ‘vampires’ if you will, and the ones who call themselves the Tribals, the Bonewalkers, and who knows how many others, they helped humanity repel the genetic horror of the Pale, murderous creatures we had brought upon ourselves. Their world was in danger as well as ours. They couldn’t stay in the shadows anymore, not with the Pandora’s Box we had opened. And afterwards? When we had won, in a fashion … when we were rebuilding our cities and countries, what were left of them, putting the shreds of our civilisation back together? Well, let’s be honest, after the war, well, the cat was pretty much out of the bag. We share our world with all these creatures now, and we cannot make the generalisation that they are all a danger, as the Pale are, when the groups could not be more distinct.”