The Man Who Sold His Son (Lanarkshire Strays) (15 page)

26

“And here, this is where the main lab is?” Rob asked, pointing from their vantage point out to the building a hundred feet or so away. Sarah nodded.

“Yeah. I strolled right into the main campus. There’s nobody around, but even if there had been I’m just another face on site. There are so many residences on the compound, there’s no way everyone knows everyone.”

Tom shot her a look of disapproval.

“I say, we just stroll in and open the door,” Sarah said, deadly serious.

“I agree,” Rob said softly. He reached into his rucksack and pulled out a pair of Glocks: a G42 for Sarah and a G41 for Tom.

“What the fuck is this?” Tom hissed.

“Well we call these guns, Thomas,” Rob said, with a grin.

“Get tae fuck, Robert. What the hell are you thinking?” Tom shoved the pistol back at his friend.

“I’m thinking that we’re going into an environment where anything could happen. We don’t know how many people are present. We don’t know if any of them are armed, or military, or aggressive. It could be an island full of science geeks or full of mercenaries. We need the weapons, it’s as simple as that.” Rob handed the pistol roughly back.

“Dick,” Tom spat, reaching for his gun.

“What about yours, Rob?” Sarah asked.

“Never used them,” Rob replied, turning away to scan the immediate area. Tom shook his head and stuffed his pistol into his belt.

“You ever shot one of those?” he asked Sarah. She shook her head.

“Fuck sake, Robert,” he muttered, before running Sarah through how to operate and hold the smaller gun Rob had given her.

Rob glanced back at them. “She’s fine, Tom. Point and shoot, just like a fuckin’ camera. S’easy.”

Tom shot daggers at him but stayed quiet and finished his brief tutorial with Sarah.

“Guys, look,” Rob whispered.

Seconds earlier an orange light had blossomed in a window of the main lab.

Sarah shot across to stand next to Rob, tucking her pistol into her belt as she went.

“Is that a fire?” she asked.

“Yes. In the main lab,” Robert replied.

Thirty seconds later they reached a door.

Finding it locked, Sarah began to panic. More people would notice and come to tackle the blaze. Their narrow window of opportunity just became a keyhole. Rob moved her aside gently and shoved hard at the door with his shoulder. Sarah watched as the big man leaned in and ripped it free from the frame, swinging the door inwards. Tom grinned.

“Should’ve seen what he could do in his youth.”

“So he told me,” Sarah said flatly, and led them through the door into the main lab.

Sarah rounded a dog-leg turn in the corridor and came skidding to a halt at the entrance to the main lab. The entire lab was ringed by a roaring circle of orange and blue flame. The fire was clinging to the walls, workbenches, cabinets and incubators filled with specimens of God knows what. Sarah put her forearm up to shield her eyes which had already begun to stream tears in reaction to the fumes.

Tom and Rob came behind her and peered into the flames.

“Shit,” said Rob. He stepped in front of Sarah. “I can see them. Stay here you two.” Rob stepped into the room but felt a tug at his arm. It was Tom.

“Robert. You can’t do this sort of thing anymore; you’re not the man you used to be. You’ll die in there. Let’s go and wait for whatever passes for a fire service around here to arrive.”

Rob turned and smiled at him. The smile never reached his eyes, which were filled with fear, not humour. “If I don’t go in there, right now, your grandson will die.”

Tom’s hand fell away from his best friend. He turned his eyes to the ground. Were he in Robert’s shoes, had he Robert’s physical gifts – even in old age he was a strong, agile man – if he had the man’s skill, he’d do the same for his best friend’s family.

“Thank you, Robert.” He kissed the big man on his cheek, then, feeling like a coward, he told him, “Go.”

Robert grinned again, a real one this time. The bastard was enjoying himself.

“I’ll be fine. I promise.” With a wink he disappeared into the smoke-filled laboratory leaving Sarah and Tom coughing in his wake.

Alex felt an impulse rack his exhausted body, sending another spasm of intense pain through his damaged neurones. He felt the unendurable pain travel along his chest and down his spine. Unable to respond to it, he merely observed as it travelled to his toes and left as quickly as it had come. The pain reminded him he that he still existed and that he had a purpose. He would change the world for the better if only his immune system would cooperate with him.

Alex focused on the voices around him in the room. He’d heard a roaring noise and then Gayle’s voice, less muffled than it had been, telling him she was sorry. Heat? Was that heat? Suddenly his bed jerked and it was moving. Heat – it
was
heat – roared intensely all around, but only for a second. Almost immediately he passed beyond it into a cooler area.

 
Other people were moving around his bed, talking, discussing him. Wondering aloud if he could hear them. He tried to respond many times to no avail.

Gayle’s voice. Voices that sounded like Sarah’s and his grandfather’s. Impossible, a dream, but a nice one at least. Part of him was ready to go somewhere else, now he’d heard them. Not yet, though. He had
his
face to cling to. Alex fixed his mind’s eye on the memory of the eleven-year-old face of his son and clung to life tightly. He indulged the stray thought that the voices he heard really did belong to his family instead of strangers.

Would his own father be waiting for him? He could barely remember the man’s face. Would Sarah and Tommy be able to manage alone? Alex couldn’t see her, but Sarah sounded well. Would his passing devastate young Tommy the way his own father’s had done to him, or had the boy, the young man, got used to Alex absence? He couldn’t know. He didn’t want to know. He held tighter to the voices.
Granda, speak again, it’s so good to hear you.

He was being moved along a corridor. The lights overhead flashed through his eyelids. Suddenly the gurney stopped and the sounds of gunfire began.

Suddenly all pain was gone. He could move again, he could think again. He was free of the dulling effect of the morphine. He was free, period. As he drifted away, he felt breath and heard Sarah’s voice whispering into his ear, “We’ve got you. We’ve got you. Stay with us, Alex. Don’t leave me.”

Gayle sat in the large chair next to Alex’s bed listening to the flames crackle and pop. She was present in the moment, here with Alex. But she was somewhere else as well. Straddling both places she was aware that she had made a decision for both of them. She was aware that it was a poor choice, but, in an ocean of poor choices, it was the least damaging.

The part of her that sat with Alex had a bottle of ether nearby. That Gayle planned to put both of them to sleep whist the lab fell around them.

The other part of her had flashed back to the very last moment she’d felt this same way. That Gayle sat in an almost identical rom, in an almost identical chair, listening to her infant son, her three-year-old. Blond, green eyes, a proper full-on rascal, full of mischief, covered in bruises, skinned knees, smiles and love.

That part was still reliving how she’d fallen downstairs with her son in her arms as she blew raspberries on his neck. That part made the same decision the other Gayle – the one who sat holding Alex’s hand and a bottle of ether – was making now. This time, she’d do it right. This time, she was going with both of her boys.

Gayle’s hand began to twist at the bottle’s cap when a roar of heat blasted through the door, then a gentle voice spoke to her.

“You don’t need that, darlin’. It’s time to go home.”

Gayle leapt from her seat in pure shock. “Leave us alone, just get out of here,” she screamed.

The man was huge. He looked in his sixties, but able, and moved with power in his muscles. Gayle was terrified for herself and for Alex.

“Tell Ennis he’s not getting a damn thing from this lab, or from this man.” Gayle raised the hand holding the bottle and threw it straight at the man’s face. She watched as though in slow motion as the bottle sailed towards the huge man. She watched his hand move calmly to catch it in mid-air, as easily as lucking an apple from a tree. He smiled a genuinely warm smile and set the bottle gently on a nearby worktop.

“Professor Robertson?” he asked.

Gayle nodded stiffly.

“In a few minutes’ time, maybe less than a minute, our route out of here will be gone. We’ll be trapped, all three of us. You and me and that handsome young man over there who you’re fighting so hard to protect will die, and I won’t be able to do a thing to stop it.”

Gayle stole a glance at Alex, passively still as he’d been for the last thirty-odd hours.

She turned back to the smiling face of the large man. “I won’t let him be an experiment for that man.”

The big man stopped smiling and looked deep into her eyes; sincerity poured from him. “Neither will I. Nor will his wife, or his grandfather. Both of them are here with me. That young man over there deserves to be with his family again. Like I said, we’re here to take you home. Let’s go home, Professor.”

He reached out with open palms.

“He’s infectious,” she blurted.

“Never mind about that now. Come on.”

Still trapped between the past and the present, Gayle could barely comprehend that this was a friend. She gave him a single curt nod and was immediately swept up in his arms. He wrapped her in a thick fire blanket, whispering reassurances the whole time. She was pliant and cooperative, totally in his care.

The man stacked all of Alex’s life-preserving machines around him on the gurney and unpacked another two fire blankets he’d dragged from their stations on the wall and threw them over the pile of machines and man. He then helped Gayle up onto the bed and tucked her tightly into her protective cocoon.

“See you in a second.” He smiled at her calmly, like he’d done this kind of thing a hundred times before, then covered her face and swept the gurney out of the little makeshift ward through the flames and out into the corridor.

Gayle felt his strong hands lift her to standing on the cool tiled floor of the corridor and then unwrap her. She kept her eyes closed for a second after the blanket left her face and said a silent prayer that Alex’s family really was here for them.

Sarah stood back as Rob whooshed straight out of the blaze, with only a fire blanket partly covering his frame for protection, through the doors and a short way along the corridor. He pushed a gurney full of equipment with a figure sitting atop and came to a stop, throwing his blanket onto the floor and patting some smouldering part of his shoulder. She watched him help a lady from the protective shell. She recognised Professor Robertson instantly and let out a loud laugh of disbelief. The Professor spun around in response and stared intently at her, clearly recognising her face also. Then she passed out, hitting the tiles with a thump.

As Robert tended to the Professor, Sarah took a few steps toward the gurney with Tom by her side. She almost didn’t want to lift the blankets back. Tom gripped her hand.