Instinct (2010) Read online

  After a minute had passed, Garrett muttered that it wasn’t working, that if anything was going to happen it would have done so by now. Van Arenn ignored her and continued to stare through the toughened Perspex.

  A minute later, Van Arenn whispered again into his mouthpiece.

  ‘We are holding still, copy?’

  Without taking his eyes off the screen, Webster replied.

  ‘Copy. Affirmative Van Arenn. Hold –’

  A wasp fell from its hole and on to the desk below.

  ‘Van Arenn, Garrett, did you see that? Over.’

  ‘Copy, Major. The wasp fell. Do you want us to go in now or hold back?’

  It was a tough question. They could see from its twitching legs and antennae that the wasp definitely wasn’t dead. And was this a one-off, or was the same thing happening to the others in the nest? Would this be the optimum time to strike, or would the two soldiers leave themselves open to attack from other wasps deeper inside? If they continued to wait, would the fallen wasp regain consciousness?

  That was the call of one person in the monitor room, one person who desperately wanted this plan to work so that the pressure to shut down the entire facility would disappear. Bishop felt eyes turning in his direction. The loss of further soldiers on his word would be disastrous. He needed more to go on.

  Just as he was thinking this over, he received a lifeline: a second wasp dropped. It was closely followed by a third and a fourth.

  ‘Send them in,’ said Bishop, as if he had been expecting this outcome all along.

  ‘Van Arenn, Garrett.’

  ‘Copy, Major.’

  ‘We are going to commence the notebook retrieval ASAP. One of you stays on this side of the door unless the situation becomes critical.’

  ‘Roger that.’

  ‘I will count down ten seconds to the opening of the door, roger?’

  ‘Roger that,’ replied Van Arenn, taking another look through the window. The wasps were continuing to fall.

  ‘OK. And don’t forget your mask. In ten … nine …’ Garrett moved further away from the door to give Van Arenn the room he needed to spring forward as fast as possible.

  ‘… Eight … seven … six …’

  The blood in Van Arenn’s head pumped louder and louder until it was drowning out the countdown.

  ‘Five … four … three.’

  He pulled the mask down over his face and crouched ready, like a sprinter on the starting block.

  ‘Two … one … and open!’

  The doors parted with a soft electronic sucking noise, and within a second Van Arenn had cleared the entrance.

  He ignored the giant wasps twitching on their backs and burst through to the other side of the room.

  There was the book, wedged between the hard drive and the monitor of Heath’s computer. He jostled them apart and snatched it into his hand. Five more seconds and it would be mission accomplished.

  Turning his back to the door, he felt a large, soft weight fall on to the top of his mask, and fear blasted through him like the nitrogen that was pumping out above his head.

  What was that? A wasp? Was it alive? Properly alive and moving in for the kill?

  It rolled off him and on to the floor. He looked down to see its pencil-thick legs scrabbling over his feet.

  Van Arenn paused to decide whether or not he had to defend himself.

  As he did so, two more shapes of yellow and black crept into his peripheral vision.

  It had only been a couple of seconds since he grabbed the book, but he knew now that he had to cover the twenty feet to the door at speed.

  His muscles snapped into position to run like hell but in that moment another weight grazed down the back of his mask.

  He would have continued his run, but whatever had fallen on him had only dropped as far as his shoulder. He felt six small scratches, like cat’s claws, on his back and neck.

  At the door he could see Garrett screaming at him to get out of there, and he knew what he had to do. But then he felt something else: a thin, hot spike slid under his right shoulderblade and two grinding mandibles tore into the back of his neck.

  Garrett seemed to disappear into the distance. Her melting image throbbed in and out of focus, replaced by three furious wasps flying towards him and three more flying towards her.

  Raising his arm to defend himself, he succeeded only in loosening the clip of his mask. It clattered to the ground.

  His vision dissolved into a washed-out blur of light and dark shapes increasing in size. Standing was now too much effort, and with a half-hearted reluctance he fell dully to his knees.

  Back in the monitor room, Webster was yelling into his microphone, instructing Van Arenn to get out.

  ‘Get the fucking door shut!’ yelled Bishop.

  Webster ignored him and watched Garrett hunkered ready in the doorway as she prepared to face the insects speeding towards her.

  She knew that if she didn’t save herself, she wouldn’t be able to save Van Arenn, so she leapt up and slapped one of the wasps with a wide-palmed backhander. It collided with the other, leaving both of them dazed on the floor halfway between her and Van Arenn.

  A third moved in, buzzing around Garrett’s face, trying to get enough purchase to deploy its stinger somewhere, anywhere, on her body.

  Meanwhile, Van Arenn was lost, able to process the loosest of visuals but unable to comprehend what was happening to him. That was just as well: nobody wants to be conscious when three wasps are ripping chunks of meat from their thighs and chest. His veins and arteries loosened to allow a growing soup of blood and tissue to collect beneath him.

  Laura felt the cold horror reaching through her. ‘Oh my good God,’ she murmured, turning away.

  Three soon became four, five, six and seven as the fallen wasps shook off the effects of the cold and took to the new set of circumstances with merciless vigour.

  They quickly transformed Van Arenn’s face into little more than the front of a skull, decorated with torn morsels of what was left of his forehead.

  ‘Oh shit! Van Arenn!’ Webster knew his cry was pointless, but watching one of his good men die like this was too much for him to remain silent.

  Although the image before his eyes would never leave Webster’s memory, it was not the sight of the dripping gore that burrowed its way to the deepest part of him. More disturbing was the expression on Van Arenn’s face: calm and willing, apparently not in the least troubled that he was suffering a death of unimaginable horror.

  As Garrett parried the attempted thrusts of the third wasp, what was left of Van Arenn moved into her eyeline, sending a mixture of anguish, fury and her own strong instinct for survival flooding into her.

  She knew she had to get out of there immediately to have any chance, but something told her the only way she could leave this situation with any honour was to get that notebook. It would mean Van Arenn would not have died for nothing.

  Leaping upwards, she raised her fists and brought them together hard, the wasp in between.

  Although they did not meet perfectly, they were close enough to obliterate the front of the wasp’s abdomen and leave it spluttering like a helicopter with a busted tail-blade.

  This released its alarm pheromone. Instantly, Garrett had become the sole focus of all the anger, aggression and malice in the room.

  She knew what happened when you killed a wasp in the vicinity of others, but she had to get that notebook.

  Her face steeled in focus.

  ‘What the hell is she doing?’ asked Bishop.

  Laura had moved away from the others, and now stood at the back of the room, her hand over her mouth.

  Webster stared at the screen in dread. Was he going to watch another of his squad die?

  Then Garrett exploded forwards, running as fast as she could back into the lab.

  Her move wrong-footed
the wasps, and as she reached them, she dived on to the floor and tucked herself into a forward roll. By the time they knew where she was, she had grabbed the notebook and stuffed it inside her jacket.

  Refusing to look at the wasps, she closed her eyes, crouched into a ball again and hurled herself towards the door.

  For a second time she confused the wasps. Those who were smart enough to follow her collided with the ones who thought she was heading back into the room.

  Her roll took her to the other side of the door, but no one had been quick enough to shut it behind her.

  Looking up, she knew she was in trouble. This moment behind the open doors gave her time to take in the noise, the death and the terror that sped up her pulse even further.

  ‘Shut the fucking door!’ yelled Bishop. Webster suddenly realized he was closest to the button and slammed his hand down.

  The doors started to come together, but two wasps were right behind Garrett and closing fast.

  She turned just in time to see the nearest one. Grasping its wings, she wrapped her fingers around its compound eyes. She was shocked to see that it barely flinched, continuing the ferocious drive of its attack.

  And now the second wasp was almost upon her.

  She tightened her grip around the first one and used it to smack the other, sending them both flying back towards the entrance.

  As they regained their senses to attack again, the doors slid closed on both of them, one at the thorax, the other at the abdomen.

  A severed head dropped to the floor at Garrett’s feet, then another slid stickily downwards at the point where the doors met.

  The rest of the wasps flew against the door, their soft impacts giving her one last moment of fear before she shifted hastily backwards across the corridor.

  The emotions rose inside her like poisoned gas. She had no idea what she was supposed to do next. As each breath took her closer to tears, she shut her eyes tight and covered them with her arm.

  ‘Get out of there, Garrett!’ Bishop shouted into Webster’s mouthpiece. ‘I want you through the other doors so we can seal off the whole area. One thing goes wrong with that entrance and we’re back in the shit!’

  She didn’t react.

  ‘Garrett? Come through the outer doors now,’ coaxed Webster. ‘Garrett?’

  She was still staring at the door, ready for more of them to come for her. When she realized she was safe, she shut her eyes again, then reopened them to gaze with hatred at the camera pointing at her.

  They all felt the blame aimed in their direction. Ultimately it was the work of the scientists that had created this situation. Without them, Van Arenn would surely be alive.

  Garrett looked through the doors of the lab and saw two wasps picking clean the last of his bones. Then she looked down to study the remains of the insects crushed by the door. With a steady shake of her head, she slowly lifted her boot and brought it down on whatever was left, feeling immense satisfaction at grinding it to nothing but a stain.

  To her left she noticed a glob of sloppy innards which had landed a couple of feet into the corridor.

  She bent down, scooped it up and smeared it across the camera lens. The four people in the surveillance room recoiled.

  ‘Well, we will be requiring a sample,’ said Harry.

  Garrett then walked to the outer doors, waited for Webster to open them and stomped through without looking back.

  In the monitor room, stunned repulsion was all anyone could feel.

  ‘Jesus Christ,’ said Bishop, searching for a surface to lean on as he retched.

  24

  Van Arenn’s skeleton became the fourth to litter the floor of Lab 23. It was impossible to tell where he ended and Roach, Martin or Heath began, especially after Garrett’s boots had scattered the bones from one end of the room to the other. They were now an indistinguishable mess of collagen and calcium, as far from a respectable burial as it was possible to get.

  The death had been a horrific tragedy, of that there was no doubt, but that did not mean time could be wasted. They needed to know what was written in that notebook, and that meant asking Garrett very nicely if she wouldn’t mind handing it over.

  Webster met her at the security door to the labs. She was walking quickly with apparent purpose.

  ‘Garrett, I’m truly sorry,’ he said, as she strode past without acknowledging him. ‘Garrett?’ He hurried to catch her up, but was just too far behind to stop her going into one of Harry’s labs. She locked the door behind her and walked towards the gene sequencers. To get to them, she had to walk past two workbenches covered in row upon row of test tubes. Opening her arms wide, she casually swept them all to the floor in a monsoon of smashing glass.

  The lab was well insulated, so all they could hear was the muted tinkle that came with each impact.

  ‘Oh shit.’ Webster was knocking hard on the Perspex window. ‘Garrett! Garrett! Come on, open the door!’

  ‘What’s she doing?’ asked Harry.

  Before Webster could speak, Garrett answered for him. She turned to the thermal cycler that was closest to her, smashing its dial and readout again and again with her big black boots. She kicked the casing, too, but made little impact on the solid steel, so she returned to the glass covering of the display, adding spidery cracks to it with each impact.

  As she kicked, she screamed from the pit of her stomach. It was impossible to hear exactly what she was saying, but the explosion of rage ripped open her face and tore through her eyes.

  ‘Oh dear,’ said Harry quietly. There was nothing he or Webster could do but watch and wait.

  Next, Garrett pulled the sample cabinets over, sending them crashing to the floor, their drawers skidding through the broken glass. One after another they hit the ground in a series of rolling booms that made Harry flinch.

  Bishop and Laura had come to find out what was taking so long. As Garrett turned her attention to the thermoperiodic chambers, Bishop banged on the glass.

  ‘Hey! Hey! Garrett! Stop that!’ He turned to Webster. ‘How do we get in there?’

  ‘We don’t. It’s locked from the inside.’

  ‘For God’s sake. Garrett! Garrett!’

  If she could hear him, she didn’t let it show. Moving on to the examination chambers, she wrenched the fire extinguisher off the wall and laid waste to the tall glass boxes.

  ‘How long’s this going to set us back?’ muttered Bishop.

  ‘We’ve got more than enough equipment in the other labs to make sure this won’t be too intrusive,’ replied Harry. ‘I’d have thought the bigger question is how you’re going to explain this to whoever allocates our budget. Those things don’t come cheap.’

  ‘I’m fully aware of the financial –’

  Garrett cut Bishop short by upending a workbench. It supported a large genome sequencer, which landed with a rumble of colliding metalwork backed by an echoing crunch of broken glass.

  Garrett gave another scream as she pounded the gene sequencers with her boots. There was nothing left to break, so she returned to the only thing left that could take another bout of her fury.

  With little damage now being done, the frequency of her blows subsided. She delivered the last dents to the front panels, then bent over with her hands on her knees, shook her head and looked around at the carnage she had created. It would do for now.

  She unlocked the door and rejoined the others.

  ‘Take it out of my wages,’ she called, as she walked down the corridor towards Bishop’s office.

  The others followed.

  *

  The office was filled with an awkward silence. Despite what she had just done, Garrett was giving off too much anger to be reprimanded. Her best friend, a man who made life down here just about bearable, had been torn to shreds and eaten in front of her. One wrong word from Bishop and she might decide to damage more than just lab equipment.

&n
bsp; For a long minute, she stared at the bookcase, her shoulders rising and falling with each hard breath.

  Finally, she turned and looked at Laura and Harry, then walked towards Bishop and stood over him as he sat in fear on the other side of his desk. Reaching into her army jacket, she took hold of the notebook, pulled it out and let it drop to the table.

  ‘There’s the fucking –’

  At that moment the door opened and in walked Andrew. Everyone turned round, quickly enough for him to realize something was up and that he might have interrupted that something.

  ‘Er … we’ve finished playing upstairs,’ he said.

  ‘Yes, OK, sweetie. Go and find … Mr …’

  ‘Carter,’ assisted Webster.

  ‘Yes, Mr Carter, and play a bit of pool with him. Or watch a DVD. We have something important to discuss here.’ Andrew nodded hard and fast and shut the door behind him.

  ‘As I was saying, there’s the fucking notebook,’ spat Garrett. ‘I hope it was worth David’s life.’

  ‘Well,’ said Bishop, ‘I’m sure Dr Heath would be pleased to know …’

  ‘Not that fucking David! David Van Arenn. My fucking David, you asshole. You don’t even know our names, do you, you piece of shit?’

  ‘Garrett,’ warned Webster.

  ‘Now, look, Garrett, calm down, please. I understand you have been through a big, big deal. You have lost …’ he looked at Webster for confirmation that he was saying the right thing ‘… your best friend, but it really has been for the greater good of the people within this facility and beyond. Your bravery …’

  ‘Don’t talk to me about my fucking bravery, shit-fuck. And know this: I didn’t do it for you, or this facility or whatever the fuck you want to call it. I did it for my friend, so at least he died for something. I really hope that book’ – she looked at Laura – ‘has got some fucking important shit in it.’ And with that she walked out of the office, slamming the door behind her.

  Back in the office, they all stared at the notebook, still unopened on the desk. It had the dimensions of a postcard, and was a hundred pages thick, black and the kind of leather you only found in London’s more discerning stationers. The pages were edged in gold, like an address book, except for the large smear of half-dried wasp guts that encrusted part of the front, side and back.