All manner of tests were carried out on the ABnegs at the sanatorium, but still no scientist or medical officer could figure out why they were immune from whatever it was that had been released by the V2
rockets. To make progress towards a solution even more difficult, those very same investigators were falling dead themselves, and it was only when a couple of medics with the immune blood type were found that any sustained research was achieved. Another problem was that it was only in the last decade that truly extensive research was being carried out on blood groupings, so very little was already known.
Now they were learning fast, but it was too late.
It seemed the disease, gas, poison, virus - the military still didn't know what had been inside those last V2s - worked on the blood system, stimulating the chemical reaction that caused coagulation so that, within minutes in most cases, the blood hardened inside the large veins of the bigger muscles, this leading to - and it was Muriel who remembered the term - thromboembolism. The veins in the heart, lungs, brain, as well as other less life-threatening areas, were completely blocked, while minor veins became engorged. It meant that because of the blockages, the excessive free-flowing blood had nowhere to go and nowhere to return to - Venous occlusions', Muriel called that effect - so massive swellings and leakages occurred all over the body. The cramping pains victims suffered because of this were excruciating, rendering many unconscious before death itself claimed them.
So, they realized anti-coagulant therapy would be ineffective, because it would only promote further haemorrhaging, and clotting drugs would only intensify the thrombosis. And they still hadn't discovered why AB negative blood refused to react to the Blood Death, why they themselves, and their human guinea pigs, were immune. You have to remember that all the advanced nations of the world were desperately working on a solution, an antidote, any kind of cure, the Allied countries keeping in close contact with one another, but none so far had come up with an answer. Time had run out swiftly, and eventually the remaining doctors in the sanatorium ran out too. One day they just walked, leaving no note, no explanations, no excuses. They'd realized it was hopeless.
For the guinea pigs left behind it was almost a relief. No more tests, no more blood drained from their bodies to be taken away in glass tubes, no more tissue samples cut out, no more needle jabs - and no more vanishing into the sanatorium's special, restricted wing where, it was believed but never confirmed, because no patient ever came back, operations were performed on the ABnegs (the rest suspected that experimental blood transfusions were being carried out). When those principal doctors fled, all order went with them. First the soldiers guarding the 'inmates' - no ABnegs had stayed on voluntarily after the first week - had absconded, soon followed by all the remaining staff and researchers. These people knew by then that death was hanging over every one of them, and they could think of better places to be when it happened.
Soon after, the guinea pigs, about a hundred in all, went their separate ways. Cissie and Muriel decided to stick together.
Muriel Drake was from a higher branch of society than Cissie, although even as a daughter of a lord she had been treated no differently from anybody else at the sanatorium (panic is classless, I guess). For whatever reasons, the two girls got along and did a lot to keep up each other's morale in those terrible days. Like everybody else, they'd lost family and friends, and at the sanatorium they never knew when an amiable nurse or guard was going to cash in their chips right in front of them. Now that the place was emptying fast, they made their plans together.
Muriel's mother, Lady Daphne Drake, had been struck down in the first year of the war, but not by anything the mad Fuhrer had sent over. A No 14 bus had knocked down Lady Daphne as she'd tried to cross Piccadilly Circus during the Blackout, after she'd enjoyed Jack Hulbert singing for the conga and outwitting Nazi spies in Under Your Hat, the bus killing her instantly and leaving Muriel pretty much alone with her father, Lord Montague Drake - Muriel's two older brothers, who had joined the Forces as soon as war was declared and much against their father's wishes, were in other parts fighting the Germans, one with the navy, the other with an RAF squadron based on Malta. Muriel had not heard from either of her brothers since the Blood Death outbreak and, not knowing if they shared the same blood type as her, assumed they were both dead. Although the family home was in Hampshire, most of the time she had lived in their Kensington apartment; at seventeen she had joined the ATS, the Auxiliary Territorial Service, and was soon serving as a subaltern. Nothing heroic in that, she'd assured us: it was a natural role for any patriot. And hadn't Princess Elizabeth herself joined the ATS just before her nineteenth birthday?
On the day the first Blood Death V2s had rained down, Muriel had been having lunch with her father at Simpson's-in-the-Strand when the waiter, who had just served them with mulligatawny soup, which was to be followed by cold roast gosling and salad - strange, she had told us, how she had never forgotten that day's menu despite the horror that had accompanied the lunch - had keeled over onto their table, his skin turning blue, the veins in his hands and temples protruding as if about to burst His eyes had started to bleed.
Muriel, not unreasonably, had proceeded to scream the place down, while her father, who was attempting to help the distraught waiter by opening his shirt collar so that he could breathe more easily, suddenly clutched at his own heart. Her attention now solely on her father, Muriel hadn't noticed that virtually everyone else in the restaurant was going through the same paroxysms, and when Lord Drake's skin began turning blue, his hands and cheeks ulcerating at an unbelievable rate, his veins swelling like the waiter's, she fainted. When she had eventually come round again, eveiy person who had not fled the restaurant, including her father, was dead. She had run out into the street, out into a dying city, and only later did it occur to her that she hadn't even heard the bombs drop.
Like Cissie, she was rounded up within days, blood-tested, then taken down to the Dorset sanatorium.
Even while this secret medical establishment was slowly being abandoned, she, Cissie and a few others had been reluctant to leave the security it offered, afraid of what they might find in the strange new world outside. But three years was a long time to be cooped up anywhere; also, rations were finally running low. Neither desperation nor bravery took them back to the capital though: it was homesickness that had done that. And as they'd driven one of the few vehicles left behind at the sanatorium through the country lanes they had come upon Wilhelm Stern.
As we listened to the German tell his story, the sun sinking low over the Thames outside, flushing the walls of the suite a soft red and deepening the shadows, it seemed to me he was a little light on detail.
Sure, he told it convincingly, but there was something about the guy that made me unwilling to trust him.
The fact that I still regarded him as the enemy had a lot to do with it, right? Yeah, no doubt about that.
But he'd said something back there in the tunnel that firmed up my suspicions.