‘Gotten your fill?’ Thorne rumbled at him.
Carson nodded blankly as the big man slipped his jacket back on and watched him for a few long seconds.
‘What do we do?’ Carson asked in dismay. ‘This ain’t happened afore now.’
Ellison Thorne took his pipe from beneath his moustache and examined its contents as he spoke.
‘I haven’t heard from the others yet,’ he said ominously. ‘What were you plannin’ on?’
Carson blinked, and shook his head.
‘I ain’t got no plan,’ he admitted helplessly. ‘Old man Conley was trying to get help from some guy up Santa Fe way, afore he got shot. He opined that we might find a cure for this affliction.’
Ellison Thorne nodded.
‘He was a Jonah who went out on his own hook, mixin’ too much with the natives when we needed to keep this amongst ourselves. It ain’t what we agreed.’
‘We weren’t dying when we agreed to anything,’ Carson protested. ‘Besides, I didn’t agree anyways. Why’d I want to be stuck out here on my own, away from civilization? We got nobody out here to help us!’
Ellison Thorne nodded thoughtfully and drew again on his pipe.
‘We’ll meet the day after tomorrow, usual place and time. It’ll give us the cover we need to blend in.’
Carson shook his head.
‘Another meeting. All that jawing hasn’t fixed us up one bit, Ellison. We need something done about this! How well do you think we’ll goddamn blend in if we’ve got bits falling off us all the time?’
Ellison Thorne pushed past Carson with his shoulder and strode slowly out into the darkness.
‘Getting yourself into a conniption fit ain’t gonna help anyone. The day after tomorrow, Lee. Don’t be dawdling.’
‘We’re dying,’ Carson said sadly.
Ellison Thorne slowed and turned to look at him over his shoulder.
‘Only temporarily,’ he rumbled. ‘There are bigger things than just us to consider, Lee. You should have paid heed to that before you started living in the cities, drinking and whoring. Hankerin’ after a quick fix now’s a lost cause. Stay out of sight until we meet.’
With that, Ellison Thorne walked out into the night to where Carson could see a horse tethered in a dense thicket of bushes no more than fifty yards away. How he hadn’t seen it on the way in he didn’t know, but then he had long since lost all the survival skills required out here in the lonely deserts. Ellison Thorne and his men had instead remained here for the past hundred forty years.
For the first time in a century and a half, Lee Carson felt lonely and afraid.
32
The laboratory was a windowless cell but the clock on the wall told Lillian it was night and she had been working for almost six hours straight under the silent gaze of a SkinGen security guard. She hadn’t eaten or drunk a thing and the guard had even escorted her to the latrine. Tyler Willis lay nearby on the mortuary slab, groaning and shivering occasionally. To her relief, Jeb Oppenheimer had refrained from slicing the poor guy’s kidneys straight out of his body, deciding instead to leave the threat unfinished in order to force Lillian into working further on Hiram Conley’s remains.
Lillian had been happy to see him leave; she would obey his parting command to find out once and for all what had infected Hiram Conley’s body before he finally died. But she was also certain that Oppenheimer had absolutely no intention of letting either her or Willis leave the building alive. They had witnessed too much. Lillian had to escape.
She turned, putting down the scalpel with which she had been dissecting Conley’s crumbling corpse, and looked at the guard.
‘That’s it,’ she said finally. ‘I can’t go on without something to eat and drink.’
The guard glared at her but remained silent.
‘What?’ Lillian asked. ‘Too many words at once for you to understand? Food. Drink. How’s that?’
The guard took two paces across the room and grabbed her throat with one chunky hand, shoving her backwards into the worktops and straining her arm against the handcuff still pinning her to Conley’s mortuary slab.
‘You stay until you’re finished.’
‘I can’t work properly,’ Lillian shot back, refusing to be intimidated, ‘if I’m exhausted, hungry and thirsty. I’ll make mistakes, miss evidence. You want your boss to find out that you half-starved me and then I screwed up?’
The guard held her for a moment longer, the handful of cells in his brain churning laboriously as he considered her point of view, and then he dropped his grip on her and turned for the door without another word. Lillian watched as he unlocked the doors and left the laboratory, locking the doors behind him.
Lillian waited until he was out of earshot and then looked at Willis.
‘Tyler? Wake up!’
Willis groaned, his head lolling to one side as he tried to focus on her. Lillian waved a hand in front of his face.
‘Tyler, I need your help.’
Willis licked his parched lips, struggling to remain conscious.
‘Water,’ he said. ‘I need water. And my stomach hurts.’
‘The guard’s on his way back here with something to drink,’ she said. ‘I can give you more morphine, but you’ve lost too much blood to give it intravenously — it might kill you.’
She turned to face his body, his chest and stomach now sealed by a neat row of stitches that she’d administered as soon as Oppenheimer had left. The old man’s cuts had not been deep, and none of Willis’s internal organs had been damaged as far as she could tell. But he’d lost a hell of a lot of blood, and the old bastard hadn’t even given Lillian a saline drip to replace Tyler’s lost fluids.
God only knew what Oppenheimer would do to him when he returned. Lillian closed her eyes, and made a swift decision.
Using a syringe, she extracted morphine from the small vial she’d been supplied with, and glanced up briefly at the camera staring unblinkingly down at her from one corner of the laboratory. She turned to shield Willis’s body from view, tapped the needle, and then slipped it gently into Willis’s femoral artery.
Slowly she saw him relax, his breathing calm and the sweat dry from his forehead. Using her scalpel, she began easing off some of the dressings now brittle with blackened, congealed blood, replacing them as she went. She dabbed at the skin under the dressings with a soft, cool cloth.
‘That’s good,’ he whispered.
‘Tell me what happened,’ Lillian said. ‘Tell me why he’s doing this to you. To us.’
Willis swallowed thickly and shook his head.
‘I can’t, it’s too dangerous.’
‘Dangerous?’ Lillian retaliated in a harsh whisper. ‘Do you honestly think we’re getting out of here alive? We’re already screwed, so the least you can damned well do is explain to me why the hell I’m stuck in here with you!’
Willis sighed.
‘Hiram Conley came to me a few weeks ago,’ he said, lifting one hand to massage his temples, ‘with a sample of halobacteria that he said came from a hidden cave somewhere in New Mexico. He refused to tell me where, only that I should check the bacteria out and then he’d visit me again, said that I’d understand. I did what he said and put the bacteria in solution. Damn me, if they didn’t revive. When we checked the age of the samples they came in at two hundred fifty million years old.’
‘Bacillus permians.’ Lillian nodded, glancing at the close-circuit camera and keeping her voice down. ‘I read about it in the papers, the oldest revived species ever discovered.’