Ken McClure - Dust to dust

‘He’s up here,’ said Lukas’s voice from the top of the lab. ‘He’s coming round.’

Steven joined them. He suggested that they might all benefit from a drink of water and asked if the supply in the lab was safe to drink.

‘It’s mains,’ replied Lukas. ‘I’ll get some beakers.’ He rose to his feet slowly and supported himself with one hand on the bench while he slid back the glass door of a wall cupboard to take out three small, sterile glass beakers. Steven managed to prop Macmillan up in a sitting position with his back against a floor cupboard, and got up to take one of the filled beakers from Lukas and give it to him before taking one for himself. Water had never tasted so good. He could see that the others agreed.

‘It’s like that scene from Ice Cold in Alex,’ said Macmillan, managing a half smile. ‘Where are we?’

‘The Lundborg labs,’ replied Lukas, his expression a mixture of embarrassment and bemusement.

‘Your labs?’ exclaimed Macmillan. ‘Ye gods, someone’s going to have to fill me in on what’s been happening.’

Steven filled in the blanks for him, ending with, ‘And when we came round, we were here in Lukas’s place.’

‘They brought us here?’ exclaimed Macmillan. ‘How would they get in?’

‘They must have used my electronic key,’ said Lukas. ‘It was in my wallet.’ He searched through his pockets and was surprised to find his wallet there. He pulled out his key and said with amazement, ‘They put it back.’ After another check, he added, ‘But they took my phone.’

‘Mine too,’ said Steven after a similar search.

Macmillan confirmed that his phone had gone too. ‘This is crazy,’ he said. ‘Why bring us here and then just walk away and leave us? They take our phones but nothing else…’

‘Maybe we’ve been mugged for our phones,’ suggested Steven, tongue in cheek. The fact that they were alive and apparently free to go was making all three of them feel a whole lot better about life.

‘Did you see them, whoever they were?’ asked Macmillan.

‘No. We came round just before you,’ said Steven. ‘We saw the two fake paramedies at the park but didn’t pay them too much attention; we thought you were dying at the time. There’s been no sign of anyone since we came round and it’s beginning to spook me out. Monk has to be behind this and he was holding all the aces. With us three out of the way, there’d be no one left to ask awkward questions…’

‘So why just abandon us? Why let us go?’ asked Macmillan.

‘What do you use this particular room for, Lukas?’ asked Steven, who had recovered enough to be taking an interest in his surroundings.

‘This is our biohazard lab,’ replied Lukas. ‘We have three labs but this is the one we’d use for handling dangerous things.’

‘What’s special about it?’

‘It has two isolation chambers,’ said Lukas, pointing to two glass-fronted boxes with stools in front of them. ‘We don’t have to handle many pathogenic organisms, but when we do we use these. The worker is protected by a glass screen and uses the armholes in the side to carry out manipulation of what’s inside the chamber. Apart from that, the whole room is constantly under negative pressure so that air comes in but doesn’t flow out. In addition to that, there’s an airlock system on the door. We also have UV irradiation lamps to sterilise the room when no one’s in it.

‘Are we locked in?’ asked Macmillan.

‘We can’t be,’ said Lukas. ‘They didn’t keep my card. It’s a master key.’ He took it from his wallet and started to go towards the door.

‘Stop!’ yelled Steven.

‘Don’t touch the door,’ said Steven. ‘You said the room was under constant negative pressure but listen… the ventilation system isn’t running at all.’

‘We turn it off at the weekend,’ said Lukas, and then had immediate second thoughts. ‘But on the other hand, it should have started up automatically when someone came in here…’

Steven, who had been wandering round the lab, inspecting the benches, held up two glass petri dishes, one in either hand, and asked Lukas what they were.

Lukas looked puzzled as he walked over to join Steven. ‘We don’t leave cultures of micro-organisms lying around ever,’ he said. He took one from Steven and examined it closely. ‘It’s like some kind of fungus,’ he said. ‘I don’t understand it. This has nothing to do with us.’ He looked at the other paraphernalia on the bench, more petri dishes, racks of test tubes, flasks. ‘We haven’t been working on anything like this. I’ve no idea how any of this got here…’

‘I have,’ said Steven. ‘Monk’s been setting the scene for one of his “accidents”.’

Macmillan, who had now joined the other two at the bench, surveyed the scene and could take little comfort from the look on Steven’s face. ‘Go on,’ he said.

‘I don’t think this is just any fungal culture,’ said Steven. ‘It’s the organism they used on John Motram. The cultures have been left here to make it look as if we were investigating the organism when we had our accident. At least, that’s what the authorities are supposed to think when they find us with our brains turned to mush.’

‘But how?’ asked Macmillan. ‘We’re not going to contaminate ourselves with these.’ He eyed the cultures on the bench. ‘Are we?’

‘No,’ said Steven thoughtfully. ‘They’re window dressing. We were supposed to come round, thank our lucky stars we were still alive and then walk out of here… and that’s when it’ll happen.’

The other two followed him over to the airlock exit where he stopped and turned round to look up at the ceiling, in particular the rectangular wire grating above them.

‘That’s for the positive pressure airflow into the room,’ said Lukas, following Steven’s line of sight. ‘Air leaving the lab has to go through the filter system over there, maintaining a pressure differential.’ He pointed to a series of extractor units on the other side of the room.

‘It’s my bet the system’s been loaded with toxic spores of this organism,’ said Steven. ‘As soon we trigger the door release, the fans will spring into life, flooding the room with fungal spores instead of the fresh air they’re supposed to pump in. Monk will have jammed the door on the other side of the airlock so we can’t get out.’

‘So we’re trapped,’ said Macmillan, reaching a conclusion no one felt inclined to argue with.

‘Unless we can come up with a way of getting out of here without triggering the ventilation system,’ said Steven, looking at Lukas, who shook his head.

‘There are half a dozen safety systems in place to make sure that it does turn on whenever it looks as if the lab is going to be open to the outside world,’ he said. ‘There’s even an auxilliary back-up if mains electricity should fail.’

‘Shit.’

‘What happens if we just sit tight and wait?’ asked Macmillan. ‘I mean, I know it could be a long weekend for us, but when one of Lukas’s people arrives on Monday morning…’

‘They’d trigger the fans; we’d be dead by the time they figured out how to open the door and it would still look like an accident. Besides, Monk isn’t going to let that happen. He’s going to come back to check on things and unjam the door mechanism so his “accident” looks perfect.’

‘If you’re right about all this and we should breathe in these spores, how long have we got?’ asked Lukas.

‘Depends how long it takes us to kill each other,’ said Steven, to the horrified looks of the other two. ‘I’ve thought a lot about what happened to John Motram. I’m sure the Public Health and hospital people up in Scotland identified the fungus correctly, but they weren’t to know that it had been genetically modified. John Motram’s symptoms had Porton Down written all over them… the madness, the aggression. This bug’, he held up one of the dishes, ‘has been designed as a bio-weapon. The clever thing to do these days is not to design weapons that kill but to come up with ones that will cause maximum disruption and create a huge drain on your enemies’ resources. Something that drives your victim mad and turns him into a homicidal maniac, intent on killing his comrades, would be seen as the perfect weapon. The fact that the victim doesn’t die himself but develops breathing problems and liver disease, demanding expensive and intensive medical care as well as restraint, would be seen as the icing on the cake.’