Sean Black - Lockdown

‘I was just heading back inside, sir.’

‘Inside where? Where were you supposed to be?’

‘The medical block.’

Richard grabbed at the guard’s sleeve. ‘Show me.’

Josh handed the keys to Mareta. ‘What number were you up to?’

‘Nine hundred and ninety nine,’ Mareta said, palming the keys into the folds of the sheet.

‘Wow, I made it just in time.’

‘You did really good.’

The door burst open and Richard rushed in, flanked by two guards. He snatched up Josh into his arms, pressed his son’s head into his shoulder.

‘He OK?’ asked one of the guards.

‘Why wouldn’t he be?’ Mareta said.

‘We were just playing a game. Am I in trouble?’ Josh’s voice was shrill with worry.

‘Just don’t do that ever again, do you hear me?’ Richard scolded him.

‘What did you think I was going to do?’ Mareta asked, the tiny set of cuff keys clutched tightly in her hand.

She waited an hour before calling over the guard.

‘May I have some water?’ she asked, her voice rasping.

‘Sure.’

He brought over a glass. She struggled to sit up. As he put his arm behind her back to help her, she brought her free hand up and jabbed two fingers as hard as she could into his eyes. Her other hand grabbed the hair at the back of his head, pulling his face so close that she could smell the tobacco smoke on his collar. Then she bit down as hard as she could on his nose, taking off the fleshy tip and a strip of cartilage with her front teeth.

Too close to get a punch in at her, he flailed his arms. Quietly, deliberately, Mareta balled up a corner of blood-soaked sheet and forced it into his mouth to muffle the screams.

Lock snapped awake, surprised by two things. He was alive, and his cell door was wide open. He struggled to his feet and made it out into the corridor. Empty. No guards in sight.

He stood there for a moment, trying to orient himself. He’d had his best sleep in weeks, even if it was for only a couple of hours. The coppery taste was still in his mouth, but otherwise, beyond the usual aches and pains, he felt fine.

There was a click, and the cell door next to his opened. Like the external doors, it must have had some kind of remote override. A man stepped out, the man who’d been injected with the placebo intended for Lock. He blinked his eyes and reached out to pat Lock on the shoulder, as if physical contact would reassure him that this wasn’t a dream.

There was another click. Another cell door opened. Then another. And another. In under two minutes all the trial subjects had emerged. All of them looked well.

They gathered in small groups, some of them talking in urgent whispers. One of them crossed over to Lock, squaring up to him. Placebo guy stepped in between them, talked to the aggressor. He backed off.

The gate at the far end swung back on its hinges. Tentatively they started towards it.

One of the men said something and some of the others laughed. Placebo guy raised cuffed hands to his face and hushed them.

Lock brought up the rear as they walked towards the open gate. As he passed through it, the gate closed behind him. The men at the rear started as it clanked shut. At the far end of the corridor the door clicked open. They pushed through it and out into the darkness.

All twelve of them were still cuffed, and made for a surreal sight as they shuffled forward in the moonlight, a chain gang on evening manoeuvres. Placebo guy seemed to be assuming some kind of leadership role. He hissed at them to spread out, directing them to back into the shadows.

Lock picked his moment and filtered away from the group. He had as much idea about what was going on as they did — none. But he knew that with the amount of firepower in the vicinity, being out in open ground was about the worst idea possible.

Placebo guy waved at two of the men to go ahead on point. They did so, creeping forward to the edge of the building. Then they stopped, suddenly.

Lock could hear the guard coming round the corner, not because of footfall, but because he was on his radio letting the control room know that he’d cleared one sector and was about to move into the next. Standard procedure for non-static security. Clear and confirm. Clear and confirm. Repeat till dead. Almost certainly literally in the case of this poor chump.

‘Base from Leech. Yellow clear, moving to red.’

There was a pause.

‘Base? Can you acknowledge?’

It made sense that the guard wasn’t getting a reply. The cells had been remotely opened, and the only way to do that was from the control room.

There were twelve of them here. Which left only one person unaccounted for.

The room was empty when Lock got there. There were some books, some of the boy’s clothes, but no Josh. The thought that the escapees had already reached him first flitted briefly through his mind, although there was no blood or sign of a struggle.

He picked up one of the boy’s sweaters and stood there for a second. Then he walked back out, and straight down the barrel of an M-16 wielded by a white-faced Hizzard.

‘Get down on your hands and knees.’

‘Hizzard, we don’t have time for this bullshit.’

Fear seemed to have defaulted Hizzard to auto-pilot. ‘How did you escape the accom block?’

‘I teleported.’

Hizzard jabbed the gun at him. ‘Get down on the ground.’

Lock waved a hand in front of his face. ‘Hizzard, it’s me, Lock. Remember?’

‘You’re a detainee. I’m tasked with apprehending and returning all detainees to the accom block.’

‘Well, good luck with that. You’ve got twelve pissed-off Chechens, or Iraqis, or Pakistanis, or whatever the hell they are, on the loose right now, and we don’t have much time to contain them.’

A burst of small-arms fire neatly punctuated Lock’s condensed rundown.

‘How do I know you ain’t lying?’

‘Who gives a damn if I’m lying or not? Didn’t you understand what I just said? This is a level four bio-research facility which is in the process of being taken over by terrorists. We act now or we all die.’

Hizzard reached for his radio.

‘That’s not going to do you much good either. I’m guessing the ops room’s been breached. You won’t get any sense from anyone up there.’

Doubt flickered in Hizzard’s eyes. ‘Base from Hizzard.’

The response was the empty crackle of static, then a voice, female, with an accent. ‘Hizzard from Base. Go outside and lay your weapon on the ground.’

Under other circumstances, Lock might have allowed himself a smile as he watched the oh shit expression seep across Hizzard’s face. Instead he grabbed the M-16 from him.

‘You have a sidearm?’

Hizzard lifted the flap of his jacket. ‘Glock.’

‘Better than nothing, I guess,’ Lock said, setting the M-16 to single shot and heading back outside, Hizzard trailing reluctantly in his wake. ‘How many guards you guys have on duty?’

‘Round about a dozen.’

‘Round about?’

‘I think.’

A classic Brand-run operation, thought Lock. ‘And what about weapons? M-16s and Glocks?’

‘There’s other stuff in the armoury.’

‘Whoa there, soldier, what armoury?’ Lock asked, looking around for the door back to his own universe.

‘That building over there.’

Hizzard pointed through the gloom to a small squat building about four hundred yards away placed between two other blocks. Lock had assumed it was some kind of boiler room or back-up generator facility.

‘You have access to it?’

Hizzard reached down to his belt. ‘Sure, got the key right here.’