Ken McClure - The Lazarus Strain

There was no answer to either his first or second louder knock and it made him curse under his breath but he couldn’t really blame whoever was inside for not answering the door at three in the morning in the middle of nowhere. He supposed the main thing had been established and that was that Leila could not be there, lying alone and injured on the floor. He got back into the Porsche and started the engine.

When he came to do a three point turn to get back to the road his headlights swept the length of the Vectra and briefly illuminated a jacket that had been draped untidily over the back of the front passenger seat. It made him hit the brakes. It was Leila’s. It was the leather blouson she’d worn over her little black number the first time they went out to dinner together. It had a distinctive, patterned collar on it. But it wasn’t Leila’s car… Well, it wouldn’t be you idiot, would it?… his subconscious accused. Leila would have returned her car to the rental company before going to the airport on Tuesday. When she realised she’d have to come back for something she would have rented another at the airport. Vectras were among the most common hire cars around. Leila could be lying injured inside after all.

Steven cursed the fact that he wasn’t driving his own car with all his bits and pieces in the boot. The Porsche didn’t have a torch in it. He angled the 911 so that the headlights lit up as much of the cottage as possible and started looking for the easiest way to gain access. The front door was solid oak and had been bolted from inside — he remembered Leila doing that at night. It would have to be a window. He moved down the left side of the building, testing each of the two windows on that side but both were tightly shut and snibbed — Leila did that too in an effort to keep out the cold. He rounded the corner at the back of the house, losing any help the Porsche lights could provide and stopped for a moment to allow his eyes to become accustomed to the inky blackness. He thought at first it was his imagination when he started to see two pencil-thin parallel lines of light in the ground but they persisted. They were very faint but definitely there. The bungalow had a cellar with a light on in it.

‘Leila!’ he cried, dropping to his knees, scraping at the dirt and trying to see down through one of the joints in what appeared to be an old glass brick skylight, which was largely overgrown with weeds and smeared with mud. ‘Leila, can you hear me?’

There was no answer.

Steven kept altering the angle of his position on the ground, trying desperately to find an area where the joint was wide enough for him to see through. He kept calling out Leila’s name but whenever he paused to listen there was just silence, apart from an owl screeching somewhere out in the surrounding forest. He was just about to give up when he found a place he could see through with one eye if he pressed his nose right up against the dirty glass. He could make out a black and white, tiled floor… and two legs lying on it… female legs. The upper part of the body was obscured. ‘Leila! Leila! Can you hear me?’

The legs didn’t move: there was no reply.

Filled with anguish, Steven pulled out his phone, finding that all his fingers were becoming thumbs in his hurry. ‘Jesus!’ he exploded when he saw that there was no signal. ‘Give me a break, will you!’

He ran back to the front of the house, this time along the right side of the cottage, again checking to see if any of the windows were open. None was. Without any further delay, he picked up a heavy edging stone from the garden and used it to smash the window of the room which had been Leila’s bedroom. He’d chosen that one because the car lights were shining on it.

Still calling out Leila’s name, he stumbled across the floor to switch on the lights and tripped over the old electric fire sitting in the middle of the floor. His head hit the bedroom door causing him to curse before he pulled himself to his feet and clicked the switch. Nothing happened.

‘What the f…’ He felt his way through to the living room and to the light switch there. Still no light. ‘How the f… could there be light in the cellar if the power was off?’ he thought as he bumped and cursed his way out into the hall and along to the cellar door. He had never been down in the cottage cellar. Apart from not having any reason for doing so, Leila had told him she didn’t use it and always kept the door locked. She had given him a one word reason: ‘Rats’.

He pulled at the cellar door and found it unlocked. The door creaked back and cold air filled his nostrils together with the competing smells of dampness and old wood. He felt for the light switch before realising that the light should be on; this was the reason he was here; he’d seen it from outside. Surely the power couldn’t have failed at the very moment he entered the cottage. Not even his luck could be that bad… the only other explanation was… that someone had turned the power off! At that moment, a blow to the back of Steven’s head ended all further speculation.

Steven came round to find himself suspended by his wrists with his toes barely touching the floor. Blood from a head wound had trickled down into his eyes and crusted over them making it difficult for him to see properly but he knew he was in the cellar because of the black and white tiles on the floor. He had a blinding headache and his arms felt as if they were being torn from their sockets by the cable that secured his wrists to a beam in the ceiling. He looked for the prostrate woman he’d seen from outside but she was no longer there. Instead, he saw a bundle in the shape of a body, wrapped in black plastic, huddled at the foot of the stairs.

‘Oh, please God, no,’ murmured Steven, closing his eyes and railing against the agonies of body and mind that were pushing him to the very brink of endurance.

‘You’re awake, Dunbar.’

The man who had come from behind him was in his mid thirties and Middle Eastern in appearance. He sounded well educated and spoke without an accent but when Steven looked into his eyes he saw a cocktail of loathing and contempt there. It was being suppressed in the cause of establishing credentials of intelligence and sophistication but it was definitely there. It was a look he’d come across before and he’d always found it chilling to be regarded as something less than nothing, be it by religious zealots in their contempt for the non-believer or even in the eyes of the poor in India who could look through you as if you didn’t exist. It was what the worm must see in the eye of the bird about to eat it. If it came to a choice between confronting a cold-blooded psychopath or a religious fanatic who believed that some unseen god was with him in his struggle against the infidel, it would be a close run thing.

‘How do you know me?’ Steven croaked.

With no change of expression, the man held up Steven’s Sci-Med ID, which he’d taken from his pocket. ‘A pity. Ten more minutes and I would have been gone,’ he said. ‘Still, as you are here, I thought I might as well make the most of it. Tell me all about Earlybird and what their current thinking is.’ He moved across to the body lying on the floor and started to manoeuvre it into position to be dragged upstairs.

Steven felt sick in his stomach. ‘Who?’ he asked, fearing the answer.

The man looked amused at the question. ‘Dr Leila Martin,’ he said.

‘You bastard! Why?’

The man stopped what he was doing and came towards Steven slowly. He didn’t stop until he was only inches from his face. ‘Call it collateral damage,’ he said icily. ‘That’s what your friends, the Americans, called it when they incinerated my mother, my father and my sister.’