Chapter Twelve

 

There was something discomfiting in the knowing expression on Sinistra’s beautiful face as Gerald stepped into the lab. She was waiting for his reaction and anticipating she would enjoy it, he could tell. The notion that he had willingly participated in their research for three months was inconsistent with how wary she was about his response to what he was about to see, and that worried him deeply.

 

“We study genetic abnormalities. Most of our subjects are disposable, but sometimes we let them grow to maturity. See what they’re like as adults,” she said.

 

“Primates?” he asked.

 

“Of a kind.”

 

The lab had every conceivable piece of equipment, all brand new. He walked over to a microscope and looked down into the eyepiece. Strands of DNA. He frowned as the image blurred. He still felt very odd and concentrating on anything was painfully difficult.

 

“We can’t just sit around and wait for oddities to be born.” There was tenseness in her tone, a sneering contempt he found repellent. “Sometimes we have to give Mother Nature a helping hand.” She slipped a glass slide under the microscope’s lens. “Thankfully, she repays our efforts in spades.”

 

Gerald looked down through the eyepiece again, adjusting the lens until the contents were clear. The DNA strands were twisted in their usual helix. “I’m a gynaecologist not a microbiologist. I’m afraid the strands of DNA alone don’t mean much to me, but I would like to see the effects of your genetic manipulation in the flesh," he said.

 

“You wouldn’t believe some of the stuff that gets born here. It’s so sick and twisted,” she replied, with evident enjoyment.

 

When she smacked her palm against a flat button, the door sprang open and she ushered him through into the next lab. There were cages on each side of the room, and he inspected each as he walked slowly along the row. Women, thin and naked, clutched at the bars and shouted to him. He looked at each one carefully as he passed their cage, assessing their physical condition. Seeing caged human beings appalled him.

 

The first woman was filthy, and her black hair was matted with dirt and grease. Her pregnant belly protruded grotesquely, and she banged at the bars with a shallow metal bowl. Lumps of meat and potatoes were strewn across the shiny floor. A pool of water lay by the metal door. At the rear of the cage was a rudimentary toilet. The place stank.

 

In the next cage, the woman inside was curled up in the corner. She was banging her head against the tiled wall. The clack of Sinistra’s high heels rang out as she followed, and her presence sickened him. “Why are you doing this? What can you possibly hope to gain from this sort of cruelty?”

 

There were eight glass cages in the next section. A creature lurked at the back of the first one behind a single bed next to a toilet plumbed into the wall. Something screamed in the next cage, but he forced himself to concentrate on one enclosure at a time. A woman emerged from behind the bed, and he felt sick to his stomach. She was heavily pregnant. Her face was streaked with tears, and her hair was long and unkempt. Her protruding belly was exaggerated by the thinness of the rest of her body. She lunged at the glass, banging on it with her fists.

 

“I thought you experimented on animals,” he muttered.

 

“Think of them as animals if it helps.”

 

They moved on to the next cage. A woman lay unconscious on an operating trolley. Her belly was also heavily swollen, but she was hooked up to all manner of drips and wires. The beeping monitors fought a losing battle against the screams of the woman they’d just passed.

 

Underling, attired in surgical garb, leant over the unconscious woman. When he saw they had visitors, he stood up and waved. “She has extensive brain damage," he called proudly. "We’re feeding instructions to the baby. Be interesting to see what he’s like when he’s born.”

 

“You damaged a woman’s brain? For what? What could that possibly teach you?”

 

Sinistra just smiled. “She was in a road accident. We just took advantage of an opportunity. Once we’d stabilised her, we impregnated her. It’s Underling’s own sperm, and he’s controlling the information fed through the computers to the baby. His son, made to order just the way daddy likes it.”

 

“That’s the sickest thing I’ve ever heard,” Gerald snapped.

 

“Because a father’s love is supposed to be unconditional, right? Guess you’d known all about that," she replied.

 

This appalling woman repelled him. He felt nauseous that only an hour earlier he’d been thrilled at the excitement of seducing her. He breathed deeply in and out to calm himself and prevent himself from throttling her. “What you’re doing is despicable, and I won’t play any kind of part in it.”

 

She guffawed. “Coz it’s okay to do it on animals, but not on people? Would you listen to yourself! Even though the results are inaccurate predictors of human behaviour? So the animals’ suffering is for nothing, and, by the way, you’ve also wasted human time and resources doing the experiment? That’s the worst sort of failure because it prevents accurate research being done now. And it wastes resources.”

 

“You sound just like my dad.” He revelled in the bitterness in his own voice as he gripped her arm. “I don’t believe in what you’re doing, and I want out. Take me to a vidcom unit so I can speak to my father immediately.”

 

She shook him off with a sly smile. "I didn't want to hit you when you were already down," she said. "That concussion from the blow you suffered earlier has really played tricks with your short-term memory. But since you've mentioned your father, Gerald, I think it only right to break it to you straightaway that he died very recently. Unfortunately, in the worst possible circumstances. The uprising has turned quite violent, and, in some way we don't yet fully understand, he got caught up in it and the resistance killed him. But he died in a cause he believed in, if that's any consolation to you."

 

Without stopping to process her statement, or even give himself the chance to assess whether it might be true, he stammered into a denial of the possibility. "I don't believe you. My father's alive and well in the Metropolis. When he hears about what you've just said to me, he'll make you pay."

 

The calmness with which she met his diatribe, coupled with the quiet sympathy she exuded at the bad news she'd hit him with, scared him. What if she's telling the truth? he thought.

 

*

 

Honigbaum gripped Ivy's arm and turned her back towards the bed. He guided her over there and stood very close to her, stroking her abdomen. She recoiled from his touch, her muscles spasming in protest at his proximity.

 

"I'm glad you understand there's no point struggling," he said. "I'm going to get exactly what I want. I always do. I've something very particular in mind, and tonight you're going to make me a very happy man indeed."

 

Honigbaum chuckled. He pressed her down onto the bed next to Eva and went over to a cabinet on the other side of the bedroom. He rooted around for something in the top drawer. Drawing out a pill bottle, he snapped the lid open. He upended it, and two white tablets, rectangular and flat, tumbled onto his palm. He tossed them into his mouth, ambled back over and took a sip from a glass of water on the bedside table.

 

When he'd drained the glass, he sat down behind Ivy and unbuttoned her dress. Tugging it over her head, he tossed it onto the floor and ran his fingers over her naked shoulders. She squirmed away from his touch, but he persisted in running his hands over her back, her abdomen and her thighs.

 

"There's something very specific I want you to do for me, Ivy, but first our friend here is going to make a better effort at helping me enjoy the evening," he said. "I always enjoy taking a woman's purity. I'm very glad that our young friend Christof had enough respect for her to wait for marriage before enjoying her. Shame it was in vain so far as he's concerned, but I can sweeten the pill in other ways. There's a management position he's been itching to obtain, and when I put it to him earlier that he ought to offer me something in return for the promotion, he was very willing to let his future wife be his advocate. So many young men here offer their womenfolk to me. I've sometimes wondered whether they see it as a bizarre honour, or a form of initiation ceremony. You can get simpleminded men to agree to almost any indignity when you frame it in those terms. Always so terrified of not fitting in! And of course the sacrifice is so much easier to tolerate when their women are serving me, and all they have to do is get drunk downstairs and not think about what's going on up here. They can drown their sorrows in good company. It's happened to enough of them, and I've passed many pleasant evenings this way over the years."

 

Eva burst into terrified sobs, pleading with him not to be violent with her.

 

"Indeed, I'll be very gentle with you this first time, provided you are obliging to me," he replied. "Fight me, and I'll have to be much more determined, won't I? Afterwards, Ivy can do what I command of her, too. I'll be gentle with you, my dear, in a wholly different way and with a very different outcome."

 

He untied Eva's hands and undressed her. She submitted in silence, but her face was still streaked with tears. He pushed her legs open and ran his hand up her thigh, but before Eva could lie down on the bed, Ivy lunged at him.

 

He grabbed her arm, twisted it behind her back and shoved her face into the pillow until she struggled to breathe. The last thing she heard before she blacked out was Eva's weeping, and Honigbaum's cruel, mocking laughter.

 

*

 

Sinistra showed Gerald into a small study-bedroom. He sat on the metal chair at the desk and put his head in his hands.

 

His mind was clouded by the trauma of what he’d just seen in the labs and by her claims about his father. A greater sense of despair than he’d ever known assailed him that such a place could exist. Somewhere inside himself, despite his father’s leading role in a political system based almost entirely on self-interest and cruelty, he tried to retain a belief in the inherent goodness of humanity. However, her boasting had shattered that naïve illusion forever. Above all, he wanted to hear that his father lived and that they could reach out to each other and work hard to understand each other better in the future. More than anything, he wanted to try hard to win his father round to a different way of thinking, even though that wasn't going to be easy.

 

The temptation to fall into despair, to curl up in a ball and weep uncontrollably was immense. But he was in real danger if his father was dead. In that case, she could do with him what she liked to prevent him from exposing the research going on down here.

 

The facility appeared to be underground. He’d never heard of it nor anything like it. No one he knew ever talked about working in such a place. That meant it was forbidden. There was nothing acceptable or lauded about the work being done here. It was grubby and disgusting and that was why, despite his father’s evolved love of nastiness and his own studies in medicine in this very area, he had never once heard his father mention the place. If even Ian Flint was too ashamed to acknowledge it, that said something very nasty indeed about it.

 

He dashed to the small bedroom’s bathroom and vomited. When he returned, he felt slightly better.

 

“Even if what you say about my father is true, my mother won’t be happy about my being kept here. She’ll find out where I am, and she’ll use my father’s connections to punish you,” he told her. "You'll be making a big mistake if you try to stop me leaving."

 

She nodded. “I don't want to cross her. Things out in the real world have changed a lot in the last couple of hours. The resistance has lost control already.”

 

He felt tempted to simply brush her comments aside. She’d lied to him enough already, but there was something in her tone hinting at truthfulness. She certainly seemed afraid of his mother's political connections. He listened patiently while she described how the new leader was beginning to discover running the country wasn’t as easy as they'd imagined. No one seemed able to re-establish authority and control. The south had fallen. The Midlands were following suit. Unrest was spreading north. Soon the whole country would be at a standstill waiting for the looting to abate.

 

He nodded gently as she went on. After so many lies, it was apparent to him that she was telling the truth. In particular, she was very clear about how much they knew and where each piece of information had come from. She was honest about where gaps in their knowledge lay, and how worried they were about the instability gripping the country. She was particularly concerned about her sister. At last there was something he could take hold of and believe in.

 

“Thank you,” he said.

 

“It’s late. Stay here, and I’ll keep trying to make contact with my sister. She might know where your mother is.”

 

This was the last place he wanted to spend the night, but he was floored by the news about his father. He was certainly not well enough to drive after receiving such a shock. The world he would be stepping into tomorrow would be dangerous enough, and he needed time to process his father's passing. For now, he had no alternative but to trust Sinistra.

 

He went over to the bed and lay down. She snapped off the light and closed the door.

 

As he drifted off to sleep, he found himself thinking about what he'd been doing recently, but he couldn’t really recollect. Sinistra had mentioned Blackacre, but he couldn't remember being up there since the twins were born. He couldn't remember anything about the last three months at all. He doubted that he'd ever worked here at the facility. His father would never have agreed to him foregoing his surgical training to waste his energies at this grubby cul de sac. The one thing his father had never stinted on was boasting about what his only son was doing in medicine. But in that case how had he got here, and why would she lie about it?

 

He turned over onto his side and tucked his hands under his head, curling up in a ball. She had mentioned a fiancée, but this had merely helped him realise how many lies she was spinning to keep him here. If there hadn't been anyone serious three months ago, he wouldn't be engaged now, but it was intriguing to fantasise about what such a young woman would be like if he ever did feel like settling down.

 

Imagining her black hair, flashing eyes and tall, slender body felt wonderful. She was smart and feisty, and that was what had attracted him to her in the first place, he decided. She wasn't like anyone else he knew, and that was why he was keen enough to see it through to marriage and be certain she was the one. The only factor that remained a blur was how on earth he could have met someone like this, when his life was so ordered and conservative, centring around the hospital, surgery and spending his leisure time at the country club all his friends frequented. He sighed and pushed that thought from his mind. If such a woman were out there, he would find her. What mattered was that he now had a better idea of what he wanted from his future than he had at the start of the day.

 

The pain of beginning to believe that his father was gone was still too raw to comprehend. He pushed it to the back of his mind as the sleep of nervous exhaustion claimed him, reminding himself that tomorrow was a new day and that his mother would use every political connection she possessed to locate him.