Lifesign, p.1
Lifesign, page 1
Lifesign
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Prologue
Part I
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Part II
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Chapter Forty
Part III
Chapter Forty-One
Chapter Forty-Two
Chapter Forty-Three
Chapter Forty-Four
Chapter Forty-Five
Chapter Forty-Six
Chapter Forty-Seven
Chapter Forty-Eight
Chapter Forty-Nine
A letter from Carl Goodman
About the Author
Also by Carl Goodman
Copyright
Cover
Table of Contents
Start of Content
For Cheryl and Ross
Prologue
Kyle ran.
Cold night air burned his lungs, trainers almost silent as he pelted over rolling swathes of fractured concrete. They were behind him. He could hear them. A pack of five. Three on foot, two on bikes, all carrying. Knives, and that weird-shit hook thing the fat kid had waved in his face before he slapped him a good one. Bastards would cut him, he knew that. One of them would stick him too.
A carving knife in the gut. A rusty blade someone had used for hacking up Sunday roast, shoved into his belly while they all watched, goading each other on. Metal and flesh. He could almost feel it coming.
Kyle Shaw. Fifteen years old, lean build, mellow skin and tight curly hair, long strides, sure-footed. A good-looking kid, everybody said so. His mum said so. She said he took after his dad, but Kyle didn’t believe she knew who that was. The girls at school said so too, with sly glances and dirty giggles. Sadie said so, which was where the problem started. Sadie said so in no uncertain terms.
Sadie had said so in the lift, when she pushed the emergency stop button. She was in the year below him, but that didn’t count for much. All the girls were up for it. All you had to do was ask, except Sadie had asked first. Not asked, Kyle thought as he jumped a metal bar. Sadie had demanded.
So what could he do? It wasn’t like she wasn’t fit. Best-looking girl in her year, she knew make-up and fashion, she looked the part even in her uniform. So when she pushed the button and started taking everything off, Kyle had thought: yeah, all right then.
He had given her one right there, up on the seventh floor of her block of flats, just down the road from school. The lifts were dodgy. Everyone knew that, so nobody would have given a second thought to one getting stuck again. All metal mirrors and fluorescent lights, Kyle got his kit off too and pushed her up against the aluminium doors. It had been great, a bunch of fun. Only problem was, Sadie had made a Gif.
He knew there would be trouble as soon as he saw it. She only shared it with a few friends, but then one of them posted it. He thought he looked pretty good with Sadie’s legs wrapped round him and that expression on her face, he thought he looked fit too. It was only a pity her boyfriend didn’t agree.
Kyle kept running. Over a tangle of junk and rubble just high enough to stop the bikes in their tracks, under a metal gate that would fall if anyone put weight on it. Down an alley, a narrow gap between two breeze block walls. Into sudden darkness.
A dead end. Kyle spat fear. He could hear them behind him. He only had a few seconds before they boxed him in. There was only one way out.
Up.
He checked his stride before he hit the wall. Two sliding steps, then hands over the top. For one gut-wrenching moment he thought he wouldn’t make it, his trainers slipped and scraped on rough breeze blocks, but then his foot caught in the corner and he gained traction. Kyle heaved, clawed, and dragged himself up.
He had to roll over razor wire, coils and braids that scratched his skin and snagged his jeans. He pushed down on it with his leather jacket, used his weight to flatten it, arched his back, kicked his legs.
One by one the five skidded to a halt beneath him. They screamed. Sadie’s boyfriend flipped a knife, sent it spinning at him. Kyle flinched, felt the blade scrape his knee, saw it tumble off into the darkness. Somewhere in shadows it clattered to the ground. Kyle rolled over. He fell.
He dropped to the floor on the other side of the wall but managed to land more or less feet first. Hard concrete took the breath from him, but then with a stagger, he stood. From beyond the wall there came a furious, frustrated yelping of pack animals that knew they had lost their prey. ‘You’re a dead boy,’ Sadie’s boyfriend screamed. ‘I’m gonna cut your fucking knob off.’
Maybe he would, Kyle thought as he stared back up at the wall and remembered where he was. Maybe they would catch up with him tomorrow, but now he knew they were coming. Tonight though, he thought as he looked behind him at the concrete landscape lit only by the moon, for a few hours he was safe.
Right?
* * *
Moonlight cast sharp shadows. In a couple of hundred metres the wall became high steel railings topped with spikes, and a hundred metres beyond that the railings ran into another stretch of vertical concrete. The railings there were twisted, bent out of shape where some piece of heavy machinery had reversed into them, probably years ago now. He could squeeze through the gap, creep out of the site and make his way home through the darkened lanes and silent alleys. Just not yet.
Not until Sadie’s boyfriend and his band of psychos got bored of hanging around and left, because he knew they would not follow him in. He knew they didn’t have the balls for that.
Kyle wandered away from the breeze-block wall and strolled towards the building.
It stood like a monolith lit from above by an inconstant moon, a pearl-white disk crossed with tendrils of cloud. Once, the building had been part of the water treatment plant, a pump-house filled with steam engines and filtration tanks. Then electricity had replaced steam and the engines had become smaller. The building was no longer needed, but the council had put a preservation order on it, so it could be used but not torn down. For a while a storage company had filled it with containers and lockups. Over the years, though, the cost of upkeep became too great, and the storage company had found cheaper premises. Now it was abandoned, a chamfered stone block no one knew what to do with. It didn’t matter. Kyle thought the building looked incredible.
Dangerous though, he knew that too, which was why Sadie’s boyfriend wouldn’t venture in. The stone tanks lay open and some of them were deep; deep and unguarded. Fall into one and you wouldn’t need to worry about clambering out. Just a splash on concrete, brains and blood and broken bones. Inside though, there would be brilliant places to climb.
A castle, Kyle thought. His castle, lit by shafts of moonlight. Lined with metal frames and steel gantries, suspended walkways that once stretched between stacked containers. Like a movie set, where aliens lurked around every corner. He’d been in the building before. Tonight, hiding from Sadie’s boyfriend and his dog-faced crew, Kyle felt like going deeper.
* * *
It took him twenty minutes to find the racks. He wasn’t looking for them, but then he wasn’t really looking for anything at all. They stood in a storage area he hadn’t seen before, set on a mezzanine deck atop a stone plinth some eight stories high, placing it not far below the ceiling in the huge volume of what would have once been the pump room. A narrow gantry led to it. He tested it, hesitantly at first. There was no reason to expect it would still take his weight, but after a couple of steps he figured it probably would.
High metal shelves with boxes stacked on them lined the outside edge of the platform. When Kyle touched them, he felt the difference immediately. No dust. Everything else in the building was covered with it, coarse grains of stone and concrete, but in this area everything felt new. Somebody had been here recently. When he looked around, dark-adapted eyes probing the shadows, he found he could make out tables covered with what looked like equipment. His foot brushed something. A metal pole; a tripod. And on top of the tripod, a light.
He followed the cable. The power to the building had been switched off long ago, so if there were lights then somebody must have brought their own electricity. It only took him a minute to find the battery pack. It took him half that again to find the switch.
Cold white LEDs flooded the space. Four lights on tripods formed a square that encompassed the tables. Kyle stood. Looked aroun d.
Wished, with every fibre of his being, that he had not.
* * *
She stared back at him from behind green-tinged glass. Skin bloated, eyes as dark as hell, wisps of hair floating and coiling in some unseen current. A face, drawn, contorted and flayed, pared from its skull like orange peel. Someone had removed her face and her scalp, stretched them over a metal frame and then suspended the frame in liquid. And the trouble with that, Kyle realised as he felt bile erupt in the back of his throat, was that tank of liquid was just one of many.
Despite himself he looked up at the racks. They were not empty. When Kyle started screaming, he found he could not stop.
Part I
Natural Selection
Chapter One
Three rounds from a semi-automatic rifle tore the air and ripped the crate next to her to shreds. Burst mode, Detective Inspector Eva Harris thought, as a police officer in black body armour grabbed her by the neck and dragged her behind a concrete column. She had not expected either of those things.
Jacks, she remembered as he forced her to the floor and all but knelt on her, his name was Jacks. A grey-haired fifty-something who had exuded quiet competence at the operational briefing. A Counter-Terrorism Specialist Firearms Officer with some sort of military background, given the job of babysitting unarmed Detective Officers on a raid that absolutely should not have involved anyone firing actual shots. Well, Eva thought as she struggled to breathe, just shows how wrong you can be.
More gunfire. Eva covered her head with her hands and stayed down as Jacks intended. She felt him move. A moment later the metallic scream of his assault rifle slapped her ears. From across the other side of the warehouse she heard another gun discharge, more staccato drumming as one of the other SFOs joined Jacks in the process of neutralising the threat. Such a clinical term, Eva thought as she tried to make out which of the other three firearms officers had also started firing. A euphemism, given that in this context neutralisation meant shooting someone dead.
When she stepped outside of the moment what struck her most was how calm she felt, given the operation had just gone catastrophically wrong. Initial surveillance had identified four individuals, but as soon as they entered the warehouse Eva counted six. Kitson, the SFO’s bronze commander, had changed deployment immediately and suddenly it was the firearms officers taking point, not simply supporting the DOs. Jacks had shoved her behind him. He didn’t strike her as the kind of officer who had much trouble with insubordination.
‘Two up above us,’ Jacks barked at his mike as she edged around the column. ‘The walkway is metal.’
‘On it.’ Eva heard the response through static. A handful of seconds later a pair of concussion grenades tumbled through the air and detonated on the walkway. Light seared behind her eyes. The sound of the blast hurt like steel shards stabbing in her ears, so whoever was on the walkway must have really felt it. They had. Someone screamed. Jacks ran.
Up half a flight of stairs, he dropped where the landing turned a dogleg, and fired two bursts of three rounds. More screams, but this time she could hear pain. Somebody else shouted, incoherent and almost hysterical. It took a second for her to realise. They were trying to give themselves up. ‘Support,’ she heard Jacks bark. ‘Two hostiles wounded. Looking to disarm.’
Eva knew then why she had taken an immediate liking to Jacks. He could have shot them dead, killed them on the spot and the internal enquiry would have exonerated him in minutes. Instead he had taken a calculated risk. Three SFOs formed a phalanx and advanced towards the stairs. Kitson and the other team members were still outside with the hostiles they had already disarmed.
She took a moment to look around her. The location of the warehouse had come from a previous investigation, from a hoard of material a local criminal named Warren Muir had collected, over the course of half a dozen years. He’d kept it in a metal case as an insurance policy, to protect himself from capricious masters. Muir was a whale of a man, middle-aged with a scrapy ponytail and thinning hair, waistline ballooned by the beer his shabby pub served. A facilitator who worked for lowlife, some local and some more distant, purveyor of brute force and ignorance to those whose businesses required it. One of Muir’s thugs had tried to ram her through a crash-barrier on the A3 with a scaffolding lorry and in the process killed an innocent bystander. Eva had chased Muir around his dingy premises, following the sound of his laboured breathing, until she found him prostrate on a stained linoleum floor, desperately trying to destroy the evidence he had squirreled away for his own security. Funny, she thought as she watched the firearms officers surround the stairs. Who knew Pandora’s box was made of tin?
Eva stood. A tall woman with closely cropped blonde hair, her movements were lithe and poised. She moved like a dancer. She took her weight on the balls of her feet and scrutinised the scene in front of her through suspicious green eyes set below black, arcing brows. Young for a DI, she had already seen more than her fair share of trouble. She knew about violence. She had come to understand it at a visceral level. And she knew when it was not over.
Eva was about to step out from behind the concrete pillar when something made her stop. A sudden gnawing realisation chewed at her gut, and this time she felt her short hair lift from her scalp. Two on the gantry, one by the door, two knocked to the floor as the firearms officers stormed the room. She crouched down, inched her head around the edge of the column and yelled, ‘SFOs! We’re missing one hostile!’
The words had barely left her lips when something sailed out of the darkness. There were too many places to hide. The men in the warehouse were far better prepared than surveillance had led them to believe. Something bright, flickering. It tumbled as it flew, struck the ground and shattered. A split second later another petrol bomb burst on the floor, then two more. A lake of flame spread over polished concrete. Whoever was in the shadows threw another. This time it erupted above the entrance and a curtain of burning liquid poured down. Shouts from outside. Nobody was going in or out through that door, Eva realised.
Two of the SFOs fired shots into the back of the warehouse. Sparks flew in darkness. She heard the screech of metal striking metal as the rounds ricocheted off the side of a storage container. Too bloody organised, she thought as the lake of flames seeped towards her. For a moment terror paralysed her. Then heat forced her to move.
Eva crouched and ran, kept behind packing cases where she could and glanced at the SFOs when she thought it was safe. On the gantry above the screaming grew, became more hysterical. A realisation came to her from nowhere. You weren’t part of the plan, she thought as she crawled the last few metres to the corner of the warehouse. A couple of seconds later that idea felt as though it had been confirmed. Whoever was behind the storage container lobbed a petrol bomb up onto the gantry. The wounded men kept screaming. In another few moments, they stopped.
She didn’t know what to do. She couldn’t do anything to help the SFOs, she couldn’t see a way out of the warehouse. All you can do is try not to die, Eva thought as she shielded her eyes against the light of the flames. She saw Jacks run down the stairs and sprint into the darkness behind the storage container. He fired as he ran. A few moments later he came back out and stood in the middle of the warehouse while the pool of fire seeped over stacked boxes and turned them to fuel. Jacks lowered his weapon. Guns covering the corners of the warehouse, the SFOs clustered around him. Eva took a chance and joined them.
Four SFOs, one DI and a fire that was rapidly consuming the warehouse. Dense black smoke broiled and churned over the ceiling. Looking up at it was like staring at the underside of a turbulent sea. It would drop soon, Eva knew. Some law of fluid dynamics would reach thermal equilibrium and the acrid clouds would fall like a curtain on a stage, choking them all.
‘There’s an exit,’ Jacks said, ‘behind the container, but he’s blocked it.’
‘We won’t get through that.’ One of the other firearms officers waved at the flames that engulfed the entrance.
Eva nodded at the gantry. ‘What about the hostiles?’
Jacks shook his head. ‘This whole op was a trap and they weren’t supposed to get out either. Two birds, one stone. I reckon we’ve got about three minutes before the heat gets too much. Any ideas?’ He didn’t direct the question at anyone in particular.
