She glanced at her watch. ‘They’ll be on the A38 by now. If we could get out we could get a flight down? Beat them there?’
He didn’t bother to reply to this either—they couldn’t get out; there was only one flight a day, and they’d probably now missed it. Suddenly, it exploded out of him. ‘Your brother made that fucking chimera!’
Her gaze flicked guiltily sidewards. ‘Yes. I told you he was obsessed. He wanted so badly to get the vaccine to work.’
‘How many people are supposed to normally be in vaccine trials?’
‘Well I have heard of some being in the tens, but it’s more usual to aim for between three and six thousand. Some don’t even go as far as using humans at all—it’s limited to testing it on mice. Why?’
‘Oh, I was just wondering.’ He thumped his back uselessly against the door once more. ‘I think he used about thirty, and I think half of those died and he covered his tracks by burning the failures.’
‘What on earth are you talking about? That’s ridiculous.’
‘He was using the homeless veterans. Bringing them here, injecting them, seeing what happened. If they survived the vaccine, he tested them with the chimera.’
‘That’s utterly preposterous. I don’t believe you. Just shut up—you don’t know what you’re talking about.’
He shrugged, then slammed his back against the door again. He felt like crying.
They were silent for a while. Aleksey sat with his hand pressed to his face in pain and Rachel sat quietly leaning against the wall across from him. She appeared deep in thought, and after glancing at him to gauge the reception she might get, she muttered, ‘I’m sorry. Using soldiers or the homeless as test subjects isn’t exactly unheard of.’
‘I know.’
‘Do you remember I told you about the Japanese and the flea bombs?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well that was an army group called Unit 731. They committed the most horrific experiments on humans ever recorded—far worse even than those done by the Nazis, and that’s saying something. Most of Unit 731’s victims were homeless people or prisoners of war.’
‘Yes. I know. Many of the latter were Russian.’
‘Oh. You know about this.’
‘Yes.’
He added, because he was on the verge of something unthinkable, a welling hysteria in his belly he had never experienced before, and he wanted to lash out and hurt someone else, ‘When we—the Russians—caught anyone who had worked in Unit 731, we put them on trial and executed them. The Americans gave them amnesty and employed them in their own biological warfare labs. I think they probably got on well with all the Nazis they found working there already. We are not condemned to repeat history, but to forget it, to redefine its language and twist it to our own cause.’
She was silent for a while, apparently mulling over what he’d said. She toed the concrete floor with her scuffed, ruined shoes. ‘It’s impossible to believe humans can be so cruel.’
‘Is it? I find it extremely easy.’ He put his face in his hands, not caring about the wound. Molly had been worried her unicorn would be afraid of the dark. ‘You made death itself and you have unleashed it into the world.’
‘No! I was making a…’
She trailed off, and he assumed she realised that he did not care to hear her excuses any more.
Time passed. Every so often he tried the door. Sometimes with his shoulder, sometimes with a boot, sometimes just scraping around the hinges with his fingernails—anything just to be free.
Finally, he thought of taking a look outside once more. Perhaps someone would visit the place, and he should be monitoring this so he could shout to them.
He put his face back down onto the cold concrete once more and peered through the tiny gap beneath the doors.
He reared away, skittering across the floor on his backside. ‘Fuck! Fucking hell!’Inhuman experiments, terrible mutilations…
‘What?’ Rachel rose extremely nervously to her feet, grasping her bag like a shield.
He got back onto his hands and knees and peered under again. There was a blood-drained, wizened face with elongated teeth staring in at him. It wheezed.
He asked hesitantly, ‘Snodgrass?’ and got a sneeze of agreement back. ‘Harry! In here! Harry!’
