PART TWO: TO HELL AND BACK

Chapter Eight: A Crazy Nightmare World

The elevator, a neatly furnished white cube with an immaculate mirror, rumbled upwards through the shaft to Simon Grant's opulent penthouse.

The painkillers were starting to take effect. Already the agony in my chest had faded to a distant hum, and my thoughts were sinking in soft clouds. I forced them away. I had to stay sharp. I was getting close, and I didn't know what would be waiting for me behind the next door.

The bleeding in my chest had tapered off. A flesh wound. You got lucky, Max. I made a clumsy tourniquet with a torn strip off my shirt for the arm. It had gone numb. Useless. I frowned. Already handicapped, and the worse was yet to come.

The elevator door slid open on another transitional area, a little faux-wood foyer with two plain white benches flanking a plant pot. Beyond the thin steel railings I could see the huge lobby window, and New York stretching away beyond that. The city at night, brooding with secret sin and death on the summer air. I reached for my Desert Eagle.

I took a right and passed through a steel door.

So this was it. The first gauntlet.

The corridor was expensively decked in priceless portraits and faux-pine walling. Laser trip wires rose and fell, brief red flashes in the sterile corridor. Doubtless packed into the walls behind them was enough C4 to blow me back to Jersey. From one end of the corridor a camera watched my every move, an electronic eye following me as I walked into my doom.

Footsteps. From behind. Driving me into those deadly scything beams and an explosive end.

I turned on them, Desert Eagle to hand. Three guards, strolling nonchalantly through the lobby. I opened fire, driving them back.

These guy were professionals. One rolled behind a bench. A bullet grazed the arm of another and he shrugged it off, returning fire. Bullets whizzed past my head, thudding home in the wood panelling behind my head. I ducked and fired a single shot into his gut. He slumped to his knees as his friend reached into his pocket.

And withdrew it clutching a little surprise. A black grenade.

I rolled into the lobby just as the grenade hurtled past my head, bouncing against the wall behind me and into the laser corridor. I hit the floor shooting. The goons returned fire.

Seconds later hunks of flaming steel were hurtling past my head and it felt like a giant hand was throwing me across the room. A jagged shard of steel tore off the head of the goon with the bullet in his gut, spraying me with his blood.

I rolled to the stop on the floor with the flames dancing around me. The other two were getting ready to act. No time to waste.

I shot the nearest goon in both knees and he collapsed, screaming. I rolled to the side and put a bullet in the final guard's skull, and he fell backwards like something out of a comedy sketch, blood shooting right up to the steel roof.

As I pushed myself up to my feet, my head swimming, feeling nauseous and weak, I could hear the distant hiss of the sprinklers extinguishing the flames that had blown the corridor out. After the explosion the sound was such a contrast that I let out a small laugh, and then let it die. You start laughing in here, Max, and you won't stop until they're carting you off to the Psych Ward.

I tread cautiously through the wreckage of the corridor, everything smouldering beneath the gentle sprinklers, and made my way to the staircase down the other end. Great ugly holes had been blown through the steel wall, leaving wires trailing out like guts. A light flashed on and off dimly before blinking out completely. And, uncaring as ever, the electronic eye just sat and watched.

Grant had known I was coming. He wouldn't have gone to these extremes otherwise. He knew I was alive, and he was plenty scared. Exactly where I wanted him. I'd scare the answers out of him, and then I'd kill him. Not because it was the right thing to do, not out of any sense of revenge, but because I wanted to send a message to whoever had charged him with this errand.

You're next.

I stepped off the staircase into an opulent reception, all white walls, subtle lighting and paintings on the wall. A few expensive sculptures dotted around. There were two doors here, on either side of the lobby, with marble desks sat in front of each. A lone receptionist sat behind one. Just as I had expected, the name on the brass plate on the double wooden doors behind her read MACK LUTHER – HEAD OF OPERATIONS.

There was no time for niceties. No time for funny stuff. I pulled my gun on the receptionist.

She was a pretty girl, all eyes and golden hair, and the fear that took over her face made my think of another face, lying dead on her own bed in a New Jersey house nearly a decade ago.

"Please," I choked. "I need to get into Luther's office."

"Don't hurt me," she sobbed.

I choked up. Had I lost my way? What was I doing? One minute you've got two kids and a wife, a mortgage, a house in the suburbs, the paper from the vendor on your way to catching the morning Metro, your latte done just as you like it, and the next you're pointing a gun at a receptionist because you've got no other choice. It gets to you sometimes. You realise that your life is nothing but a cheap backdrop and beyond it is some crazy nightmare world where Fortune 500 companies kill thousands to knock up their share prices and policemen are murdered in their own precincts. That when the backdrops fall away there's nothing but darkness, hopelessness, insanity, and big shark smiles. And the terrified eyes of a woman who wants to be home with her family, not sitting in the office at midnight on the brink of death because her bosses screwed up somewhere along the way.

The gun fell to my side.

"Listen," I said, my voice hoarse. "Hundreds of people are going to die tonight, and it's your boss's fault. You're probably not going to believe me, you probably think I'm a kook or something, but I'm serious. I need to get into that office, because the only person in the whole world who means a damn to me right now will die if I don't. And so will your husband, and those two pretty kids in that picture on your desk. And so will you. So please… open the door."

She turned pale, nodded briefly, put the key code in and let me pass.

I stumbled into Luther's vast office, its window eyes seeing the world beyond half-sealed horizontal blinds, the only light the unnatural blue of the computer screen and the dim yellow of a table lamp.

It no longer mattered to me. None of it.

I threw a load of papers on the floor, papers that probably held enough damning evidence to shut AvaMed down for good and send half its employees to the lethal injection, and opened shelves, filing cabinets, anything.

Nothing. The vaccine wasn't here.

I sighed and collapsed into the seat. Looked at the computer. All the answers here, everything I'd ever wanted to know. The case, all of it. Maybe a clue to the big answer.

My hand moved of its own accord, opening files, folders, idly scanning through Luther's computer. He'd been too arrogant to seal anything with passwords. Maybe he'd hoped that any normal person would be dead by now.

I wasn't normal. I'd left normality behind a long time ago.

One file caught my eye. Labelled 'Distribution,' it contained a set of documents, all, I soon realised, compiled lists of a legitimate front called Glaxo-Testing. Lists of patients who had been paid a small amount of money to test medicinal products, cosmetics and so on. I clicked on a GlaxoTest office in the Bronx, and read the listing. Columns labelled FIRST TEST, of a product with some complicated Latin name. I went down the list of patients and results, and then saw the name that sealed it all, the piece of the jigsaw where all the other pieces come together.

A single name: MARIA ESCOBAR. And the word SUCCESS.

I followed the name along, all successes. Scrolled up on the last column. And saw it, the awful truth. MIASMA A-STRAIN. And the word SUCCESS.

Reality itself, falling aside. Had you even noticed those clinics? They had just been rooms on the third and second floors of grimy brick buildings, rooms with unassuming window logos, rooms where people went to make a little extra cash to pay the bills. Take the shot, make a few dollars. All simple. And then, one day, slip in a little extra. Terminate their lives.

They'd spread Miasma through these centres. Pumped the poor and desolate of New York city with their lethal cocktail, sat back and watched it spread.

I'd seen too much, I never wanted to see anything like it ever again.

I left the room.

To be continued…