The Adjusters Page 19

  “I don’t need citizens who will stand still for a bullet,” Aziz snapped, without taking his eyes from the kid. “I need citizens who will put a bullet in their own heads if I command. Do it, boy! Shoot yourself.”

  Christian’s eyes flicked towards Mallory, who sighed and shook his head. “This is going to take some explaining to his parents,” he said. “Go on, Christian, do as the man says…”

  Christian straightened a little, finger tightening around the trigger…

  “No!” Henry yelled, leaping from behind the counter. “Christian, stop!”

  Every head in the room turned towards him. For a moment no one moved – even Christian seemed momentarily confused, although he showed no sign of recognizing his friend. Then Dr. Chancellor grabbed a communicator from her coat and barked into it, “Security breach in demonstration lab!”

  A siren sounded in the corridor. General Aziz threw out his arm, finger pointing towards Henry like an arrow.

  “Shoot him!”

  Christian brought the gun from under his chin and fired twice across the lab. Henry threw himself back behind the counter as bullets whizzed by, impacting the wall. More rounds ripped into the counter as Christian began unquestioningly to empty the clip at his former friend.

  “Henry!” Gabrielle screamed from the vent opening. He threw himself towards her, squeezing into the shaft as she crawled back.

  “Move!” he said, half expecting to hear the sound of Christian following them. Instead he heard Mallory yelling from the lab…

  “Stop! Stop shooting, you idiot! I want him alive!”

  Security lights flickered on around the medical centre as distant alarms sounded in the background. In contrast to the first time Henry had escaped from the building, this time it seemed they would stop at nothing to catch him.

  As they crawled through the vents, the sound of running guards seemed to come from all around. Yet somehow they made it to an exterior vent grille. Henry grabbed Gabrielle’s hand and pulled her from the shaft. They’d come out at ground level and, as yet, the guards didn’t seem to be searching nearby. Henry ran towards the gate and the cover of the trees, dragging Gabrielle with him. Halfway there, a buggy driven by a single guard whizzed out from the side of the building. Henry saw he had two choices; he could run, or…

  Letting go of Gabrielle, he sprinted towards the approaching buggy. The guard’s eyes widened, wondering why his quarry wasn’t running in the other direction. Henry leaped seconds before the buggy mowed into him… Landing on the front of the vehicle with his right foot, he struck out with his left, hitting the guard in the shoulder and pushing him over the side. As the guard hit the gravel with a cry of pain, Henry half-fell into the vacated driver’s seat, wrenched the wheel round and skidded to a halt in front of Gabrielle.

  “Get in,” he said.

  She jumped into the passenger seat and Henry sent the buggy speeding down the drive as more guards broke from the centre. The small vehicle was fast enough to outrun a man and Henry put the accelerator to the floor. The chain-link security gate was closing as they sped down the drive… The buggy whizzed through at the last second, knocking another guard aside as he tried to make a grab for Henry. Then they were clear of the perimeter and racing down the drive into the complex.

  “Where are we going?” Gabrielle asked as they drove across the grass behind a set of lodges, headed for the school.

  “We need to get to Newton,” Henry said. “Find Fox and get out of town. I’ve got the evidence of what Mallory’s been up to on my phone. We can use it to get the FBI in here and shut Mallory down.”

  “They’ll have shut down the main gates,” Gabrielle said, as guards with torches appeared ahead of them. “We’ll never get past.”

  “I’ve got an idea about that,” Henry said, steering the buggy towards a line of bushes on the edge of the school grounds. Driving the vehicle into the foliage so it was half hidden, he leaped out and beckoned for Gabrielle to follow him. Hand in hand, they ran the length of the school towards the swimming pool. There was only one person left in the Malcorp complex Henry thought he could trust…

  Coach Tyler.

  As they reached the side door to the sports complex, Henry looked back over the grounds. Torchlights shone in the night and the sound of men’s voices was getting closer. It wouldn’t be long before the guards caught up with them.

  “Coach!” Henry yelled as he and Gabrielle slipped into the building and ran down a corridor to the main pool. The water flickered, sending blue ripples of light across the glass ceiling. The place looked deserted. Henry just hoped the coach was having one of his late nights. “Coach!”

  “Henry?” The stocky man appeared in the door to his office.

  They ran over and pushed past him into the tiny office space.

  “Henry, what’s going on?” the coach asked, following them in and hastily grabbing a bottle of Scotch from the cluttered desk. He dumped it in a filing cabinet at the back and studied them carefully. “Are you in some kind of trouble?”

  Taking a deep breath to regain his composure, Henry said, “I know this looks bad, but we need your help. Remember all those things we were saying were weird about Malcorp…”

  “Uh-huh…”

  “Well, it’s a lot weirder than that.” Henry looked round as a door slammed somewhere in the building. “I just don’t have time to explain everything right now.”

  Footsteps sounded from the pool area.

  “You can’t let them catch us.”

  The coach looked from him to Gabrielle, no doubt wondering where she’d appeared from.

  “Please,” she said appealingly. “They want to hurt us.”

  The footsteps got closer…

  “Under the desk!” the coach said urgently. Henry and Gabrielle moved fast, but the space was a tight squeeze. Coach Tyler flopped back into his chair and put his feet up. Seconds later, a security guard appeared in the doorway.

  “You seen two kids in here?” the guard demanded.

  “Uh, no,” Coach replied, trying to sound casual about it. Under the desk, Henry and Gabrielle held their breath.

  “A security door at the back of this building was left open. You sure nobody came in here?”

  Coach laughed, moving to the filing cabinet. “Kids are always going out that way and leaving it unlocked. No matter how many times I tell them not to.” He removed the bottle of Scotch and held it up. “I was about to have a nightcap. Do you fancy—”

  “No thanks,” the guard interrupted, backing away from the door. “If you see anyone…”

  “You’ll be the first to know,” Coach said, pushing his sagging leather chair back and sticking his legs under the desk so they almost kicked Henry in the head. “If you change your mind about that drink, just let me know.”

  The guard gave no reply. As his footsteps echoed away around the poolside, nobody in the office moved. It was only as a door banged in the distance that Henry and Gabrielle breathed a sigh of relief and climbed out from their hiding place. Coach Tyler poured himself a drink for real and knocked it back in one.

  “I am not cut out for lying,” he said.

  “You did great, coach,” Henry said. “Thank you.”

  Coach Tyler looked at him. “I could get sacked for what I just did. This had better be worth it.”

  “It’s worth it,” Henry replied. “You wouldn’t believe what Malcorp is up to.”

  The coach cocked his head. “Try me.”

  Henry looked at Gabrielle, who shrugged. If they were going to ask the man for help getting them out of the complex, he at least deserved an explanation. Henry gave him a potted version of events that evening, describing Mallory’s plot to implant strange devices into the brains of students in the Malcorp complex, while Gabrielle backed him up.

  The coach took a while to register everything Henry had told him, then he poured himself a third drink. “So what do you want from me?” he asked.

  Henry reached out and took the glass
from his hands. “First, stay sober because you’re going to drive us out of the complex. Gabrielle and I will be in the back of your car and you’re going to drop us off at the coffee shop in Newton.”

  Coach raised an eyebrow. “That’s it?”

  Henry shrugged. “We might need a lift to the city as well. We have to contact the police, but Malcorp controls all communication in and out of this place…”

  The coach stood up and began to pace around the office, which wasn’t easy considering its size and the amount of junk that lined the walls. “Man, this is crazy,” he said. “No one out there is going to believe you…”

  Henry and Gabrielle exchanged a look. Although the coach had listened to their story without question, he was obviously nervous about getting involved.

  “Come on, coach,” Henry pleaded with him. “You said yourself something stunk here. What does your gut tell you?”

  “It’s turning over!” he replied. “But I thought Mallory was feedin’ these kids steroids or something. Not…this brain stuff!”

  Gabrielle stepped forward and placed a hand on his arm. “We need your help. If we don’t get out of the complex they’re going to do bad things to us.”

  Her tone seemed to calm the coach, because he stopped pacing.

  “Please,” she continued. “If you don’t want to help us after that, you don’t have to. Right, Henry?”

  “Right,” he agreed.

  Coach Tyler sighed, then grabbed a set of keys from his desk drawer.

  Ten minutes later the coach’s ancient Chevy drove across the complex from the pool in the direction of the main gate. In the back, Henry and Gabrielle lay squeezed into the seat well, covered with a rather smelly blanket that had previously been lining the trunk. The Chevy’s suspension was practically shot, so they felt every little bump in the road.

  “Sorry,” Henry whispered as a turn pressed him closer to Gabrielle in the confined space.

  “It’s okay,” she whispered back. “How much further?”

  “I think we’re almost at the gate.” Henry sincerely hoped Hank was on duty tonight and not some other guy who would want to check the interior. If they were lucky, the guards would still be confining their search to the buildings within the complex.

  “They did it to me, didn’t they?” Gabrielle asked as the car continued on.

  Henry looked at her, able to make out only her eyes staring back in the darkness under the blanket. “Did what?”

  “Put one of those SPIDIRs in my brain. And now they can make me do whatever they want, whenever they want…”

  “We don’t know that.”

  “I do,” she said. “I don’t feel right… Mallory told me it’s taken longer than they expected to get my ‘treatment’ working. I think the only reason I’m not like Christian and all the others is they haven’t finished programming me yet…”

  Henry reached out and squeezed her hand. “It’s going to be okay, you know. You’re still you, whatever they’ve done.”

  Her eyes bored into his. “Am I? I’m not so sure.”

  He changed tack. “There has to be a way to shut those implants down. If we could just get hold of one of those Initiators Mallory has…”

  Henry thought it over. There had to be more than one of the command switches around somewhere in the complex – either in the medical centre or Mallory’s house… John Mallory was a cautious guy, he’d said so himself. He must have an Initiator on hand at all times, just in case his experiment went wrong.

  Gabrielle asked again, “Henry, what are we going to do?”

  Before he could answer, the car pulled to a halt. They’d reached the main gate. Up front, Coach Tyler wound down the window and Hank’s familiar voice asked him if he’d seen anything unusual. The coach did a good job of sounding annoyed at being stopped, saying that he’d already been questioned back at the pool and no, he hadn’t seen anything unusual.

  To Henry’s massive relief, it worked and Hank let them carry on through without even asking to look in the trunk. A few hundred metres up the road the coach gave a little whoop of triumph.

  “Yeah! We’re out!”

  Henry pulled the stinking blanket down from his and Gabrielle’s faces and they both breathed a little easier.

  “You two had better stay down,” the coach said, keeping his eyes on the road. “There might be more patrols up ahead.”

  “Good thinking,” Henry said.

  “Thank you, coach,” Gabrielle added.

  The man gave another whoop. “I feel like I’m in a goddamned James Bond movie!”

  Gabrielle smiled, looking a lot happier than she had a few moments ago.

  “Thank you, Henry,” she said, leaning in and planting a kiss on his cheek. “I’m glad you didn’t give up on me.”

  Henry hoped she couldn’t see him blushing in the darkness. “That’s okay.”

  The car screeched to a halt without warning. The coach cursed loudly and then said, “Get out of the road, you idiot!”

  Henry closed his eyes as he heard footsteps approach the vehicle. Then he recognized the sound of Steve’s voice. Without being invited, Steve jumped into the passenger seat and slammed the door shut.

  “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Coach Tyler demanded. “I almost ran you over!”

  “Sorry, coach,” Steve said. “I was just looking for a lift into Newton. You don’t mind, do you?”

  Grumbling, Coach Tyler started the car going again. Gabrielle squeezed Henry’s hand tighter as Steve began to talk in a monotone about the swim team and sports day in a never-ending stream. The coach gave non-committal replies to his questions, just concentrating on getting them to Newton as fast as possible.

  “So, have you heard about the break-in at the medical centre?” Steve asked out of the blue.

  “What, another?” Coach replied.

  “Yeah. Turns out that girl Gabrielle Henson was involved. The one Henry Ward was asking about last week.”

  “I thought you said you didn’t know her.”

  Steve laughed. “Turns out I did. And it turns out she’s in the back of this car right now.”

  “What are you talking about?” the coach said, his voice wavering.

  Steve looked over the seat, holding up something in his hand…an Initiator! He pressed the green button and said, “Initiate.”

  Henry felt Gabrielle tense beside him and was caught by surprise as she slipped her hand from his, took hold of the blanket and ripped it away from their bodies.

  “No!” he hissed as she rose to a sitting position in the back…

  Then he saw her expression…blank…just like Christian’s had been in the lab…

  He tried to get up, but her feet had his legs pinned to the floor with surprising force. Steve looked over the back of the passenger seat and took in the scene calmly.

  “Take him out,” he ordered.

  Gabrielle closed her hand into a fist, drew it back and smashed it into Henry’s face. Stars exploded across the bridge of his nose and his vision went blank. Then she hit him again and there was nothing more…

  “Ward!” Fox’s voice floated across to him through layers of blackness. “Ward, wake the hell up!”

  With a groan he opened his eyes and tried to raise his hands to his nose, which was hurting and felt twice its normal size. His hands were bound behind the wooden chair upon which he was sitting. His ankles were bound to the legs.

  “I think my nose is broken,” he mumbled, looking blearily around the room, which he recognized as the lounge above the coffee shop. “People keep making me unconscious.”

  “Stop being a baby,” Fox said. “It is not broken. Maybe.”

  He focused on her voice and saw that she was sitting opposite him on another kitchen chair. Like him, her arms and legs were bound with heavy-duty packing tape. There was a cut on her right cheek and a bruise was appearing; it looked like someone had hit her.

  “Are you okay?” he asked.

  “Yeah, I�
�m just great. Tied to a chair in my apartment. Having fun.”

  Henry sniffed and looked around the lounge, trying to clear his head. The sounds of a struggle came from behind the door to Fox’s mom’s room.

  “They’re tying her up,” Fox said, seeing where Henry was looking. “Steve and Gabrielle. We have to do something…” Her voice cracked.

  “It’s okay,” he said, looking back at her. “What happened? Where’s the coach?”

  Fox frowned at him. “What coach? Gabrielle turned up with you five minutes ago, saying you’d got injured escaping the complex. When I opened the door, Steve jumped me. He had a gun!”

  “Malcorp has altered their brains,” Henry said, quickly explaining about the SPIDIR implants. If Steve was armed, he’d be prepared to kill. “Mallory’s turned Christian into some kind of soldier he can control at will. You should have seen it, Fox. It was…” His voice trailed away as he pictured his friend under Mallory’s control. It’s not over yet, he told himself. Mallory’s going to pay for what he’s done.

  Fox looked at the door to her mom’s room. “We have to get out of here.”

  Henry strained against the tape around his wrist and felt it give a little. With enough time he could probably pull free…

  The bedroom door opened and Steve and Gabrielle appeared. As they closed it behind them, Henry caught a glimpse of Mary Layton with her wrists taped to the bedpost.

  “Get the petrol can from the coach’s car,” Gabrielle said to Steve, her voice an emotionless monotone now. “You can fill it across the street at the gas station.”

  Without a word, Steve exited the lounge, leaving them alone with Gabrielle. She walked to the kitchen, extracted a large carving knife from a block on the counter and returned to them. For a moment she merely stood, as if processing something internally. She looked like a different person, Henry thought. Her face was like a mask – expressionless, unmoving.

  He said, “Gabrielle, don’t do this. Mallory is using you.”

  She snapped out of her trance, moving swiftly towards him and placing the knife against his cheek. “Who else knows what you have learned?”