Lee
"Budgie" Barnett is a writer of comedy and of comic books. He first
broke into the business with three stories in Imperium Comics' TRAILER PARK
OF TERROR, before getting his first big break with Marvel in X-MEN UNLIMITED
#4, which hit the shelves in August 2004. Well known in the UK Comics industry
for the annual Hypotheticals panel
he devised and presents with Dave Gibbons at the UK Comics Festival, he's been
described as being to accountancy what Indiana Jones is to archaeology. He currently
writes GOING CHEEP at the Pulse.
Several miles away, and a hundred feet below Davies (currently floating fifty foot off the ground outside the main board room window of Doncaster and Monkton), Doctor Betty Grable was rehearsing her opening words, trying to find the right tone.
She was still getting over the shock of being told by Docherty precisely to whom she would be delivering her briefing, but at the same time trying to remember whether or not she’d brought all the information with her to justify what would, undoubtedly, be regarded as science fiction. She sighed with relief as she remembered slipping the recorded DVD of the rats into a plastic wallet and then putting it in the folder.
As she approached a large set of double doors with the legend “PRIVATE - NO ENTRANCE EXCEPT FOR AUTHORISED PERSONNEL” written by them in large white letters, she gasped. “Oh no,” she said, something that had troubled her from the moment she’d been driven into Downing Street springing to the forefront of her mind.
Docherty gave her an urgent look, concern flooding his features. “What is it,” he asked.
Grable looked at him in genuine worry. “I just remembered. I didn’t vote for him.”
Docherty’s face creased, as if he was trying not to laugh, which was indeed the case. “Don’t worry about it – I doubt if he’ll ask you.”
“No,” she continued, “but what if he does?”
Docherty gave up the struggle and laughed. “I suspect that what you’re about to tell him will worry him far more than whether or not you voted for him last time.” He grinned at her and then said, “though he might well ask you if you’re voting for him next time,” which didn’t exactly reassure her.
She soon gave up trying to remember the route she took from the front door of The Chief Whip’s Office, two doors down the street from the Prime Minister’s official residence, to what she’d been told was called COBRA, the Cabinet Office Briefing Room A. When she’d walked through the large black door with the number 12 on the front, she’d turned to Docherty, almost slightly disappointed that she didn’t get to walk through one of the most famous doors in England. But then Docherty, anticipating her comment, had merely asked her if she’d rather be in all the morning newspapers. Given that one of the reasons she was here was precisely because of the truth or otherwise of a newspaper report, she’d understood his meaning. After she was taken down a dozen corridors, each one becoming more anonymous than the previous one, finally she entered an elevator, accompanied by Docherty and the latter’s Head of Section. As soon as the doors closed, they dropped fifty feet and when the doors opened again, she was subjected to both a handprint and retina scan.
She asked Docherty what baseline they were using. After all, how had they the previous scan results to compare these to? He gave her a look that basically, and quite effectively, told her to shut up.
They walked past two armed soldiers into a large briefing room, larger than Grable had expected. There were about twenty people already in there and she swallowed hard as she recognised the Leader of the Opposition and the Leader of the Liberal Democrats. She turned her head and saw half a dozen men in military uniform and then the woman who was head of the Security Services, the first to allow herself to be known by name in the media.
A man she didn’t recognise came over to them. He nodded to Docherty’s boss and introduced himself to Docherty and Grable. “Mr Docherty? Miss, I’m sorry, Doctor Grable? I’m Anthony Bowman, the PM’s Chief Scientific Advisor. The PM will be down shortly. He’s just waiting for the men from over the pond.”
A voice came from their side. “Sir Anthony? They’re on their way down,” said a young man, hanging up a telephone.
“Right,” Bowman said, rubbing his hands. “Let’s sit down, shall we?”
At that, the doors opened, and the Prime Minister walked in, together with the Deputy Prime Minister and two men who had to be American, Grable thought.
The Prime Minister, looking far older and more tired than he looked on television, asked everyone to take their seats, and introduced the Americans as he did so. Grable only half caught their names, but started at the position one of them held. She looked around again, wondering what her mother would have said at her daughter sitting in a meeting with the Prime Minister, the Leader of the Opposition, assorted military personnel, the head of the UK’s intelligence services, and the Deputy Director of the CIA. Mum would probably have wanted to know if any of them were single, she thought.
As the Prime Minister was sitting, he beckoned to Bowman, who went over to him. They had a brief quiet, conversation, during which Bowman pointed at Grable. Grable noticed that the Prime Minister took a long, hard look at her.
When everyone was seated, the Prime Minister spoke to the room. “Good evening, all. Thank you for coming at such short notice. As always with Blue Committee, there are no official minutes. Well,” he gave a small smile, “not the ones that enter the official record anyway.” His smile was matched by those around the room. “However, I understand that we’re in for something of more than usual interest this evening.” He stopped, and looked as if he wanted to say more. But then he merely said, “OK, Dr Grable, we’re all yours.”
He looked at her expectantly. Grable panicked and looked at Docherty, who thankfully stood. “Prime Minister, gentleman, lady,” he nodded at the sole other woman in the room. “You’ll have to forgive Doctor Grable’s confusion and slight reticence. Until approximately ten minutes ago, she had no idea that she was going to brief this committee on the subject matter for discussion. Nor, as it happens, was she aware of the existence of this committee. However, I have no doubt that what she’s about to tell you will more than deliver the ‘more than usual interest’ that the Prime Minister just promised.”
He sat, and as he did so, he whispered to her. “Stand up, deliver your report, then sit down.”
Grable had used the few moments to gather her thoughts and especially how to grab their attention. She’d not seen a copy of The Guardian in the room, but would have bet her pension that everyone there would have read it. She stood slowly and pulled her copy from her briefing notes.
“Prime Minister, gentlemen, madam… you’ll have all seen this headline today, I presume?” She was greeted by nods and a few muttered comments about tabloid journalism and the gullibility of the masses.
“We’re fortunate,” she continued, “that the reactions I’ve just seen in this room would, I have no doubt, be that of any sane person.” She took a sip of water from the beaker in front of her, and then went on. “After all, who would believe that a man can move things with his mind, can halt speeding cars with a look. In short, who would believe a man can fly?” She smiled, deliberately giving the impression that the very thought was laughable. And then she looked directly at the PM who was also smiling. “There’s only one small problem, Prime Minister. This story? There’s every likelihood, indeed probability, that it’s true,” she said.
There was silence in the room for a moment, before the laughter started. Docherty, concerned, looked at Grable, as if expecting her to crumble. To his surprise, she stood there waiting for the laughter to stop. When it subsided, a minute or two later, she said “I’ll repeat it for the hard of believing: it’s true.”
“Come now, Prime Minister,” said a man in uniform, “are we seriously expected to…?”
“Air Chief Marshall?” responded the Prime Minister. “Please do me the courtesy of shutting up, and Doctor Grable the courtesy of listening to her? Please go on, Doctor,” he nodded to her.
Grable swallowed again, opened her folders, scanned them for a moment, and started briefing Blue Committee on the material, what was known about it, the mutagenic affects thereof and why she thought Britain had its first real life super-powered being.
In the North London Hospital, the siege was about to start.
The time from the first murder until the fifth, sixth, seventh and eighth murders (which had conveniently but tragically occurred within seconds of each other) had only been a few hours. Though when all things were considered, it’s unlikely that things would have turned out any differently in the short term even if the creature had been discovered after the first killing.
The creature that had been Samuel Withers didn’t have much else to do after all, and the little conscious thought it did at that time have didn’t really have an appreciation for Shakespeare. Nor for The Sopranos. Nor, if the subject was pushed, even for Big Brother. What little time it had had that day had been taken up with murder, destruction and other assorted mayhem. However, the changes that had taken place within, what for want of a better word, its brain were continuing and the destruction was taking on a far more creative edge.
It hadn’t taken that long for the hospital staff to start wondering where the staff were who had been sent to the basement for one reason or another. The first theory had been that the poorly paid staff who hadn’t returned had just had enough of working for the national health service and had, as one porter put it, “just buggered off”. And were that to have been the case, there’s not a lot of people working in the hospital that would have blamed them.
Telephone calls to the vanished staff got no response, though, although one of the mobile telephone’s rung for some minutes before a voice came on the line to tell the caller that the telephone was not in signal range. One could hardly blame the recorded announcement. After all, there aren’t that many telephone companies record announcements saying “We’re sorry, but that telephone is no longer working because it’s been stepped on by a mutated creature that’s killed the registered owner of the handset”. And those that do probably don’t use it that often.
One enterprising doctor had suggested almost trivially that there must be a poker game going on down there. A few others, who were no mean hands at the game in their own right, and had their own (strictly against the rules) floating game running in the wards at night, thought they’d get in on the act and five of them went down in their next break, hoping that they’d find something that the hospital administrators didn’t know anything about. They got their wish, but not in any way that could have been predicted.
The first the rest of the staff knew what was going on was when one of the doctors (by now lacking his mean hand, as well as several other body parts) staggered up from the basement screaming about “a monster” before passing out, crashing to the floor, the trail of blood behind him spreading rapidly.
Police Constable Marcus Gold came running at the screams and arrived at the accident and emergency ward to find a scene of chaos. He saw the blood on the floor and half a dozen medical personnel surrounding someone on a trolley. He grabbed a doctor to find out what was going on and was a bit upset when the doctor told him, in no uncertain language, to seek sex and travel, (but in not so many words). His offence was ameliorated somewhat when he followed the doctor and saw what was left of the person who had been doing the screaming.
He staggered out of the treatment room and leaned back against the wall, trying to keep down his lunch. Before he could say or do anything else, he felt a hand on his neck. “Stick your head down and breathe deeply,” came a familiar voice. He followed the instructions and when he felt a tad better, he stood up. Next to him was Howard Baker, an old school friend, and a charge nurse at the hospital. Baker slipped Gold a couple of pills and a glass of water. “Take them,” he ordered, “it’ll help.”
Gold swallowed them gratefully.
“What the hell?” he got out.
“I don’t know,” his friend replied. “Half a dozen staff have gone down to the basement for supplies and stuff. None of them came back this morning and then,” he gestured towards his colleague, currently being worked on by half a dozen different staff, “this happened.”
Gold grabbed at his radio and started talking to his station, calling for back-up. As he was waiting, he asked Baker whether or not there was any connection between the doctors.
“Other than that they were all doctors? No – oh, they played poker, but then so do most of us on occasion. No, some from every department. He’s from paediatrics.”
“OK, I want to talk to his boss – can you arrange that?”
“Sure – I’ll call him,” said the charge nurse and went to do just that. As he left, Gold confirmed with the station that they had an incident, that it probably involved an armed suspect and received, in turn, confirmation that backup was on the way.
It would have been most sensible for Gold to have waited both for the backup and the doctor, since in short order, he’d need both of them, the latter more urgently than the former, but what ran through his mind was that he was overdue for promotion and sorting this out would surely get it for him. His wife was constantly going on about it and it’d be nice not to have to worry about that any more.
It was true. In about half an hour, Gold would never have to worry about promotion again, unless, of course, he wanted the harp and wings and special halo that went along with it. At Doncaster and Monkton, The four men stood there looking at each other for a few minutes. Davies waited, the wind ruffling his hair, and then, with an annoyed shrug, gestured. It didn’t escape the three men’s notice that the wind around his head ceased immediately. He presented a strange image, since the wind continued around the lower half of his body.
Williams realised that the latter was simply because Davies didn’t care about it. Oh my Lord, he thought, just how powerful is he? And with a second thought, wondered if he really wanted to know...
This Week's Artist: Armando "Mannie" Abeleda After leaving college in 1994, Mannie's been submitting to major comic book companies, but without success so far. He trained under Whilce Portacio, and his international comics break came with Imperium Comics' TRAILER PARK OF TERROR where, among other stories, he illustrated this novel's author's tale IT'S BEEN DONE BEFORE in issue #2. Mannie has worked as a mechanical draftsman, and a layout artist for animation (mostly for Disney). His website is here.
