Dying to be Cured – VII

Dying to be Cured is set in a modern-day Britain where the Roman Empire still rules. Dai and Julia take on a fight against institutional corruption whilst dealing with the demands of family, friendship and domestic crises.

The door was directly off the carer’s waiting room and turned out ot be little more than a cubbyhole with a water closet and a wash basin. Julia carefully locked the door behind her and took stock of her options. There was a single narrow window open to the warm air and looking out onto the patio, but being designed for a toilet, it could not be looked in on from the outside, which meant she was safe from security cameras here at least. The first thing she did was to check and load the two weapons she had taken from the wheelchair tubes. One was a tranquilizer pistol. The other a small, but powerful, handgun she hoped she wouldn’t need to use.

Now to try and figure out what precisely was happening in this place. Julia was just about to attempt a ‘suicide run’ along the corridor – trusting in her own speed and silence and hoping to remain unseen – when she noticed a trapdoor in the centre of the ceiling. The old building clearly had a space above where no doubt cables, ventilation ducts and other such essentials were concealed from view. But the ceiling was still almost twice her own height overhead so how to get up there? 

She opened the door to the waiting room and made a dash – dragging three straight-backed wooden chairs into the necessary chamber before shutting and relocking the door. It was a relatively simple job, to stack the chairs in such a way as to provide her with a rudimentary and somewhat rickety ladder. With some trepidation, she she swarmed up onto the top of the wobbly pile. She had just managed to push the trap open and grasp the edge with both hands when the chairs under her gave a mighty creak and collapsed. Heaving herself into the roof space, she carefully closed the hatch behind her.

It was fairly light up there, with illumination coming via many ventilation grilles under the edge of the roof. Julia was grateful for that as it meant she could see the solid beams and avoid the places where the ceiling panels had no strong support. She had made her careful way about half the distance back to where she reckoned Gwen was, when she heard voices.

“That’s a total of five units so far. Any change?”

“Nothing so far. Patient is still stable.”

“Very well. Another unit then.”

She knew then that whatever was going on it had little to do with prayer. Her eyes were drawn to a pattern of light which seemed to be coming from under the fibrous insulation mat a little to her left. Carefully lifting the edge of the mat, she looked down into a room where an enormously fat woman slept in a high cot-sided bed. There were intravenous drips connected to her arm, but no one in the room. The voices spoke again, and Julia reckoned they were coming from just in front of her. She crawled forwards and picked at the edge of the matting.

Sure enough there was another ventilation grille, but the scene she looked into this time was even less like anybody’s idea of a holy temple. A man lay on a similar bed to the one the woman was asleep in, but he was strapped down with sturdy restraints on his arms, legs and torso. The room was full of white-coated men and women, one of whom was injecting something into a tube that ran into the supplicant’s chest. The muscles in the man’s arms and legs seemed to spasm against the restraints as they did so. For the first time since the start of the ‘adventure’ Julia felt real fear; she swallowed a mouthful of bile before making a brief recording of the scene with her wristphone.

Pulling herself together, she eased the insulation back in place before sending the signal that would have the cavalry charging to the rescue. Meanwhile, she had to get back to Gwen. 

She carried on along her beam until she thought herself the correct distance from the end of the building, but it still took her four increasingly desperate goes to find the right room. Gwen lay on her back, motionless, and for a moment Julia feared she was too late and Gwen had been given some experimental drug or other. But as she moved the ceiling panel Gwen’s eyes flew open. Julia stuck her head down through the hole in the ceiling and hissed. 

“I’m up here. Can you push the bed over so I can drop down onto it?”

“I think so.” Gwen’s voice was thin and thready but she heaved herself off the bed and managed a mighty shove that pushed it under the small hole. “Goodness me! Will you be able to get through there?”

“I have to. Now I’m going to drop a tranq pistol. Can you guard the door?”

Julia suited action to words and by way of reply, Gwen grasped the pistol in both hands and turned to face the door. Julia meanwhile, got her legs down the hole and squeezed her hips through with a little difficulty. Her torso was easier, and by putting both arms high above her head she managed to compress her shoulders enough to scrape through the aperture, landing in an ungainly heap on the mattress below. 

“They are using this place as a cover for some very unethical experimental medical interventions,” she told Gwen as she sat up. “I already called in the cavalry.”

Dying to be Cured by Jane Jago and E.M. Swift-Hook first appeared in Gods of Clay: A Sci Fi Roundtable Anthology.