Follow the Blood

Absolute silence combined with absolute darkness can drive you mad. Your brain begins to fill in the void with its own noises as if your blood has a dimension within it, a layer of a world you don’t witness unless you cut through the clutter of senses. I swear I could hear a waterfall, and birds chirping but I was deep underground in the airlock of a top-secret facility. It amused me that I knew its layout already. I had ways to find out anything I wanted, hacks, military-grade scans, informants and moles all around the world. I was what anyone might describe as, over-cautious, a planner. I was someone who needed to look a long way ahead and to do that, I needed the best information and a solid agenda.

I had been there for I guessed, half an hour, and I knew I was being monitored closely. They had already taken a swab from inside my cheek, an iris scan and a breath analysis. Finally, the heavy steel door cranked open, like I was about to enter a bank’s vault. The treasures beyond the door were not bank notes and gold bars but a commodity even more valuable to the right buyers, weapons. Weapons represented two things that everyone wanted the most, hope or dominance, yet those thin concepts didn’t matter much to me. I was in it for the cash, the super-yacht, the mansions, the private jet and the football team. I had women, not a woman, I had anything I wanted when I needed it. They say undertakers never run short of business, but war, by God, whilst a dead body is profitable, mass death is a lottery win.

A tall willowy man in an ill-fitting grey suit approached me with an outstretched hand. His ID badge, clipped to his suit pocket said Dr. Samson Phillips, Chief Scientist, Research & Development, TitanCorp.

“Mr. Riseman, good to finally meet you in the flesh.”

The way he said ‘in the flesh’ disturbed me. Either side of him was a tall soldier, armed and armoured to a degree I thought excessive after such robust security protocols. They wore masks, and their guise as anonymous, featureless guards was effective. They were puppets, they didn’t frighten me.

“It’s an impressive place you have here, I was unnerved some three miles back at the border gate up there, but I had no idea you were hidden this far beneath the desert,” I lied.

“My apologies for the long walk. It gives us a chance to observe and prepare for any threats. You can’t be too careful in this game. Besides, we need to assure secrecy and prepare for any accidents. Ofcourse, you understand this already.”

He grinned, so his immaculate teeth shone from thin, malnourished lips. Everything about him looked out of place: his glasses, his glowing face, his robotic walk, and that slicked, dyed black hair. I guessed he was in his late fifties, and on some diet that he’d been advised would help him to bolster his withering health. There was evidence of weight loss in his neck and chin, flaps and folds where he had shed fat. It was like he was trying hard to be a certain sort of person, but he was mismatched at the seams and joints.

He led me along the tunnel to arrive at a magnificent wall, punctuated with seven evenly spaced enormous steel doors, each with CCTV cameras mounted by them and a red screen displaying the word, LOCKED. It was like entering the bowels of an underworld where hidden Gods and demons sat on thrones in gloomy halls. I could be in Hell itself, with nothing more than a visitor pass and a smart suit.

He unlocked a door with a large number 6 emblazoned on it in a military font. It led to yet another stretch of featureless grey boxy tunnel – the only break in monotony, the odd strip light in a corner. I noticed he kept peering back over his shoulder at me, grinning falsely, as if to check I had not wandered off. At the end of the tunnel was an expansive airlock leading to a dingy windowless room about the size of an average garage – it was unimpressive yet bleakly ominous. In its ceiling was a metal chimney funnel, an exhaust for smoke and fire. There were scorch marks on the wall.

The guards hovered about us, too close, oppressively officious.

“This is it…” and he unfurled his arm to present the table with the one solitary object on it, a black smooth cylinder, dead centre. It was as if I had been granted access to a museum’s secret room, a sole viewer afforded a glimpse of a priceless holy artefact.

“This drone, is it? I’ll be honest, it doesn’t look as impressive as I’d imagined. When you said, you had the ultimate surgical strike weapon, my mind had conjured all kinds of ideas but not this…”

I took it in and frowned. There were no rotor blades, just holes where some kind of propulsion jets would vent, I presumed.

“Don’t be fooled. This is a precision killer, our latest perfect assassin. The first-ever ‘blood grenade’ as we call it. We will start manufacturing in a month. The factory is nearly ready.”

“Explain how it works,” I demanded.

“Give it a sample of someone’s DNA in a remote digital upload and in a vicinity of three miles it will sense them, lock on, fly into them and detonate, simple! A precision, fail-safe sniper weapon. It’s small enough to make it nearly impossible to intercept. DNA is unique, so, it has surgical strike capability. Precise, rarely much collateral damage and highly cost-effective. Imagine, you could take out border guards, generals, and even presidents with very little planning and logistics.”

I circled the table slowly, like a wolf around a lamb, and drew in closer to study it for any discerning details.

It was remarkably plain to be so terrifying.

“So that’s what makes it the perfect assassination device, a DNA sample…”

“Correct… And Mr. Riseman, your request for a presentation of this work has been of great interest and a little surprising. You must realise, that your latest arms deals in the Middle East have been having an impact on our bottom line. The board, the shareholders, they are not happy.”

I laughed.

“Business is business,” I said. “You think the arms trade can be a monopoly? You must be delusional!”

I knew I was a risk for them but also tantalising. I had my own R&D department, my own programme but most of all, my own set of lucrative customers. Now and again I could be a reseller and the best in the business.

He kinked his head to one side, chewing his words carefully.

“Mr. Riseman, this blood grenade is a prototype, but we want to demonstrate to you, its effectiveness. As you know, we swabbed you to gain entry to this room. We uploaded your DNA to this device, and in precisely two minutes it will switch on and it will detect and lock on to your DNA signature. You may have noticed you are now standing in what’s basically a granite box, for explosive containment. This room is an incendiary product test room. So, if you don’t mind, I am going to leave you alone now, so you can see first-hand how good these grenades are. Goodbye, Mr. Riseman.”

For a moment I presumed he was joking, or it was disarmed and a show-test, but when the guards left the room with him, it was clear this was a trap to eradicate the competition, namely, me. I wasted about twenty seconds shaking off what could be described as an irritated moment of indignity, but I was not naïve, you could never afford to be in the arms trade. I had my contingency.

I popped open the metal buckle of my belt and fumbled out a tiny square device with a single button. It was a portable short-range electromagnetic pulse generator, good for one use. I pressed it firmly, and it shut down the grenade immediately. I watched with satisfaction, as its activation light flickered off.

As smug as I felt, disarming the device so quickly, I knew they would simply shoot me after thwarting their field test.

They were busy frantically trying to reboot the locking system on the door, which gave me time to examine the exhaust chimney. It was a stubby funnel with not so much as a grill in the way, leading to a wide horizontal air vent. I jumped up on the table and wriggled into the vent – listening to the scrambling trio crashing into the room now under me. A gloved hand grabbed my ankle as I lay flat in the crawlspace, so I kicked the fingers hard with the wooden heel of my shoe and listened to the soldier tumble and bounce off the display table, knocking the disabled blood grenade onto the floor. A second later a single shot hit the vent’s exterior wall but only dented it – it was blast-proof after all. I turned a corner and shuffled like a caterpillar until I found a panel with bolts I could easily remove. I kicked the panel out and unfurled myself into a laboratory. A single scientist in a full hazmat suit was staring at me with widening eyes, through a Perspex mask.

“Who the fuck are you?” he grunted. He was tall and thin and imposing, in his hands a carefully cradled petri dish with a culture.

I axe-kicked the circular transparent dish out of his gloved hands so it spun across the lab toward the wall. He curled into a ball instinctively, and screamed, “What have you done!?”

Whatever was in that dish was clearly dangerous and his panic gave me a window to manoeuvre. I grabbed a large microscope on the worktop and smashed it over his head with its heavy base, at first just the one impact, that produced a single trickle of blood. His hood tore. I paused for one second and then rained continuous blows into his scalp and face mask until he was silent and twitching, covering my mouth and nose with my hand afterwards, aware the air might be filling with a toxin. I felt nothing for my victim, no regret, no remorse. He had posed a problem and he was now not a problem. It was how I worked, it was how I lived.

There was a white lab coat and face mask next to the door, so I grappled them off their hook for a disguise. I took a moment to focus for clarity of purpose. Fights were won by mindset, and as an arm’s dealer, that might seem an odd belief, but it was true. Brute force had its place but alone it was no more than the nail, which always needs a hammer blow to be meaningful. I opened the door, and as expected, it was an airlock, which meant jets of disinfectant blasted my whole body to clear it of any unwanted pathogens. I was pleased, because glancing back at the dead scientist through the door glass, I could see his face turning purple as if something was attacking it. In a moment I knew the room’s sensors would flash-burn the lab and everything in it, followed by a dump of sticky extinguishing foam.

Chemical weapons and toxic pathogens were popular with dictators, as they did not affect infrastructure, so there was no need to rebuild after a strike. Rebuilding a city after an artillery bombardment or carpet bombing would roll into the billions or trillions – it was a waste and it was clumsy.

I had sold many barrels of chemical death in my time, often formulas of my own making or AI-generated exotic toxins. My bank accounts were burgeoning as a result. You could say it was my specialism, my preferred product for warfare. I was a world-class geneticist, amongst other things. It was where my career in arms had started.

The corridor beyond was lit red and a rhythmic alarm was cycling with ear-grating tones. There was a clipboard on a hook outside the laboratory airlock, so I grabbed it and jogged like I was fleeing from a workstation in bewilderment. I ran right past an armed guard running in the opposite direction. I would need all my cunning to keep in the flow, to stay ahead of them, to stay alive.

Two days previously, I had studied the base with thermal imaging from my state-of-the-art satellite, so I understood its basic network of rooms and tunnels. The first rule of arms meetings is always to know your exits. The base did have a significant weak spot in security I could exploit – not an exit but somewhere I could transmit commands. If I reached the kitchen at the live-in quarters for the staff soldiers, there was one space near the ovens where I could signal my drones for a strike. There were three of them circling a mile above the desert in an airborne holding pattern. They could respond to a signal if I could get a signal out. It would be leverage if cornered or if it came to it, I could simply blow the base deeper into the dirt. Not a win, but not technically a lose either, in the balance of this challenge.

As I ran, I noticed the white blocky wall-mounted cameras swivel to track me. They knew where I was. I would have seconds before I was caught, shot in the head or locked down like a rat in a pipe, in some desolate tunnel. The kitchen came up on my left as expected, and behind me, I heard the frantic thudding of army boots making up ground toward my position.

I swung into the kitchen, shut the door and backed up to a spot near the hob’s flume which I knew was my best bet to transmit a command. It was the equvialent of one bar on a mobile but that was all I needed. I leaned down and tapped my shoe heel, so a small slither of a compartment popped out to reveal a shallow switch. I had devices all about my clothing, tucked away in tiny places, camoflauged from x-ray, ready for use in a split second.

The guards burst in, and I held one hand up in defiance, as a warning, my thumb on the other hand hovering over the switch in my shoe heel. I made sure they could see what I was doing, to demonstrate I was threatening an unknown but potentially devastating action.

Dr. Phillips lurched in, brushing aside the armed guards with their guns trained on me. He held their barrels one at a time and pushed them down, as a crude instruction to stop the men from firing.

“Phillips, you know what this is?”

He shook his head and sighed as if frustrated with my tricks.

“This is the end of all your research… You shoot me and my thumb falls on this button. Put the guns down and back away. They are state-of-the-art bunker busters. The blast zone will be extraordinary, I can assure you.”

The scientist waved the guards away, so they lowered their weapons to their sides and retreated slowly to the corridor outside.

He continued to shake his head as if confounded and impressed in equal measures: “I underestimated you.”

“Yes, you did.”

I was buying time. My eyes were fixed on his every move and sure enough, Dr. Phillips began to suddenly turn pale. It must be the running around he assumed, the sudden excitement of the chase, it had affected him. He was wrong.

“When you swabbed me, way back at the front door, I failed to mention something.”

Phillips stabilised himself with one hand on the corner of the cooking countertop, feeling a little sick and dizzy.

“What have you done?” he whispered in horror.

Behind him, some of the soldiers were beginning to cough under their masks.

“You’re not the first to develop DNA weapons, Phillips. I’d say your research is behind, about three years behind.”

Phillips pointed a bony finger at me, his other hand tugging to loosen his tie. The choking was a symptom but soon his skin would peel off, soon his eyes would be blind, and his bones would fail to support his flesh. With luck, I had infected the whole facility.

“You!” he said accusingly, “You’re a weapon!”

I managed to smile. Every day for the last year I had injected myself with the anti-virus to suppress it, but not this morning. This morning I had let it run free, to become the death it desired.

The scientist was on the floor scratching the tiles with desperate fingernails. Behind him, the soldiers had dropped their guns and were tearing off their masks and helmets, clawing at their throats and choking with that rasping cough that would only cease when breathing had stopped.

All I needed to do next was take their IDs and open all the doors. My affluent Saudi client had hired me for this job, and I was in for a windfall. They would just walk a team in with hazmats, through the front doors, take the research they wanted and walk out, stepping over the bodies in their path. I would then trigger the drone strike and that would be the end of that, no more base, no more rival – the virus incinerated in situ. A productive day, a profitable day.

I stood up tall, and brushed myself down, discarding the lab coat and mask. The threat, as they say in the job, was neutralised. After this, I could double my price.

I would need to inject myself soon to tame the beast hidden in my blood.

Dr. Phillips was right, I was the weapon, I would always be the weapon. I killed the alarms first and as I walked toward the ramp leading outside, through the deep darkness of the biggest airlock before the exit, absolute silence returned. This time, I could not hear those little noises to fill the void of nothingness, as if they too had been smothered from existence. It made me feel something, which was rare, it made me happy.

The End