Blood Water

CHAPTER 14

In the staff room above, Phoenix coughed up blood for the third time. He’d been expecting as much, even though he knew little about what was really going on within him. His insides felt like jelly, his muscles were limp and barely responsive, and his eyes hurt. He was very thirsty too, so he tried to first sit, then stand up so he could go and get a glass of water. His stomach was instantly attacked by cramps and he doubled up in pain. He clutched his sides, then bent over and vomited dark blood onto the carpet, his eyes bulging in shock as he watched the cascade from his insides flow out of his mouth. The blood was specked with black dots and he wondered what was happening to his system – and what the creature had left inside him. He shook his head and started to panic. The pain in his stomach grew; he now had a splitting headache too. He staggered backwards and steadied himself against the wall before vomiting again, even more than before.

Afterwards Phoenix was overcome with dizziness, so he fell back into the chair and waited, praying for the nausea to pass. But it didn’t, it simply changed form, the waves of pain and sickness washing over him in unrelenting assaults. Blood was now seeping from his nose, and small cuts that had recently healed were now red and raw once more. He didn’t know if he was more embarrassed or terrified by the fact that his trousers were now soaked through with something horrible.

Phoenix sobbed as the rest of his insides tried to force their way out.

Mr Waites was indeed in his classroom, as Phoenix had guessed. When Sean and James burst in, he jumped and had to steady himself on his chair.

‘Bloody hell, don’t you two know how to knock?’ He put his pen down and scowled at them.

‘Sorry, sir,’ Sean said, ‘but we need your help.’

Waites stood up. He was just over six foot, in his early forties – though he looked younger – fit and strong enough to put Mr Cole, the PE teacher, to shame. His hair was long and dark, and he wore small, round, wire-rimmed glasses.

‘What sort of help? Is it to do with the rain?’ Although he’d been too absorbed in his work to pay much attention, Waites now realized that the weather must be causing havoc.

‘Sort of,’ Sean said. ‘It’s a parasite.’

‘What is?’ Waites looked from Sean to James, whom he vaguely recognized as Sean’s brother.

‘It’s something we found at the research centre where I work,’ James told him. ‘It can get into people and make them do things. It’s got a mind of its own.’

There was a moment of silence before Waites took off his glasses, rubbed them on his shirt then put them back on.

‘What the hell are you two talking about?’

‘Dr Morrow, isn’t it? Good lord, you must be drenched.’ Mrs Rees was startled by the sight of the scientist standing, dripping, just inside the entrance doors, and approached him slowly, feeling that something was wrong. ‘Are you all right? Where are the boys?’

She watched Morrow’s eyes move from her to the staff room above, so she followed his gaze. When she turned back she was a little unsettled to see that Morrow was now closer, though she hadn’t heard him move.

He opened his mouth to speak, then closed it again as Mrs Rees started to back away towards the staff-room steps. He followed her at the same speed, smiling now in a way she really didn’t like. She was half expecting him to suddenly jump on her and pin her to the steps when he started coughing, then, after looking around frantically, dashed into the boys’ toilets.

She turned and took the steps two at a time, glancing back only once to make sure she wasn’t being followed. When she reached the top she turned to see all that was left of Nigel Phoenix.

Morrow stumbled into the toilets, coughing and spluttering. His thoughts were churning again. He could sense the creature screaming in frustration and impatience. He had been telling it over and over again that he knew nothing, and he sensed it had finally decided to believe him. He didn’t know what it was after, and suspected that it didn’t either, but he was pretty sure he was holding no profound secrets. The creature had scoured his mind, seeing many things – Morrow retrieving it from the pool, taking it to the study centre, conducting tests on it – but none of this was useful: it was information it already possessed.

Morrow staggered towards one of the hand basins and felt his stomach heave. Then he felt a movement in his head, and something dislodged itself, then wriggled through impossibly small spaces to squeeze itself into his mouth, then out into the basin below him. He spat, stared at the black monster wriggling in the basin, then heaved and vomited all over it. It sprang up and managed to ooze up the spout of the tap, before contracting and squeezing its body so that it could work its way up into the spout and then into the plumbing system itself. As it disappeared, Morrow sighed with relief, but then his stomach turned again, and spasms of pain racked his body, and he knew his ordeal was far from over.

‘I know this sounds like some sort of Doctor Who shit,’ James said, ‘but it’s true, and we need to stop it before it infects everyone.’

‘Infects everyone?’

‘Yeah, Dr Morrow used it on a couple of animals at the research centre. It poisoned them while it was inside and they died once it had left them. It seems to have had a bad effect on Mr Phoenix too – that’s why we need to get him to a hospital as soon as we can.’

‘Nigel? Where is he?’

‘In the staff room. But we have to find the parasite first, before it gets into anyone else.’

‘Well, where is it now?’

‘It’s inside Dr Morrow – he’s one of my colleagues at the centre. It jumped from Phoenix to him, then… jumped through the window.’

‘It did what?’

‘It doesn’t seem to care about the body it inhabits. It just uses it as a vehicle and a way of gaining information and knowledge.’

‘But we don’t know what it wants,’ Sean added, ‘though it seems it’s after something specific – I think it’ll keep attacking people until it finds it.’

Waites looked from Sean to James, waiting for one of them to give him the slightest sign that it was all a big joke. No such luck. ‘So this thing is outside somewhere?’

‘Yeah, unless it’s already got back in.’

‘I don’t much like the idea of going out there,’ Waites said, turning to the window. ‘But—’ He stopped as he heard a bloodcurdling scream from above. ‘What the hell was that?’

‘I think it was Mrs Rees,’ Sean said.

Confusion more than horror had gripped Mrs Rees initially, but now she had made some sort of sense of what her eyes were seeing. She was barely aware of Morrow standing very close behind her, almost breathing down her neck, as her eyes continued to dart all over the dreadful scene. It looked as though all the blood in Phoenix’s body had evacuated itself, along with blobs of slushy matter – his liquefied organs. His face was a pallid death mask, pocked with sores and streaked with the blood that, in his final moments, had poured from his eyes – which were now staring, yellow and misshapen, while his mouth, agape, still oozed blood and matter.

Part of Emily Rees wanted to walk forward just to check that Phoenix was definitely dead; the other part of her wondered how she could be so stupid as to even entertain such a notion. Of course he was dead. And whatever had killed him could be highly infectious, possibly airborne. She could already have caught it, but touching him would surely be the most idiotic move imaginable. She was reminded of pictures she’d seen in biology textbooks of the effects of the Ebola virus. This was similar, though it couldn’t be Ebola. Not here.

‘Oh God,’ came a voice over her shoulder. ‘What a mess.’

She slowly turned to face Morrow, wondering as she did so what this strange man had to do with the appalling death of her colleague. As she looked into his eyes, she realized that this was not the same man she’d met earlier: something about him had changed drastically.

‘You… you’ve got something to do with this. What’s going on? What happened to Nigel?’

‘Please,’ Morrow implored, wiping blood and drool from his chin. ‘Don’t panic. I’m going to fix this somehow, but we have to make sure that no one leaves the school.’ He moved towards her, his arms outstretched in an effort to placate.

‘Keep away from me.’ It was no longer his behaviour that frightened Emily Rees; it was the fact that he looked very ill, and could well be suffering from whatever had killed Nigel Phoenix. She didn’t want him near her, much less touching her. She wanted to get as far away as possible.

‘Just listen,’ Morrow said, still moving forward. ‘Please, just listen—’

But Emily Rees had heard enough: she turned and bolted out of the room and straight into the men’s toilets. She went over to the smashed window, rain still blowing in, and looked out, down to the ground. It was too far to jump – she could break her legs. She heard Morrow approaching from the staff room, still offering words of comfort, so she entered one of the toilet cubicles and locked the door. Morrow shuffled in and stopped. She could hear his breathing.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I’m so sorry about all of this, but you have to listen. We are all in danger. We have to think of the children.’

‘Please! Just get away from me.’

‘I will, I will, I just…’ There was a pause, then she heard him rush to the window and vomit out into the rain. It sounded rough, painful, like more than just the contents of his stomach were being brought up. He coughed, vomited again, then started to cry. She began to feel sympathy for him, but there was no way she was leaving this cubicle. No way on earth.