Bleed by Marc Stapleton

Author:Marc Stapleton [Stapleton, Marc]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2023-11-21T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 24

We follow him through the doorway, down a corridor filled with gorgeous black-and-white photographs of landmarks all around the world, and into a large, beautifully appointed dining room.

The table is short – accommodating six people at the most – made of dark, finely varnished wood, and the chairs are a similar design, upholstered with red leather. There’s a lit candelabra in each of the four corners of the room – electric flames, rather than real ones – and more of those black-and-white photographs, blown up and framed all around.

He tucks himself in at the head of the table, and Alessia very reluctantly strolls up, pulls out a chair with a deafening and maddening squeal along the floor, and sits down in it. I manage to do the same without conjuring a horrible noise.

“Boeuf bourguignon?” he turns to her and asks, before turning to me and asking the same thing, an excited, buoyant spark in his eyes. He doesn’t look like a man who just got threatened to be killed by a thousand glass shards to his face, that’s for sure. It makes me wonder if he knows something we don’t.

“Funny enough, I’m not hungry,” Alessia says, never letting up sending fiery daggers his way with her eyes.

“Sounds good to me,” I tell him, hearing an annoyed exhalation from Alessia’s direction, which doesn’t quite rival the volume of a consequential growl from my stomach.

“Excellent,” he says, before shouting something in French to a man in chef whites standing in the doorway; a man I hadn’t even noticed there. The chef disappears and Lacombe begins talking again.

“I guess I’d better go from the top,” he says, rubbing his eyes with one of the cuffs of his suit jacket.

“Every last memory in that rat’s maze of yours,” Alessia says, gesturing towards his head. “Every dirty secret, every experiment gone wrong.”

He laughs – a hard, mocking, cruel laugh – and intensifies the rubbing of his eye.

“I’m retired and I’m old, my memory isn’t, you know, what it was,” he says, stretching credibility even further than the story of a teenage vampire set loose. “But I’ll do my best.”

Alessia is still staring, unblinking, unrelenting. I can see her nails digging into the wooden surface of the table.

“Eleven years ago, Matriel Pharmaceutical received a contract,” he says, leaning forward in his wheelchair. “An open R&D contract of sorts; an almost blank check from the DARPA and the very generous folks at the United States Pentagon, to study the limits of the human body at war, and if possible, to extend those limits.”

I swallow loudly, still clutching that whiskey glass tightly in my hand.

“Firstly, our biomedical department attempted to create a new drug, one that would enhance strength and athletic performance, but we ran into the same old problems. Disastrous side effects, exorbitant costs, the unreliability of testing. We spent tens of billions and needed results, and we began to panic.”

A new face paces out and begins to lay the table before us with cutlery. Lacombe waits until he’s done, and then continues.

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