Chapter 8
It is obvious to us that this guy is scared to death because he keeps looking over his shoulder as if he is running from something or someone.
I step forward and say, “Hi,” in a soft voice, “my name is Kobi and this is my husband, Derrick, and our guide Dane. We are visiting from America. What’s your name, sir?”
“My name is Dr. Trevor Tomblim.”
“Dr. Tomblim, may I call you Trevor?”
“Sure,” he says reluctantly.
“Can you tell me first of all, are you all right?”
“Yes, I’m fine.”
“Good, I’m glad you are OK. Can you tell me what happened here?”
“No, I really shouldn’t. If anyone finds out what has happened here it could cause a panic across the entire country. I need to try and figure out what my next move will be. You shouldn’t be here.”
“How many people are working here in the facility with you, Trevor?”
“There were eight of us working on this project.”
“You said ‘were’ eight of us. What has happened to the rest of your team? Is the project finished?”
“No, the project wasn’t completed, but I guess it is now. Everyone else is either dead or out there somewhere.”
“What do you mean, Trevor?”
He reluctantly pulls up a chair and starts to explain. “About a year ago we decided to start testing a compound that was designed to reduce aggressive behavior. It all started when a doctor in the state penitentiary was brutally attacked by an inmate a few years ago for no apparent reason. He said the inmate just had this urge to kill anything with a heartbeat. The doctor fully recovered and began working diligently trying to find a drug to control aggressive behavior. He didn’t want anyone else to be harmed or worse--killed. ”
He went on to explain how the compound is supposed to calm the individual with absolutely no side effects. If taken in very small doses on a daily basis, it can control anger and aggressiveness not only in humans, but in animals as well.
Dane responds, “How would you market such a drug?”
“The possibilities are endless,” Trevor explains. “Think about a world with no war or hate. It may sound a little far-fetched to you, but the government was very interested in it--interested enough to fund the entire project and build this facility just for that reason. We started testing the compound on wild mice and rats and it appeared to be very effective. We soon realized that we needed a bigger test subject before we went to human trials. Wild dingoes can be very aggressive, especially when they are hungry. We hired an expert trapper to gather some dingoes--three females and three males.”
He continues to tell us how the experiments were conducted and how they got the dingoes to be even more aggressive than normal by depriving them of food. About six days ago they had a breakthrough with the oldest male in the bunch. This particular dingo was extremely aggressive with the containment guard. It was so aggressive in fact, the guard had to put a noose around its neck and drag it back to its cage. The dingo remained in lock-up all night.
Trevor continues. “The next morning, we fed the dingo breakfast with a small amount of the drug mixed in. Within an hour, the dingo was just as calm as a domesticated dog. He was responsive and playful with the guard. It was truly unbelievable. The next morning, we gave the same dingo a small amount of the drug again and he remained calm for the remainder of the day. We were planning to deprive the dingo of food for a few days but continue the drug in his water to see what effect, if any, food deprivation would have on his behavior. Unfortunately, we never had the opportunity to do that because that was the day the plane crashed into the containment area.
“Six of us worked here inside the facility, and the other two were in charge of the dogs and stayed mainly in the containment area monitoring the dogs. Both guards were outside cleaning the cages when the plane crashed almost right on top of them. The dogs were all in a holding pen surrounded by a high fence. The force of the impact leveled the fences, and the dingoes escaped. The guards tried to follow them, but it was pointless. They walked around the plane and managed to pull the pilot out of the cockpit.”
Trevor gets up from his chair and starts to pace. “The pilot was injured badly but still breathing and able to talk. The guard asked him what happened and the pilot told him that something hit the plane. A meteorite, he thought. He heard something hit the roof of the airplane and then he smelled smoke like something hot was burning the interior. He looked around towards the back of the airplane and saw what he called a ‘hot rock’ burning a hole through one of the seats. The rock eventually went through the seat and started to penetrate the floor. Beneath the flooring are a lot of cables and some electronics; thus, the pilot said he could not maintain control of the aircraft and was forced to land. The impact was harder than he expected.”
Trevor said the pilot died a few minutes later. The guard dragged him away from the wreckage and went back to investigate the plane. He found the meteorite inside the fuselage and saw where it had burned through the floor, through the metal to the cables located beneath the flooring. It was very small--smaller than a golf ball, but extremely hot. The guard used a shovel to pick up the meteorite and brought it back to the containment area.
Trevor goes on to say, “We didn’t want to interfere with the crash site too much because we knew that the feds would probably track the plane down and come to investigate. But the strange thing was they never did. The only thing I can think of is perhaps the pilot was flying on his own and wasn’t talking to Air Traffic Control. Perhaps no one even knew this guy was out flying that day. We thought about calling the local police, but we did not want anyone snooping around our facility, asking a lot of questions about the secret government-funded project.”
Trevor sits and continues. “So, the guards buried the pilot and started cleaning up the containment area. The inside crew continued with the research and felt that they had enough data to convince their investors that human trials could commence. We weren’t concerned about the dingoes too much. We just figured they were back in the wild and were fine. We were planning to present our findings to the board and request human trials to start immediately. There are some inmates on death row that exhibit extremely aggressive behavior, and the scientists thought they would be great test subjects.
“Four nights ago, the night before we were scheduled to leave, strange things started happening around here. The two guards came in around 5:30 p.m. and got cleaned up for dinner. I said hi to Carlos, one of the guards, on my way to the kitchen. I grabbed a sandwich and went to my room, where I planned to work most of the evening preparing for the presentation I had to give at the board meeting the following day.
“Around 7:30 p.m. I heard raised voices coming from the vicinity of the big steel door, followed by a gun shot. I got up, turned off my light, and crawled under the bed. Three more gun shots rang through the halls and then my door handle started to wiggle as if someone was trying to get in. They must have thought I was gone, because I heard the sound of footsteps walking from my door down the hall. I don’t know who was in the facility, but I heard windows breaking and equipment being thrown on the floors. I stayed right there for the next thirty minutes, too terrified to move. I got out from under my bed and opened the door. I slowly crept down the hall towards the lab and that’s when I found two of the doctors shot in the head right outside the vault by the steel doors. One of the doctors, Dr. Elliot, was a brilliant chemist, and the one responsible for perfecting the experimental drug. I continued down the hallway and entered the lab. It was a disaster. Much to my surprise, Carlos was sitting all alone in the lab.
“I remember asking Carlos if he had any idea what was going on. Carlos just looked at me. It was a look I had never seen before in his eyes. You see, Carlos and I have been best friends since the first grade. We grew up next door to each other and were pretty much inseparable our entire lives.
So to see him with this look in his eyes was very disturbing. I sat down and started calmly talking to him to see if he was okay. He was extremely nervous and very angry. It was totally uncharacteristic for him to be that way.
“Carlos looked at me and said, ‘I just want to hurt someone and I don’t know why. What’s wrong with me, Trevor?’
“I didn’t know what to tell Carlos. I decided to draw some of his blood because I wanted to check his toxin levels. Maybe he was contaminated with something from the vault. He told me he felt funny, and I noticed beads of sweat forming on his forehead. I knew something wasn’t right. I asked him to follow me back to one of the operating rooms to get a blood sample.”
Trevor recalls, “Carlos got on the table and I proceeded to draw several vials and noticed that it was a little discolored and had a few clumps in it. I had trouble collecting the blood because the clots kept clogging up the needle. I switched to a higher gage needle, which didn’t clog up quite as fast. I didn’t say anything to Carlos about the blood, because I didn’t want to alarm him in any way since he was already agitated. Once the caps were placed on the vials, I slipped them into my pocket. I would have to go to another medical facility to run the tests because all of the equipment here had been destroyed. I asked Carlos to come with me, but he refused. Before I had a chance to try to change his mind, he took his gun out of his holster and committed suicide. Startled, I couldn’t believe it. I placed him on the table and put a sheet over his body. I stood over his body and wept. My best friend just killed himself and I don’t know why. What in the hell happened to make him take his own life? I was angry and very confused, but I knew I had to get out of there. I felt like my life was in danger.
“I left the facility that night and decided to go to Sydney for a while to let things cool off here. Then I realized that I had forgotten my notebook--the one you are holding in your arms, Kobi. I came back for it. I waited this long to come back because I wanted to make sure that no one was here or coming back. I was collecting as much data about our project as I could find from the rooms and the floors. I even checked the pockets of the dead doctors and found something very disturbing in Dr. Elliot’s pocket. It was a small notebook filled with equations and information that I didn’t recognize. After reading the entire contents of the notebook, I realized that he was not working on the same project as the rest of us.
“He was developing an infectious biological disease and using the dingoes and the humans here at the facility as his test subjects. He had been giving it to the alpha male dingo for days and recording its change in behavior. I thought the dingoes were more aggressive because of food deprivation, but that wasn’t the case. The alpha male quickly infected the rest of the dingoes. Dr. Elliot’s notes also mentioned that the chemical and parasite were going to be placed in the food that was being served in the kitchen that very night. That was the last entry in the notebook, because he was murdered later that night.”
I look at the notes and notice an asterisk on the bottom of the page that says, “The parasite will be unleashed tomorrow, during the meeting with the government officials.”
“Trevor, this is an odd statement.” I say, showing Trevor the paper.
“I didn’t see that when I looked before. He knew I had a meeting with the people financially backing the government and this project. He didn’t realize that I was in my room rather than at dinner with the rest of the staff. He was planning to use me as a carrier of his parasite to infect the government.” Trevor says and then gasps.
“That was the night I ate the sandwich in my room, so that explains why I am not infected. The rest of the team is obviously infected, and now they are out there somewhere. I don’t know what effect it has on humans other than it seems to make them very irrational.”
Trevor didn’t hear us when we first came into the facility because he was downstairs in the basement burning the bodies in the incinerator. He said he called his contacts in the government, and they advised him to take care of the situation and leave the facility once all the data and bodies were disposed of. They were going to send a demolition team to the facility to get rid of all the evidence. The entire incident was going to be covered up and forgotten. When the government hired the employees to work at the lab, they made sure that none of them had any family--it was almost like they anticipated trouble.
How strange. Dane, Derrick, and I look at each other in disbelief. We have been listening to Trevor explain what happened here for over an hour when Dane suddenly jumps up, obviously panicked about something.
“Hey, what about the sample of blood we gave to Nicola? Do you think it
might be from those dingoes? It had the same clotted consistency as you described about the blood from Carlos.”
We explained to Trevor what happened that night at Katherine’s Gorge with the dingoes and told him about the blood.
Trevor said, “We need to get that blood sample away from your friend. We need to keep this just between us.”
“I’m afraid it’s too late, Trevor,” Dane says. “She has had the sample for a few days now. Don’t worry, you can trust her.”
“I hope you are right,” Trevor says.
“Come on, Trevor,” Derrick motions, “get what you need and let’s get out of here. I think we need to head back to Nicola in her lab.”
We help Trevor gather up all of the documents he needs and head out to the SUV.
“I’ll give her a call this evening and let her know we will be there bright and early in the morning,” Dane says. “Also, I will tell her to be extra careful with the dingo blood sample, because it might be infected.”
Dane suggests that we all spend the night at his house since it is out of the public eye. That seemed to make Trevor seem less paranoid. We were at Dane’s house within an hour and unloaded most of the car. The food we were going to use on the trip will now become our dinner for a few more days.
“Everybody just relax and try to get a good night’s sleep. We will try to sort out all of this tomorrow,” Dane says.