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“So now why don’t you tell me the truth,” Chase said when she had finished admiring the room. “Why don’t you tell me why you aren’t in it for the money.”

Adam linked his fingers and stared at the floor. “Have you ever seen someone you love die? I have. I was married once. Her name was Nicola.” He took a wallet out of his pocket and produced a photograph from it that he passed to Chase. Tears moistened his eyes.

She looked at the picture of a dark haired girl with vivacious eyes and a jaunty smile before passing it back.

“We were married for six years,” Adam continued, taking the photograph from Chase and looking at it. “After the first year of our marriage, she was diagnosed with Huntington’s disease.” He shook his head. “I had to watch as she slowly deteriorated. At first she started forgetting things. Then came the change in her personality. She became antisocial; you should have heard the things she said, how angry she got.” He shook his head. “We tried everything, but there’s no cure. There are experiments with stem cells being injected directly into the brain, but it isn’t yet an effective treatment, so it wasn’t an option.”

“And you think what you’re doing in
Paradise
is? These people don’t even have the option.”

Adam continued, unfazed. “She took five years to die.
Five years
. Out of the six years we’d been married, she was slowly dying for five of them.” He held his head in his hands. When he had composed himself, he looked up and his eyes sparkled with tears.
 

“When Nigel Moon came to me with the idea of combating illness of every sort, I thought it would be my chance to help, like a lasting legacy to Nicola. I didn’t want other people to suffer like she had. Of course I was sceptical, but Moon was so convincing. He chose me because the villagers knew me. They trusted me.”

“Like Belinda did you mean?”

Adam shook his head. “It was her or you. I had to make a choice, and I chose you.” He blinked back tears. “I’m not proud of it, but If you’ve watched someone you love die, you’d know how inadequate you feel. How helpless. And then here was someone saying
I
could make a difference. All I had to do was monitor the test subjects. Deep down I knew it wasn’t right not telling people they were being experimented on, but all I saw was an end to the suffering. You have to believe me. I didn’t want it to be like this.”

Even though Chase didn’t want to believe him, she did. She wanted to have someone to blame, but she didn’t feel that someone was Adam and she found herself feeling sorry for him.

“At first the results were encouraging. Well, more than encouraging really. People who had suffered years of sickness were getting better. Blood pressures improved. Cardiovascular health improved. It was a minor miracle. Arthritic patients could grip things for the first time in years without a twinge of pain. But then things started going wrong. I didn’t have a lot to do with the test results as Moon’s main research team dealt with them, but I’d noticed people were becoming forgetful. And then there was the violence. That’s why I’ve got the gun. I asked Moon for it when I felt my safety was in jeopardy. I only wanted it as a sort of last resort. I never thought I’d use it. But I was still convinced the work was going to succeed. I still am.”

“Then you’re a
fool
,” Chase spat. “How many more people do you have to kill before you realise? Doctors are supposed to save lives, not take them. I thought that was what you took the Hippocratic oath for, to observe medical ethics. Or should that be the hypocritical oath?”

“Nicola,” Adam whispered. “I did it for Nicola.”

“You’re just using her as an excuse. Would she want you
killing
people in her memory, for god’s sake?”

Adam didn’t answer.

“So why the change of mind. Why haven’t you told Moon where I am?”

Adam rubbed his face and then shook his head. “The whole idea behind the project was to alter food so that it could cure people of any illness they might have. It would also stop people getting ill. This just improves on nature, improving the evolution process. But now ... I don’t know what to think.”

“So what went wrong?” Chase asked

“Well, from what I’ve heard, it looks as though the human system contains too many pollutants. The experiment didn’t take into account the amount of chemicals we unwittingly ingest. Fluoride in the water, formaldehyde that leeches out of the plastic containers into the milk, oestrogen in the water system, pesticides, additives, e-numbers, and they’re only the ones we eat. There are others that are absorbed by the skin or carried on the air. We take in a chemical cocktail every day without realising. This cocktail has reacted unfavourably with the food enzymes, and as it’s the enzymes that determine the function of a cell, the intended chemical reaction is being inhibited or it’s interacting with the wrong cells. Unfortunately, this has resulted in a form of functional psychosis.”

“You mean they’re going mad”

“In a word, yes.”

Chase let out a sigh and shook her head. “I can’t believe anyone could be stupid enough to mess with our food.” She suddenly remembered Belinda’s face and how her features appeared to change. “And is there anything else? Is the food doing something more physical?”

Adam looked down at his hands. “There might be something else going on, but it’s hard to tell. I think that the food might be causing mutations. Evolution is all about mutating, so to be more precise, it’s taking us to the next stage of evolution before we’re ready ... But it might not be our natural stage ...”

“Oh my god.”

“Well, Moon now seems to think that you hold the key. That your child will be born with perfect immunity to disease and that they’ll be able to obtain the ultimate insulin from it. He hopes that this will also stop the mutations, letting the body reach a happy medium.”

Chase protectively grabbed her stomach. “You mean they want to cut my baby up to use it as a pharmacy!”

“Well, not exactly like that ...”

“That’s what you’re saying.”

“I don’t know what I’m saying anymore, but I like you Chase. And I don’t want to see anything happen to you.”

“So what am I going to do? Moon will find me wherever I am.”

“We’ll find a way. Trust me.”

What choice do I have
, she thought as she stared out of the window, watching the rain fall like Gods tears on a blighted land.

CHAPTER 25

Ratty could hear voices in the fog, muffled and indistinct. He grabbed
Izzy’s
hand and dragged her into a hedge. He knew it wouldn’t hide them from anyone wearing the goggles, but it was better than standing out in the open, waiting to get caught.

“I knew this was a bad idea,”
Izzy
protested.

Ratty glared at her and covered her mouth with his hand. “
Shsss
,” he hissed.

He didn’t know whether it was his imagination, or whether he had been walking around in it for too long and gotten used to it, but the fog definitely appeared to have dissipated slightly and there were no new emissions from the vents. They had circled the village, and rather than using the lane where they were more likely to come across wandering patrols, they had walked behind a hedge that ran parallel to the lane.
  

As the voices drew closer, Ratty tensed, his muscles bunched like taut springs. Making sure
Izzy
and himself were as prone to the floor as they could get, he peered through the hedge, but at first he couldn’t see anything. The hedge was prickly and sharp and the more branches he tried to move out of the way, the more it scratched him. He silently cursed. Then he saw them, drifting like ghosts through the fog: men dressed in white fatigues.

 
One of the men suddenly stopped and turned toward Ratty, and he felt a spasm of fear knot his stomach. Then the fog drifted thick and impervious over the scene, and when it eventually dispersed, the men had gone, vanished into the fog.

Ratty let out a sigh of relief. “Come on, let’s go,” he said, standing up.

“Who
was
that? Was it them?”

He knew she was referring to the hunters or soldiers or whatever they were, but he didn’t want to scare her by telling her the truth. “I don’t know. Come on, let’s go.”

“Are you mad? We can’t carry on.”

“Would you rather stay here?”

Izzy
scowled at him. “If I didn’t like you—” She abruptly stopped talking, her cheeks flushed.

Ratty pulled a quizzical expression. “If you didn’t what?”

“Nothing. Just forget I said anything.”

“If you didn’t like me, is that what you said?”

“I didn’t say anything. Now can we get a move on because I’m cold, wet and miserable.”

Ratty grinned and kissed her on the cheek.

“What was that for?” she said, wiping the spot where he had kissed her.

“Because I … like you too.” He couldn’t believe what he had just done.

Izzy
shook her head and snorted. “Come on Romeo, why don’t you get me out of here.”

Still grinning, Ratty took
Izzy’s
hand and they continued walking through the field, following the hedge.

After about twenty minutes, they came to the fence surrounding the compound, which they followed. Ratty assumed that it must be a boundary fence, erected to either keep people out or in.

The hum of a generator sounded in the distance and using it as a beacon, they headed toward it.

On the way they passed by a long building with numerous windows. Ratty peered inside, alarmed to see people dressed the same as those who removed the vicar’s body: white coveralls and gas mask type devices. They were working away at various stations, looking through microscopes and filling test tubes. One of the figures glanced in
Ratty’s
direction and he ducked down, pulse pounding.

“Come on, let’s hurry up,” he said as he crawled along the ground until clear of the building. He didn’t know what the people were up to, but it couldn’t be anything good.

Once they reached the source of the sound, they scurried behind the building, watching people wandering between other facilities, their appearance indistinct in the fog, like ghosts, trapped between the past and the present. When the coast was clear, Ratty checked the door to the generator room. Finding it locked, they decided to skirt around the building, looking for another way inside.

High up the side of the building, Ratty spotted a ladder, but it was too far up to reach as it needed another section to enable anyone to climb it. Further on, pipes emanated from the side of the building, but a metal fan of spikes stopped anyone climbing up them. He found it ironic they had decided to take so many precautions when the building was blanketed by fog and surrounded by a fence and guards; but then again,
Izzy
and himself had got through, so perhaps it wasn’t so ironic.

With no visible way inside, Ratty felt frustrated. He leaned against the building, wondering what to do next.

“So now can we get out of here?”
Izzy
asked.

Ratty ground his teeth. It looked as though
Izzy
was right. Perhaps they shouldn’t have come back here. Perhaps they should have just tried to find a way out of the fog.

Just then he heard a door open. Although apprehensive about looking around the corner, he knew this might be the only chance he could have.

Carefully, he peered around the side of the building to see a figure disappearing into the fog and before he lost his nerve, he dashed out and slipped his hand between the door and the frame before it shut. He held his breath, hoping there was no one inside as he opened the door and called
Izzy
. She stepped from around the corner, looking dishevelled and scared as he pulled her inside the building, letting the door shut behind them.