THE SIGN SAID WELCOME to Sunnyvale.
It was a large sign, the size of a family car, and it was showing its age. The passing vehicles had kicked up the dust from the road, which had reacted with the rain and trickled down its façade in little rivers, leaving a trail of sediment behind. Some of the kids from the village had taken potshots at it with their BB guns, leaving angry welts in the surface of the metal. It was plastered with bird shit and the facility’s cartoon mascots—all animals, of course—looked like they were suffocating beneath the weight of it all. Sunnyvale’s tagline was right there beneath it: The Home of Good Food.
Tom Copeland stared at the sign as it grew larger in the windscreen, floated softly past on the passenger side, then disappeared as the path rolled away beneath them. Calling it a road would have been like comparing a burger van to a McDonald’s. At best, it was a narrow dirt track that had been worn into the grass by the passage of vehicles and time. Copeland was glad he was in the back of a Land Rover and not on foot or bouncing up and down in his Vauxhall Corsa.
It had been an unusual day so far. This was his first time visiting the facility, and he was following the strict instructions that John MacDonald had given him when he was offered the job. He’d met the three men he was sharing the Land Rover with in the car park of the Red Lion.
“You’ll need to hitch a lift until you’re given security clearance,” MacDonald had explained. “If you don’t have a key card, you can’t get in.”
The Land Rover hit a bump in the road and the driver, a dour-faced Scot with a bristly ginger beard, smacked the steering wheel with the palm of his hand and shouted, “Come on, ya bastard.”
Copeland turned his face to the window again. He was sitting in the back behind the passenger seat because it was the only seat left when they’d picked him up. There had been no time for introductions. That had come later, once the Land Rover had started to worm its way through the back roads and, eventually, the countryside. Sunnyvale was tucked away in a natural dip in the Chiltern Hills, a good ten miles away from the nearest major town or village. There had been plenty of time for them to talk during the commute.
The driver had introduced himself as Big Jim Benton, and Copeland had made an immediate mental note not to mess with the guy. Big Jim had a mess of scars poking out from beneath his fiery beard, deep, sunken eyes, and a fat face. He was built like a brick shithouse thanks to twelve years of professional hooliganism and ten years before that of amateur street fights in downtown Leith. His right arm was a mesh of tattoos, and they caught and reflected the sunlight when he hung it out the window. His hair had started to recede and he had a small mole on the left side of his face. He was a little overweight, but he was far from obese. The excess was from the cheese, the beer, and the kebab meat, and it clung mostly to his face, his waist, and his stomach. It was the kind of bulk that belonged to professional wrestlers, a slowly cultivated weight that came in handy when he needed to use it. He could turn it into a weapon when he got in tussles with unexpected vandals or trespassers. It’s what his job was all about.
The passenger seat was taken up by Big Jim’s second-in-command, an Irishman called Darragh O’Rourke. He wasn’t as muscular as Big Jim, but he had the look of a wiry street dog with a bruised muzzle. He wore his greasy brown hair down to his shoulders, where it grazed his skin and brought blackheads and spots out in angry welts. He had a disconcerting habit of reaching beneath his Kevlar jacket and scratching at his skin, then bringing his hands back out and investigating his fingernails for blood and pus. He also bit the damn things, which Copeland thought was nothing short of cannibalism.
“Darragh’s from Belfast, ye ken,” Jim said.
“That’s right,” the Irishman confirmed. “I came over to Liverpool during the recession and ended up moving here for work.”
“Ah worked with Darragh afore Sunnyvale,” Jim continued. “Eh’s a good lad, ye ken. Eh’s goat a dog. Ye’ll like tha, Mr. Vet Man.”
“Yeah?” Copeland said, raising an eyebrow. He’d never much cared for dogs, but he was socially adjusted enough to know when he was expected to say something more. “What breed?”
“She’s a little Jack Russell called Milly,” O’Rourke said. “She’s got a lot of energy. The missus says it’s good practise for when we have kids.”
“Take mah advice,” Jim grunted. “Git yeself tha snip afore it’s too late. Ah cannae stand wee bairns. Ah’d rather stick ma dick in a blender thun huvtae raise some wee shite ah didnae want in tha first place.”
“I’ll bear that in mind,” O’Rourke replied, but he was laughing.
The Land Rover’s final passenger sat to Copeland’s right, slouching back against the leather seats. He couldn’t have been out of his teens. He was an Englishman from Bootle with a thick accent who looked as out of place in his security gear as a bum in a shirt and tie. He had short black hair with zigzags shaved into the back of it, as well as big lips, big ears, and a massive nose that looked as though it had been broken a dozen times. The kid’s face reminded Copeland of a cross between a cauliflower and a bowling ball.
The young man nodded at him. “First day?” he asked.
Copeland nodded, then flashed a glance at the man’s name badge. “Sure is, Chase,” he said. “The first day of the rest of my life.”
“Yeah,” Chase replied. “Something like that. What are you doing here, anyway? You working the line?”
“I’m a veterinarian.”
“Jesus,” O’Rourke said. “What the shite are you doing at Sunnyvale?”
“What do you think?” Copeland replied.
That killed the conversation, at least until Big Jim hit a button on the radio. He’d matured into adulthood while grunge was on the rise and was still listening to Pearl Jam and Alice in Chains all these years later. Kurt Cobain was dead. Layne Staley was dead. Chris Cornell was dead. And in a lonely hotel room somewhere, Eddie Vedder was shitting himself at the prospect of being next.
As they cruised towards the entrance to the complex, they were listening to L7, an all-female riot grrrl band. Benton was nodding along to the beat, the feminism wasted on a man with a Hibs tattoo and a history of casual domestic violence, but O’Rourke was lying back in his seat with his eyes and ears closed, and Chase looked like he’d tried to swallow a pickled onion without bothering to chew it.
Tom Copeland looked at himself in the rear-view and took stock of what he saw there. Back in the day, when he’d been running his own practice instead of “working for the man” on a factory farm, he’d shaved every morning and gone to great lengths to make sure that he smelled of expensive cologne. But he’d lost all that when he’d been dumb enough to steal ketamine from storage. His partner had called him out on it and given him two options: either sign over his share in the company or be reported to the police. For Copeland, that was no choice at all.
A shadow passed across his face as he stared at the mirror. It was an ordinary face with a large forehead and a receding hairline. He had short black hair that flicked up from his head because of the way he slept, and he had thin, weedy eyebrows that looked like he waxed them, although he didn’t. He also had big, flat ears that hung to the side of his head like two strips of bacon, but his face wasn’t fat and neither was his body. He kept himself in shape, but it didn’t come easy to him. And he’d let himself go since Linda had left him all alone in the big, empty house that he could no longer afford.
When he thought about stuff, he started squinting, and he saw from the mirror that he was squinting then. He was a good guy. He knew he was. But he’d made some bad decisions, and sometimes he felt like an asshole. But he did his best, especially for the animals. His fellow humans chose to be evil and corrupt. The animals had no choice.
Copeland had only stolen the drugs because a very unpleasant man had forced him to do it. He recognised the man by sight—he’d seen him in the practice’s waiting room—but he didn’t know his name. The name didn’t matter too much when he had his metaphorical knife to Copeland’s throat and his mouth full of threats against his family. The irony was that when he’d been caught in the act and kicked out of his own veterinary practice, Copeland had lost his family anyway. But at least no one had lost their life.
Copeland looked away from the mirror. A stilted silence hung heavy on the air. He fiddled uncomfortably with his seatbelt and shifted position to try to get comfortable.
“Jim,” O’Rourke said. “Be a top man and put something else on.”
“Like what?”
“How about some grime?” Chase said.
“Fuck ya grime, ye wee gobshite,” Big Jim snapped. He flashed a glance at Copeland in the rear-view. “Chasey boy thinks eh’s a rapper, ye ken.”
Copeland smiled. “Is that so?”
“Yeah,” Chase replied. “Opened for Devilman a couple of months back.”
“And how come you’re working at Sunnyvale?”
“I’ve got no choice,” Chase said. “I need the money. Used to work as a labourer, and before that I was at a warehouse. Then I saw Sunnyvale was hiring and I thought I’d give it a shot. Besides, women love the uniform.”
“Aye,” Jim conceded. “That’s true. But ah’d appreciate it if ye could keep yer trap shut fae a while. Ah cannae be dein wi yer chat today, ye ken? Ah’ve goat a hangover. If ah hear another peep, ah’m gonnae drop ye off and let ye walk tae work.”
Chase opened his mouth to reply, then thought better of it. Copeland stepped in to fill the silence. “An Englishman, an Irishman, and a Scotsman,” he said. “What is this, some sort of joke?”
Big Jim fixed him with another penetrating stare in the rear-view, but said nothing. A hundred yards or so in front of them, two of Jim’s men were working a checkpoint. A high chain-link fence stretched to the left and the right of the checkpoint as far as the eye could see, disappearing into the trees and following the curve of the land. The fence was festooned with “danger of death” signs, their black lightning bolt insignias popping out from their bright yellow backgrounds. Other signs, white ones this time, warned of guard dogs patrolling the premises. Curlicues of barbed wire lined the top of the fence. Copeland spotted the feathered remains of a bird—a pigeon, perhaps—caught amongst the metal.
“Welcome to Sunnyvale,” O’Rourke murmured.
“Aye,” Big Jim added. He glanced at Copeland in the mirror again and caught his eye. “Ah’m guessin’ this’ll be yer first look at the place. It’s a shithole, but it’s our shithole.”
He idled the car to a stop at the barrier and leaned his head out of the window. “Open the gate, ye whoresons,” he shouted. “It’s me, Big Jim.”
One of the men on the gate shouted an acknowledgement and held his thumb up. The other raised the gate and waved them through. Copeland got a good look at the gatekeepers while Jim was revving the engine and easing the vehicle back into its slow, inexorable crawl towards the complex. They were wearing army greens with Kevlar vests and heavy truncheons on their belts.
Chase caught Copeland’s eye and said, “Sunnyvale’s got the best security this side of the Mersey. Top lads.”
“Why so much security?”
“It’s more than my job’s worth to tell you that,” Chase said. “Especially not with Big Jim at the wheel.”
“Aye,” Jim said. “Eh’ll find oot fae hisself soon enough.”
Copeland nodded. “I’m looking forward to it,” he said. “I love a challenge.”
“Is that why you’re here?” O’Rourke asked. “The challenge?”
“Something like that,” Copeland said. He sighed. “Ask me about it some other time.”
The Land Rover was slowing again, and Copeland peered over O’Rourke’s shoulder and out through the windscreen. They were approaching something else, another mess of metal. As the vehicle drove closer, scattering dusty pebbles every which way across the dead ground, the terrain levelled out. At the same time, a wave of brutal fragrance pierced the vehicle and Copeland started coughing.
It was the kind of smell that lingered in the nostrils. There was a certain stickiness to it, like second-hand cigarette smoke. It reminded Copeland of a kid he’d gone to school with who reeked of starch, fat, and vinegar because his parents owned a chip shop. Sunnyvale didn’t smell like starch or vinegar, but it did smell like fat. It also smelled like sweat and fear, blood and bile. There was a not-so-subtle hint of rotting flesh and a fishy aroma that put Copeland in mind of bad sushi. It also smelled like desperation. It was a depressing smell, and Copeland couldn’t help turning his nose up at it.
“That’s the famous Sunnyvale stench,” Chase said.
“Do people get used to it?”
“Nah,” Chase replied. “They just accept it. Ain’t no use holding your nose, pal. You’ve just got to get on with it. It’s part of the job. It‘s what we get paid for.”
“Smells like shit,” Copeland observed.
O’Rourke laughed from the passenger seat. “Smells like a whole lot more than that,” he said. “But Chase is right. That smell won’t go away no matter what you do.”
“It gets in yer heid,” Jim said. This time, he didn’t look back at Copeland in the rear-view. His eyes were firmly on the road ahead. They’d reached the second mess of metal, and now they were closer, it was clear what they were looking at.
“Is that another checkpoint?” Copeland asked.
“Aye,” Jim replied. “It’s like Chase seid. Sunnyvale’s goat the best security this side ay the Mersey.”
Big Jim reached forward and turned the music off. The atmosphere in the Land Rover had changed, probably because the great facility was looming in front of them on the other side of the formidable fence. It blocked the sun and cast the approach into shadow, reminding Copeland of a Transylvanian castle in some old vampire movie.
The hairs on the back of his neck stood on end. It’s a far cry from the old practice in Chalfont St. Peter, he thought. It was followed by a second, more urgent thought, something that came from somewhere deep within him. It was a primal thought, like the urge to eat or drink or ejaculate, and it came on suddenly and without warning.
We’re being watched.
