The Exodus Towers (23 page)

The worst of it over, Skyler leapt to his feet and ducked inside.

The main hall ran deep into the building, into darkness. On either side were empty door frames, every three meters. Anyone waiting inside would expect an intruder to enter the first room, so Skyler bolted right past the first two openings.

The tactic worked. Two gunshots, one from either side of him, both late. They shook the walls of the old building, nothing more. Skyler saw that the next door on his right was a bathroom. He ran into it, stopped abruptly, and pressed himself against the tiled wall.

He closed his eyes and counted to ten. When he opened them, his vision had adjusted to the darkness.

Skyler realized that the subhuman wailing came from below. A basement, then. Cries for help came from both below and above.

A creak from the floorboard in the hall focused him. Skyler half-spun out of the bathroom. He gave himself a split second to make sure Davi or Ana hadn’t followed him in. They hadn’t.

An older woman stood in the hallway, overweight, dressed only in a threadbare nightgown. She raised a shotgun, aiming from her waist—a clumsy motion. The weapon discharged into the wall a meter from Skyler.

He answered with two rounds. One took her in the gut, one in the chest. She gurgled as she slumped to the floor.

Eyes adjusted, Skyler now saw the interior of the main hall. He stalked toward the front of the house, stepping over the old hag’s corpse.

He’d heard two shots when he first entered. Someone was still there, he knew; he did a somersault across the entryway.

A shot rang out, hissing through the air above him, where his head would have been. He came up firing, a
rat-tat
that shook the very walls. The bullets hit the chest of a teenage boy, adding two red holes to his dingy shirt. The kid fell backward with the impact, lifeless, landing on an overturned milk crate, smashing it with his weight.

A damn kid! Skyler had no time for remorse and shoved
the look on the boy’s face aside. The sound of footsteps drifted down from above. From the second floor.

“Skyler?”

He turned at Davi’s low voice, coming from the doorway. “In here,” he replied. “Two down, more upstairs. And subhumans in the basement.”

“I’ll take the basement,” Davi said, readying a pistol.

“No,” Skyler said, “I’ve got it.”

“You sure?”

Skyler nodded. “Where’s Ana?”

“Stunned from that explosion. I told her to guard the door in case we flushed anyone out.”

“Good,” Skyler said, genuinely. “Right. Shout an all-clear when you can, and exercise caution. We still don’t know where your friends are.”

Davi nodded and led the way down the main hall. They came to a narrow stairwell. To one side of it, an open door gave way to another set of steps leading down.

Skyler stopped only to take a brief look down the stairs. The steps looked aged: cracked wood nailed atop older rotten planks. He crept forward, leaving Davi to deal with the second floor.

The smell from below overpowered him—worse than the bathroom. A mixed scent of death and human waste. Skyler stopped halfway down and vomited. He could not hear his own retching above the agonizing cries from below. After a time, the nausea passed. Another four steps, taken slowly, and Skyler reached the basement.

When his feet hit the floor, the wailing stopped.

It felt markedly cooler in the subterranean room, enough to make him shiver. He placed an arm across his mouth and nose to quell the odor, and moved inside.

His shoes encountered a sticky, wet patch. Skyler thrust out a hand to brace himself, just preventing a slip and fall. He paused to gather himself, to let his heart rate slow.

The room spanned ten meters on each side, following the footprint of the building above. In the near darkness, Skyler could see poorly erected rooms—pens, or cages, he sensed—lining the other three walls. In the center of the space, an area
three meters square was marked off by sections of chain-link fence.

Inside the center cage, a naked woman was crouched on hands and knees. Her head tilted slightly when Skyler’s eyes met hers. The movement reminded him of a cat. She had the wild eyes and unkempt hair of a subhuman, but not the starved leanness. Her hands and feet were held in place by metal braces. A section of fence behind her had been cut away, allowing … access.

Skyler swallowed, a knot of realization forming in his gut even before the thought came fully to mind. The restrained subhuman woman was filthy save the part of her pressed against the gap in the cage. A steel bucket sat on the ground just outside, a soiled towel hung carelessly over the lip.

He shot a glance at the cells along the far wall. A female subhuman form loomed within each, save one that was empty, the door slightly ajar.

The knot within him tightened. Skyler turned to the opposite wall. More cells, more prisoners, though these were different. He saw six naked men and women, all devoid of that animalistic glare. Immunes. Two slept or were, perhaps, dead. The others stared at him with hope in their eyes.

Skyler didn’t need to see any more. He’d heard enough about Gabriel and his followers to guess what was going on here: breeding.

The subhuman woman hissed at him. Within seconds, the shrieks and wails from the other cells began anew.

Time to end this
.

He shot the subhuman woman in the cage at point-blank range, between the eyes. She made no effort to avoid it. Skyler had a vague sense that she wanted him to do it, the way she closed her eyes just before he fired.

With a methodical march along the far wall he found six more of the poor creatures. Skyler put a bullet in each, ending their misery. The anger in him morphed, became resolute, a white-hot coal. This was evil, pure and simple, and whatever else happened he would make sure Gabriel paid for it. The world had enough problems without this kind of shit.

Turning back toward where he’d entered, Skyler faced the immune prisoners.

“I’m here to help you,” he said.

Combination locks secured each cage. Skyler made a cursory search of the room for bolt cutters or anything of the sort, but found nothing. “Get back,” he said to the prisoners. The order registered for those awake and they hobbled toward the wall.

Four gunshots later the cages were open.

“Carry them,” he said, pointing to the sleepers. “Get outside and wait for us. I’ll try to find you some clothes.”

One mumbled thanks. Skyler ignored them and went back up the stairs.

Davi waited for him at the ground-floor landing, carrying a young girl in his arms, three or four years old. She hugged him fiercely, face buried in his shoulder, her chest heaving with sobs. At the door to the lodge Skyler saw a few other immunes, shuffling out into the bright sun.

“Find anyone?” Davi asked.

“Six,” Skyler said. “We’re burning this place when we leave. No debate.”

Davi held Skyler’s gaze for an instant. “Okay.”

The immunes shuffled up the stairs, carrying their brethren. Davi greeted the first one by name and a flicker of hope flashed on the man’s face. They embraced as well as they could.

“Take them outside. I’ll look for clothing and blankets,” Skyler said.

When the others cleared the front door, Skyler bounded up the stairs to the second floor and searched it again. Davi might have had little formal training, but he’d killed two armed men in the central hallway. Skyler stepped over the bodies and entered the first bedroom he found. In the closet he found black uniforms like those worn by Gabriel’s people in Belém. Skyler grabbed the garments and tossed them on the bed. He found one pair of hiking boots and some underwear, and threw that on the pile, too.

As he ransacked the place for useful supplies, the rage within him turned cold. It froze into a deep resolve. Whoever
this Gabriel fellow was, he’d not just held these people against their will; he’d forced them to breed. And not just with each other, but also with subhumans. Try as he might, Skyler couldn’t keep his imagination from painting what this place must have been like an hour before they arrived, and what kind of sickness lived within the people who ran it on Gabriel’s behalf. He felt no remorse at killing those he’d encountered on the way in, and would feel none when he put a round through Gabriel’s brain, either.

Outside he found Ana cradling the young girl Davi had rescued. She wept openly, as did the child.

The two unconscious prisoners were being tended to by the rest. In all, a dozen immunes had been freed.

Skyler set the blanket in the dirt and unfolded it to reveal the items he’d scrounged, then walked away to let the group dress with a modicum of privacy.

Davi brushed the hair from Ana’s face. “Wait for us here, sis,” he said, and followed Skyler over to examine the wreckage of the barn.

Smoking debris littered the ground for hundreds of meters around the structure. Whatever explosive they stored in here was either very potent or in a large quantity. Skyler saw bits and pieces of food packaging, and signs of less critical things like toiletries and charred books.

Nothing remained of the barn itself. Skyler could only hope no one had been inside. No one friendly, that is. He sighed. Clearly Gabriel’s people had stored their reserve supplies here, and it might have been worth rummaging through. No point in worrying about it now.

“Your sister …,” Skyler said without looking at Davi.

“… takes risks,” Davi said, finishing. In tone and terseness, he said he didn’t want to talk about her actions.

Skyler let it go. He’d force the topic before they returned to Belém, but more pressing issues were on his mind. “The purpose of this place, Davi. Not just a prison.”

“I know,” he said.

“Did you know about this before we arrived? Is this what you two escaped from?”

Davi shook his head. “I …” He searched for the words. “Gabriel talked often about how just finding immunes wasn’t enough. We needed to create more. I thought he meant to force Ana …”

To breed
. Breeding immunes. Skyler didn’t know if the trait even worked that way, but the presence of the young girl seemed evidence enough. She couldn’t be more than five, Skyler guessed, and that meant she’d been born after the disease ravaged the planet, beyond the aura.

Had there been others who didn’t have the protection? Dashed against a wall or drowned for their inferiority?
Skyler shivered.

Together, Skyler and Davi walked the perimeter of the compound, and then through the field of wreckage that had been the barn. Other than a few cans of food, and a box of pain-relief pills, they found nothing salvageable.

“The two vehicles are a gift,” Skyler said. “We might be able to sneak up on the colony in them. There are a couple of uniforms, too.”

Davi said nothing and avoided Skyler’s gaze.

“Pack anything useful into the trucks. We’ll move back to the clearing tonight and head to Belém at dawn,” Skyler added. He watched the young man carefully and saw the distance in his eyes. “You do intend to come back with me, right? We had a deal.”

“Yes,” Davi said, his voice defensive. “At least give us some time to tend to our friends, after what they’ve been through. I can’t think about tomorrow right now. Even without … all this … Ana and I have been on the move for months.”

Skyler thought of Davi sitting in a hammock on the beach in Belém, but kept it to himself. “How long are you talking? A day? A week? My people are under Gabriel’s thumb back there, and those in orbit—”

“Just …” Davi swallowed whatever he intended to say, and then lowered his voice. “Can we just wait until morning to decide? Let my friends rest, and not have to ponder a rush into danger so quickly after they’ve been freed?”

That’s when their thirst for revenge will be strongest, though
, Skyler thought. He kept it to himself, though. Davi
feared the dangers ahead, too, he guessed. Maybe some time would help him remember the purpose of their plan.

Those who were able spent the rest of the day hoisting what supplies they could find onto the cargo racks on the tops of the two trucks. Ana sat atop one vehicle, organizing the meager goods and tying them down. Davi stood atop the other truck, rifle at the ready, scanning the surrounding countryside for any approaching subhumans.

When finished, Skyler told Ana and Davi to drive to the clearing where they’d camped the night before. “I’ll hike out there after I’ve had a good look around,” he said, and waved them off.

In the common room he found nothing except blood and furniture. The tables could be burned for firewood, but then so could the entire cursed building. He left everything where it lay and didn’t bother to search the corpses.

He moved on to the kitchen. In one pantry he found a box of packaged noodles with bouillon packets, a discovery that made him think of Woon, and Prumble, and the old airport. Skyler hadn’t thought about Darwin in a day at least, and the realization filled him with a mixture of guilt and sorrow. He may have had next to nothing left there, but he’d abandoned it all, and for what?

For Tania. For Tania, and the future
.

She’d be desperate by now, he guessed. Air and water would be running short. He wondered if she knew anything about the situation on the ground. Maybe she’d taken the stations back to Darwin, for sheer purposes of survival. He couldn’t blame her if she had.

In a drawer Skyler found a bag of hot sauce packets. Past their expiration date, but if he’d learned anything in the last five years it was that expiration dates were grossly underestimated. The ubiquitous Preservall could keep most foods safe for many years, something food manufacturers must have found bad for sales, so they shaved months or years off the printed date. The hot sauce went into his bag with the freeze-dried noodles.

Out the back door he found a small garden, blissfully free of mango. Skyler left the plants untouched, deciding he
could send someone else back here to pick anything edible. Next to the planters he found gardening tools, and a hefty axe that had been recently sharpened. This he kept in hand as he circled the building.