The Living End (13 page)

“You were…” I started to say, forcing my numb tongue and lips to move. “Down there.”

He nodded fast. “Yeah, yeah, and you took care of that little girl. Whatever you did, man, you laid her to rest.”

I didn’t lay Stacy’s soul to rest. I sent her to hell. It wasn’t my finest hour.

“You’re magic, aren’t you?” Eric whispered. He shot a look over toward the sandwich line, making sure nobody was listening. “You really are. We need you, man. We need you
now
.”

“Can’t…can’t think right. Head’s not attached to the rest of me.”

Eric squeezed my shoulder hard and marched me to the back corner of the cell. He pushed me down, and I sat on the cold stone floor. He squatted beside me.

“It doesn’t last long,” he whispered. “That’s why they keep feeding us that shit. Another hour and you’ll be sharp again. I figured it out. Got a couple of other guys to stop eating, too. Leroy and Bull, they’re wide-awake and ready to throw down, but we need a plan. We’ve just been playacting, pretending to be zombies like the rest of these guys while we try and figure out how to get out of here. We ain’t eaten in three days, Dan. I don’t know how much longer we can hold out.”

A screech ripped through the air. It wasn’t human.

It came from somewhere beyond the bars, farther than my blurred vision could see. A second screech set my teeth on edge. It sounded like a pterodactyl getting its wings sawed off.

“And that’s why,” Eric whispered. His face went ash gray.

“What?” was all I managed to say, but the question was obvious.

He shook his head. “They take two or three of us a day, one at a time, up that hallway. Nobody ever comes back. You just hear the screaming. I think it’s like that horror movie, man. The one where those sick fucks pay a million dollars to torture somebody?”

I didn’t have the heart or the words to tell him the truth. Whatever was going on here, it was probably far, far worse than that.

“Just sit here and rest a minute.” Eric looked deep into my eyes. “I’m gonna go tell the others. I was scared as hell, but man, now that you’re here? Now I
know
everything’s gonna be all right.”

He left me there, carrying that weight on my shoulders while I waited for my senses to swim back through the fog.

My vision came first. I was in a cell about twenty feet by twenty feet, with maybe a dozen prisoners. No windows, and beige-painted bars straight out of a county jail. The room stank of fear and stale piss. Outside, a corridor ran off in both directions, but I couldn’t see where it led. Now and again a guard strolled past, dressed in fatigues and toting a matte-black rifle that looked like something out of a science fiction movie. He barely paid us any attention beyond the occasional glance of contempt.

Eric came back with two other guys and made quiet introductions. Leroy was a big bruiser with a pug nose while Bull was short with a shaved head and a bad attitude. The kind of guy who starts bar fights to prove himself, and usually wins.

“Guard sweeps by every five minutes,” Eric whispered as we huddled in the back of the cell, “so we gotta talk fast.”

Bull gave me a hard look. “Eric says you can get us out of here. That true?”

“Do my best,” I said. “What are we up against? How many guards?”

“Too many,” Leroy said. “I know these fuckers. One rolled up his sleeves, and I saw the triangle tat on his arm. Xerxes. I was in Desert Storm, Fifth Engineer Battalion, that’s where I remember seeing that logo. These guys? They’re fuckin’ mercenaries. They got no right to operate on American soil.”

Bull curled his lip. “They do if this is a government facility. Think about it, bro. It’s a FEMA camp, just like I been warning you for years.”

Xerxes. Now I knew why the Nevada Heritage Coalition was making secret payments to a private military contractor. They needed help keeping their dirty business under wraps. I wondered if the crew that had ambushed us out in Chloride had tattoos on their arms, too.

“These guys are hard as nails,” Leroy said. “Their gear is no joke, either. Those rifles they’re toting? Tavor TAR-21s. Chop you up like a fuckin’ Ginsu on full auto.”

“What about a bum-rush?” I said. “Wait for them to open the gate, then we jump the guards?”

Bull and Leroy gave Eric a look. Eric turned to me like a doctor about to tell a patient he has terminal cancer.

Eric shook his head slowly. “Look up.”

I followed his gaze to the sprinkler heads set into the ceiling. There were at least four of them in the cell, more than I’d expect for a fire-control system, but innocent enough.

“The guards think we’re all zombies, so they feel safe shooting their mouths off in front of us. They had a new guy who was bellyaching about, you know, what happens if the cops get wind of what’s going down. The other guard said they can always get more bums, so in case of an emergency—
any
emergency—the number-one priority is getting rid of the evidence.”

“Get rid of it, how?” I said.

Eric nodded upward. “That sprinkler system isn’t for fires. It runs to a pair of hundred-gallon tanks on the other side of that wall. The tanks are full of concentrated sodium hydroxide.”

“Lye,” Bull said. “If the alarm goes off, for any reason, everyone in this cell
melts
.”

I leaned my head back against the cinder-block wall and closed my eyes.

“Then we need to up our timetable,” I said.

“Yeah? Why’s that?” Eric said.

“Because I’m just the advance scout. The FBI knows about this place, and in less than twenty-four hours, they’re going to kick in the front door. If we’re still in this cell when they do, we’re all dead men.”

A
metallic
bang
echoed from up the hallway, followed by another inhuman screech. Then a scream of pain, this one all too human, ending in a ragged gurgle.

“Containment breach in two,” a placid voice said over a loudspeaker as a klaxon whined. “Calling all hands for immediate termination protocol. Containment breach in two.”

My stomach clenched as we looked up at the sprinkler heads, poised and ready to rain down with caustic death.

“Door’s closed,” Eric said, squinting at the bars. “That’s not for us.”

Something was coming. A slithering wet stomp sounded from the corridor, and the air filled with the stench of rotting meat.

“Not us,” I whispered. “The breach was the other room. The one where they’re taking people.”

Whatever I’d imagined was slouching its way toward our cell, screeching and limping and hitting the walls with meaty thuds, the reality was worse. The creature rounded the corner and came into sight, turning its eyeless head to face the cage and its prisoners like a butcher eying a fresh slab of meat.

It might have been human, once. It walked on two legs, though one dragged behind it, a bloated and rubbery tube of puckered flesh that twisted and bent like a crazy straw. It had two arms, though one wept with pestilent sores and the other, flailing bonelessly, was lined with hungry little mouths whose yellowed and broken teeth chomped at the rancid air. Its head and chest were overgrown with purple and black tumors and pustules the size of golf balls. The growths blistered and swelled, as if breathing on their own.

The creature forced its arm between the bars of the cell and wrapped itself around the neck of the nearest prisoner, hauling him close. Even lost in a drugged haze, the poor bastard found the voice to scream as a dozen sets of teeth clamped onto his skin and started chewing.

A pair of double doors at the other end of the hall burst open. Four men in camo ran in, two dropping to one knee and the other two aiming high, swinging their rifles toward the cell bars. I had just enough time to wave the others back toward the wall before a hurricane of bullets jackhammered through the air and left me half-blind in the muzzle flash. The creature’s pustules exploded in the fusillade, splashing yellow pus and black blood across the bars, and it slumped to the ground still clutching its bullet-riddled victim. Another prisoner’s corpse sprawled on the concrete nearby, his skull blown open by a stray round.

“Zombie up!” I hissed, prompting Eric, Leroy, and Bull to wipe the looks of horror off their faces and play listless. The other prisoners stayed where they stood, wavering on drugged feet as if nothing had happened at all.

“Jesus
Christ
!” shouted a voice from up the hallway. An older man in a long white lab coat and mirrored glasses stomped into view, flailing his arms as he took in the wreckage. He had a disheveled mop of black hair and fat, puffy lips that curled in disgust. “What are you idiots
doing
? We could have contained this.”

“They’re doin’ their bloody
job
,” said the scowling man who came in behind the guards. His fatigues were crisp and his black leather boots polished to a shine, his back ramrod-straight and his eyes hard enough to cut glass. He wore his salt-and-pepper hair in a buzz cut, and his accent was pure Cockney.

“Their job? Their job is to obliterate a successful test subject and potentially contaminate half the facility?
Look
at this mess!”

The military man waved his men back, ignoring the comment. “You done good, lads. None o’ you got any of that shite on you, right? Good. Back to your posts.”

“We’re going to need a full toxic scrub here,” the man in the lab coat fretted, his eyes concealed behind his glasses. “An atmospheric workup—”

“Oh, come off it and quit your grousing. The only mess here is comin’ out of your lab. If this is what you call a success, you’re a long way from getting paid.”

The man in the coat strode up to him, poking a slender finger against his chest as he spoke.

“Pardon me,
Major
, but I think I know a little more about the intricacies of this project than some hired gun. What we’re attempting here, on a quantum-chaos scale, has literally never been—”

The major’s hand shot out in a blur, locking around the other man’s finger like he was snatching a fly with a pair of chopsticks. The man in the coat yelped as his finger bent backward, slowly, hovering just shy of the breaking point.

“Nedry,” the major said, his voice a leathery growl, “the senator pulled me and my lads onto this job because we know what we’re about. I’ve been to the Temple of the Black Mother in Mogili. I’ve drunk the cold sweat of the ten dead saints. So don’t talk shite to me about black magic like I ain’t never seen it. And don’t
ever
touch me again unless you want to lose your finger
and
your cock, not necessarily in that order.”

He let go. Nedry took a stumbling step backward, shoulders hunched, clutching his finger to his chest. I had a pretty good idea of who the major was, now. If the hired thugs were his “lads,” then this had to be Angus Caine, Xerxes’s president. Senator Roth and Lauren were calling out the big guns. Literally.

“Sorry,” Nedry mumbled with his reddened face turned toward the carnage on the floor. “I’ll just…I’ll just get this cleaned up.”

“You do that,” Angus growled. He turned and strode away, leaving Nedry with the mess.

Whatever the hell was happening in this freak’s “lab,” I didn’t want any part of it. Even so, it was my best and only chance to get out of this deathtrap of a cell and hopefully—if I was really good and really lucky—get the others out too.

“Eric,” I whispered, crouching low behind a couple of the zombies, “how do they pick who gets taken out next?”

He huddled next to me, nodding toward the bars. “They just grab whoever’s closest to the door. They ain’t picky. That’s how we’ve been staying alive. We just keep to the back of the cell. Thing is, they’re taking more people out of here than they’re bringing in. Sooner or later…”

“I’m going next.”

“What?” he whispered, eyes wide. “Are you crazy?”

“I’ve got to get to a phone and call off the feds before they spook these guys. You three just hang back, keep up the zombie act, and get ready to move. When things start to happen, they’re gonna happen fast.”

Two men in yellow decontamination suits, their faces blurry behind visored hoods, dragged in some black nylon body bags and a cart of cleaning supplies. They had to come into the cell, pushing the prisoners back, to get at the two corpses inside the bars. That was my chance. I made my jaw slack and unfocused my eyes as I gently pushed my way through the tight crowd, slipping a little closer every time the cleaners’ faces turned away. Eventually, inch by inch, I made it to the front of the pack.

“It’s ridiculous, having to work under these conditions,” Nedry said to the cleaners. “They toss me table scraps and expect me to cook a gourmet meal with them.”

The cleaners, preoccupied with their grisly work, ignored him. I tried not to wrinkle my nose as they lifted the creature’s bullet-pocked corpse and wrestled it into a double-sized body bag. The room stank like someone had put a week-old piece of meat under a broiler and turned up the heat. Nedry looked over toward the cell. I saw my doubled reflection in the lenses of his mirrored glasses.

“Time for one more, I think. Let’s see. Eeny, meeny, miny…you.”

His finger pointed my way. I stared straight ahead and acted like I wasn’t aware of anything. The only thing I couldn’t control was the pounding of my heart.

“Come on, come on,” he said, reaching in and giving my sleeve a tug. I stumbled forward like a wind-up toy, letting him guide me along.

My deck of cards grew hot against my hip, but I let them sleep. I wasn’t sure what this guy’s background was or what he could do, but right now my life—and the lives of all the people back in that cell—depended on making myself look as harmless as possible.

An armed guard stood outside the door at the end of the hall. To the left, a second door hung open on one twisted and broken hinge with its screws ripped from the wall. Dents hammered the reinforced steel like it was made of tinfoil. I wanted to get a better look, but I didn’t dare turn my head or show interest in anything beyond my own breathing.

Nedry’s lab looked like a mad interior decorator with a chrome obsession got loose in a doctor’s office. My reflection bounced back at me from mirrored cabinets and walls, distorted and warped in a wall of burbling beakers and flasks connected by polished brass piping to a pair of stainless-steel vats. A surgical gurney stood in the center of the room, laid out with fresh white sheets and ready for an operation, lit by a dangling light fixture on a swing arm. Difference was, most gurneys in my experience didn’t come with leather restraints.