The Dragon Factory

by Jonathan Maberry

  “What is this stuff?” asked Tonton as Hecate injected a golden liquid into the IV line attached to the Berserker’s arm.

  “A gift from my father,” said Hecate. She emptied the syringe and threw it into a red sharps disposal. “It’ll make you feel better.”

  “I feel pretty frigging great right now,” Tonton growled. Even when he spoke in ordinary conversational tones, he had a deep voice that rumbled like thunder. Over the last few months the gene therapy had taken him a few steps further than the other Berkserkers. Tonton’s brow had become more pronounced, his nose wider and flatter. He looked less like his natural Brazilian-German and more like a mature silverback gorilla. Hecate had even noticed that Tonton’s back hair was starting to fade from black to silver. It was one of the things that troubled Paris, because they hadn’t given the Berserkers the genes for hair coloration or facial deformity and yet the traits had emerged anyway.

  Hecate found it fascinating and wildly sexy.

  It also reflected some of the changes she was experiencing with her own covert experiments. The gene therapy she used on herself was nowhere near the scale used on the Berserkers, and it drew on feline traits from the Panthera gombaszoegensis, the European jaguar, a species extinct for a million and a half years but whose DNA was recovered from a German bog. Her goal had been to enhance her strength by making her muscles 20 percent denser and to heighten her senses. She could not achieve feline sensory perception, but already she realized that it would soon become necessary to start wearing tinted contact lenses to hide the pupilary deformation and color changes. Her teeth were growing sharper, too, and that was absolutely not part of the plan. Hecate accepted the reality that these would need to be filed soon, but for the moment she liked the extra bite.

  “So . . . what’s it do?” growled Tonton.

  Hecate gave him a playful slap across the face. “It’ll keep you and your boys from going apeshit during missions.”

  He stared at her, then got the joke. They both cracked up.

  “Yeah,” he said at length, “some of the boys do get a bit rambunctious. In Somalia . . . Alonso and Girner were really fucked up. I had to stomp them a bit to keep ’em from eating people. Dumb sonsabitches.”

  “It’s not their fault,” Hecate said. “The therapy has some wrinkles, but my father had some ideas on what to do.”

  “And I’m the guinea pig?”

  “Yes.”

  “Jeez.”

  “You scared, big man?” she purred.

  “Scared? No. Who’d be scared with a crazy bitch like you pumping God knows what into me based on the advice of a total whack-job.”

  Hecate slapped him again. Harder.

  He grinned at her. There was a trickle of blood at the corner of his mouth and he licked it up. The cut was deep, though, where the vulnerable flesh of his inner mouth had been smashed against his teeth. A new bead of blood formed, and Hecate pushed Tonton back in the chair, climbed on him, straddling him with her white thighs, and then bent and licked off the trickle of blood.

  “Is the door locked?” he asked.

  “Yes,” she said huskily.

  “Good,” Tonton said with a growl. A second later they were tearing at each other’s clothes.

  Chapter Eighty-Eight

  The Hive, Barracks 3

  Sunday, August 29, 4:10 P.M.

  Time Remaining on the Extinction Clock: 67 hours, 50 minutes E.S.T.

  “Wait—what?” said Bunny.

  “Neanderthals,” SAM said again.

  “Slow down,” Top said. “There are no Neanderthals. Not for—”

  “Not for over thirty thousand years,” SAM said. “I know. And I guess these aren’t true Neanderthals, but they’re close enough. Otto and Alpha started with mitochondrial DNA recovered from old bones and then mapped the genome. Then they repaired any damage with human and ape DNA. These people are the first generation. By studying them the science teams will know how to improve the model in the next generation. And they’re working on adjusting performance and attitude with them through gene therapy and conditioning.”

  “What do you mean by ‘conditioning’?” Top asked.

  “The guards . . . they’re told to do anything they want to the New Men. Beat them, torture them, rape the females. Some even rape the males.”

  “For the love of God—why?” demanded Bunny.

  “Part of it is a test to see if the New Men will ever talk back, or strike back, or rebel. Or try to escape. The sales brochures claim that they’re perfect servants, with zero ability for insubordination.”

  Bunny gaped. “They have sales brochures for this shit?”

  SAM nodded.

  “Who are the buyers?”

  “Rich people, mostly. Some corporations have bought them for work that’s too dangerous or expensive for human labor. Mining, unskilled labor around radioactive materials, toxic-waste handling . . .”

  Top opened his mouth to say something, then bit down on it, unable to let those words have voice. I felt fevered and light-headed, like this was some weird dream and I was lost in it.

  “Is this all of them?” I asked.

  SAM shook his head. “No. There are three barracks in the compound. Barracks one and three are the same. Five hundred in each. Barracks two is the nursery.”

  “ ‘Nursery’?” Top’s eyes closed and his face fell into sickness. “God save this sinner’s soul.”

  I stared at the rows of New Men.

  At the rows of Neanderthals.

  The word was jammed into my brain like a knife.

  “SAM . . . how do I tell them to relax? To . . . stand down?”

  “They’re trained for code words. If you want them to relax but still listen, you say ‘community’; if you want them to do what they were doing, you say ‘downtime.’ ”

  “ ‘Downtime,’ ” said Bunny. “Christ. Hey, I have an idea. Can we tell them to go out and find the rest of the guards and tear them into dog meat?”

  “No,” said SAM. “They’re incapable of violence. Otto and Alpha made sure of that. There are certain genes for aggression that were—I don’t know, removed or deactivated. But they just won’t get violent no matter what. There’s one . . . a female . . . who was hurt by that guy Carteret.”

  “The one you went after with your rock?” I asked.

  “Yes.” He told us about the female who had been brutalized over the dropped rock. “Otto says that a dedicated program of humiliation erodes the will and rewrites the instincts to accept all forms of abuse as a natural part of life.”

  Bunny said, “Boss, I really want to spend some quality time with this asshole, Otto.”

  “Stand in line, Farmboy,” Top growled. “I got a few things to say to him myownself.”

  “Okay, Kid,” I said, “time for answers. What’s happening in Africa on September 1, and what the hell is an ‘Extinction Clock’?”

  “Didn’t you watch the video?”

  “I already told you. Sound was bad on most of it and we just translated a fragment.” I showed him the transcript on my PDA. “September 1 is a couple of days from now. Tell me absolutely everything you can.”

  “The two guys talking during the hunt was an accident. If Hans had heard them, he’d have done something bad to them.”

  “Who’s ‘Hans’?”

  “The guy leading the hunt. Hans Brucker. He’s here at the Hive.”

  Top flicked me an inquiring look, but I shook it off.

  “Who exactly is Otto Wirths? Is he any relation to Eduard Wirths?”

  “From Auschwitz? I think so. There are portraits of Eduard Wirths here and at the Deck.”

  “Where’s the Deck and what is it?”

  “It’s short for the ‘Dodecahedron.’ That’s Alpha and Otto’s lab in Arizona. I don’t know exactly where. In the desert and mostly underground.”

  “Alpha . . . he’s Cyrus Jakoby?”

  “Yes.” He looked at Bunny. “Can I have my stone back?”

 
Bunny glanced at me; I shrugged and nodded. The kid put it back in his pocket.

  “Okay, big question now, Kid,” I said. “What’s the Extinction Wave?”

  “I don’t know much, but it has something to do with the release of some kind of disease—or maybe a couple of diseases—that’s supposed to make all of the . . .” SAM cut a look at Top and then back at me. “Um . . . all of the black people in Africa sick. Really sick. With something that could kill them.”

  “Just the black Africans?” Top asked.

  The Kid flinched when Top addressed him. Top saw it and knew that I did, too. File that away for later.

  “Yes. Just the . . . um . . . blacks.”

  “And it’ll be released on September 1?”

  “Well . . . yes. That and the other stuff.”

  I said, “What other stuff?”

  “Other diseases.”

  “In Africa?”

  SAM shook his head. “All over the place. I heard something about Jews in Louisiana, but I don’t know what exactly will happen there, or how they’ll be released. That’s why I needed help. We have to find out and stop them.”

  “Yes, we do,” I said. “I need you to show me where the computer rooms are and the right labs. I need information and proof.”

  “Okay.”

  “Kid,” asked Bunny, “why’s Otto got such a hard-on for black Africans?”

  The boy edged slightly away from Top as if he expected to be hit for what he was about to say.

  “You have to understand,” he began in a trembling voice. “These are their words, not mine, okay? Otto and Alpha. It’s not how I think.”

  Top smiled his warmest smile. He was the only one of the Echo Team who had kids. “Kid, you’re helping us out here. If you were one of them, then you wouldn’t be here with us.”

  I liked the way he leaned on the words “them” and “us,” and I could see how the subliminal hooks softened the Kid.

  SAM nodded.

  “Otto and Alpha always separate people into three groups. There’s the Family, the white race, and the, um . . . mud people.” He looked at Top as if expecting the genial smile to melt, but Top gave him a nod and a light pat on the shoulder.

  “Yeah, Kid, I’ve heard that sort of thing before. Heard worse. Bet you have, too . . . living here with people like that.”

  SAM’s eyes filled with tears and he looked down at his shoes. “A lot worse,” he said softly. “Heard and seen. You don’t understand . . . you don’t know.”

  “Then show us, SAM,” Top said. “Show us what we need to see so that we can stop this.”

  “It’s all in the computer rooms.”

  “Take us there,” I said.

  SAM looked desperate and he turned back toward the New Men. “You’re going to help them, aren’t you?”

  “Those records are first priority.”

  “But you will help them?”

  I nodded. “Yeah, Kid . . . we’re going to help them. Bet on it.”

  SAM searched my eyes for a lie and didn’t find one. Tears rolled down his bruised and bloody face, but eventually he nodded. “Okay, then I’ll take you to the computers.”

  He turned back to the waiting New Men.

  “Downtime!” he cried, and immediately the New Men fell out of line and shuffled back to their cots and chairs and the wretched reality of their lives. Only the one female lingered. Once more she raised her head and stared at SAM. Then she touched her face with a finger and drew it to one side as if she was wiping away a tear. SAM stared at her and then did the same motion.

  When he led the way out of the room SAM was sobbing.

  Chapter Eighty-Nine

  The Hive

  Sunday, August 29, 4:14 P.M.

  Time Remaining on the Extinction Clock: 67 hours, 46 minutes E.S.T.

  We found the computer room without incident, but there was a nasty surprise inside.

  The computers were slag.

  Every last one of them. Rows of networked supercomputers leaked oily smoke. Puddles of melted plastic and silicon had formed around each one.

  “Son of a bitch,” growled Bunny. He slipped a prybar from his pack and forced open the front panel on one unit, but the insides were a melted mass that looked like a surreal sculpture.

  Top poked at the melted goo. It was still soft and hot. “This just happened. We missed it by a couple of minutes.”

  No one said anything, but we were all aware that while we were in the New Men barracks we could have been here. Should have been here. A few minutes might have changed everything.

  “What’s the call, Cap’n?” asked Top quietly.

  “We better hope we can find some disks or paper records,” I said. “And I mean now. You two work on that.”

  “Where you going, boss?”

  “I want to go have a talk with our boy Carteret.”

  “He won’t help you,” said SAM. “And you can’t threaten him. He’s a mercenary. He’s really tough.”

  “Then I’ll have to ask him real nice,” I said with a smile.

  I headed out alone, watchful for guards and tiger-hounds and any other bit of nastiness that the Hive might have to throw at me, but the halls were empty. My heart was sick at the thought of losing all that computer data. If that meant that we wouldn’t be able to stop the release of a pathogen designed for ethnic genocide . . .

  God, I didn’t even want to think about that.

  Chapter Ninety

  Tactical Operations Center

  Sunday, August 29, 4:27 P.M.

  Time Remaining on the Extinction Clock: 67 hours, 33 minutes

  “Copy that, Cowboy,” Church said. “Deacon out.”

  Church leaned back in his chair and pursed his lips. Grace, Bug, and Dr. Hu surrounded him, each of them waiting to learn what had happened down in Costa Rica.

  “Every time I think we have a handle on the definition of evil,” Church said, almost to himself, “someone comes along to prove that we’re shortsighted.”

  “As a conversational opener,” Bug said, “that makes me want to run and hide.”

  “The computers at the Costa Rica facility have been destroyed. Some form of thermite-based fail-safe device. Captain Ledger thinks it was remote detonated. However, Echo Team has found some paper records and a handful of flash drives and disks. There was also one laptop that wasn’t networked in and it did not receive the self-destruct code, so we may get lucky there.”

  “That’s something,” said Grace.

  But Church shook his head. “At first glance all that Captain Ledger has found are references to the Extinction Wave, and the date, but most of the paper records are coded and we don’t have the code key. Without that we don’t know how many pathogens, their exact names and strains, or any information to tell us where, how, and by whom they will be released. Africa is a big continent.”

  “Effing hell.” Grace punched Bug on the shoulder. “I thought your lot were supposed to be able to crack any bloody code.”

  “First . . . ow!” he said. “Yeah, given time we can crack it. But time’s not our friend here. I got all forty of my guys—here and at the Hangar—on this thing. Plus we’re having to scan in tens of thousands of pages, and the stuff in Costa Rica will have to be scanned. I think we might even be dealing with several different codes. I’ve seen that sort of thing before, where there are individual codes for different aspects of an operation. Whoever set this is up is good.”

  “Better than you?”

  Bug didn’t rise to the bait. “Maybe. But I have better toys, so I’ll crack it. Big question is whether we crack it in time to do any good. Be nice to find the code key, or—if there are multiple interrelated codes—a master code key.”

  “Birds from the Ark Royal should be there soon,” Grace said. “We can prevail upon them to get that material here as fast as possible.”

  “True,” Bug said, “but it’s already August 29 and the Extinction Wave is set for September 1. We not only need to break the code
; we need to devise a response and then put it into place.”

  “We should probably bring World Health and the CDC into it now,” said Hu. “And CERT, National Institutes for Health . . . a few others.”

  Church nodded. “Yes, but carefully. We don’t know if any of those organizations have been compromised.”

  Grace studied him. “I have a feeling that there’s more. Care to drop the other shoe?”

  Church nodded. “This, perhaps more than anything, will give you a window into the souls of the people we’re up against.”

  He told them about the New Men.

  Chapter Ninety-One

  The Hive

  Sunday, August 29, 4:46 P.M.

  Time Remaining on the Extinction Clock: 67 hours, 14 minutes E.S.T.

  I found Carteret where we’d left him. He was awake and furious and had wriggled his way across the floor and had rolled onto his back so that he could kick open the door to the New Men’s barracks.

  “Come on, you slope-headed fuckers!” he screamed. “Come out here and cut me loose.”

  I came up quietly and saw through the small door glass that several of the New Men were indeed shambling toward his cries. Even now, even after he’d brutalized them and tried to exterminate them, they were obeying the conditioning that had removed all traces of free will. It made me furious. If I didn’t need answers, I think I might have just slit Carteret’s throat and called it a job well done.

  Instead I grabbed him by the plastic band holding his ankles together and dragged him away from the door.

  “Hey!” he yelled. “What the bloody ’ell do you think you’re playing at?”

  “Shut the fuck up,” I said quietly. I went back to the door, opened it, and called, “Downtime!”

  The single word burned like acid on my tongue, and the sight of the New Men slowing to a confused stop, then turning without question and heading back to their cots made me heartsick. Carteret was still yelling when I turned back to him, but the look on my face quieted him for a moment.

  I dragged him by the heels past the dead or unconscious bodies of the other guards and into an adjoining room, then closed the door.