The pistol’s beam guided him deeper into the darkness. He walked in a shooter’s stance, allowing the surprisingly strong light do the exploring for him. There were six enclosures on either side of the central aisle. A dozen in all. As above, they appeared to have been designed for animals—animals of a different kind, however. They were maybe six feet wide and eight feet deep, with locking gates. The drains set into the floor were red with rust.
“This is where they kept us,” she whispered. “When they were not hurting us.”
She stared into the cages to the right as she walked past, as though searching for one in particular. He heard the hesitation in her footsteps beside the fourth stall and could only imagine the thoughts going through her head.
Past the final cage on the left, a short corridor led into a room nearly the size of the auction house above it. The floor and the walls were made of the same polished-looking concrete. There were drains every ten feet or so. No interior walls or subdivisions of any kind. Just a giant open space with spigots low on the walls for hoses, and showerheads mounted above them. He wasn’t actually sure what the rest of the pipes that ran along the ceiling had been designed to carry, but they looked a whole lot more like gas lines than water pipes, and the downward-facing nozzles appeared better suited to the dispersion of an aerosol than water.
“There used to be long metal tables,” she said. “They had holes in them. At the ends. So things could be hosed into them.”
“Drains. They had tables with drains?”
Mason imagined autopsy tables set up down here. He could still see the copper conduits they’d used to run the electricity across the ceiling to power the lights and the implements.
“They took our blood every day. Put it into different machines. There was a constant humming sound. Sometimes there were animals. Monkeys, mostly. We listened to them die. Screaming.”
There was a fine layer of dust on the floor, just enough to prove that theirs were the only footprints that had disturbed it.
“Every day it was the same,” she said. “The first person to awaken would begin to cry. Then someone else would join them. The crying turned to screaming. People threw themselves against the doors of their cages. They were like animals. And I was like them. Until the men in the white suits came with the mist. Not mist, exactly.” She rubbed her fingertips together. “Powder. Dust. It did not smell of anything. It just made us tired. So the men could come into our cages. They kept me alive with tubes in my arm. I was always thirsty. They stuck needles into my belly. Into my neck. My back. They swabbed my mouth. Put strips of paper under my eyelids. A tube in my vagina. They took everything from inside of me. The men in the white suits. And then they took me upstairs.…”
Mason knew what had happened upstairs. He had seen the framework of the stalls here and the occupied ones in Arizona. If he was right, the man with the blue eyes had injected people like Alejandra and her sister with a virus and an experimental vaccine—or two pathogens, or maybe a single virus in two parts—and then sent them into the United States through the desert, along the route of least resistance. These men and women, these undocumented aliens, for all intents and purposes, simply didn’t exist. There was no record of their travel itineraries. No one who would miss them back home. No one would file a report when they didn’t reach their destinations. They had been selected for just that reason. Those who survived had been consigned to a painful death sentence, which had been enforced down here with invasive medical testing and executed on the hooks hanging from the rafters. But to what end?
Darkness emanated from everything around them. The things the men responsible had done to these poor people. What they intended to do to everyone. Not since the days of Josef Mengele and his Nazi ilk had such horrors been visited upon innocent men and women. The monsters responsible for these atrocities needed to be exterminated and the entire earth cleansed of anything they might have touched.
He followed Alejandra back up the stairs and into the lone remaining section of the stall area, where the wind blew the snow into a drift in the corner.
“When they were done with me … when it was my time … they brought me up here. I had no strength left to fight. I thought for a moment they were going to release me. Maybe God had decided to take mercy on me after all. And then they dropped me on the ground. Rolled me onto my chest. I could taste the dirt. And I knew. I knew this was where I would die. In this horrible place. Here was where I would rejoin my sister.”
The wind wailed, causing the walls to shake. Mason thought for a second he might have heard a car in the distance.
“Then came the pain. Worse than anything I had ever felt. The hooks. I felt them go into my skin. Through my skin. Felt them in my back. Beside my shoulder blades. They scraped the bones inside of me. The men told me I should not be feeling the pain. But I did. I felt the other hooks go into my sides. Felt them tighten, then lift me from the ground and hold me there. I screamed for them to kill me. To end my pain. I told them I would give them anything they wanted if they would just … kill me. But instead, they left me. They left me hanging all alone. At least I thought I was alone, until I saw the others. They left me hanging with the dead. Where I could scream all I wanted because no one would hear me.”
She was reliving it as she spoke. He could hear it in her voice.
“I recognized the man from the cage across from mine. The woman who took his place after they were done with him. A man I had seen only once when they dragged him past my cage the night he arrived. And I saw my sister. Mi hermana pequeña.” She drew a shuddering breath and continued in a flat, emotionless tone. “She survived the desert and the disease, only to die in this horrible place. My Gabriela. The last thing she knew in this world was hanging from these hooks. Alone and afraid. They left her hanging here to rot. Until even I could hardly recognize her. I felt anger, not sadness. Anger even stronger than the pain.”
There it was again. Was it a car? Mason couldn’t be sure. He couldn’t even tell if there really was a sound beneath the wind. He peered around the wall, but could barely even see the house fifty feet away through the storm, let alone the road a quarter mile past it.
“That was when the man came,” she said. “The man with the blue eyes. He stood in front of me and looked into my eyes. He smiled and said, ‘Tuve una sensación acerca de usted.’ ‘I had a feeling about you.’ That was what he said to me. ‘I had a feeling about you.’ This man with the awful blue eyes. Standing there in his old-man suit and his old-man hat. Looking up at me with pride. As though everything I had endured … everything I had survived … had been a game to him. I prayed to God for the strength to kill him.”
Mason exchanged the pistol from the case in Ramses’ Bronco for his Sigma. If he was going to have to use it, he wanted a gun he’d taken care of himself. He still couldn’t be certain he heard a car, but the fact that he still heard something wasn’t a good sign.
“He said to me in Spanish, ‘Do not worry, child. Your sacrifice is not in vain.’ Then he reached up and stroked my cheek. When he spoke next, it was in English. I did not let on that I understood. I watched him open a case full of syringes. Like the ones from Altar. Watched him smile as he picked just the right one. ‘There’s just one problem we haven’t solved,’ he said. ‘How do we dispose of all the bodies?’ And then he took my hand. Gently. Rolled it so he could see the vein on the side of my wrist. He slid the needle inside me. I felt the heat. It crawled up my arm and into my shoulder. Spread through my chest. I tasted it in my mouth. Like pond water. Or mold from bread. And then I was … convulsionar—convulsing. My body jerked. My ribs broke with a loud snapping noise. There was blood. So much blood. And more pain than I could bear. My skin tore and I fell from the hooks. I landed on the man. He shouted at me. Shouted and cursed. Knocked me off of him, and I saw it. The needle. It was sticking out of his neck. Under his chin. His mouth was open and he was choking. He pulled on the needle, but he could not get it out. The veins in his face darken
ed. Spread through his eyes like lightning.”
Louder now. One car. He was certain of it. Moving slowly. Away from the road. Toward them. The wind rose and stole the sound once more.
“We need to get out of here while we still can,” Mason said.
“So I ran. I ran as far and as fast as I could. I never looked back. I lived on the street. Suffered from my wounds until they healed well enough that I could find other people like myself. Other illegals, other deserters. They gave me what little money they could spare, but they would not help me. They knew what would happen to them if they got caught. There was nowhere to go. Nowhere to hide. Not after what they did to me. To my face.”
Mason understood now. The final injection had produced the disfiguring effect. That was the reason her left eye was milky, the lid immobile. Why she used her hair and her hood to conceal her features. And why what looked like burns covered the left half of her forehead, cheek, and jawline—the same kind of scar tissue that covered the face of the man with the blue eyes.
There’s just one problem we haven’t solved.
He could hear the car clearly now. Even over the wind. It was on the lone driveway leading to the main house.
They were running out of time.
How do we dispose of all the bodies?
“All of what bodies?” he whispered to himself.
The sound of the engine died.
He was wrong.
They were already out of time.
49
Mason grabbed Alejandra by the hand and pulled her toward the cattle chute. Kicked it several times to widen the gap beside it. A series of rickety ramps led back to a maze of blind wooden corridors and holding pens. If she weaved through them and sprinted in the opposite direction of the house, she’d be able to vanish into the storm and the adjacent farmland.
“Run as far as you can and find a place to hide,” he whispered directly into her face. “If I don’t make it, go to Club Five in Denver. Find Ramses. He’ll take care of you. Now go!”
She scurried through the chute without a word. The moment he heard her footsteps on the wooden ramp, he crawled through after her.
The men hunting them were undoubtedly already moving to outflank them. One of them would approach from the path beside the main house, while the other would come around the charred auction house from the eastern side, closest to the turnaround where they’d presumably parked by the Bronco. A third man would provide a variable for which Mason couldn’t entirely account. He could be posted by the cars to block their escape should they get past the other two men, or he could be taking up position on the roof of the house with a high-powered rifle at this very moment.
Alejandra had already disappeared into the blowing snow by the time Mason scrambled down the decrepit chute. She’d escaped from this place once; he had no doubt she could do so again. He made a mental note of the direction she’d gone and then crawled under the ramp, worked his way into the snow, and flattened his back to the ground. If the second man took a diagonal path from the east to intercept them, he would walk between two pens, right through Mason’s line of fire. If the man approaching from inside the structure came out through the chute, Mason would be staring straight up at his underside through the gaps between the weathered planks.
He focused on slowing his heartbeat. On attuning his senses to even the slightest sound beneath the screaming wind. He adjusted his grip on his pistol and took aim at the corner of the building.
Waited.
The wind slowly obliterated Alejandra’s footprints. And still no one came.
What were they waiting for?
A creaking sound overhead.
Subtle.
Mason rolled onto his back and looked up through the narrow cracks between the boards. A dark shape climbed out of the chute. He saw the thick rubber tread of a large boot. The man shifted his weight again and he was all the way out. Moving in a crouch. Pistol in a two-handed grip.
The man crept forward.
Slowly.
Quietly.
Mason could have easily fired a full clip up through the boards, but he couldn’t afford to sacrifice whatever information he might be able to get out of him.
As soon as the man was completely past him and near the end of the ramp, Mason rolled out from underneath and lunged to his feet. The man made no indication that he had seen or heard Mason as he studied Alejandra’s vanishing tracks leading toward the distant fence to the north. Mason had the back of the man’s head sighted down the barrel of his Sigma when he spoke.
“Drop the weapon.”
“Mason. I hoped I’d find you—”
“Drop the weapon and hold your hands away from your body, where I can see them.”
“This is a simple misunderstanding. We can clear this up with a single phone—”
“Drop the goddamn pistol and show me your hands!”
The man held a .45 auto Glock 21 away from his body with his left hand and let it dangle from his finger by the trigger guard before dropping it into the snow. He slowly extended his arms to either side and fanned his fingers. He was wearing black boots and black cargo pants. His jacket was black and was the kind made almost exclusively of pockets. He wore a baseball cap facing forward. It was the kind of field utilities SWAT guys wore. Or federal agents. Mason had an outfit just like it himself.
“You’re making a mistake, Mason. Christensen sent me to see what I could do to help you. Call him yourself if you don’t believe me.” The ground felt like it fell out from beneath Mason when he recognized the man’s voice. “Why don’t you let me turn around, so we can talk this over like civilized human beings? You know … without you aiming a gun at my back?”
“Technically, I’m aiming at your head, but now we’re just splitting hairs.”
“Come on, Mason. You wouldn’t shoot an unarmed man in the back.”
“We’ve been over this already. I’d be shooting an unarmed man in the head. Now keep your hands where I can see them and turn around. Slowly.”
“How about this, then?” The man turned around, arms out to his sides as ordered. “You wouldn’t shoot your own partner, would you?”
The wind blew the snowflakes into Special Agent Jared Trapp’s face. They deflected from his sunglasses, which might have hidden his eyes themselves, but not the bruising or the stitches above his left eye.
“Yes.” Mason lowered his aim and shot his partner on the outside edge of his left knee. “I would.”
The report thundered across the plains.
Trapp dropped hard into the snow. He bared his teeth and pressed his hands to the wound to stanch the flow of blood.
“Jesus Christ, Mason! Why the hell did you do that?”
“It’s just a flesh wound. For now. I have another sixteen bullets in the magazine and would be happy to go get more if I run out. Tell me what you know, or I swear I’ll take my time—”
“For the love of God! You just shot me!”
Mason shifted his aim to Trapp’s right shoulder.
“I’m not going to ask you again. I know you were at the trailer last night—and, by the way, that eye’s really not looking so good—and now here you are again. Start talking or there won’t be a third time.”
“She’s a fugitive, Mason.”
“So you’re a bounty hunter now? The FBI doesn’t send a team armed with HK417s for one little girl in the middle of the night … partner.”
“Maybe you’re right. But tell me, if you’re so fucking smart, why in the world would you think I’d come alone now?”
Mason watched the smile form on his partner’s face. He glanced up and to his left and realized his mistake. He hadn’t thought what little was left of the roof of the auction house would be strong enough to support a man’s weight. He dove to his left as bullets struck the snow behind his heels. Twisted in the air. Lined up his shot down the length of his body, between his feet. Pulled the trigger repeatedly as he slid on his back through the snow.
The
man on the roof bucked. Toppled backward. He was still sliding down the roof in the crimson slush when Mason lunged to his feet and bolted for the cover of a cow pen.
The crack of gunfire. A bullet sang past his ear.
Mason didn’t know how many of them there were or where they might be. If they had someone coordinating their movements via satellite, the storm would work to his advantage. There was no way a satellite would be able to penetrate the dense cloud cover. And the advantage was his on the ground. They couldn’t shoot him if they couldn’t see him.
Another round of gunfire and the snow kicked up at his feet.
He turned and fired off a few shots. Dove over the split-rail fence. Rolled back to his feet. He needed to lead them away from Alejandra. And he eventually had to find his way back here for a vehicle. He’d be too easy to track across the open fields. Besides, where could he possibly go?
The trees.
He remembered the line of dead cottonwoods filled with crows the first time he’d come here. They ought to at least provide temporary cover.
Mason veered to his left and ran straight across the field to the west. His leg muscles already ached from fighting through the accumulation. He kept anticipating shots that never came. Either someone had a visual bead on him or they intended to track him by his footprints.
The trees wavered in and out of the storm. There and gone again. There. Gone. By the time he could see them clearly, he was just about standing underneath them. They were old and gray. The termites had already felled several and cored holes through the others. Undoubtedly a consequence of the neighboring farms shunting the water from the irrigation ditch on the far side of the tree line when Fairacre was abandoned. The ditch itself was maybe six feet deep and twice that distance across. More skeletal cottonwoods stood sentry over the opposite side.
He cleared the near lip and jumped down into the drainage ditch. There was hardly any snow on the slope of the western bank, largely due to the enormous drift the wind had created on the eastern side. It looked like a great white wave preparing to crash down on him. The upper layer was crisp with ice.
The Extinction Agenda Page 24
