“I’m going silent now,” Mason said. “Let me know the moment you have ears.”
He started forward, still in a crouch, and swept his light from one side of the large room to the other. The ceiling had to be a good twenty-five feet high. Corrugated aluminum on a framework of rusted girders. Metal support posts flaking with rust. Pipes as thick as his thighs traversing the walls. There was an elevated platform to his left, the remains of the fallen staircase that had once serviced it on the ground beneath it. There was a door up there. The padlock on it looked new. The walls were covered with graffiti. No one had made any effort to paint over it or scrape up the oil stains covering the concrete floor. The only evidence that anyone had been in here recently were the sawhorses, wood scraps, and bags of cement surrounded by gray dust. The smell of death was stronger here, but the source was obviously somewhere else. And it looked like the only way to find it was by climbing the concrete stairs at the far end of the room, which led up to a platform that spanned the width of the building.
Mason started to piece together a mental map. He was in the loading dock. The bay doors were at his back, which meant that the main body of the slaughterhouse was directly ahead of him. When he reached the stairs, he switched off the light. The door was to his left. He figured it should open upon a large preparation room, where the product was readied for shipping.
He opened the heavy steel door as quietly as he could. The hinges creaked loudly enough to wake the dead, but it smelled like they were long past the point of caring. The horrific stench that rushed out to greet him was overwhelming. His first instinct was to duck back into the dock. It took everything he had to slip through the crack and into the room, where he promptly slid down the wall and into a crouch. He heard a buzzing sound from somewhere off to his right. One that he immediately recognized.
Flies.
He listened for any subtle sounds beneath the drone: footsteps, breathing, the click of a safety being disengaged. Anything that might betray the presence of someone waiting in the darkness.
“I have audio,” Gunnar said. “The four hundred sixty-seven megahertz range. Three distinct voices. So far. No verbal identification. No indication of their locations. Are you getting this?”
Mason tapped the microphone twice in acknowledgment. He didn’t want to make a sound. They’d agreed upon a system of two taps for yes and one for no to eliminate the possibility of an inadvertent answer in the affirmative.
“Be careful, Mace.”
Another two taps and he risked turning on the light.
There was a long stainless-steel table to his left, discolored by oxidation and riddled with scratches. Directly ahead was a wall with a scraped Plexiglas insert, through which he could see the rusted blade of a massive saw jutting upward from another stainless-steel table. There were enormous bucket sinks to his right. The floor utilized the same polished coating with textured particles for traction. It sloped downward and away from him, toward a drain with a rusted grate. Everything was marbled with crusted brown streaks.
He crawled underneath the table, through a maze of slender metal legs, until he was able to see around the corner to his left and on the opposite side of the floating wall to his right. There was a closet full of broken wooden pallets and crates. A conveyor chute ran diagonally overhead, presumably to the room with the locked door above the loading bay. Another open doorway directly ahead of him revealed little more than darkness. Maybe a table and chairs at the very farthest reaches of the beam. To the right of the opening was another scored Plexiglas insert, upon which someone had spray-painted a crude face looking back out. The buzz of flies beckoned from his right, beyond the table with the saw blades, past the heavy door of an industrial freezer, and through a pair of swinging doors.
Mason drew in a deep breath. Blew it out slowly.
He crawled out from under the counter and darted diagonally to his right. Passed the worktable. Grabbed the handle of the freezer door. Pulled it open. Recoiled from the stench. Clogged drains in the middle of the floor. Plastic wrap. Hair. Dead mice everywhere. Aluminum peeling from the walls in sections, revealing the discolored Styrofoam insulation. Hooks dangling from the ceiling. Clamped hoses where the compressor had been mounted.
Clear.
He whirled, slipped back out. Faced the swinging doors. Circular Plexiglas inserts. Flies buzzing beyond. The air seeping through the tattered rubber seal smelled worse than anything he’d encountered in his life. He shined the beam through the porthole windows. Large, indistinct shapes cast shifting shadows. He had a pretty good idea what they were and would have been happy enough to leave the doors closed forever.
“Four voices now,” Gunnar said. “Still no names. Two on the second floor. At least one on the third. No idea where the fourth is. Probably outside patrolling the perimeter.”
Mason tapped his acknowledgment.
“Alejandra’s moving into position within range of the building now. The moment she fires that grenade launcher, whether she hits the target or not, we’re out of here. The resulting chaos will only buy you so much time. If there are any survivors, they’re going to see through our ruse pretty quickly, and then they’ll be coming for you.”
Mason wanted to tell Gunnar to get the hell out of there right now. The best he could muster was a double tap. While he was grateful for his old friend’s help, he never should have allowed him to get this close. Coordinating their movements from miles away wasn’t without risk, but the consequences were nothing compared to what these men would do to Gunnar if they caught him out here. Mason wasn’t about to let anything happen to him, though. He’d bring the whole damn place down on their heads first.
He bulled through the swinging doors, low and fast, then rolled to his left. Waited for them to clap shut behind him. Directed the beam straight ahead and through a roiling black cloud of flies, which cast bulbous shadows across the carcasses hanging from hooks all around him. He lowered the light and swept it across the floor, below the bare feet of the victims. There was no one else in the room. Nothing but greasy blobs of decomposition, clumped beneath the suspended bodies and slinking down the slanted floor toward the industrial drains, beside which were the shovels used to unclog them and buckets overflowing with sludge. Four parallel rails crossed the ceiling, automated conveyors from which all of the chains dangled. But these weren’t slabs of beef hanging from the hooks. They were human beings. Or at least that’s what he thought they were. Or had been, anyway.
Now he understood what the blue-eyed man—this monster who called himself the Hoyl—meant by what he’d said to Alejandra.
There’s just one problem we haven’t solved. How do we dispose of all the bodies?
The final tumbler fell into place. The breadth and the scope of their plan was beyond anything he could ever have imagined. The culprits weren’t merely greedy and self-serving; they were downright evil. These were men who thought themselves lords of the land and everyone around them little more than serfs.
No, worse.
These men thought of everyone else as livestock.
There was precious little left of the bodies hanging before him. They’d been absolved of every last bit of flesh. Only their skeletons remained, and it didn’t appear as though it would be long before they disintegrated, too. The bones were eroding in black amoeba-shaped lesions that exposed the intricate matrices of calcium from which they were formed. The victims had been hooked through the holes in the bases of their skulls and the gaps between their ribs. Some had broken or missing teeth, most the color of yellow he attributed to unsanitary drinking water. Others had the kind of cheap dental work with metal crowns and tin fillings that hadn’t been used stateside in his lifetime. These were more immigrants, more undocumented aliens like Alejandra, men and women whose lives had served no other purpose than to herald the impending arrival of hell on earth.
There’s just one problem we haven’t solved.
The bones were covered with a fine layer of pale, almost
transparent fuzz from which tiny filaments grew. Some sort of fungal species or bacterial agent that was actively eating the remains. Like the bacteria that cleanup crews released into the ocean to consume the oil after a tanker spill, this species had been engineered to eliminate mankind’s waste, only a waste of a different order.
How do we dispose of all the bodies?
It was a biological agent that consumed its host.
The most immediate and pressing problem that surfaced in the wake of any pandemic was how to handle the mass quantity of remains. They couldn’t be left to rot in the streets. The bodies needed to be collected and incinerated, at great financial cost and at the expense of significant manpower. They threatened the health of the survivors and created conditions that allowed the virus to breed and mutate. To adapt and combat existing vaccines. They became the reservoirs of mankind’s ultimate eradication and the final variable for which to account when designing a biological extinction-level event.
This was the Thorntons’ contribution to the endgame. They’d provided the missing piece of a puzzle they’d started putting together on a lot full of dead pigs a century ago. Maybe even before that. This was about more than money, more than power.
It was about complete and utter world domination.
As he walked between the rows of deteriorating skeletons, passing the remains of human beings who had meant less than nothing to the men upstairs, to people like the Thorntons, he realized that the wheels were already in motion. This was the endgame of a plot that had been passed down through generations of evil men with the kind of patience it took not to realize their dreams in their lifetimes, but to sacrifice their life’s work so that future generations would fulfill their fantasized destiny of becoming a master race.
“Do it,” Mason whispered.
“What?”
“Do it now, Gunnar. Burn this awful place to the ground.”
“What did you find?”
Mason stormed through the cooler and into the precooler, where the bodies hanging from the chains hadn’t been up there nearly as long. He barely smelled the reek of decomposition or heard the buzzing of flies. He didn’t look at the faces that appeared to rot before his very eyes as Victor’s vile organism melted the fat beneath their skin or into the hollow sockets where their eyes had once been. He pretended not to hear the wet slapping sounds of flesh dropping to the ground.
His entire world had flipped upside down. People he’d trusted had looked him in the eyes and pretended to be just like him, while deep down they wanted nothing more than to watch him die. The job to which he’d devoted his life was little more than a puppet show performed on a stage where nothing mattered and no one watched. The men with the power had insulated themselves from the rest of the world. They merely sat by, biding their time until technology caught up with their imaginations. Not only were they going to decimate the global population, they were going to use the virus to corner the world’s wealth in the process. There would be no power they didn’t possess, no government they couldn’t control.
Only those who could afford the cure for the pandemic soon to be released would survive. Or was the plan more insidious than that? Had they figured out a way to weed out certain elements? To choose the survivors based on their skills and jobs? Their bloodlines?
He was so angry, he was positively shaking. His vision throbbed. He wanted to lash out and destroy everything around him. He needed to be more than his wife’s avenging angel. He was going to have to avenge his entire race.
A sudden shift in the air currents.
The squeak of a chain.
The body beside him moved.
A cold barrel pressed against the base of his skull.
“You so much as twitch and these wetbacks are wearing your brains,” a deep voice said from directly behind him.
63
“What’s going on in there, Mace?” Gunnar asked.
“Now slowly—slowly—raise both hands where I can see them.” The man’s voice was muffled. Tinny. Like he was wearing a respirator. “Don’t think for a second I won’t put a bullet through your head. I don’t give a rat’s ass who your old man is.”
“You do realize these people will kill you, too,” Mason said. “That is, if I don’t first. And at this point, I’m kind of thinking I might.”
“I’d laugh if I didn’t think that by doing so I might accidentally pull the trigger of the gun that I’m holding to your head. You seem to have forgotten that little detail. Now let me see your hands.”
“Talk to me, Mason,” Gunnar said. “Should we accelerate our timetable?”
“No. I have everything under control.”
“Everything under control?” the man said. “What world do you live in? The last thing you’re going to see is a bullet exiting your skull between your eyes if you don’t raise your goddamn hands!”
Mason held his arms out to his sides, his left hand open, fingers splayed. The Infinity was in his right, the barrel pointing up and away. The beam cast long shadows from the dead bodies, as though their souls were trying to depart their physical forms. He removed his index finger from the trigger and placed it on the side of the under-barrel light, where the man could see it.
“Just give the word,” Gunnar said. “Alejandra can put a hole through the side of that building—”
“Like I said, everything’s under control.”
“Now drop the gun on the floor,” the man said.
“It’s a custom Infinity. I should set it down gently.”
“I said drop the fucking gun!”
“I don’t want to break it. Do you have any idea how much love goes into the manufacture of one of these things? I’m going to set it down gently. No sudden moves, right? I’m just going to lean over—”
“Drop it now or—”
Mason switched off the under-barrel light and ducked. The crack of gunfire above his head was deafening. He pivoted on his left foot. Came up hard with the pistol in his right fist. Struck the underside of the man’s forearm. He barely heard the second shot over the ringing in his ears. The bullet went high and wide and careened off the ceiling with a spark. The man’s pistol clattered to the floor.
“I heard gunfire. I’m making the call whether you like it—”
“Not yet, Gun—”
The man bulled into Mason’s chest and lifted him from the ground. He collided with something soft and forgiving. Something that slopped cold sludge down beneath the collar of his jacket. It made a snapping sound as it gave way. He landed squarely on top of it, the full weight of his adversary on his chest. He sensed the blow coming in time to move his head to the side. The dead woman underneath him wasn’t so lucky. Dampness spattered his cheek, but he was already rolling to the side. He switched the light back on and swung it toward—
Blunt impact to his wrist. The Infinity skittered away across the floor, spinning the light in circles as it went. He lunged for it, but the man grabbed him by the jacket and pulled him backward. He swatted away the man’s arm and popped to his feet.
Gunnar was shouting in his ear, but he couldn’t afford the distraction.
He reached for the Sigma under his other arm, but his attacker recognized what he was doing and charged him before he could draw it. He stepped to the right. Drove back into the man’s body. Used his momentum to turn him around. Got in close, under his arms. Lifted and pushed—
With a snapping sound and a grunt, something pried the man from his grasp. Mason stumbled forward. Hit the ground. Rolled to the side. Grabbed his pistol. Swung it back in the opposite direction. The beam highlighted the man’s twitching form and cast a long, swinging shadow across the wall.
“Answer me, Mace. That’s it. I’m giving the order—”
“I’m fine, Gunnar. Like I said, everything’s under control.”
The man’s body twirled from the chain, his feet dangling inches above the floor. He wore a glistening bib of blood. The hook had passed through the back of his neck and out the fro
nt at a severe angle. His arms hung limply at his sides. Only the fingers on his left hand continued to move.
Mason stepped closer and waited for the man’s face to come around again, but it remained concealed by the spatter of blood he’d coughed out against the inside of the respirator mask.
“Under control? The others are converging on your position!”
The man’s body jumped and blood burst from his shoulder. Right in front of Mason’s face. He heard footsteps and the clapping sound of the swinging doors behind him and extinguished his light. Darted back into the maze of bodies. Bumped as many of them as he could. The chains squeaked as the bodies swung and spun, masking the sound of his movements. Unfortunately, the racket also prevented him from hearing his pursuer.
“I’m going silent,” he whispered. “Stick to the plan. Don’t fire the grenade launcher too soon. Give me as much time to find the Hoyl as you can.”
Another shot rang out, but the bullet went well wide of him.
Mason stopped and stood perfectly still, listening to the squeaking and squealing slow and then finally stop. Assuming he hadn’t lost his bearings, he was at the back of the precooler room with the cooler, where the bodies were further along in the process of decomposition, to his right.
The man hunting him was undoubtedly already moving into containment position to prevent him from advancing deeper into the building. He tried to remember everything he’d seen before he turned off his light. There were four rows of corpses, maybe a dozen per row, separated by five feet in all directions, which meant the room was roughly seventy feet deep and thirty feet wide. If he could pinpoint the man’s location and get a clear shot, there was no chance he’d miss at such close range.
Unfortunately, his adversary knew this place better than Mason did. He knew the sounds, the layout. He also knew where the light switches were. If he turned them on, he’d expose Mason, but he’d reveal himself in the process. The whole confrontation would boil down to who could shoot the other first, and Mason liked his odds. It was a risk the other man didn’t have to take, though, not when he could utilize the darkness and his familiarity with his surroundings to his advantage, which meant he would likely make the first move.
The Extinction Agenda Page 33
