Mason was rewarded for his patience with the sound of soft footfalls approaching.
Slowly.
Cautiously.
The faint squeak of a chain.
The patter of fluid dripping to the floor.
Mason was behind the next-to-last body in the second row. One row to his right and he was in the cooler. Two rows to his left and he was cornered. The fact that his adversary wasn’t filling the room with bullets suggested he was being herded toward a second man, who was already attempting to outflank him.
He decided to test the theory.
In one swift motion, he lunged right. Shoved the body beside him in the first row. Ducked back.
The man fired a single shot, which struck the body hard enough to knock it off the hook. The discharge from the barrel revealed him to be maybe thirty feet away and between the first and second rows.
Mason exploited the thunderous echo. He pushed the body in front of him, the one in the first row to his right, and the one behind him, then sprinted back into the corner behind the fourth row. The chains screeched for several seconds before twirling back into place.
He wasn’t the only one who’d had that idea.
Bodies swung to his left, near where the first man had been when he fired. Presumably, he intended to use the distraction to move closer to where he’d last seen Mason, assuming he was going to make a break for the cooler rather than retreating deeper into the maze of corpses.
Mason concentrated and listened for any sound that would betray the location of the second man. He thought he heard a footstep diagonally to his left. And another diagonally to his right. The soft creak of a chain.
He inched forward until he was right up against the body in the corner. A naked male. Shorter and stockier than he was. Also hairier, apparently. He had an impressive gut, which—hopefully—would be big enough to serve his purposes.
“You have two in the room with you, Mace. Another coordinating their movements from the second floor. That accounts for all four, but I can’t confirm there aren’t more.”
Mason tapped his confirmation.
It wouldn’t be long before the men discovered his deception.
He slipped off his right glove and threw it across the room, between the two men.
Shots rang out from both directions at once and he marked his hunters’ positions by the twin flares of discharge.
He pulled himself up onto the dead man’s back, wrapped his legs around his midsection, and clung to him around the neck. The smell was nauseating. As was the feeling of the dead man’s flesh shifting on his bones. The added weight minimized the squealing of the chain.
The echo of gunfire faded.
Mason pulled off his other glove with his teeth, quietly drew his Sigma with his left hand, and extended both of his arms so they crossed in front of the dead man’s chin. Flexed his biceps against the victim’s jaw to brace himself. Focused on where he’d seen the two simultaneous bursts of muzzle flare. Aligned the Infinity in his right hand with the man to his left. The Sigma in his left with the man to his right.
A loud cracking sound and he dropped half an inch. Maybe the hook was up to the task, but the dead man’s bones weren’t.
The footsteps immediately ceased.
It was now or never.
“Don’t shoot!” he shouted.
The men fired at the exact same time.
Mason aimed at the flashes of discharge and pulled both triggers.
Bullets struck the dead man’s gut. The force of the impact knocked Mason from his perch. He hit the ground a heartbeat before the corpse landed on top of him. Rolled out from underneath it. Rose to a crouch, with both pistols aimed into the room.
Listened.
Silence and darkness.
No sound. No movement.
Nothing but the thudding of his heartbeat.
Then a sound he didn’t recognize. Not at first. A chuckling, gurgling sound.
He allowed himself to breathe.
It was the sound of fluid trickling into a floor drain.
Mason turned on the under-barrel light and swept it across the ground, below the suspended feet. He’d hit the man to his left with a lucky shot high to the forehead. His body was propped against the wall, a stream of blood rolling toward the drain between his boots. He wore a half-mask respirator. His eyes were blue, but not the shade Mason was looking for.
“Tap if you’re alive,” Gunnar said.
He tapped twice and walked toward the precooler.
“All communication on the channels I’m monitoring has ceased, which means I can no longer confirm the location of the fourth man.”
Mason tuned Gunnar out and focused on tracking the man to his right.
The skeletal remains dangling from the chains cast shadows reminiscent of a forest in the dead of winter. There was a smear of blood on the floor. He followed it between the rows until it led him to a man lying facedown on the floor, dragging himself forward with his left hand and right elbow. Rich black arterial blood flowed from somewhere underneath him, only to be smudged by his exertions. Mason stepped over him and stood on his right wrist. He didn’t have to grind his heel very hard to convince the man to drop his gun. He kicked it away into the darkness.
“Roll over,” Mason said.
The man made a gasping sound and flopped over onto his back. Blood positively gushed from the inside of his right hip, near his groin, where the builet had clipped his femoral artery. He put his trembling hand over the wound, but it just vanished into the blood. His wide eyes above his respirator confirmed that he understood the nature of his injury and the gravity of his situation.
“The man with the blue eyes. The one who calls himself the Hoyl. Where is he?”
The man mumbled something incomprehensible through the respirator. Mason tore off the mask and revealed the rictus of pain on his face.
“Tell me where he is!”
He looked up and to his right and Mason had his answer.
This was where the Fischer bloodline ended.
Right here. Right now.
Mason turned his back on the dying man and headed deeper into the building.
“You guys ready to do this, Gunnar?”
“Everything’s set.”
“And we’re still on schedule?”
“Close enough.”
“Then let’s torch this place.”
He kicked open the swinging doors to the killing floor and went through with both guns raised.
64
The rail above Mason wound back to his right, past several industrial-size washbasins. There were maybe half a dozen corpses hanging from the chains. They were so recently deceased that it almost looked like they were sleeping. Their skin was waxy and blood dripped from their fingertips and toes. Their chins and upper chests were freckled with scarlet from coughing so violently. He had to get closer to see the black lesions where the microbes responsible for their decomposition were already eating through the tissue. Those whose eyes remained open demonstrated petechial hemorrhaging, an indication of asphyxiation. In conjunction with the blue lips and bloody sputum, there was no doubt they’d experienced some sort of acute respiratory crisis.
All these people had wanted was a shot at freedom, not to be subjected to a deadly virus and for every trace of their existence to be dissolved down a drain in this awful place, simply to prove the efficacy of Victor’s awful decomposition-accelerating microbe.
On the other side of them was a wall made of bars, between which he could see an enormous oxidized metal structure with what looked like a dull guillotine suspended above the front end. The neck crush of the knocking pen. The pen itself was maybe six feet higher than the rest of the room. At the rear end was an iron door with a rusted chain and pulley system, which must have opened upon the cattle chute. That would make the recessed room beside it the bleeding pit, above which the conveyor rail system originated. The drains set into the floor were a full foot wide and the crusted line of disco
loration on the bases of the surrounding walls indicated the blood had generally remained about four inches deep.
Mason passed through the inspection room and found two open doorways. One had an eight-inch concrete lip to contain the reservoir of blood, while the other opened upon a room that had no rails, but plenty of drains. He imagined men in knee-high rubber boots shoveling mounds of offal through the rusted hatch at the back, which looked like it would take a blowtorch to open. There was only one way to go from here.
He stepped over the lip and found a staircase at the end of a short corridor. The concrete steps were worn smooth and the cinder-block walls were covered with graffiti that demonstrated more creativity than anatomical knowledge. To his left, several doors opened onto exterior platforms overlooking the races and crowd pens. He paused at the bend, pressed his back against the wall, and listened.
If he were up there and had just heard his entire team die, he would take up a post at the top of the stairs and shoot down at anyone coming up.
He rolled around, popped up, and aimed his light at the top of the staircase.
Nothing.
Unless there was another way out he didn’t know about, Mason had to believe the Hoyl was still up there somewhere. And he had a feeling his nemesis was looking forward to this confrontation every bit as much as he was.
But he still couldn’t confirm that the Hoyl was the only one left.
“Any more radio traffic?” Mason whispered.
He waited.
No response.
He thought he’d lost the connection until he heard a faint crackle of static.
“Gunnar? Can you hear me?”
He tapped the mic to make sure he was transmitting. The blasted stairwell was probably interfering with his reception.
Mason turned off the light and crept upward slowly, silently, keeping close to the wall. He heard the soft whistle of the wind across the side of the building and the distant clanging of a broken roof vent. He paused again near the top and waited. Part of him was dying to check his watch; the other part simply didn’t care. At five o’clock on the nose, Alejandra was going to use the gift Ramses had given him to blast this place into oblivion. Whether he killed the Hoyl or the Hoyl killed him, that monster would never leave this building alive. Mason had seen to that.
He dove from the top stair and slid across the floor on his side, clicking on his light as he went. The beam revealed a large room that had once served as office space. And maybe a locker room for the supervisory staff. Now it was something else entirely. The walls were lined with enormous silver vats. Stainless steel. Sparkling new. The kind with valves and hand wheels he associated with microbreweries. There were all sorts of digital readouts and access terminals. Temperature and pressure gauges. Clipboards hung beside them, whatever had once been clipped to them now gone. Only one still held a single scrap of yellow notebook paper, maybe a third of a page, torn diagonally.
There had to be more than twenty vats, he realized. Pipes lined the walls. There was a long table in the center of the room, which appeared to have been hurriedly cleared off. Broken glass glimmered from the surrounding floor.
Mason shined the light on the scrap of paper. Several handwritten lines had been crossed out. They appeared to be equations. No … chemical formulas. The one remaining looked like a jumble of numbers and letters. [(CH3)2CHO]CH3P(O)F + CCl2FNO2. He mentally rehearsed it for later recall, in case it was important.
The room reeked of chemicals. It was a major improvement over the smell downstairs, though.
There were two doors off either side of the room beneath tangles of pipes. He could see a mattress on the floor through the first doorway to his left. A quick peek with the light revealed a refrigerated unit beside a locker freezer. Neither made a sound. Across the room to the right was a row of portable generators and tanks of fuel. All of them were silent and still. He thought about the kind of racket they would have made when they were on.
They’d been turned off before Mason arrived.
He looked at the hurriedly cleared table and the trashed room. The pages torn from the clipboards. Thought about the first attacker waiting for him in the cooler. Heard Gunnar’s words.
This is too easy, Mace.
They’d known he was coming.
“Gunnar! Get out of there! Grab Alejandra and go! Now!”
Mason sprinted back toward the stairs. He’d been tricked into going as far into the building as he could go. The only exit he knew of for sure was on the opposite side of the slaughterhouse.
“Damn it, Gunnar! Acknowledge!”
He leaped from the top of the stairs. Hit the landing. Careened from the wall. His light swung wildly as he regained his balance. Rounded the landing. Stumbled down to the main floor.
“Acknowledge!”
The doorways flew past to his right. He hurdled the concrete lip. The Hoyl was going to burn this building like he had all the others. He’d lured Mason inside to take him out at the same time.
He burst into the inspection room, and suddenly there was a bright light shining directly into his eyes from across the chamber. He matched it with his own and squeezed the trig—
A muffled grunting sound.
High-pitched.
Female.
He eased the pressure off the trigger and advanced slowly, his aim affixed to the source.
“Identify yourself!” he shouted.
The grunts became squeals at the sound of his voice.
Frightened. Panicked.
Desperate.
They were coming from directly past and to the right of the light, which prevented him from seeing more than the vague outline of the upper portion of the knocking pen. There was no response other than what now sounded like someone crying into a pillow. The light remained static. No one could possibly hold it that still.
Mason moved to his right.
The beam didn’t follow. It remained directed at the doorway from which he’d emerged. He risked directing his light away from the other one so he could better see into the surrounding darkness.
“Jesus,” he gasped, and broke into a sprint. “Alejandra!”
65
Mason ran toward the metal ladder leading up to the floor of the knocking pen, where the operator would have stood with his captive-bolt gun, waiting for the next cow in line to stick its head through the neck crush. A flashlight was duct-taped to a chair in such a way as to momentarily blind him when he burst from the hallway. Behind it was a steel tube. Maybe a foot and a half long and shaped like a cannon, only the end facing away from the pen had a plunger rather than a fuse. The plunger had been drawn back five or six inches and attached to a cord that ran underneath the seat, and then in the opposite direction to where Alejandra held it between her bared teeth. The business end of the captive-bolt gun was nuzzled against her forehead.
The plunger cocked the weapon. If she released the cord from between her teeth, the bolt would more than stun her as it would a cow; it would explode through her much thinner cranium and impale her frontal lobe.
Her throat rested on the bottom edge of the neck crush, with the upper, guillotinelike portion hovering mere inches inches above her spine. It had been designed to hold in place an animal weighing thousands of pounds. If it didn’t break her neck when it fell, it would undoubtedly collapse her trachea and cut off the blood supply to her head. That is, if she was still able to maintain her grip on the cord with her teeth.
He couldn’t see her body through the side of the pen. Not until he was halfway up the rungs.
She was kneeling on the floor with her arms behind her back, clinging to a rusted chain that ran up to a pulley, then down to the upper half of the crush. If she released the chain, the crush would fall. Tears streamed down her face, even from the milky eye on the scarred side. She was trembling so badly that he was amazed she’d been able to hold on to the cord at all. Her arms were pulled way too far backward and upward from sockets that hadn’t been designed with that mo
tion in mind.
She could let go of either at any moment.
Mason holstered his Sigma and approached the chair cautiously.
“It’s okay.” He tried to make his voice sound reassuring. “I’ll get you out of this.”
She whimpered and closed her eyes even tighter.
The bolt gun was the more immediate threat. It would kill her. No doubt about it. The problem was that any diminishment of the tension on the cord would cause the spring-loaded mechanism to jerk the cord from her teeth, strike the firing pin, and cause the .22 blank cartridge to propel the bolt half an inch through her brow.
“You’re going to be all right. Don’t worry.”
Mason wasn’t sure if he was saying it for her benefit or his own.
He pressed down on the metal tube with his right hand to hold it in place. It had been affixed to the seat of the chair with a single piece of duct tape, which had already begun to peel as a consequence of the downward force being applied to the plunger.
Alejandra whimpered as the pressure against her forehead increased.
Mason gripped the thin metal pole of the plunger with his left hand. It was cold and greasy in his palm, which was roughly the same width as the distance between the plunger and its destination. He closed his fist around it, then turned and spoke to her as slowly and calmly as he could.
“We do this on the count of three. When I say three, you turn your head to the side and duck out of there. One.”
She made a sobbing sound.
“Two.”
He drew a deep breath and blew it out slowly.
“Three!”
In one swift motion, he jerked the captive-bolt gun upward and away from her forehead. The tape made a tearing sound. The plunger bit into the muscle on the pinkie side of his hand. The gap at the base of the tube lacerated the meat beside his thumb. The pressure was astounding, far greater than he’d expected. It was a miracle she’d been able to hold it for as long as she had.
The Extinction Agenda Page 34
