At the bottom of the staircase were a few other people, mostly technicians in white coats. They looked dazed, and most were bleeding. I trained my gun on them, and Top leaned in and did the same with his Snellig rifle. We watched the people get to their feet, shaking heads like befuddled dogs.
“Give me a happy ending,” I murmured.
“Day ends with a Y,” said Top sourly.
The people down there suddenly all looked up. Whether drawn by the sound of our voices or driven by some chemical force, it was hard to say. They glared at us. They bared their teeth.
And with a mingled howl of murderous joy, they charged up the stairs.
CHAPTER 9
THE PLAYROOM
UNDISCLOSED LOCATION
NEAR VANCOUVER, BRITISH COLUMBIA, CANADA
SIX DAYS AGO
“Do you have it?”
Mr. Sunday stood beside his car, his face in dense shadows thrown by a massive old pine tree. The sunlight was so bright and the shadows so dark that the dividing line between made the salesman look as if he were cut in half.
Kuga did not offer to shake hands. Neither did Sunday. It wasn’t that kind of moment.
“I got it,” said Kuga, holding up a thick padded envelope.
“Blood and hair?”
“Took some doing. We had to get it from an Oslo evidence locker. Not easy and not cheap.”
“The effort will be worth it,” said Sunday.
Kuga did not immediately hand over the envelope. “You know, man, this is some real spooky shit right here. This whole thing…?”
“Yes?”
“How do I know you’re not just running some kind of weird psycho head trip on me?”
“You can’t know either way,” said Sunday. Although Kuga couldn’t see the big smile, with all that darkness, he could feel it. That awareness gave him the creeps.
“Shit.”
“There’s still time to back out,” said Sunday. “Just throw that envelope away and forget we ever had this meeting.”
Kuga looked at the envelope, at the shadows, and up into the sky. It was blue overhead, but a storm front was troubling the horizon and there were flocks of black birds—ragged-looking crows or starlings—flying toward those clouds. He didn’t like the way that made him feel.
He sighed heavily and held out the envelope. A pale hand reached out of the shadows and plucked it from his fingers. The envelope vanished into the shadows, and Kuga heard the seal rip open.
“This will be fun,” said Mr. Sunday, though for just a moment his voice sounded different. Rougher, stranger, with a different accent—not Southern but foreign. Italian? And it was a much, much older voice.
Sunday got into his car, keeping his face turned away from Kuga, who stood watching as the car backed up, turned, and drove in the same direction as the black birds.
CHAPTER 10
TRSTENIK ISLAND
CROATIA
Top and I opened fire as we began walking down the stairs. Sandman did its work, dropping them one after another. I heard Bunny’s heavy steps on the stairs behind me, and Andrea’s lighter footfalls. Ghost stood on the stairs and barked. Had I told him to stay back? I couldn’t remember. Or maybe he had been in enough biohazardous situations by now to follow his own wisdom.
We reached the floor and immediately formed a half circle around the base of the stairs, each of us firing. There were maybe twenty people down there. They came at us with bare hands and snapping teeth. Others grabbed whatever they could to use as weapons to smash us. A chair, a piece of pipe, a screwdriver, a mop. The choice of weapon didn’t matter. All that filled their minds was an unbearable need to hurt, to kill.
I understood that need. I’d felt it in Oslo when I’d been sprayed with Rage and tried my best to kill everyone, including my own team. I went after Belle, and she’d shot me with Sandman. But … damn … that rage was real. It was an emotion so real, so pure that it crowded everything else out. It was genuine, it defined me in that moment. I would have killed her and Top and Bunny and anyone else I could have gotten my hands on. Or my teeth. In those few moments, nothing else mattered to me. The rage was my life, my heart, and my god.
As it was to these poor bastards.
I felt a flicker of empathy for them, and with it came that insidious compassion infused with rationalization. Maybe they didn’t know they worked for Kuga. Maybe they didn’t understand the uses to which whatever they were doing down here would be put. Maybe they didn’t know that their boss, Mitrović, was a pedophile who raped and abused young girls.
Maybe, maybe, maybe.
None of that stopped my finger from pulling the pistol. Not sure it would have stopped me if I was pulling the trigger on a more lethal weapon. The three aspects of my fractured personality were all engaged in this. The Modern Man—that normal aspect—was yelling that this was merciful, that once subdued they could be treated, helped, rehabilitated. The Cop was being his pragmatic self, arguing that dropping all these people would allow us access to the physical assets of machinery, computers, samples. And reminding me that if there were bioweapons of any kind here, they’d be sealed in safety containers and flown out to where Dr. John Cmar and his Bug Hunter team were waiting on a biohazard containment barge forty miles off the coast. And the Killer, the savage hunter in my head, just wanted to eliminate the enemy and maybe look for whomever might be down here. More girls like the one upstairs, or test subjects for Rage or other dreadful concoctions.
So my finger pulled and pulled, and the bodies dropped.
There was another presence inside my head. Not a voice per se, though it did sometimes whisper to me. Usually at night when I was deep in a nightmare re-creation of Christmas Eve. Watching Santoro, dressed in a Santa hat and beard, deliver a box to my brother, Sean. Handing it to him. Smiling as he drove away in his stolen FedEx truck. The memory of my brother carrying the box inside, likely to set it down so his hands would be free for hugs with me and Junie Flynn. And then my realization that the port-wine stain on the FedEx driver’s face was not that at all but a healing bruise from the fight we’d had in Norway. The package exploded, killing everyone inside the house, nearly killing Junie, and Ghost, and me. And in the weeks of recovery that followed, I became aware of that new presence. Not another facet of my splintered personality. Nothing as sane as that. No, this was like a sentient and lightless cloud of dark energy that was trying to take possession of me, body, mind, and soul. A pernicious shadow thing born of a loss so deep that I could not and cannot process it. In the lexicon of my own damage, I called it the Darkness.
As the screaming people closed around us and we fired the tranquilizer darts at them, the Darkness kept trying to pull my hand down, to make me holster or drop the Snellig and reach for the Sig Sauer with its full magazine of copper-jacketed hollow-points.
That ache, that temptation, that need was so damned strong, and so much of me wanted to give in to it. Out of a weariness of fighting it. And out of a desire to be it.
The last of the technicians fell, and there was a moment of an awful silence. We were surrounded by a wall of bodies. There was no haze of gun smoke or shuddering gasps of the dying. The people lay in heaps, each of them sleeping.
Almost all of them were bloody, though, just not from us.
Rage is not targeted. It doesn’t direct the infected toward an enemy. All humans were the enemy, and so before we’d entered the scene, they had been attacking one another. Beyond the ring of unconscious people were a half dozen corpses, some badly dismembered. One man had almost no head, and from the shape of the pulped mass of what was left, someone had stomped his head to jelly. A woman lay against a row of filing cabinets, her skirt pushed up and her legs spread so wide they’d clearly become dislocated. She had been violated with a long-barreled flashlight. A man had dozens of pencils shoved into each of his eye sockets.
“Psycho wombat balls,” breathed Andrea.
Bunny shook his head. “Fuck me sideways.”
I looked around. We were in what looked like a computer center. Dozens of workstations, supercomputers off to one side behind glass in a cooled room, and rows of file cabinets of various sizes.
“Spread out and search this place,” I said as Ghost crept down to stand beside me. He was quivering with nervous energy. “Jackpot, disconnect the computers from any power source, cable, or landline. Pappy and Donnie Darko, assess the tech and bag anything we need to take.”
“Too much to take,” said Bunny.
“Prioritize,” I told him.
There was a corridor leading off the room, and I thought I heard some muffled sounds coming from there. “Ghost and I will check that out,” I said.
Once I rounded the bend, I saw that the corridor ran forty feet to a big door on rails, like a barn door, and made out of oak planks. Very sturdy, and with a big industrial dead bolt lock. No way to tell if it was locked from the outside or inside. I had a blaster-plaster with me, but I didn’t want to injure anyone if there were prisoners or test subjects incarcerated there. However, there was a glass case inset into the wall near where I stood that had a red fire extinguisher bracketed in between a heavy flathead fire ax.
I paused to reload the Snellig, then used the butt of the pistol to smash the glass, then holstered the dart gun. I pulled the ax from the aluminum clips. Like the extinguisher, it was painted a vivid red to make it easier to see in smoky situations, with the blade coated in clear rust-resistant lacquer. It had a bright yellow thirty-six-inch fiberglass handle and felt solid and sturdy in my hands as I approached the door.
The muffled sounds I’d heard earlier were definitely coming from there. I leaned close, but the sounds were odd and indistinct. No screams, though. None of the Rage-infused mania.
“Get back,” I said to Ghost. “Watch.”
He walked backward fifteen feet and sat, eyes alert, ears swiveling, nose sniffing the air.
I braced my feet, grasped the neck of the handle a few inches below the ax’s head, with my palm facing away, making sure my grip was firm but not tense. Then, as I swung it down, using muscle, posture, and gravity to accelerate and gather force, my top hand slid down to meet the other, creating a nice fulcrum to deliver that power. The way my father had taught me to split logs on his brother’s farm. The farm where they all died. The blade bit deeply into the wood, and splinters flew into the air.
I kept swinging, feeling my muscles flow through the movement, accepting the jolt of each impact, allowing the shock to travel up and out through unresisting tissue, before tugging the blade free again. And again. The wood was thick and did not want to break apart, but the ax and my own brand of personal rage offered a more compelling argument.
Suddenly, the whole lock assembly toppled onto the floor, and the door swung inward. I shifted the ax to my left hand and drew the Snellig with my right, then kicked the door open and stepped in, fading to one side, sweeping the room with eyes and gun barrel tracking together.
I have long ago stopped requiring proof that you don’t need to die to enter hell.
What I saw was out of something by Dante or maybe Bosch. Or maybe this was what the U.S. Seventh Army’s Forty-Fifth Infantry Division saw and felt when they liberated Dachau. The people were chained to the beds with leg irons and bound with leather belts across waist and chest, wrists secured by cuffs. Many were naked, their bodies punctured by wires and IV lines and electrodes surgically drilled into their skulls and sternums. They were a cross section of humanity with no apparent bias toward one race. More than half were. The room stank of urine, feces, blood, sweat, antiseptic, and human misery. Stepping into that room was like being punched in the soul, and that blow was damned near crippling.
Eyes turned toward me with fresh horror, seeing a big man dressed for combat, armed with an ax and a gun and a combat dog with blood on his muzzle. Those who could scream, did. A few begged for mercy from God or cried out for their mothers. The little ones merely screamed.
And behind the beds were a dozen technicians in stained lab coats. They cringed back against the far wall as if they could distance themselves from my awareness of what they were doing here. As if holding up hands was all that they’d need to escape punishment for their crimes. As if trying to look weak and helpless and pitiable would be effective.
I heard Bunny calling my name, asking about my status. The Snellig slipped from my fingers and clattered to the concrete floor. I tore the coms unit from my ear and ground it underfoot. I slammed the door through which I’d just entered and pulled a heavy steel worktable in front of it. Then I began walking toward the cringing technicians. I passed between rows of children covered in surgical scars, some still with stitches from god only knew what kind of obscene experimentation.
I don’t know why these technicians, nurses, and doctors were not infected by Rage when the facility fail-safe was triggered. Maybe they were too senior, too valuable to what was going on. To what Kuga and Santoro had intended for this place.
I also didn’t care. I kept walking, trying not to let the horrors on either side of me cripple my progress. The overhead fluorescents threw my shadow across the faces of the cowering.
They screamed for mercy.
They begged for mercy.
But I hadn’t brought any mercy with me.
I stood in the doorway, chest heaving, sweat running down my body inside my clothes. The room was far too bright, and every sound was terribly loud.
I looked down at the ax in my hands.
I could hear Bunny yelling from outside the room. Top, too. Ghost stood at the door and barked at them. My team were all outside.
Kuga’s people were inside with me.
Here with me and my ax.
In my heart and head, the Darkness roiled and twisted and finally broke free.
CHAPTER 11
FREETECH RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT OFFICE
SAN DIEGO, CALIFORNIA
Junie Flynn was in the act of lifting a glass of wine to her lips when she suddenly shuddered with such unexpected violence that the wine sloshed and the glass slipped from her twitching fingers. It struck the side of the worktable and exploded, showering her and her companion with tiny glittering fragments.
Then Junie staggered back, a hand going to her throat.
“What’s wrong?” cried Toys, a young man whose normally stern face twisted into a look of mingled shock and concern.
“I—” she began, and then her eyes rolled high and she puddled down to the floor.
Toys caught her under the neck and back, inches from the floor. He squatted, grunted, and picked her up. She was a tall woman, and he was a man below middle height, but he was wiry and much stronger than he looked. Toys carried her quickly to the adjoining staff lounge, kicking the door open and laying her down on a leather couch. Junie was totally out, and he quickly took her pulse. Finding the steady heartbeat was not entirely comforting because it fluttered like hummingbird wings on a window of a house in which it had gotten trapped. He felt her head, but there was no sign of a fever.
Toys pulled a cell phone from his jeans pocket and punched 9-1-1. When the call was answered, he said, “I need an ambulance at—”
“No,” said Junie sharply. “No, please, Toys, don’t … I’m okay.”
He glanced down at her. “You sodding well aren’t. You dropped into a dead faint.”
“Please,” she said, gesturing weakly to the phone. “No ambulance.”
Toys explored the inside of his mouth with his tongue—a habit he had when he was trying to decide something on the fly. Then said, “Sorry, my mistake.” And disconnected the call. He dropped to his knees beside the couch and took her hand. “To quote your beefcake boyfriend, what in the wide blue fuck was that?”
Clouds of doubt passed across her features. Junie was a little older than Toys but normally exuded youthful energy and strength. Anyone who didn’t know her and didn’t look too closely merely saw a woman with masses of wavy blond hair, sky-blue eyes, and a wholesome smile th
at was so infectious it made other people smile without knowing why or even being aware they were doing it. But when they looked closely, they saw small lines of care around her mouth and at the corners of her eyes. Lines that may have been born as laugh lines but that had been deepened by stress, awareness, and pain. Life had been unkind to Junie in ways none of the other employees at FreeTech knew about. Toys did, because they were friends on that special level where there are no secrets.
Just as Junie knew about Toys and his very checkered past.
Their life paths had made them freakish by any normal standards, but there was a bonding in that. They both were from what Junie’s lover, Joe Ledger, called the storm lands. It gave the refugees from life’s more troubled places a shared understanding that ran deeper than mere empathy. It taught them a language that often did not require words and whose aspects seldom had appropriate adjectives.
“What’s going on with you?” he asked. His accent, though refined by education and world travel, easily echoed the Essex town of Purfleet, where he’d grown up hard in a bad neighborhood and a worse home. This was long before the local government changed it to the more upscale-sounding Purfleet-on-Thames as part of an intended gentrification. “Since when do you get the vapors, you silly cow?”
“It wasn’t that,” she began, but paused. “I … I…”
“Finish a sentence for me. There’s a good lass.”
Junie pushed herself up to a sitting position while Toys watched, studying her eyes and complexion to look for a drop in blood pressure. She seemed fine, though, if a bit pale.
“It was so weird,” she said. “I mean … I never faint.”
“Because you’re not an ingénue from a Victorian drawing room novel,” he said. “So why did you faint? You feeling sick?”
“No, it’s not that.”
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