The Dragon Factory jl-2

by Jonathan Maberry

  Bunny cut him off, “No way. He was hard, Top, but that was flesh and bone I was punching.”

  “Rubber cushions with air baffles and metal struts can feel like muscle and bone,” Top suggested. “What with all the confusion—”

  “Doesn’t matter,” I said. “They had something extra, so we’re lucky we were able to turn the tables on them. We may not have dropped them, but we didn’t get our heads torn off, so let’s put it in the ‘win’ column.”

  “Glass half-full,” said Bunny, nodding. “I’m okay with that.”

  They stood on either side of me and looked at the bodies. I turned and assessed the room. The blood was contained to that one corner. There were blood spatters everywhere, but most of the floor was clear.

  “Okay,” I said slowly, “here’s what we need to do. We have to check the bodies for ID. Probably won’t find much, but we have to look.”

  “Balls,” murmured Bunny.

  “Then I want to move the remains to that section of wall.” I pointed to a ten-foot stretch where there were no boxes.

  “Why touch ’em at all, Cap’n?” asked Top.

  “Because we have work to do and we don’t want to have to trip over anything. You feel me?”

  He nodded.

  I squatted down and began searching the dead Russians. It was grisly work, and though Bunny and Top joined me, none of us were happy about it. Bunny paused and pulled a tube of peppermint ChapStick from his pocket, rubbed some under his nose, and handed it around. We each dabbed our lips. Peppermint kills the sense of smell pretty quickly, and between blood and other bodily substances the room was getting ripe.

  As expected, the search yielded nothing. No ID. Nothing.

  Without saying a word we began moving the bodies over to the wall. I knew that Top had done this kind of thing before in Iraq—pulling bodies out of the rubble after suicide bombers. Bunny and I had our own separate experiences. I’d been part of the contingency of Baltimore cops who worked Ground Zero after the planes hit the towers. It was always bad, always beyond the capability of the rational mind to associate this with deliberate human action. I know, that’s a funny thought coming from a guy like me—someone who’s killed people with guns, knives, grenades, garrotes, and bare hands—but there is a difference between combat killing and this. I wasn’t even sure what to call it. “Murder” is too vague a word, and “mutilation” seems oddly clinical. This was . . . what? The two brutes we chased out of here had done this to the Russians here and to the staff upstairs. They had enjoyed it. Maybe that was the key. Even when the death of an opponent—say a terrorist holding a gun to a sixth grader’s head—had given me a bit of momentary satisfaction, I’d never enjoyed it. Never gotten a visceral or erotic delight from the death of another person . . . and I believed that’s what I was seeing here.

  As this was going through my head, Top muttered three words that said it all.

  “This is evil.”

  Bunny and I looked at him and then each other. None of us spoke as we worked, but we knew that Top had put his finger on it. This was evil.

  WHEN WE WERE done we washed our hands from our canteens and used the lids from some of the file boxes to cover the corpses as best we could.

  I turned and surveyed the rest of the room. Half the boxes had fallen to the floor. So far it looked like all that was stored here was paper.

  “Top, Bunny . . . the guys we chased off, did they take anything with them? Boxes, computer records? Anything?”

  “Not that I saw, unless it was small enough to fit into a pocket,” said Top. “We staying or going, Cap’n?”

  “We’re staying for the moment. If those guys with the body armor are out there I don’t want them dogging us all the way back to the elevators, and there’s not enough of us to guarantee a safe run back.”

  “I’m good with that, Cap’n,” said Top. “Don’t know about you fellas, but I’ve never been roared at by enemy combatants. Can’t seem to get that noise out of my mind.”

  Bunny nodded. “Yeah, that’s hitting ten on my freak-o-meter, too.”

  “All the more reason to stay put,” I said. “We’re secure in here. Besides, if they didn’t take anything, then that means that it’s still here.” I went over to the wall so I could see the room better and assess its layout. “We still have our primary mission objective, so we need to go through these records. We have at least two players—the Russians and the other team—who think this stuff is worth killing a lot of people over. Let’s find out why.”

  It was clear from the expressions on Bunny’s and Top’s faces that they didn’t like it any more than I did.

  “If those guys are on their way out of here then they’re going to run into Brick,” Bunny said. “It’d be just him against them.”

  Top snorted. “Him in an armored vehicle with a minigun. Body armor be damned.”

  Bunny grinned, but it was mostly faked. “Yeah, I guess.”

  “Either way, it’s beyond our control,” I said. “We’ll leave that up to the gods of war. In the meantime let’s get to it. We’ve been behind the curve on this thing all along. Let’s see if we can figure out what the hell’s going on.”

  So we set to work . . . but as we worked we each listened to the big silence outside of the storage unit. Listening for the sound of elevators, for the shout of familiar official voices, for the sound of footsteps running with that precise speed that you only hear with SWAT or special ops teams. We heard nothing.

  We were alone down here, and as long as the NSA was still chasing the DMS, there was no chance of the cavalry coming.

  We tried not to think about that; we tried to focus on the task at hand.

  We tried.

  Chapter Forty

  Bulawayo, Republic of Zimbabwe

  Five Days Ago

  Gabriel Mugabe sipped tea as he watched the forklift drivers move back and forth to shift pallet after pallet of bottled water from the train depot to the warehouse. He was pleased with the quantity. An American had given him a very tidy kickback to make sure that customs cleared the delivery quickly.

  “Why so quickly?” he’d asked.

  “We’ve invested a lot of money in advertising,” said the American. “Our advertisements go live on September 1, and we want the product available right to the moment.”

  “But you said you’re giving the water away. What does the timing matter?”

  “Impulse buying is one of the few things that still survives in this economy. Give a little and they’ll buy more.”

  Mugabe thought that the American was being stupid. Giving away sixty tons of bottled water was like flushing good money down the toilet. But the American insisted that worldwide one-day buzz was worth many millions at the launch of a product. Mugabe neither knew nor cared if that was true. All that mattered to Mugabe was the fat envelope of money the American discreetly gave him. Mixed currencies—American dollars and South African rand—none of the Zimbabwean dollars that were worth less than toilet paper. Very nice.

  They’d shaken hands on the deal. Mugabe wasted very little of the money on bribes to the custom officials. Mugabe’s name was enough to inspire cooperation. What little he spent was to grease the wheels in the port of Beira in Mozambique. The cargo ship unloaded there and the water was sent by train to the depot in Bulawayo and from the train yard to warehouses owned by men who feared the Mugabe family.

  Gabriel Mugabe was the nephew of the President of Zimbabwe, who had been accused by organizations around the world, from Amnesty International to the African Union, for human rights violations. Gabriel privately agreed, but in his view the issue of human rights was an attempt by the weak to undermine the strong. He believed that strength came with rights that superseded anything the weak had to say. History, he felt, supported this view, and Mugabe could cite historical precedent going back to the Old Testament and up to the hypocritical U.S. so-called War on Terror.

  Though Gabriel Mugabe was not the flesh-eating lion that his uncl
e was, he was rightly feared here in Bulawayo. The water arrived safely and most of the cash the American had given him was still in his personal safe at home.

  He sipped his tea, which had been fresh brewed with water from the pallet Mugabe had appropriated for his personal use.

  “Free water,” he said with a sneer. “Fucking Americans.”

  Chapter Forty-One

  The House of Screams, Isla Dos Diablos

  The Morning of Friday, August 27

  The boy’s name was Eighty-two. Or SAM. It depended on who was speaking to him. Otto always called him by the number; when Alpha was in a good mood he sometimes called the boy SAM. The boy seldom thought of himself as anything other than “me.” He didn’t believe the number or the name was truly his. He suspected he had a real name, but if he was right it was one he would never be allowed to use—and would never want to use.

  He crouched on the sloping terra-cotta roof in the shadows cast by the fronds of a pair of towering palms. Eighty-two was small and well practiced in the art of being invisible. Most people here at the Hive were not allowed to talk to him, and those who were mostly ignored him. The people who paid attention to him terrified him, and so the boy avoided them. He lived among them, seeing scores of people every day, but he sometimes went a week without so much as a meaningless exchange of commentary on the weather. In the span from November 10 of last year until March 2 of this year he did not have a single conversation. Even the doctors who tested him seldom spoke to him. They grabbed him, poked him, pierced him with needles, took samples, made him lie down under scanners—all without directly addressing him. They knew he knew what was expected of him and mostly they pointed to where they wanted him to sit, stand, or lie down.

  It hurt him for a long time, being alone, but recently he’d come to prefer it. It was better than engaging in conversation about what was going on here at the Hive. And it was better than when Otto’s men dragged him along on one of their hunts. Eighty-two went on those because he had to, because Alpha expected it and Otto demanded it, but so far he had not shot at any of the animals. In another year, when he was bigger, he knew that he would be expected to participate in the hunt rather than tag along with the videographer.

  Nobody—not even the videographer—knew that Eighty-two had taken his own camera, a little button camera he’d stolen from the previous videographer’s gear.

  The hunters had gone to São Paolo for a single day of celebration, and Eighty-two had slipped away from the pool area for forty minutes and found a cybercafé half a block from the hotel. Sending the e-mail with the video had been the single bravest thing he’d ever done, and those forty minutes were the most frightening of his life. He was not able to wait around to see if there was a response. He wished and prayed that there was, that the Americans were on their way.

  Now he was back at the Hive. Back at the House of Screams, Eighty-two’s name for it, though he suspected many of the New Men thought of it in that way, too. After all, it was their screams that filled the corridors of the building day after day and night after night.

  The boy wore only a pair of swim trunks. His skin was pale. He was not allowed to tan, and if he allowed himself to get a sunburn Alpha would have Otto beat him. Otto’s beatings lasted a long, long time. Eighty-two suspected that Otto enjoyed them and was sad when Alpha told him to stop. Otto’s lips were always wet with spit when he was done giving a beating, and his eyes burned bright as candles.

  Down in the compound three of the New Men were working to dig postholes for a chicken pen. The boy watched them, fascinated. The New Men had thick features and coarse red hair, and when no one was around they chattered back and forth in surprisingly high-pitched voices. The boy recognized two of the New Men. One of them was the oldest of the community still living here on the island, maybe twenty-five, though his hair had already started to go gray and the skin on his face was creased with lines. He looked sixty or seventy. The young man working beside him was not much older than the boy, but the New Man was top-heavy with muscles and looked at least thirty. The third member of the party was a woman. Like the others she was dressed in lightweight cotton trousers and a tank top, but she was sweating as she dug and the shirt was pasted to her breasts so that the boy could easily see the dark outlines of her nipples.

  Eighty-two felt a stirring in his loins and looked away, embarrassed that he was spying on her. And ashamed that it was affecting him.

  The female’s shovel hit a stone in the dirt and she bent quickly and used her fingers to dig it out of the ground. Without thinking she threw it over her shoulder and picked up her shovel.

  Suddenly there was a harsh shout from across the compound and the boy turned to see one of the guards—a huge man with a blond crew cut and a gun belt slung low on his hips—come striding toward the work party.

  “What do you think you’re playing at, you ugly slut?” he shouted in an Australian accent that was sometimes hard for the boy to follow.

  The three New Men froze in place, terror blooming instantly on their faces. They looked frightened and confused, unsure which rule they had broken but knowing that they had done something. They reacted to their conditioning and dropped to their knees, heads bowed, as the Australian approached. He towered over them, and the boy saw three more guards come down from the veranda and spread out in a loose line behind the blond man. They were all grinning.

  The Australian nudged the rock with his booted toe.

  “What’s this shit?” he demanded. The New Men did not move except to tremble with fear. It made the Australian grin broader. He raised his voice. “I said . . . what’s this shit?”

  No answer. Even from his perch on the roof Eighty-two could see the female begin to cry, saw the first silver tears break from her brown eyes and roll down over her lumpy cheeks.

  “You!” called the Australian. “Yeah, I’m talking to you, you ugly ape-faced bitch. Look at me when I’m talking to you.”

  The female slowly raised her eyes toward the man; her companions kept their heads firmly down, though their muscles were rigid with the terror that washed through them in icy waves.

  “Who told you to make a mess of the whole damned yard? Look at this squalor.” He nudged the stone again. It was the size of an egg. “You get your ass over here and pick up this mess. Now!”

  The female bowed several times and then scuttled forward, keeping low to the ground, so frightened of giving further offense that she scuttled forward on all fours. But as she drew close to the guard she slowed and stopped almost out of reach before extending one tentative hand toward the stone.

  The guard looked down at her and the boy could see the moment when the Australian became aware of the thin cotton shirt clinging to the female’s heavy breasts. The look on the man’s face changed, shifting from vicious anger to something else, something that was beyond the boy’s understanding. The boy knew that the man might rape the woman—he had witnessed enough abuse to understand the forms it could take. Rape, sodomy, beatings, even murder. However, no matter how many times the boy saw these acts, or saw the aftereffects of them, he could not understand it. Even in his own personal darkness, even deep in the strangeness of his own damaged dreams, he had no connection to that kind of hunger. Eighty-two leaned forward, his muscles tensing, wondering for the hundredth time what would happen if he shouted at the men while they did this. Would they stop because of who he was? Or would interference merely result in another of Otto’s beatings? Indecision trapped Eighty-two on his perch as, below, the female picked up the rock.

  She bobbed and bowed and mumbled apologies in her high-pitched nasal voice.

  The Australian kicked her in the stomach.

  A single sharp kick that drove the toe of his steel-tipped boot into the softness of her upper abdomen and slammed all the air from the female’s lungs. She could not even scream. Her body convulsed into a ball of knotted, trembling, gasping agony as the guards laughed and the other New Men knelt nearby and wept.

 
The guards made jokes about it and turned away, heading back to the veranda, back to their beer and dominoes, leaving the female in the center of the yard, the stone still clutched in her fist.

  A minute dragged by as the boy watched. He sniffed back a tear and then froze as the two male New Men suddenly turned and looked up. Eighty-two remained stock-still. Had they heard him? Could they see him?

  Even the female slowly raised her head and looked in his direction.

  The guards were laughing and talking about football. They hadn’t heard anything. The boy’s eyes burned with tears, and he slowly lifted a hand to his eyes to wipe them clear.

  Down in the garden the oldest of the New Men stared upward with a furrowed brow. Then he lifted a hand and mimicked the action. Or had he simply wiped away his own tears, the action merely a coincidence?

  Then the second New Man did the same.

  Eighty-two held his breath and did not move.

  Finally the oldest of the New Men turned back toward the female. He cast a cautious glance at the guards and then slowly crept toward the female, gathered her in his arms, helped her to her feet, and walked with her back to their companion. Both of the New Men hugged her and kissed her, but always one watched the men while the others embraced. From time to time they all cut quick glances up to the shadows on the porch roof. Then they went back to work.

  The boy watched the female’s hand, hoping that she would covertly pocket the stone. He would have taken it to use later if an opportunity presented itself. To use on Carteret while he slept. It was something Eighty-two wanted to do, had thought long and hard about doing, though he had not yet done it. But the female apparently did not have that thought or was afraid of being caught, because she dropped the stone onto the pile of dirt they’d dug from the hole and picked up her shovel.