The Dragon Factory jl-2

by Jonathan Maberry

  After five minutes, the boy edged back along the porch roof and climbed into his bedroom window. Eighty-two sat on the edge of his bed and thought about what to do.

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Deep Iron Storage Facility

  Saturday, August 28, 4:06 P.M.

  Time Remaining on the Extinction Clock: 91 hours, 54 minutes E.S.T.

  Debris is a puzzle if you look at it the right way. You can retro-engineer it. You look at a roomful of junk and you pay attention to what’s lying on what, because that will eventually tell you what fell first. When I was working homicide for Baltimore PD I had one of those classic cases where there’s a dead body amid a bunch of broken plates and scattered books. A novice would think that the victim came home and interrupted a robbery in progress and that the place either was already trashed or was trashed during a struggle. But the carpet under the body was completely clean, no litter, which established that the murder happened first. Sure, we considered the fact that the place could have been trashed afterward, but when we looked at what lay under what it became clear that someone had walked around the room smashing things. It had been done in a circular pattern—deliberate and systematic. That’s when we started looking at the wife, who had reported finding her husband dead. The debris pattern, plus the angle of the blunt-force blow that had killed him, gave us a pretty solid circumstantial case. After that it was a matter of breaking down her alibi and grilling her in a series of interviews.

  This part of the mission was cop work, so I switched mental gears to let that part of me do his job. I may not be Jerry Spencer, but I can work a crime scene.

  There were dozens of overturned boxes. We knew from the firefight when some of them were knocked over. Most of the boxes were sealed with two-inch-wide clear tape. The tape had burst on about a third of the boxes, and some of the boxes and papers had landed in pools of blood. We started in the driest corner.

  So I had to do some horseback math: if a stack of ten boxes fell at such and such an angle, encountering an obstacle—and for the sake of argument let’s call that obstacle the back of my head—then they’d hit the floor with x amount of force and scatter their contents in such and such a fashion. Calculating the way the papers slid out of the boxes was similar to the way blood spatter experts estimate flying blood.

  And that thought made me aware of the torn bodies hidden under the box lids and I had to squash down the horror that wanted to make me either scream or throw up.

  The boxes were also chewed up pretty well by gunfire. The Russians had emptied a couple of magazines each into the room. The cinder-block walls were pocked with holes and heavy-caliber bullets had plowed through the contents of the boxes. Luckily paper is a great bullet stop, so the damage wasn’t as bad as it could have been. Grenades would have made this job impossible.

  Each of the boxes was made from corrugated cardboard. Most were a dark brown with a faux walnut print and a little metal sleeve on the front in which an indexing file card could be placed. There was a code on the file cards that was apparently something used internally by Deep Iron.

  It was Top who figured out the code on the file cards. He held out the card—HH/I/3/6-8/051779—and said, “Okay, the second H is probably our boy Heinrich Haeckel. Now, this box came from that corner over there. This other box here was two rows up. It has a card with ‘III’ on it. Roman numerals for the rows. Follow me?”

  “Right with you,” I said, pleased.

  “Six-dash-eight’s next. Sixth box in a stack of eight. See? And the other number’s got to be a date. These boxes have been here for a long time, so it ain’t a stretch to see that as oh-five, seventeen, seventy-nine. With this code we can restack every box in the right place without doing Sherlock Holmes stuff.”

  “You just earned your pay for the month, Top,” I said. “And a pretty damn good bottle of Scotch.”

  “Make it Irish and we’re square.”

  “Let me guess,” Bunny said. “You like ‘Black Bush’?”

  Top gave him a sniper’s squint. “Don’t make me hurt you, Farmboy. I know forty-three separate ways to make sure you can’t ever have kids.”

  Bunny held up his hands. “We’re cool.”

  We went back to work and now the only thing that slowed us down was deciding which papers went into which box.

  “What is this stuff?” Bunny asked, reaching to pick up a clipped sheaf of papers.

  “Careful,” I cautioned. “We need everything to go back in the right box.”

  “Okay,” he said, “but . . . what is this stuff?” He tapped the top page and I bent over him to look. The page was covered with columns of numbers whose value made no sense. At the top of each column was a number-letter identifier that also made no sense. I lifted the first page, then the second. More of the same. The pages were old, the entries all done by hand.

  “Accounting?” Bunny asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Got something!” called Top. He was going through the boxes stacked by the door. “This one’s not paper. Looks like microfiche.”

  He handed me several sheets of film, and when I held them up to the light I could see dozens of tiny pages smaller than postage stamps. Without a reader I couldn’t tell if they were the same as the pages we had here or were something else. We searched around and found only eight sheets of film, scattered as if dropped.

  “If those are microfiche copies of this stuff,” Bunny said, “then it sure as hell doesn’t add up to all of this crap. I’m thinking the Hulk and his buddy took the rest of them.”

  “Yeah, dammit,” I said, and reached for another box of paper.

  We worked together to repack and restack the boxes that had fallen during our part of the fight. All of the boxes that had fallen on me were filled with the same kind of handwritten notes. Then Bunny found a page with annotations in a box he was carefully repacking.

  “Take a look, boss,” he said and I squatted down next to him.

  At the top of one of the columns someone had used a pencil to write: Zwangs/Trauma.

  “Is that German? What’s that mean?” he asked.

  I nodded and took my notebook out of my pocket to copy down the ID code on the front of the file box. Something began niggling at the back of my brain, but it was too timid to step into the light. We kept working.

  Outside the room there was only silence. No cavalry with trumpets blowing.

  “What the hell are these?” Top asked as he held up a stack of index cards. Each one had notes written in some kind of medical code and in the upper left corner was a fingerprint. Top peered at the prints. “This ain’t ink, Cap’n. I think it’s old, dried blood.”

  “Don’t smudge any of them,” I cautioned. “We don’t know what the hell we have here.”

  A few minutes later Bunny said, “Hey, boss. I got another one with words on it. And . . . a couple of names.”

  Top and I picked our way through the mess to see what he had. He passed me an old-fashioned wooden clipboard, marking its place on the floor with his canteen. The numbers here were written in a different hand, and on the lower right of each page were the initials “JM.” The words “Zwangs/Trauma” were scribbled on the upper left of the page, and over each column was either a single word or a few: “Geschwindig-keit,” “Winkel,” “Druck in Pfund pro Quadratzoll.”

  Speed. Angle. Pounds of pressure per square inch.

  Then vertically along the left side of the page:

  “Kette,” “Schläger,” “Pferde-Peitsche,” “Faust,” “Barfuss,” “Gestie-felt.”

  I swallowed a throat that was as dry as dust.

  Chain. Club. Horsewhip. Fist. Bare foot. Booted foot.

  “Oh my God,” I whispered, and the others stared at me. They peered over my shoulder at the page. I translated for them and saw the meaning register on their faces.

  “Fuck me,” said Top, and he looked older than his forty years.

  “If this is what I think it is, then we’re into some sick
shit here.” Bunny said, “Who would collect this kind of information?”

  I didn’t answer as I rifled through the rest of the papers and then handed the clipboard back to him. “Let’s repack this box. Check everything. I want to see any scrap of paper with words, especially handwritten notations.”

  They set to work, but there was nothing else in that box.

  The next box, on the other hand . . . well, that changed everything.

  I was sitting on the floor putting the pages in some kind of order when I found a single handwritten note tucked inside a file folder. It was in German, which was no problem for me. As I read it my mind began spinning with shock and nausea:

  Heinrich,

  The third phase was completed this morning and we have sufficient material to initiate the next part of our research. I will present the test results to Herr Wirths on Thursday next. I hope you will be able to join us.

  I must confess that I am as excited as a schoolboy with what we are accomplishing here . . . and with what we are going to accomplish. We are doing God’s work here, my friend. Thank you for your compliments on the work I have been doing with twins. Your notes and suggestions on that have been of inestimable value, as are your observations on zoonosis and the noma work.

  Please let me know if you can join me for the presentation. Your observations would be of tremendous value to the audience, and to me personally.

  The letter was dated 22 February 1942. It was addressed to Heinrich Haeckel. I sat there and stared at the envelope to which it was clipped. Haeckel’s address had been in Berlin. The sender’s address was in a town called Birkenau in Poland. My blood froze in my veins.

  Birkenau.

  Good God Almighty.

  Birkenau was the small Polish town where the Nazis built Auschwitz.

  The man who sent the letter was Josef Mengele.

  Chapter Forty-Three

  The House of Screams, Isla Dos Diablos

  The Evening of Friday, August 27

  All afternoon and into the evening Eighty-two thought about what had happened down in the garden. Not simply the guard kicking the female—that sort of thing happened fifty times a day here in the Hive—but the way the three New Men had looked at him. If they had even seen him . . . and he was sure they had. Or sensed him. Or something.

  They had heard him sniff back tears. When he had brushed those tears out of his eyes they had mimicked the motion. Why? What did it mean? Did it even have a meaning, or were they acting on their imitative impulses? Eighty-two had overheard Otto saying that it was hardwired into them, that they were natural mimics. Like apes, only smarter, more controlled. It had been an intentional design goal. That was how Otto had phrased it when discussing it with one of the doctors.

  But had it been only that?

  What if it had been something else? Eighty-two hoped so. If the New Men were capable of independent thought and action, then maybe once the Americans got here the New Men could be shown how to break out of their conditioning.

  If the Americans got here. It was already two days since he had sent the hunt video. He ached to sneak into the communications room and check the e-mail account he set up. Would the techs realize it? Would they—or more important could they—somehow determine that it was him? If so, what would Alpha do? Worse, what would Alpha let Otto do?

  The more the boy thought about it, the more frightened and desperate he became . . . and the more he wanted to do something else to try to reach out to the man known as Deacon.

  The August sun set slowly over the island and Eighty-two sat on the floor, in the corner between his bed and the dresser, staring at the TV without watching it. He was required to watch six hours a day, every day. Nothing of his choosing, of course. Otto made the schedule and programmed his DVD player. This week it was all war films. Eighty-two didn’t mind those as much as the sex stuff he had to watch. He didn’t completely understand why, though, because there was a lot of violence in both kinds of videos. There was violence in almost everything Otto scheduled for him. Even the videos of surgeries looked violent. The blood . . . the screaming of the patients strapped to the tables. Even with the sound down it was ugly.

  And it was no good closing his eyes or lying about having watched it. Otto always asked Eighty-two questions about what he saw, questions that he could only answer if he watched. Eighty-two had learned fast not to get caught in a lie.

  The sun was down now, but he didn’t turn on the lamp. He heard noises and walked to the window and peered out into the night, listening to the sounds that filled the air almost every night. Shouts. Cries of ecstasy, cries of pain, sometimes overlapping in ways that turned his stomach. Screams from the labs and the bunkhouses where the New Men lived.

  He thought about the stone that the female had been kicked for throwing. It burned him that she hadn’t picked it up and taken it with her. It seemed to Eighty-two that it was the smartest thing to do. Keep it. Maybe . . . use it.

  But she had tossed it in with the dirt being dug from the hole, unwilling or unable to find a better use for it.

  The wrongness of that refused to leave his mind. It burned in his thoughts like a drop of frying grease that had spattered on his skin. Why hadn’t she thought to take the stone for which she had been beaten? What was it about the New Men that kept them from fighting back? There were hundreds of them on the island and only sixty guards and eighty-three technicians. The New Men were very strong, and though they screamed when beaten it was clear to Eighty-two—who knew something about hurt and harm—that they could endure a great deal of pain. They would cringe, cry out, weep, even collapse to the ground when being beaten, but within minutes they were able to return to hard labor. Eighty-two did not yet know if they faked some of their pain, amplifying their screams because that’s what was expected of them, because screams satisfied the guards and satisfaction was part of why the New Men existed. It was an idea Eighty-two had been playing with for weeks, and it was what made the incident of the stone so crucial to his understanding.

  In his dreams—sleeping and waking—the New Men rose up all at once and tore the guards to pieces. Like the animal men in the H. G. Wells book The Island of Dr. Moreau, Eighty-two’s dreamworld ideal of the New Men saw them finally throwing off the abuse and torment and slaughtering the evil humans. Eighty-two longed to see the House of Screams echo with the same kind of cries of furious justice that had shook the walls of Wells’s House of Pain.

  And Eighty-two would have believed it to be more of a possibility if the female had just taken the damn stone.

  The evening burned on and Eighty-two found that he could not endure another night of doing nothing.

  He left his room and crawled along the sloping tiled roof to the end, waited for the security camera to pan away. Eighty-Two had long ago memorized every tick and flicker of the compound’s cameras. When you’re that bored you find ways of filling the time. Once the camera turned away he would have ninety-eight seconds to reach the rain gutter on the far side of this wing. He made it easily, paused again as another camera moved through its cycle. One move at a time, always counting, always patient, Eighty-two made his way from his bedroom window to the spot where he’d perched earlier today. The garden below was draped in purple shadows.

  Eighty-two jumped from the corner of the roof to the closer of the two big palms, caught the trunk in a familiar place, and then shimmied down with practiced ease. At the base he stopped, waited for the ground camera to sweep past, and then he sprinted along the edge of the new chicken coop to the flower bed on the far side. The rich black dirt from the postholes had been spread out atop the flower bed. Eighty-two bent low and let his night vision strengthen until he could make out every detail. He ran his fingers over the dirt, sifting it back and forth, up and down, until he found the lump. His nimble fingers plucked the egg-sized stone from the soil and he weighed it in his palm. It was a piece of black volcanic rock, smooth as glass.

  Eighty-two rolled it between his palms as he c
rouched there, and his eyes drifted toward the porch where the guards had been playing dominoes. The big Australian’s name was Carteret. Eighty-two could imagine him drowsing in his hammock, stupid with too much beer, a porno movie playing on the TV, a cigarette burning out between his slack lips. The image was as clear as if Eighty-two was actually looking at the man. Carteret.

  Another part of Eighty-two’s brain replayed the image of the female lying in a knot of convulsed agony. And the laughter of the guards as Carteret walked away from her as if she was less than nothing.

  The stone was a comfortable weight in Eighty-two’s hand.

  He looked up into the sky—a great, vast diamond-littered forever above the trees—and he wondered why the man named Deacon had not come. Did the e-mail ever reach him? Was he coming at all? Would anyone come?

  Eighty-two closed his fist around the stone, feeling its ancient solidity and hardness.

  He wondered if he could risk reaching out one more time.

  If that didn’t work . . . then what would he do?

  There was a high-pitched female scream from the House of Pain. Was it the same female? Had thoughts of her festered in Carteret’s mind all day, the way the thought of the stone had burned in Eighty-two’s?

  The boy stared with narrowed eyes at the laboratory complex. The House of Screams. Above him the speakers in the palm trees began to wail. The dog handlers were getting ready to release the dogs for the night.

  Time to go.

  He smoothed the dirt to hide the spot where he’d removed the stone, waited for the ground camera to move, and then went from stillness into action. He ran across the garden, scaled the palm tree effortlessly, and leaped onto the roof. The stone was in his pocket.

  Chapter Forty-Four

  The White House

  Saturday, August 28, 4:10 P.M.

  Time Remaining on the Extinction Clock: 91 hours, 50 minutes

  The Vice President of the United States sat behind his desk, but he felt like he was under a spotlight in the back of a police squad room. Three people stood in front of his desk. Two men and a woman. They’d declined seats or coffee. None of them were smiling. Bill Collins looked from face to face and knew that he had no friends in the room.