The Dragon Factory jl-2

by Jonathan Maberry

  Time Remaining on the Extinction Clock: 68 hours, 52 minutes E.S.T.

  The exterior door was steel, so I stepped back as Bunny put a C4 popper on the lock with one of Hu’s newer gizmos—a poloymer shroud that was flexible enough to fold into a pocket but strong enough to catch shrapnel. It was also dense enough to muffle the sound, so when Bunny triggered it the lock blew out with a sound no louder than a cough. The door blew open in a swirl of smoke.

  No alarms. Kid’s still batting a thousand so far.

  I led the way inside.

  The hallway was bright with flourescent lights and stretched sixty feet before hitting a T-juncture. There were doors on both sides. Everything was conveniently marked, and it was clear that this corridor was used by groundskeepers and technicians. Most of the rooms were storage. The left-hand rooms had bags of chemical fertilizer, shovels and garden tools, racks of work clothes. The right-hand rooms included a small machine shop, a boiler room, and a changing room for support staff. There were plenty of clothes and I debated having my guys change into them, but I didn’t. My gut was telling me that we were fighting the clock here, so we tagged each doorway with a paper sensor pad set below the level where the eye would naturally fall. The sensors had an ultrathin wire and a tiny blip transmitter. We peeled off the adhesive backing and pressed them over the crack in the door opposite the hinge side. If anyone opened the door, the paper would tear and a signal would be sent to our scanners. Simple and useful.

  We found one room in which a large piece of some unidentifiable equipment hung from a chain hoist. From the scattering of tools and the droplight that still burned it looked like a work in active progress. There was no one around. Everyone must have gone to investigate the fire the Kid had set and, like most employees would, was probably stalling before heading back to work.

  I still had the Beretta in my hands and we moved through a building that was empty and silent.

  That all changed in a heartbeat.

  Two men rounded the right-hand side of the T-juncture while we were still twenty feet away. Both wore coveralls stained with grease, and I knew they had to be the mechanics working on the equipment. They were deep in conversation, speaking German with an Austrian accent, when they saw us. They froze, eyes bugging in their heads, mouths opened in identical “ohs” of surprise as they stared down the barrels of three guns. I put the laser sight of my Beretta on the forehead of the bigger of the two men and put my finger to my lips.

  All he had to do was nothing. All he had to do was stay silent and not try to be a hero.

  Some people just don’t get it.

  He half-turned and drew a fast breath to scream and I put one through his temple. Top took the other with two side-by-side shots in the center of his chest. They hit the floor in a sprawl.

  If Lady Luck would have cut us a single frigging break we’d have been past them and into the complex within a few seconds. But she was in a mood today. There were other people behind them, out of our line of sight, farther down the side corridors.

  People started screaming.

  Then people started firing guns.

  A moment later the alarms sounded.

  So much for stealth.

  Chapter Seventy-Five

  The Dragon Factory

  Sunday, August 29, 3:17 P.M.

  Time Remaining on the Extinction Clock: 68 hours, 43 minutes E.S.T.

  The three businessmen from China stood wide-eyed and slack jawed, all pretenses at emotional aloofness lost in the moment. Behind the glass, perched on the twisted limb of a tallow tree, its wings folded along the sleek lines of its sinuous body, was a dragon.

  The creature turned its head toward them and stared through the glass for a long minute, occasionally flicking its flowing whiskers. It blinked slowly as if in disdain at their surprise.

  One of the men, the senior buyer, broke into a huge grin. He bowed to the dragon, bending very low. His two younger associates also bowed. And just for the hell of it Hecate and Paris bowed, too. It might help close the deal, though both of them knew that this deal was already closed.

  “Does . . . does . . . ,” began the senior buyer—a fat-faced man named Chen—“can it . . . ?”

  Paris smiled. “Can it fly?” He reached out and knocked sharply on the window. The sudden sound startled the dragon, and it leaped from its perch, its snow-white wings spreading wider than the arm span of a tall man, and the creature flapped away to sit in a neighboring tree. The enclosure was designed for maximum exposure, so even though the dragon could move away, it couldn’t hide.

  Chen murmured something in Mandarin that Paris did not catch. Neither of the Twins could speak the language. All of the business with these buyers had been conducted in English.

  “How?” said Chen in English, turning toward the Twins.

  “Bit of a trade secret,” said Paris. He was actually tempted to brag, because the creation of a functional flying lizard was the most complicated and expensive project he and Hecate had undertaken. The animal in the enclosure was a patchwork. The wings came from an albatross, the mustache from the barbels of a Mekong giant catfish, the horny crest from the Texas horned lizard, and the slender body was mostly a monitor lizard. There were a few other bits and pieces of genes in the mix, and so far the design had been so complicated that most of the individual animals had died soon after birth or been born with unexpected deformities from miscoding genes. This was the only one that appeared healthy and could fly.

  The really difficult part was designing the animal for flight. It had the hollow bones of a large bird and the attending vascular support to keep those bones healthy. They’d also had to give it an assortment of genes to provide the muscle and cartilage to allow it to flap its wings. Unfortunately, they had not identified the specific gene—or gene combinations—that would give it an instinctive knowledge of aerodynamics. So they’d spent hours with it in an inflated air room of the kind used at carnivals and kids’ parties, tossing the creature up and hoping that it would discover that those great leathery things on its back were functional wings. The process was frustrating and time-consuming, and the animal had only recently begun flapping, and the short flight it had just taken was about the extent of its range. More like a chicken thrown from a henhouse roof than a soaring symbol of China’s ancient history. The heavy foliage in the enclosure helped to mask the awkwardness of its flight. The entire process had been a bitch. A forty-one-million-dollar bitch. And the damn thing was a mule, unable to reproduce.

  But at least it was pretty, and it more or less flew. Paris hoped it would live long enough for them to sort out all of the genetic defects so they could actually sell one. This one was display only. A promise to get the Chinese to write a very, very large check.

  Paris thought he could hear the scratching of the pen even now.

  The three Chinese buyers stood in front of the glass for almost half an hour. They barely said a word. Paris was patient enough to wait them out. When the spell finally lifted—though they still looked quite dazed—Paris ushered them to a small table that had been set with tea and rice cakes. The table had a view of the dragon, but it wasn’t a great view. That was Hecate’s suggestion.

  “If they can’t see the damn thing,” she’d said, “they’ll get impatient. They’ll want to close the deal so they can go back and gape at it.”

  Paris liked the tactic.

  Before the tea was drunk, before it had even begun to cool, the buyers had placed an order for three full teams of Berserkers. The total purchase price was the development price of the dragon with a whole extra zero at the end. The Chinese had been too dazzled and distracted to do more than token haggling.

  The deal closer was Paris’s promise to provide them with a dragon of their very own. Just as soon as they managed to make another one. Which, as far as he was concerned, was a couple of days before Hell froze over.

  Chapter Seventy-Six

  The Hive

  Sunday, August 29, 3:26 P.M.

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nbsp; Time Remaining on the Extinction Clock: 68 hours, 34 minutes E.S.T.

  Four guards rushed the corner and they did it the right way, laying down a barrage to stall us and then putting just enough of themselves around the corner to aim their guns high and low. It was nice.

  I threw a grenade at them.

  We ran through the smoke and screams and took the corner ourselves. The side corridor was choked with people who were fleeing back from the blast, tripping over one another, trampling the fallen, getting in the way of armed resistance. The opposite side corridor led to a ten-foot dead end and a closed door.

  “Pick your targets!” I called as I aimed and fired at a guard who had taken a shooter’s stance and was bringing his weapon to bear. My shot spun him as he pulled the trigger and his first—and only—shot punched a red hole through the leg of a hatchet-faced woman who was screaming into a wall-mounted red security phone. The woman shrieked in pain, but as she fell she pulled a .32 from a hip holster. Bunny put her down for the count.

  I heard a yell and a barrage from the other end and then I was too busy for chatter as more security began forcing their way through the flood of panicking workers. These boys had shotguns and H&K G36s and they opened up at us even though some of their own people were in the way. A whole wave of civilians went down in a hail of bullets, and we had to duck for cover because there were ten of the sonsabitches.

  “Frag out!” yelled Top and he and Bunny threw a pair of M67s. Most soldiers can lob the fourteen-ounce grenades up to forty feet, and then they’d better take cover, because the M67s have a killing radius of five meters, though I’ve seen them throw fragments over two hundred meters. We hunkered down around the corner and the blast cleared the hallway completely.

  When I did a fast-look around the corner I saw drifting smoke, tangles of broken limbs, and no movement at all.

  We got up and ran, leaped over the dead, avoided the dying, blocked out the screams, and plowed through the clouds of red-tinged smoke. A man leaned against a wall, trying to hold his face on with broken fingers. The blast had torn his clothing and blood splashed the rest, so I couldn’t tell if he was a technician or guard. He threw us a single despairing look as we passed, but there was nothing we could do for him.

  The corridor opened into a big central lobby set with exotic plants and cages of wild birds. Technicians were running everywhere creating a wild pandemonium, tripping over couches and jamming the exits so that no one got through. A knot of a dozen guards burst through a set of double doors. A big blond guy with a lantern jaw and killer’s eyes was clearly in charge, and he knew what he was about. He used the noncombatants as human shields to close with us and we had to either shoot the technicians or take unanswered fire.

  I don’t remember seeing “martyr” in my job description, but even so I didn’t want to kill anyone who didn’t need to die. It was a terrible situation that got very bad very quickly.

  “Boss . . . ?” called Bunny.

  The guards were taking shooting positions behind the screaming staff members.

  If we fell back and got into a range war with these jokers we could be here all day, and we had no idea how many more shooters they could call on. It was balls out or beat it, so I did the one thing the guards did not expect: I attacked them, up close and personal. I knew my team would follow my lead.

  The blond guy was behind a pair of women who crouched and plugged their ears and screamed, but he was too far away, so I zeroed the closest gun and I rammed my gun into his gut and fired twice. The impact jerked him a foot off the ground and I grabbed a fistful of his shirt and spun my body hard and took him with me. He hit the guy behind him hard enough to put them both on the cold terrazzo floor, and I stamped down on the second guy’s throat.

  To my left Top had closed to zero distance with a pair of shooters, and he used the same stunt as them—keeping the staff between their guns and his skin. When he was close he chucked a technician hard under the chin with the stock of his M4, and as he collided with the shooters Top shot over the falling man and hit one guard dead center. The other guard lost his gun in the collision, but he tossed the technician aside and lunged out and grabbed Top by the throat. I could see Top actually smile. Here’s a tip: never grab a good fighter with both hands, because he can hit back and you can’t block. Top dropped his chin to save his throat and put the steel-reinforced toe of his combat boot way too far into the bad guy’s nuts. Bones had to break on that kick. Top slapped away the slackening grip on his throat and chopped the stock of the rifle down on the back of the guard’s neck. Knocking him out was probably a mercy.

  I saw movement to my right and I pivoted and ducked as one of the guards came around a thick potted fern and tried to put his laser sight on me. His face exploded and I saw Bunny give me a wink.

  More people were flooding into the lobby. It was like trying to stage a firefight in the middle of a soccer riot. There had to be a hundred screaming people around us.

  I dropped two more guys and my slide locked back. I dropped it and was reaching for another mag when the big blond guard and two others came at me in a fast three-point close. If I retreated they’d have closed around me like a fist, so I drove right at the closest of them, a red-haired moose with missing front teeth. I slapped his gun hand aside with the back of my gun hand and then checked the swing to chop him across the bridge of the nose with the empty pistol. That knocked him back into me, and as his back hit my chest I pivoted like an axle, whipping us both in a tight circle that allowed me to throw him at the man in the middle. It would take the redhead a second to disentangle himself and I used that second to lunge forward and bashed him in the crotch with my pistol. I didn’t care if that hurt him, but I wanted to stall him in place; then I slammed the butt of the pistol down onto the top of his foot, feeling the metatarsals snap. Before he could even scream I shot back to my feet and put every ounce of weight and muscle I had into a rising palm strike that caught him under the chin and snapped his head back so far and so fast that he was out before he hit the ground. Maybe hurt, maybe dead, maybe I didn’t give a shit.

  The middle guy—the big blond—pushed his companion away. He’d lost his gun in the collision and as he stepped toward me he whipped a Marine KA-BAR out of a belt holster. I have a whole lot of respect for that knife, and he held it like he knew how to use it.

  The KA-BAR has an eleven-and-three-quarter-inch blade with a seven-inch sharpened clip. The point was a wicked dragon’s tooth that could pierce Kevlar like it wasn’t there. The Marines and Navy have been using it since World War II, and in the hands of an expert it has all the bone-cutting force of a Bowie knife, coupled with wicked speed. I whipped my Wilson Rapid Response folding knife out of my pocket and with a flick of the wrist snapped the blade in place. Yeah, I know it only has a three-and-three-quarter-inch blade that looked like a nail file compared to the KA-BAR, but like they say, it’s not the size of the ship but the motion on the ocean.

  The blond guy—he had a name tag on his shirt that read: “Gunther”—began circling right and left, trying to force me to move with him. He kept cutting his angles and each time he changed direction he bent his elbow a little more to make me think he was staying at the same distance while actually moving closer. It was a nice trick that I’d used myself.

  He suddenly lunged, taking a very fast half step forward and jabbing at my knife arm with the point of his blade. It was an expert’s trick. Idiots try to stab in a knife fight, and though they can sometimes bury a blade, it leaves the other guy free to deliver cut after cut before the wound takes them. This guy went for a “pick,” a micro-jab to try to injure my knife arm and take away both my offensive and defensive capabilities right away. He was lightning fast and I had to really move to evade the pick.

  I circled left and he tried it again, this time going lower and deeper before flipping his blade up, the idea there being to cut me with the clip as he pulled his blade back. Another smooth move.

  I was ready for him, though
, and as he lunged in and back I did a tap-down with the curve of my blade. My knife was very light, so I had to use a wrist flick to give it enough weight to cut, but I could feel the edge tap bone. Blood drops danced in the air as he pulled his hand back.

  The pain and surprise showed on his face, but he went immediately into another attack, this time doing a double fake and pick that caught me on the elbow and left a burning dot of pain where the flesh was thinnest.

  The panic still roiled around us, but if either of us split his focus he was a dead man. I knew that my squad was doing their job. Top and Bunny were in the thick of it, but it took a whole lot of guys to outnumber that duo.

  Gunther’s eyes held mine, and I knew that he was relying—as I was—on peripheral vision to pick his moves and his targets. We stayed in motion, always on the balls of our feet, moving like dancers in a complex and dangerous piece of choreography. When he moved, I moved; when I moved, he moved. The blades flicked out and back. Twice steel hit steel, but each time it was a glancing parry.

  When you’re fighting an expert you can win if the other guy gets emotional, if he makes a mistake, or if you bring something to the game that he doesn’t. So far Gunther wasn’t letting his emotions drive the car, and he hadn’t made a single mistake. He was bleeding from three nicks; I was bleeding from four.

  He shifted to the right and then faked back and tried for a face slash, turned that into another fake, and went into a half crouch to try to slash me across the femoral artery. The high fake almost always makes you lean backward to slip the cut, and that raises your guard away from your lower torso, exposing groin and thigh. It was beautiful; it was textbook.

  It wasn’t the right move to use on me.

  When he went for the face cut I knew it was a fake. Gunther hadn’t made a mistake—he just picked the wrong guy to try this move on. As he dropped low and went for the long reach toward my thigh I dropped with him so that his blade skittered across the gear hanging on my belt. I mirrored the arc of his cut with my own, shadowing his recoil so that my knife followed him all the way back, but I went deeper and drove the tip of my knife into the soft cleft between the bottom of his inner biceps and the upper edge of the triceps. My blade only went half an inch deep, but that was enough to open a pinhole in his brachial artery. From the way pain flashed across his face I knew that I’d nicked the medial nerve, too.