“Yeah,” I mumbled. “Guy gave me a—a card and a sammich. Said I should come around, you’d help me out.”
“Absolutely! Let’s just have you sign in.”
She gestured to a clipboard on the edge of the desk. The sheet on top was filled with scribbled names, just two vacant spaces left at the bottom of the page. Judging from the dates, they’d had more than a few visitors in the last couple of days. I wondered where they were right now. I reached for the pen, then froze.
The plastic glistened. It was wet, a trap waiting to be sprung.
I looked up at her and gave an apologetic shrug. “I, uh…I don’t know how t’write so good.”
“It’s okay! Just do your best, sweetie. You can even just draw a little X if you want.”
Picking up that pen meant getting a dose of the Missionary’s zombie juice straight through the skin of my fingers, just like when I’d taken his business card. On the other hand, the effects from my first exposure had only lasted about fifteen minutes. If I kept myself together, I could probably ride it out. The receptionist wasn’t going to take no for an answer, and I was about five seconds from blowing my own cover.
I picked up the pen, scribbled an X, and dropped it as fast as I could. The familiar tingling numbness hit me in seconds, making my fingers go slack.
Remember the numbness, I told myself. If you’re numb, you’re not yourself. Remember that!
Strangely, though, it didn’t seem as important as it had a minute ago. I couldn’t remember why I was so worried. The receptionist leaned over and clicked a little white button on her desk intercom.
“That’s perfect, sweetie! Now you just wait one second, right there, and somebody will come along to help you out.”
I waited. It felt like a good idea.
The door behind her desk swung open, and the Missionary came out with a big smile and a hearty “Hey there, buddy!” He’d traded in his street ensemble for a pristine white lab coat and thick white latex gloves. I thought, on some level, that his new outfit should concern me, but I couldn’t figure out why. He was such a nice guy, why worry about it? His tranquil blue eyes, so big and expressive, welcomed me in.
“I am so glad you came,” he told me. “Are you hungry? It’s almost lunchtime! Come on back with me. Let’s get you taken care of.”
He led me down a green-walled corridor lined with crisp white tiles. The air smelled like Listerine and mothballs. We paused by a rolling cart stocked with supplies from a clinic: cotton swabs, tongue depressors, bandages, and a glass jar with a shiny chrome lid.
“Just one last thing, buddy,” he said. “Stand right there, real still, okay?”
He pulled back the lid on the jar. Green glittery dust sparkled inside, like ground glass from a church window.
My thoughts squeezed through my brain like molasses, my reactions confused, like a deer trapped in the headlights of an oncoming car. I had just enough time to realize what was coming, but not enough time to stop it. He dipped his gloved fingers into the jar, raised them to his lips, and blew. The dust hit my face and I impulsively jerked back, inhaling sharply, pulling it in through my mouth and nose.
The world turned into an oil painting. Colors faded and blurred and ran like melted wax. My body went numb, and under the numbness came a wriggling itching feeling all over my body, like centipedes under my skin. My ears rang with a slow dull droning like a wordless lullaby.
“That’s better, friend. Let’s put you with the others,” I heard the Missionary say as he put his hand on my back, steering me up the corridor. Sure. Put me with the others. That sounded fine.
Steel bars rattled. A cell door slid open. Bodies moved all around me, drifting aimlessly or just standing still, wavering on their feet. I walked until I came to a cinder-block wall, and then I stopped and stared at it. The block in front of my face had so many tiny ripples, imperfections in the concrete, and I wanted to count them all. That seemed like a fine thing to do.
“His mind is not in his mind,” a voice whispered off to my side. It echoed, the reverb bouncing around inside my cotton-candy skull. I looked to my left and squinted.
The smoke-faced men hovered before me, their polished black leather Oxfords dangling an inch above the floor of the cell. The rest of the room was a blur of blobs and smears, but they stood out as if drawn onto the skin of the world with a calligrapher’s pen.
“Yes,” the other said. “He can hear us now.”
Fifteen
I’d only seen them once before, in the tortured memories of Eugene Planck’s dreams. They’d appeared to Lauren Carmichael in Nepal, taught her the arts of a sorcerer, and handed her the Ring of Solomon. They’d groomed her for twenty years, guiding her pursuit of power, but it was all a long con: she would have accidentally jump-started the apocalypse if we hadn’t been there to stop her.
“Objection!” said one of the men, his words buzzing like the thrum of a thousand flies’ wings flurrying in concert. His face was a blur of smoke, a break in reality. He wore a smock and mortarboard like an old-time professor, while his companion dressed in Armani black.
“Lauren and we are un-hello!” the other shrilled. “She couldn’t fail properly! Some planetary disassembly required!”
I tried to answer, but the zombie powder had my words locked in a vice. My tongue felt fat, numb and useless in my mouth, like a dead slug.
“We had to destroy the village to save the village,” the professor buzzed. “Burn out the infection. We were not in the tomb. We did not give her the ring.”
“We do not believe in marriage! Only divorce! Are you on our frequency, Kenneth?”
I shook my head, mute. I could feel them scrabbling at my mind, trying to take hold—no, trying to explain. They wanted to show me something, but they didn’t know how to talk and I didn’t know how to listen.
“Get your mind right,” the professor said, “and come see us. We will teach you gardening skills. There are strange weeds to be pulled.”
“Limited-time offer!” the other buzzed. “Act now or forever hold your peace!”
“What’s another word for life abundant, Faust? What’s another word for life abundant?”
I rubbed at my forehead. My numb fingers slicked off beadlets of hot sweat, like oil on rubber.
“When you know the word, you will know your enemy,” the professor said. “But not if you die here. Wake up! Wake up and go deaf!”
Their images faded, turning blurry and vague at the edges. I felt my thoughts slowly returning as the dose of the Missionary’s powder passed its peak and ebbed away.
“Come and find us,” the professor droned. “We have to show you—”
Then they were gone. I blinked, trying to focus my eyes, struggling to make sense of the world. The drugs in my system were wearing off, but they were still strong enough to keep my brain locked in a straitjacket.
“Line up!” a gruff voice shouted. “Lunchtime! You’re hungry! Take a sandwich and eat it!”
I stood at the end of a ragged line. I wasn’t sure how many of us there were, squeezed into the prison cell, and nobody talked. We shuffled ahead, one at a time, as a man in camouflage fatigues shoved sandwiches into our hands. My stomach grumbled, and I staggered toward the back of the cell, eager to eat. I hoped I remembered how.
“You?” a voice whispered. “Holy shit, it is you! Dan, hey, focus!”
I didn’t want to focus. I wanted to eat. The first man had said I was hungry, and I was. I ignored the new voice and lifted the sandwich, but rough hands tore it away from me and snapped their fingers in my ear.
“Don’t eat that shit! They lace the food, that’s how they keep you stupid. Hey, you listening? You remember me? Eric, from the storm tunnels!”
He grabbed my chin and turned my face toward him. He looked more ragged than the last time I’d seen him, with bloodshot eyes and a week’s worth of scraggly chestnut beard, but his face sparked something in the back of my mind.
The Stacy Pankow murder. T
he job that had put me on a head-on collision with Lauren and her cult. I’d gone down into the tunnels under Vegas to check out an alleged drowning, and found an enraged wraith instead.
“You were…” I started to say, forcing my numb tongue and lips to move. “Down there.”
He nodded fast. “Yeah, yeah, and you took care of that little girl. Whatever you did, man, you laid her to rest.”
I didn’t lay Stacy’s soul to rest. I sent her to hell. It wasn’t my finest hour.
“You’re magic, aren’t you?” Eric whispered. He shot a look over toward the sandwich line, making sure nobody was listening. “You really are. We need you, man. We need you now.”
“Can’t…can’t think right. Head’s not attached to the rest of me.”
Eric squeezed my shoulder hard and marched me to the back corner of the cell. He pushed me down, and I sat on the cold stone floor. He squatted beside me.
“It doesn’t last long,” he whispered. “That’s why they keep feeding us that shit. Another hour and you’ll be sharp again. I figured it out. Got a couple of other guys to stop eating, too. Leroy and Bull, they’re wide-awake and ready to throw down, but we need a plan. We’ve just been playacting, pretending to be zombies like the rest of these guys while we try and figure out how to get out of here. We ain’t eaten in three days, Dan. I don’t know how much longer we can hold out.”
A screech ripped through the air. It wasn’t human.
It came from somewhere beyond the bars, farther than my blurred vision could see. A second screech set my teeth on edge. It sounded like a pterodactyl getting its wings sawed off.
“And that’s why,” Eric whispered. His face went ash gray.
“What?” was all I managed to say, but the question was obvious.
He shook his head. “They take two or three of us a day, one at a time, up that hallway. Nobody ever comes back. You just hear the screaming. I think it’s like that horror movie, man. The one where those sick fucks pay a million dollars to torture somebody?”
I didn’t have the heart or the words to tell him the truth. Whatever was going on here, it was probably far, far worse than that.
“Just sit here and rest a minute.” Eric looked deep into my eyes. “I’m gonna go tell the others. I was scared as hell, but man, now that you’re here? Now I know everything’s gonna be all right.”
He left me there, carrying that weight on my shoulders while I waited for my senses to swim back through the fog.
My vision came first. I was in a cell about twenty feet by twenty feet, with maybe a dozen prisoners. No windows, and beige-painted bars straight out of a county jail. The room stank of fear and stale piss. Outside, a corridor ran off in both directions, but I couldn’t see where it led. Now and again a guard strolled past, dressed in fatigues and toting a matte-black rifle that looked like something out of a science fiction movie. He barely paid us any attention beyond the occasional glance of contempt.
Eric came back with two other guys and made quiet introductions. Leroy was a big bruiser with a pug nose while Bull was short with a shaved head and a bad attitude. The kind of guy who starts bar fights to prove himself, and usually wins.
“Guard sweeps by every five minutes,” Eric whispered as we huddled in the back of the cell, “so we gotta talk fast.”
Bull gave me a hard look. “Eric says you can get us out of here. That true?”
“Do my best,” I said. “What are we up against? How many guards?”
“Too many,” Leroy said. “I know these fuckers. One rolled up his sleeves, and I saw the triangle tat on his arm. Xerxes. I was in Desert Storm, Fifth Engineer Battalion, that’s where I remember seeing that logo. These guys? They’re fuckin’ mercenaries. They got no right to operate on American soil.”
Bull curled his lip. “They do if this is a government facility. Think about it, bro. It’s a FEMA camp, just like I been warning you for years.”
Xerxes. Now I knew why the Nevada Heritage Coalition was making secret payments to a private military contractor. They needed help keeping their dirty business under wraps. I wondered if the crew that had ambushed us out in Chloride had tattoos on their arms, too.
“These guys are hard as nails,” Leroy said. “Their gear is no joke, either. Those rifles they’re toting? Tavor TAR-21s. Chop you up like a fuckin’ Ginsu on full auto.”
“What about a bum-rush?” I said. “Wait for them to open the gate, then we jump the guards?”
Bull and Leroy gave Eric a look. Eric turned to me like a doctor about to tell a patient he has terminal cancer.
Eric shook his head slowly. “Look up.”
I followed his gaze to the sprinkler heads set into the ceiling. There were at least four of them in the cell, more than I’d expect for a fire-control system, but innocent enough.
“The guards think we’re all zombies, so they feel safe shooting their mouths off in front of us. They had a new guy who was bellyaching about, you know, what happens if the cops get wind of what’s going down. The other guard said they can always get more bums, so in case of an emergency—any emergency—the number-one priority is getting rid of the evidence.”
“Get rid of it, how?” I said.
Eric nodded upward. “That sprinkler system isn’t for fires. It runs to a pair of hundred-gallon tanks on the other side of that wall. The tanks are full of concentrated sodium hydroxide.”
“Lye,” Bull said. “If the alarm goes off, for any reason, everyone in this cell melts.”
I leaned my head back against the cinder-block wall and closed my eyes.
“Then we need to up our timetable,” I said.
“Yeah? Why’s that?” Eric said.
“Because I’m just the advance scout. The FBI knows about this place, and in less than twenty-four hours, they’re going to kick in the front door. If we’re still in this cell when they do, we’re all dead men.”
Sixteen
A metallic bang echoed from up the hallway, followed by another inhuman screech. Then a scream of pain, this one all too human, ending in a ragged gurgle.
“Containment breach in two,” a placid voice said over a loudspeaker as a klaxon whined. “Calling all hands for immediate termination protocol. Containment breach in two.”
My stomach clenched as we looked up at the sprinkler heads, poised and ready to rain down with caustic death.
“Door’s closed,” Eric said, squinting at the bars. “That’s not for us.”
Something was coming. A slithering wet stomp sounded from the corridor, and the air filled with the stench of rotting meat.
“Not us,” I whispered. “The breach was the other room. The one where they’re taking people.”
Whatever I’d imagined was slouching its way toward our cell, screeching and limping and hitting the walls with meaty thuds, the reality was worse. The creature rounded the corner and came into sight, turning its eyeless head to face the cage and its prisoners like a butcher eying a fresh slab of meat.
It might have been human, once. It walked on two legs, though one dragged behind it, a bloated and rubbery tube of puckered flesh that twisted and bent like a crazy straw. It had two arms, though one wept with pestilent sores and the other, flailing bonelessly, was lined with hungry little mouths whose yellowed and broken teeth chomped at the rancid air. Its head and chest were overgrown with purple and black tumors and pustules the size of golf balls. The growths blistered and swelled, as if breathing on their own.
The creature forced its arm between the bars of the cell and wrapped itself around the neck of the nearest prisoner, hauling him close. Even lost in a drugged haze, the poor bastard found the voice to scream as a dozen sets of teeth clamped onto his skin and started chewing.
A pair of double doors at the other end of the hall burst open. Four men in camo ran in, two dropping to one knee and the other two aiming high, swinging their rifles toward the cell bars. I had just enough time to wave the others back toward the wall before a hurricane of bullets jackhammer
ed through the air and left me half-blind in the muzzle flash. The creature’s pustules exploded in the fusillade, splashing yellow pus and black blood across the bars, and it slumped to the ground still clutching its bullet-riddled victim. Another prisoner’s corpse sprawled on the concrete nearby, his skull blown open by a stray round.
“Zombie up!” I hissed, prompting Eric, Leroy, and Bull to wipe the looks of horror off their faces and play listless. The other prisoners stayed where they stood, wavering on drugged feet as if nothing had happened at all.
“Jesus Christ!” shouted a voice from up the hallway. An older man in a long white lab coat and mirrored glasses stomped into view, flailing his arms as he took in the wreckage. He had a disheveled mop of black hair and fat, puffy lips that curled in disgust. “What are you idiots doing? We could have contained this.”
“They’re doin’ their bloody job,” said the scowling man who came in behind the guards. His fatigues were crisp and his black leather boots polished to a shine, his back ramrod-straight and his eyes hard enough to cut glass. He wore his salt-and-pepper hair in a buzz cut, and his accent was pure Cockney.
“Their job? Their job is to obliterate a successful test subject and potentially contaminate half the facility? Look at this mess!”
The military man waved his men back, ignoring the comment. “You done good, lads. None o’ you got any of that shite on you, right? Good. Back to your posts.”
“We’re going to need a full toxic scrub here,” the man in the lab coat fretted, his eyes concealed behind his glasses. “An atmospheric workup—”
“Oh, come off it and quit your grousing. The only mess here is comin’ out of your lab. If this is what you call a success, you’re a long way from getting paid.”
The man in the coat strode up to him, poking a slender finger against his chest as he spoke.
“Pardon me, Major, but I think I know a little more about the intricacies of this project than some hired gun. What we’re attempting here, on a quantum-chaos scale, has literally never been—”
The major’s hand shot out in a blur, locking around the other man’s finger like he was snatching a fly with a pair of chopsticks. The man in the coat yelped as his finger bent backward, slowly, hovering just shy of the breaking point.
Daniel Faust 03 - The Living End Page 10
