A glance showed me that these guards also wore heavy rings.
I holstered my gun and used the BAMS unit to sniff the air. The lights glowed a reassuring green. When Top, Bunny, and I had encountered our first God Machine, it had belched out a witch’s brew of toxins, including a hitherto unknown strain of the Spanish flu. We all got sick and I nearly died. I was planning on lighting a candle to whichever saint was in charge of keeping idiots like me safe. Or, safe-ish, anyway. There were no obvious microscopic monsters here. Did that mean they hadn’t turned it on yet? Or had found a way to prevent those sorts of things from happening? No way to tell until Bug and Nikki tore apart the data I’d sent, and there was a whole damn lot of it to sort through.
I wondered how they were doing with the hunt for Valen Oruraka and Gadyuka. I hoped like hell there would be a clear scent to follow once we got back from Russia. Shooting the guards hadn’t resolved my anger management issues.
The room with the two dead guys held nothing of interest, so I moved down the right-hand side of the T-junction. I switched the BAMS to my left hand and drew my gun with my right. The other room was a large lab with rows of computers, workstations, locked file cabinets, and a massive glass-enclosed hot room in the center fitted with a revolving-door airlock complete with steam and disinfectant spray jets. There was a medium-sized vault inside the hot room, but I was not wearing a hazmat suit. There were plenty on hooks by the entrance, but that was going to take more time than I had.
Ghost came up beside me. Dogs react mostly to smell and hearing; slightly less so to sight. There was no sound or odor, but he came to point and stared at what lay on the table. I glanced down and saw that once more all the hair stood up on his neck. His low growl of anger and defiance was laced with fear. The hairs on the back of my neck stood up, too. Any thoughts I might have entertained about the rest of the day making more sense died right there. I touched my bodycam to make sure it was on.
There, against the far wall, was a second secure chamber, also glass-fronted. It was forty feet long and ten feet high, and inside there were stainless steel dissecting tables and heavy-duty shelves above them on which were huge clear specimen jars.
The world seemed to dwindle down to that chamber and what it held. My mouth went dry, but I tapped my earbud to get the TOC and managed to croak out a few words.
“Tell me you’re seeing this.”
I heard Doc Holliday say, “What the hell is that?”
“Kind of hoping you’d be able to tell me.”
At a glance, from across the room and on the other side of the glassed-in hot room, it looked like a tentacle. Now, standing five feet away, with a crystal-clear wall between me and it, I was positive no marine biologist would hang that label on it. It was at least fifteen feet long, and had been torn off at the thick end. Torn, not cut. The flesh looked … chewed. A shark, maybe? If so, it had a hell of a big bite.
The thing was enormous. Easily four feet thick at the tear, tapering only a little to about two-thirds that thickness at the undamaged end. There were rows of huge suckers on it. But, unlike an octopus, the suckers were not all on one side. They covered the entire thing. A little bit of high school biology crept back to me, telling me that this was actually an arm, not a tentacle, because tentacles have suckers only near the end, while a cephalopod’s arms have suckers the whole length. But not on all sides. I was sure of that.
And the suckers themselves were … wrong. Octopus, squid, and cuttlefish suckers are round, with an outer rim and a hollow cavity inside. These are all made of muscle and covered with something like a cuticle to protect the flesh. It’s the flexing of powerful muscles in the suckers that crushes prey and tears it apart.
That’s not what I was seeing here. The suckers were round, yes, but the inner cavities were not hollow. Fuck no. They were lined all around with row upon row upon row of small, sharp teeth. Actual teeth. Or, maybe fangs was the right word.
The end of the tentacle was worse, though. It did not end in blunt flesh like an octopus’s or even a paddle like a squid’s. Instead it terminated with a clutch of bony, hooked things that looked like claws. I stood there and stared at it. And I’m sure everyone back at the TOC was staring, too. No one said a word.
I glanced up at the specimen jars. There were parts of the thing that corresponded with surgical gouges in the flesh. But there were other things, too. Creatures that looked like deformed crabs or lobsters. They floated—dead, I hoped—in liquid.
The crustaceans and the cephalopod—if those words even applied—were similar in one regard, though. They were mottled and armored like the back of a Louisiana alligator; and they were colored in a hundred different shades of green. And not merely green … buried between the knobs and bumps on the strange skin I saw tiny glints of something else. I risked a closer look, bending toward the glass, peering to see what I did not want to see. Light was sparkling off the sharp tips and edges of pieces of green crystal. Without going inside the tank I couldn’t tell if the pieces had been forced into place or whether they were in some way a part of this thing. Maybe they were like barnacles. But they looked so orderly in their placement that it was almost as if they had grown out through the mottled flesh.
When I could speak I said, “Doc? What. The fuck. Am I looking at?”
“God almighty,” was her only coherent reply.
Then there was another voice on the line. Junie. “Don’t touch it, for God’s sake, Joe. I mean Cowboy. Don’t go near it.”
“There is not one chance in hell,” I said, backing away. “I wouldn’t go in there at gunpoint.”
Before anyone could gather herself to say anything more, a situation alert bell bing-bonged in my ear and then Duffy broke into the call.
“Spartan to Cowboy,” he said in a fierce whisper, “be advised, we got company. Three big SUVs just pulled into the parking lot and a whole team has deployed. Count eighteen hostiles. Civilian clothes, but they’re all locked and loaded. Automatic weapons. Six heading for the front door, six each heading to the side door and the rear loading bay. Looks like a raid. We must have tripped an alarm somewhere.”
“Copy that,” I said, then cycled over to the full team channel and repeated what Duffy had said. “Echo Team, abort mission. Retrieve all gear that you can. Burn what you can’t take with you. Do it now.”
I stood for a long moment looking at the thing on the table, at the specimens in the jars. Something about this triggered a memory that was either too deep to grab, or one that did not want me to pull it into the light. Things from dreams, from nightmares. Images from the fevered hallucinations I’d had while the Spanish flu was burning me alive. Ghost stood up and placed his front paws on the glass and snarled with unfiltered hate. He was so upset, so angry, so scared, that his whole body trembled with it and he was panting.
“Ghost…,” I said gently, and he turned his head and gave me a werewolf growl. I patted my thigh and he looked at me without a trace of recognition, still wrapped up in whatever complex emotions were tearing at him. I called his name again, but his eyes were glassy and strange.
So, I tried it another way. I straightened and snapped my fingers, loud as a gunshot. “Ghost. Come.” I put all of my voice of command into it. He flinched and blinked and the feral look in his eyes flickered. All those thousands of hours of training him ever since he was young; the combat simulations and then the missions. All of the hell we’d run through together. All of the blood and smoke and gunfire. All of the times we limped off the field when damn near everyone else was dead. All of that was hardwired into him on a deep, deep level. It went deeper than his fear, the way it does with all good soldiers.
He dropped to all fours and trotted over to me, turned, and sat down by my side. Ready. In position. With me. We both took a lingering look at the horrors and mysteries behind the glass. Then we looked at each other.
Then we got the hell out of there.
CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED ELEVEN
THE HANGAR
FLOYD BENNETT FIELD
BROOKLYN, NEW YORK
Doc Holliday pointed to the picture of the tentacle that still filled one of the big viewscreens in the TOC. Her finger trembled visibly.
“What in hell is that?”
When no one answered, she swung the finger around and pointed to one of her lab techs. “You. Get to a terminal, call up image recognition, and cross-reference with the fossil record database and any other source you can access. I want to know everything about that thing, all the way down to the size of its dick, and I want it in the next ten minutes.”
The tech literally broke into a dead run.
She pivoted and speared another tech with her glare. “You, I want a different search. Go into art files and other image sources. If someone so much as doodled that thing on a cocktail napkin, I want a full report. Move!”
She kept rattling orders. Junie stood and watched, finally impressed by Doc Holliday. Until now she had been getting very frustrated by the woman’s reluctance to think outside of the box. That had been a flaw in Dr. Hu’s makeup; Bill Hu had flatly refused to believe in the possibility of extraterrestrial life until the unfolding Extinction Machine case forced him to. Foot-dragging was always tedious to Junie, but ten times more so when Joe’s life was on the line.
When Doc paused to gasp in a breath, Junie asked, “How can I help?”
Doc looked around, clearly seeing no one else that she needed to make jump. She turned back to Junie. “If there’s more I need to know, then damn well tell me. I am officially open for business in every possible way. We got big green Reptilians, madness-inducing green crystals, interdimensional gateways, and giant alien tentacles. I think we can declare my skepticism dead and damn well buried. So … as Joe is so fond of saying … hit me.”
CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED TWELVE
PUSHKIN DYNAMICS
VOSTOCHNY DISTRICT
RUSSIA
There is a popular military acronym: SNAFU. It stands for “situation normal, all fucked up.” Some people will insist it’s “fouled” up, but it’s not. It’s fucked. As we pretty much were.
Duffy said that the newcomers were massing at the doors but had not yet breached. “Not sure what they’re waiting for, Cowboy. No breaching tools that I can see, but they haven’t touched the hand scanner or keycard box. Wait. One guy in the front has his hand to his ear. Think he’s talking to someone, maybe getting orders. I’ll send a bird drone over to try and eavesdrop.”
“Bug,” I asked, “can you hack the transmission on the new players?”
“Working on it, Cowboy,” he said, and I could hear him hammering on his keyboard. “It’s some kind of cyclical scrambler. Something new and spiffy.”
“Ticktock,” said Top. “I’ve got guards coming.”
“Me, too,” said Bunny, “but they’re still on slow foot patrol. No one seems to be running. No alarms going off inside. What gives? Are the jokers outside on their side or did someone else just buy into this poker game?”
“Unknown,” I said. “Don’t even know if the rent-a-cops up there knew about the pro ballers I ran into.”
“Guys outside look like serious players,” warned Duffy.
“Call the play,” suggested Top.
“I—”
That was all I got out, because suddenly there was a sound. Very loud, very odd, impossible to really describe. Kind of a gigantic whooooomp!
It shook the entire building with such force that my immediate reaction was: Bomb. But it wasn’t. I’ve heard thousands of explosions, from firecrackers up to fuel-air cluster bombs. This wasn’t like any blast I’d ever heard. It was softer, more compressed. Close to the sound of something very large and flat being forcibly slammed down on a flat table, with the sound of impact softened by the air as it is forced to escape. Like that, but not like that. It was also something that vibrated everything. I felt it like a punch to the breastbone. It hurt my heart and buckled my legs, and I went down into a duck walk that ended with me on my knees, crammed up against the corridor wall. Ghost belly flopped and skidded past me. We both froze there, gasping. Feeling momentarily battered and sick. All of the alarms in the entire building went off at once.
Smith, outside, was the first to call in. “Cowboy, was that an explosion? It looked like the whole damn building shook.”
“I … I don’t—” But again I was interrupted.
“Spartan to Cowboy,” yelled Duffy. “Be advised, you have hostiles coming in all three doors.”
In the distance, I could hear gunfire. And screams.
So many screams.
CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED THIRTEEN
PUSHKIN DYNAMICS
VOSTOCHNY DISTRICT
RUSSIA
Soft exfil my shiny white ass.
“Cowboy to Echo Team,” I yelled as I struggled back to my feet. “Cleared to go weapons hot. Hard exfil. Repeat, hard exfil.”
I whipped the door open and ran into the hall with Ghost at my heels. There was no one in sight, but in the distance, coming from several other parts of the building, I could hear the gunfire. Various calibers. Shouts in Russian, some in English, all too muffled to understand. The screams were not the high-pitched shrieks of pain. Not exactly. I’ve heard enough battlefield injury cries to know them in their various intensities, and this wasn’t that. This was more like madhouse screeching. Filled with power and raw emotion.
I heard one voice shouting “Zatknis! Zatknis!” Over and over again. Shut up. No one seemed to be responding to him, though. His voice was rising to a hysterical pitch and sounded odd. Wrong.
Then there was another, louder voice bellowing at my men to stand down. From the barrage of responding gunfire it was clear my guys weren’t all that much in a stand-down kind of mood.
“Ghost,” I said, “find Sergeant Rock. Shield. Shield. Shield.”
My dog was trained to locate my team by real names or combat call signs, and he bounded forward toward the left end of the corridor and I raced after. We were halfway down the hall toward our intended exit route when a door opened and two men stepped out of a stairwell. Both were dressed in identical black suits, both carried automatic rifles. Soldiers, not guards. They immediately swung their barrels toward us and began shooting. What happened next occurred all inside the bubble of a cracked half second.
A bullet punched into my hip and slammed me halfway around.
White-hot pain exploded in every nerve—but even with its intensity I knew that the round hadn’t penetrated. The Kevlar and spider silk had done their job, and the impact-dampeners had sloughed off some of the force. There was impact pain but not the hot burning agony of a bullet passing through.
I used the impact to spin me all the way around and came out of it shooting. The two soldiers split left and right and my rounds chased them. Ghost was already moving, having launched himself at them before their fingers had squeezed the triggers. He was a white missile; all teeth and claws and savage intent. The closest man went crashing back against the wall. I corrected my aim and used my pistol to put two center mass in the other guy. He was not wearing the most advanced shock-absorbing, bullet-stopping body armor currently available, and I was firing armor-piercing rounds. He sat down and died, his gun hitting the polished floor and sliding ten feet.
All of that. Done in a heartbeat.
I wheeled to see if Ghost needed help.
He didn’t.
It takes a little bit of time for him to wrestle a guy down and subdue him if the command was to “own.” Killing is always quicker. It simplifies the math.
I limped forward, feeling for damage. My hip hurt like a bastard, but it held. Nothing broken, I thought, then heard a glassy rattle. When I checked the pouch on my upper thigh, I found that the round had smashed the green crystal gun I’d taken from Yuri’s safe. It was in a hundred pieces and some jagged ends had slashed through the Faraday bag. None had sliced through my trousers, though, so there was that. I debated throwing it the hell away because—let’s face it
—green crystals in any form were beginning to freak me the fuck out. But before I could do that, there was noise from inside the stairwell and I did a quick-look around the doorway to see a third man coming up fast, gun socketed into his shoulder. I shot him twice in the face and he tumbled back down.
The moment became instantly still as I listened for more immediate threats. Nothing close to hand; all of the weird screams and sounds of battle were downstairs and in remote parts of the building. Even so, there was an odd little flicker inside my head and heart as I looked at the three dead men, and for the strangest moment I saw my own face superimposed over theirs. And in that fragment of a second, I wished it was me lying there with my brains blown out. With all of my bad memories splattered across the floor. An ugly little voice seemed to whisper to me.
That’s how the pain ends. Miss the next shot. Pause for a heartbeat and all of this goes away. Helen and Grace and your mom … they’re all waiting for you.
It stopped me. Chilled me. Horrified me.
Because that inner voice was mine. Or … one of my voices. It was the Modern Man aspect of my fractured personality. The civilized part of me. The one who would have been dominant if Helen and I had never been attacked. Maybe the real me. The Modern Man was not a killer, not a soldier, not a cop. He wasn’t part of anything that happened in my life after Helen. Nothing. He was stalled at the ending point of my innocence, standing on that cliff edge.
Never once in all my life had he ever spoken so harshly, so savagely, to me. Never once in my life had he made so goddamn much sense.
Let it end and be free, he told me.
The Cop part of my mind rose up and began to talk, to reason, to construct arguments against that kind of insane thinking, but he was howled down by the Killer. Guilt, heartbreak, despair were all as foreign to him as the kind of weariness of spirit I heard in the Modern Man’s voice. The Killer threw back his head and roared an inarticulate challenge. In hatred and defiance.
Deep Silence Page 37
