Sturm pulled her cell phone from her pocket and took several quick snapshots of the characters with the built-in camera.
“We need to keep moving,” he finally said.
She nodded her agreement and led him toward the other tunnel he had seen upon entering. He realized he had drawn his pistol and had to wonder, if his growing suspicions were correct, would he be able to look into the eyes of a little girl and pull the trigger?
TWENTY-FIVE
Seattle, Washington
12:48 p.m. PST
Sturm knew what Porter was thinking, but it couldn’t be possible. Could it? She’d been alone in there with that little girl and nothing had happened to her. She couldn’t imagine that poor child who had curled up in her lap and cried into her chest doing anything terrible to anyone. The sounds she had made …so full of fear and hopelessness…those weren’t the kinds of noises that a monster made. Were they? No. She was certain of it. But the more she truly thought about it, the more the seeds of doubt began to take root. Physically, the girl had been no different than any other child. Well, there was the odd shape of her head, so unlike any person she’d ever seen before, and the teeth, of course. While she hadn’t seen them per se, the girl’s mouth had appeared barely able to accommodate them. Now that she stepped back and looked at the girl objectively, her facial structure was markedly simian, her jaws protruding like those of a great ape. She remembered the wounds on the necks of the men aboard the Scourge and the casts she had made from them. Was it possible that those long, sharp teeth she had originally envisioned in the mouth of a silverback could fit into the skull of such a small child? And, if so, and if this lone girl was responsible for so much death, why hadn’t she attacked Sturm when she had the chance?
She was still lost in thought when a horrible stench assaulted her from somewhere ahead.
“You smell that?” Porter whispered from behind her. They were in the fourth branch of their systematic exploration of the network of tunnels, and regardless of how narrow their passage had become, he had somehow managed to stay right on her heels, his flashlight casting her shifting shadow ahead of her to where it met with the amber fan of her own beam. “You’d better be ready.”
He didn’t have to tell her. She was well acquainted with the smell of death by now and understood that every tunnel they cleared brought them closer to encountering whatever lurked down here, whether a seemingly innocent child or not. She cleared her mind of all thoughts of the coincidence and the timing of the little girl’s appearance, of the speed with which she had struck to snatch the doll from her hand, and the eerie, almost predatory sentience that had reflected the light from those pink eyes, and focused on the darkness ahead of her, which seemed to constrict her beam to a useless aura that barely stained the mote-filled, suffocating air.
The tunnel gave onto a larger room. The walls had fallen and what remained of the ceiling was tented by aged timber that barely supported the weight of the rubble above them. Her rapid breathing echoed in the confines as she rose to a crouch and scrutinized the room down her pistol sights. Even this far underground and this deep in the ruins, the flies had somehow found their way into the rear corner, where the swarm buzzed angrily at their intrusion. Their swirling ranks cast shadows on the wall, like snowflakes in a car’s high beams, above a mound of furry, festering carcasses. They teemed on the coarse gray hair and the long pink tails of at least twenty rats, their gray tongues protruded between their hooked, yellow teeth.
Sturm buried her mouth and nose in the crook of her left elbow, but the scent somehow found its way through and took up residence in her sinuses. She tried to breathe shallowly through her mouth. She was still five feet from the heap of rodents when she noticed the distinct ridges of teeth marks on their sides. It looked as though something had held them like ears of corn, by the head and the tail, and bitten right through their flanks. The viscera were gone, leaving behind cavities rimmed by the lower ribs and the hip bones. The fore and hind quarters were held together by little more than the spines, the skeletal musculature, and strips of greasy fat and fur.
Porter eased around her and added his light to hers. The rats’ eyes and the exposed connective tissue were still moist enough to glisten. They stared at the carcasses in silence until Porter finally turned away and moved toward the opposite side of the room. Sturm backed away and pointed her beam at the ceiling. There were more symbols scratched into the cribbing overhead. She snapped several photographs with her camera and nearly bumped into Porter when she turned to catch up with him. His light was directed at the ground, where the dirt had turned to mud in a wet circle around several well-formed piles of feces that roiled with black flies. It almost looked as though someone had scattered dirt on top of the mess. The stool was still moist, and so dark in color it resembled tar. Sturm’s mind raced back through her schooling to one of her many pathology classes. Bile generally dictated the color of stool, but it could be altered by any number of dietary and pathological causes. Most notably, black feces suggested a gastrointestinal bleed. This stool was positively rich with blood.
“It exsanguinated its human victims but didn’t consume them,” Porter said. “And yet it ate the rats without bleeding them first.” He shined his light across the walls, searching for another exit from the room that didn’t appear to exist. He focused his beam on the ground near the excrement and fingered something on the dirt. “What does that tell us?”
Sturm didn’t know what to think, so she let the question hang in the air until he eventually nodded to himself and crawled back toward the lone tunnel.
“We’re done here,” he said, and ducked into the metal chute.
Sturm looked back at the ground where he’d been kneeling by the dark urine-mud. At the very edge, she saw what had drawn his attention. There were faint teardrop-shaped grooves in the dirt, as though some clawed animal had attempted to kick the dirt behind it to cover its spoor. She crawled closer and held her palm over them. The marks had to have come from something not much larger than her hand, something roughly the size of a large dog’s paw…or a child’s foot.
“You coming or what?” he called back to her, his voice made tinny by the tube.
“Yeah,” she whispered. “I’m right behind you.”
She felt a sinking sensation in her stomach as she crossed the small chamber and crawled into the hole behind him, the waning aura of his light already far ahead of her.
* * *
They found several more pieces of wood carved with the strange symbols over the course of the next couple of hours, but no other signs of whatever was living down here. No tracks. No carcasses. No urine or excrement. Nothing. It was as though the chamber in which she had found the child had been set up as a den of sorts, and another established as a depository for refuse. It was arguably a human behavior model, for animals tended to have no qualms about living in close proximity to their waste.
Time seemed to fly past and stand still at the same time, separate from the outside world, which existed only as an abstraction there in the smothering darkness. Sturm had no idea how long they’d been searching and had become so disoriented by the twists and turns in the network of tunnels that when the smell reached her, she was convinced that it had to be a figment of her imagination. Until Porter stopped in front of her and tilted his face upward to savor a deep inhalation.
She smelled the sea. The unmistakable aroma of brine riding a cool breeze sweetened by ozone and a coming storm. She breathed deeply and allowed the fresh air to cleanse her from the inside out.
“Careful ahead,” Porter said. She watched his silhouette cautiously lean forward, flatten to the ground, and then slither out of sight. When she reached the point where he had disappeared, he shined his light up at her from below. “It’s about four feet down. Watch out for the lip of the opening.”
The tunnel ended abruptly in front of her where debris had smashed down through the tube into the levels below her. Porter crouched at the base of a mound of
rubble, his head nearly touching the rounded brick ceiling above him. She glanced back up and saw where the tunnel continued deeper into the ruins. The ragged metal edge tore her uniform shirt as she eased herself down onto the sharp pile of broken bricks and crawled to where Porter waited in a passage that was nothing like the others, which had all been metal chutes designed to transport fish in various states of processing from one location in the building to the next. This tunnel had a time-smoothed, paving stone floor with a central channel crusted with salt and dead algae. The walls were cribbed with ancient timber and lined with bricks to which desiccated strands of seaweed clung.
“Bootlegger’s tunnel,” Porter said. “They’re all up and down the coast, especially under downtown. A whole underground network developed during Prohibition, but you won’t find any of them on the maps. These sneaky bastards were moving more than just mackerel back in the day.”
“Thank heaven for criminals,” Sturm said.
She inhaled the clean air and felt just the faintest hint of its movement on her sweat-dampened face.
“Probably how that thing got in here in the first place,” he said. “This is going to make it much harder to contain. Especially if there are more tunnels like this one that won’t show up on any blueprints.”
“What do you mean by ‘contain’?”
“We can’t just let this thing live down here forever, can we?”
“What if it’s not a thing? What if it’s…?”
She couldn’t bring herself to vocalize the words.
“You’d better start thinking of it as a thing, Layne. A lot of people are dead. There’s no way this thing is getting out of these ruins alive. Make no mistake about that. No one’s going to allow that to happen. You know that neither you nor I can allow that to happen either. We have our jobs to do.”
He turned and walked in a crouch to the northwest, if she hadn’t lost all sense of direction. It wasn’t long before she heard shrieking gulls and grumbling waves. The walls grew damp with condensation and the channel underfoot filled with water. The light from the outside world announced itself as a pale gray glow ahead. It grew steadily brighter as they approached until it resolved into a design of golden dots. The rusted grate was covered with seaweed and detritus from the other side. It opened easily enough when Porter put his shoulder into it, the rusted hinges screaming in protest. They crawled out under an elevated wooden pier that had collapsed down into the ocean, where its remains now colonized barnacles and green slime. When they finally picked their way through the wooden wreckage and scrambled up the rocky slope to the shore, they were maybe a hundred yards from the rear verandah of the Cultural Center, maybe an eighth of a mile north of the demolished warehouses. The active harbor where the Dragnet had been moored was barely a mile up the coast.
Porter stared past the Bertha Knight Landes Center, where the workers still labored around the property. Sod nearly surrounded the building and the tables were already being set up under the tents on the new paving stones. The transformation had been far quicker than she had thought possible.
It felt like they had been underground for days, and yet the sun had hardly dipped toward the Pacific.
“What are we supposed to do now?” Sturm asked.
Porter continued to stare in the opposite direction, as though looking for something he couldn’t quite see.
“You know what we need to do, Layne.”
“What exactly are you suggesting?”
Porter sighed and struck off toward the construction frenzy.
Sturm wanted to make him say it. That way he would be forced to vocalize what he proposed, but saying the words out loud changed nothing. They had no choice in the matter. They were going to have to go back down there and make sure that no one else suffered the fate that befell the green-eyed man the night before.
They were going to have to kill the monster hiding in the guise of an innocent little girl.
TWENTY-SIX
Seattle, Washington
1:36 p.m. PST
Ritter stood at attention just inside the doorway to Spears’s office, his stare fixed somewhere out the window over Spears’s head. He’d been waiting patiently, a bill of lading clasped in his right hand.
“Yes, sir,” Spears said into the telephone. “You can trust that the situation will be resolved tonight.”
Spears rolled his eyes and sighed while the voice on the other end droned on.
“Yes, sir. I just need your assurance that we will have the location all to ourselves. I don’t believe either of us would welcome any unnecessary distractions…or attention.”
The voice on the other end was high-pitched and whiny. The last word of every sentence seemed to have an upward lilt that made it sound like everything the man said was a question rather than a statement. If there was one thing that Franklin Spears despised, it was dealing with politicians, especially ones so low on the totem pole, who somehow perpetuated the illusion that they wielded the might of demigods. Under other circumstances, he would have taken great pleasure in telling this man exactly what he thought of his pseudo-authority and just how easy it would be to get to his family, no matter when or where, but he needed the city’s cooperation for one more night. And then this glorified Rotarian could go suck on an exhaust pipe for all Spears cared. He hated kowtowing to these people, and took such displeasure from it that he vowed to exact a measure of revenge with more than his single vote somewhere down the road after being placed in the position of having to kiss the ass of a man who probably hadn’t done an honest day’s work in his entire life, let alone sacrificed for his country.
“Thank you, sir.” It took every last ounce of his restraint to keep from slamming the phone on the cradle. He closed his eyes, massaged his temples, and gestured for Ritter to approach. “Everything in place?”
“Yes, sir,” Ritter said, proffering the yellow copy of the bill. “We took delivery less than twenty-five minutes ago in building cee-one-three.”
Spears snatched the receipt from Ritter’s hand and quickly scanned it.
“That was the mayor on the phone. He just wanted to make sure that our little problem would be squared away before his fancy shindig tomorrow night.”
“He still has no idea what’s down there, does he?”
“The only thing on his mind is puckering up to the legion of sycophants. I don’t even think he’s spared a thought for the homeless people this thing is feeding on. He just wants to pump those fools for the money to finish the waterfront project so he can get himself reelected.”
“Maybe we should take him on a guided tour down there, then,” Ritter said, a smile tugging at the corner of his mouth.
“Believe me, there’s nothing I would enjoy more.” Spears tucked the bill into his desk drawer and rose from his desk. “Have you assembled our team?”
“As you requested, sir. They’re waiting for us in Hanger Three.”
“Good work, soldier.”
“I should tell you, sir, they’re a little confused as to why you didn’t put this thing down when you had the chance.”
“I won’t tolerate insubordination.”
“Nor will you get any, sir. I just figured you should know. You can’t blame them for wondering if taking this thing down is worth more to you than their lives. What with these things having killed your son and all.” He lowered his voice. “They have seen the remains in the lab, after all.”
“I was under the impression that I hired men, not little old ladies who like to gossip. They think my only interests are personal? That somehow that’s going to make me reckless, or worse, soft?”
“All I’m suggesting, sir, is that perhaps a little enticement might make such petty concerns disappear.”
Spears ground his teeth and curled his hands into fists.
“So that’s what this boils down to, is it?” Spears shoved past him toward the door. “Fine. Fifty thousand for its head. A hundred if it’s taken alive. And you’d better believe that if I he
ar anything else along these lines, there’ll be a permanent retirement ceremony. Understood?”
He didn’t wait for Ritter’s acknowledgement. He entered the elevator and pressed his thumb onto the security scanner so he could descend to the labs on the access-restricted sublevels.
“I have to make a quick stop first,” he said through the closing doors. “The team will just have to wait.”
Fuck Ritter and fuck his men. He was already paying them like kings. There was no way in hell he was going to give any of them a reward for doing their jobs. They were either loyal or they were disposable. Period. And the method of their dismissal was solely at his discretion. But any man who chose to try to leverage Spears for extra money not only wouldn’t work in this business again, he’d be lucky to find employment as a drug mule for the cartels.
The door opened and Spears stepped out into the sterile white hallway. The air was cold and smelled of disinfectant and something that reminded him of burning hair.
Damn straight this was personal. He didn’t care who thought what. But that didn’t mean he couldn’t still do what needed to be done. They were not only going to change how wars were waged, they were going to return the United States of America, the country to which he had devoted his entire life, to its former glory.
And there was no greater mission—nor one more personal—than that.
He walked directly down the corridor to the lab and burst through the door.
* * *
Predatory Instinct: A Thriller Page 16
