Son of Cerberus (The Unusual Operations Division Book 2)

by Jacob Hammes

  “What?” the man said in a high, scratchy voice. “You don’t think you’ll have room this trip?”

  “What is he getting on about?” Henry asked. “You think we’re here to help you move?”

  “If you’re here, it’s to help me move. I don’t know what the boss told you, but we’re evacuating this location today. I was supposed to be gone yesterday, but I couldn’t move the samples without preparing them or they would die.”

  “Okay,” Marcus said, playing along. “Where do we start?”

  “Down those stairs,” the disgruntled doctor-like man said, opening the door the rest of the way so that they could step inside. The interior was much different than what they had pictured it would be. Cement walls went at least two stories beneath ground. Through the center of the room ran a small stream of water. It entered through one wall and exited through the far one as quietly as if it had never existed. There were work stations that had been emptied, yet some still had what looked like medical equipment. Beakers, bags of solution, and hoses were aplenty.

  “Where are the samples?” Cynthia asked. “I’d like to take a look at them before we load them up.”

  “Ah yes,” the mysterious man in the lab coat said. “They’re in their respective containers and ready to be moved. I just need some strong young gentlemen like yourselves to help me get them up the stairs. Then we can get them to the boat and be done with this whole mess.”

  The three teammates followed the crazy-haired guy down the stairs, noting that he stank of sulfur. At the bottom of the stairs, they made their way around a corner to where a door had been hiding. It looked as if the door was one that had come off an old restaurant refrigeration unit. It was at least eight feet high and six feet wide, silver and full of stickers that ranged from ‘hazardous’ to ‘lethal bacteria inside’.

  Their unlikely guide threw the door open without a second thought as to what the stickers said. Inside was something Marcus had never anticipated seeing in his entire life. Along the wall there were mason jars filled with a strange blue liquid. Inside the liquid, suspended as if in glue, floated a single pink mass. It was no larger than a centimeter in total, yet something about them seemed horrifying.

  Marcus walked closer to one, unable to keep his curiosity at bay. As he did, he realized Cynthia and Henry were doing the same thing. As they got closer, they noticed what the strange allure to these jars were—the pink blob on the inside was moving.

  “What are these?” Marcus asked, not worried as to whether or not the man would catch them for who they truly were.

  “You must be really new,” the man said. “The product of countless years of work; our newest children. This is what all the trouble is about. They are the path to stop global hunger, a way to cure all diseases. It’s our way to the stars, or other dimensions…to cure ourselves of humanity and all that troubles us. These little buggers, in essence, are who and what we work for.”

  “Could you explain that in a way that doesn’t confuse us,” Cynthia said, inching closer to the blue goo inside the Mason jar.

  “You are new, aren’t you,” he said, frowning at Cynthia’s obvious ignorance. “They are our newest children—the offspring of the master. Haven’t you undergone the transference yet?”

  “No,” Henry said. “We decided to keep our humanity.”

  The doctor eyed them suspiciously for a moment before shrugging.

  “I cannot blame you,” he said. “We will eventually be outmoded, you know. I did not take one on either. I have seen the change myself—people are never the same after they take on the kinsman. Though they gain so much knowledge, they are no longer themselves. It’s as if the kinsman use their host as only a body and a library while the host’s consciousness dies.

  “Though I yearn for knowledge, I much enjoy being myself.”

  Marcus backed up suddenly, understanding what the man was talking about.

  “These are the bacteria that have been infecting people,” Marcus said incredulously. “These are not bacteria.”

  “No,” the man said, confused by Marcus’s poor choice of wording. “I’ve never been privy to the true story of how they came to be here, but they are not bacteria. They are living entities, capable of remembering the history of anyone who has ever been born into their society. Like little hard drives interconnected using networks of invisible cables. They may truly be the most powerful entity in existence.”

  “Jesus,” Cynthia said, grabbing for her cellular telephone to take a picture.

  “You’re not the movers,” the man finally caught on, edging back toward the door. Henry smiled as the man bumped into his folded arms. “You’re not part of the Kin of Cerberus at all, are you?”

  “The Kin of Cerberus,” Marcus tried it out. “Can’t say we’ve ever heard of them.”

  “And you never should.” The scientist looked frightened now, as if he were trapped in a room with a bunch of people he didn’t want to be trapped with.

  “The Kin of Cerberus have done nothing but good for the world. We, this secret society, have kept monsters at bay for countless years now. You shouldn’t be meddling in things you don’t understand.”

  “Why don’t you give us a little rundown on all the ‘good’ you’ve done,” Marcus said sarcastically.

  “More importantly, what are you talking about with all that network mumbo jumbo,” Cynthia said.

  “The kinsman,” the doctor licked his lips, “I’ll tell you nothing about them.”

  “Oh,” Henry said, eyeing his pistol from top to bottom, slowly, so that the doctor would get the point.

  “Are you threatening me?”

  “Yep,” Cynthia said, picking one of the jars up and shaking it violently.

  “Stop,” the doctor said fervently. “I’ll tell you whatever you want, just leave them alone. They claim to be from another world—sent here hundreds of years ago to track our progress as a species. I don’t really know where they come from, but they do have miraculous abilities.”

  “Such as?” Henry tapped his foot.

  “Such as the ability to operate off of a hive-mind for information, while performing duties separately.”

  “Hive mind,” Marcus said quietly. “All learning from one?”

  “Like a cloud drive for the mind,” the doctor nodded emphatically. “They store every piece of information gathered throughout the years. They are then capable of pulling from that information at any time.”

  “So what good has come from this?” Henry asked seriously. “You said they’ve done a lot of good for the world—what?”

  “You think we could make such rapid improvements in modern technology on our own?” The doctor seemed to lose himself for a moment. “We’re on the verge of things humans once couldn’t even fathom. Space travel was possible so quickly after the first man grasped the concept of flight, yet no one ever bothers to think of why?”

  “You infect hosts with this.” Marcus pulled his eyes away from the little dot. “I’m assuming it’s a parasite that speeds up the degeneration of the body by decades, and you’re telling me that you’ve been keeping monsters at bay. Why would I think this is, in any way, a good thing?”

  “We’re not infecting people,” the scientist tried to respond.

  “We’ve seen first-hand what these little guys do to the inside of a body,” Cynthia cut him off, anger flooding her face. “Organs look like sun-dried raisins, disease sets in, and the body seems to shut down early. These little bastards are jumping from body to body, too. Now that I’ve seen the true magnitude of how many thousands of these things there are, I only have one word to describe what I feel—horrified.”

  “How would you know anything of what we’re doing here?” The caretaker of the little pink dots was getting agitated. “You may have heard of the one disruption to our long-running operation, but that will never happen again. The transfer process has since been perfected. No longer will our little masters have to swap bodies so often. Soon, they will live l
ong and healthy lives alongside their hosts.”

  “Little masters?” Cynthia said, anger spreading across her face. “What the hell are you talking about? You’re infecting people with diseases, named diseases…diseases that take people and change them, and you’re trying to justify it?”

  “You don’t get it,” said the small, bespectacled scientist, his voice dripping with fear. “We are not infecting people.”

  “So you’re simply letting the bug do the infecting,” Henry said, grabbing the man by the arms.

  “No,” the scientist stammered. “We’re trying to save a species that would have otherwise been lost decades ago. It’s the only known species of its kind. We have no idea where it has come from, no idea how it got here, but we know one thing—it’s not something we created.”

  “It,” Marcus said curiously. “It, being a small pink dot, doesn’t seem like it would know much that would help us as a species.”

  “You don’t get it,” he tried again. “Within that small life form comes the knowledge of every past life that it has lived. It holds the keys to centuries lost, to secrets untold… It will unlock the way to the stars, pave our freedom from this world. Allowing it a host is merely paying it back for what it will be giving us. It will save our world.”

  “And how do you go about extracting this information from a blob of flesh?”

  “It isn’t extracted,” the scientist sputtered, finally managing to look indignant. “It’s given, freely. Once the host is inside a body, the two become as one.”

  “One,” Henry said, allowing the weight of what the man was saying to sink in. “So these little guys are memory chips in a computer that can live in symbiosis?”

  “A rather obscure reference to an unrelated event,” the scientist said, looking perturbed again. “We all have five fingers, two arms and two legs, a mouth, a nose, two eyes, and two ears. Each of those just so happen to be connected to the same body, yet they work independent of one another. We don’t have to concentrate on our toes to move them, nor do we have to command our fingers to grip a bottle one finger at a time. We are one—we think and eat and breathe as one organism. It is the same for these creatures, once fully integrated into our own bodies.

  “And the horrible side effects you’re referring to, they are in the past… One has to crack a few eggs, and all that.”

  “You know that’s not true,” Marcus said. “You know these little things destroy the person they live inside. That’s why those people changed in the past. That’s why people didn’t even recognize them, like a man who has had a lobotomy.”

  “But the machine—” the scientist started. “It doesn’t destroy the human aspect of the vessel. It preserves it, allows our kinsmen to fully integrate. Without it, the transition is much more difficult.”

  “And the people who are not infected?” Marcus asked. “How does it fair for them? They end up killing themselves and others. That doesn’t sound like a good trade to me.”

  “It’s the product of decades of research,” he stammered. “It’s not perfect, but—“

  A door opened somewhere above them. The sound of men speaking another language floated down to meet them. Suddenly, this basement setting was not the best place for them to be standing.

  “And what about the wounds?” Marcus ignored the sound of the door opening. He closed in on the doctor, fire burning in his eyes.

  “The transfer,” he responded quietly. “It takes specific drugs to help it go so quickly. They burn the flesh if they leak out of the vein.”

  “The vein,” Marcus growled.

  “Ayudame,” yelled the scientist, sensing he had reached the end of his rope. “Help.”

  Henry smacked him on the side of the head with an open hand, sending him stumbling forward and grabbing his ear.

  The sound of footsteps coming down the stairs quickly followed, meaning the ‘movers’ were probably on their way down to help the mad scientist after all.

  “God damnit,” Marcus said, pulling his pistol out from beneath his coat. Cynthia and Henry both followed suit, happier to have a weapon in hand than one hiding in this situation.

  “Please don’t bother, I’m quite alright,” Marcus said, trying his hardest to mimic the scientist’s voice.

  “That’s not how I sound,” the mimicked party said from deeper in the freezer-like holding area.

  “Who is there with you?” someone said from outside the freezer. “We saw another car outside and wondered what is going on.”

  “We’re federal agents here to investigate the involvement of this facility in the disappearance of a girl,” Henry said, poking his head out to look at the individuals approaching. “We’ve got a federal warrant, which means we’re here legally.”

  “Perhaps your laws are different than ours,” one of the men said. “Do you belong to the Unusual Operations Division of the NSA? If so, you should not be here.”

  “Unfortunately for both of us, we’re already here,” Henry continued, using his hands to communicate to Cynthia and Marcus that there were five armed men in total. Cynthia’s eyes darted nervously between her boss and Henry. Something bad was about to go down, she just wanted assurance she was going to be doing the right thing if she shot someone.

  Henry smiled at her as he pulled the slide back on his own black Glock. She did the same, giving a wink as she did.

  Marcus grabbed the scientist from where he was cowering on is haunches, just inside the door. Pushing him out in front of Marcus, he stepped away from cover to face the men. Not all of them had their weapons out, but three of them did. Three was enough to make Marcus somewhat nervous.

  “You should probably put those weapons down,” he said, holding onto the shirt of the scientist so he couldn’t run away. “We’re here on a federal warrant. That means if anything happens to us, you’ll have a thousand cops descend on this facility within ten minutes.”

  The men looked around for a moment, wondering what they should do. That was when one man stepped forward. Taller than the rest, bigger than the others, and gruesomely ugly, the individual looking down the barrel of the biggest nose Marcus had ever seen was fearsome and utterly fearless.

  “You bluff,” he said, spitting on the ground before him. “You don’t have any wires, so who will come to find you? You don’t have any cell phones that you’re going to be using here, so who will be calling the cops? And there are only, I presume, a few of you compared to the five of us. What do you want to do?”

  “I’d like for all of us to leave here alive,” Marcus said, jostling the 1911 in his hand. “But I fear you’re making that improbable.”

  “Improbable is a stretch,” said the giant, his accent coming through.

  Marcus saw a picture being painted before him. For one, the giant had a smile creeping across his hideously ugly face. The pock marks decorating his cheeks dimpled in as his lips pulled tight. A man beside him reached beneath his shirt for what Marcus figured was a pistol, or a knife, or any other sort of weapon. The other man who didn’t have his weapon had already pulled it out and was tossing the pistol back and forth between his hands.

  The other men looked around suspiciously, waiting on their leader to act. Marcus didn’t see a way out of this that did not shed blood. Everything seemed as if it were in slow motion for just a moment as he pondered all the outcomes of this fight.

  “You sure you want to kill federal agents?” Marcus said,

  “Yes. Besides, we’ll be gone soon anyway,” the man said, surging suddenly into action. With one hand, he pulled the slide back on his giant pistol. The Desert Eagle, a completely impractical weapon by any standard, was something that Marcus had shot a few times. It had the kick of a mule but the punch of a rocket launcher. Anything standing in its way would be obliterated by the giant projectiles being loosed at rapid velocity.

  Marcus didn’t have any choices left. In a move much quicker than the big man could manage, he raised his pistol and let one round off. With incredible aim, he m
anaged to pierce the man through the center of his chest, blowing his heart into a quivering lump of useless flesh. Before anyone could react, Marcus managed to squeeze three more rounds off as he spun around and dove for cover.

  He could barely see through the corner of his eye that one man was falling to the ground as he dove, still squeezing off rounds toward the enemy. Whoever had shot him had managed to take a large chunk of his skull off. Bullets started tearing through everything as Marcus fell behind the cover of the freezer. His teammates laid down a thick blanket of covering fire as the men tried their hardest to find a place to hide.

  Marcus realized he had been grazed when he landed on something that caused him too much pain. Looking down, he saw a small puddle of red leaking out of his side, though it wasn’t anything he could worry himself with now. Instead, he ripped a small piece of his coat off and shoved it painfully into the wound.

  “You okay?” Henry said, ducking as a round pinged off the steel beside his head.

  “Fine,” Marcus said, chancing a glance at the gash. “We need an exit.”

  “An exit,” Henry said, hardly flinching as another round pinged off the doorway. “What a novel idea.”

  Cynthia was hard at work. She didn’t mind killing the small beings inside the blue goo, as their attackers had obviously thrown all caution about their valuable ‘cargo’ out the window. She shoved a huge batch off the side of one long steel table and flipped it up on its side. Marcus had enough adrenaline flowing through him to not notice the gash in his side and in a moment he was up and helping her.

  Henry pulled the trigger on his pistol using only well-placed shots. Hot lead flew from the end of the gun and tore through tables, man, bone, and flesh like it was all made of butter. Of the five men, two were still standing while a third was busy dragging himself behind a barrier.

  Marcus had two more tables stacked in front of the one Cynthia had dumped, making three stainless steel barriers that they could hide behind. Henry stayed where he was, making sure that none of his body parts were showing around the corner of the doorway.