Ironheart (The Serenity Strain Book 2)

by Chris Pourteau

  Lauryn cursed as Stavros made the same wrong turn. She paused at the juncture with a quick glance behind as Colt caught up to her.

  “They went the wrong way,” she said, her voice much calmer than her gut.

  “There’s only one wrong way,” Colt replied, and the cawing behind them, growing ever closer, made his point for him. “Give me your pack.”

  “What?”

  “Do it! I’m out of bombs. I’ll slow them down. Go make sure Megan’s safe.”

  Lauryn locked eyes with the boy for a brief moment as the prisoners neared, and saw the same resolve in Colt’s eyes she’d shared with Mark on the rooftop. A resigned look of choice. But a look without regret this time, without a plea for forgiveness.

  “Do not sacrifice yourself, Colt!” Lauryn said, yanking the pack from her back. “Light these damned things and move your ass.”

  Colt winked, taking the bag.

  “I mean it!”

  The boy-thief turned away without speaking and dug into the backpack.

  “Caw, caw, caw!”

  She saw the angry flashlight of a hunter, amplified and spread like a floodlight by the fog. She heard heavy breathing, echoing toward them, riding the slimy stone of the tunnel between the sharp, staccato screeching of the prisoners’ call.

  Much closer now.

  Lauryn turned and followed the others down the wrong passage. She mouthed a silent prayer as dread crawled up her spine on thin, hairy legs. Dread pursued by the unshakable feeling they were all about to be trapped.

  * * *

  The explosion took the Maestro by surprise.

  It erupted from the hazy darkness ahead of him. Nails shot outward in every direction. He winced but didn’t slow his pace, and the glare from the blast betrayed the one who’d tossed it. Was it Herr Professor Stavros? He couldn’t tell, but he knew one thing—the universe was planting another signpost along his route to balancing the scales.

  A Molotov, just like the one that had scarred him and mutilated his eye. No, not like that one—this one was deadlier, hurling shrapnel. Fine, then. This was his inspiration for expediting justice. This was his sign that everything was unfolding as it should.

  Marsten saw a second fuse being lit, heard it hissing. And now he was close enough to see by the sparkling light that it wasn’t Stavros at all, damn it, just some bastard boy intent on slowing him down.

  Let me show you how it’s done, kid. Let me educate you.

  The Maestro ignored the jar lobbing through the air. He demanded more from the dynamos twisting in his head and sprint-loped forward, under and inside the arc of the descending bomb. The grenade hit, exploded, and one of the Black Hand behind him cried out as nails shredded his shins. The Maestro bore down on the boy, his left eye wide, his axe raised high. The churning worms whispered louder and louder—an eye for an eye, an eye for an eye—with each stride of his charge. He brought his axe down with all the force his muscles could muster.

  And nearly fell to his knees in the sludge and shit as the fireman’s friend sliced only air.

  “Sonofabitch! Where’d you go, boy?”

  The Weisshemden caught up to him, pausing as their leader scoured the tunnel, first right then left. The echo of their cawing slowly petered out.

  “Give me that goddamned flashlight!”

  Cackler handed it to Marsten, who cast it high and low. But he saw no sign of the teenager that’d thrown the grenades. He’d faded away, seemingly right through the walls.

  “Boss, what’s that noise? Sounds like a flood coming.” Cackler looked around worriedly to find with his eyes the shushing sound his ears were hearing. The sound of slapping feet, heavy breathing, and the humming ache of hunger that begins deep in the gut and rides up the throat on a moan of want. “Sounds like a flood of people is what it sounds like. I ain’t never heard nuthin’—”

  “Shut your jawin’ and get movin’!” roared Marsten. Robbed of his justice, he was infuriated. But he knew where he could find it. “That way! Let ’em hear you coming, boys!”

  Having caught their breath, the dozens of Weisshemden renewed their call with the whooping zeal of baying hounds.

  “Caw, caw, caw! Caw, caw, caw!”

  * * *

  She pulled Megan aside and was about to lay into her, when she noticed the almost-silence behind them. They’d emerged into some kind of bi-level, underground pumping station. Metal stairs crisscrossed upward, and Lauryn knew this place had to be aboveground. The details were dim.

  She cast her fading flashlight around them, half-hoping to find Colt running to join them. Instead, she found Eamon, bent over and trying to catch his breath. And she saw the fog blanketing the floor and rising, as heavy as she’d ever seen it. As heavy as it’d been outside that building in downtown Conroe, where they’d taken refuge the first time from Marsten. And in the momentary respite from the angry call of their pursuers, the heavy mist carried strange sounds to her ears.

  Echoes of earlier.

  “Mom, what is that?” Megan asked.

  The paranoia of feeling trapped became full-blown terror, gripping Lauryn by the back of the neck. The beam of her flashlight tripped over something nearby and she reversed her sweep.

  It was a rat, sniffing the air. The animal raised itself on its haunches, its beady eyes staring straight into her muted flashlight. Then it squeaked and ran in the other direction.

  “We need to get up high,” she said quietly, like speaking in a soft voice would make any difference. She cast her beam above them, along the gangway.

  “What? Why?” asked Eamon. He threw his own light back down the tunnel. In the not-so-distance, the prisoners had resumed their murderous cawing.

  More squeaking as more rats followed the first.

  The chittering of hungry mouths whispered out of an access tunnel across the pumping station. The wet, flat sound of bare feet smacking the semi-solid muck of the sewer grew louder. It was the same sound they’d heard earlier, when Colt pulled them up short in the tunnel.

  The same, exact sound.

  Only hundreds of times over.

  “Because there’s a horde of those Exers coming!”

  At that moment Marsten and a handful of prisoners appeared at the mouth of the tunnel behind them. There was a gleam in the psychopath’s blind, open eye.

  “Oh no,” said Eamon. “Not like this. Not like this.”

  Lauryn grabbed his arm and pulled him up as Megan mounted the rusty stairs. Jasper leapt after her, and they climbed as fast as they could, the hollow clang of old metal ringing in the large chamber.

  Enemies from two sides converged—one driven by a murderous rage, the other by insatiable hunger.

  * * *

  So focused on how close the object of his hunt was, Marsten didn’t notice the ravenous horde at first. They spewed forth from the tunnel opposite his position like ragged, desperate cockroaches. They homed in on the cawing of the whiteshirts like moths to flame.

  “Boss! Holy crap!” For once, Cackler cut himself off, pointing with a shaking hand at the creatures headed straight for them.

  “What the hell?” Marsten checked his charge. Each of the Black Hand emerged into the pumping station to stop in their tracks, confused. The Maestro watched his prey climb higher, gaining distance from him. One or two of the creatures had already mounted the ladder after them. The skeletons-in-skin might get them first.

  “Kill these bastards!” he shouted, raising his axe.

  “Caw, caw, caw!” shouted Cackler.

  The prisoners answered, charging forward as a single mob. The Slenderex cannibals met them in the middle of the chamber—black forearms reaching past slashing teeth, grey fingernails clawing at white uniforms. The cawing of crows and the starved cries of the Exers gave way to the shrieks and guttural furor of eye-gouging, hand-to-hand combat.

  A handful of the gaunt ghosts penetrated the Weisshemden’s line. Marsten swung his axe first left, then right, cleaving skulls. Bodies collapsed as corpses t
o the grimy floor and were quickly consumed by the thick, orange ground fog. His men were holding their own, Marsten saw. He felt Cackler cowering behind him.

  Bedlam reigned in the chamber as the armies clawed and bit at one another. Some of the whiteshirts stood off and fired randomly into the melee, heedless of whom their bullets hit.

  She would love this, the Maestro thought. All this chaos.

  He heard three quick pistol shots above.

  Hughes.

  “Come on, you,” he called over his shoulder. The Maestro made for the metal stairs. Cackler followed, just to keep Marsten’s protective bulk close.

  Chapter 20: Wednesday, morning.

  The narrow ladder-stairs groaned under their feet. The ground below was a murderer’s delight, where prisoners and Exers ripped each other apart. But two Exers had bypassed the fight when they saw easier prey and were lunging upward after them.

  Megan and Jasper paused on a small platform above the fray and stood watching. Eamon climbed the flight just behind them. The framework groaned, its rusty iron twisting, and the scientist grabbed onto the sides with both hands as one, then another rivet popped loose. The frame tilted, the metal stairs turned cockeyed. He placed his feet flat as vertigo looped-the-loop in his stomach.

  The groaning stopped. The ladder seemed to stabilize for a moment, and Eamon jumped the last two steps to Megan’s outstretched hand, his momentum carrying him onto the platform above.

  Lauryn was a half-landing below them, and the old iron vibrated against her palm as the Exers vaulted up the stairs behind her. She turned, aimed, and fired three times. The first cannibal jerked backward, bullet holes in its chest and head. The other behind it pushed it over the side, relentless in its pursuit of protein.

  She turned and climbed higher, firing another shot wide of its mark. As she approached the stairs that had nearly thrown Eamon into the battle below, Lauryn knew they’d never hold her and the Exers both. She imagined falling into the gristmill on the ground floor and nearly lost her footing.

  An object dropped past her and she heard the whoosh! of the frag grenade as the Mason jar shattered, its fuel and fragments tearing into the raging combatants. She turned and fired at the nearing Exer, missing again, then renewed her climb as Eamon dropped a second bomb into the melee below.

  “Keep going!” Lauryn shouted. “Megan, keep climbing!”

  She didn’t understand how there could be more stairs, but she was glad for it. The aboveground station must be hidden among the decades of vines and undergrowth and trees of Memorial Park. Her guesswork was cut short when the second Exer gained the stairs directly behind her. She aimed more carefully, fired, and the creature shrieked once and tumbled backward, its bones cracking against metal. Lauryn turned to find Eamon’s half-hanging, twisted ladder between her and the others.

  Megan was moving as Lauryn had ordered, climbing one level higher with Jasper by her side. Eamon dropped another shrapnel bomb. Lauryn stuck the .40-caliber in her belt and grabbed the corroded rails with both hands. Leaning toward the stronger side she took the stairs two at a time, willing her body weight to be less. The metal shook and shuddered but it held, and she reached the platform with a helping hand from Eamon.

  Then she saw them: Marsten, followed closely by Cackler, two flights below.

  “How many of those things you got left?” she asked.

  The scientist lit the firecracker fuse on the grenade in his hand and dropped it. He watched it fall, then burst open and fling its deadly payload into prisoner and cannibal alike. It made a hole in the tangle of fighters below, but new Weisshemden and Exers soon filled the gap with their red fury.

  “Not enough.”

  She sighted down her barrel at Marsten, trying to remember how many bullets she’d already fired.

  Fuck.

  Her other clips were in the backpack she’d handed to Colt.

  “Me either,” she said, pulling the trigger.

  * * *

  The bullet plinked rust from the gangway near his hand, and Marsten yanked it back, throwing a hate-filled look at Hughes. He dived as a second shot rang out, his face grating on the flaky red iron of the gangway. He heard a squawking gasp behind him and turned to see Cackler, a look of utter disbelief on his face, topple backward into the arms of a cannibal below.

  So long, loudmouth, mused the Maestro. The raggedy-asses would be on him soon enough. Nowhere to go but up. He regained his feet, grabbed up his axe, and saw any immediate danger from Hughes was past. She and Herr Professor Stavros were following the whelp and their damned dog up.

  The raggedy-asses on the stairs were busy with their latest meal.

  He had time.

  The Maestro dragged his injured leg up the stairs, his axe tolling like a dull bell against the metal surface of the stairs.

  * * *

  “I’m out!” yelled Eamon. Dropping his empty backpack, he attempted to follow Megan.

  Lauryn had no idea how many bullets were left in her pistol, but at least there were no more Exers between them and Marsten. If they could just find the way out, maybe they could escape this stinking murder hole.

  Stupid, stupid, should’ve never come with Stavros, should’ve never listened to any of them.

  “Just keep going!”

  Above, they heard the metal groaning. Jasper barked furiously.

  The twisting and breaking of weakened iron.

  The shearing sound that sickens your spine.

  Megan screaming.

  Lauryn halted and looked up to see the horror every parent dreads—a child about to die.

  Megan hung from the gangway, her feet dangling in the empty air. Jasper stood over her, barking incessantly.

  “Megan!” Lauryn’s voice pitched into panic. She was unable to look away. Eamon stood in front of her, voiceless and paralyzed.

  “Get out of my way, get out of my way!”

  She pushed past him, nearly knocking him over the side of the stairs, frantically trying to reach her daughter.

  A scream above, descending.

  Lauryn’s eyes unable to unsee. Her own scream, shredding her heart.

  Megan, plummeting to her death.

  * * *

  The Maestro looked up when he heard the girl’s scream. He saw her dangling above him, fallen through a jutting hole in the stairs of the upper level. She was moments away from slipping.

  Two simultaneous thoughts occupied Marsten’s mind as he watched the girl’s sweaty fingers lose their purchase.

  Watched gravity do its work.

  Watched her fall.

  Thoughts streaked across the worm-riddled terrain of his psychopathic brain, while events in the world outside his head seemed to move in slow motion.

  The first thought: the strongest sense of déjà vu he’d ever had in his life. The feeling that he was reliving a moment. As she dropped like a stone, as she screamed, as Marsten watched Hughes watching her daughter fall and heard a mother’s agony tearing her throat, a knowing smile spread across his grizzled face. Because he knew this was the final signpost.

  The balance to the rooftop two days before, he realized. Where justice was denied.

  The worms turned.

  The second thought: the Lady’s pouting, patronizing disappointment when she learned her prize was dead, either crushed in the fall or pulled apart, piece by piece, and eaten by cannibals after she hit the floor. His second failure to secure her precious key.

  The worms twisted.

  Without malice of forethought, without consideration at all, Marsten dropped the axe and lunged. Oblivious to the pain in his thigh, he acted on instinct beyond impulse, heaving himself forward on the shuddering gangway. Marsten opened his massive arms wide. When Megan landed in his grasp, the force of the fifty-foot drop and the weakness in his left leg drove the Maestro to his knees.

  Justice delivered, he thought as he held her weight against his chest.

  Marsten stood, gathering up the trembling waif of a girl and pausing
to search out the mother above. He found revulsion, relief, and realization dawn as one in Lauryn’s face. Happiness, horror, and utter helplessness. All in a single stricken expression of understanding.

  You lose.

  Marsten looked down at the teenager in his arms, who stared back at his evil eye, her little, delicious teen mouth open in shock and disgust—as if she couldn’t decide whether to celebrate her rescue or protest her capture. Her expression, like her mother’s, gave Marsten physical pleasure. Just like pulling that little girl out from under the bed had, so many years ago.

  “Let her go, Marsten!”

  “Peter! I can still help you!”

  The pleas, spoken at the same time, made the Maestro laugh. He stared up at Herr Professor Stavros’s guilt-ridden face, at Officer Hughes and her half-lifted weapon. He could see it: she wanted to shoot him right there, dead in the head, but was afraid of hitting her daughter. He lifted the girl up to protect himself.

  A heroic fireman’s pose, he realized. To go along with the axe.

  For a third time, the worms tilled the soil of his graveyard mind.

  Bring me the child, he heard Id say in his memory, and the mother will follow. And she will be the instrument of his assimilation of this world. Of all worlds.

  And his own mind answered.

  Justice deferred. For now.

  He scouted below and saw that the Black Hand and the raggedy-assed mob had nearly annihilated each other. Most of the ground was on fire. No, not the ground. The carpet of corpses covering the ground.

  Burning.

  The acrid smell of roasting flesh rose all around him. The skeletons-in-skin still standing were falling back through the hole they’d crawled from, a handful of remaining Weisshemden chasing them. Sporadic gunfire from the pursuers echoed in the tunnel. The room was suddenly empty of all save Marsten and his prize, Hughes and Stavros.

  And two of the mob, who were tearing apart their lean meal once named Cackler. The scarecrow’s mouth stretched open, agape in some final no-doubt longwinded protest uttered before he’d been eviscerated.