by Curran, Tim
Something big.
Tommy let out a little gasp and Mitch and Harry just tensed right up. Whatever was up there, it was heavy, the roof popping with metallic sounds as it moved around like it was trying to get comfortable. Tommy had slowed, but now he sped up a bit, not really knowing what else he could do. It was too dangerous with all the vehicles and what not around to try any fancy TV sort of maneuvering.
“Just keep us moving,” Mitch said, his voice dry and cracked like he’d been chewing on salted peanuts and needed something to wet his whistle. He brought up his Remington auto-loader, but mainly to have a weapon in his hands. He wasn’t about to play hero and shoot through the roof; he could just about imagine all those pellets bouncing off the roof and tearing into them.
More popping sounds and then something else that rose above the constant murmur of the falling rain: a squealing, almost mewling sort of sound that made everyone tense, brought out the gooseflesh at the backs of their necks. It was quiet up there after that and they had no true way of knowing whether their guest was still present or had gone elsewhere. Which put them in an awkward position, for sooner or later they would have to get out and the idea of that was frightening to say the least. Mitch just hoped it was gone, because although it sounded like something from a bad movie, he was firmly of the school that there were certain things sane eyes should not see.
And especially at this place.
About that time, Tommy realized his window was open a crack. He closed it real quick, his Adam’s Apple bobbing up and down as he tried to swallow something down. All three men were sweating now. It was growing moist and warm in the truck cab. Tommy thumbed the AC button and it cooled off right away, but that hardly solved their problem.
They were starting up the hill to Doc Frankenstein’s place, as Mitch began to think of it. Problem with the old doc was that he had gotten senile and forgotten to latch the cages of his pets. Now they were wandering everywhere.
Their guest was still present.
A thudding sound from overhead proved that much. It came again and again and the roof dented in slightly.
“Holy shit,” Harry said.
And then it showed itself…or part of itself. Something long and serpentine came sliding down the driver’s side window. It looked almost like a tentacle, but there were no suckers or anything on it. It was perfectly smooth and mottled gray and pink like it was shedding its skin. Tommy pulled away from the window. It coiled at the glass, about as big around as an arm, smearing the rain and leaving bits of itself stuck to the glass. Then it retreated and several more limbs spilled over the outside of the window. Some of them were jointed like the legs of a cricket and at least one of them looked something like a human arm but with no hand at the end.
There was another thudding and their guest took off.
Mitch caught a quick glimpse of it…something huge and bulbous with a hundred trailing appendages. It veered off into the rain, but he could not say it flew off, just maybe drifted away like it was filled with helium.
“I’m for getting the hell out of here,” Tommy said.
Harry nodded. “I second that. Take me back to Slayhoke. It’s too scary out here.”
Mitch found himself laughing at that. It had to be the most absurd thing he’d ever heard anyone say and being Tommy Kastle’s friend all these years, he’d heard some pretty damn absurd things.
Tommy said, “I ever tell you about that cousin of mine with the third nipple?”
Mitch laughed nervously.
“It’s true,” he said. “My cousin Kathy. Kathy Dolin. When I was ten I spent the summer with my cousins in Streator, Illinois. Goddamn hot, I remember that. One night, my cousin Joe said, you wanna see something and I said, sure. Kathy was taking a bath. There was a coat closet on the other side of the tub and you could see through a crack in the caulking, see somebody in the tub. I saw that nipple, swear to God. Kathy had some pretty big pillows on her, but right in-between them, there was another nipple, looked like maybe it hadn’t really took.”
Harry was giggling.
Mitch said, “And what’s the point of that story, Tommy?”
“Pretty obvious, ain’t it?” he said. “There are certain things man was not meant to look upon. Like what’s inside that building ahead.”
He drove them up to the fence, but the gate was locked.
“I guess we walk from here,” he said.
They got out into the water, that building looming up above them. They took their guns, a couple flashlights, and two Coleman lanterns they had taken from Mitch’s garage. The main gate was locked, but they slipped in through a smaller gate that wasn’t. They huffed it up the drive and to the main entrance. There was a little guard shack out front. A soldier with an MP armband was sitting in there, slouched in his chair. His flesh had oozed off him like hot cheese, was stuck to the floor and walls in a webby mess.
At the door, they paused.
“Go ahead, Mitch,” Tommy said. “This is your party.”
14
Of course, the front door was locked.
They’d gotten through too many entrances already, so there was bound to be one that wouldn’t let them in. This was it. All of Fort Providence was high security, but this place, this building, was especially so. Just a steel-faced door with a small slit of thick one-way glass at the top. There was a slot where you could insert your ID card if you happened to have one, but other than that, you weren’t getting in. And there was not a single window that they could see.
“What now?” Tommy said.
“We just go around the side,” Harry explained. “Where the fire was. Should be open there.”
It was a plan.
At least they were out of the water now, that was something. Though it wasn’t like they were going to dry out any time soon with the rain pelting them. Mitch leading, they moved through the wet grass, the rain running down their faces. Patches of groundfog blew around them. But other than the rain, there was no sound to be heard. Just that same dead silence that was eerie and unearthly. They could tell themselves that they were alone, but they knew better than that. Maybe there weren’t any people around as such, but there were other things. Awful things that they just did not want to meet up with.
The building was cut from brick, whitewashed and windowless, boxy in shape. There were cameras set out, listening devices, motion detectors…not that any of them were much good any longer being that there was no one to monitor them. Generally, there was a smell of dankness and rot, but now and again they smelled that acrid odor of the yellow rain. Something that was very frightening, because if it came down suddenly, they were done for. There was no cover to be had anywhere.
“Pick it up,” Mitch told them.
But it was not easy. Their clothes were so heavy and wet they seemed to weigh a hundred pounds. They trudged along behind Mitch until the scene of that burned wreckage came into view. Whatever had exploded, it had destroyed not only that jutting wing, but a good section of the main building. What they were seeing were crisscrossed blackened beams, rubble, and twisted metal scattered in some great heap. They found a few bodies in there cremated right down to the skeletons. Lots of mangled conduits and pipes, the shattered remains of what might have been machinery.
“Look at that,” Harry said.
Above, on the roof, there were a dozen crows sitting up there, stretching their wings and clacking their beaks. In the rain, you couldn’t see much of them. They were just perched up there like they were looking for something to descend upon.
“Something alive, anyway,” Tommy said.
But Mitch didn’t think so. “Look over there.”
Another body just around the side of some metal drum, boiled to slop like the others. There were three of those crows on it, pulling out strands of pulpy meat with their beaks. That was bad enough, but as they looked closer they could see that those birds were not right. Their hides were threadbare and you could see the bones through them. One of them had ve
ry little flesh on its head and you could plainly see the skull beneath, one eye socket with a black eyeball, the other empty. They flapped their wings and kept pecking and picking.
“Lead on,” Tommy said. “I’ve had enough.”
Mitch ducked under a burnt arch of wood, climbed over a pile of bricks and slid down the other side, leapfrogging iron beams and a spiderwebbing of pipes and melted hoses. And as he did so he was thinking that whatever had gone up here, whatever had exploded, it had let loose an incredible amount of energy and an incredible amount of heat. He was seeing that wrecked machinery and a lot of the metal was actually fused, lots of glass melted in to unrecognizable shapes. There were times as they picked through those ruins that he thought the whole thing would come down on top of them. But finally they made it, climbing over a collapsed wall and sliding beneath jagged sheets of cracked plasterboard.
And then they were in.
Great sheets of plastic were hung from ceiling to floor to keep the wind and rain out of the rest of the complex. There were a couple more bodies here, soldiers apparently, reduced to a sort of mush that had absolutely nothing to do with the fire. Their skeletons looked like they were trying to climb out of the doughy paste their flesh had been reduced to. Carpets of moss were growing out of their mouths.
“What the hell did this?” Harry asked, wrinkling his nose at the smell which was not so much organic decay but something hot and moist like plaster rot, the stink of old houses threaded with wood blight. “That rain? It turned their skins to goddamn gruel? Looks like fucking Malt-O-Meal.”
“Ground zero,” was all Mitch could say about it, a blanket explanation that explained absolutely nothing.
“Here’s another one,” Tommy said.
This one might have been a woman judging from the long brown hair hanging from its scalp. And although her hair was only mildly singed, her flesh had gone liquid and mushy like the others. She was like some morbid wax effigy that had been lit up and then put out just as it began to melt, her flesh sinking into the skeleton below, her fleshless jaws locked in a scream. One hand was reaching out to them, a laminated plastic ID card in it that looked like a credit card.
“C’mon,” Mitch said.
They pushed aside the plastic sheeting and found themselves in a long corridor studded with offices, the walls black from the heat and smoke damage. The base had its own power supply and it was still running. A few lights were on overhead, but most were not. It was gloomy in there, their footsteps echoing out. At the end, they passed through a door and came into some sort of lobby. There were a bank of elevators, but you needed an ID card to operate them. But there was a directory on the wall. And although the complex was only single story, there had to be four or five levels below ground. The lowest, no doubt, being the most secure and contained.
Tommy read from the directory. “Let’s see…do we want biochemistry or embryology? That’s downstairs. Then we got developmental biology and cell biology, bioengineering and nanoscience…what are we looking for?”
“Nanoscience?” Harry said. “I saw that shit on the Discovery Channel. They let little mechanical bugs loose in you to repair things, repair your cells.”
“I’m betting what these eggheads have been doing here won’t make the Discovery Channel…except maybe on Halloween night,” Tommy said.
They found the stairs leading below, but the doors were locked and again you needed an ID card to get down there. The doors were three-inch steel and there was no way in hell a four-ten or twenty-gauge shotgun would do more than scratch them.
“What now?” Tommy said.
Harry had that one covered, though. “That woman out there…she had an ID card in her hand.”
“You wanna get it?” Mitch asked him. “I don’t think I want to touch her.”
“Shit, I worked the prison mortuary, that stuff don’t shake me.”
“Use a rag or something to grab it, Harry,” Mitch warned him. “She might be contaminated with something.”
“Got ya.”
Harry raced off. Despite his soaking wet clothes, he moved off very fast. But unlike Tommy and Mitch, here was a guy who worked the weights every day and did a hundred-and-fifty pushups before breakfast. He was in peak condition. Fighting condition, as you had to be to survive in his world.
Tommy and Mitch lit cigarettes, avoiding looking at each other.
“If I was Harry,” Tommy said, “I’d run and keep running. Steal the truck and get the hell out of here. That’s what I’d do.”
“He won’t.”
“No…I don’t think he will.” Tommy pulled off his cigarette. “What about Chrissy, Mitch? I mean, yeah, I want some answers, but what about the kid? This isn’t helping us find the kid.”
Mitch didn’t say anything to that.
What was there to say? Should he try and make Tommy realize that this was important in ways he couldn’t adequately put into words? That like Wanda Sepperly had told him this was very necessary, them coming here? She had said it was all circular. That all roads would connect in the end. That to get to Chrissy he would have to follow roads that seemed to lead nowhere, but they would link him to her in the end. There was no point trying to explain things he didn’t even understand himself. He trusted in what Wanda said. He had to; he simply didn’t have any other choice.
None of it made sense and yet, in his guts, it all did. Somehow.
Just as Harry Teal was part of it, so was this.
“We’ll find my girl, Tommy. I know we will.”
Tommy exhaled smoke. “You know this is going to be bad, don’t you? What we see below?”
“Yeah, I know.”
“You can feel it like I can?”
“Yes.”
And he could. It was thick in his mouth, that taste of fear, like sucking on copper pennies…metallic and sharp and unpleasant. There was a smell here that had little to do with putrescence or death, this was bigger than that, older than that. The smell of blackness and pain, insanity and spiritual evil.
Harry came back with the card which looked shiny and new. “I wiped it off with a rag,” he said. There was a barcode on the back. He inserted it into the slot and the door clicked. “There we go.”
Mitch led the way through and down the iron steps to the next lower level. Again, Harry had to insert his card. The door opened and they passed into a corridor that was completely dark. They lit the lanterns right away, hoping they’d see some light switches ahead. The air was decidedly foul and corrupt, moist and hard to breathe. Something had gotten out of control here and this was its smell.
Holding the lanterns, they moved down the corridor. There were no doors on either wall, just a set of heavy steel doors at the end. Again, the ID card opened them and out came a nauseating, hot wave of decomposition that made them turn away, swallow their guts back down.
“Oh, Jesus,” Harry said. “That stink.”
They moved in there, each wondering what sort of awful vapors they might be breathing, but none of them wanted to turn back. There was discovery ahead, the sort of things no man…or precious few…had ever been allowed to see. The room they were in was large with white walls, three doors set into it. They used the card again and went off through the one on the right that said PATHOLOGY over the doorway. The room was circular and tiled in green, set out with trays of surgical instruments, stainless steel slabs with drains set into them, cabinets of chemicals. Scales and specimen jars.
“Looks like an autopsy room,” Tommy said.
There were no bodies or anything in there, but lots of tell-tale stains on the floor and on those slabs. The air smelled of alcohol and preservatives. You could just image the sort of nasty things that went on there, but there was nothing much to see. They went through a set of double doors at the back like the kind that lead into restaurant kitchens. This room was even bigger. Set along one wall were the mouths of brick ovens and along the other were huge circular iron doors set into steel faces that gleamed. The smell in there was o
ld, but unsettling. The stink of burned things and ashes.
“This is a crematorium,” Tommy said. “I don’t know about those brick ovens, but those steel hatches are for sliding bodies into…to cremate them.”
Nobody doubted what he said.
They moved around with their lanterns held aloft, shadows jumping around them. There was a coating of fine gray ash on the floor. They didn’t open the circular iron doors, but inside those brick ovens there were great heaps of cinders and blackened remains. You got the feeling that somebody had been burning a lot of something and very quickly, hadn’t cared much about the mess they were making. Which made Mitch think of those concentration camps in Europe, how the Nazis has been incinerating bodies as fast as they could before the Allies moved in. The air was dusty and gritty, left a dry film on your tongue.
“Can we get out of here?” Tommy said.
Mitch led them through another door and this room was narrow with shelving running from floor to ceiling along both walls. There were leaden, rubberized coffins heaped all over the place. But the shelves themselves were crowded with zippered body bags. Harry went right over to a few of them, took hold of the straps.
“There’s remains in these,” he announced.
Many were full and many were not. But nobody had to tell them that these were the remains of soldiers shipped back from Iraq and other terrible places where American sons and daughters were dropping like flies. This is what the government was doing with them. Not all of them, of course. Many were shipped to their families, but many were not. They ended up here to be used as raw materials for whatever line of research the Army Medical Command was pursuing. The nature of which must have been shocking beyond belief.
“This is sick,” Tommy said. “I mean, this is really fucking sick. You die for your country and this is the respect they show you in the end.”
“Are you surprised?” Harry said. “Are you really surprised?”
But he wasn’t, none of them were. You tried to be a good American, you tried even to be patriotic at times. You hung your flag out on Veteran’s Day and Memorial Day, the Fourth of July. You tried not to be too hard on your leaders even though you knew, down deep, that they were dirty and manipulative, spinmasters and bureaucrats and out-and-out liars. But you tried to trust them, you tried to believe in them, you tried to tell yourself that there were not dirty backroom politics going on. You did your best to support wars that were unnecessary and bloody and costly, had no true purpose that you could see. And this is what it got you. This is how the puppetmasters pulled your strings and wasted your sons and daughters, pissed on the flag and the constitution they were supposed to uphold. And when the mask was stripped away at midnight, regardless of party affiliations, what you saw was ugly and brutal and squirming. Absolute power corrupts absolutely, as they said.
