—BRIEFING BOOK: CODE NAME: NIGHTMARE PET
LEVEL THREE
Bell burst through the stairwell door, putting as much distance between herself and Book as she could. She knew he was bugnuts enough to look at being a six-foot lizard as a bright spot on his résumé.
She hadn’t signed on for that. And even though Graves had locked the Site down, there were still ways out. She knew the place as well as he did. Maybe better.
She would never use the hypo he’d given her. She had her sidearm, and she’d put that in her mouth first. All she had to do was make it to the surface.
The elevators wouldn’t be anything but coffins now. The stairwells would be full of Snakeheads. There were only one alternate route. She just had to get there alive.
She heard a tack-tack-tack on the floor behind her. She glanced back, and realized she wasn’t merely running now.
She was running from something.
A lone Snakehead was bounding after her, using arms and legs, on all fours.
Bell grabbed her gun, but the tack-tack-tack stopped. Oh shit, she thought, in the split second before the Snakehead landed on her. It had leaped through the air and taken her down.
The A/A fatigues had incorporated body armor, which protected her a bit. But it wouldn’t keep the Snakehead from chewing through her neck.
She managed to flip over and get her hand up, but her gun was somewhere far away, and the creature was lunging in for the kill.
Something grabbed it by the snout. Something yanked hard, pulling its jaws back toward the ceiling, until the creature’s head touched its back. Bones snapped through the scales at its throat.
The Snakehead was tossed aside, out of her field of vision.
Bell only really got scared then.
Cade stood above her. She looked into his eyes. And if he was frightening before, now he was terrifying. Because now he was angry, and he let her see it.
LEVEL FIVE
Hewitt and Reynolds were the only ones inside the Black Site who were not trapped. They could fold themselves into shadows and emerge outside at any time they wanted.
But to them, the sounds of pain and torment, the rending and tearing of human flesh, were like grand opera delivered via cocaine injection. Everywhere they went, there was more to see, more to hear, more to sense.
The Shadowmen hung on the walls and watched as the Snakeheads ran down former friends, coworkers and prisoners alike. Some died fast, while others began the insanely painful process of turning.
The Snakeheads had little interest in the Shadowmen. In fact, they seemed to actively avoid the darkness, as if they knew something even more unnatural lurked there.
It didn’t reduce the Shadowmen’s fascination one bit. They were like kids in a toy store, promising, “Just five more minutes, just five more minutes.”
The Shadowmen found an empty corridor. The cells had already been picked clean by the Snakeheads. Only bodies and the echoes of screams remained.
Then they saw Barrows cautiously working his way down the cell block, looking for an exit.
Behind the darkness that hid their faces, both Hewitt and Reynolds broke out into huge smiles.
They’d never liked that little prick.
Their talents were not as obvious as Cade’s. Their abilities were not made for direct confrontations.
But there were other punishments, other tortures than the merely physical.
And they finally had Zach where they wanted him: alone.
LEVEL TWO
Book picked up the vial Graves left for him with only a moment’s hesitation.
Bell ran out of the office as fast as she could.
She knew him better than he thought.
Book sat in an office chair in front of Graves’s desk. He was only playing at making a decision, he knew. He sat there not because he had anything to consider, but because he was scared.
For the first time in years, he could admit that to himself. He was frightened.
He wasn’t a sociopath, despite all he’d done. Book was capable of feeling things. There were times, undercover or in a fight, when he felt fear. You’d have to be an idiot not to. It never stayed with him, never kept him up nights.
But what was in the vial frightened him.
He saw, for the first time, how small and petty he was compared to the predator waiting in that vial to be born. His rage, his viciousness, his power to harm—these were the things he’d used to make his way in the world, and to convince himself he was truly strong enough, bad enough, to make the world step out of his way. In the end, it was nothing more than the mewling cry of an infant who was not held enough, who was not given the toys he wanted or the attention he demanded.
But he looked into the vial and saw real strength. The creature inside was indifferent to the suffering it caused because that would imply it cared about its victims. Its power was untainted. It was stronger, and it fed off the weak. It had no need to prove itself. There was no wish for peace at its source, no secret wound to be healed. It simply killed, and did so because it was made to kill. It was pure.
Looking at it, seeing himself, Book had nothing to offer. He was a matchstick before the sun. He was nothing compared to the thing contained in the vial.
Nothing.
Book was scared because he had never wanted anything so much. He was about to become perfect.
As the needle punched into his skin, Book almost wept, he was so grateful.
LEVEL THREE
“Where’s Graves?” Cade demanded.
“Gone. I don’t know where,” Bell said.
“Where is Zach?”
“I don’t know.”
“Very well,” he said, and reached for her throat.
“Wait, wait, wait,” she blurted. “I delivered Zach to Graves and Graves took him to a cell. I swear to God that’s all I know.”
Cade kneeled down and got very close. He didn’t lay a hand on her. He didn’t have to.
“Then can you give me a single good reason to let you live?” Cade asked.
Bell mustered every bit of control she had. Her pulse hammered behind her ears, she felt sick, but when she spoke she managed to make her tone level and even.
“I can give you two,” she said. “I’m your only way out of here. The Snakeheads are heading for the surface. They’ll cluster around the main exit. But I know another way. You’ll never find it without me.”
“Why shouldn’t I kill you once we get there?” It wasn’t spoken like a threat. Cade sounded genuinely curious.
“Because the only elevator still working is DNA-encoded. If I’m not on it, you won’t get anywhere.”
“I could tear off your hand. Or some other body part.”
Bell shuddered, but held her ground. “Biological scanners. Won’t accept cold meat. You’re stuck with me.”
Cade shook his head. “I can find a way out.”
“I told you there was another reason.”
“What is it?”
“I can show you how the Snakeheads were made,” she said, a smile of triumph escaping despite her fear. “If you don’t know that, you’ll never stop Graves from starting this all over again.”
LEVEL FIVE
Zach crept along in the murky gray cast by the emergency lights along the floor.
So far, nothing had jumped out to eat him. But the night was still young.
The shadows seemed to deepen and swirl around him. The emergency lights fluttered, spat and finally gave up entirely.
There was no light at all now.
Zach tried to take a step, tripped over the threshold of a cell, and found himself sprawled inside on the tile.
So much for the other senses compensating for blindness, he thought.
Then again, maybe not. He felt, rather than saw, something move.
Zach didn’t hear anything. But he couldn’t escape the feeling that he wasn’t alone.
His eyes had to be playing tricks on him now.
There
was no light.
So how was it getting darker?
THE DARKNESS MOVED over Zach like cold fingers, prodding and stroking his skin with a malicious familiarity, a kind of casual violation, as if to let him know his boundaries, his body, his person meant nothing at all.
Then the whispering started.
He couldn’t quite make out the words. Couldn’t quite place the voice, either, because it was doubled, in stereo, and too low to hear properly. But he could hear—and feel—the tone. The hate that was in every mumbled word. The curdling note of contempt.
Zach didn’t allow himself to be scared. He got angry instead.
“You’re trying to haunt me? Seriously?”
The whispering paused, then started again.
Zach laughed. “I work with the scariest bastard you’ll ever meet. You’re going to have to do better than that.”
His voice echoed in the dark.
The silence deepened.
He heard footsteps. Leather soles on the concrete.
Zach wondered if he’d just made a huge mistake.
A figure appeared from the shadows, forming as if out of solid darkness.
“Hey, kid,” it said. “Been a while.”
Zach suddenly placed the voice. He knew who was speaking to him.
“Griff?”
At the sound of his name, former Special Agent William H. Griffin stepped out of the shadows.
He still wore the suit he died in, and the wound that killed him: a massive hole in his chest, his viscera spilling out through the broken remains of his rib cage. His skin was gray and mottled purple, decay setting in around the edges.
He smiled at Zach, revealing teeth painted like fingernails with crusts of blood.
“So,” he said, in the same deep voice that had introduced Zach to this world. “How are you liking the job so far?”
THIRTY-EIGHT
January 24, 1946—The Central Intelligence Agency is unofficially founded by President Harry S Truman, who hands a ceremonial black cloak and wooden dagger to Sidney Souers, the agency’s first director.
—Cole Daniels, Black Ops: The Occult-CIA Connection
Cade and Bell found the access shaft, Bell’s secret way around the Site, nestled next to the concrete wall of the giant elevator platform. He gestured for her to lead and he followed.
They moved down into the Site. Bell’s head was just below the ceiling. Cade had to duck. The shaft corkscrewed around, following the odd layout of the Site in a kind of descending staircase pattern. But it was so twisted even Cade would have had trouble navigating it without a guide.
Occasional hatches—Cade assumed for maintenance workers—gave them a glimpse of what was happening in the rest of the Site.
Many of the Site’s personnel were nothing more than piles of bones now. Bell stopped looking after a while.
At Level Four, through the hatch and on the other side of a sally port, they saw a crowd of Snakeheads moving toward the surface. Through the port’s windows, the creatures’ heads bobbed as they streamed through the narrow space. There were hundreds of them.
Once, they found another Snakehead, wandering on its own, but it seemed lost in the shaft and confused without the herd.
One-on-one, Cade killed it easily.
Bell still had her gun. She kept it holstered. Maybe Cade forgot it—unlikely—or just didn’t think of her as a threat—more likely. Either way, she didn’t want to give him any reason to question his decision to keep her alive.
She was sweating, not entirely from exertion, by the time they emerged at the lab, the chamber at the heart of the Black Site.
LEVEL FIVE
Bell thumbed the scanner to unlock the door. It opened, revealing the interior of the lab.
Cade looked inside. For a moment, he was still as a statue.
Bell wondered what he was waiting for.
When he turned to her, she got the impression of great effort, as if he was pulling against gravity.
She realized he was struggling not to kill her.
“You knew about this?”
She couldn’t lie. She nodded, afraid to move any more than that.
Cade tore his gaze from her and stepped to enter the room.
“Are you letting me go?” She could hear the hope in her own voice, creeping in around the disbelief.
“Stay here,” he said.
She glanced, involuntarily, down the corridor, measuring the distance back to the access shaft.
Cade gave her a look that would keep her from sleeping soundly ever again. “You think I won’t find you?” he asked.
He slammed the door shut behind him.
CADE WALKED AMONG the surgical equipment and lab tables. He walked slowly. He struggled not to make a mockery of this by his mere presence.
He still had his pack of tools, but they were useless here.
There, buried deep in the ground, in the middle of America, he saw how Graves had managed to build his monsters.
It even made sense on an obscene level, one Cade understood almost instinctively. Graves needed people as raw material. He needed people who could be disappeared, whose absence would not cause the world to pause, even for a second.
Most of his prisoners were malcontents, nobodies, homeless, insane, wanderers or criminals. But even among the unwanted and forgotten, there were one or two who had people who cared what had happened to them. Even some of the ones who went missing from the battlefields and the POW camps were names in systems and on registries, so they could not vanish without someone marking their absence.
But there was a rich supply of children who barely even had names, living in bone-grinding poverty all over the world. In a war zone, or after a disaster, dozens of them could vanish at once without so much as a ripple in the surface of the greater world.
Cade already knew Graves had used children in his first attempts to create the Snakeheads. When no more bodies showed up, he simply assumed that Graves had stopped using them. Not out of morality, but because they were of no more use.
He realized how horribly wrong he’d been.
The children lay on hospital beds in two neat rows. Respirators pumped their lungs. IVs dripped chemicals into their sticklike arms. Most of their eyes were closed, or stared unseeing at the ceiling.
They were almost corpses already, shriveled like raisins around their bloated, distended bellies.
That was the only sign of life in the room, in each child’s swollen abdomen. Their skins stretched tight as drums and translucent, revealing the writhing masses inside them.
They looked like the same eggs he’d seen on the shore at Innsmouth in 1928. Tiny, amphibious creatures turning and twisting. But they thrashed without hope of escape. Cade saw the needles and hoses plugged directly into the children’s bodies, sucking out the eggs and slurping them into a central collection tank. Inside, they were strained and shredded, sucked through more filters and tubes, until they were distilled into serum at a final dispensing point.
Even as the eggs were drawn from them, Cade could see the other embryos beneath the skin, dividing, filling up the space, waiting to be harvested.
The virus, or whatever it truly was, lived in that serum, ready to fill syringes, bottles, or maybe the tanks of crop dusters.
Graves had turned these children into incubators. He had made them nothing more than warm nests to spawn horror.
There was nothing here for Cade to fight. All he had to do was end life. All he had to was kill.
For him, this was the easy part.
He went to each bed and shut down the life-support machines. There was no last gasp, no sudden clawing reach for air. There was nothing left in these bodies except death, and they slid into it quietly.
The machines made more noise. They bucked and protested and finally churned to a stop as their supply was cut off.
He knew he didn’t have much time. But this was something that required some kind of mourning, even from a thing like him.
&nbs
p; Cade held his cross until his hand burned like fire.
It reminded him that he was not human. And at that moment, at least, he was grateful.
THIRTY-NINE
Evidence has linked the CIA to the spread of crack and heroin; the start of wars in Asia, Latin America and Africa; the murders of JFK, RFK and MLK; even dosing innocent civilians with everything from LSD to smallpox. Given all that, is it really such a stretch to believe the agency might be in league with the actual forces of darkness?
—Cole Daniels, Black Ops: The Occult-CIA Connection
LEVEL FIVE
You’re not Griff,” Zach insisted. He could hear the childishness in his voice, but he clung to the truth of what he was saying.
“How would you know?” Griff asked.
“Because Griff would never let himself be used as a puppet by whatever fist is up your ass.”
The Not-Griff scowled. “You’ve got a big mouth, kid. I never liked that about you.”
“You can’t hurt me. That’s why you’re screwing with my head.”
“You look ready to piss your pants. I’d say it’s working.”
Zach hesitated. “Doesn’t matter. Whatever you are, you’re not Griff.”
“Part of you knows I’m telling the truth, Zachary. The part that’s honest. I know things about you that you’d never admit to anyone else. Look at Cade. The closest thing you’ve got to a friend. And you betray him every day.”
Not true, Zach thought. That’s not true.
“Do you even know what’s true anymore, Zach?”
“I know Griff isn’t anywhere your side can reach him. I’m sure about that.”
Not-Griff shrugged, and some bit of organic matter fell from under his arm.
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