“What do you think?” I asked silently.
“I think that something is terribly wrong here,” Kutkha said.
He wasn’t wrong. There was an eerie, unsettling feeling to the place that had nothing to do with it being a funeral home. I looked around and tuned in, walking a circle around the cars. There was a row of steel freezers against the far wall, fridges where they stored bodies before taking them to the embalming room. Across from them was a small office, unlocked and open, that had rows of screens with camera feeds, and an elevator used to transport a body and its attending staff to the upstairs floors. Well, to the second floor: it only had one button. There were stairs, too: a narrow, steep stairwell behind an unlocked door. I opened it and looked up inside. They looked like they skipped the first floor as well.
“So where do we go to get this computer information Talya wants? Upstairs?” Zane asked.
Possibly? But… no. I swung back, nose twitching, and found my eyes drawn back to the freezers. There was something odd about them, a break in the pattern. There were three freezers, and each had three vertical rows of cadaver trays. I saw the shadowed lines of each door, the brightness of the buttons, and the negative space around them more than I did the freezers themselves… but it was the sound which led me over. Or more accurately, the absence of it.
Zane said something, but his words were an unformed blob of color as I focused on my senses. Curious, I touched the handles of the pull-out trays. The rightmost fridge had a fine hum that buzzed my fingertips through my gloves, making them twitch spasmodically; the center one did not. The center and the left-hand freezers weren’t humming, even though they had live lights and appeared to be on.
“What are you doing?”
“Facade,” I grunted, pressing the button locks and tugging on the tray handles. None of the middle three trays opened. When I tried the left-hand ones, yanking on the middle handle caused all three to shift slightly. Turning one or the other locks on or off didn’t result in anything opening. I was vaguely aware of Zane drifting over to join me as I peered over and around the switches and buttons.
“You know, I can help with anything scent related...?”
Annoyed, I waved him away as I tracked the faint glint of fingerprints on the burnished steel, the way the white fluorescent light was twisted by the tracks of oil left by countless hands. Cops wore gloves by default, but their hands simply smeared the grease from the sweaty fingers of those who didn’t… and with a couple of mishaps, I was able to figure out the sequence.
“Locker one’s ‘Occupied’ alert on, lock button left on ‘Lock’; middle locker unlocked, no Occupied light, lower locker’s light on, unlocked, temperature lowered to…” I tapped the temperature button, watching the digital display as we went from 72 degrees to the 60s, 50s, 40s. I put my ear to the door and listened to the way the faint electronic whine from inside changed as I skipped through the 40s, getting loudest around 42. When I found the right percentage, there was a deep ‘clunk’ from inside the false meat locker. “42.5 degrees.”
“No shit.” Zane watched on from behind me with folded arms. “Stupid question. Why didn’t you bust the lock with magic?”
I swung the heavy steel door open, revealing a Mobius strip-like trigger ward that encircled a small device, an unremarkable beige box with folded wires protruding from neatly drilled holes its base. “That. I don’t know what it does, and I don’t want to find out.”
Chapter 20
A short flight of stairs lead into something awfully like an industrial maintenance corridor, the kind that had no place being in a house like this. I had a strange feeling of familiarity as we passed underneath a humming doorframe into what should have been the homey interior of the first floor, but was instead a kind of in-between mezzanine porch plus basement, a basement of pit cells dug into the earth below us. They were small and narrow and powerfully warded, and definitely not regulation standard.
“What in the living hell?” Zane pulled down his balaclava, and padded ahead of me. “This is some kind of… holding center?”
“I wish I could say I was shocked.” I sniffed before I did the same thing, scenting the oily pink odor of bleach, the iron tang of blood, and the musty perspiration and mildew smell that always seemed to accompany spaces where people exerted themselves. Locker rooms, dance floors, torture dungeons: they all smelled the same.
I kept the Uzi ready in my hands as we descended hollow steel steps at the end of the mezzanine. The place was deserted. We scanned the cells—all empty—and then tried the doors that faced them on the other side of the corridor. They were not warded but they were locked, an issue quickly and easily solved with bump keys. The doors were on rollers and slid across, instead of pushing in… a detail that made sense when we opened the first one. The doorway fed through a plain device that resembled an airport metal detector. It was studded with pieces of black stone, and had a bone-chilling, alien aura. Beyond the funnel was a familiar sight: the interrogation room where I’d had my chat with Agent Keen.
“I can’t.” Zane shook his head, swallowing. “Whatever that thing is. I can’t walk through it.”
I stuck my hand out into it, and immediately felt a swooping dampening of my senses. My ability to sense the wards behind us muted, like a volume switch turned down. For a person like Zane, whose body was enmeshed with that of his puma-form Neshamah, the disruption would be very physical. “An anti-magic device. Interesting.”
“This is creepy as hell, Rex.” Zane backed away from it, moving to the next door. “Let’s find this shit we need and get out of here.”
We had a look at the other rooms. Two were interrogation rooms like the first one; one was an office. There was no computer, or even filing cabinets. The last was the torture dungeon I’d suspected was here by the smell. It superficially resembled the one we had in the lower level of the AEROMOR office warehouse, with a tiled floor and a drain to hose the room down. They had facilities for foot torture—if you were torturing someone to a confession or a revelation and also didn’t want them running away, you generally stuck to the feet.
“I wonder if Ayashe knows about this,” I mused aloud.
“Jenner warned us about the Deutsche Ordern puppeting the Vigiles, but I don’t think I really believed her until now.” Zane hung back, brows furrowed. “They’re like boogeyman stories for little Weeders, you know?”
“No one has really explained to me what they are.”
“They’re like... descendants of the Teutonic Knights via Nazi Germany and the old Catholic church,” Zane said. “That’s what Jenner and Karim say. They’re the only two Elders who are old enough to remember them when they were operating in the open, now that Michael’s dead.”
“I see. Well, the Men in Black will check in on this room soon. We have to get moving.” I made sure the rifle was ready to fire. “Let’s try upstairs.”
The stairwell to the second floor opened up into a Victorian Gothic hallway. We stepped out cautiously into a heavy, dead silence broken only by the distant thundering of the rain outside. Thick carpet, dark line wallpaper, Empire furniture and chandeliers. They couldn't have made it look more like a funeral home if they tried.
"Elegant, but oppressive,” I murmured.
“Ugh.” Zane’s lip curled. “This place makes my fucking skin crawl.”
It was a safe bet that the computer was in the manager’s office, and that the office was behind one of the Staff Only signed doors. “Let’s search. I’ll take the odd doors, you take the even.”
Zane grunted, and broke off down the hall.
The first door on the left was a bathroom, the second a store of cleaning supplies. The third, which was locked, was labelled Embalming Room. I bumped the lock, oiled the hinges, and pushed the door in. There was no alarming smell from inside, but after a moment, a strange, oppressive, creeping sensation passed through my skin, the primal feeling of entering into the den of something large and dangerous. Normally, I’d heed my intuit
ion and not go in. The problem was, the computer and documents Talya needed were possibly in this room, or in an office attached to it.
With the Man in Black’s rifle in hand, I waited to the side of the door a couple of seconds before stepping inside. There was no one in the room, but the lights were on. I checked for cameras, didn’t see any, and eased down on the trigger. The embalming room was clean, clinical and tidy. Everything was in its place, clearly labeled: ‘Makeup’, ‘Catheters’, ‘Drainage’, ‘Prep’. The tables had been washed down, the mortuary tray blood-free and shiny. The body cooler was built into the wall on the far side of the room, across from another internal door. One of the freezers was empty; the other had a red light. Occupied.
I went to the mortuary freezer, and was just about to unlock it when a toilet flushed from behind the door across the room. I reflexively spun around and pulled the trigger, shredding the door with a burst that emptied a quarter of the clip. The enchanted gun made barely any sound, a rattling thud thud thud, but chips blasted out from the holes and into the air in a cloud of dust. I froze, breathless, as a heavy silence fell over the room. After several seconds, a runnel of blood crept along the floor from beneath the remains of the door. Red blood.
When the dust cleared, I opened the remains of the door to reveal a fallen man in a suit—an ordinary, non-bulletproof suit. He was unremarkably middle-aged, neat Ivy League hair, and now very dead. He was still twitching, pants crumpled down around his knees. He had a radio that chirped and clicked. I turned him over with my foot, and my heart sank. He was wearing an FBI badge. A Vigiles badge.
“Shit.” I’d just killed a fucking Federal Agent in cold blood. Accidentally. Reflexes, in this case, were accidental.
“Feeling a little highly-strung today, my Ruach?” Kutkha asked.
“The first time you’ve spoken to me since we got in here, and it’s smartass bullshit.” Where there was one Agent, there was always another. I couldn’t search him—not without contaminating the scene and giving investigators ammunition to track and prosecute me. At the same time, couldn’t they do it anyway? Adeptus Varma had magic capable of reconstructing crime scenes. “What attracted your attention?”
I felt, rather than saw, my Neshamah’s wry smile. “The sensation of impending doom.”
I swallowed, turning, and looked over the room. The only other thing of interest here was the freezer. If the dead agent had been watching this room, it was entirely possible that whatever was in there was not actually a body.
“Is it an immediate doom, or a deferred sort of doom?” I sighed, and shouldered the rifle while I went to the meat locker, unlocked it, and pulled out the tray.
The stench of putrefaction punched me in the face like a tangible thing. I staggered back, coughing, and squinted at the body with watering eyes. The freezer wasn’t cold, and there was no way this body was here for embalming. The flesh had peeled away and partly liquefied. The woman—by the hair and the remains of her breasts, I was sure it was a woman—was missing her eyes, which had melted in their sockets and tracked down both sides of her face. Her neck was swollen and puffy, inflated up around her jaw, and her tongue was grossly swollen, forcing her mouth into a silent rictus scream.
“Fairly immediate,” Kutkha replied.
Chapter 21
Varma’s illusion hadn't prepared me for the extent of the horrific, degraded ruin that was the remains of Agent Kristin Cross, but I was sure that was who I was looking at. Her face was barely recognizable. All her remaining flesh was soft and fish-like, bloated with rot, and black ichor leaked from the gaping wounds in her neck. I’d ever only seen a couple of corpses this bad. Frank Nacari, back in Brighton Beach, and Moris Falkovich in Hunts Point. It was more than just physical ruination. The horrified expression, the black slime crusting the wounds, the way that she just somehow felt wrong. Violation was a characteristic of Morphorde kills, and whoever – whatever – had done this clearly hated women, and this woman in particular. Was it personal? A vendetta? Or just Morphorde?
I thought back to what Agent Mattson said about what had killed her. Some kind of toxin, they thought, or magic that replicated a toxin. Was there a residue left behind? Something I could use to track the killer? Even if Soldier 557 hadn't killed Kristin, it wasn't like I had any better leads.
I searched around the room until I found a thick needle and syringe, took them back to the corpse, and slid the needle into a squishy patch of decayed flesh on her neck. The gunk drew into the tube like brown-black custard. When I had a sample, I took it back to the counter and squirted it into a small plastic jar with a yellow lid, like the kind used to collect urine samples, trying not to breathe in the smell.
Squorch.
I paused, the syringe still in my hand, as a soft wet sound popped the bubble of silence around us. I turned just in time to see something shoot through the liquefying remains of the Agent’s belly, darting like an eel.
“No. Oh no. No, no no.” I lunged back at the freezer and unceremoniously slammed it closed. I had my hand on the locking mechanism when it slammed open again. A prehensile tentacle whipped out and around the edge of the freezer. The steel handle hit me in the gut and sent me stumbling back into the edge of the surgery table.
“I said ‘NO’, GOD-dammit!” I lunged forward again, recoiling as the creature tore itself free of the corpse, sending liquefied tissue slushing off the tray to the floor. It fell off the roller bed in a clumsy heap.
I backed away, not turning around. It wasn’t a DOG... it was some kind of giant insect-dinosaur death machine. Its color flexed and shifted under a coat of reeking black ichor. It was six-legged, eyeless, with a long snout and a rounded shell that reminded me of a pill bug. It was a bit larger than a human torso, and the tentacle was actually a tongue that darted in and out of a tube-like, toothless mouth. The tongue waved back and forth warningly, and the blind head swung unerringly in my direction as I put the table between me and it. I was about to break away when a horrific sound rumbled through the floor, though my bones and the nerves of my teeth. It was not a sound you heard with your ears: in fact, sound was drowned by the curtain of sonic white noise, rendering ears useless. Worse, it wasn’t just booming through the material plane. It was rattling the Phi around me, shaking the metaphysical structure of the room—and the metaphysical structure of my body along with it.
My vision turned to static and I crumpled to my knees, gasping as the air shook. The burst relented, and I had enough sense to throw myself and scramble away over the floor on my hands and ass before it boomed again. This time, the sound crushed me down to the floor. It was like a hand pushing me down against the ground. I rolled over onto my belly, pulling myself arm-over-arm toward the door.
The creature staggered around, throwing its head and its tongue—a good six feet of barbed, sticky flesh—like a bullwhip. It smashed trays and cabinets, pulled a door off one of them and slammed it into the surgical table, crumpling three inches of steel like tin foil. I froze as it bowed its sightless head and began to slide its tongue over the ground in a serpentine wave. I was almost to the door when the next crushing wave of sound emanated from it. It dragged me helplessly to the ground. Worse, I was getting a migraine: the edges of my vision crawled with aura, like heat haze. When I tried to grasp my magic, the energy slid through my control like sand vibrating through a sieve.
I pushed against the wall and watched the creature unerringly stumble to the bathroom. It lashed out with its tongue, roping around the dead Agent’s legs and dragging him across the floor like a winch. The Morphorde—it had to be a Morphorde of some kind—was drooling copiously. The corpse went in feet-first, and whatever its saliva touched disintegrated into goop. It took seconds for the body to disappear, not minutes. Seconds.
When the creature paused for a breath, a bang and a shout broke through the wall of white noise. The door kicked in, nearly hitting me in the face, and three Men in Black opened fire from the doorway. They were oblivious to my presence, foc
used on the Morphorde.
“We got a Streetsweeper!” One them yelled over the magically silenced gunfire. “Echo, Echo, Echo!”
The Streetsweeper responded with sonic. It’s normal pulses of echolocation had been debilitating: the weaponized form was agonizing. I clamped my hands over my ears, trying to block out the intense vibratory pain. Through watering, slitted eyes, I saw the Men in Black stagger, screaming silently in the sonic bubble, and then the Streetsweeper lurched forward, slashing with its tongue at the MiB closest to the front. I was expecting it to pull the MiB’s legs out from under him. The Streetsweeper wrapped its tongue around his waist, and cut him in half with it. It dragged the man’s torso toward itself, leaving the legs to topple over.
“Fuck!” I swore, unable to hear myself. Involuntary tears poured down my cheeks. I forced my eyes open and half crawled, half dragged myself to the door. I was slightly better outside in the hallway: I got my feet under me, stumbled in the direction I’d seen Zane go, and nearly ran into him as I rounded the corner.
“What the fuck is happening!?” He shouted, one hand clamped to his ear, the other carrying a bag of dismembered computer equipment.
“We need to get out, now!” I grabbed his arm and pulled him forward, toward the inner stairwell. Going back the direction we had come was suicide: there was no escape through the garage. “There’s a Morphorde in there!”
“We have to stop it!” Zane shook me off, yearning back toward the sounds of shooting and screaming. “We-”
“We don’t have the tools or the manpower for this!”
“I’m the tool for this job!” Zane snapped. “That DOG could kill everyone in this neighborhood!”
“It’s not a DOG, and I’m telling you that I just watched it cut a supersoldier in half with its GOD-damned tongue,” I snapped back. “A supersoldier who just called for backup, and they’ll shoot you as readily as they’ll shoot it.”
“Cover me, then.” And Zane dropped his gear, shedding his clothing as he ran for the now-quiet room and transformed .
Zero Sum: An Alexi Sokolsky Supernatural Thriller (Alexi Sokolsky: Hound of Eden Book 3) Page 19
