There was a solid wall of containers on the other side of the rough path. Firelight illuminated the very top edges. I stared at the containers, trying to make out what was different, and then figured it out. These were intact. Rusty, spray-painted with all sorts of hip-hop tags, dented and scratched, but otherwise intact. The three straight lift rods on the backs indicated working double doors. Three in a row, end on to the path, and sitting fairly upright, unlike the majority of the containers, which sprawled at all angles in the darkness. Everything around them was wrecked, but these three containers were definitely not wrecked. I decided to wait some more, hoping that Pardee would come creeping down the alley between the other containers. I had an increasingly urgent sense that I badly needed my backup, or what was left of it. Where were the damned dogs?
After another two minutes of just standing there, I got out my cell phone and keyed Pardee’s number.
It wasn’t Pardee who answered. It was Trask.
“Hi there, Lieutenant,” he said. “How can I help you?”
“Let me talk to him,” I said.
“Afraid he’s somewhat indisposed just now, Lieutenant. Not harmed, mind you, but not available for phone-cons. Sleeping. In your Suburban.”
“Sleeping.”
“Yup. A little whiff of ether and down he went. It’s a lot more efficient than whacking somebody on the back of the head. You never know what will happen then. Ready to palaver?”
“I suppose I am,” I said, looking around again. I had the sense that he could see me.
“Right in front of you are three containers,” he said, confirming my worst suspicions. “The middle door is the one you want. Watch your step.”
He broke the connection. Well, shit, I thought. We did agree to meet him in his jungle, not ours. We should have figured a way to come by boat. I put my. 45 away and slipped across the open space between my detour and the middle container. There were no locks on the operating handles, so I undid the latches and shoved the two halves open.
I flipped on my penlight. The container was empty, just a blank cube of space that smelled faintly of some kind of exotic animal dung. I tried to remember where I’d smelled that before. The deck of the container was about a foot above the ground level outside, so I stepped up and into the container, keeping an eye on those doors. If there was someone waiting outside to lock me in, I thought I’d have a shot at keeping one of the door halves open long enough to deal with him.
I stood there and searched the interior with the penlight again. I thought I heard a faint whimpering sound-the shepherds? I saw what looked like a big floor seam halfway down the container. Maybe there was a trapdoor of some kind? I took one more step in that direction and felt the floor sag under my feet. In the next instant, before I could step back, the half that I was standing on dropped down to a forty-five-degree angle and I went sliding down the plywood floor into serious darkness. The moment I hit bottom, the floor panel snapped back up behind me with a loud bang.
I’d managed to hold on to the penlight, which I quickly shone around into the darkness. Instantly two fuzzy shepherd faces pushed into view and then into my own face. While I was fending off an incipient love-in, lights came on in the ceiling. One of the dogs knocked the tiny light out of my hand, but I no longer needed it. The lights were bright enough to make me blink.
I found myself sitting on a dirt floor in an underground chamber. Actually, I realized, it was another container, submerged ninety percent under the surface level of the junkyard. For that matter, this might be the true surface level of the junkyard, depending on how old the place was. The walls and ceiling were made of what looked like aluminum or light steel; the only thing missing was a plywood floor. The air was dry and musty, but the ground smelled of damp. There were four small lights embedded in the ceiling, and an even smaller hole, maybe two inches square, at one end of the container, high up on the wall. It looked like there was a glass cover on that aperture. High on one side wall was a black circle about a foot and a half in diameter, which I assumed was an air hole. That was not a good sign.
My cell phone began to vibrate.
“Lieutenant,” Trask said, when I opened it. “Glad you could drop by.”
“How’d you get the dogs down here?” I asked.
“Dragged a rat on a string in front of them and into the double doors,” he said. “Which were open when you made your little detour there, in case you didn’t notice, and I don’t think you did.”
“Got me there,” I said. I told the dogs to sit. I was trying to be really stern with them, but I was very glad to see them back. They sat, but they weren’t happy.
“I’ve got you here, actually,” he said, “and we’re going to have some fun, presently. But first: I’m curious. What is it you think we’re going to do at Helios?”
“I think you’re going to create some kind of fake terrorist incident. That wake-up call you were ranting about. Something to do with moonpool water.”
“You’re close,” he said. “Perhaps wrong about the fake aspects.”
“So why knock us off?” I asked, examining the space again. I didn’t like the sound of that have-some-fun comment, and I wanted out of here. Obviously I’d need to pull that plywood ramp back down, but I couldn’t see a seam anymore.
“Because you’re getting in the damned way,” he said. “I don’t have time for any more of your interference. We have a plan, and a window of opportunity, which is upon us, so to speak. I need you out of the way, which is where you are.”
“You keep saying ‘we.’ ”
“Some like-minded people in the nuclear power industry,” he said.
“What did you do to my partner out there?”
“Put him to sleep,” he said. “Temporarily, I hope. He’s going to be medium useless when he does wake up, though.”
“I told the Bureau you’re alive and kicking,” I said, “and where I was going tonight.”
He laughed. “Nice try,” he said, “but the Bureau is shortly going to be much too busy to worry about you.”
“Going to turn some more of your aliens loose in the container yard?”
“My aliens?”
“We ran into an ICE guy the last time we came over here. He told us he’s undercover over here in the junkyard, and that you’re part of an alien immigration surveillance program.”
“My, my, how some people do run their mouths,” he said. “But I’m not worried about the Bureau. Their only interest in me right now is that I’m not their vic in the moonpool. Where’s the little Italian wise-ass?”
“Out there somewhere,” I said.
“Or back in Triboro,” he countered. “That’s what my sources tell me, anyway. Back home doing some homework. Something to do with the Helios visitor logs. You don’t have any idea why your Ms. Gardner overran her sell-by date down here, do you?”
“You said you were going to enlighten me.”
“I did say that, didn’t I. But I don’t know-you’re a pretty resourceful fella. You might yet get out of that hole you’re in. As long as you don’t manage that in the next twenty-four hours or so, I won’t care, of course.”
I wondered if that meant tonight was the big night. “So give me a hint,” I said.
“Okay, I will: What was her maiden name?”
“Beats the shit out of me,” I said. “I guess I just assumed Gardner was her maiden name, after two divorces.”
“Therein lies the tale, Lieutenant. Now: I have things to do, people to see. Some spectacular incidents to precipitate. That. 45 loaded?”
“Of course.”
“And you still have that baby penlight you were flashing around all over the place outside?”
I did, even if the single AA battery was running down. I realized then that it had stayed on when I dropped it. The tiny spot of white light was now yellow.
“Okay,” he said. “If it were me, I wouldn’t go shooting that hand-cannon of yours down there. Steel walls over hard-packed earth, sides and
floor. What goes around will almost certainly come back around, if you follow me.”
“Why would I be shooting?” I asked.
“Because something’s coming for dinner,” he said.
The phone connection switched off. I put the thing in my pocket, retrieved and switched off the penlight, and then walked around the confines of the chamber. I tapped the side walls, and, although they seemed to be made of metal, there was obviously hard-packed earth behind them. They felt like brick walls. He was right about the. 45-there’d be ricochets forever. The dogs just sat there watching me, panting a little, and waiting for orders. I wished I had some for them, but this looked like a modern version of an oubliette. Then the shepherds both looked up at that black hole high up on the left side.
A soft sound, like grain coming down a silo chute, began to fill the air, and then an enormous snake head came into view, its black tongue flickering urgently. The triangular head was pale white and the size of a partially flattened regulation-size football. The snake looked around, saw me, and then saw the shepherds, who were raising hackles and backing up. Locking on to the dogs, the snake continued to emerge from the hole. The body was proportionally smaller than it should have been right behind that enormous head, but then began to swell as the thing reached the floor and began to spread across it.
I backed up right along with the dogs. Time began to slow down as more and more snake kept coming, the body getting thicker and thicker before finally slimming down to a vigorously switching tail, itself the size of a full-grown rattler. The cell phone began to vibrate in my pocket.
“Isn’t she a beauty?” Trask said when I picked up. “Albino Burmese python.”
“Beauty’s in the eye of the beholder,” I said, pulling out the. 45. Ricochets be damned, I wasn’t going to let that thing get a whole lot closer.
“Yeah, I get that,” he said. “She’s almost six meters, and did I mention that she’s hungry? She just loves a good dog for dinner.”
The snake wasn’t coiling, which surprised me. It lay full-length-out on the floor of the container in a big serpentine arc, that flat bone-white head maybe ten feet away, watching all three of us. At the moment, its six meters looked like six miles. Wearing two German shepherds, I backed against the front wall of the container, and aimed the SIG at the thickest part of the snake’s body. I recognized the smell now as the scent I’d picked up on the boat. Jungle smell, something rotting and hideously primitive. The tongue never stopped.
“She’ll go for the dogs, not you,” he said. “Unless you interfere, of course. But it’ll be a fairer fight than if you were, say, doing this in the swamp. See the tail? Nothing for her to hold on to down there. They need to anchor that tail to really throw coils.”
“I’m going to shoot this fucker, starting right now,” I said.
“Only if you can see her, Lieutenant,” he said. And then the overhead lights all went out. Almost immediately I heard that flowing-grain sound. I dropped the cell phone and nearly fired, but realized in time that that would be pointless. The penlight. Where was that goddamned penlight?
Both dogs began to growl deep in their chests as I fished for it in my pockets.
More sliding sounds, and that primordial stink was getting more pronounced.
My fingers closed in on the plastic light, and I popped it out of my shirt pocket. Tactical instinct took over as I held the light in my left hand, way out to one side, and pointed the SIG into the darkness. I switched it on.
No snake.
The light seemed a tiny bit brighter than it had been; maybe the battery had rested, or maybe it was just because the darkness was damned near absolute.
Where was the snake?
I scanned the floor of the container in an arc right in front of us, then sensed something looming to my right.
To my right, and up, not on the floor. I could feel the shepherds pressing harder against my legs.
I swept the light over there and found myself looking into that white snake face, which was no more than three feet away. The snake had lifted its forebody on its coils like a cobra, which still left about a half mile of snake on the floor behind it. Without thinking, I fired a round at that face.
The noise was terrific, a painful bang that hurt my ears and startled me into almost dropping the SIG. I felt the snap of the bullet as it smashed into the steel wall right behind my head, after clearly missing the snake altogether and then ricocheting around the container. Then something leathery and heavy whacked the side of my head as the snake finally struck, missing my face but ending up with its neck alongside mine for a single horrifying instant before it withdrew.
I lunged to the left before it could strike again and tripped over one of the dogs. We all ended up on the floor in a heap of scrambling legs. I still had the penlight but didn’t stop to relocate the snake. I yelled at the dogs to come and bolted for the other end of the container, flying blind along one slippery side until I came up against the back corner of the can. The dogs were still with me, trying hard to get behind me in the corner.
I pointed the tiny light out into the darkness of the container and listened. Then I realized I was providing a target and quickly shut it off. I didn’t know if a python could see well in the conventional sense or if, like a pit viper, it tracked by infrared. Either way, I didn’t want to help it find us.
I heard the sliding sound again. It was a huge snake, probably a couple of hundred pounds, and it was making no effort to be quiet. I pointed the SIG out into the darkness and tried to control my breathing, subconsciously aware that breathing was what the snake intended to attack. One of the shepherds growled and then barked. I again held the light out to one side and flicked it on. The snake was right in front of us, head low and flat above the floor, shifting sideways. Two huge coils of its trunklike body were rising behind it as it prepared to throw a hundred pounds or so of hungry muscle at one of us.
I fired again, twice this time, aiming at the body. I hit it once, and possibly both times. The coils collapsed on the floor with a sodden thump, but this time that head came up, way up, rising almost to the top of the container as the beast arched in response to the trauma to its body. I rolled to the right, keeping the light on the snake, the dogs tumbling with me. We collided with the other side and then scrambled all the way down to the door end. The penlight could no longer reach across the container, so I shut it off.
We listened.
I tried to tamp down my own heavy breathing. The shepherds were better at that than I was and didn’t make a sound, although I could feel their hearts going a hundred miles an hour. Like mine.
I knew I hadn’t killed the thing. Primitive animals, Trask had called them. Like a dinosaur-hit it in the ass and it took a few minutes for the impact to register all the way up in the brain. But then, look out.
Sliding sounds again… and then a chilling, prolonged hiss, followed by the reek of primordial ooze that seemed to hang over this reptile. I had no sense of where that hiss had come from, other than it wasn’t behind me. I looked up and thought I saw a small red square at the top of my line of vision. Then I remembered there had been what looked like a glass window up there. Was Trask watching, using night vision gear? Watching, and possibly even filming? Like Hitler when he had his rebellious generals hung on meat hooks in the basement of the supreme court building in Berlin?
That thought pissed me off. I raised the SIG and took careful aim at that dim red square and fired one round. When I can shoot carefully, I’m going to hit what I aim at, and this time no bullet came spanging back at me from the other end of the container.
Then the snake hit. I felt a hammer blow on my raised forearm, a sharp pain as several dozen backward-curving teeth sank into my arm, and then I was being buried under the satin coils of an infuriated python. I distantly heard the dogs get into it, with lots of savage growling and snapping, but I was too busy to wonder what they might be accomplishing. I crumpled into as round a ball as I could and switched the gun from
my right hand to my left just before the snake pulled hard and took my forearm straight out away from my body. Before I could react or retract it, it had pushed a coil completely over me and now had a partial grip on my chest, a grip that instantly tightened.
But my left hand was still free.
And the snake’s head was not free, attached as it was to my right arm. I knew there was only one way to end this.
I turned sideways, to my right. Instantly the snake increased the pressure and I felt my ribs starting to compress. I couldn’t see anything, but actually didn’t want to. I pressed the muzzle of the. 45 against the snake’s head and fired.
The first thing that happened was that the damned thing gripped even tighter. I could exhale, but I could not inhale. The gun was still pressed against something. Just before I fired again, I realized it was pressed against my arm. The area where the teeth were embedded had gone numb, but I moved the barrel slightly, found what I prayed was the head, and fired again.
This time I felt a lance of pain-the bullet must have grazed or even penetrated my own arm. Then the snake really constricted. I saw a red cloud coming toward me through the darkness, and I went out. The last thing I heard was another one of those hideous hisses and the roar of the shepherds as they attacked the snake in total darkness.
I could breathe.
I couldn’t move, couldn’t see, but I could breathe. I could hear.
The shepherds were whimpering and tugging at my legs, but I was wrapped in what felt like a ton of slippery muscle meat.
Slippery. Contrary to popular opinion, snakes aren’t slippery, so I’d done some damage with those two body shots. And the fact that I could breathe meant that I’d done some real damage with the head shots. Now the problem was to get out from under before the damned thing stiffened up and pinned me here forever.
I backed the dogs off and started to wriggle my way out from under a mile or so of dead coil. At one point the head flopped down into my hands. It was a satisfyingly soggy mess. I fished out the penlight. I had to see.
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