Breeds 2 (29 page)

“All right then,” Decker said, and pinched the radio mic fixed to his helmet. “We’re ready.”

Five minutes later, the lights within the mall and the surrounding buildings and houses for a ten-block radius winked out, leaving a scorched-earth patch of blackness that marred an otherwise elegant city nightscape.

When the lights went out, Kirk’s fingers tightened on the steering wheel. A great black void had suddenly opened where only seconds before the mall’s superstructure glittered and shone with pre-Christmas merriment. Tiny lights blinked on amongst the crowds behind the police-erected barricades. Kirk struggled to see anything and told himself to relax, even though he’d already picked up his cell phone.

This is bad
, he thought and craned his neck, straining to discern anything along the shopping mall entrance. Five minutes later, Carma opened the door and climbed aboard. “Cops are going in with a tac-team.”

She settled into her seat and punched numbers on her phone. “Janice? Yeah, get down to the Martin and MacDonald Mall. No, we’re not coming back. Get a cab. Martin and MacDonald. We’re parked… where are we parked?”

“South parking lot,” Kirk answered. “Look for H-section. No one around us anyway. Everyone’s up front where the cops are.”

Carma relayed the information and snapped the phone shut.

“Well, looks like he didn’t wait for the full moon.”

“Looks that way.”

“I saw about a dozen special forces rushing to the door,” Carma reported, staring at the mall. “Armed to the teeth. The story from the crowd is some guy walked into the food court and started throwing people around.”

A surprised Kirk regarded her profile.

“Sounds like our guy,
n’est pas
?” Carma asked

“Shit.”

“We’re going to have to go in there,” Carma said. “When everyone gets here. We’ll go in as a pack. Find him and take him down.”

“That’s a SWAT team going in there.” Kirk swung his attention back to the mall. “They might have a chance.”

“There’s no chance. Best they could do is hope they blow its head off again. Or torch him. And I didn’t see anyone carrying anything that looked like a flamethrower.”

“It might be something else,” Kirk muttered. “Maybe a terrorist inside.”

“It’s our boy,” Carma said in a resigned tone, thudding against her headrest. “And he’s taken the center of the ring. Of the arena. Waiting for his challengers. You’ve been to this place before?”

“I’ve shopped here, yeah.”

“Then start thinking about how we can get in there.”

An armored train of bodies bristling with automatic weapons swept through the front entrance and steamed into the wide corridor beyond. The lead man carried a black shield the size of a small door with the word POLICE stamped across the front, just below a generous viewport. A hunched Sergeant Decker, goggles and balaclava covering his face, stayed at the heels of the shield bearer, sweeping his MP5 wherever he looked. The remaining officers followed in a line where each person covered a section of the corridor with their weapon. The night goggles utilized the minutest light fragment and intensified it, transforming pitch black conditions into a haunting, aurora borealis green. Flattened packages and toppled display stands littered the floor in strikingly detailed images of lime and shade. Christmas decorations and signs heralding super sales hung in tatters. Marching through the deserted corridors as Decker and his team were, an eerie sense of wrongness nestled at the back of his skull. Something terribly wicked had occurred within these walls, and Decker’s unit was going to locate and deal with it.

“Coming up on the staircase,” he whispered into his headset mic, broadcasting it to the members of his unit as well as the police outside.

Three unit specialists turned their weapons upon the staircase while the force slunk and curled around the base like a voiceless dragon of war. The shield bearer ascended first, angling the barrier upwards. The train followed on his heels, spiraling upwards, rubber-sole boots padding over the steps in a soft tattoo. They regrouped on the next level in seconds. Decker lifted a fist and the line stopped, looked and listened, weapons aimed. The closed doors of a nearby tavern were on their right. Deserted tables arranged upon an indoor terrace glowed in green. Three corridors that led north, west, and south looked as forbidding and desolate as abandoned underground bunkers. Nothing moved in the night-vision optics. Nothing could be heard.

“Reached the second level,” Decker reported in a whisper. “Initiating sweep en route to the food court.”

“Affirmative. Be advised, One, suspect could be on the move.”

No shit
, Decker thought sardonically, but what he said was, “Roger that.”

He slapped the shoulder of the shield bearer, pointed in one direction, and the lethal train got moving. Decker held up a fist and swung his arm, pointing to the closed door of a tavern. The team stopped, divided, half covering all angles while the other half attempted to enter the tavern. One officer tried the door.

“Door’s locked, skipper,” a female officer whispered over the radio.

“Regroup,” Decker ordered. “Move on.”

The team reformed and, near soundless, they trekked along the east passage, paying heed to every set of opened doors. A jewelry shop twinkled like a royal tomb. Decker held up a fist once again and stopped the unit. Half the line entered while the others ringed the entrance, guarding against attacks from the outside. Operators snaked through the aisles with grim efficiency.

Decker glanced over his shoulder and glimpsed his team illuminated in green-black. Three of them slipped through a doorway at the rear of the shop. Decker returned to scanning the wide corridors. The immense mall was dead. Soundless. The surface of the moon possessed more life. Decker figured a person could probably hear a cockroach scurry across the tiles a football field out. The distinct absence of noise didn’t bother him. He was the fist of God with his team around him. Fingers flexing on his MP5, his attention settled upon the food court somewhere ahead. With the lights off, targets usually panicked and made noise. This one wasn’t making a peep, which suggested the individual had either moved or was keeping quiet.

And if he was keeping quiet, he knew someone was coming, and might very well be waiting for them. Decker would assume so.

In a short minute, the operators emerged from the jewelry store’s back room, signaled
all clear
, and rejoined the team. They crossed the floor to an outlet for novelty goods, where an inflated drunken elf hung from the ceiling just inside the doorway. Decker trained his weapon upon the elf, daring the merry fucker to utter a single syllable. His team split again and he led the other half into the joke shop. Debris cluttered the floor, slowing the sweep as he had to pay attention to what was underfoot.

Goddamn shitbox
, he fumed, checking his corners before proceeding into the next aisle. The first beads of sweat seeped into his balaclava.

A sheep’s guilty bleat shattered the silence and Decker whirled about to see a team member holding up a hand. A second later, the officer picked up the noisemaker––a plush toy that moaned a second time upon leaving the floor––and placed the offending device upon a shelf. Decker exhaled.
Goddamn
noisy
shitbox
. Well, he figured the gig might very well be up with the smiling sheep and its dose of parliamentary language.

Feeling just a little more wired, Decker directed his unit through the remainder of the store and deemed it empty. They proceeded to the drugstore next door with a log jam of overturned displays upon its threshold. A splatter of what might have been vitamins and greeting cards covered the floor.

The tactical team repeated the search, found nothing, and moved to the shop across from the drugstore. Decker didn’t like all the open shops. There were too many places to hide. Too many back doors to storage areas. If a determined individual didn’t want to be found in such a setting, the hunter would have to be even more determined. And thorough.

And Decker considered himself to be one ruthless and methodical bastard.

The corridor wound to the left and arched to the south, passing more shops and more evidence of mass flight by the mall’s dwellers. The unit members maintained silence as they stitched their way through every outlet, stoic and resolute.

The team member carrying the shield stopped and pointed. Decker peered over his lead man’s shoulder. A green and black lump lay in the middle of the corridor, a body, its feet pointed skyward and the head aimed at them. Decker’s heart rate increased ever so slightly while he scanned the shops left and right. One was a men’s clothing shop with a spilled heap of boxes and sneakers covering the floor. The other store sold used and new console games.

Tendrils of foulness reached them, wrinkling Decker’s nose. He recognized the smell.

“Body ahead,” he whispered into his mic and positioned half his team facing the corpse while the others cleared the caves to the left and right. When they regrouped, Decker gave the signal to proceed. The squad advanced upon the body like a hurrying caterpillar, gun barrels bristling.

The smell hit them hard.

The team forced their way through that eye-watering stew of ripe blood and offal as if it were a wall of horrid, permeable jelly. Boots padded through a wide pool of fluid, thick and warm enough to make one think they were walking through a basement flooded with paint. When they reached the body, Decker placed a hand on his shield man and stopped the team. He crouched and didn’t bother with the useless gesture of checking for vitals, seeing how both the victim’s arms had been removed and were nowhere in sight. The dead man wore a mall security uniform. Decker took a moment to absorb the morbid sight at his feet, knowing full well it would take a pair of trucks to rip a human being apart in such a manner.

To their credit, the other team members didn’t say a word, but Decker sensed a swelling abscess of disbelief.

“Pulled him apart,” a voice whispered in Decker’s ear with a telltale note of dread. Potter. Safely situated in the command van, far and away from the front line. “Pulled that poor bastard apart. Holy Christ our Savior.”

Decker agreed with the assessment, but he didn’t care for the dismay in the sergeant’s voice, not over the open line where all of his team could hear. Decker looked away from the carcass and saw the corridor opened into the ominous cavern of the food court.

He spotted two other bodies.

One hung over a table like a sacrificial offering to dark gods. The sight of the green-black body chilled Decker’s steely nerves. The corpse lay on its back and appeared to be one of the missing police officers. The front plate of ceramic body armor worn by the man had been ripped free like loose packaging, and the cloth and flesh underneath opened and ravished like a cooked crab. As still as an evil sculpture, the sight disturbed Decker.

The sergeant chopped at the air, starting the team into an open aisle between a flat labyrinth of prefabricated tables and chairs. Another corpse lay at the end of the lane some twenty feet away, the torso visible from the waist up, the face turned away from the tactical team. A third body lay ten quick paces to the team’s right, lying on a pair of chairs and opened like a grisly purse.

Decker panned his weapon side to side in a smooth motion, searching for targets. The team slithered along the aisle, leaving boot prints upon the floor. He leaned to his right, looked over a low wall, and noted the sizeable drop to the first floor. The escalators gleamed but from his angle, he couldn’t see anyone on them. The team halted next to the body tangled in the chairs and Decker involuntarily studied the dead security staff.

“Holy shit,” one of his team members whispered.

Decker did not reprimand the officer.

The body resembled a messy banquet. Fluids dribbled from the table edges. The wafting smell prompted Decker to glance away, ready to signal his people to move.

A cup scuffled across the floor, bringing the tactical team to a standstill. They centered their weapons on the nightmarish space on the far side of the gaping pit containing the escalators. Decker blinked as sweat trickled into his eyes, not appreciating the sting or its timing. A second rattle sounded from across the way, quickly stilled as if grabbed with a heavy hand.

Decker slapped his lead man on the shoulder to move out when a man appeared on the other side of the escalator pit, the torso rising from between the assembled tables like a soundless green ghost. In the magnification of the goggles, the man appeared half-naked, broad across the chest with muscular shoulders, and possessed a hyena’s leanness. The ghoulish black-eyed individual sniffed the air with doe-like curiosity and quickly caught the scent of the tactical team.

Upon which the man’s mouth split apart with alligator mirth.

The unexpected transformation chilled the hot coils of Decker’s guts and made his brain hesitate in a double take. Worse still, the guy held something, something which dripped in thick rivulets.

“Light him up,” he whispered softly.

The team opened fire, the deadly stuttering of automatic weapons shattering the mall’s crypt-like silence. Light streaked across the escalators and zinged through the space once occupied by the grinning, half-naked suspect, who ducked out of sight the instant the first shot was fired. A few rounds drilled spidery holes into the table surfaces while others bit off corners.

Decker slapped the shield bearer on his shoulder and the train chugged forward, guns quiet but poised to speak. They double-timed it through the aisle, stepped over the body with the twisted head, and rounded the wall toward the fiend’s location. Decker hunted for a target, seeking to place a full burst in the monster’s heart.

His breath caught in his throat at the figure streaking through the gaps between tables, surging around the corner like a torpedo.

Straight into the shield bearer.

Decker swung his weapon around to fire as the goblin-man gripped the edges of the police shield and yanked it up, taking the officer whose arms were strapped to the shield. The team member yelped as he was tossed into the tactical squad lined up behind him. A boot caught Decker hard across the forehead. Stars exploded in his vision, driving him to one side as the mall killer flashed by and crashed into his squad.