Brood XIX (14 page)

"Get up, Colonel," a firm voice said from
behind him. Fists knotted into his jacket and he was pulled to his
feet. "We're registering heat signatures down the hall."

And with that, the Colonel was running,
through the lab and the decontamination chamber, through the locker
room into the corridor where two men stood before the other door
with a thermographic infrared camera directed at the steel slab.
The eye was in his hand before he shoved them aside and thrust it
up to the scanner. He slid through sideways as the door opened,
welcomed into the darkness by a cacophonous riot of crying.

There were plastic incubators to the left,
rows of bassinettes to the right. Toward the back were clear
plastic cribs with cage lids. The screaming was all around him.

"Jesus Christ," one of his men said from
behind him, but he was already dashing toward the incubators. The
heating elements over two of the incubators provided a faint green
glow through the goggles. The first unit was empty. Beneath the
second was a squirming infant, arms stretched stiffly from beneath
a blanket, tiny fists clenched and trembling. Its mouth framed a
scream, its eyes pinched closed. A tuft of light hair capped its
wrinkled, round head.

The Colonel reached in and gently lifted the
child from the incubator, cradled it to his chest, and sobbed
anew.

There had been two umbilical cords in the
cryogenic freezer, two heat lamps over the incubators.

"Where's the other one?" he shouted.

"There are more over here," one of the men
called from his right. Children swaddled in blankets, none of them
newborn, all crying. He passed them by, noting that only every
other bassinette was occupied.

"More back here!" another man yelled.

The Colonel ran toward the voice, but there
were only toddlers and small children wailing behind the vented
plastic walls of their cages. He spun in a circle. There were no
more infants.

Only the terrified cries.

"Where's my child?" he screamed, his voice
echoing into the dark stone corridors beneath the temple.

The communication of the dead is tongued
with fire beyond the language of the living.

- T.S. Eliot

20 Miles Southwest of

Wren, Colorado

The words of the dying man haunted him in
whispers.

You'll never find her in time.

Special Agent Paxton Carver cranked the
wheel to the right, the black Caprice Classic fishtailing on the
gravel road in a cloud of dust before the tires finally caught and
launched the sedan down the long, rutted dirt drive toward the
distant farmhouse. Fallen barbed wire fences blew past to either
side, tangled with tumbleweeds and overgrown by wild grasses and
sunflowers, the fields beyond a riot of vegetation, prematurely
browning from dehydration.

He could barely hear the distant cry of
sirens behind over the pinging of rocks against the
undercarriage.

The crows were already waiting when he
reached the house and jammed the brakes, lining the steepled roof
of the white clapboard house, the aluminum outbuilding, and the
thick black wires stretching back to the telephone poles. The
setting sun beyond cast a scarlet glare over everything, limning
the feathers of the raucously cawing birds as though they'd bathed
in blood.

The transmission had been well masked,
bouncing from one satellite to another. They had finally isolated
the source, but it had taken so long... Too long.

Twenty-two hours and nineteen minutes.

Carver leapt from the car and hit the front
steps at a sprint, tightening the Kevlar vest over his torso, his
official windbreaker still on the passenger seat. He drew his M9
Beretta 9mm from his shoulder holster and pointed it at the front
door. The porch planks were bowed and gray, pulling the nails from
their moorings; the siding of the house sandblasted, white paint
peeling in curls. Two rusted chains dangled from the overhang to
his left where a porch swing had once been suspended, the window
behind covered from within by dusty drapes and cobwebs. He threw
back the screen door, hammering the wall with a bang, tried the
front door, then kicked it in.

"FBI!" he shouted, shoving past the
shivering door through the cracked and splintered threshold and
into the living room, arms tensed in front of him, taking in the
room along the sightline of the Beretta.

Single level; no stairs. Dusty sheets draped
over a couch and chair to the right. Twin framed oil landscapes
flanking a single window guarded by floor-length maroon drapes.
Older television on a stand. Magazines on an end table, glossy
covers dulled by dust. Open bedroom door to the left. Stripped,
stained mattress. The mirror on the inside of the open closet door
reflected a rack of empty hangers, nothing beneath. A bathroom door
stood ajar beside the bedroom. Shower curtain missing, the toilet
and rim of the tub stained by rust. Mirror on the medicine chest
spider-webbed.

The buzzing of flies drew him toward the
kitchen ahead before being drowned out by the rising sirens and the
grumble of tires on gravel.

He paused at the entryway, flattening his
back to the wall between the living room and the kitchen. Deep
breath. In. Out. Ducking around the corner, he scrutinized the room
with a sweep of the pistol. To his left: white refrigerator, ice
chest-style handles; oak cabinets; gas stove; green Formica
countertops freckled with crumbs. To his right: dinette, two
chairs, no dust; microwave behind, green numbers flashing the wrong
time.

He glanced at his watch. Twenty-two hours,
twenty-one minutes.

At the back of the kitchen, the sink was
overflowing with foul-smelling pots, above which bloated black
flies swarmed, seething over the tarnished copper. They darted in
and out of the hole to the garbage disposal. The gold sashes
covering the window behind were alive with them.

Carver turned to his right and passed
through the mudroom without slowing, bursting out through the rear
door onto a windswept stretch of hard dirt. A worn path led to the
corrugated aluminum building, the slanted roof covered by screaming
crows jostling for position.

Voices rose in tumult from the far side of
the house, now a black silhouette against the swirling red
cherries. Footsteps thundered hollowly on the front porch and
pounded the packed earth as they converged upon his position.

Twenty-two hours, twenty-two minutes. There
was no time to wait for backup.

He grabbed the knob and threw the door
inward, thrusting the Beretta through in front of him. The sour
smell of spoiled meat and feces swatted him in the face. Frenzied
talons clamored on the roof, the frantic cawing reaching a
crescendo. Twin slants of mote-infested light stained the straw
floor crimson, illuminating a bare room the size of the entire
house, with only a single fold-out table with a laptop on it in the
middle of the vast emptiness. The screen faced away from him,
deeper into the vacuous space.

You'll never find her in time.

He sprinted to the table and spun the laptop
so he could see the image he knew would be there. The girl had
slouched forward onto the concrete floor, her face buried beneath
her tangled blonde hair, her flesh a sickly shade of gray under the
single overhead bulb. Her shoulders trembled almost imperceptibly
with a soundless inhalation.

"She's still alive," he shouted over his
shoulder.

He yanked on the computer until he met
resistance. The power cord was strung to an orange extension cord
and buried beneath the straw, but it was the network cable
stretching deeper into the outbuilding that he sought. Following
its length, he stomped as he pulled it from the straw, listening
until he heard the change from solid cement to something
metallic.

Carver fell to his knees and cleared away
the detritus, uncovering a rusted iron hatch, secured to the
concrete by an eye-bolt and a padlock. A single shot destroyed the
lock and he frantically lifted the hatch, revealing a set of wooden
stairs leading down into the earth.

Steeling himself against the intensified
smell, he pointed the barrel toward the landing below, and slowly
began the decent into hell.

Twenty-two hours and thirty-two minutes
earlier, Carver had known he was close, but he had no idea just how
close. He had been pursuing the monster for the last two months,
since the discovery of the body of eleven year-old Ashlee Porter. A
vagrant had found her right foot in the Dumpster behind a
convenience store, but the resultant search had only turned up
eight more parts in trash receptacles across the west side of
Cheyenne, Wyoming. Fortunately, her head had been among them.
Angela Downing's corpse had been found similarly dismembered in the
hollow trunk of a lightning-struck cottonwood outside of Brush,
Colorado three weeks later, and only two weeks prior to unearthing
the right hand of Jessica Fenton from the bank of the Big Thompson
River southeast of Greeley. By a stroke of luck, one of her
fingerprints had escaped the claws of the crawfish, providing her
identification since they never did find her head, or any of the
rest of her for that matter. All three had presented with
lacerations of the palmar surface of the distal phalanges, broken
fingernails, and trauma to the cuticles consistent with a futile
struggle against a hard surface while being pinned from behind. The
two salvaged heads had exhibited bruising on the occipital and
temporal regions, betraying repeated blows from behind, and areas
where fistfuls of hair had been torn from the scalp. Angela
Downing's left ankle had been chafed to the exposed muscle by what
residual traces of metal confirmed to be an iron manacle.

The Rocky Mountain Regional Computer
Forensics Laboratory had been able to conclude that all three
victims had been exsanguinated prior to being butchered. The
superficial strata of their skin showed elevated levels of ammonia
absorption consistent with chronic exposure to urine and feces, a
trait common in people held captive in close confines over an
extended period of time. Unfortunately, they had been unable to
separate any viable DNA from those of the corpses.

Until that point, his day had been spent
following up on one dead-end lead after another and he had been
both physically and emotionally exhausted by the time he returned
to his townhouse that night, take-out Chinese under one arm and a
week's worth of forgotten mail under the other. He had left his
briefcase in the car, knowing that if he brought it in with him, he
would be staring down the barrel of another sleepless night spent
poring over the pictures of dismembered little girls. For a moment,
he thought he had been right on the monster's heels, but he had
come to the grim realization that there would be no more progress
until his worst nightmare became reality.

Until they discovered the next body.

He set the soggy brown paper sack on the
table and the mail on the eating bar. The sink beneath the lone
window was brimming with dishes he'd at least managed to rinse, the
curtains riffling gently behind. The counter beside was littered
with crumpled fast food wrappers. He was about to open the fridge
to grab a Killian's when he saw the note he had affixed to it only
the night before: Buy Beer. Shaking his head, he shrugged off his
suit jacket and drank some water straight from the faucet. He'd
just head upstairs and change his clothes, come back down, choke
down a little Mongolian Beef, and pray sleep claimed him before he
again broke down and cracked open the case files.

Passing through the darkened living room,
the light from the kitchen reflecting through the layer of dust on
the TV, he ascended the stairs one at a time, feeling aches upon
pains throughout his body. There were three doors at the top of the
landing overlooking the great room: to the left, the master
bedroom; straight ahead, a bathroom; and to the right, the second
bedroom, which served as his study. He always kept them open.
Always.

The door to the study was closed.

He took a deep breath to focus his senses.
There was no time to hesitate or whoever was inside would realize
that he knew. He pulled the Smith & Wesson Model 19 snubnose
from his ankle holster and jammed it under his waistband, untucking
his button-down to hang in front. Drawing his Beretta, he kicked
the door in with a crack of the destroyed trim.

The room beyond was dark, as he knew it
would be, but he immediately sensed someone else in there with him.
He could smell their sweat, rank breath, ammonia---

Cold metal pressed against the base of his
skull behind his left ear as he entered the room. An even colder,
trembling hand with spider-like fingers closed around his and
relieved him of the Beretta.

"Why couldn't you find them?" a voice
whimpered directly into his ear. It was somewhat effeminate and
dry, a freshly sharpened scythe through wheat.

"I must have been close."

"I never meant to hurt them. But I know, I
know. I did. They're dead, aren't they? Dead, dead, dead!" the man
said, jabbing him in the head with the barrel of the gun.

Carver staggered deeper into the room,
colliding with his desk chair.

"Sit down," the man said, training both guns
on him through the darkness. The mismatched pair of pistols shook
in his hands. There was a rustling of papers as he sat on the desk.
"I have to show you. So you'll understand. You have to
see
."

He turned the computer monitor on the desk
toward him and pressed the power button with the barrel of the gun
in his right hand. A weak glow blossomed from the screen,
highlighting his face. His unblinking eyes bulged and tears
streamed down his cheeks. The muscles in his face twitched
spastically.

"This wasn't what I wanted," the man sobbed.
"It wasn't supposed to be like this. No one can help them. No one
can---"