Forged From Ash (9 page)

“Let’s get this done quickly and get the hell out of here,” Sayers said.

Rico tightened his grip on his weapon until he was able to shift it into its full gauntlet form. “Amen to that.”

The next room was similar to the previous one except for the fact that only half of the cages were full. After a quick look around to make sure there was nothing else there, Rico and Sayers moved on to the next door. That one opened into a larger lab which was set up as more of a workspace with tables, burners, centrifuges, microscopes and other equipment that could be used for mixing chemicals and studying them. When Sayers tested the knob to the last door, he was able to open it without any resistance.

On the other side of the door was a small square room only slightly larger than a closet. Apart from a dirty throw rug spread on the floor, the only other things in there were a hose connected to a faucet in the wall and a stack of bottled water in the corner. When he started to go inside, Rico was hit by a putrid stench that slapped him squarely in the face. “Get ready with that shotgun,” he said as he crouched down to reach for the throw rug.

Sayers put the Benelli to his shoulder and aimed into the room.

Once the Skinner had a hold of the edge of the rug with his left hand, he cocked back his right as the gauntlet’s knuckle spikes grew another half inch. When he pulled aside the rug, he was almost knocked over by an even more powerful wave of stench that quickly filled the room. It was a powerful mix of feces, rust and body odor. Just when Rico had steeled himself against it, he was hit by the odor of rotting meat beneath everything else.

“Jesus!” Sayers gasped.

Through the earpiece, Marsh asked, “You need backup down there?”

“Stand by.” Once the earpiece had been muted, he spat a few hacking coughs into his sleeve before asking Rico, “What’s under there?”

Rico had seen plenty in his years as a Skinner. Plenty of death, plenty of decay, plenty of deformed creatures that gave him a real glimpse of what might be waiting for the sinners if there truly was a hell at the end of life’s ride. The sight in front of him now was enough to punch through the walls he’d built inside his head to keep his mind from breaking. To keep that from happening, he had to shut his emotions down. It wasn’t a trick that would last very long, but he hoped it would pull him through until he could take a breath of clean air.

Beneath the rug was a steel, five foot square grate that lay flush with the cement floor. The grate was almost as large as the rug, which meant it took up almost all of the floor space within the closet. Light from the crackling fluorescent bulb overhead barely made it beyond the grate to filth encrusted walls of a pit below. Rico couldn’t see all the way down to the bottom of that pit since the bodies piled inside were at least three deep.

Like the Nymar trapped within their cages, those bodies were emaciated and close to dead. What little movement Rico could see was limited to squirming limbs, craning necks and mouths slowly gasping for air. The sides of the pit were blackened by filth, some of which had been scraped away near the top. Rico could barely get himself to move, and the stench was too powerful for him to breathe unless it became absolutely necessary. A few of the squirming prisoners groaned in low, quivering voices. From the bodies at the bottom of the pile, there was only deathly silence.

“Are those more Nymar?” Sayers asked from directly beside Rico.

Reaching out with his right hand, Rico opened his fingers and stretched them out from within the gauntlet to touch the metal grate. Since he didn’t feel any new reactions with his scars, he said, “No. I’m guessing they’re human and that whoever is runnin’ this show is feeding these poor bastards to the Nymar.”

“Good God.” Turning his back to the room and storming into the hallway, Sayers reached for the radio clipped to his belt and keyed it to the correct frequency. “Mobile Four, this is Unit Seven. Mobile Four, this is Unit Seven, over.”

“Go ahead Unit Seven,” replied the IRD communications officer back at the Mobile Command Center situated at the feet of the Appalachians.

“Send at least two personnel carriers with a medical compliment to my position in Charleston. More if you can spare them, over.”

“We are aware of your wounded soldier and his escort. Have been advised they are en route to base.”

“I’m not talking about my soldier!” Sayers said. “Just get me some trucks or an ambulance or a goddamn camper so I can get these wounded out of here!”

“Give me your coordinates and we’ll send what we can. Over.”

After telling the officer where to send the reinforcements, Sayers clipped the radio back to his belt and looked at Rico. “Have you…ever seen anything like this?”

“Yeah,” Rico told him.

Staring at the closest wall as if he could see through it and every foot of earth behind it, he said, “Then I’m damn glad you didn’t tell the rest of us about what was out there. We never would’ve been ready for it.”

“None of us can be ready for this,” Rico said as he filled his lungs with air from the hall which was only slightly less nauseating than what swirled inside the small room at the end of the row. “Now let’s find a way to get that fucking grate off.”

CHAPTER SIX

A
part from a pair of cheap padlocks, the only thing keeping the grate in place was the fact that it was too heavy to be lifted by people who were too weak to lift their own heads. Rico and Sayers worked to remove the grate and start pulling people up from the pit where they were lined against the wall like a row of dirty mannequins with heavy eyelids and lolling heads. By the time the rescue effort could be turned back to the Nymar within the cages, reinforcements had arrived.

IRD medics and another unit of soldiers drove two commandeered vehicles to the warehouse. Neither of the vehicles was military, which was more than a simple attempt at urban camouflage. As the shapeshifter rampage had worn on, supplies thinned out until the only military vehicles left in operable condition were reserved for the largest offensives or the most desperate escapes. In the last year, there had been distinctly more of the latter than the former.

Drea and Seth were taken into custody. Most of the reinforcements loaded the occupied Nymar cages onto the back of a semi trailer still bearing a Coca-Cola logo, and the rest of the IRD personnel emptied the pit one skeletal civilian at a time. Some of those people had to be peeled apart from one another after lying prone for so long that their skin was bonded in filth. Only the ones at the top of the heap survived long enough to be escorted into an SUV loaded with medical supplies. The ones in the middle were so close to death that they succumbed to seizures before making it down the hall. The rest were nothing more than rotten meat to be scraped off the cement floor.

As the Coca-Cola truck drove away, Sayers looked up at the roof of a gas station a quarter of a block away. Wright had positioned himself there during the extraction so he could watch the surrounding area for any sign of the warehouse’s owners or threats from shifter attacks. He signaled for the Lieutenant to hold and fired a round at something on one of the cross streets.

Rico and McCune emerged from the warehouse after making their final tour of the building. The SUV was secured for transporting the survivors and idled as more shots cracked through the air.

“What’s goin’ on there?” Rico asked while nodding up toward the sniper.

“Small pack sniffing around down the street,” Sayers replied. “Wright should have them mopped up before they get too close. What about in there? Doesn’t look like you found much worth saving.”

The Skinner had two canvas bags in his hands that were relics of the days when using plastic grocery bags was a major concern. Neither one was completely full. “Like I said, I ain’t no chemist, but I do know the sort of things that might be useful in crafting poisons, lures and other Skinner goodies. The stuff in there wasn’t that kind of thing.”

“At least…not the stuff
you
could find,” Sayers said.

Rico twitched and grunted, “Yeah.”

When another unit member approached, Sayers turned to her and asked, “What is it, McCune?”

“I found some explosives wired into the walls. They were hooked to a few trip wires and motion sensors, but none of the detonators were active.”

“So that place could have been blown,” Sayers pointed out. “It just wasn’t.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Why don’t you join Marsh and the others for the ride back to camp?”

“Aren’t you coming, sir?”

“The Specialist and I will take the long way.”

She looked over to Rico, who seemed just as surprised by the news as she was. Knowing it wouldn’t do any good to argue, McCune saluted and hurried to get to a nearby SUV. The shots in the distance were tapering off, and in less than a minute, Wright gave the all clear. The SUV made a straight line for I-64, and the Coke truck detoured to pick up the sniper.

“Need a long hike and some fresh air?” Rico asked as he and the Lieutenant started walking away from the warehouse. “After seeing and smelling all of that, I can’t blame ya.”

“Actually, I was hoping to draw out the pieces of shit who run that…whatever that place is back there.”

“By presenting an easy target for them to shoot? Nice plan.”

Sayers wore a disgusted expression as he glanced up at the surrounding rooftops and then down to the barren Charleston streets in front of them. “If they wanted to kill us, they could have triggered those explosives. I’m thinking we might catch a glimpse of them if it’s just me and you out here.”

“Why?”

“Because you’re a Skinner.”

“You really think we’re responsible for that hell back there?” Rico asked.

“Those two prisoners swore to it.”

“You mean those two Nymar prisoners? The two inhuman prisoners? When did the IRD start putting so much stock in their word over ours?”

“I don’t give a damn about inhuman or not,” the Lieutenant said. “I know scared when I see it, and those two were too petrified to lie worth a damn. Also, from what I’ve heard about you Skinners, that facility back there seems well within your wheelhouse.”

Rico pivoted while pounding his hand against Sayers’s shoulder to force him to look in his direction. “Stop right there. Just what kind of monsters do you think we are?”

“Didn’t mean it that way, Rico. I know you would never be a part of anything close to that. I’m just saying I can imagine another Skinner with a screw loose might see that hellhole back there as some sort of…extension of what they think they need to do.”

Despite being angered by being lumped in with anyone who might toss innocent civilians into a pit to be used as food for vampires, Rico could tell the other man wasn’t just trying to cover up a slip of the tongue. “Actually,” Rico said, “you’re not far off. There are some Skinners who are willing to go to pretty drastic lengths to get what they’re after. So long as enough monsters get killed, they’re fine with collateral damage. To them, those civilians were already dead.”

“Means to an end.”

“Something like that.”

The two men started walking again. Sayers held his assault rifle across his body as his eyes scanned back and forth, up and down, in search of hostiles. “Your file mentions something about you working with some kind of splinter group of Skinners.”

“The Vigilant,” Rico said grudgingly.

“Right. Would they be capable of something like this?”

“Yeah.”

“Do you know for certain if it was them?”

Pulling in a deep breath, Rico let the cool fragrances settle in his lungs. Without the traffic, commotion, smoke and people that would have flowed through that city when things were better, the air that came in from the mountains was fresher and untainted. He hung on to it for as long as possible before saying, “It was them.”

“Why would they do something like that?”

Rico lifted his chin to another passing breeze. Allowing his gaze to wander beyond the nearby rooftops, he asked, “You know why I joined The Vigilant?”

Disappointment drifted across the Lieutenant’s face, but he stowed it away almost immediately. “Why?”

“Because of that whole means to an end thing you mentioned. Drastic shit was happening, and even more drastic measures needed to be taken to keep everything from going to hell. Of course,” Rico added with a grin, “that was before things really went to hell. Anyway, The Vigilant got their ideas from some wise men. I suppose at the time I was in a frame of mind where it seemed like a good idea to throw in with a bunch of gun-toting extremists. You want to know why I left them?”

“Sure.”

“Because they started branding their members.”

Sayers grimaced and looked over to Rico. “Aren’t you the ones who tattoo yourselves in the field? Seems like the whole branding thing wouldn’t make you squeamish.”

“It wasn’t because I couldn’t stomach it. The real question is why they wanted to brand their members. Or…why the brand had to be on the back of their neck.”

After they’d walked a few more yards, Sayers asked, “It’s not just some initiation thing?”

“Nope.”

“I know I requested you to walk back to camp, but it wasn’t because I wanted to draw out one conversation for the entire hump out of Charleston.”

“The Vigilant are all about their posturing and macho bullshit,” Rico said. “So when the brands started happening, I figured it was just more of that. Just some tough guy membership card to carry around and flash to each other at meetings. Turned out that was part of it, but I never really knew the whole thing until I was checking in with one of The Vigilant branches a few months after the nukes were dropped.”

“I thought you were done with them before that.”

“I was. But when you Army boys wouldn’t stop shooting at Full Bloods or burning your own cities down just to get rid of a few packs of Half Breeds, I started thinking society was too far gone to listen to reason. When it looked like every country would order tactical nukes dropped on locations where they
thought
Full Bloods might be holing up, I knew there wasn’t no such thing as civilized man anymore.”