Souls At Zero (A Dark Psychological Thriller) (44 page)

The smell of death.

On both sides of the corridor there were a number of rooms. The top rooms appeared to be laboratories of some kind, and Edger remembered Rankin talking about the rumours of experiments supposedly being conducted by Mason.

"I guess this is where Dr Frankenstein does his work," Black said, as he peered through the windows into the labs.

Edger walked on down the corridor, the silence of the place unnerving him. He was half expecting more guards, but there were none.

And then he looked through one of the large windows on down the corridor, and couldn't believe his eyes when he saw what appeared to be a boy sitting in the middle of an empty room, naked it seemed, and covered in what looked like excrement. The boy raised his head slowly to look at Edger through the glass. Despite the muck all over the boy's face, Edger noticed what was in the boy's eyes. The same thing that he saw in his brother Declan's eyes. A deadness, an emptiness brought on by forced trauma and abuse.

Edger went to the door that lead into the room. It was a metal door, electronically locked. You needed a key card to open it.

"Jesus Christ," Black said when he joined Edger and looked through the glass at the boy in the room. "Is he covered in his own shit?"

Edger moved down the corridor to the next room and looked through the window. In the brightly lit room was a naked girl who looked younger than his own daughter. She was standing in the very corner of the room, against the wall, while a pack of large brown rats sat around her. The rats were sniffing at the blood on her feet, caused by the cuts on her legs and body. Occasionally, one of the rats would try to bite the girl, and she would scream and try to kick the rats away from her. The rats hardly moved. They knew they had the girl trapped, that she had nowhere to go.

Banging on the glass, Edger said, "Hold on!"

He stepped back to the middle of the corridor and pointed his silenced Beretta at the window. When he pulled the trigger the bullet merely bounced off the glass. He fired another round and the same thing happened, the bullet bouncing off the fortified glass and ricocheting of the concrete wall behind him.

"We need a key card," Black said. "Before you shoot yourself."

"Fuck. Check those labs up there. I'll go this way."

Black went to the labs while Edger moved deeper down the corridor, his sense of horror increasing as he came across more and more rooms, each room holding a naked girl or boy in it, some of them plainly injured in some way, blood running off them, others so defiled in unspeakable ways that they just lay in their prison cells curled up and overwhelmed by the trauma they had underwent. Edger counted over a dozen rooms before he came to another corridor that led to the left.

This corridor also had doors on both sides, but no windows. Every door was electronically locked except one. The metal door was open. Raising his gun, Edger entered the room, almost gasping when he saw the array of torture implements hanging on the walls and spread out over the top of a large steel gurney. In the centre of the room there was something like a dentist's chair with straps hanging off the side of it, obviously designed to keep whoever was in the chair from escaping. The concrete floor around the chair, although scrubbed clean, was still stained with red patches, like the blood from the victims had soaked permanently into the porous concrete.

A chill ran through Edger as he realised his brother had been in a similar room in the video he and Black had watched. These were the rooms the Red Falcon members came to in order to have their sadistic fun. Cunts like McGinty, Rankin, all the others.

At least their all dead now.

That was something at least.

All but one anyway.

Mason.

Edger walked out of the torture room just as he heard a loud scream echo down the other corridor.

Black.

He sprinted up the corridor to see the ex-cop go stumbling out of one of the labs, no gun in his hand, holding onto his side like he had been injured. A split second later, a woman in a white coat rushed out after him, holding what seemed like a very long knife in her hand, screaming like a banshee as she went to attack Black.

Throwing the Beretta up as he ran, Edger fired at the knife wielding lab assistant, hitting her four times in various parts of her upper body, the last shot going through her skull and splattering her brains all over the wall next to her.

Black slid down the wall to the floor just as Edger came up beside him. "Fucking bitch stabbed me," he said, his hands holding his side just below his body armour.

He was bleeding badly. Given the length of the knife that had stabbed him, his insides were probably sliced to pieces. "Let me see," Edger said, setting his gun on the floor and crouching down to check out the wound. "I can patch it up, stop most of the blood flow, but it'll only be temporary. You need a hospital, Black."

Black laughed, almost choking. "Are you fucking kidding me? A hospital?" He laughed again. "Just cover it up. I need to get those kids out of here. That bitch has a key card on her." He looked over at the dead woman, her white coat stained with blood from the bullet wounds Edger put in her. "Never even seen her coming."

"Hold on, Black."

Edger went inside one of the labs and searched around until he found a first aid kit, then he carried the large plastic box out into the corridor. After helping Black remove his bullet proof vest, Edger spent the next five minutes doing his best to patch up the gaping wound in Black's side. All he could do was put a thick surgical pad over the wound and tape it in place. Within seconds of applying it, the white surgical pad turned red as the blood continued to ooze from the deep hole.

"What's the verdict, doc?" Black's eyes were half closed as he struggled to remain conscious.

You have less than hour before you bleed out and die.

"I've seen worse. Can you stand?"

Black snorted weakly. "I'll try."

Edger helped the ex-cop get to his feet as Black held on to him, grunting in pain. "Try to keep pressure on the wound."

"You can let me go. I'm fine."

When Edger stopped holding him up, Black nearly collapsed to the floor again, only the wall holding him up. Edger waited a moment to make sure Black was okay to stand. Then he went to the dead woman on the floor next to them, her white coat now stained red from the blood of her bullet wounds. The woman was in her early twenties, pretty before Edger shot her in the head. He wondered if Mason had programmed the girl the way he did with Declan, ordering the girl to kill anyone who came near the labs. Did Mason also kidnap this girl from somewhere, force her to help him with his fiendish experiments? Either way, no one controlled the girl now. Edger plucked the key card from of her white coat and handed it to Black, who received it with a bloody hand.

"Get all those kids out," he said to the ex-cop.

Black nodded and winced at the same time. "What are…you going to do?"

Edger took one of the plastic explosive devices out of the bag he still had around him. "I'm going to set these. Blow this whole fucking house up."

"How much time do I have?"

Not long.

"I'll set them for thirty minutes. That should give you enough time to get the kids and yourself clear, and for me to find Mason."

"What…what will you do when you find him?"

"What do you think? I'm going to kill him."

CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT

Edger planted the explosives at either end of the basement. When they went off, they would decimate the foundations of the building, and the whole house would collapse into rubble, reducing Mason's lair and any traces of the so-called Red Falcon Country Club to rubble.

After setting the second Semtex device, Edger came back down the corridor where Black still was. He was shuffling along, holding his side as he used the key card to open all the doors to the rooms that held the captive children. A few of the kids had already come out of their cells, looking shell shocked and afraid. They reminded Edger of people who had barely survived a bomb blast intact.

"I don't know what's been done to these kids," Black said, his face a mask of pain as he held one bloody hand to his side. "But they don't know whether they're coming or going. It's a job just to get them out of these rooms."

Edger looked at one young girl, standing with her back pressed against the wall, eyeing him fearfully like he was about to hurt her. The girl couldn't have been any older than ten.

How the fuck could people do this to kids?

He wanted to go to the girl, try to comfort her somehow, but he didn't have time. The bombs were set and due to go off in less than thirty minutes. His only objective now was to find Mason, the real source of the little girl's pain, and take him out.

"You okay, Black?" he asked, walking up to the other man.

"Never better." Black had a rictus grin on his pale face. A trickle of blood ran out of his mouth. "Just go and get that sicko Mason. I'll get these kids to safety."

The two men stood looking at each other for a moment. Edger doubted he would ever see Black alive again. "Thanks, Paul. I don't care if you burnt your badge. You're still a cop, and a damned good one."

"You're a good soldier yourself, Harry. Look after that daughter of yours, right?"

"I will."

They shook hands, then Edger ran down the corridor towards the stairs.

When he got inside the main house again, Edger checked his watch. After setting the first bomb, he had started a countdown. According to the timer on his watch, he had twenty-three minutes to find Mason, kill him, and then get clear of the house. As he moved down the narrow corridor towards the stairs, he thought that maybe he should have given himself more time before the bombs went off. It was a big house. Mason could be anywhere.

If the man was even still here
.

There was a strong possibility that he had left the estate altogether at some point.

But Edger didn't think so. Despite the massive security breach, this was still Mason's home, his base of operations, and he wasn't going to abandon it that easily. Besides that, Mason was probably arrogant enough to want to meet the man he knew was coming after him.

Edger was happy to oblige him on that front.

As he moved up the wide staircase, Edger ejected the magazine from his Beretta and slid in a fresh one, chambering a round immediately after. When he reached the end of the staircase, he stood on the landing and looked left and right. There were a number of rooms on either side of the landing, but there didn't appear to be any staircase leading up to the top floor. Edger thought for a moment. If there was no staircase, then there must be some other way to get up there, like a lift or something.

He turned right and headed down the hallway, stopping when he heard one of the doors opening.

A man in a black suit came walking out of the room, a gun in his hand, not seeing Edger until it was too late. Edger shot the man in the gut. The guard cried out as he fell to the floor, a red stain flowering out in his white shirt.

"Don't fucking move!" Edger shouted as he ran towards the fallen guard. The guard still held his gun loosely in his hand. Edger stamped on the man's wrist, then used his other foot to kick the gun away. He stood over the injured guard, pointing the Beretta down at his face. "Where's Mason?"

The guard's face was a mask of pain from the gut shot. Edger had seen guys shot in the gut before. It was one of the most painful deaths a man could have. The guard pointed down the hallway with a bloody hand. "Around the corner…the elevator…" he gasped.

Edger stared down at him. He was just a young guy in his mid-twenties. Hard to tell if he was under Mason's control, or whether he was just a man doing a job. Edger debated for a second, then shot him in the head. He couldn't afford mercy.

He headed down the end of the hallway, then turned right into another, much shorter hallway. No doors. Just a lead up to an elevator. As he hit the call button on the elevator, he checked his watch. Less than twenty minutes before the bombs went off.

The elevator door opened and he stepped inside. There were four buttons to choose from on the control panel. He hit the button marked "3" and the elevator kicked into gear then stopped immediately afterwards. He pressed the button again. "Come on, for fucks sake!"

No matter how many times he pressed the button, the elevator didn't start moving.

Then the acrid smell hit his nostrils. Sharp, sulfurous. He looked up to see a yellowish gas leaking from the air vent in the elevator. By the time he got a chance to cover his mouth, he had already inhaled too much of the gas.

His head began to spin and his vision started to blur. Then his balance went, and his legs gave way underneath him as he crashed to the floor.

The last thing he remembered before he blacked out was the elevator jerking to life and beginning to move upwards.