The Dragon Factory (31 page)

After he’d snuck out to recover the stone, Eighty-two had climbed back into his bedroom so that he’d be there for the midnight bed check. When the nurse and guard—there were always two of them—were sure he was in bed and asleep, they closed and locked the door. That left him four hours until the next bed check.

Eighty-two lifted the corner of his mattress and removed a small tool kit. The cover was part of a leather work apron he’d picked out of the trash, and the individual tools were things he had collected over the last two years. None of them were proper tools, but each of them was carefully made. Eighty-two was very good with his hands. He had learned toolmaking by the time he was ten and had even assisted Otto in making surgical instruments for Alpha. It wasn’t something the boy enjoyed, but then again there was almost nothing he enjoyed. Toolmaking had been a thing to learn, and Eighty-two never passed up an opportunity to learn something. He believed that his willingness—perhaps his
eagerness
—to learn was one of the reasons Alpha hadn’t let Otto kill him.

Alpha had hopes for him. Eighty-two knew that much, although he didn’t know what those hopes were or
why
Alpha held on to them with such aggression. It wasn’t out of love; the boy knew that much from long experience. There were a lot of other boys at the Deck, and Eighty-two had seen Alpha’s mood change from approval to disapproval of many of them over the years. Alpha’s disapproval was terrifying. Six weeks ago, Alpha had made Eighty-two and a dozen other boys sit and watch as One Thirteen was fed to Isis and Osiris. One Thirteen had not been clever enough at numbers, and his hand sometimes trembled when he held a scalpel. Alpha had been very disappointed in him.

Eighty-two used a pair of metal probes to undo the lock to his bedroom door, slipped out, and relocked the door. Then like a ghost he drifted along the empty corridors of the main house and along an enclosed walkway that led to the guardhouse. Twice he passed crosswalks that had cameras mounted on the wall, but he kept to his memorized timing schedule and no one saw him. To get to the House of Screams he had to pass through the guardhouse or go outside—and that wasn’t likely with the dogs out there. From his window Eighty-two had seen four of the dogs—two big tiger hounds and a pair of some new breed he didn’t know and didn’t want to know. No thanks.

The guardhouse smelled of beer, sweat, sex, unwashed clothes, and testosterone. Eighty-two would love to have doused the place in gasoline and tossed in a match. Or thought he would. It was easy to think of doing that because the guards made him so mad.

But could he ever do that? Take lives?

He knew he was expected to. He knew that soon he’d be asked to. Told to. Made to.

God.

He slipped inside and hid in the shadows by the door, watching the rows of beds, listening to the snores.

There was a sound to his left—soft and weak—and he edged that way. It wasn’t a male sound, not a guard sound. He thought he knew what it might be.

She was there, lying on the floor in a puddle of moonlight.

The female.

She was naked, knees drawn up to her chest, head half-buried under her arms. Her red hair was sweat soaked and tangled; her hunched back was crisscrossed with welts. Belt marks, with cuts here and there from the buckle. Eighty-two recognized them.

Carteret.

The female shivered despite the heat. The boy could smell urine and saw the glint of light on a small puddle. The female had wet herself. Either too afraid to move or too hurt, she just had wet herself. Eighty-two felt his heart sink. He knew that when Carteret woke up and saw the mess he would hurt her some more.

There was an expression Eighty-two heard in a couple of movies: “damned if you do, damned if you don’t.” That’s what the female must have felt. What she must feel now. There was no way to be right, to act right, to do right, in the eyes of the guards. Even obedience was sometimes punished. It was all about the punishment, about the breaking of the will. Eighty-two knew this, and he knew why it was important to Otto and Alpha, why they encouraged the guards to do whatever they wanted to the New Men. Especially when other New Men were watching.

The female opened her eyes and looked at him. The naked clarity of her gaze rooted Eighty-two to the spot. Her eyes searched his face and he could tell that she recognized him. Then her gaze shifted away toward the cot where Carteret slept, lingered for a moment, and shifted back to the boy. Slowly, being careful of her injuries and not to make a sound, she raised her hand, extended a finger, and touched it to her cheek. Then she drew the finger across as if wiping away a tear. Eighty-two instantly recognized the gesture—it was what the two male New Men had done after they’d seen him wipe away a tear after the female had been beaten.

Eighty-two’s mouth went dry. He reached into his pocket and removed the black piece of volcanic rock and held it in a shaft of moonlight so she could see it. Her eyes flared wide in horror and she cringed, but Eighty-two shook his head. He closed his hand around the rock and mimicked throwing the stone at the sleeping Carteret. Eighty-two then
pretended to be struck with a stone and reeled back in a pantomime of cause and effect.

The female’s eyes followed his actions and he was sure she understood what he meant, but she slowly shook her head. Fresh tears filled her eyes and she closed her lids and would not look at him again.

Eighty-two watched the female shiver and he wanted to do
something
, but he made himself move away. He felt ashamed for scaring her and furious that she would not fight for herself, not even when Carteret was helpless. There was a sound like cloth tearing behind Eighty-two’s eyes and the shadows dissolved into a fiery red around him as rage drove him suddenly to his feet and he raised the rock high above his head, muscles tensed to hurl it at the guard’s unprotected head.

Eighty-two had never wanted to kill anyone or anything before. Not truly.

Until now.

But he didn’t. His whole body trembled with the effort of not killing this man. It took more strength than Eighty-two thought he possessed to lower his arm.

Not yet
, he told himself.
Not yet
.

There was other work to be done.

He forced himself to move away, but as he did he saw the female watch him. She didn’t plead with her stare; there was no flicker of hope that he would rescue her. All Eighty-two saw was a bleak, bottomless resignation that came close to breaking his heart.

Anger was a burning coal in his mind. He cut a final glance at Carteret’s sleeping, drunken, naked body sprawled on the bed, and Eighty-two forced himself to put the stone back in his pocket.

Not yet
, he told himself again.
But soon.

He made it all the way to the end of the guardhouse and undid the lock and slipped into the House of Screams. Eighty-two had a plan, but it was a dreadful risk. He had tried once by sending the hunt video.

There was one more thing he could try. But if he got caught . . .

He did not worry as much about his own skin—he never expected to grow up anyway. Most of the other boys were already dead by the time
they were his age. He had to be careful so that he could do something about Carteret.

Eighty-two made it to the House of Screams and slipped inside, evading all of the cameras, and found what he was looking for. A laptop sitting on a technician’s desk. Eighty-two had seen it yesterday and hoped it would still be here.

Eighty-two opened it and hit the power button. It seemed to take a thousand years for the thing to boot up, but when it did there was a clear Internet connection. He licked his dry lips and tried not to hear the deafening pounding of his beating heart. He pulled up a browser page, typed in the address of Yahoo, logged into the same e-mail account, and set to work. He was halfway finished composing his note when he saw that the laptop had a built-in webcam.

For the first time in weeks, Eighty-two smiled.

In flight

Sunday, August 29, 12:44
A.M.

Time Remaining on the Extinction Clock: 83 hours, 16 minutes E.S.T.

I’m a damaged person. I know that about myself, and it’s part of the reason that my best friend was also a shrink. We met because of Helen.

Helen had been my girlfriend when I was in junior high. One September afternoon a bunch of older teenagers who were high on whiskey and black bombers cornered us in a field near where we lived. The boys stomped me nearly to death, rupturing my internal organs and breaking my bones, and while I lay there bleeding I could do absolutely nothing while the sons of bitches raped and sodomized Helen. Physically we’d both healed from the assault. Psychologically . . . well, what do you think? I got lost in frustration and impotent rage, and Helen just went inside her own head and got lost somewhere in the dark.

For the rest of her life Helen was under regular medical and psychiatric care. Rudy took over her case when Helen and I were twenty-one, and over the years it seemed like Helen was making some progress.
Then one day I went to her apartment to check on her and she was gone. Her body was there, but she was already cold.

What can you do when they turn out all your lights?

Well, for my part, I learned to
use
the darkness. I’d joined a jujutsu dojo a few months after the assault and over the years learned every vicious and dirty trick I could. I made myself get tough. I never competed in tournaments; I just learned how to fight. When I was old enough I enlisted in the Army and after that I joined the Baltimore cops. Rudy knew what the attack had done to Helen and me. It had destroyed both of the people we had been. I lost a lot of my humanity that day and lost more of it after she killed herself. The process fragmented me into at least three different and occasionally compatible inner selves: the civilized man, the cop, and the warrior. The civilized part of me was, despite everything, still struggling to be an idealist. The cop was more cynical and less naïve—and luckily for all of us he’s usually in the driver’s seat. But when things got nasty, the warrior wanted to come out and play. As I sat in the noisy darkness of the C-130 I could feel the cop sorting through the available data, but the warrior wanted to slip into the shadows and take it to the bad guys in very messy ways.

I knew that I should probably talk to Rudy about what I was feeling. About Big Bob, about the firefight in Deep Iron, and about the things we’d found in Haeckel’s bin. I could feel my self-control slipping notch by notch. I know I’m a professional soldier and a former police detective and a martial arts instructor—all roles that require a great deal of personal discipline and control—but I was also damaged goods. Guys like me can never assume that self-control is a constant.

Rudy was working as a police psychiatrist before he got hijacked into the DMS. It’s his job to keep his eye on a whole bunch of front liners—men and women who have to pull the trigger over and over again. As Rudy is so fond of pointing out, violence, no matter how justified, always leaves a mark. I’d killed people today, and I wanted to find more people to kill. The urge, the need, the
ache
, to find the people responsible for this and punish them boiled inside of me, and that is not the best head space to be in before a fight.

Not that I wanted to lose my edge, either, because the damage I owned also made me the kind of fighter that had brought me to the attention of Church. It left me with a useful kind of scar tissue, a quality that gives me an edge in a fight, especially when the fight comes out of nowhere.

You see, we don’t always get to pick our battles. We don’t often get to choose the rules of engagement. Sometimes a nasty bit of violence comes at us out of the blue, and it’s not always of our making. We neither ask for it nor subscribe to it, but life won’t ask you if it’s fair or if you’re ready. If you can’t roll with it, if you aren’t programmed to react when the hits come in on your blind side, then you go down in the first round. Or you can cover up and try to ride it out, but getting beaten into a corner is no way to win a fight. The sad truth is they won’t tire when they’re winning and so you’ll still lose, and you’ll get hurt more in the process.

Then there are those types who thrive on this sort of thing. If someone lands a sucker punch they dance out of the way of the follow-up swing, they take a little taste of the blood in their mouths, and then they go after the bad guys with a wicked little punk rocker grin as they lunge for the throat. It’s hard to beat these guys. Real hard. Hurting them never seems to work out, and threats aren’t cards worth playing. They’re wired differently; it’s hard to predict how they’ll jump. You just know they will.

The bad guys have to kill them right away or they’ll turn the whole thing around and suddenly “hunter” and “prey” take on new meanings. These types don’t bother with sucker punches—they go for the kill. They’re addicted to the sweet spot.

I understand that kind of person. I get what makes their fractured minds work.

I should.

I’m one of them. The killer in me was born in a field in the back-streets of Baltimore as booted feet stomped on me and the screams of an innocent girl tore the fabric of my soul.

I CLOSED MY EYES
and in my head the face of the warrior was there, his face painted for war, his eyes unblinking as he peered through the tall
grass, waiting for his moment. He whispered to me,
Take it to them. No mercy, no quarter, no limits.