The Dragon Factory (48 page)

“Take them!” I yelled. Easier said than done. With the red-haired people on the far side and the Kid in front, a gun battle was iffy, and we were right on top of them. So we crashed right into them and it was an instant melee.

Bunny hit the line from an angle and it was like a wrecking ball hitting a line of statues. The impact knocked guards into one another, and that probably saved all our lives because suddenly everybody was in one another’s way. Top and I both capped a couple of the guards with short-range shots and then we were up close and personal. Top clocked one guard across the jaw with his M4 and spun off of that to ram the barrel into someone else’s throat.

I went for SAM, but the boy was once more grappling with the big guard. Another guard stepped up and put his rifle to his shoulder. If I’d been five feet farther back it would have been a smart move for him, but I was way too close. I grabbed his rifle and thrust the barrel toward the ceiling and pistol-whipped him across the throat, then gave him a front kick that knocked him down. The guard next to him swung his rifle at me and knocked my pistol out of my hand and damn near broke my wrist. I pivoted and broke his knee with a side-thrust kick, and as he sagged to the ground I chopped him across the throat with the edge of my other hand.

Bunny tore a rifle from one guard’s hand and threw it away, then grabbed the guy by the back of the hair so he could hold his head steady while he landed three very fast hammer blows to the nose. The man was
a sack of loose bones, so Bunny picked him up and slammed him sideways into the chests of two other men. Bunny’s strategy was to keep destablizing the line. It was something we’d worked on in training. He was enormously strong and fast and he had a lot of years in judo, so he knew about overbalancing. Top, on the other hand, was lethal at close and medium range and his hands and feet lashed out with minimum effort and maximum efficiency. Top had done karate since he was a kid, and none of it was tournament stuff. No jump-spinning double Ninja death kicks. He broke bones and gouged eyes and crushed windpipes.

One of the guards came at me with a six-and-a-half-inch Fairbairn-Sykes commando knife. I took it away from him and then gave it back; he fell back with the blade buried in his soft palate.

SAM screamed in rage and pain as the big guard grabbed him by the hair and punched him in the face. The Kid’s nose exploded in blood and his knees buckled. He would have fallen if not for the massive fist knotted in his black hair, but even so the Kid tried to swing that stone again. Kid really had spunk.

There was one more guard between me and the big guy and I wasn’t in the mood to dance, so I grabbed the punch he was trying to throw and broke his arm, stamped on his foot, and then gave him a rising knee kick to the crotch that went deep enough to break his pelvis. He fell screaming to the floor and I closed on the big guy.

The guard saw me coming and swung the boy around to use him as a shield, locking a huge arm around SAM’s throat.

“I’ll pop his bleeding head off,” the man said with a thick Australian accent.

I pulled my Rapid Response knife and clicked it into place.

“Let him go or I’ll put you in the dirt,” I said.

Around me Echo Team was tearing the last of his men to pieces.

The guard—his name tag identified him as Carteret—lifted SAM off the ground so that he was a better shield. The boy’s face was going from rage red to air-starved purple.

“Killing the Kid’s not going to make the day end better for you, sport,” I said. “He’s the only coin you have left to spend.”

“Fuck you!”

I was about to rush him when SAM, oxygen starved and battered as he was, swung both feet toward me and then bent his legs and swung them back and up so that both of his heels slammed into the man’s groin. The guard’s eyes went as wide as dinner plates and he let out a whistling shriek. I grabbed SAM by the front of the shirt and pulled him free.

The guard staggered back. I put him on the deck with an overhand right that knocked him cold.

I spun back to the fight, but there was no fight. Bunny and Top stood in combat crouches, both of them bruised and breathing heavy, but none of the guards were able to answer muster. Most never would.

SAM took a staggering step toward me. The lower half of his face was bright with his own gore and he hocked up a clot of blood and snot and spit it into Carteret’s face.

It was a strange moment. Even with all of the vicious combat and murder around me, that act seemed to possess more real hatred than anything else that had happened here today. The boy was panting and crying.

“SAM—?” I asked.

He nodded. “Are you . . . Cowboy?”

“At your service.”

The Kid pawed tears from his eyes with bloody fists and then turned toward the open door through which the last of the red-haired people had fled.

“We have to save them . . . ,” he said thickly.

“Are there more guards?”

The Kid shook his head. “I don’t know . . . but I heard the tiger-hounds roaring earlier.”

“So, that’s what they’re called,” said Bunny. “We put two of them down.”

“Two? What about the other six?”

Christ.

“First things first,” I said. “Who are the people the guards were shooting?”

“They’re the New Men.”

“Why do the guards want them dead?”

The boy shrugged. “To hide the evidence, maybe. I don’t know.”

“ ‘Evidence’?” asked Bunny. “Of what?”

“Of what Otto and Alpha have been doing here. The stuff in the computers is just part of it.”

Bunny and Top moved among the groaning survivors and bound their wrists and ankles with plastic cuffs.

I gestured to the doorway through which the New Men had fled. “What’s through there?”

“Dormitories. It’s where they keep all the New Men.”

“Are they dangerous?” Bunny asked as he picked up his fallen M4 and checked the action. “To us, I mean.”

SAM shook his head. “They won’t fight. They . . . can’t.”

“Where are the computers?” I asked.

“We can cut through the dormitories and go around back. It’s faster than going back through the building . . . and besides, if the tiger-hounds are inside, then it’ll be safer out there.”

“Show us.”

“Will . . . will you help the New Men?” he asked.

I didn’t know how to answer that question, so I said, “We’ll see what we can do.”

He didn’t look deflated, but there was a look of disappointment in his eyes that had a lot of mileage on it. I didn’t know his story yet, but trust was not something he expected. That much was clear.

“Okay,” he said as he picked up his rock. Almost as an afterthought he took the knife from Carteret’s belt and staggered toward the open door.

Like players in a bizarre drama, Echo Team and I followed.

The Hive, Barracks 3

Sunday, August 29, 4:06
P.M.

Time Remaining on the Extinction Clock: 67 hours, 54 minutes E.S.T.

We stepped into hell.

The barracks was vast, stretching into the shadows. There were hundreds of cots set in neat rows that fled away on all sides of us. Figures lay sprawled or huddled on the narrow beds, or sat in rickety chairs, or shuffled around with their heads down. Everyone wore the same kind of thin cotton trousers, tank tops, and slippers. The clothing was a sad gray that made the people look like prisoners, or patients in an asylum, and I had the sinking feeling that they were both.

Top said, “Holy Mother of God.”

The New Men who had fled from the gunfire were clustered a few yards away. Several of them were wounded, and the others huddled around them, pressing their own wadded-up shirts to the bullet holes. None of them looked directly at us, though a few cut nervous glances our way, but each time we made direct eye contact with them they looked away. I saw no trace of anger, no rage at what had just happened. The only emotions that I could read on those faces were fear and a sadness that was endessly deep.

All of the people in the barracks had red hair, though that varied from a bright orange to nearly brown. They were short, even the men, and all of them were heavily built. The most striking feature was their heads. Their skulls were large, suggesting a larger braincase, but it was lower and longer than normal. They had sloping foreheads, thick lips, and no chins.

“What the hell’s going on here?” asked Bunny. “Who are these people?”

“They look like . . . ,” began Top but left it unsaid, and none of us wanted to put a name to it, either.

“We have to get them out of here,” said SAM. He turned and grabbed my arm. “We have to get them off the island.”

I said nothing.

One of the New Men—a female—rose from the huddled group. She looked at SAM, then away, and then back. She looked scared, but she held the eye contact longer than any of the others. She was as brutish and ugly as the others, but there was an innocence about her that was touching.

“Master,” she said in a voice that was higher-pitched than I expected from her muscular bulk. She turned toward the main barracks and shouted, “Master!”

The call was repeated over and over in that high voice. Suddenly everyone in the barracks was in motion. The New Men all got quickly to their feet and began moving forward.

“Boss . . . ?” murmured Bunny. He began raising his rifle, but SAM reached over and pushed the barrel down.

“No . . . it’s okay. They have to line up. They’re afraid not to.”

Bunny and the others stared at the Kid and then turned back to watch as the New Men shuffled forward, eyes and heads down, to stand in rows in front of their cots. Because they moved with their heads down they frequently collided with each other, but there were no grunts or growls of annoyance, no harsh words. After each collision they would separate and bob their heads as if each automatically took responsibility for the mistake, then continue toward their assigned spot. We stood rooted to the spot, unable to speak, as five hundred of these strange people formed into lines and slowly straightened as much as their stooped and muscular bodies would allow. One of them—an older man with gray in his red hair—who stood at the first cot in the line called, “Master!”

All of them dropped to their knees and bowed until their heads touched the floor.

Bunny wheeled on SAM and grabbed a fistful of the Kid’s shirt and lifted him to his toes. “What the fuck is this shit?” Bunny snarled in a dark and dangerous voice.

“Tell them to get up,” I said.

“Stand!” SAM yelled. “Stand.”

The New Men climbed to their feet, but their heads were still bowed like whipped dogs waiting for their master’s approval. I felt sick and angry and deeply confused.

“Farmboy here asked you a question,” said Top, leaning close to SAM, who was still up on his toes.

“Let the Kid go,” I said.

Bunny opened his hand and pushed the Kid roughly away. SAM fell back against Bunny, who twitched his hip to push him away. The Kid looked up and saw a lot of hard faces staring down at him.

“Tell us,” I said. “What are they? Why are they acting like this?”

“They have to. They’re genetically designed to be servants.”

“You mean slaves,” said Bunny.

He nodded. “Yes. Slaves. They did gene therapy on them to remove genes that code for aggression and assertiveness. The idea is to create a race of people who will do anything they’re told to do and . . .” His voice faltered, but he sucked it up and tried it again. “And accept any kind of abuse. No matter how bad you beat them or . . . degrade them . . . they’ll just take it. Otto and Alpha call them the New Men.”

“I didn’t ask what they’re called; I asked what they are.”

“They—Otto, Alpha, and their science teams—they took old DNA and then rebuilt it to create them.”

“They’re not human. What
are
they?” I asked again.

SAM looked scared to even say the word.

“They’re Neanderthals,” he said.

The Dragon Factory

Sunday, August 29, 4:09
P.M.

Time Remaining on the Extinction Clock: 67 hours, 51 minutes E.S.T.

“What is this stuff?” asked Tonton as Hecate injected a golden liquid into the IV line attached to the Berserker’s arm.

“A gift from my father,” said Hecate. She emptied the syringe and threw it into a red sharps disposal. “It’ll make you feel better.”

“I feel pretty frigging great right now,” Tonton growled. Even when he spoke in ordinary conversational tones, he had a deep voice that rumbled like thunder. Over the last few months the gene therapy had taken him a few steps further than the other Berkserkers. Tonton’s brow had become more pronounced, his nose wider and flatter. He looked less like his natural Brazilian-German and more like a mature silverback gorilla. Hecate had even noticed that Tonton’s back hair was starting to fade from black to silver. It was one of the things that troubled Paris, because they hadn’t given the Berserkers the genes for hair coloration or facial deformity and yet the traits had emerged anyway.