The Montauk Monster (13 page)

Did someone higher up know about Dr. Greene’s condition? She couldn’t shake the feeling that they’d been set up to fail.

While Dr. Greene walked out to the bathroom, Kathryn went through the various e-mails that had been sent to her by their teams in the quarantined hospital and in the field. The news was dire.

The infection had a 100 percent mortality rate. Death came in hours, a day at the most. The physical effects of the contagion were horrendous. It was as if the infected carried within them the materials for a nuclear meltdown. The hospital was such a hot zone, Dr. Greene had requested they evacuate one square mile around the facility.

That request had been denied.

Kathryn assumed the DARPA spook that had attached himself to her rapid response team had put the evac order on ice. He’d intercepted them when they stopped in Westchester to gather needed supplies. No one was even given a name or rank of the DARPA man—just a badge and an order to do whatever was asked of them. Her protest was cut short by Dr. Greene. He’d pulled her aside and warned her not to cross the man. DARPA caused tougher men to lose their lunch.

The man offered no assistance or information in return for their cooperation.

Oh, but he and other DARPA agents on the ground watched. They had the ear of whoever was in charge of this disaster.

The more she thought of the size of the rapid response team they were allotted, with members from Atlanta and the tristate area, the hotter her anger flared. They needed five times the personnel if there was ever a hope to get a handle on things here. They had been hamstrung from the start.

She had to push her frustration aside and concentrate on the things she could control.

How long can we contain this?

Or was that a question too late in the asking.

Maybe containment was no longer an option.

The walk to Lab 101 was quick, but not without its share of surprises. From his vantage point, Dalton felt like he’d entered a wildlife sanctuary, not a government facility. The vegetation had been left to grow lush and dense. The humid air was heavy with the smells of damp earth and greenery. It called to mind days spent on his grandmother’s back porch, the acre of tilled land spread before them, snapping green beans and tossing them in a brown paper bag. A pair of feral cats, all dirty fur and tattered ears, skittered to his right, disappearing within the tall, dark grass.

The lab itself was a study in governmental architectural blandness, an unimpressive series of whitewashed connected concrete blocks, fronted by a grassy quadrangle. It had the look and feel of a ghost town. Dalton wouldn’t have been surprised to see a tumbleweed blow past. Cold, empty windows stared down at them, indifferent to their presence.

“I can’t believe I’m actually here,” Meredith said, her voice dripping with awe.

“On an island full of labs?” Dalton asked.

“You don’t understand.”

Meredith stopped and pointed with her crutch to a grassy area on their left. “What is that?”

Robert shaded his eyes and scanned the foliage off the paved walkway. “Hopefully not what I think it is.”

He cautiously stepped over the steel handrail, dropping onto the grass. Dalton touched Meredith’s shoulder and said, “I’ll go with him. Wait here.”

She followed his gaze to her crutch. He immediately felt like a creep, pointing out her disability like that. Yes, he wasn’t sure how she’d fare on the uneven terrain, but that was her decision to make, not his. It was too late to take it back and he felt saying he was sorry would only make things worse. He avoided her eyes and ran after Robert.

The man stood over a crumpled pile of stained clothes. There were rents in the fabric of the dark blue shirt and tan Dockers. One brown loafer lay on its side, just a few feet from the pile. A dried, unidentifiable substance flowed from the shoe to the clothes. When Robert bent down to get a closer look, Dalton warned him, “Don’t touch it!”

“Thanks for the warning. Trust me, I’m not going to touch anything on this island if I don’t have to. I just wanted to see if there were—”

He craned his neck, scanning the bundle. “Glasses. Blue Gucci frames. Only Dr. Stanley wore those.”

“I saw something like this a couple of nights ago. A couple on the beach was torn to pieces. They were scattered all around a dune. The chunks of their bodies were smoking, like they were dissolving in acid. I heard that everything completely melted in the morgue. If this is anything like that, Dr. Stanley is right here with his clothes.”

Robert straightened and took a few steps back. “What the hell were they messing with?”

Dalton looked up at the stark white structures that made up Lab 101. “Something they shouldn’t have. And if we don’t find any answers in there, a whole lot more people are going to end up like this guy.”

When they rejoined Meredith, she asked, “What was it?”

“One of the doctors,” Robert replied, forging ahead.

Meredith drew her Glock from her holster. “I’m not taking any chances.”

Dalton did the same. “I think that ship has sailed.” He cast a glance back at the ferry.

The vegetation outside the walkway to the lab looked as if it hadn’t been tended in years, though this time in the summer it took only a couple of weeks for Mother Nature to take over. “Is it always like this?”

Robert turned to him. “Usually overgrown, but not this bad. They had us take turns with the grounds keeping. We all hated it, so we half-assed it. If any duty here could stand cut corners, this was it.”

They stopped in front of a squat building with double steel doors. There were no markings on the building to indicate its function; a square, gray card reader was fastened to the wall.

“This is the decontamination room,” Robert said. “Every employee is expected to go through here when they get to the island and repeat the procedure when they leave. It’s to make sure nothing gets on or off the island. There are more areas like this throughout the lab. Depending on your job, a person could have to strip and shower up to twenty times a day. We’re skipping the shower part because I’m pretty sure safety protocols have been rescinded.”

He produced a white card from his pocket and waved it over the reader. A green light came on, followed by a loud buzzing as the door unlocked.

“There goes my chance to shower with you,” Dalton whispered to Meredith.

“You always get this goofy when you break into government labs?”

“This being my first one, I guess so.”

“Try not to let Robert hear you. He knows these people. This is going to be hard on him.”

The decontamination room had lockers and cubbies to hold shoes. A line of shower stalls spread out before them. They walked through, sans water. Stacks of plain white overalls, masks, gloves and shoe booties were piled in cubbies on the other side.

Robert handed masks and gloves to each of them. “Better safe than sorry.”

Dalton fastened the elastic bands of the mask around his head and donned the gloves. He was astonished to look up and see spiderweb cracks in the ceiling. Some of the gaps in the cracks were considerable in size. If this was a decontamination room, shouldn’t it be sealed tight?

They came to an opaque glass door that slid open when Robert flashed his card. A draft of welcome, cold air enveloped them.

“At least the generators are still working,” he said.

But what’s flowing in the air?
Dalton worried. He tightened his mask, showing Meredith she should do the same.

“Is anybody here?” Robert called out. Anyone in the vicinity had to hear it and know he was serious. “Hello? It’s Robert Nicolo. If you can hear me, let me know where you are and if you’re okay.”

The hallway was lined on either side with numbered doors. Most of them were solid, but a few had small windows constructed in the upper portion. As they walked down the hall, Dalton peered inside. It looked like regular labs with test tubes and glass piping and instruments that must have cost thousands of taxpayer dollars. Behind some of the doors were offices. The general appearance of the interior of Lab 101 was one of neglect. It had the patina of a typical government building, one that wasn’t made for the public to see, so why bother with décor?

“How many levels are there?” Meredith asked.

“Three. This is where most of the personnel did their work. If no one is here, I’m not sure where they’d be.”

Dalton tried the knob of a solid door. It didn’t budge. “Maybe someone’s in one of these rooms we can’t see into.”

Robert flashed his card. The door didn’t budge. “It doesn’t work on the individual rooms. My clearance didn’t take me that far. We just have to hope they hear us and come out.”

Meredith and Dalton banged on doors, identifying themselves as police and asking if anyone was inside. Neither received any replies. Coming to the end of the hallway, the three paused, taking in the sounds and overall feeling of the lab. It was eerily quiet in here. Even the soft hum of the air units had been muffled.

“I’ve never been in here with it so silent,” Robert observed. “And I’ve been here on graveyard shifts.”

“As far as I know, diseases don’t make noise,” Meredith said. “I feel like something is all around us, but that could just be paranoia.”

“It’s a justified paranoia. All of the deadliest diseases in the world are in here,” Robert said. “If we came in and the power was out, I wouldn’t have let us go this far. As long as it’s cold, the specimens, if they’re put away correctly, should be in deep freeze.”

They listened for sounds of any movement on the floors above and below. Nothing.

An idea hit Dalton. He may have been new to the whole Plum Island mystery, but there was a pragmatic line of thinking they had all forgotten to follow since they stepped into the building. It was easy to throw practicality out the window when you were immersed in a modern-day Frankenstein’s lab.

He said, “If something escaped, like these Montauk monsters Meredith showed me, and made it to the shore, where would they have been kept before?”

Robert’s eyes lit up. “Shit. The animal holding pens.”

“I’d think if they had a crisis there, everyone would have been diverted to that area to see what they could do to put a lid on it before it boiled over. Where are the pens?” Dalton asked.

“The next section over. Even on a good day, the place is something out of a horror movie. I’ll find us some protective suits and we’ll go there.” He patted Dalton on the shoulder. “I’m glad Meredith took you along.”

They descended the stairs and followed an enclosed breezeway to a door marked
ANIMAL TESTING.
Robert popped a locker open by the doors and pulled out three suits that would cover them from head to toe.

“Try not to puke in the suit. I hear it’s very unpleasant.”

Sergeant Campos said he needed to stop home for a minute but he’d be right back. In his squad car, he hit the lights and sirens, tearing ass all the way to his house.

Pulling in to his driveway, he left the car running and door open and jogged to his front door. His lungs wheezed as if they were filling with fluid. Adelle’s car was nowhere in sight, but it could be in the garage.

The moment he opened the door, he knew she’d left. His wife had a way of filling their house, making it a pleasant place to be, no matter what his mood. It was as if she was a source of flowing energy, keeping their house standing.

Adelle’s energy was absent. He silently thanked God that she took him at his word and left. Her closet door was open and he saw several missing sundresses.

Knowing she was gone was one less thing he had to worry about. He walked over to the liquor cabinet and eyed the bottle of Macallan eighteen-year-old whisky he’d been saving for a special day, his retirement. The doctors had forbid him from drinking the hard stuff anymore and Adelle was quick to squash any temptation.

Opening the glass cabinet door, he grabbed the whisky by the neck, savoring the feel of the bottle in his hand. The nectar sloshed ever so slightly as he turned it from side to side. He pulled a crystal tumbler from the shelf and poured three fingers’ worth. He almost added a splash of water before remembering that this was single malt and in no need of anything but a clean glass. The first sip went down easy with just the slightest burn. Warmth spread throughout his body as the whisky ran down into his belly.

After the second sip, the glass was empty.

“If I knew you were this good, I would have cracked you open a lot sooner,” he said to the bottle.

As he poured a second glass, a distant, steady roar broke the silence of the hot afternoon. He slowly walked to the window, sipping the whisky as he went. The floor carried the tiniest vibration. Pulling the curtain aside, he looked down Ash Street to Second House Road. The street was empty save for some parked cars, a yellow Hummer and Vic Tyndale’s Kawasaki motorcycle in the driveway next door.

He may not have been able to see anything, but he knew the sound, had felt the same vibrations underfoot during his three-year stay in Fort Bliss.

The military was here.

The moment Dalton, Meredith and Robert opened the doors to the animal holding area, every atom in their bodies screamed to turn away. The smell of blood and offal was so pungent, their nasal tissue swelled on contact in an effort to block the horrid odors from entering. Though they couldn’t see a thing out of order at this early juncture, it didn’t take a Plum Island expert to realize something terrible had happened here.

Dalton’s eyes watered but he couldn’t wipe the tears away within the suit.

“Why are we able to smell through these?” he asked. “And is it always this bad?”

“I don’t know,” Robert said, breathing through his mouth. “And no, it’s not supposed to be this bad. I’ve been here on days when they’d had to put down a dozen sick cows and it was nothing like this. I don’t think it’s going to get better the farther we go. Just try to put it out of your mind.”

Meredith placed a gloved hand over her stomach. “I can never un-smell this. Jesus, Robert, what the hell were they doing here?”

“Whatever it was, it came back to bite them in the ass,” he replied.

Dalton pointed at a gooey mass in the far corner, wedged between a pair of waiting-room-style chairs. A bloody white coat, torn skirt and loafers rested atop the remains.

Meredith gasped. “What is that?”

“It
was
a woman,” Dalton answered. It was just like what he’d seen at the beach at Shadmoor Park, only in a far more advanced state of putrefaction. “Whatever they created here doesn’t just bite you or tear you to pieces. It infects you with something—some kind of chemical or disease that melts you from the inside out. You know of anything that can do that?”

Robert shook his head, studying the gelatinous puddle for clues as to who it was.

“Doesn’t the Ebola virus make you bleed out?” Meredith said.

“Bleeding and melting are two different things,” Dalton said.

“This is a lab where they create bad shit. Ebola could have been the base. Add some Marburg virus and a few other things and who knows what they came up with,” Robert said.

The big man turned to Dalton slowly, as if he was moving underwater. He muttered something but they couldn’t make out the words.

“We should be extra careful. Some of those things might still be around,” Dalton said, motioning with his head to the gun in Robert’s hand. “If we come across one, shoot it. Empty your gun if you have to. They move faster than you think.”

“That’s not comforting,” Meredith hissed, checking to make sure there was a bullet in the chamber.

His elbow crooked and the barrel of his gun pointed at the ceiling, Robert led the way past a pair of swinging doors. There were a few blood spatters along the metallic bottom of the doors. It was far worse on the other side. The doors and the hallway looked as if someone had tossed a can of red paint in every direction. Along the walls was a series of long, Plexiglas windows. Deep, white scratches gouged the surface of each window.