The Dragon Factory

by Jonathan Maberry

  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.

  Chapter Fifty-One

  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.

  It was bad thinking.

  But try as I might, I couldn’t find fault with it.

  The plane flew on through the burning August skies.

  Interlude

  Das Alte Schloss

  Stuttgart, Germany

  Five days ago

  Conrad Veder stood in the shadows beneath one of the arches in the courtyard of the Old Castle in Stuttgart. He chewed cinnamon gum and watched a pigeon standing on the plumed helmet of Eberhard I, Duke of Württemberg, a wonderful statue sculpted by Ludwig von Hofer in 1859. Veder had read up on the Old Castle before coming here, partly as research for this phase of the job and partly out of his fascination with German history. He was a man of few abiding interests, but Germany had intrigued him since the first time he’d come here thirty-four years ago. This was his first visit to Stuttgart, however, and this morning he had whiled away a pleasant hour on the Karlsplatz side of the Old Castle in a museum dedicated to the memory of Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg, a former resident of Stuttgart who attempted to assassinate Adolf Hitler in 1944. A couple of years ago Veder had seen the movie Valkyrie, based on the incident. He thought Tom Cruise was a good fit for Stauffenberg, though Veder liked neither the actor nor the traitor who had failed in what should have been an easy kill.

  After reviewing all the data, including floor plans of the site of the attempted assassination, Veder concluded that he would have done it differently and done it correctly.

  He checked his watch. Almost time.

  He took the gum from his mouth, wrapped it in a tissue, and placed it in his pocket. Veder never left useful traces behind. Veder had little respect for police intelligence, but their doggedness was legendary.

  A group of tourists came ambling past—fat Americans in ugly shirts, English with bad teeth, haughty French. It was no wonder stereotypes persisted. As they passed, Veder melted into the crowd. He was dressed in jeans and a lightweight hooded shirt with the logo of the VfB Stuttgart football club embroidered on the right chest and the emblem of the Mercedes-Benz Arena on the back. There were at least five other people in the square with similar shirts. He wore sunglasses and a scruff of reddish gold stubble on his jaw. His gait was slouchy athletic, typical of the middle-aged ex-athlete who resented being past his prime. It had taken Veder only a few days to identify the personality subtype among the crowds in the city. He saw hundreds of them and now he was indistinguishable from any of the others who wandered in and out of the shops and museums around the Old Castle.

  He followed the crowd into the Stauffenberg museum. Veder was not dressed this way when he had visited the museum earlier that day. The other costume had been similarly based on a common Stuttgart look, and like this one it was equally at odds with Veder’s true appearance.

  It was possible, even likely, that he could have wrapped this job up during his early visit, but he liked the distractions and confusion that a group would provide. Earlier the attendance at the museum had been sparse. If someone very smart was to have watched the security tapes from the morning they might have been able to make some useful deductions about Veder’s true physical appearance. But amid a sea of tourists he was virtually invisible.

  The crowd was made up of three different tours, and the tour guides herded the people into one of the rooms to await a brief lecture by Stellvertretender Direktor Jerome Freund, the professor who was the assistant director of the museum. Freund came out of the back, walking slowly and leaning on a hardwood walking stick with a flowery silver Art Nouveau handle. Veder knew that the limp had been created by a high-powered bullet smashing Freund’s hip assembly. That shot had been one of the very few misses Veder had ever made, and he disliked that he had failed in the kill. That, at the time, he had been bleeding from two .22 bullets in his own chest did not matter. It was one of three botched jobs—all related to the work he had done for his former “idealistic” employers.

  Freund was a tall man with a Shakespearean forehead and swept-back gray hair. His spectacles perched on the end of his nose and arthritis stooped the big shoulders, but Veder could still see the wolf beneath the skin of a crippled old man.

  The speech Freund gave was the same one he had given that morning. Even the professor’s gestures were the same. Ah, Veder thought, there is nothing so useful as routine.

  He waited until the professor began describing the day of the assassination attempt. If this was all rote to the man, then he would raise his cane and use it to point to the large photo that covered one wall, tapping the photo with the cane tip to indicate where Stauffenberg and Hitler had each stood. All throughout the talk Veder pretended to take photos with his digital camera. Sure enough, the professor turned and began tapping the wall.

  If Veder was a different kind of man, he might have either taken pleasure in how easy it was or been disappointed that it did not challenge his skills, but Veder had the cold efficiency of an insect. Insects are opportunistic and they don’t gloat.

  He pressed the button on the camera and the tiny dart shot out of a hole beside the fake lens, propelled by a nearly silent puff
of compressed gas, traveling at a hundred feet per second. Freund flinched and swatted the back of his neck.

  “Moskito,” he said with a laugh, and the hot, sweaty tourists chuckled. It was hot and flies, gnats, and mosquitoes were everywhere. The lecture continued, the moment forgotten. Veder remained with the tourists until they finished the tour, and as the crowd boiled out into the courtyard he detached himself and strolled idly across to the opulent market hall. He bought clothes in different stores, changed in a bathroom, and became another kind of tourist who vanished entirely into the crowd.

  Veder had no desire to linger. He did not doubt the efficacy of the pathogen on the dart, and he had no need to see his victim fall. He would read about it in the papers. It would make all of the papers. After all, how often does a German scholar die of Ebola?

  By the time the first symptoms appeared, Conrad Veder was on a train to Munich. He was asleep within twenty minutes of the train leaving the station. By then Jerome Freund was already beginning to feel sick.

  Part Three

  Gods

  If the gods listened to the prayers of men,

  all humankind would quickly perish since they

  constantly pray for many evils to befall one another.

  —EPICURUS

  Chapter Fifty-Two

  The Dragon Factory

  Sunday, August 29, 12:51 A.M.

  Time Remaining on the Extinction Clock: 83 hours, 9 minutes E.S.T.