The Dragon Factory

by Jonathan Maberry

  It wasn’t the right move to use on me.

  When he went for the face cut I knew it was a fake. Gunther hadn’t made a mistake—he just picked the wrong guy to try this move on. As he dropped low and went for the long reach toward my thigh I dropped with him so that his blade skittered across the gear hanging on my belt. I mirrored the arc of his cut with my own, shadowing his recoil so that my knife followed him all the way back, but I went deeper and drove the tip of my knife into the soft cleft between the bottom of his inner biceps and the upper edge of the triceps. My blade only went half an inch deep, but that was enough to open a pinhole in his brachial artery. From the way pain flashed across his face I knew that I’d nicked the medial nerve, too.

  Gunther tried to switch hands, and maybe he was a good left-handed knife fighter, too, but he knew as well as I did that the moment had moved away from him. It’s a terrible thing when one feels his combat grace deserting him. It takes the heart out of you in an instant.

  He shuffled backward to make the hand-to-hand exchange, but I jumped forward and my cut was deep and long and it took him across the throat. I had to spin out of the way of the arterial spray. He went down and I spun back into the fight, shaking off the knife, scanning the floor for my pistol, bending, pulling a new magazine, slapping it in, and all of it before Gunther had finished falling.

  Chapter Seventy-Seven

  The Deck

  Sunday, August 29, 3:28 P.M.

  Time Left on the Extinction Clock: 68 hours, 32 minutes E.S.T.

  An aide came tearing down the hallway to the private alcove where Cyrus and Otto shared a huge and complex computer workstation. Intruding into this area was forbidden without a call or advance warning via e-mail, and more than one employee had been summarily executed for an infraction of one of Cyrus’s strictest rules. However, the words the aide shouted as he pounded on the door wiped all thoughts of punishment out of their heads.

  “They’re attacking the Hive!”

  Otto and Cyrus leaped to their feet demanding answers.

  “It’s on the central channel!” cried the aide, and Otto hit the buttons that sent the audio feeds to his speakers.

  “. . . message repeats . . . a team of armed men is attacking the Hive. They’ve penetrated the perimeter and are in the building. We’re taking heavily casualties. Please advise; please advise.”

  Cyrus gasped. “It’s the Twins! It has to be. . . .”

  “How could they—?”

  “They must have taken the team that we sent. Pinter and Homler both know about the Hive.”

  “They’re trained operatives,” argued Otto. “They’d never talk.”

  “That witch Hecate . . . my darling daughter . . . could make Satan himself give up the secrets of Hell and you damn well know it.”

  Otto waved the aide away and slammed the door to the alcove.

  “We have to move fast,” Otto said.

  “But we have to make the right move,” countered Cyrus. “This will be a team that they’ve sent. If they’re doing this much damage, it must be one of the Berserker squads.”

  Otto nodded. “Then they won’t be there in person. Paris doesn’t have the balls for fieldwork, and Hecate is too smart. Even so, the Berserkers aren’t totally stupid. They’re smart enough to tear a hard drive out of a computer. We can’t allow the Twins to see what’s on those computers. I don’t trust that they’d let the Extinction Wave go forward.”

  “I know they wouldn’t. They’re not truly gods,” Cyrus said with grief and regret in his voice. “We have no choice; we have to use the fail-safe. . . .”

  Otto stepped around the workstation and put his hand on Cyrus’s shoulder.

  “Mr. Cyrus,” he said kindly. “My friend . . . Eighty-two is at the Hive.”

  Cyrus’s eyes went wide for a moment and then he closed them as the reality of that drove nails of pain into his heart.

  “No. . . .”

  Otto squeezed Cyrus’s shoulder and sat down. With a few keystrokes he called up the security command screen that would activate the Hive’s fail-safe system. He sent two sets of code numbers to Cyrus’s screen. One activated the fail-safe and the other simply detonated the communication centers and hardlines that connected the Hive to the Deck.

  “It’s come down to this,” he said softly. “Either we let the Twins see what we’ve been doing and risk having them stop us—and they could stop us—and then the mud people get to survive and the dreams of the Cabal and everything we’ve worked toward for seventy years will be wrecked, or you choose the boy who will make you immortal. That’s the choice. The Extinction Wave or the boy.”

  Cyrus shook his head. He stared blindly at the screen, tears in his eyes.

  “Eighty-two has my heart,” he said. “He has my soul.”

  Otto said nothing.

  “Please, God . . . give me a choice between the Twins and Eighty-two, but not this. . . .”

  “Were going to run out of time,” Otto said. “You have to make a choice.”

  Cyrus wiped the tears from his eyes and sniffed. When he lifted his hands to place his fingers over the keyboard they felt like concrete blocks.

  “Cyrus . . . ,” murmured Otto.

  Cyrus used the cursor to select one of the codes.

  He closed his eyes, squeezing them against a fresh wave of tears.

  And hit “Enter.”

  Chapter Seventy-Eight

  The Hive

  Sunday, August 29, 3:38 P.M.

  Time Remaining on the Extinction Clock: 68 hours, 22 minutes E.S.T.

  It was a slaughterhouse. I went through another magazine with the Beretta before holstering it and switching to the M4. More guards crowded into the lobby from the far side, but they paused for a moment when they saw that the floor was littered with bodies. Some of them were people who had wisely dropped and covered their heads to stay out of the line of fire; the rest were dead. Bunny laid down some cover fire for me as I made a dash for a heavy counter on the far side of the lobby. I felt the wind and heard the buzz of a few close shots from guards who were crouched down behind a conversational grouping of couches and overstuffed chairs. I jumped into a diving roll and came up into a kneel, pivoted, and laid my shoulder against the side of a hardwood counter. Bunny was behind a Coke machine and Top had faded to the far side of the lobby and was shooting from behind a decorative column.

  Echo Team formed three sides of a box, with the guards at the far corner. There were seven of them, and for a moment all we exchanged were wasted bullets. I had one fragmentation grenade left and a couple of flash bangs, but the lobby was half the size of a football field. To reach them I’d have to stand up and really put some shoulder into it, and I didn’t like my chances of being able to walk away from that. The remaining guards were dishearteningly good shots.

  I tapped my earbud. “Who has a shot?”

  Nobody did.

  Bullets tore into the counter, knocking coffee cups into the air and splashing me with hot coffee and creamer. The coffee burned, but none of the bullets penetrated. I knocked on it. Steel in an oak sheath. I shoved my shoulder against the counter and was surprised when the heavy piece of furniture moved almost two inches. Not bolted down, and it must have little casters on it. Sweet.

  “I’m trying something,” I said in the mike, “so make sure I have cover fire when I need it.” I threw my weight against the counter. It slid easily and moved four feet, the metal casters sounding like nails on a blackboard.

  “Copy that, boss.”

  The guards saw what I was doing and concentrated their fire at me, but to little effect. The steady bullet impacts slowed me, but I kept going, shoving the counter across the terrazzo floor. I kept praying to whichever god was on call that these guys didn’t have any genades.

  “We got a runner, boss,” said Bunny and I peered around the edge to see one of the guards break from cover and race to the far wall. There was a series of pillars there and if he could get to them he could inch his wa
y up on my blind side.

  “Got him,” said Top, and the runner suddenly spun sideways and went down. With all of the other gunfire I never heard the shot.

  I kept pushing the counter until I was thirty feet out. None of the other guards tried the same end-run stunt, but I could heard the squawk from walkie-talkies and I knew that they were calling up all the reinforcements they could. This was taking way too long,

  “It’s fourth and long,” I growled. “Make some noise.”

  My guys really poured on the gunfire and for a moment it forced the guards down behind their cover. A moment was all I needed. I pulled the pin on the frag grenade and risked it all as I rose to a half crouch and threw it. Then I flattened down just as the blast sent a shock wave that slammed the counter into me.

  There was one last burst of gunfire as a guard, blind from shrapnel and flash burned, staggered out on wobbling legs and emptied his gun in the wrong direction. Top put him down and the lobby was ours.

  “Move!” I yelled, and I scrambled out from behind the counter and made a dead run for the far end of the lobby. Bunny was behind me and Top came up slower, keeping a distance so he could work long-range visuals.

  At the far end of the lobby we peered down a wide hall that curved around out of sight. Now that the thunder of the gunfire was over I realized that the alarm Klaxons had stopped. The lobby and hallway were eerily silent.

  I tapped the command channel. “Cowboy to Dugout.”

  There was no answer. Bunny tried it, same thing.

  Top looked at his scanner. The little screen was a haze of white static.

  “We’re being jammed.”

  Two things happened in short sequence, and I didn’t like either one.

  First the lights went out, plunging the lobby into total darkness.

  And then we heard something growl in the darkness. Behind us.

  Chapter Seventy-Nine

  The House of Screams, Isla Dos Diablos

  Sunday, August 29, 3:40 P.M.

  Time Remaining on Extinction Clock: 68 hours, 20 minutes E.S.T.

  The man on the radio—the one who called himself Cowboy—had told him to run and hide. He almost did. When he heard the voices in the hallway, Eighty-Two grabbed his portable radio and fled the communications center and ran down two side corridors and across the veranda, back in the direction of his room.

  The problem was that the guard quarters were between the communications room and the main house. He skidded to a stop at a juncture of corridors, torn by indecision. In the distance he heard gunfire and then screams. And then alarms. These weren’t the fire alarms that had gone off when he’d sent his diversionary fire. No, these were the heavy Klaxons to be used only in the more extreme emergencies.

  The Americans were attacking.

  The thought sent a thrill through Eighty-two’s chest. He started toward his quarters again but stopped after a single step.

  What if he ran into Carteret on the way? When this alarm was going off, Eighty-two was under orders to remain in his room. Everyone on the staff knew that. Guards would probably be at his room now, wondering where he was, and his absence would be relayed to the head guard. Carteret. How could Eighty-two explain his presence on the far side of the compound, in the wrong building? Carteret wasn’t stupid. He’d put the pieces together: a small fire to distract everyone and then a full-scale invasion.

  Would Otto have given Carteret orders to kill Eighty-two if there was a danger he’d be taken?

  No. Alpha would never allow that.

  Then a second thrill went through the boy’s chest and this time it wasn’t excitement—it was terror.

  If there was an invasion by government forces—American or otherwise—then their guards would almost certainly have other orders. Orders more crucial to Alpha and Otto’s plans than the life of Eighty-two.

  The boy looked down one corridor toward the sealed computer rooms. In there, in the very heart of the Hive, were records of all of the research done here on the island. Years upon years of study of genetics and transgenics, of special surgeries, of breeding programs, of the rape and perversion of nature. Evidence that would put Otto and Alpha away forever. Maybe have them executed.

  Then Eighty-two turned and looked down the opposite corridor, back to the House of Screams. That’s where the labs were, and that’s where the bunkhouses for the New Men were.

  The Americans were here because of what was in those computers. Even though Cowboy had told Eighty-two that the audio on the hunt video was bad, they must know that something terribly evil was being done here on the island. They’d come to find out what and to stop it. The computer records could save millions.

  On the other hand, Otto and Alpha could never risk having the New Men fall into the hands of any government. The worldwide outcry would be like the shouts of outraged angels.

  And there was the female.

  In Eighty-two’s pocket the stone felt as heavy as an anvil.

  He stood and looked down the corridor toward the computer rooms, chewing his lip in dreadful indecision. Then he made his choice.

  He turned toward the House of Screams and ran.

  Chapter Eighty

  The Hive

  Sunday, August 29, 3:42 P.M.

  Time Remaining on the Extinction Clock: 68 hours, 18 minutes E.S.T.

  We flattened out against the walls and flipped down our night vision. I dropped to one knee and pivoted as I heard a second growl. The lobby went from absolute blackness to eerie green.

  “What do you see, boss?” hissed Bunny, who was facing the other way.

  “Nothing,” I said, but I could feel something moving in the shadows. We’d left a lot of wreckage behind us, but everything looked still. But there was something and my senses were jangling. The after-echo of the growl played over and over in my head. It wasn’t a dog growl. More like a cat, but not a cat, either. Whatever it was, the growl had been heavy, deep chested. Something big was back there, and it was ballsy enough to stalk three grown men.

  “Move,” I said, and began backing away from the lobby. We moved backward five feet, ten, following the curve of the hallway until the lobby was lost to view.

  Just as we moved out of sight I thought I caught movement at the extreme range of the night vision, but it was too brief a glimpse. Just a sense of something huge moving on four feet, head low between massive shoulders.

  Way too big for a dog.

  “What the hell’s on our asses?” Bunny asked in a jittery voice.

  “I don’t know, but if it comes sniffing down here I’m gonna kill it.”

  “Works for me.”

  “Let me know if you get a signal, Top.”

  “Roger, but we’re still dead.”

  “Lousy fucking choice of words,” muttered Bunny.

  The thing behind us screamed.

  It was a huge sound, high-pitched and filled with animal hate. Like a leopard, but with too much chest behind it. Then I heard the sharp click of thick nails on the tile.

  “Run!” I yelled, and the two of them pounded down the hallway, but I held my ground, raised my Beretta in a solid two-hand grip, and clamped down on the terror that was blossoming in my chest. In the microsecond before the creature rounded the bend the image of the unicorn flashed through my head. If these maniacs could make something like that, then what other horrors had they cooked up in their labs? Horrific images out of legend and myth flashed before my mind’s eye, and then something moved into my line of sight that was far more terrifying than any monster from storybooks or campfire tales.

  It ran like a cheetah, with massive hindquarters thrusting it forward as long forelegs that ended in splayed claws reached out to tear at the tiled floor. The monster’s face was wrinkled in fury and its muzzle was as long as a Great Dane’s but contoured like a panther. The eyes were glowing green orbs in the night-vision lenses, but I could see feline slits. It snarled with a mouthful of teeth that were easily as long as the blade of my Rapid Release knife.r />
  I had never seen, never imagined, a creature like this. It was easily as big as a full-grown tiger. From the points of those fangs to the tail that whipped the air behind it, the monster had to be twelve feet, and when it was five yards away it launched more than seven hundred pounds of feral mass into the air right at me.

  I heard myself screaming as I fired. I pulled the trigger and fired, fired, fired as I threw myself down and to one side. The creature’s mass was already in the air and it couldn’t turn to track me, but I could feel the wind of its passage over me and I saw the dark blossoms as bullet after bullet punched into it, the big .45 slugs exploding through muscle and meat. I hit it six times and then it was past me, landing hard on the floor, skidding, sliding down the hall in the direction my men had taken, snarling, its claws tearing up floor tiles, smearing the walls with blood.

  The monster scrambled to a violent turn and got to its feet, turning fast to face me.

  How the hell was it still standing with six bullets in it?

  The monster hissed at me and I could see its monstrous shoulders bunching to make another run.

  I put the laser sight on its left eye and the creature flinched.

  But not soon enough. I put my seventh shot through its eye and my eighth and ninth through the heavy bone of its skull. My slide locked back, the gun empty.

  A terrible scream tore the air as the creature fell.

  The sound did not come from the dying monster.

  This scream came from right behind me.

  These animals hunted in pairs.

  I THREW MYSELF backward, dropping the magazine and clawing another out of my pocket as the second animal came at me out of the swirling darkness. I slapped the magazine into place, but this beast was bigger, faster, and it hit me like a freight train before I could get a round in the chamber or bring the gun to bear.

  The impact drove me backward so fast and hard that I had no time to do anything but roll with it and try to hang on to my gun. Claws ripped across my chest, tearing open my heavy shirt and gouging chunks out of the Kevlar. The creature’s own weight kept me alive because it continued to tumble over and past me. I didn’t try to get to my feet; I just jacked the round as the monster twisted around with a screech of claws on tiles and pounced. It landed on me with all of its weight, knocking my night vision off so that the world was black and full of teeth and claws. The sheer weight of it drove the air from my lungs, but I jammed the barrel up until it hit something solid and I pulled the trigger, over and over again.