When Nick opened his mouth, Morley intervened.
The gray-haired, scarecrow-thin detective raised a hand.
“Not here,” he said, his dark brown eyes warning.
Without waiting for their reactions, Morley motioned Jordan towards the wall, still aiming that death-stare between the two of them.
“You, now,” he said. “Come on. We don’t have all night.”
There weren’t any surprises in Jordan’s litany of clearances and stats, other than Nick finding out the detective’s exact age for the first time, which was thirty-two.
Jordan’s security clearance level was a three, according to the machine.
That had been probably twenty minutes ago.
Now, trying to trace the spot where that bare trace of possibly-human blood was the strongest, Nick walked back down the wider corridor, stopping at the head of each aisle and taking a few good sniffs.
He stopped completely at the head of one aisle.
The scent was fainter again.
Frowning, he reversed course, taking three long steps back to the aisle before that one. Stopping at the head of that aisle, he took a heavier sniff.
He took three more steps back. Sniffed.
He took three steps forward again. Sniffed.
Definitely strongest here.
He walked down the aisle, concentrating on the scent as his eyes scanned the featureless boxes embedded in the lit, transparent walls to either side. Still following his nose, he walked right up to the black-metal wall at the end of the narrow corridor.
He stopped, abruptly, hands on his hips.
The scent was still weak, but definitely stronger here than anywhere else.
He glanced to the walls on either side, but the black boxes hung there, silent, suspended in their glass-like enclosures. Apart from that eerie, ghostly glow emanating from inside the transparent material, there was no other light.
Nick’s vampire eyes could pick out more than a human’s would have, but he still found himself squinting, trying to see if any of the individual boxes were damaged, or their doors open.
They all looked untouched. They all looked identical, utterly still.
Down here, it felt more like being inside a crypt.
He tried to see the ceiling, but couldn’t make out anything other than an unmarked stretch of black. It smelled like metal, exactly like the walls. Igniting the light on his headset and jacking up the settings to make it as bright as it would go, he looked up again.
Still nothing.
He didn’t see so much as a speck of blood.
Just the faintest hint of green-silver highlights in the metal where it caught the light. It reminded Nick of the A.I. panel outside the vault door. He wondered if the whole inside of the vault was part of the same intelligent machine.
He could still smell the blood.
He just had no damned idea where it was coming from.
It seemed to be all around him now, circulating in the air.
Exhaling, mostly to convey annoyance, he let his eyes and the headset light flicker around the end of the aisle.
Then he saw it.
He caught the flash of white as the light from his headset slanted down, following the direction of his head and eyes.
Something was embedded in the wall there, by the floor.
Nick walked closer. He frowned, training his light on what he’d found, feeling a whisper of nausea as his eyes made sense of the shape.
It was part of a face.
He hadn’t seen it because it protruded directly behind one of the glowing segments of wall, obscured by the black box suspended in front of it. Now that he was closer, he could see it clearly, though.
It was almost a complete face.
The eyes stared out, like Ming’s and Nuñez’s outside.
Then, while Nick continued to stare…
They blinked.
Chapter 7
Metal And Flesh
Nick shrieked. He shrieked at the top of his lungs.
He couldn’t help it.
He leapt back in the same instant.
It was a vampire leap, not a human one… and briefly, he clung to one of the transparent walls, a good eight feet off the metal floor.
He hung there, staring down for a few seconds before he got out what might have been a stunned half-breath, if he’d been human. If his chest hadn’t been compressed in shock, it might have been another yell.
A few seconds after that, he felt foolish.
He released the transparent wall, letting his weight take him silently to the floor. He broke the cathedral-like quiet intentionally then, for the first time since they’d walked through the vault door.
“MORLEY!” Nick’s eyes never left the creepy-as-fuck face. “JORDAN! GET THE FUCK DOWN HERE! NOW! RIGHT NOW!”
There was a silence.
Nick realized only then that he’d heard shoe and scuffle sounds in the seconds before he called out. They must have been looking for him after he let out the shriek.
Now he could hear them coming directly towards him.
Once he knew for certain they were coming down the right aisle, Nick made himself venture closer to the thing in the wall.
It was staring at him.
Unlike Nuñez and Ming outside, Nick could see movement in those eyes.
Worse, he could see emotion.
The mouth was trying to move now, like it was trying to speak.
Nick couldn’t make up his mind if it was male or female. That chalk-white oval of skin stood out from the black metal with its green and silver shimmers, looking like a death mask mounted on the wall of a pre-war collector.
Nick watched the face’s mouth try to speak to him, opening and closing like a fish. The eyes grew wider, more pleading, more filled with terror. Nick found himself talking to that face, without really knowing why, without thinking about what he was saying, or whether it made any sense, given that he couldn’t see the thing’s ears.
“It’s okay,” he told it, holding up a hand. “It’s okay. I’m with the police. You’re going to be okay. We’re here to help. Just stay calm––”
“Nick?” Jordan called out. “You down here?”
“Move your ass!” Nick yelled, without tearing his eyes off the face. “And call… fuck. Call an ambulance or something. Call Praetorian. We need their people down here NOW.”
Jordan skidded to a stop, nearly running into Nick’s back, probably not seeing him at all in his black coat in the weird lighting and with the black wall behind him.
Nick could hear Morley coming down the aisle, a few paces behind the younger and more athletic Jordan.
“What the hell, Midnight?” Jordan said, even as he stepped back from their near-collision. “You scared the living shit out of us, screaming like that. Are you trying to give the old man a heart attack, or––”
“Look!” Nick snapped, pointing at the wall. “Look at it, Jordan! Tell me you wouldn’t fucking scream, if you saw that!”
Jordan frowned, his expression startled. Then he craned his head and neck around to look at the part of the wall where Nick was pointing.
He immediately leapt back, letting out a yelp.
“See?” Nick snapped.
“What is going on here?” Morley reached them, slightly out of breath, a thread of annoyance in his voice.
Without waiting for either to answer, he walked around the other side of Nick, then did more or less the same thing the other two had done, leaping back, running his elbow and shoulder right into Nick’s chest.
“Jesus fucking hell!”
Morley’s voice was loud, louder than Nick’s had been.
Nick was on his headset, trying to contact Praetorian.
“Get someone down here,” he snapped, as soon as whoever was manning the security console picked up. “Right now! We need paramedics… but more than that, we need engineers who understand how this fucking vault wall protection system works.”
“Sir, I don�
�t understand. The physical readings for all three of you appear to be normal. Did something happen to one of you, or––”
“It’s not one of us,” Nick cut in. “Your damned wall ate someone. And whoever they are, they’re still alive.” Hearing the other about to speak, Nick cut him off. “They won’t be alive long if you don’t send someone down here. Right. Fucking. Now.”
“But our people went over every inch of the inside of that vault,” the human insisted, their voice rising, increasingly defensive. “There was no one in there. The sensors show everything at normal right now. Are you sure you are correct in this?”
Nick’s jaw hardened to granite.
Rather than arguing with the asshole, he used his headset to image-capture the wall and the embedded face, making it video so they’d see the eyes and mouth moving.
“Look like a hallucination to you, buddy?” he growled, putting it up on his virtual screen as an insert, so the security guard would see it. “That’s what we’re looking at. Right now. In your goddamned wall. You want to argue with me again? Tell me how there can’t possibly be anyone in here but us?”
There was a silence.
Then the man’s voice rose.
That time, it shook.
“Sending someone now, sir.”
“Yeah. I thought so.”
Without waiting for the human to answer, Nick terminated the connection, shifting his gaze grimly to the other two detectives. Neither of them had managed to tear their gazes off the wall, or off the face staring at the three of them, still fighting to speak.
“Jesus,” Morley said, his voice thick.
Nick didn’t have much to say to that.
Even so, he looked at the other detective, worried in spite of himself.
Morley definitely wasn’t having a good night.
An hour and a half later, Nick stood in nearly the same spot, watching the techs work on the wall, trying to get the guy out.
Well. Nick assumed it was a guy.
Jordan had just come back down, after going upstairs to grab a cup of artificial coffee.
Morley left a few seconds after Jordan, and hadn’t yet returned.
Unlike with Jordan, Nick had been relieved to see the old man go.
Morley hadn’t looked so hot.
Jordan nudged him with an arm. “I didn’t think they were going to let me back in here,” he muttered. Looking around, he leaned closer to Nick’s ear. “Where’s Morley?”
Nick gave him a sideways look, then went back to watching the techs.
One of them had a morphing access panel open.
With gloved hands, the thirty-something male tech fingered squishy, live circuits that looked like iridescent octopus legs where they hung out of the wall. Nick grimaced, watching tendrils wrap around instruments and fingers, pulling on them as if seeking contact.
Still staring at the techs, watching them work, Nick copied Jordan’s quiet voice, careful to not speak so low Jordan wouldn’t hear.
“Morley didn’t look so good,” he murmured. “It’s probably best he skips this.”
Grimacing, Nick watched the lead tech take a fistful of the slimy tentacles out of the wall and dump them into a bucket with a wet, squelching sound.
“…He said he was going up to talk to the Lieutenant,” Nick added, leaning his head down slightly and glancing sideways at Jordan, who was a few inches shorter than him. “Something about Nuñez. About her body. I think he really wants to keep that in-house.”
Jordan returned his look, his full lips firming.
“Yeah,” he said. “He looked pretty beat-up about that, when I first got here.”
“You think he knows what’s going on?” Nick muttered, his voice even lower. “More than us, I mean. More than he’s said?”
Jordan frowned, then shook his head perceptibly. “Don’t know.”
“He wants to take us to breakfast. Some diner. You know it?”
Jordan gave him a faintly warning look.
Looking away a second later, taking a sip of his artificial coffee, he nodded, his lips still curled in a visible frown. “Yeah, I know it. Good bacon sandwiches.” He grunted, nudging Nick with an elbow. “Wasted on you, of course. But maybe they serve blood, Midnight. Can’t hurt to ask. Maybe they even have a cute waitress who’ll volunteer.”
“Yeah,” Nick grunted. “Clearly you want to see me get stabbed by my girlfriend. Right before she cuts into my guts and starts playing with my entrails, all the while detailing to me the error of my ways and how long I’ll be sleeping on the couch––”
Jordan burst out in a laugh.
The sound, inside the deathly-quiet vault, made the techs jump and turn. Their wide eyes stared up at Nick and Jordan in disbelief.
The African-American detective waved them off, covering his mouth, but aimed the vestiges of that grin at Nick.
“Did I mention how much I like Wynter?” Jordan said, quiet again. “I’m glad to see she’s still got you appropriately terrified of her.”
Nick returned his smile, hearing and seeing the warning there.
“Yeah, laugh it up,” he grunted. “Wait until you get a girlfriend. See how sympathetic I am.”
Pausing, still thinking about their conversation before, he added,
“As to the diner, I’m in,” he said. “But you’re paying. You owe me for about twenty coffees by now. Not to mention dinner the other day.”
“Cheap bastard,” Jordan muttered, snorting. He took another sip of the crappy artificial coffee Nick could smell in his morphing travel mug.
Nick grunted in return, not bothering to answer.
They’d both decided, by silent agreement, not to use their headsets, since those were almost certainly being monitored. Of course, their regular speech might be under surveillance down here, too, given they were surrounded by a wall made of organic metal and infused with artificial intelligence.
Nick knew that wall came equipped with multiple forms of surveillance, including audio and visual, whether someone was manning it right now or not.
They had to assume everything they were saying right now was being recorded.
Hell, given everything he’d seen so far, Nick knew being recorded might be the least of their worries. If whatever was behind this was sensitive enough, the powers that be could decide to memory-wipe every last person who’d been down here.
Everyone below a certain security clearance, anyway.
Nick felt a shiver go up his spine.
He hadn’t felt like this in a long time––like he could feel the target forming on his chest, simply from being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Frowning, he watched the techs work. For over an hour now, they’d been using the controls to try and convince the wall to let go the poor bastard go.
The face had stopped trying to speak to them. The eyes remained open, but the mouth was no longer moving. Too-large, brown irises stared at the techs, following their every move, at least those that fell within their range of vision.
“How the fuck is he still alive?” Jordan muttered.
Nick shook his head, without taking his eyes off that too-pale face.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Why didn’t the wall kill him? Like Nuñez and Ming?”
Jordan glanced at him, frowning.
Shrugging at the look there, Nick went back to watching the face in the wall. He didn’t tell Jordan that the human’s temperature had gone down since they’d first been down here. Using his infrared vision, he could see the human cooling inside that wall, almost like he was being encapsulated inside a deep-freeze unit.
“I don’t think––” he began.
A high, shrieking alarm went off.
The tech on the ground, the one playing with what now looked like glowing entrails inside a green bucket, rose abruptly to his feet.
He walked to the second open panel, where the other tech knelt. He hit through a sequence of pressure points, and the alarm turned off.
“W
e’re losing him!” The human tapped the second tech’s shoulder. “Blood pressure is dropping. I’m getting cardiac irregularities.”
The tech below him scowled, but didn’t look up from his work.
“Suggestions?” the second tech said, still manipulating his own set of slimy-looking circuits, separating different-colored strands with his fingers. “I’m not getting through to it. It refuses to acknowledge that the human even exists inside its matter––”
“Can we shut the whole fucking thing down?” the first tech said. “Wipe all security orders? See if it’ll spit him out that way?”
The second tech shook his head, that scowl still on his face.
“There’s no guarantee that will work.”
“We have five minutes,” the first tech said, squinting at some reading inside his headset. “Life support says he’ll almost certainly die after that. It looks like the wall’s trying to preserve him, not kill him. Like it’s trying to freeze him alive, put him in some kind of stasis… but his system’s too traumatized. Life support says he will die.”
Nick felt his body tense, his shoulders bunch up.
He heard Jordan’s breath stop next to him, his heart beating harder in his chest. Damon gripped his coffee mug in front of his chest, but seemed to have forgotten it.
“Four minutes,” the first tech said. “Can you shut it down, or not?”
The kneeling tech’s fingers never stopped moving.
He’d let go of the octopus tentacles and now his fingers were hitting keys and sliding over colored bands on what looked like a virtual access portal for a dead-metal circuit. It was strange to see him operating such mundane-looking tech, while kneeling in front of the creepily animal-like guts spilling out of the access panel in front of him.
It struck Nick that the two different types of machine likely weren’t even talking to one another. They couldn’t be, not if the “animal” part of the machine refused to acknowledge the presence of the human at all, while the “dead” machine warned them that same human was dying inside the living metal.
Staring at the embedded human with his vampire vision, Nick found himself agreeing with the dead machine.
“All right,” the second tech said.
Fang & Metal: A Science Fiction Vampire Detective Novel (Vampire Detective Midnight Book 4) Page 6