“Let’s get to the lifts and find out,” Carlisle said.
We set off through the facility, James following from afar, looping the camera feeds ahead of us and unlooping those behind just in case someone happened to be paying extra close attention. A couple times, he had us duck out of the path of incoming guards or night shift researchers.
The scenery was highly repetitive—mundane, sterile-looking hallways linking lab after lab, which themselves all looked pretty damn similar. All I saw were long, dark countertops full of expensive-looking equipment and rows and rows of beige shelves and cabinets, full of all manner of containers and chemicals.
Something about the place made my skin crawl.
The sight of the mag lifts was a relief for all of five seconds. Then we boarded, and I couldn’t help but start worrying about what it was we were headed to find.
I punched the icon for the bottom floor, anyway, and wasn’t too surprised when the lift display protested. ERROR: I.D. REQUIRED FOR CLEARANCE - ACCESS LEVEL 5.
“You don’t say,” I muttered. “James? Think you can—”
“Try to break into the lift controls?” James said. “I’m working on it.”
“Thank you, James,” Carlisle said, “but there may be an easier way if I…” He planted a hand on the wall of the lift, eyes drifting closed. “Hold on.”
I gripped the hand rail and kept my mouth shut, trusting that he knew what he was doing.
Good thing, too.
I was about to ask what he was thinking when the lift car gave a metallic groan and dropped out from under my feet. My stomach flew into my chest, my grip on the handrail pulling tight against the sudden free fall.
I narrowly contained the wild yell fighting to escape my throat.
Carlisle knew what he was doing.
The lift car kept plunging.
But he knew what he was doing.
Right?
We were about to find out.
Right when I was sure I’d lose my grip on the panic, the lift car began to slow, the floor pressing up to gradually reclaim my weight until I had to tense my legs to brace against a hard halt.
“Alpha be damned with the warnings, man!”
Carlisle’s lip twitched. “I did say ‘hold on.’ I believe we’ve reached true bottom.”
“Wonderful. I don’t suppose you have a trick for opening the door now?”
He held up a finger to tell me to wait, his eyes still closed. I fiddled with my gun and was starting to wonder exactly what we were about to find on the other side of those doors when Carlisle gave a sharp gasp.
It didn’t sound right coming from him, as unshakeable as he always seemed to be. But his face had blanched, and his expression was shocked—horrified, even—his breathing ragged in the suddenly too-tight space of the lift car.
What in demon’s depths could make him react like that?
I reached for my pendant, thinking to explore with my own senses.
Before I could, though, the doors slid open, and my jaw dropped.
“Sweet Alpha,” I whispered.
19
Blood Drive
Two things immediately struck me about the room beyond the lift doors.
For one, it was enormous. By the dim light that drifted up from below, I could barely make out the room’s ceiling and sides from my viewpoint in the lift. The back wall was far enough to be lost to darkness.
The room’s size, though, quickly fell background to the feeling in my gut.
There was something terribly wrong about the space. Some sickly haze that clung to the greenish-yellow air. A cloying scent I couldn’t immediately place.
Carlisle caught my elbow as I started forward. “This… will be disturbing.”
I met his gaze, and he reluctantly released my arm.
We stepped cautiously onto the catwalk platform outside.
No signs of movement.
The room was cavernous—the ceiling at least thirty feet above us, the ground floor a good fifteen feet below. A network of bare-bones metal staircases and catwalks led around the room’s perimeter, providing access to the rows of dark cylindrical somethings lining the walls.
Aside from the low, steady thrum of running machinery, all was still and quiet.
Almost remorsefully, Carlisle stepped to the railing ahead and indicated that our interest lay below.
The first thing I noticed was how neatly the rows of equipment were arranged on the ground floor. Then I got a closer look at the equipment, and I had to clamp onto the railing to keep my knees from buckling.
People.
Those were people down there.
Dozens of lifeless human beings, strapped to rows and rows of rectangular white racks. Sickly pale. Each one stripped to their undergarments. Each assaulted by a mess of tubes—respirators, waste collectors, IVs. All of it.
I was going to be sick.
What in demon’s depths were they doing to these people?
“They’re alive,” Carlisle said quietly beside me.
“What are they—”
I clutched at my stomach, fighting down a fresh wave of nausea.
Carlisle was right.
The rise and fall of respirator breaths was faint but discernible in a few of the closer chests. I dialed my cloak, reached out with my extended senses, and felt life, horribly frail as it was. And it seemed to be fading.
I studied the dark red line that ran from one woman’s arm, down and under her neighbor’s rack, where it joined his dark red line. It went along like that, rack by rack, until the common line of the ten racks in that row emptied into a tall cylinder at the end.
“They’re… draining their blood?”
Carlisle didn’t seem to hear me.
“But… why?”
He turned for the stairs. “Keep your eyes open.”
I followed him to the ground floor in a trance, unable to pull my eyes away from the unwilling donors, wired up to their apparatuses. There was something disturbingly mesmerizing about the sight.
They must’ve been drugged. Their sleep looked almost too serene, yet still there was some faint unease—as if, deep beneath the surface, they wanted to cry out for help, but couldn’t.
It was horrifying.
There was a roughly equal mix of men and women, mostly early twenties to late fifties. My stomach turned at how pale and weak they looked. As we approached the first row of racks, the respirators greeted us with a steady chorus of mechanical sighs.
Alpha forbid one of their victims stop breathing before they’d finished sucking them dry.
“Liquid nutrition.” Carlisle’s voice snapped me out of my haze. He was tapping at a node console beside several large drums whose tubes ran to the thin frames above each row of racks. “Heparin… barbiturates… Some of these people may have been here for cycles already. Maybe longer.”
“We have to get them out,” I heard myself say. “We can’t leave them like this,” I added when Carlisle turned to me.
“We also can’t make it out of here with forty-some comatose victims.” He seemed to age thirty years before my eyes saying it. “We need to route James into one of these nodes, pull what data we can, and figure out how to stop this from happening to thousands more like them.”
I stared at him dumbly.
We had to try. These were people we were talking about. Real human beings. Of course we had to try.
I walked over to a console near Carlisle’s and woke it up before I lost my nerve. “James, I need you to help me see if we can wake these people up somehow.”
“Uhhh…” James said.
“Do it, James,” Carlisle said. He crossed to my console and connected another routing chip, along with an external storage drive. “Just get the transfer started first. We’ll look around while you work on that.”
“Right.” James sounded relieved. “I’m on it.”
A directory window popped up over the display’s request for a valid user ID and passcode and promptl
y came alive with a long string of digital commands.
“Hold tight,” James said. “Should only be a minute or two before I’m in.”
I looked around, wondering where best I could apply myself while we waited. I didn’t have the first idea about how to help these people. Yanking tubes and hoping for the best didn’t seem like a great bet.
My gaze drifted to the rows of cylindrical structures that lined the walls along the perimeter catwalks, just too far removed from the light to clearly see. “What are those things?”
“I don’t know,” Carlisle said, already starting for a nearby staircase. “But we better have a closer look while we can.”
Ascending to the first row of cylinders, I was able to start making out more details. Thick panels covered the front of each tube. Glass, maybe? They were dark, but I thought I could see something in the closest one—a dark shape subtly contrasting against the surrounding darkness.
I was reaching for my hand lantern when Carlisle conjured light from his palm and shined it onto the nearest panel. Definitely glass. The light pierced easily through to illuminate a tank full of some thick green fluid and—
“Holy scud!” I whispered.
“I’ll be damned,” Carlisle agreed quietly.
At first glance, the thing floating in the tank looked like a man.
At second glance, it clearly wasn’t.
The details were all horribly wrong—face reptilian, lips nearly non-existent, eyebrows and facial features all at harsh angles. Large patches of its skin had a scaly texture, and its fingers and toes ended in claws rather than nails.
It looked just like Kublich had when he’d attacked my parents.
A cold shudder gripped me, along with a sudden intense desire to be far, far away from this place. “Is that thing alive?”
“Yes,” Carlisle said. “But it appears to be unconscious. Are you seeing this, James?”
“What?” James’ voice crackled back. “No, I was—Holy crap! What the scud is that thing?”
“It looks like a raknoth,” I said.
“But it’s not,” Carlisle said. He closed his eyes. Placed a hand to the glass. “It’s… I’m not sure what it is. A new breed. Some manner of hybrid between raknoth and human, maybe.”
I traced the row of cylinders with my eyes until it was lost in darkness, counting rows, estimating the arithmetic. “They’re building an army.”
Carlisle opened his eyes, nodding slowly. “I think you’re right.”
“But they already have the Legion.”
It didn’t really add up unless…
“Perhaps discreetly manipulating the Legion through Kublich was becoming too cumbersome,” Carlisle said.
That was it, all right. None of this added up… unless the raknoth were planning on wiping out our Legion and replacing it with theirs.
“The blood.” I glanced back down at the lines of pale victims, slowly bleeding dry. “You think that’s the first step of… whatever this is?”
Carlisle shook his head and raised his light until I could see the lines at the top of the cylinder. “I think it’s the food.”
I couldn’t decide if that was better or worse. My brain could barely manage a single thought, aside from the one.
Whatever was happening here, we had to stop it.
“Guys?” James said. “I’m in. Data’s transferring.”
I turned and started back down the stairs to his console. “Do you see any way to wake these people up?”
“Working, working.”
I reached the display and saw files transferring to the external drive in the background while James remotely navigated through a visually hectic interface of vitals, ID tags, and a couple dozen other metrics I couldn’t make easy sense of.
“Guess it was too much to hope for a wake up button, huh?”
“Actually…” James said, still flicking through menus. “Yes! Look. There’s an arousal subroutine that… scud.”
The tiny flutter of hope died in my chest as I studied the display and realized what James had seen. The shortest option on the list, the emergency arousal protocol, would take a full hour, with most of the actual projected waking times being well over that.
Scud was right.
“Can you see if there’s any way to—”
A series of loud, electronic cracks and the sudden flare of floodlights above hit me like an electric shock to the spine.
Before my brain could catch up, I had my sidearm drawn and at the ready, sweeping the now fully-illuminated reaches of the enormous room for any incoming threat, adrenaline coursing through my veins.
Were we caught? Trapped down here, surrounded by Alpha knew what manner of monsters? I didn’t see any sign of imminent danger, but—
“We need to leave, now,” came Carlisle’s voice as he ghosted down the catwalk stairs toward me. “James,” he added quietly as he joined me and reached for the external drive, “can you finish the transfer remotely?”
I only half-registered his words, still tensed, trying to look everywhere at once, feeling entirely too much like a rat in a cage.
“Only if you can give me an hour’s uninterrupted access. The drive’s a hundred times faster than—”
“Well, well,” crackled a voice from above, distantly familiar. “What do we have here? Interlopers. Oh, dear.”
I scanned the high catwalks, looking for the source of the suave, self-satisfied baritone. Nothing. It must’ve come from amps in the ceiling.
“That sounds like Alton Parker,” Carlisle sent.
That was it. Alton Parker, CEO of Vantage and, infinitely more importantly, raknoth.
“Oh crap,” James was whispering in our ears. “Oh crap!”
“You, I’ve been half-expecting, Carlisle,” Alton continued. “But is that the Raish boy I see? Oh, the General is going to love this.”
“Spare us the theatrics,” Carlisle called, his voice firm but admirably calm. “What are you doing to these people?”
“He hasn’t stopped going on about your mother, Haldin,” Alton continued as if Carlisle hadn’t spoken. “Swears she’s the sweetest he’s ever drank. Won’t stop talking about it. Well, that and how much he’s looking forward to having you for comparison. Honestly, it’s getting to be…”
He kept talking, some corner of my mind noted. But rage had taken me, roaring through my veins, through my ears, drowning out everything else. I was already lurching forward, opening my mouth to cry that, if Kublich wanted my blood, the son of a bitch was welcome to try for it. Something tugged me back before I could. A hand clamped to the back of my neck. Carlisle’s hand, I realized, just as something I could only describe as liquid calm flowed into me from the spot where his skin met mine, restoring some semblance of rational thought.
“Ah, what spunk,” Alton was saying above. “Delightful.”
“He’s baiting you,” Carlisle sent. “Trying to keep us here for something.”
“And you, Carlisle,” Alton pressed on, “yes, we know who you are. I knew you the moment I saw you the other night. Your dear old master told us all about you. After all the torture, of course. Ugly business. My colleagues are what you might call monsters, you see.”
He was a smug son of a bitch.
I felt Carlisle tense at the mention of Cassius, but, unlike me, he held his composure. “We’re leaving,” he sent, reaching for the external drive though the transfer on the display read only eighty-seven percent complete.
“But these people—”
“These people are lost for now. The entire base will be on us in minutes.” He slipped the drive into his pack, turning for the mag lifts. “James?”
Nothing.
“James?”
“Your friend cannot hear you,” Alton said, all traces of amusement gone from his voice now. “No one will hear you.” Above, the doors of our waiting lift car slid shut with the finality of a gun cocking against the head. “But I do have something to show you, if you’d be so kind.”
<
br /> A series of mechanical pops sounded from along the walls, followed by a string of sharp hisses, like pressurized gas being vented. I didn’t have to look to know the sounds were coming from the cylinders holding those monstrosities. Carlisle grabbed me by the strap of my pack and pulled me toward the stairs to the closed mag lifts.
“I said I have something to show you, humans,” Alton Parker growled after us. “You’ve been such curious little boys so far. Don’t tell me you’re losing your nerve now?”
I couldn’t process what was happening—what was about to happen. Couldn’t look away from the poor souls still bleeding on the racks.
“We can’t leave them, Carlisle.”
And yet the sounds of venting gas and draining liquids from cylinders all around us told me we had no choice. Never mind the Vantage army no doubt waiting above. We’d be lucky to make it out of this room alive. Because I had a bad feeling I knew what came next.
Across from us, the first cylinder popped open with a victorious chime.
Inside the tank, its inhabitant gave a shudder. Then the creature’s eyes snapped open, pale and red and hungry.
“Awaken, children!” Alton called. “Awaken, and bring these interlopers to me.”
20
Nightmares
The air crawled with an unholy cacophony of eager hisses and guttural roars, punctuated here and there by those Alpha-cursed chimes that each announced the arrival of yet another monster to our underground death trap. Terror froze my brain, held me in a stupor. Three of them hit the floor across from us, wetly smacking down from the catwalk—falls that should’ve broken limbs. They just loped straight for us, none the worse.
Those eyes. Those hungry, gaping mouths, all full of sharp, utterly inhuman fangs.
“Haldin!” Carlisle snapped.
I’d drawn my gun, swapped to lethal rounds, and put two neat holes in the closest creature’s chest almost before I knew it, the old training finally kicking in.
The creature dropped to the floor with a wet-sounding gasp, which only enraged its two companions. One sprinted straight for us at an alarming speed. The other hauled a supply tank off the ground and hurled it at me.
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