There’d been bookshelves built into the playroom walls, filled with classical literature and textbooks on every subject under the sun, but no one had ever taught from them. The whitecoats’ preferred method of measuring intelligence had been to observe which books a subject chose to read—if any—and how often.
Bryce snapped the book shut and read the back cover.
WE STAND ON THE SHOULDERS OF GOD
AND BUILD ON THE PILLARS OF MAN
TO DOMINATE THE LAWS OF NATURE
IN THE GENESIS OF ETERNAL PERFECTION
At the bottom was an image of a soldier and three straight-faced scientists in full regalia posing for a photograph, and a dedication: In Memoriam: General Aleksandr Vukovich, Dr. Akira Saito, Dr. Rajab Nejem, and Master Sergeant Belinda Creedy – the pillars of the Delta-Omega Project.
“Yahtzee!” Randy shouted, toppling several boxes off the rack to take one out.
Bryce tossed the book aside. “We should go.”
“What, why? But! We have. You know. Things. Uh… Games!” Randy held up the box and rattled its contents. “We can play so many games! There’s this one, and this one, and…not this one. This one is out of dice. Hmm…”
“Let’s go, Sinna.”
“Five more minutes!” Randy stomped his foot, then laughed. “The five minute game! I love that one.”
“Sinna, come on—”
“You will sit,” Randy suddenly snapped, baring his teeth in a rabid snarl, “and you will play.” He was clutching a scalpel, wrist turned outward toward Sinna and the heater, but his crazy eyes focused solely on Bryce.
Instinct took over. Senses went on high alert, but while that blade was leaning toward Sinna, Bryce did not engage. The whump-whump-whump became louder to his ears, an almost-sound that made his skin crawl and his teeth itch from the inside. It was incessant, and it was everywhere, all around him; a rhythm to slowly drive him mad.
Watchful and wary of Randy, Bryce slowly raised his hands in surrender. “All right. I have a game we can play.” When Sinna began to rise by slow degrees, he twitched his hands to stay her. Randy was too close.
“You do?” Randy’s eyes went owl-wide.
“Yeah, it’s called Maze.”
Randy gave a knee-slapping laugh. “Maze! That’s a good one!” He danced in place, scalpel clutched in both hands. “How do you play it?”
“It’s kind of like hide-and-seek. You close your eyes, count to fifty…” And I wring your neck. “And Sinna and I run and hide.”
Randy giggled, and taunted in a sing-song voice, “I’ll find you.” He stared at Bryce for a moment as if he’d spaced out, then he ran past, yelling, “You’re it!” Bryce heard him laugh as Randy raced down the corridor, counting so loudly his voice echoed. “One, two, three…five-six-seven-ten, fifteen, twenty-five…”
Fuck this shit.
Bryce grabbed Sinna’s hand and ran the other way. Raw stone gave way to concrete, and then they were at the door they’d entered through. He ran past it, looking for another way out. The memory of Chernobyl was forever seared into his mind, but this place was just different enough to turn him around. He ran to the end of the hall, expecting an escape hatch to be marked in the ceiling.
It wasn’t. Bryce swore, backtracked, and tried another way, all the while listening to Randy count. “Forty-six, forty-seven, forty-eight, fifty! Where am I?”
The line on the walls changed from green to blue, branching off to red in one section. Bryce avoided that one. Red meant danger zone. Convert holding pens. Instead, he took the path left, staying to the blue section.
“Hey,” Randy called, “where are you?”
“He’ll come after us,” Sinna said.
“Let him.” Bryce would enjoy ripping the weasel’s head off.
“Get back here!” Randy roared, stomping after them in pursuit.
Bryce squeezed Sinna’s hand tighter and kept going. He passed intersection after intersection where the corridor branched off, glanced through doorways similar enough to an exit that it messed with his head. He almost ran them into a wall like that, and he swore, brandishing a bowie knife in his free hand.
Sinna reached across him and pulled out its matching double. “How do we get out of here?”
“We think our way out,” Bryce said. He wasn’t a master strategist like Aiden, but he wasn’t an idiot, either. Think, goddammit!
Okay. Okay.
This place was unfinished, emergency exits unmarked. They probably didn’t even exist yet. But he knew for a fact there was one guaranteed way out: the convert pens. Bryce had seen it in the blueprints they’d brought to Montana—a vertical shaft for easy feed delivery, tall and smooth enough so the monsters couldn’t climb up and out, but it had a safety door and a hidden latch mechanism to drop a chain ladder from the top in case of a breach. It’d have been the most logical way to bring in equipment. It had to be there.
“Come on,” he said, and he raced back to the red corridor, despite his gut screaming in silent alarm.
Randy scraped his scalpel over the wall around the next corner down. “Where aaaaareeee youuuuuu…?”
Red on the walls. Not far now.
Bryce frowned, slowed, and his eyebrows twitched together in confusion. “Do you smell that?”
“I don’t smell anything.”
Could his mind be playing tricks on him?
He breathed in again and growled.
Goddamn psychotic son of a bitch!
Converts. He smelled converts. And the closer they got to the pens, the stronger their stench became.
“Stay close.” Bryce moved forward with caution. Randy was now hollering at the top of his lungs; they still had a pretty good lead. The crazy bastard was taking his time, like this whole thing was a game. A few feet ahead, the corridor branched off in two directions.
“Which way?” Sinna whispered.
He didn’t know. The smell was more concentrated here, and Bryce couldn’t tell which way it came from. For all he knew, they could run smack into a convert, or find the utility shaft, or find the shaft behind the convert. Bryce wouldn’t put it past this guy to pull a stunt like that.
“Marco! Polo!”
“Left,” Sinna said.
Fine. He went left. The wiring in this section was faulty. The fluorescent lights flickered, the hallway dark, and rife with shadows. Daytime or nighttime, Bryce could see like a hawk, but his eyes needed time to adjust between light and dark. This flickering made him dizzy and disoriented. He shook his head, blinked hard, and squinted, but it did little good.
“I don’t like this game anymore!”
Something hissed beyond a corner ahead.
Bryce stopped. Too late to turn back now. “Remember how the Haven converts were different?” he whispered.
“Yeah…?”
“They’re not all like that.”
“How do you know?”
He didn’t. “I just do.” He believed. Had to. It was the only thing that kept him going forward.
“Annie and Emma are very unhappy with you!” Randy shouted. “They made their fancy tea—and it’s all gone cold!”
A convert screeched in agitation.
“Oh, no.” Sinna stopped, tugging on his hand to hold him back.
Bryce looked her square in the eye. “Trust me.”
She looked absolutely terrified—pupils dilated, nostrils flaring. She was breathing too hard, and her hand had grown cold. But she pressed her lips together and nodded, following him around the corner.
Bryce bit back a foul curse.
There it was, the utility shaft—a thick metal door at the end of the hallway, with a huge red exit sign painted across its center.
And right before it, a pair of converts were chained by their necks to the walls in opposite pens. Each had just enough chain to toe the thresholds and almost touch claws if they reached out. Bones were littered around them, evidence that Randy, the sick fuck, actually kept these things, and fed them.
&nb
sp; Bryce gritted his teeth hard. If he left Sinna to take them out, Randy would get to her. If he left them to take out Randy, the scent of blood would rile up the converts and make it harder to get to the exit.
Randy took the choice out of his hands. “There you are,” he said, grinning from ten yards away, his scalpel in one hand and something small and electronic in the other. The grin dropped quickly, and he sneered. “You have been very bad. Do you know how excited the girls were to meet you? And you stood them up!” He clucked his tongue, and shook his head. “Bad, dog. Bad!” He pushed a button on his device. A high-pitched siren blared from built-in speakers, making the converts scream.
Sinna flinched, plastering herself against Bryce’s side. If that remote controlled the pens, then Randy could release the converts if he decided to play nasty. One push of a button and they were in deep shit.
Time to go. Bryce pushed all doubt away and turned his back on Randy. There was his way out, right in front of him. And he was taking it. “Nice and easy, okay? Just keep slowly moving forward. No fast movements, no matter what you see or hear.”
Sinna nodded, but she was shivering in fear.
Randy laughed. “You think you can just walk out of here? No one gets through my lions. No one!” The siren cut off, and a chorus of screams split the air. Human. Terrified. Men and women, crying for help. The two converts flared their claws, popped their jaws open to taste the air. Saliva poured from their mouths as if they’d been conditioned to expect a meal with those sounds.
Bryce curled his arm around to hold Sinna tight against his back, and she moved with him, one foot after the other, her face pressed between his shoulder blades.
“Do you have any idea what it’s like,” Randy roared over the screams, “to live underground, in darkness—for years! They stuck me here to watch the contractors, and then they brought in these things and left! They left!”
The screams grew louder.
The two converts snarled at each other, lashing at the air to ward the other off of the kill, eager to fight for dominance but forever denied the opportunity.
Bryce’s step faltered, but he made himself keep going.
Randy giggled. “Funny, the friends you make when you’re desperate. I hunt and feed them, and they keep me safe. It’s the smell of their waste, you see? It keeps other monsters away. You just scatter that stuff topside and, voila! Instant security fence.
“They used to be pretty good company, too. We even shared meals sometimes. Used to be all it took was a couple rabbits, a coyote, that sort of thing, and everything was fine. But now…” His voice rose in pitch and volume. “I don’t know what’s wrong with them! They scream, and scream, and…” He laughed; a maniacal sound on the wrong side of crazy. “If I don’t feed them fresh meat,” he grated, “they don’t stop!”
As if to underscore his point, the converts screeched. Sinna flinched, and Bryce froze in his tracks.
Randy screamed right back at them. “Shut uuup!”
Bryce gritted his teeth again, and forced his foot forward. His skin throbbed. Even through the din from the speakers, he still felt that rhythm; in the floor and in the walls. He’d bet his teeth the converts felt it, too.
Behind him and at a distance, Randy turned downright conversational. “A shame they can’t talk. But they listen quite well.”
The screams cut off as a single voice came through the speakers—an agitated male speaking Japanese. He snapped orders and, like confused dogs, the converts obeyed. A step back. A step forward. Sit. Crouch. Stand up. They obeyed, though it was obvious they hated that they did; their venom poisoned the air, made Bryce’s eyes sting and his nose prickle. And their skin twitched to the rhythm of the whump-whump-whump.
He kept going. “Calm,” Bryce whispered, focusing all of his senses on the utility shaft door. The rhythm was stronger there, reverberating off of the metal like a giant, noiseless bell. He’d be crazy, too, if he had to listen to it day and night. “Calm.” A few more strides, and they’d be within reach. The converts had caught a whiff of Randy, cocking their heads, sniffing for a meal, but they weren’t fighting for it. Not as long as the Japanese man kept talking. With mouths drawn back from their fangs and tongues stuck out to taste the air, they shook their heads, unfamiliar with the scent of Wolfen. Didn’t mean they wouldn’t decide to have a taste.
“You’ll never make it,” Randy goaded. “My little barbarians are ravenous things, and food hasn’t been dropping out of the sky lately. You’re the first people I’ve seen in a week. I hope they leave me a taste.”
Sinna clutched tighter at Bryce, silently urging him to move faster. But he couldn’t. Too fast and it wouldn’t matter what they smelled like. The converts would lash out like any other predator.
Within reach now. One careful step after another.
“I see they want to toy with you first. Marvelous. I could use some entertainment.”
A beast to his left, a beast to his right, and a monster at his back. Bryce slowed even more. The two converts cawed to each other, and one reached out, claws skimming down Bryce’s arm. He held steady, kept going. When the other touched Sinna’s hair, she flinched, but didn’t make a sound.
“What are you doing?” Randy demanded. “Eat them!”
A series of questioning squawks bounced between the pair, and they strained against their chains to take a closer whiff, but in three more steps, Bryce and Sinna were out of their reach. “We’re through,” he said.
“Stop!” Randy screamed. “Eat them!”
Bryce glanced back only long enough to see the idiot running forward, then spun the wheel to open the door and herded Sinna through it.
“Stop!”
Randy had taught his pet barbarians well; the moment he was close enough, flailing and shouting it was dinnertime, the converts pounced, clawing at him. Randy squealed in pain, but he managed to slip free, away from them, and the beasts screamed, strained madly to get at him, chains holding them back.
Bryce pulled the door closed and spun the wheel to lock it. It wasn’t soundproof. They could still hear Randy wailing, moaning, cursing out the converts.
The bastard would live. At least as long as those chains held.
Not about to risk the converts breaking free, Bryce opened the hidden compartment and turned a lever to release the ladder. “Climb,” he barked at Sinna, giving her a boost up. He followed right behind, climbing over her to reach the latch in the ceiling. Overgrown with years of disuse, it had at least five hundred pounds of earth and foliage sitting on top of it. Bryce, standing on the swinging ladder, had little leverage to budge it. He stepped up higher and, bracing his shoulder against it, pushed with all his might, hoping the latch would give before the ladder did.
Roots tore, earth broke apart. Water poured in, almost washing them back down, but Bryce held strong and kept Sinna anchored. He shoved her into the storm and crawled out right after her, then released the ladder to drop it down into the hole. Even if Randy or his beasts managed to get through the door, they’d never be able to climb up this way.
He collapsed onto the grass next to Sinna, breathing hard and squinting into the rain. The worst of the storm had passed. Pretty soon the clouds would move on and there’d be enough sun to dry them out and charge the mule.
They were safe—for the moment. The road wasn’t far; if they followed it down a half-mile, they’d find the mule. The bunker was sealed, and the two of them were outside and safe. Freezing, but safe.
After all that, there was only one thing Bryce could say: “I told you so.”
23: Sinna
You must face your fears or they will forever own you.
That’s the biggest lie ever told. Fear is a lesson. It is learned for a reason and can never be unlearned. To remove it would be to remove that part of yourself which knows there is danger in the darkness, that there are times when you ought to run instead of fight, and hide instead of challenge your enemy.
Fear keeps you alive.
It is my constant companion. But I think, one day, I will learn to wield it.
I am not an object. I will not be owned.
~
It rained for hours in an endless deluge that flooded the parched ground and took away any hope of building a fire. After trekking back to the mule, Sinna was so stiff with cold, she couldn’t work the latch to open the door. The cabin was flooded with water; with all of the windows gone, there was no shelter or warmth to be found inside.
Bryce’s hands shook when he started the engine. The driving rain forced him to take it slower, but even at thirty miles per hour, the resulting wind stripped them both of any remaining body heat. “Get in the back seat,” he said. “Sheet of plastic in storage bin. Hand it to me.”
Sinna nodded and climbed back there. Pulling out the twelve-by-twelve-inch square of clear plastic with numb fingers was a challenge. When she gave it to him, Bryce stopped the truck and pulled out a knife. He cut a wide strip off of the sheet, carved out three arches, and put it over his face like glasses.
“Now hunker down there. Out of the wind.”
She did, curling up on the floor behind his seat, making herself as small as possible. It wasn’t difficult to do. Getting out again would be the hard part.
Bryce stomped on the gas pedal and sped up, driving much too fast in this weather. Wind howled through the broken windows, and raindrops became small, icy bullets aimed at any exposed flesh. She wanted to cry out in pain; couldn’t imagine what Bryce had to be feeling, completely exposed in the driver’s seat.
But there was method to his madness.
Between one mile and the next, like passing from one world into another, the rain simply stopped. Sinna raised her head to look out the back window. The farther they got, the better she saw the storm as a clearly defined area over the landscape.
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