Joe Ledger

by Jonathan Maberry

  I said, “Secret door?”

  “Secret door,” she agreed. “And your federal task force missed it.”

  “Balls.”

  With her pistol in her right hand, she placed her left on the back wall, over the partial print. She moved her hand to one corner and pressed. The tile tilted inward with an audible click.

  The whole rear wall swung inward on silent hinges, revealing a set of metal stairs that went down into blackness. A smell wafted up at us.

  Rotting meat.

  Human waste.

  And… something else.

  A fish stink. Not actually unpleasant, like the way an aquarium supply store smells, or the kitchens at a low-end fish-and-chips restaurant.

  There were sounds, too.

  Machines. Whirring motors. Rhythmic pumps. Other mechanical sounds, all soft, all muted.

  “How do you know about this?” I asked quietly.

  Felicity shrugged. “This information was hard won, believe me. Literally blood, sweat, and tears.”

  She moved to the top of the steel steps.

  I drew my Beretta. “What’s down there? I mean really, no bullshit about werewolves or boogeymen. What the fuck are we going to find down there?”

  Felicity turned toward me. In the crowded confines of the bathroom she was very close to me. I could smell her perfume. It was the same brand Grace used. What the hell was it, standard issue by Barrier? Or maybe it was the top-selling scent in England, and I was out of the stylistic loop.

  Her body was achingly familiar and devastatingly female. It was the kind of body that no matter how well-balanced and normally nonsexist a man is, he can’t help but be profoundly aware of it. Of hips and breasts, of long legs and a slender, graceful throat, of animal heat that was purely, inarguably, powerfully female.

  And yet….

  Standing this close to her there was something wrong about her.

  Maybe it was because she was so like Grace that knowing she wasn’t Grace made her feel fundamentally wrong. It was meeting a deliberate fake, a double or stand-in for someone I loved. Everything similar suddenly felt like a cheat, like a fraud perpetrated on my broken heart by a cruel and vindictive universe.

  And beyond that, there was one other quality. One other thing that was not anything my senses or my personal pain perceived. This woman, this Special Agent Felicity Hope, seemed strange. Sure, I was still rattled by her sudden appearance in the dark, and by her similarity to Grace, but there was something else. She had a quality that made her not….

  Not what?

  I really had no idea how to finish that thought.

  And no time.

  Felicity moved away from me and began descending the steps. She moved well in the darkness, and if her feet made any sound at all on the metal stairs it was beyond my senses. With great reluctance and confusion, I followed.

  The stairs zigzagged down two levels, and I realized that we had to now be at least twenty feet below sea level. Cape May is pancake flat and houses in the center of town had basements. Certainly nothing built this close to the bay would normally have a cellar. But the stairs went down and down.

  With each step the smell of rotting meat increased.

  I almost said, “There’s something dead down there.” But it would have been inanely obvious. Something was not only dead, it had been dead for some time.

  Felicity slowed her pace and took her gun in a two-handed grip.

  Sweat was beginning to run down the sides of my face and pool inside my shirt at the base of my spine. It would be nice to lie and say it was because the stairway was oppressively humid, but that would have been bullshit. I was scared. Really damn scared.

  Changeling, whatever it really might be, in whatever horrific form the madmen at Koenig had conceived with their perverted science, was down here somewhere. Hopefully it was dead or it was nothing more than samples of transgenic animals that had died without food and water. I really didn’t want to have to euthanize some kind of mutant rhesus monkey or lab rat. I like animals far more than I like people, and I’ve seen what scientists do to chimps and dogs and pigs in labs. Dead animals would be easier to take. Sure, that’s a cowardly view, but fuck it.

  Changeling.

  What was it? Where were these guys going with research to allow deliberate shapeshifting? Where could they go?

  Since I signed onto the DMS, my optimism for common sense and bioethics has taken a real beating. That thing Michael Crichton said in Jurassic Park rang true every time. We spend so much time wondering if we can, we don’t stop to think about whether we should. Or words to that effect. I’ve encountered monsters and mutations already. I wasn’t sure how many more I could face before something inside my head snapped. How long did you have to fight monsters until you really became one?

  And how long could I dance at the edge of the abyss?

  Bad questions to ask yourself in the dark.

  Bad questions.

  As we descended, though, the darkness changed, becoming cloudy and finally yielding to the glow of a security light in a metal cage mounted on the wall beside a big metal door.

  It was massive, as solid and ponderous as a bank vault. There were several high-tech scanners beside it, and even though I had plenty of gadgets for bypassing all kinds of security systems, I could see that I wasn’t going to need any of them.

  The door stood ajar.

  It was held open by a corpse.

  I think it had once been a man.

  But it was impossible to tell.

  The body was swollen and black, the tissues distended by expanding gasses as putrefaction ran rampant.

  And…it had no face.

  The flesh had all been torn away to reveal the striated remnants of muscle and the white of naked bone.

  This hadn’t been done by a knife or any kind of weapon. The flesh was torn in very distinctive ways.

  By teeth.

  Not small rat teeth, either. And it didn’t look like dog or cat teeth. The flesh was savaged by very large and very sharp teeth. Not fangs, but rows of teeth. There was enough left of the throat to see that much.

  “Christ,” I said. “What did that?”

  Her voice was very small.

  “Dear God,” she whispered. “They’re out….”

  Chap. 9

  “What’s out?” I demanded, but she shook her head.

  “I…don’t know exactly. We’ve only had rumors. But….” Felicity shook her head and set her jaw. Tiny jewels of sweat glistened on her forehead. “Cover me.”

  “Hey, wait, dammit….”

  But she was already in motion, stepping over the corpse, squeezing through the opening, disappearing inside. With a growl I gripped the edge of the massive door and hauled on it, swinging it wider to give me room to follow.

  There was light inside, and I ran forward, gun up and ready, into a lab that looked like it was born in the fevered mind of Dr. Moreau. The vast chamber must have stretched hundreds of yards under the streets of Cape May and outward under the waters of the bay. The ceiling was twenty feet high, supported by massive steel pillars. The floor was pale concrete, stained by dried seawater, rust-red old blood, and a dozen chemicals of various sickly hues. There were ranks of computers—the high-end supercomputers used for gene sequencing—tables of arcane scientific equipment, and a dozen stainless-steel dissecting tables. There were also bodies in the room.

  Many bodies.

  Most of them were human, and none of those were whole. Legs and arms, ragged torsos, bodiless heads lay scattered across the floor.

  I knew without counting that the bodies down here and the corpse blocking the door upstairs would add up to an even dozen. The missing scientists.

  Not working at a separate site or in another country.

  All of them here.

  Forever here.

  Each missing scientist…but not all of any of them.

  Felicity and I stood nearly shoulder to shoulder, gaping at the slaughter.

>   But then, even with all of that carnage around us, our eyes were drawn to the far wall. How could we not look? How could anyone not stare at what was there?

  Row upon row upon row of glass cylinders, each ten feet high and as big around as elm trees. Each filled with murky water that smelled of brine and decay.

  And in nearly all of the tanks a body floated.

  They were all naked.

  Men and women.

  Tall. Powerfully built, with corded muscles under layers of gray-green skin.

  They floated in the water, tethered by cables and wires attached to electrodes buried in their chests and skulls. Pale hair floated around their faces. Pale eyelids dusted their cheeks.

  There were at least fifty tanks.

  Three of them were empty, the glass shattered, the wires hanging limp and unattached. Every other tank was full.

  Each of the bodies was naked.

  None of them were human.

  “Holy Mother of God,” murmured Felicity.

  I felt myself moving forward, taking numb steps like a sleepwalker. My eyes were wide, burning from not blinking. The sight before me was hideous, appalling in its implications, but I couldn’t look away. I stopped in front of one of the tanks and reached to touch the glass. The body inside floated on the other side of the thick glass, inches away from me, but worlds apart in so many ways.

  The people—the things inside the tank—did not have hands.

  Not as such.

  They had long flat panels of flesh with segmented bony structures that had once been fingers, each connected by rough webbing. The feet were the same. And all along the waterlogged limbs, the flesh glistened with scales.

  In movies, in Disney pictures, creatures like this are beautiful.

  In these tanks, here in the real world, they were hideous.

  I looked into the face of the body floating inches from me. The mouth was little more than a slash with rubbery lips, between which I could see row upon row of serrated teeth.

  The creature’s eyes were half-open. There was a trace of white around large, black irises.

  On the sides of the creature’s face, below stunted and useless ears, were gills.

  The sound of a footfall in water startled me, and I suddenly whirled, bringing my gun up, but it was Felicity.

  She was standing ankle deep at the edge of what I’d first thought was a large puddle but I could now see was a pool. It ended at a wall, and when I shone my flashlight at the water, we could see that the wall ended a few feet below the surface. Tendrils of seaweed wafted back and forth, and there were small fish in the water, darting here and there.

  “It must lead to the bay,” said Felicity.

  We looked from the pool to the three broken cylinders and then at the decaying bodies.

  “Three of them must have escaped somehow,” she said. “They killed the staff and escaped.”

  I nodded. And though I was almost too sick to speak, I asked, “Do you know what this is?”

  She gave me a quizzical look. “I should think it’s effing well obvious.”

  “No…I can see what they’re doing. Transformative genetics…theriomorphy…they’ve turned test subjects—”

  “—or volunteers,” she cut in.

  “—or volunteers…into monsters. Into water-breathing….” I fished in my mind for the word.

  “Into mermen,” said Felicity Hope. “And mermaids.”

  “I thought mermaids were supposed to be beautiful.”

  She gave a short, ugly laugh. “You don’t read your folklore. The mermaids of legend were monsters who lured men to terrible deaths. They drowned them and fed on them.”

  “So these madmen created genetically engineered…what’s the word? Mer-people?”

  “Close enough.”

  “But...for Christ’s sake why?”

  She cocked her head appraisingly. “What is your nation’s primary weapon of response to deliberate aggression from either China or North Korea?”

  “Generally speaking, lots of missiles.”

  She shook her head. “Which are launched from…?”

  “Ah,” I said, “our fleet.”

  “Top marks. The U.S. fleet in the Taiwan Strait is the most powerful weapon of war in existence. Aircraft carriers ready to launch the world’s most sophisticated and lethal fighters and helicopters, battleships and cruisers, and nuclear submarines capable of launching nuclear and non-nuclear missiles. China is working on building a blue water fleet, but beyond hype, they are many years away from anything comparable, and it’s doubtful they ever will achieve it. That’s why they’ve worked so hard on their missiles and on a submarine fleet capable of slipping past your surface ships. It’s why North Korea is developing its nuclear capabilities and building long-range weapons of mass destruction.”

  “What’s your point?”

  “No nation on earth can face your fleet in any version of a surface battle. You have more ships and better military technology, and you can call in far more resources. Everyone knows this. But consider how the Taliban has been able to wage so long and costly a war with your army in Afghanistan, and how they fought the Russians to a standstill at the height of Soviet power. They have no army, no technology. So what do they have?”

  “Hit-and-run terrorists who hide among the civilian population and comes at us in small and very mobile groups.”

  “Bloody right. It’s the exact kind of warfare that greatly helped you Yanks fight off our larger and better-trained armies during your Revolution.” She spread her arms to indicate the massive tanks, and the bodies floating inside. “Now imagine the hit-and-run terrorists needed for a war against a fleet. A fleet that can detect any metal ships and that can sweep away any network of mines. Imagine teams of merpeople who could swim undetected into the heart of your fleet, carrying small satchel charges and nonmetallic limpet mines. Enough of them, with the right equipment, could destroy your fleet without North Korea or China launching a single missile. And what defense could you offer? You can’t patrol beneath the surface for something this small and mobile. It’s impractical to the point of impossibility.”

  I wanted to tell her that she was out of her mind. That she was delusional. That such a plan was far too wild to ever work.

  But the faces of the dead scientists mocked my denials. The powerful bodies floating in the brine told me that my view of the world was relevant to yesterday. Today was a different and much more terrible day.

  “I have to call this in,” I said. “I need to get someplace where I can get a clean signal and get every-fucking-body out here.”

  She looked at me with her dark eyes.

  “Captain,” she said, then amended it. “Joe…you do understand that if this technology is acquired by our people—yours and mine—they’ll do the same thing, continue the same research.”

  I said nothing.

  “They’ll make monsters, too,” she said, “because the proof is right here that monsters are the next viable weapon of war.”

  “Monsters,” I said, echoing the word. It tasted rancid in my mouth. “But what options do we have? The Koenig people are in custody, their research is either slag or it’s in these computers, and we don’t know if they’ve already shared their secrets with the Chinese or North Koreans. If our enemies have these weapons, won’t we have to….”

  I heard what I was saying and knew that it was absolutely true and absolutely wrong. It was the trap that has escalated warfare since the invention of the longbow. Since the gun. Since the first nuclear bomb.

  It was keeping up with the Joneses in a very real and very ugly way, and unless everyone suddenly came to their senses, how could we avoid committing sins of conscience to defend our people?

  What’s the answer to that question?

  Where’s the path that leads us away from ever escalating the arms race?

  “Joe,” she said as she walked over to the bank of supercomputers, “the Koenig people haven’t sold the information yet. The sec
rets are all here. The research that was burned was a decoy. All of it is here.”

  “You can’t know that.”

  “Yes, I can. I do know it.”

  “How can you be so sure?”

  Without turning she said, “I’m sure, Joe.”

  And she said it in Grace’s voice.

  Exactly Grace’s voice.

  My mouth went dry.

  I took a small step toward her. “Grace…?”

  “If we destroy these computers, it stops here.”

  I licked my lips. “The senior Koenig people are—”

  “It stops here. This abomination goes no further.”

  I wanted her to turn around. I wanted to see her face. I needed to see the light of Grace’s soul shining out of her eyes. If that was an impossible wish, who cares. We stood in an impossible place.

  “Grace…,” I whispered again.

  And then a sudden violent sound of splashing water broke the moment. I spun around as three monstrous shapes rose from the pool.

  Gray-green skin.

  Black eyes.

  Rows of teeth.

  And webbed hands that ended in terrible claws.

  Two of them rushed at me, and one launched itself at Felicity and slammed her against the computers. Felicity screamed. It sounded like the call of a wounded seagull.

  I heard myself yelling. Screaming, really. But the sound was lost beneath the roar of the mermen who ran at me and the thunder of my gun as I fired and fired.

  One of them abruptly spun sideways, his face torn away by a bullet that went on to strike a cylinder. The glass shattered in a spray of jagged pieces and gushing water. The occupant of the tube tore loose of the wires and fell heavily to the floor.

  I saw this only peripherally as the second creature slammed into me.

  He was enormously strong and drove me ten feet backward and nearly crushed me against a concrete wall. Even with the impact I managed to keep hold of my gun, but the monster twisted its head and clamped its jaws around my forearm. Blood spurted, and I heard my wristbones break. Pain exploded with inferno heat inside my arm, and I almost blacked out.