Just like that his decision was made.
He would try to speak to this group of newcomers, try to convince them of the righteousness of his task and see if they would help him accomplish his aims without resorting to other, more violent, measures.
And if they chose not to help, he would eliminate them just as he had those who had returned him to the light.
He would not be denied.
It was as simple as that.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Riley gathered the troops and led them through the vault, across the hall beneath the holding cell and out the other side into a short corridor. This in turn ended at another door protected by a card-lock. Rather than have Olsen try to jury-rig the lock mechanism, they attempted to use the various pass keys that had been collected from the bodies in the cafeteria and got lucky on the second try.
On the other side of the door was a small antechamber. Lockers painted a bright blue lined one wall. Opposite them were a series of stainless steel sinks, four in all. Cotton towels, a light blue in color, were stacked on a shelf nearby.
A series of cubbies stood in the center of the room between the lockers and the sinks and stacked in these were white cotton suits designed to be worn over the clothes. Each suit zipped up the front and included booties to go over the shoes and a shower cap-like hat to cover the head.
It was standard clean room gear; designed to keep contamination from external sources to a minimum, and the twin set of swinging doors on the far side of the room suggested the presence of a laboratory or assembly room just beyond.
Riley ordered Chen and Duncan to go through the lockers, but they came up empty. By the time they’d finished Cade had made up his mind to continue forward and Riley took point once more. With the rest of Echo at his back, he eased the doors before him open with one hand.
He didn’t know what he had expected, but it certainly wasn’t this. Emerging from the prep chamber, Riley found himself standing in some sort of containment center. The room had been divided up into what were, in essence, three long corridors. He stood in the central one, his shoulders practically touching the glass walls on either side. Beyond those, against the walls, were a series of what he could only call cells, small glass fronted enclosures with floors covered in a matt of dirty straw. The walls were concrete and on the doors were complicated electronic locks holding them shut. There was enough room between the cell doors and the wall of the corridor he stood in to allow room for the handlers to move in and out of the cells while keeping observers in the center corridor confined away from the action.
Even in the dim illumination provided by the emergency lights, Riley could see that the first cells on either side of him were empty. He began edging forward, looking into the cells on either side as he went. In several instances the doors to the cells were open, but he had no way of reaching them until he had moved half the distance down the hall. There he found a door on either side leading into the cell access area. A quick discussion led to First Squad taking the corridor on the right while Riley and the Command Squad would search those on the left.
The minute they entered the access corridor they were smothered with a strange smell that was somehow both inviting and unpleasant at the same time, like the scent of lilacs and jasmine mixed with that of wet fur. It was apparently coming from the cells with the open doors, though neither Riley nor anyone else had any idea what kind of animal would give off a scent like that.
Having already determined that the first several cells were empty, Riley turned right. He stopped at the next cell, taking a moment to examine the lock on the door. It was of sturdy construction and he could find no evidence of a short or other mechanical problem.
He turned to Cade and indicated the doors with a wave of his hand. “Think they all failed when the power went out?”
The Knight Commander shook his head. “It’s usually the other way around. The power fails and these things lock down tight. Practically impossible to get them open again without restoring the electricity.” He glanced up and down the row of cells and something caught his eye. “That’s strange.”
Riley turned to follow his gaze. All of the cell doors were unlocked and open, except one.
The last.
The two men looked at each other and then, wordlessly, made their way down the corridor toward it.
Much to their surprise, they found the cell occupied.
The man looked Indian to Riley, though he supposed he could have been Pakistani, Turkish, or any other Middle Eastern ethnicity. He was short, somewhere in the neighborhood of five and a half feet, and of small stature, with dark curly hair and an ungroomed beard. He wore a tattered blue jumpsuit with the now expected Eden patch on his right shoulder. From the accumulated grime on his exposed skin, including his bare feet, it was obvious it had been several days since he’d had the chance to shower.
The straw flooring had been pushed into a pile in the corner and the man was lying either unconscious or asleep on the exposed floor. On the other side of the room were several large jugs of water and a stack of canned goods. Obviously, he’d planned to be in there awhile.
Riley watched as Cade tried the cell door, discovered it locked, and then rapped sharply on the glass door several times with the barrel of his gun.
Inside the cell, the man shifted in his sleep, but did not awake.
Cade turned to his companions. “I want this door open and I don’t care how long it takes or what we have to do to open it.”
“Got it,” they answered and went to work. First Squad hadn’t found anything of note in the opposite cells so they were called back to join the others. Davis had a fair degree of experience with locking mechanisms and he was called over to assist Olsen as they worked to find a way around the electro-magnetic lock that held the door firmly shut. The rest of the men set up a perimeter and prepared to meet any unexpected visitors.
Halfway through their efforts the man inside woke up. He raised himself on one elbow and blinked weary-eyed at them. Riley watched as he first rubbed his eyes and then, apparently deciding they weren’t figments of his imagination, rifled through his pockets until he came up with a pair of gold-rimmed spectacles. He slipped the glasses on.
“Hang on!” Riley shouted to him, hoping the man could hear him through the thick glass. “We’re going to get you out.”
The master sergeant was unprepared for what happened next. The man inside the cell jumped to his feet and rushed the door, shouting, the excitement on his face obvious. But the thick glass stole anything the man tried to say to them.
As Olsen and Davis continued to work, Riley tried to indicate with hand signals that they would have the man free shortly and to just sit back and relax. Unfortunately, that only seemed to get him more worked up.
“Think he’ll answer our questions?” Duncan asked.
“I don’t care whether he wants to or not,” Riley replied. “He’s the first living soul we’ve seen in this place and I suspect Cade isn’t going to give him a choice.” Riley couldn’t blame him, either. He wanted answers, too.
It took Olsen and Davis almost an hour but they eventually got the door open. The second they had, the prisoner pushed it open and stepped out of the cell.
“Oh thank God! Am I glad to see you!” He smiled at them all and then turned back to Riley. “You got him, right? Tell me you got him.”
Misunderstanding, Riley replied, “Yeah, we got him. Father Vargas is resting comfortably in a hospital not too far from here. We can take you to see him shortly.”
The man froze and a strange expression washed across his face. “Vargas? You got Vargas?”
“And like I said, he’s all right. As soon as you can tell us what happened here, we’ll take you to see him.” Riley was speaking softly, gently. The man was obviously emotional and he didn’t want him to get any more riled up.
“I don’t give a damn about Vargas! Tell me you killed it! That’s all I want to hear. That you blew its divine ass all the
way to kingdom come, where it belonged.”
Divine ass? What the…”Look. Why don’t you tell us your name and we’ll go from there?”
The former prisoner stood there, staring. Riley was about to repeat his request when the man flew into action. They had never expected he’d tried to barrel his way through several well-armed men and the prisoner was able to get past all three of them, rush up the hall, and reach the door to the central corridor before Riley, close on his heels, brought him down with a picture-perfect tackle.
Now the man turned violent. Kicking and thrashing, he did what he could to throw Riley off of him, shouting all the while. “Get off me you stupid son-of-a-bitch! You have no idea what you are doing!”
“Then why don’t you explain it to us,” Riley laconically replied, making no move to get up. His six-foot-four, 240 pound frame easily held the smaller man to the floor.
“All right, Riley. Let him up.”
Cade had come down the hall and was now standing in the doorway to the central corridor, his pistol held casually in his hand. Riley had seen him use that weapon without hesitation when he didn’t get the answers he wanted and one glance at the prisoner’s face made it clear that he understood the unspoken threat in Cade’s stance, too.
Riley stood, then reached down, grabbed a hold of the man’s bicep, and hauled him rather reluctantly to his feet as well.
“Who are you?” Cade asked.
The man sullenly stared at the floor and didn’t respond.
Cade sighed. “We can do this the easy way or…. I’m Commander Cade Williams and you are?”
For a moment the man was silent and Riley expected he’d have to get a little rough in order to get some answers, but then the prisoner rounded on Cade. “You stupid fool,” he said, his face inches from Cade’s own. “You have no idea what you are doing here and if you were smart you’d get the hell out of here while you still could. This isn’t an issue for the Army.”
“With all due respect, I believe I do know what was going on here, but it would certainly be easier if you could fill in a few details. Let’s start with your name.”
An exasperated snort. “Bhanjee. Dr. Manoj Bhanjee. Chief Geneticist.”
“Thank you. That wasn’t so hard, now was it?”
But Bhanjee wasn’t willing to engage in pleasantries, however. “Look, idiot, I don’t give a flying crap just who you are or how many men you have with you. Unless you’ve got the entire U.S. Army out there, I was about 100 times better off locked in my little hidey-hole back there.”
Something in his tone struck a chord with Riley. The man clearly felt he was safer locked up inside a cell, effectively cornered like a rat in the hole, rather than out here with them. It wasn’t the glowing endorsement Riley’d expected from someone they’d just extricated from the inside of a glass box.
Apparently the comment hit home with Cade, too. As Riley watched, he pulled the patch off his eye and turned to look at the glass walls around them.
“They’re warded. All of the cells are warded!”
The prisoner glanced at him, his expression changing from anger to curiosity, but when he spoke up his scathing tone hadn’t changed. “Of course the cells are warded. Do you think we’d have tried to contain them with only bullet proof glass?”
Whatever Cade was going to say in response was lost as he whipped his head around to face the entrance they’d passed through more than an hour before. As he turned Riley could see that his good eye, his left, was still closed, which meant whatever he was seeing was coming to him through the ghost-white orb that was all that remained of his right.
“Reapers!” he shouted into the radio and a moment later the double doors at the end of the hall burst open as the surviving demons from their earlier battle smashed their way through them.
The creatures came on without thought to tactics or strategy and this was just fine with the members of the Echo Team, who wanted nothing more than the chance to avenge Callavechio’s death. Cade’s warning had been enough for Chen and Ortega, positioned about fifteen feet back from the entrance, to prepare themselves for the assault and in seconds the central corridor had become a shooting gallery. The demons were constrained by both the bullet proofing of the glass and the warding etched all over its surface, effectively limiting their options. They had no choice but to funnel straight down the hallway toward the two men, which was just what they wanted. Their MP5s roared, the sound echoing in the confined space, and the slugs tore into the flesh of their foes with what to Riley appeared to be reckless abandon.
As the men from First Squad held off the initial assault, Riley and Cade moved into position behind them. On a radioed command from Cade the two men in front went down on one knee, allowing the newcomers, now standing behind them, to open fire also. Riley’s Mossberg thundered in counterpoint to the crack of Cade’s pistol, and both weapons played a syncopated rhythm to their companions.
The demons were, quite literally, cut to pieces by the withering hail of gunfire.
By the time Duncan, Olsen, and Davis had moved into position to back them up, the firefight was over.
In the silence that followed, a muffled cry came from the other end of the hall.
Riley spun around.
Down at the other end, he had the barest glimpse of Dr. Bhanjee being wrapped in inky black wings and they were gone.
The corridor was empty.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
With Dr. Bhanjee gone, their chance of learning first-hand just what had happened here disappeared with him and a sense of gloom settled about the group. That they could have been so careless as to leave him undefended was troubling to say the least. Cade knew it was simply a result of having constantly to be on alert, the pressure slowly chipping away at their awareness and control, but that didn’t make things any less disappointing.
With no choice but to continue their search, Cade ordered the team to leave the cell block behind by passing through the door at its other end.
What they found there only added to their growing disquiet about the place.
The room was clearly a laboratory, and a sophisticated one at that. Olsen wasn’t a scientist by any stretch of the imagination, but he considered himself an intelligent man and knew the difference between a microscope and an MRI machine. The equipment in this room, however, defied his understanding. Everywhere he looked there was some new contraption measuring heaven knows what.
But what really caught his eye were the two rows of glass tanks in the center of the room and he crossed over to them to have a look.
They were cylindrical in nature, about eight feet tall, and filled with a thick liquid that was slightly yellow in color. If anything they reminded him of giant specimen jars full of formaldehyde and the comparison was especially apt for in the last tank on the left, the only one containing anything other than the liquid, there floated the naked body of a young man.
Stepping closer, Olsen could see that he just might have to rethink that characterization.
The body was clearly humanoid; a torso from which extended two arms and two legs, with a head supported by a neck of the proper proportion. But where there should have been a face there was only a blank expanse of flesh, like a bare canvas before the painter has arrived, and Olsen couldn’t help but stare. No mouth. No nose. No means of air intake. How had it grown to be this big without the ability to breathe? The blankness of the face didn’t appear to be the result of an injury, so how had the thing survived for so long?
The body was slowly shifting in the fluid in the tank and Olsen attention was drawn to its upper left shoulder as it came into view. From its neckline to the middle of its back the body was covered with a fine goose-down like set of feathers. Even stranger, those feathers quickly changed to a set of iridescent scales that were interwoven with each other and covered the entire rest of the thing’s left side down to a spot behind the left knee.
Just what the hell was this thing?
Riley walked up as h
e stood there, staring. “Now that’s an ugly son of a gun.”
Olsen nodded, not trusting himself to speak. He normally would have been the first to make some lighthearted wisecrack, especially in a tense situation like this, but this thing in front of him was just so inherently…wrong… that he couldn’t find it within himself to do so.
Riley must have sensed his mood, for he turned serious suddenly. “Once, a number of years ago, I had the opportunity to enter a section of the archives I’d never been admitted to before.”
Olsen didn’t need to ask just which archives he was referring to. For a Templar, there was only one, the Archives, the great collection of information and artifacts that the Order had been gathering and cataloging for centuries.
“If memory serves, it was just after I’d transferred into Echo. We were facing a rash of attacks by some unknown cryptid and managed to get some fairly decent casts made from the bite marks on the seventh victim. Cade sent me down to the vaults to see if I could match any of them with the various specimens that had been collected over the years, particularly the ones that had been catalogued at the turn of the century.”
Riley turned to face him and in his eyes Olsen could see a reflection of the horror he’d seen that day. “I’ll tell you something. What I saw down in that vault, what we as an Order actively collect and store for future studies, make this oddity seem tame in comparison. The world’s one strange place, there’s no question of that.”
As if to punctuate his statement, the thing in the tank suddenly jerked as if awakening abruptly from a long sleep and its hands slapped palm down against the glass. In the center of each palm was an eye of jet black that stared out at them. After a moment, one of them winked.
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