by Weston Ochse
“Boss has intuition like a fiend sometimes,” Laws said. “He’s from Vegas and there are some casinos he can’t go into. He doesn’t count cards, he doesn’t cheat, he just has itches sometimes. And when he gets them, there’s always a reason.”
“An itch?” Walker asked, trying to make the word make more sense.
“An itch,” Holmes repeated. He flashed Walker a grim smile, then turned to the others. “We leave in thirty seconds. Check the sidewalk for traffic.”
Forty-seven seconds later, they flung open the door and entered the target section of the building through the front door. A narrow set of stairs ran to the second floor.
The stacking order was Holmes and Ruiz, then Laws and Fratolilio, then Walker. Hoover padded beside him. Walker glanced at the dog as it glanced at him. He couldn’t help but smile at the grinning mug. The dog seemed as excited as he was.
Holmes and Ruiz took the stairs and cleared the landing above. The rest followed, checking their sixes as they traversed the stairs.
Once they reached the landing, there wasn’t much choice about which way to go. The hall doglegged right, showing a single door on the wall and a window at the front. Holmes edged forward, careful of booby traps, looking for displaced dust, lines in the floorboards, and tripwire signs, but there was nothing. He made it to the window without harm. He stared at the buildings across the way for a full minute to ensure that he and his men weren’t about to enter a killing hallway. When he was certain that it was safe, he waved the others over.
Ruiz stayed at the head of the stairs to ensure that no one snuck up behind them.
Laws checked the doorjamb and the lock.
Walker moved in a crouch near the window and took up the vigil with the aid of the Stoner’s scope. He fought the exhilaration and concentrated on his assignment.
Fratty pulled out his tablet and showed the others what he expected the room to look like. It was basically a large rectangle. It had another window like the one Walker was staring through, but other than that and the door, there were no avenues of egress.
Hoover padded over and gave the door a sniff. She seemed to be interested in something.
Everyone went silent as Holmes and Fratty checked out the schematics one more time. When he was finally ready, Holmes ordered Ruiz and Walker to stay put, then stacked the remaining three SEALs at the door. He held up a hand and silently counted down to five.
Ruiz fired his Super 90 into the lock, and then Holmes kicked it open. The three of them crashed into the room, weapons aimed left, right, and center.
“Clear.”
“Clear.”
“Clear.”
“What the hell, Fratty?” came Laws’s voice. “There’s nothing here.”
“Ruiz, deploy a wire and get in here. Walker, you follow.”
Each of the men squelched the radio to let him know they heard.
Behind Walker, Ruiz deployed an electronic tripwire at the top of the stairs and tuned to the same frequency they were using for a command channel on their MBITRs. Consisting of an infrared actuator and a transmitter, it would tell them if anyone was moving in behind them.
Ruiz finished with his setup, signaled Walker, then moved into the room.
Walker took one last look through his scope; then he too followed.
The room was empty. Not even a piece of trash littered the floor. The far wall and the outside wall were made of brick, while the back and side walls were made of wood. The floor was a sickly green linoleum, peeling in places.
Laws shook his head. “I’ll say it again. What the hell, Fratty?”
“I don’t know what to say. We’re at the right address. We’re in the right room. It has to be the intel.”
“Won’t be the first time intel didn’t pan,” Ruiz said.
Hoover got tired of standing in the middle of the room and began to sniff the baseboards.
Ruiz and Laws checked the brick wall.
Walker again posted near the window and scanned the buildings across the street. For a moment, he thought he saw someone looking at them, but it was just a guy in his underwear, leaning over his balcony railing smoking a cigarette. Soon, he went back inside.
Fratty and Holmes checked the wooden walls. When they got to the back wall, they began to tap lightly. Finally, Holmes called Hoover over.
Hoover suddenly became animated. She didn’t bark and she didn’t howl, but she began to breathe deeply and paw at the floor.
“Okay. We got something over here.” Holmes knelt and faced the wall. “There’s something I don’t like about it.”
Walker glanced outside and tracked back to where the man in the underwear had been standing. He was gone now.
“What is it? An itch?” Laws asked.
Holmes shook his head. “Not quite. Walker, get over here.”
Walker backed across the room to where the others were kneeling. “Sir?”
“Apply the TWR.”
Walker slung his Stoner across his back and pulled the paperback-sized through-wall radar from a cargo pocket. Looking at the wall, he was relieved it wasn’t composed of brick. The radar was still a new technology and wasn’t powerful enough to penetrate anything other than standard drywall or wood.
He switched it on, let it cycle through its start-up protocols, then pressed the ready button. He moved to the wall and held it against it. While he waited for it to read and translate the three-dimensional line drawing on the tablet-sized screen, he noticed a tingling sensation begin to course throughout his body. The tingling increased until it felt like an electrical current was running through him.
Then it all went crazy.
His vision went supernova, then suddenly cut to black, like a galaxy imploding on itself. Not merely the dark of night, but the dark of an absolute lack of light, life, and anything good. A feeling of doom slammed into him as he realized that there was something on the other side of the dark. Something that wanted him. Something that had been inside him before.
It came darkly through the gloom. At first, it was nothing more than a spot of blackness; a pinprick, really. But it was coming closer, and Walker realized that he didn’t want to see it. He closed his eyes, but that didn’t make a damn bit of difference. It came inexorably toward him. He knew it before he saw it. He’d known this shape his entire life. A monster from his childhood. In the red glowing eyes, the shock of white hair, and the cruel little mouth, Walker discovered to his horror that he’d found himself. That child he’d been at nine, not like any normal child, but one who harbored the soul of evil; a child who spent his days staring balefully at the world while an entity scratched tic-tac-toe on the inside of his skull.
Walker screamed as memories flooded through him of the black thing that had once lived inside him. It had whispered secrets and told him things that no child should ever know. It knew what evil others had done and had detailed them to nine-year-old Jack until his mind was on fire.
And now, as the vision of himself surfaced like a bloated corpse from the depths of his memory, he heard the voice of the beast in his mind once more, telling him things that no one should ever understand.
Images flashed through his mind of Holmes, Fratolilio, Laws, and Ruiz dead, bodies burst from the ravaging of maggots and red, hoary beetles. Billings naked and staked to a wall with machetes, her body already scored with the burns of cigarettes, eyes smoking holes, teeth jagged and broken. A child curled up in fetal position in the back of a closet, covered in his own feces, his cheek resting in a puddle of urine as he vibrated with the rage of the ancient thing trapped inside a mind that wanted nothing more than to build a castle in which to hide.
A jag of light fired through the images like an electric shot.
“Walker!”
The child, now standing naked, body bruised and bitten as if animals had been gnawing on him, looked at him. Smoke seeped from the corners of his red eyes. The smoke took form and became a single hand tipped with talons. The smoke billowed and the hand came cl
oser.
Walker wanted to back away but there was nowhere to go in his mind. He was trapped there, just as he’d been in those dark days of his nine-year-old life, when the beast took him over and turned him inside out.
“Walker!”
He felt a blow to his face.
Another supernova evaporated his being, but on the other side of this one was light instead of darkness.
He saw the hand descending and managed to block it with his own. He was on his back on the floor. Holmes knelt over him. Fratty, Ruiz, and Laws stared at him with worry and just a little fear in their eyes.
“What…” A single flash of his own red nine-year-old eyes shot through him.
“Walker!” Holmes called to him, somewhere between a hiss and a shout. The word was amplified through the MBITR and echoed through the now empty space of his mind.
Then, suddenly, he knew.
“It’s down there,” he said, pointing toward the wall. “Something … wrong … is down there. Through the wall.”
He started to get up. Holmes grabbed him and helped him to his feet.
“You okay, SEAL?”
“Yes, sir.” Walker wiped sweat from his face.
“Billings said this might happen. Chalk one up to her and her people.”
Walker stared at the SEAL team leader. The woman from the Senate had mentioned that this might happen? How could she have known? How could anyone have known? But there was no time to contemplate. Now that he was back on his feet, he was once again a gear in the SEAL machine. Laws ran the TWR, and though it didn’t show any evidence of a staircase down, it did show a room that was roughly five feet square and empty on the other side of the wall.
Ruiz pulled a line of detonation cord that had been salted with Semtex from his satchel. He attached it to the wall, creating the outline of a four-foot-high doorway. The rest of the SEALs stacked against the same wall, but several feet away. Ruiz attached an electrical lead, backed up to where the other SEALs were waiting, then depressed the contact button. Halfway between a zipping sound and a muted explosion, the cord went off, explosively sawing through the wall, but not completely obliterating it.
The SEALs moved quickly to the spot.
Ruiz pushed against the wall and the new doorway fell free to the floor on the other side.
Hoover was through first, followed by Fratty, Holmes, Walker, Laws, and then Ruiz.
The room was little more than a large landing for the set of descending stairs. From below, an unbelievable stench was joined by the sounds of clicking like the claws of a thousand crabs and the susurrations of Chinese voices. But all eyes were on the set of shackles bolted to the middle of the floor on the landing. Illuminated by a single dangling bulb, blood and claw marks surrounded the shackles. A broken piece of fingernail lay absurdly next to the metal bolt.
The SEALs looked at each other. In their eyes was the recognition that they’d just entered the Land of Fucked-Up.
Holmes grabbed Laws and pointed down the stairs. “You first. Translate.”
Laws moved down the stairs in a crouch. When he’d gotten halfway down, he paused and listened. After a moment, he said softly through his MBITR, “Mostly from Fujian Province from the sound of it. The noise is sewing machines, I think. Sweatshop.”
“And this is the center of the illegal tech transfer?” Fratty asked.
“We’ll see what we’ll see.” Holmes glanced at the dog. “Hoover?”
The dog looked up.
Fratty shrugged. “Dog doesn’t care about the state of illegal shirtmaking.”
“Laws, take a look.”
Laws crept down several more stairs. He pulled a thin metal cable from his side pocket and snaked it around the corner.
Fratty dialed it in on his tablet and they all watched as a dark and cluttered space sprang into a fish-eye view. Women of all ages sat in front of aged machines, spindles of thread twisting in the art of creation. Here and there, flames from candles in the background lit the women in a strange orange light, casting shadows that moved along the walls.
“What’s that?” Walker asked, pointing toward the screen.
Fratty and Holmes peered at it.
It was Holmes who spoke first. “Looks like a pentagram.”
“Or it could be a pentacle,” Laws offered.
“What’s the difference?” Walker asked.
“One is used as a religious symbol and the other is used in magic rituals,” Ruiz said from where he was guarding their six.
“Which one is that last one?” Walker asked.
“A pentacle.”
“Then I don’t want it to be a pentacle.”
“Laws, sweep the fish-eye around,” Holmes ordered softly.
They watched as the monocular vision of the room moved from left to right.
“Don’t see any beegees,” Fratty said, meaning bad guys.
“Me neither,” said Holmes. “Let’s move in, but stay danger close. Hoover, to me.”
While Laws wrapped the sniffer back into his pocket, the others stacked down the stairs with Ruiz bringing up the rear. Since Walker was in the middle, he shouldered the Stoner across his back and pulled out his 9mm pistol. There wouldn’t be room to fire the rifle.
It was a blind landing at the bottom of the stairs, requiring a ninety-degree turn to the right. The sniffer had told them that the room extended to both the left and the right, but they couldn’t discern how far without actual eyes on.
Laws was the first down.
“Left dead-ends at an office about ten meters. Right extends beyond LOS,” he said, meaning line of sight. “Room is about twenty meters wide. Uh…”
“What is it?” Holmes asked.
They were only a few meters from the bottom of the stairs, and if there was danger looming, they all needed to be able to prepare for it.
Laws’s voice broke through the static of the headsets. “No beegees. Just strange is all. Like a satanic taxidermist lives here. The room is smoky from candles and something that smells like hell’s own ass.”
Walker and Fratty exchanged looks with Holmes in between them.
“So it’s clear?” their leader asked.
Walker saw the knuckles of Holmes’s left hand tightening on the grip of the MP5.
“Clear, boss,” Laws said.
“Then move out. Danger close. Alternate.”
They moved like a centipede, each SEAL a part of the whole. Each was close enough to touch the SEAL in front of him. Laws held his MP5 at shoulder level and crouched forward. Fratty came next with a Super 90, then Holmes with an MP5, then Walker with a 9mm, and then Ruiz with a Super 90 covering the team’s six.
Walker felt a tingle, as if the room’s energy were wired directly into his skin.
He searched for evidence of weapons on the women hunched over their machines. What was becoming increasingly strange was that not a single one of them looked up from their work. He and the other SEALs had to be registering in their peripheral vision, but not a single curious look made it their way, as if their glances couldn’t be spared, or perhaps they’d been convinced that distractions weren’t part of the program.
Each was manacled to her chair by thick bracelets connected by lengths of rusted chain. Several of the women were also chained by the neck, heavy links holding them inches from the dancing needles of their sewing machines. Most were nude below the waist. Some were completely naked, their bodies covered in filth and excrement.
Then Walker saw them even more clearly.
“Oh my God,” he said. “Their lips are stitched shut!”
Their SEAL machine paused while everyone assessed the stitched-lip seamstresses. Then it was Holmes who, in a voice raw with emotion, whispered, “Keep moving.”
They began edging forward again.
Pentacles with arcane symbols in English and Chinese adorned virtually every surface. Many of these had been applied with glow-in-the-dark paint and shone brilliantly in the gloom.
Here and there, r
ats, small dogs, and cats had been tacked to the walls. They’d all been cut from head to tail. Many had flesh peeled back and held in place by threads that crisscrossed the room, stretching from spindles atop machines to hooks on the ceiling, like a web or a net. If these interlocking threads had been any lower, it would have been impossible to cross the room. As it was, they intersected and ran about a head taller than Laws, the tallest of the SEALs.
“Watch your feet,” Laws said.
Piles of excrement, half-eaten food, the intestines of small animals, and scraps of cloth had been pushed against the walls. Closer examination showed the marks where the floor was stained from the continual pushing and sweeping of the offal.
The ravaged animals, the taxidermy threads, the host of hunched, naked, and chained workers had sent Walker to the edge of what he could handle. He felt his eyeballs spasm as they tried to unfocus in order to relieve his mind of the horror of his vision.
Hoover growled about the same time Walker saw something sweep past. It was just a blur, but it seemed to have hands. The only problem was that it couldn’t have been any larger than a doll, or maybe a Stretch Armstrong. Walker remembered fighting over the toy in the orphanage, he and little Henry Jimmison pulling at each arm. Any other doll would have burst in half with the efforts of the two kids, but not Stretch Armstrong. As good as its name, it had stretched and stretched and stretched, until the arms were twice the length of its body.
Yeah, that’s what the thing had looked like.
Fratty groaned. “Homunculus. Damn, I hate those things.”
“What did you say?” Walker’s peripheral vision caught another movement, but try as he might, he couldn’t get eyes on. “Hunkuless?”
“Homunculus,” Laws repeated. “An artificially created life, usually through alchemy.”
“Fucker won’t stand still,” Ruiz drawled, trying to aim toward it.
“Also from the Greek, anthroparianism,” Laws continued. “The creation of a golem-like being with its own sense of will.”
“What does that mean?” Walker asked.
Holmes said, “It means we have a small humanoid monster of immense power whose primary ability is to remain unnoticed.”