Forged From Ash - Book #7 of the Skinners Series

by Marcus Pelegrimas

“She’s been talking pretty well,” he pointed out. “And the reason I shot her was because she’s a piece of shit bloodsucker.”

  “And,” Sayers added, “he knew she could recover from it.”

  Rico shrugged. “That too.”

  Jutting his chin defiantly at the Skinner as if he was about to spit at him, Seth said, “He’s not much different than the ones who put this place together. We’ll say more, but only to the IRD. That Skinner can piss off.”

  “He’s with me,” Sayers said. “Anything you want to say, you can—”

  “No, no,” Rico interrupted. “It’s all right.”

  “You sure?”

  “Yeah. I can step outside and let these two say their piece. Most Nymar ain’t nothing but a bunch of whiny bitches anyway. Listenin’ to them cry gives me a headache.”

  Every muscle in Sayers’s body tensed as he brought his assault rifle up to his shoulder and took a step back. “All right, then. If you see any hostile movement at all in this room or hear anything, it means these two have overstepped their bounds. Even if they get me, they don’t have what it takes to stand up to the rest of my unit.”

  Neither of the Nymar seemed particularly frightened by the threat, and Rico had stepped out of the office before it had fully left the Lieutenant’s mouth.

  The Skinner wasn’t worried about missing much of anything in there. While he and Sayers may have butted heads about a few things now and then, he knew the Lieutenant wasn’t about to withhold any vital mission intel. Also, Sayers was too freaked out by the Nymar in general to keep a Skinner in the cold when it came to the finer details. As for the Nymar getting over on him, Sayers wouldn’t have lasted this long in the IRD if that could happen.

  Relaxing his grip on the gauntlet, Rico allowed the weapon’s thorns to sit loosely within the holes they’d dug into his palm. That way, he could feel more of what his scars were telling him without being distracted by the sting. There were more Nymar somewhere in the vicinity but not close enough to worry about just yet. He kept his guard up as he hopped down from the loading dock and approached the body propped against the crates.

  The four bloody gouges in the dead man’s chest were relatively fresh. Two were much deeper than the rest. Reminding himself just how little Sayers knew about Nymar, Rico tapped his earpiece and said, “Watch yourself. At least one of ‘em might be able to grow claws.”

  Sayers gave him one click to acknowledge the warning, probably trying to be stealthy. Rico knew the Nymar had more than likely heard him, which was just fine since it let them know they weren’t in the presence of idiots.

  Next, Rico squatted down to the dead man’s level and started reaching for his wrist. Before he got there, he drew the Sig and tapped it against the man’s cheek. He placed the largest spike of his gauntlet under the man’s chin and pushed just hard enough to break the skin. Having barely punctured the corpse’s flesh, he removed the spike and held his hand over the man’s wound. In Rico’s experience, it was never a good idea to take dead at face value. There was no reaction from getting tapped or stuck and nothing reacting with his scars, so he was fairly confident this one was down for the count.

  The next thing Rico checked was the man’s hands. The right palm was mildly scarred but the left one was covered with a roadmap of overlapping tissue put there by thorns from a wooden weapon. Not only was the dead man a southpaw, but he was a Skinner as well. Placing one hand under the man’s chin, Rico lifted his face so he could get a direct look at it. The guy wasn’t at all familiar.

  Rico glanced over to the office where Sayers was still conducting his interrogation. The blond Nymar seemed to have become chatty, so that was good. He didn’t keep his hopes up that she was giving him anything useful, but she was at least buying some more time for Rico to check a few more things. Grabbing the dead man by the hair, Rico pulled his head forward and down before snagging the corpse’s shirt collar with his gauntlet and stretching it out until he could see the back of the guy’s neck. There was another scar there; a horizontal line cut by two shorter diagonals. It wasn’t a wound and sure as hell wasn’t from a Skinner weapon. It had been placed there by a branding iron, and just seeing it made Rico want to reach back to touch his own neck. Slamming the dead man against the pile of crates, he stood up and walked toward the back of the warehouse.

  Without looking into the first office being used by Sayers, he went straight to the second one where Pretty Boy had been found. Apart from a bunch of shredded papers and two broken swivel chairs, there was nothing inside that room. He stayed there, removed the gauntlet from his hand and dug the dead man’s cell phone from his pocket. His thumb left bloody smears on the touch screen as Rico sifted through the notifications set to trigger an alarm.

  Feeding Time was every three days at 0600.

  There was a meeting scheduled for 0815 in two days.

  Other than that, the phone contained nothing but a bunch of pictures taken of several different Nymar dressed in dirty jumpsuits similar to the ones worn by Drea and Seth. Most of them were emaciated and not very happy about being photographed. Others were messed up a whole lot worse. So messed up that Rico winced and moved on to searching other portions of the phone. Since there was no cell service, there were no calls or texts to find. There were some hastily typed notes and a few cryptic lists, but Rico decided to sift through those some other time. Things in the next room seemed to be heating up. The muffled voices he could hear through the wall connecting the two offices were quickly growing in volume. Rico left one office and approached the other, which allowed him to hear the tail end of one sentence.

  “…got to move NOW!” Seth said. He stood with feet planted, chest bowed out and both fists clenched.

  Sayers had his assault rifle at his shoulder and ready to fire. “Stand down,” he ordered. “We’ll do what we can.”

  “You don’t understand,” Drea said. Although she placed a hand on Seth’s chest to try and move him back, the younger Nymar was chomping at the bit to make a move. “We were lucky to get as far as we did,” she continued. “There are still more of us being held captive, and the people responsible will kill us all if they think they’ve lost control.”

  “Oh, I understand plenty,” Rico said as a way to announce his presence. “From where I’m standin’, it seems the guys who locked you up still have plenty of control.”

  “Really?” Seth growled as his fangs slipped down from where they were housed in his jaw. “Then maybe you should take another look at your friend out there, Skinner. We killed him, and we can kill you too!”

  Rico lunged forward without a second thought about putting himself within the Nymar’s striking distance or into Sayers’s line of fire. He grabbed Seth’s bony wrist, twisted it to get a look at the underside of his arm and then bent it against its joint to force the kid to one knee. “YOU didn’t kill that man or anyone else,” he said.

  Drea came at him in a hurry, just as Rico had been expecting. Letting go of Seth, he snatched one of her wrists and twisted it using the same hold he’d put on her friend. Instead of twisting all the way, he stopped when he saw the writhing black markings leading from the bottom of her arm all the way to the top of her hand. Wrenching her around, Rico said, “Take a note, Lieutenant. This is your killer. If she was sweet talking you before, just remember that that’s how they operate. They’re all soft promises and sexy voices until you’re close enough for them to feed.” To drive his point home, Rico squeezed her wrist until a set of pointed black protrusions poked out from beneath her fingertips.

  “You’re goddamn right I killed him!” Drea said as soon as Rico let her go. “I even told that to him already,” she added while flipping her other hand toward Sayers. “And you’re wrong if you think the rest of those pricks are still in control of us.”

  “Oh yeah,” Rico said. “You’re runnin’ the show. You managed to get one lucky shot, probably when your sissy friend over there was distracting him by batting his eyelashes. If you’re the masters
of your fate, why haven’t you left this building?”

  “We sent a distress signal. That means we need help.”

  “Help for what?” Sayers asked. “If you wanted to escape, all you had to do was walk outside.”

  “That’s exactly what we should do,” Seth snapped. “These assholes aren’t about to do anything for us.”

  Rico stepped up to the skinny Nymar and clamped a hand around his neck. “You got some real fucking nerve! Before the shapeshifters tore everything down, it was the Nymar who took it upon themselves to shred through cops, soldiers, innocents and Skinners alike!” As he spoke, he lifted Seth to his tiptoes and shook him. Even as Drea tried to pull him back with supernaturally strong hands, he continued his tirade. “The Shadow Spore were created to be nothing less than a goddamn nightmare. After you did your damage and lapped up as much blood as you could stomach, the whole chicken shit bunch of you disappeared. What was the plan for the last couple of years? Hide until it’s safe enough to poke yer fucking heads out?”

  Seth gurgled in a way that made it impossible to discern whether he was attempting to speak or simply trying to breathe.

  “Let’s hear it,” Rico demanded. “You wanna talk so tough? You gotta be able to back it up! And your little blondie pal can scratch me all she wants. She won’t be able to put me down before I take care of you.”

  “Stand down,” Sayers demanded.

  Those words drifted through Rico’s head like something heard while he was submerged in restless waters.

  “I said stand down, Specialist!”

  No matter how much Rico had resisted the military conditioning forced upon him by riding with the IRD, hearing his title barked at him from a superior officer cut through everything else. Waiting just long enough to make it clear he wasn’t obeying as a knee-jerk reaction, Rico opened his hand to allow Seth to pull away. The skinny Nymar coughed and hacked while turning his back to everyone else.

  Drea stood less than a foot away from the Skinner as she hissed, “You proved you’re the big badass. Happy now?”

  Examining the scratches on his forearm and then watching as Seth composed himself, Rico said, “More or less.”

  Sayers lowered his rifle and removed the commanding edge from his voice when he said, “He does make a valid point, though.”

  “Oh does he?” Seth spat.

  “Shut up, kid,” the Lieutenant commanded. “You make one more move I don’t like and I’ll drop you.”

  Seth wasn’t happy about it, but he shut up.

  Shifting his focus to Drea, Sayers asked, “Why did you stay here?”

  “I already told you,” she replied.

  To Rico, Sayers said, “While you stepped out, she was informing me of how she and her friend here escaped. They were being held captive in the basement under this warehouse by a group of six to eight individuals. She’s fairly certain they’re all Skinners.”

  “Go on,” Rico said.

  “That’s about as far as we got. Most of the rest of our conversation was me identifying myself and letting them know it was safe to talk.”

  “Fine use of our time,” Rico sighed. “Especially when there’s Half Breeds out there sniffing us out.”

  “Are they closing in on us?” Drea asked.

  “Saw one outside. Probably smelled the blood you spilled.”

  “Or smelled us,” Seth said.

  When Rico tossed a look at the Nymar as if he was going to smack him across the mouth, Drea stepped in and said, “He’s right. We’re being held here as some sort of experiment. Those assholes that locked us up keep mixing new drugs and feeding them to us any way you can imagine. Started off with injections, then they made us drink, eat, even snort different shit. They’d send one of us outside and when the wolves came to rip him to shreds, those fucking Skinner assholes damn near threw a party to celebrate.”

  Rico’s eyes narrowed. “What happened to the Half Breeds?”

  “What?”

  When he stepped closer to her, Drea reflexively hopped back. Rico didn’t try to grab her, but his entire body tensed when he said, “The Half Breeds that came after those Nymar that were cut loose. What happened to them?”

  “I don’t…”

  “Did they live or die?”

  Too frightened to posture, Drea was unable to mask the confusion she felt as she shook her head. “All I could hear was the screaming of the ones that were being eaten. Screaming…and ripping…and tearing.” Tears streamed down her face, cutting paths through the dust and dirt that had collected upon her skin. “The Skinners who kept us here would bring in the pieces that were left. They tossed them onto the floor in front of our cages just to screw with our heads.”

  “But the Half Breeds lived?” Rico asked.

  “Yes, for Christ’s sake!”

  He nodded and stepped away from her.

  With Drea still shaken from the exchange, Seth walked over to place a hand on her shoulder. “That’s why we couldn’t go much further than this room once we got upstairs,” he said. “Whatever it is those Skinners cooked up, it draws the wolves to us. That one you found outside had to have been attracted to that. Lord knows there’s too much blood spilled everywhere for a little more to draw any attention.”

  “Got a point there,” Rico admitted.

  After drawing a deep breath, Drea said, “But that’s not the only reason we didn’t leave. There’s more than just us two being held under this warehouse. If we bolted from here, we’d have to move fast…just the two of us. Once the other Skinners knew we were gone, they’d probably just kill the rest of our kind that are still locked up.”

  “How many of you are still here?” Rico asked.

  “At least ten.”

  “You don’t know for certain?”

  “There could be other rooms. Counting me and Seth, there were ten of us in the room we were locked in.”

  “You broke loose,” Sayers pointed out. “Why didn’t you do some reconnaissance?”

  “Because we wanted to get the hell out and call for help. If you knew these guys like we do, you’d understand.”

  Before Sayers could follow that line of questioning any further, Rico stepped in. “She’s right. Considering the circumstances, I’d say she did the best she could. Might have been a bad move offing the guy out there, though.”

  “I didn’t have a choice with that one,” she replied. “He was one of the meanest ones we knew. If he would’ve even gotten a whiff of what was going on, he would have pulled the switch.”

  “What switch?”

  “There’s supposed to be a destruct switch that dumps a bunch of gasoline or some kind of crap from the sprinklers that would be ignited to torch this whole place if things got out of hand. This warehouse, the basement under it, everything. At least, that was the threat.”

  “You think that’s a genuine possibility?” Sayers asked.

  “Yeah,” Rico told him. “It is.”

  “Is there something else you want to tell me about these people? You seem to know plenty.”

  “I do, just not in front of the kids.”

  Choking back what he wanted to say to that, Sayers touched his earpiece. “McCune, report.”

  “Some Class Twos have been sniffing around,” McCune replied, “but we managed to steer them in another direction. They’ll probably be coming back. Other than that, all clear.”

  “Anyone using the roads? Scavengers? Anyone at all not walking on four legs?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Stand by.” Glancing back and forth between all three of the others in the room with him, Sayers addressed them as if he’d absorbed the entire warehouse under his command. “This is an active zone, and I will not be standing in it any longer than necessary. You,” he said directly to Drea. “Where’s the room where you were kept?”

  “The basement, just like I said,” Drea told him. “The entrance is hidden, but I can take you down there right now.”

  “Ok. Show me how to get there, but th
en you and your friend will go back into your cells. I’ll get a lay of the land so when I return with a group better suited for an assault and extraction, we can carry it out as swiftly as possible.”

  Drea was shaking her head before he could finish. “That won’t work. I’m telling you, these guys are crazy, and they’ll pull that switch. If the switch breaks, they’ll find some other way to take out the rest of us trapped downstairs and move on.”

  “I won’t risk my entire unit until we’re better prepared. This was supposed to be a standard recon patrol followed by a more organized rescue.”

  “He means he won’t risk his men to save Nymar,” Seth said.

  “Why should we?” Rico asked.

  “Because it’s not just Nymar you’d be saving,” Drea said. “For however many of us they’ve got locked up, those psycho Skinners have at least one or two humans stashed away. That means at least twenty to forty innocent people as well as the Nymar.”

  The Lieutenant scowled as if he’d just swallowed a bug. “If these Skinners want to run their drug experiments on Nymar, why would they stash people away as well?”

  Rico groaned and showed him the dead man’s cell phone. “Feeding time.”

  “Aw, Christ.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  250 feet beneath the English Channel

  The passenger car rolling along its subterranean tracks wasn’t even half full. Although Randolph had never felt the need to use the Chunnel to span the gap between the UK and France, he did so now as a way to gauge the local populace and their efforts to go about their daily lives. It was very telling, indeed.

  In Folkestone, Kent, Randolph had strolled into a ticketing office that looked as if it might have been shut down for the season. The single agent working there was surprised to have a customer and flashed him a nervous smile that spoke less of an employee wishing a traveler well and more of someone taking a look at a man walking blindly to his own destruction. Such was the reason for his choice in transportation in the first place. In the midst of a widespread epidemic of rampaging beasts, volunteering to be trapped for over 31 miles in an underwater tube was a true test of a people’s sense of personal security.