He scanned the cells one last time. If the operation were as big now as it had been then, they would be outnumbered and outgunned by an enemy with a severely skewed moral compass. They wouldn’t stand a chance. They’ll pay later, he decided, unless they get in my way.
“Here!” Joliet shouted from the next room over.
Hawkins felt a weight lift as he left the room, but it returned in force when he followed Joliet’s voice into an identical cell. Drake lay on a pallet in the cell nearest the door. Despite the cool respite provided by the thick concrete and the breeze created by the waterfall, sweat covered Drake’s body in a sheen and dripped from his forehead.
Joliet had a hand on Drake’s cheek. “He’s on fire.”
“It’s a bacterial infection,” Bray said, standing behind Hawkins. “I’m telling you. It’s from the croc’s tentacle hooks.”
Hawkins looked at Drake’s leg. Joliet had already bandaged it. “How did the wound look?”
Joliet leaned back on her heels, but stayed next to Drake. “Like it would hurt like hell for a few days. Some of the puncture wounds were deep. Could probably use a stitch or two. But it could have been worse. Squid tentacle clubs aren’t designed to kill. Just grip. I don’t think the wounds are life-threatening. I covered them with Bacitracin.”
“Doesn’t matter if it’s in the blood already,” Bray said. “He needs an antibiotic. Like now.”
“We can’t just leave Kam and DeWinter here,” Joliet said.
Bray thrust a finger at the captain. “He’s going to die if we don’t.”
“Leave me,” Drake mumbled. He didn’t open his eyes or move, but there was no confusing the voice. “Find the others. Come back for me.”
“Captain,” Bray said. “If you don’t—”
“That’s an order!” Drake tried to sit up as he shouted, but flopped back down on the wood and once again slipped into unconsciousness.
The silence that followed Drake’s command stretched for nearly thirty seconds. Hawkins thought about all the possibilities, but each and every one included someone dying. There was no way out of this. Like Captain Kirk, he was facing the kobiashi maru—the unwinnable scenario.
Joliet stood and leaned against the bars of Drake’s prison cell. “What do we do?”
The answer came from above in the form of running footfalls.
Three heads snapped up.
“What was that?” Bray asked.
“Another rat?” Joliet offered.
“Rats have four feet, not two. And they don’t run on the balls of their feet.” Hawkins took the rifle from his shoulder. “We’re not alone.”
28.
“Stay close. Stay quiet. And Bray”—Hawkins pointed to the fire ax lying on the floor next to Drake—“I don’t think the captain’s going to get much use out of that now.”
Hawkins glanced out into the hall, then shed his backpack. “Where are your packs?”
“First room in the hall,” Joliet said. “With the speargun.”
“Stay here,” Hawkins said. He turned to Bray. “Watch the hall.”
Hawkins tiptoed into the hallway. Bray stood behind him, ax in hand. He passed the first door only after sweeping the room with his rifle. He performed the same check on the room nearest the exit and quickly spotted three backpacks and the speargun piled next to the door. He grabbed everything, then hustled back to Bray. He placed the packs on the floor next to Drake and handed Joliet the speargun. “Stay here.”
He knew Joliet wouldn’t like being told what to do, or being left behind, but it was necessary. Before she could speak, he added, “Someone needs to guard Drake.”
She looked down at the immobile captain and nodded. “Go.”
Hawkins motioned with his head for Bray to follow and crept toward the end of the hall. He quickly checked the last room on the right and found only more barred cells with rotting pallets, disintegrating walls, and a large dark brown stain on the floor that could have only been blood.
At the end of the hall were a staircase leading up and a closed door. Hawkins paused at the stairs. He didn’t want to go up without first knowing if the last room was clear. He turned to Bray, pointed to his eyes, and then to the stairs. Bray nodded, turning his eyes to the top of the staircase and winding up with the ax.
The door creaked when Hawkins pushed it open with the rifle’s barrel. The interior of the room was lit by a single, small window that still held a thick pane of glass. The first items he saw—metal buckets, mops, glass jars, and a variety of rotting containers—mixed with a faint smell of detergent, identified the space as a simple storage closet. But scattered among the common items were more rubber aprons, gloves, and boots, and manacles and chains. Looking closer, he saw that some of the wooden poles he thought were broom handles were actually clubs, many of which held single half-inch-long nails—not long enough to kill, but certainly long enough to add an extra level of agony to each strike.
As disturbing as the room’s contents were, Hawkins felt relief that it wasn’t occupied by anything living. As he turned toward the staircase, that small amount of relief quickly faded. He led the way up, stepping cautiously to avoid the occasional dry leaf. In the silence of what felt like an oversize crypt, the slightest sound could give away their position.
At the top of the stairs, there was another staircase leading up to the third floor, and a hallway that wrapped around the second floor. Hawkins motioned for Bray to once again watch the staircase. There was no way to know if the person they’d heard had headed up, or even if he, or she, were alone. Hawkins would have preferred to have the big man with the ax at his back, but he didn’t want to risk someone getting down to Joliet, and Drake.
The hallway around the corner wasn’t a hallway at all. While the first floor had been divided into a long hall with four rooms on one side, this space was just one large room. Eight metal operating tables stretched down the center of the room. Each table was accompanied by a small, empty supply tray. Hawkins had no trouble imagining the trays’ contents. They were probably very similar to implements used to dissect the loggerhead.
Except the people dissected here were sometimes still alive, Hawkins thought, remembering Bray’s tales of vivisection and experimentation. Was this where it happened? Was this where the people on the beach were taken apart and reshaped? Hawkins suspected as much, but could only be sure of one thing: This was a torture chamber.
Hawkins moved down the center aisle created by the twin rows of operating tables. Details jumped out at him. The tables weren’t flat. They had a slight bowl shape with a drain at the center. Dark stains covered the floor under each table. He wondered if they just let the blood pour onto the floor, but found rows of similarly stained metal buckets lining shelves on the wall opposite the still-glassed windows.
The room turned left at the end, extending out over the bottom floor’s entryway. He inched forward, looking for anything alive. Nothing moved, but he saw evidence of habitation, though not human. A nest had been built out of leaves and shredded lab coats. It looked similar to what a rat in a cage might make, but was far too large. It looked large enough for a medium-size dog.
Hawkins turned away from the nest and inspected what he thought were two more operating tables. But the angled, chairlike shape, twin sets of stirrups, and buckets at the ends identified these as birthing chairs. Hawkins winced when he saw more bloodstains on the floor beneath his feet. His face twitched with anger and revolt until he could no longer handle the conjuring of his imagination. He turned away from the table, muttering a string of curses.
Ting, ting.
The cautious tap of metal on metal sounded like an explosion. Hawkins flinched, but realized the sound had been slow and deliberate. Bray was calling him back. Hawkins double-timed his retreat, happy to be leaving the operating suite.
When he rounded the corner, he found Bray still standing guard at the bottom of the stairs. But the man’s face had gone pale.
“What is it?” Hawkins
asked.
Bray’s eyes flicked toward Hawkins, but then quickly returned to the top of the stairs. “Something growled at me.”
“Did you see it?”
“No … but it sounded like…” Bray shook his head. “It sounded like a kid. And I don’t mean a baby goat.”
Hawkins remembered the oversize nest. Could a child be living here? He decided against the idea. A human child couldn’t survive on this island. Not alone. And he hadn’t seen any indication that there was anyone else here. At least not on the first two floors. Raising the rifle, Hawkins ascended the staircase.
The first thing he noticed was that the glass on the windows along the outside wall had been coated with a layer of mud—he smelled the rancid air—or was it feces? He decided he didn’t need to know the answer to that question. All that mattered was that most of the sunlight that lit the lower floors had been blocked out. A few shafts of light made it into the room, allowing him to see the most basic details, but he was at a serious disadvantage. He scanned back and forth, looking down the barrel of the rifle. He stepped cautiously forward, finger wrapped around the trigger. Safety off.
When the window to his right shattered, he spun and nearly fired. But the form of Bray, bathed in sunlight, stopped him short. He was about to chastise the man when he realized he could now see much of the room. And what he saw made him want to back up and haul ass back to the Magellan.
Like the second floor, this was one large room. But instead of being divided by operating tables, or cells, this room was a maze of shelves, each covered in glass jars of various size. Some were as small as baby food jars. Others, resting on the floor, looked large enough to hold a grown man.
And some of them did.
Many of the glass containers had broken over time and the bones of what they once held littered the floor. But others had weathered the past seventy years, blemished only by dust.
“Holy fuck,” Bray said.
Hawkins agreed with the sentiment, but couldn’t find his voice. The jar nearest him, perched on an eye-level shelf, glowed yellow, struck by the full light of day. And suspended in the amber liquid was a baby, curled up in a fetal position as though still in the womb. He stepped closer and lowered his weapon. “The baby,” he said. “It has a tail.”
“And not a vestigial tail, either,” Bray added. “I think that’s a rat tail.”
“Is it a chimera?” Hawkins asked.
Bray shook his head. “Looks like it was stitched on, maybe at birth.”
Hawkins ran a hand over his head. He knew that humanity had committed atrocities over the years, especially during wars, but this was beyond reason. What good would a human being with a rat tail be? How could someone do this to a newborn baby?
“Hey, Ranger,” Bray said.
Hawkins looked at Bray, who nodded toward the rifle.
“Mind keeping that up in case something tries to eat us?”
Hawkins’s distraction disappeared. He raised the rifle and scanned the room again. “We’ll move forward slowly and together. Break the windows as we reach them.”
Hawkins moved forward, trying hard to ignore the different animals and people of various ages kept in jars of formaldehyde. Some looked unaltered, but others had limbs, and eyes, and teeth, and digits that clearly did not belong to them.
A window shattered, spilling more light into the room and revealing more horrors. Hawkins ignored them now. He heard something a moment before the window broke.
Breathing.
“If you can understand me,” Hawkins said, “show yourself now. If you don’t, I will shoot you.”
“I don’t see anything,” Bray said.
“It’s there. Trust me.” Hawkins picked up an empty jar and threw it toward the back of the room. The sharp sound of breaking glass was accompanied by a shrill cry of surprise. And then a growl.
Bray is right, Hawkins thought, it sounds like a child.
And when their quarry stepped out from behind a shelf, Hawkins thought for a moment that it was, in fact, a five-year-old boy. But then he saw the hair covering its naked body, the tail thrashing about behind it, and the awkward way it stood. Still, he thought he saw a trace of humanity in its yellow eyes. But all doubt was erased when it snarled and showed its teeth.
29.
“Hawkins!” Bray shouted. “Shoot it!”
The rifle’s report was contained by the thick, concrete walls, which amplified the sound. Hawkins grunted and lowered his aim. A ringing buzz in his ears drowned out the creature’s shrieks. Bray’s hands went to his ears after dropping the ax. Hawkins could see him cursing, but couldn’t make out the words. Both men were stunned and distracted by the explosion of sound, and wide open to attack. Luckily, the sharp report had a similar effect on the creature across the room.
It wailed while throwing itself back and forth, smashing into shelves. Jars of preserved bodies tipped and rolled from their perches, shattering on the floor. The sharp, tangy odor of formaldehyde filled the air.
“Smells like my dissection lab,” Bray said as he picked up the ax. “If it gets much stronger, we’re going to have to fall back. Or break more windows. Whoa!”
A glass jar sailed over his head as he ducked. It struck the wall next to him and shattered, its contents spilling to the floor. Bray jumped away before the expanding puddle of formaldehyde reached his feet. But it wasn’t the liquid that made him jump. It was the head that rolled past him. When the head stopped rolling, a woman’s face stared at the ceiling with black, hollow eyes. Her head had been shaved, revealing several scars atop her cranium. Her skin had been stained the sickly yellow tinge of formaldehyde, and face was frozen in an expression of horror, or extreme pain. Either way, it was a sight neither man would ever forget.
Hawkins tore his eyes away from the woman’s face and looked for the creature. A second jar, thankfully empty, arched toward him. He side-stepped the projectile and tracked its trajectory to its origin. The creature had slowed, but now kept to the shadows.
“Get the next window,” he said. “If I yell, ‘ears,’ cover them.”
Bray took a deep breath, tucked his nose under his shirt, and inched forward, ready with the ax.
A large jar containing what looked like sloshing intestines sailed out of the gloom. But it must have been too heavy for the small creature. It crashed to the floor, spilling its contents. The wave of formaldehyde pushed the intestines out across the floor, making the organ look like some kind of giant worm.
Bray saw the noxious pool approaching his feet. He rushed forward, swinging the ax with his last step. The window shattered and the room brightened. And the creature’s concealing shadows disappeared.
Nowhere to hide now, Hawkins thought. He lined up a shot, zeroing in on the creature’s quickly rising and falling chest. Its eyes were wide. Its limbs shook.
“The thing is terrified,” Hawkins said, holding his fire.
Bray stepped back behind Hawkins. “It’s an animal.”
But Hawkins wasn’t so sure. “It’s using tools, Bray. Throwing jars at us. And it’s hiding in the shadows.”
“Chimps throw stones, and maybe it’s nocturnal? Prefers the dark.”
Hawkins kept the thing in his sights. There was more to this creature. “The formaldehyde,” he said. “It wasn’t trying to hit us with the big jar. It saw our aversion to the liquid and covered the floor in it. That’s not just tool wielding. That’s intelligence.”
Bray’s defensive stance loosened. “You’re right.”
The creature hissed at them and Hawkins nearly fired on reflex.
“What are we going to do?” Bray asked.
Hawkins wasn’t sure. The creature might be intelligent, but that didn’t mean it wouldn’t tear them apart if given the chance. At the same time, it was clearly as afraid of them as they were of it. Normally, he’d pack up and check out, but Drake needed to rest. Like it or not, the creature had to be evicted, at least until they figured out their next move.
&n
bsp; But the intelligent beast had other plans. With a shriek, it threw two small glass jars. Outside of a head shot, the jars wouldn’t do much damage, but both men dodged, fearful of being coated by a toxic chemical bath.
Hawkins righted himself and looked for the thing, but it was gone. A blur at the center of the room caught his eye. By the time he focused on it, the creature was upon them. It charged down the top of a shelving unit at the center of the room, knocking jars asunder as it ran. Then it leapt, arms outstretched, jaws open, sharp teeth revealed.
It was too close to shoot, so Hawkins swung at it with the rifle. But his aim was low. The creature cleared the weapon’s barrel and found Bray’s ax swinging toward it. For most people, the blow would have been impossible to dodge and, given the force behind it, impossible to survive. But the nimble creature placed its hands atop the flat edge of the swinging blade and pushed its body up and over the weapon.
Bray’s missed swing pulled him forward. He crashed into the shelf, clearing the rest of the specimen jars to the floor, and expanding the pungent puddle.
Hawkins spun with the creature, abandoning the rifle and reaching for his knife. He expected the fast creature to press the attack. It clearly had the advantage in a close-quarters fight. It could outmaneuver the larger, slower men and, using its teeth and claws, could probably inflict a lot more damage. But when it landed, it gave a quick look back at Hawkins, shrieked angrily, and bolted for the stairs.
In the next second, Hawkins felt a wash of relief—they wouldn’t be killed by the creature—followed by a surge of panic: It was headed for Joliet. He ran to the stairs. When he reached the top of the stairwell, he saw the creature dive toward the next flight.
“Joliet!” he shouted as loud as he could. “It’s coming to you!”
“Here!” Bray shouted.
Hawkins turned to find the rifle already in the air, tossed to him by Bray. He caught it and launched himself down the stairs, taking them three at a time. But it was too late. By the time he’d reached the second floor he heard Joliet shout, followed by a savage shriek.
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