Five Roads To Texas | Book 11 | Reciprocity [Sidney's Way 3]

by Parker, Brian

  Several dull reports echoed down the artificial canyons created by the rows of shipping containers as snipers positioned atop the metal boxes fired at infected that had appeared at the edges of the jungle. When they’d planned the operation, they’d hoped the infected had starved to death over the many months, as the ones near the desert city of El Paso had done, but that was a pipe dream. The jungle provided ample edible foliage and insects for things like the infected to survive on. Distance and isolation were their only real hope.

  “How are we coming inside the building?” the major asked into his radio. Hannah was too far away to hear the reply, but he turned to the small command element and said, “Okay, we’re going in. Prescott, you’re in charge of the perimeter defense. Use the suppressed weapons as long as we can and remind guys to stay as quiet as possible.”

  “Yes, sir,” the captain replied.

  “Alright. Miss Dunn, you’re with me.” He didn’t wait for her reply. Instead, he jogged toward the loading dock where a smaller side door was held open by a soldier.

  When they entered the site, her nose was immediately assaulted by the smell of decay. It hung heavy in the air, clinging to everything. Hannah felt as if it wound its way around her body, wrapping her in death’s cold embrace. She lifted her shirt up over her mouth and tried to avoid breathing through her nose.

  “This way, sir,” a soldier said, beckoning.

  They walked single file down the hallway, following color-coded arrows labeled with two clearly distinct types of alphabet, which Hannah assumed to be Korean and Arabic since they looked similar to the book that Grady had found in North Korea. The words meant nothing to her, but since their guide chose the orange arrows at every intersection, she assumed that he knew where he was going.

  They passed the remains of bodies almost everywhere, which was the source of the stench. The facility had suffered the same fate as the rest of the world. They’d tried to play God and He’d destroyed them for it.

  “We killed four of them inside,” their guide said over his shoulder. “They were surviving off the bodies of the others, but they were barely a threat at all. Doc said that their bodies had basically shut down on them because they were eating the rancid, spoiled meat.”

  “Dumb motherfuckers,” someone behind her muttered.

  Hannah hated the infected, they’d taken everything from her, but somewhere in the back of her mind—or maybe it was her heart—she felt sorry for them. They didn’t ask to be this way. They’d been fully functioning human beings and now they were reduced down to this. It wasn’t fair for the survivors or for the infected. It was a shitty deal all around.

  They took a few more turns and went down a set of stairs to an underground sublevel before entering a large, open area. It was an absolute mess. Tables of overturned equipment created barriers that had to be negotiated. Broken glass and twisted, jagged metal threatened to scratch or impale anyone who wandered too closely.

  “This is the main research area,” their guide said. “There are holding pens another level down, those are filled with dead infected. The stronger ones ate the weaker ones inside the cages, until eventually they died too. The really weird part—if anything could be considered weirder than anything else—are those cells along the back wall.”

  Hannah followed the guide’s outstretched hand to a row of about ten cells. Heavy metal bars set into cinder block walls created a formidable holding cell for something. It seemed much more secured than an average jail cell would have been. What were they doing here? she wondered.

  Several of the doors were open and the cells were empty except for a small counter with notes or paperwork. The open cells seemed to be mostly undisturbed, with the bulk of the damage occurring out here in the main research space. The cells with closed doors held a more chilling discovery. Inside of them, Hannah saw gurneys with decomposing bodies strapped to them. Each cell held one person. They appeared to have been performing individual experiments on each victim.

  “It’s some weird, fucked up shit, sir,” the soldier who’d led them in stated. “Doc’s back there in those cages taking a look.”

  The major nodded and headed toward the holding cells, so Hannah followed him. He’d said to stay with him, so that’s what she intended to do. They came up to the doctor as he leafed through a notebook. “Hey, sir. What have you been able to find out?” the major said as a way of greeting to the lieutenant colonel inside the cells. Hannah had seen the situation hundreds of times over here career. Major Edmunds, the infantry officer, was the mission commander, even though Lieutenant Colonel Lawrence, the medical doctor, outranked him.

  “Jim, Miss Dunn,” the doctor replied. He pointed at the notebook and said, “This is pretty interesting stuff. Medical sketches and notes in Korean in one cell, same sort of stuff in Arabic in another. We’re gonna collect it all.” His hand lifted toward the walls. “You see these pictures, here?”

  Hannah looked up and noticed the walls were covered in pictures of a woman strapped to a gurney. It appeared to be over a period of time as her features gradually changed, becoming more sunken in and malnourished. In the final picture, if they were in chronological order, she appeared to be fully infected.

  “Yeah?” the major replied. “What are they doing?”

  “I’d say they were trying to perfect the virus,” Doctor Lawrence replied. “But we won’t be sure until we can have these journals translated.”

  “Fucked up shit.”

  “Agreed. I spent a little bit of time in the open cells, can’t get into the closed ones. There’s something really interesting about the one on the end. Come on, let me show you.”

  He closed the book and gestured for one of the men to collect everything. “All of these patients appear to be from one of the local Indian tribes. But, this guy here. He seems to be…”

  Hannah didn’t hear anything else that the doctor said. A loud buzzing exploded in her mind as she attempted to process what she saw on the walls of the final cell.

  Grady Harper’s steel gray eyes stared back at her across time. He bore several cuts and scabs that turned to scars in the subsequent pictures, but it was still him. The man she’d known for only a few months, but had wanted to learn everything about, had been in this cell. She thought the entire team was dead. It turned out that she’d left Grady to die here as part of a sick and twisted experiment.

  “What happened to this man?” she blurted out, cutting the doctor off mid-sentence.

  “Uh…excuse me? I was—”

  “That’s Grady Harper. The CIA team lead that was here with me a year ago.”

  Major Edmunds’ head whipped from her to the pictures on the wall before turning in a full circle. “Where’s the gurney?”

  “What?” Doctor Lawrence asked, looking around as well. “Huh. I hadn’t noticed. You’re right, the gurney isn’t in here.” He walked to the counter and opened a few drawers. “The logbook is missing as well.”

  “What does that mean?” Hannah asked.

  “I don’t know,” the doctor admitted. “It’s not in his cell though.”

  “What does that mean?” she repeated, pleading this time. “Where’s Grady?”

  21

  * * *

  MANHATTAN, NEW YORK CITY, NEW YORK

  MARCH 7TH

  Grady came awake instantly as ice cold water splashed over him. Where was he? His mind felt sluggish and his back ached. He needed to piss. He tried to change position to relieve the pain and realized his hands were tied behind his back. Panic threatened to overwhelm him. Was he back in the facility with the scientists? Were the freedoms he’d enjoyed recently only in his mind? Was that it? Had he finally broken and lost his sanity?

  He thrashed around, trying to pull his hands apart. A boot landed in his gut, forcing a small amount of urine from him.

  “Oof!” he grunted.

  “I said wake up, cocksucker.”

  English. That meant he wasn’t back in the Iranian facility. But since he
was tied up, he wasn’t sure if that was a good thing or not. He could see several pairs of boots and tennis shoes, but that was all. Grady craned his neck to see who his attackers were. A bunch of Hispanic dudes.

  “Wha?” He was groggy and had no recollection of how he’d been captured. He’d gone hunting, bagged quite a few of them, and then, nothing. He couldn’t remember how he’d come to his current predicament.

  “You done fucked up, son.”

  Another foot landed in his lower back, hitting his spine. That hurt. “Mother… fucker,” Grady groaned.

  “Oh, that does it,” another voice said as feet impacted all along his body and legs. He went ahead and pissed himself. Why not?

  “Ew! Goddamned fool pissed hisself.”

  At least the kicking stopped.

  “Alright. Alright. Enough. What’s this maricón got to say for himself?”

  “Why we bothering with it, Scorp? We should just kill him.”

  “Because I said so, cabrón. He killed twenty-three of my soldiers, our boys. I want to know why. Then we’ll kill him.”

  “Scorp? What the fuck is that dumb shit?” Grady said, coughing up blood after he got the words out.

  Another boot hit him in the kidney. “Don’t disrespect The Scorpion like that, you piece of shit.”

  “I said, enough!” Scorpion roared. “Sit him up.”

  Grady felt a pair of hands hook in between his arm and ribcage. They pulled him into a sitting position and the gang leader squatted in front of him. His face bore a tattoo of a scorpion’s tail encircling his right eye. “You,” the gangbanger said. “I want to know why you killed my men.”

  “Because they were there,” Grady replied with a bloody grin.

  A look of appreciation passed over the man’s face for just a moment. “A warrior, then?”

  “Some might say that,” Grady agreed. “Others just say I’m a fucking asshole.”

  “One and the same,” Scorpion replied. “What should I do with you?”

  Grady tried to shrug, but the motion was hindered by the ropes binding his hands.

  “These guys wanna cut you up into little pieces and drop you into the Hudson for all the fishies to eat. Why shouldn’t I do that?”

  “What do you think you’re gonna get from me?” Grady asked. The fact that this guy was talking to him meant that he wanted something.

  “Maybe I should take your pants down and let the boys rape you until your asshole rips open and you bleed out, eh?”

  Grady laughed, or at least tried to. Doing so hurt, a lot. “You called me a faggot, but you’re talking about having your gang fuck me? Hello pot, meet the kettle.”

  Scorpion’s punch came out of nowhere. Grady’s nose shattered and blood poured from his nostrils. “There goes my acting career,” he groaned.

  “You think you’re some kind of tough guy, huh?”

  “I’ve been—”

  Another lightning fast jab hit him in the cheekbone and his eye began to swell almost immediately.

  “What do you think of that?”

  “Sucks,” Grady admitted.

  “Why don’t I kill you right now? Stab you through the eye with this blade?” He held up a fixed-blade knife.

  “If you were gonna kill me, you’d’ve done it already. You need me.”

  “Ha!” Scorpion laughed wildly. “I’m here threatening to murder your sorry ass and you still think you’re the baddest motherfucker in the room.”

  Grady lolled his head to the side, leering at the other gangbangers present. “It isn’t hard to be the best around these sorry sacks of shit.” With the swollen lip, his S’s sounded like he had a lisp. It probably made his bravado seem pathetic to the gang’s leader, but he needed to keep it up, let him know that he wasn’t afraid of him. Men like Scorpion respected that.

  The knife embedded into the wall beside Grady’s head, just inches from his ear. “I like you, pendejo,” Scorpion said. “You’re a tough motherfucker. You’re right. I could use a guy like you.”

  “Scorp, no! He killed Flea and Chupa. What—”

  The gang leader surged to his feet out of Grady’s line of sight. “You shut your fucking mouth right now, Weasel. I rule the Kings. Don’t you ever fucking forget it.” Scorpion dropped back down in front of him. “You create a problem for me. On the one hand,” he held out an open palm, “you killed a whole lot of my men, making the Kings vulnerable to other gangs in the city. And for what? For sport? For revenge? Why?”

  “Because they were there,” Grady repeated. It was the truth. He’d murdered, hunted, those men simply because they were a convenient target for his rage.

  Scorpion smiled wickedly, exposing several silver capped teeth. “I knew it. You’re a killer. You don’t give a fuck. Blood recognizes blood, y’know?” He held open his opposite hand. “On the other hand, you are a man with invaluable skills. With that type of talent, we could even go up against the cops and run all of Manhattan.”

  Scorpion dropped his open hand, then raised it while he did the inverse with his other one, mimicking that he was weighing his options on a scale. “The world we find ourselves in is nothing like it used to be. But you know that, or else you wouldn’t have survived this long. I got to where I am, first by being ruthless, second by recognizing talent. The Latin Kings could use a soldier like you. You might could even work your way up to the number two spot, killer. What’s it gonna be? You think you could take orders from me, or do I let the boys run a train on you, then chop you up and put you in the river?”

  “Hmmm,” Grady mused. Would they be stupid enough to let him go free? He could easily wipe the gang out once they let him go. He needed to get himself untied before he could do anything, though. He needed them to think he was willing to be in their stupid gang. What would somebody like that say?

  “If I work for you, I want a woman—no, two or three women.” He wanted Scorpion to think that he could be easily bought.

  “That’s no problem. Bitches in the city will do whatever you tell them to if you can offer protection and food. In fact, I can go get one to suck you off right now.” He snapped his fingers. “Go get some bitches.”

  Grady watched as two of the gangbangers disappeared through a door. “Where are my guns?” he asked.

  “Put away so the children don’t hurt themselves.”

  “How’d you knock me out?”

  “One of the boys must have hit you or something,” Scorpion said. “They found you on the ground, out cold.” His eyes narrowed. “You’re not one of them, like, what’s it called? When you fall asleep all the time in the middle of the day and shit?”

  “Narcolepsy,” Grady offered.

  “Yeah, you’re not a narcolepsy are you?”

  Grady suppressed a grin at the idiot’s misuse of the term. “No. I’m not. I think I remember somebody hitting me on the back of the head.”

  In truth, Grady had no fucking clue what had happened. He remembered killing the first two gang members as they hung around outside of a brick building, but that was it. His mind was a blank after that. He’d gone on a killing spree, allowing the rage to take him, and he didn’t even remember doing it. Had he simply passed out in the middle of the firefight or did one of them hit him? That seemed unlikely. Again, he wondered what those fucks had done to him in Brazil.

  “Good,” Scorpion said. “I can’t have a narcolepsy working for me. It would make me look stupid.”

  “Wouldn’t wanna do that, boss.”

  “So, you gonna do it?” the gang’s leader asked. “You gonna…” Two thin, scared-looking women, one white and one black, came into the room, interrupting him. “Take his pants off and suck his dick,” he ordered.

  “I’m okay. I’m fine right now.”

  “You sure. This one here,” Scorpion gripped the petite black girl’s arm and pulled her down to Grady’s eye level. “She can suck the chrome off a Harley’s muffler, man.”

  “I gotta piss first,” Grady replied, deflecting the statem
ent.

  “Have it your way. You ain’t a faggot are you?”

  “No. I’ll fuck both of these bitches once you set me free.”

  “I’ll give you an hour with them, then you gotta come see me for your first assignment, understand?”

  “Yeah,” Grady replied, adjusting his position against the wall.

  “What’s your name, killer?” Scorpion asked.

  An idea popped into his head from the pre-infection days, from his former employer. “I go by the name Havoc.”

  “That’s cool, bro,” the gang leader said. “I like it. Dangerous and shit.”

  “You have no idea,” Grady stated. “You gonna have your guys untie me so I can piss and fuck some bitches?”

  Scorpion pulled the knife he’d stuck in the wall beside Grady and pushed him forward roughly, forcing him to bend at the waist. He slid the blade through whatever material had been used to restrain him. “There you go, Havoc. Don’t leave this house until I can introduce you to the boys. Otherwise, they might try to get even for what you did.”

  “Got it,” he said, pushing himself to his feet with a wince. He had at least a couple of broken ribs. That’d slow him down a bit.

  “Mandy, Carla, take care of our newest King. Remember what happens if you get yourself pregnant though.” He gripped the brunette’s chin roughly in his hand. “Don’t do it.”

  Grady watched the gangbangers file out of the room warily. Were they really so stupid as to let him run around free in the house? Or was Scorpion just that desperate for an enforcer? Either way, the gang lord had fucked up.

  “One hour, Havoc,” Scorpion said, holding up his index finger. “One hour and then come find me at the house next door.”

  The door shut and he heard Scorpion telling somebody to guard the door. The two women began to take off their clothes. They were just shells of the people they’d probably been before all this went down. They were simply going through the motions of day-to-day survival. It was sad.