Steele couldn’t see Jones’ face, but she could imagine that his trademark slight smile hadn’t shifted an inch. “And what will killing me gain you?” he said. “I can still be useful to you.”
“Yes,” the President answered, “you can: you can show the rest of the world that we are still the United States of America and we stand proud against those who seek to bring us down. Get him the hell out of here, Steele.”
Steele put a hand under Jones’ arm and tugged him to his feet. “With pleasure, ma’am.”
As she led Jones back to his cell, he said, “I thought you were smarter than the rest of them, Sandra. You should know that the US doesn’t have what it takes to survive.”
“We’ve got more than you know,” she said, hoping it would put a chink of doubt in Jones’ delusion.
It worked. “What’ve you got?”
“Landen,” Steele said, as they reached the OC’s two-cell jail, “it gives me tremendous pleasure to tell you to go fuck yourself.”
She thrust him into the cell, locked the door behind him, and walked away. She had more important things to worry about right now – like getting Harland Dawson to be the “more” they needed right now.
Chapter Forty-Five
“OKAY, HE’S IN and I’m sealing the doors now.”
Steele and the President, seated in their Command Center, looked from Ty’s monitor, where he was closing a door and using duct tape to seal all the edges, to Dawson’s, which showed him walking towards the storage room. Steele leaned forward and turned up the volume as Dawson began to speak.
“Am I coming through?” he asked.
“Loud and clear, Dawson,” Steele answered.
Dawson turned two more corners and reached the storage room. He entered, closed the door behind him, and repeated Ty’s door-sealing routine with a roll of tape that had been left in the room for that purpose. When he finished, he looked up at the room’s only vent, already sealed over with a metal square. “Vent seal in place.”
The President nodded. “Go for it,” Steele said into her Bluetooth.
Dawson picked up a sledgehammer and began pounding on the bricks.
As he worked, Ty Ward entered the Command room, taking a seat beside Steele. “Anybody bring the popcorn?”
Steele couldn’t manage a smile; she’d been unable to shake the feeling that today’s events would lead to disaster. She had no rational basis for that feeling, and she tried to tell herself that it was likelier to yield answers . . . but the most primitive part of her – the part that still believed in ghosts and feared spiders and fled at the thought of death – shrieked in protest.
On the monitor, Dawson was laying waste to the bricks. The construction was two centuries old, and it only took him minutes to clear most of it away. He set the sledgehammer aside and looked into the hole he’d created. “We’ve got a wooden door behind here. It’s barred from this side, so it should be easy to open – just give me a minute or so . . .”
He kicked aside the bricks he’d scattered, moving them into a neat pile out of the way. Once he had a clear path, he picked up the main item he’d been provided with: a flamethrower. He’d received a crash course on how to use it before they’d brought him down, blindfolded and with ear muffs, to the OC. He donned the backpack holding the cylinder tanks, released the ignition valve, pulled the ignition trigger and a small jet of blue flame burst from the nozzle. “I’m hot. Here we go.”
Dawson stepped forward and pulled up the heavy metal bar that was laid across the door. He set the bar aside and Steele held her breath as he grasped the iron handle set near one edge.
“Hinges are rusty,” Dawson said, effort audible in his voice as he pulled.
Steele wondered, Is Moreby somehow tuning in on all of this? Have we already given him some information he needs to defeat us? Unfortunately, there’d been no way to ask Dawson to complete this task without removing the blindfold and ear muffs. It was one big overall risk package.
Beside her, the President flinched as the Command Center filled with the nerve-wracking sound of the hinges squealing. The door opened outward, one inch, two . . .
Fingers appeared from the other side, grasping the door, fingers that were nightmares of tattered flesh and bone. An inhuman cry sounded over the speakers, and Steele’s heart leaped into her throat.
“What the fuck was that?” Ty whispered beside her.
Even Dawson had jumped back, startled. He stood two feet away from the door now, watching.
The door was abruptly shoved all the way back. Something stood there, lit only by the dim glow of the fire from the tip of the flamethrower. “Wait . . .” Dawson said, and the view from his camera jostled as he evidently reached down for something. A Maglite appeared, was turned on and revealed the thing in the doorway.
It had once been human, but was now little more than a living scarecrow – a creature of ragged shreds and stained bones. The head was a skull with a few wisps of colourless hair and strips of skin, putty-like eyes sunken within the sockets. The remains of a frock coat, shirt, waistcoat and trousers hung from it, and it rattled, bone on bone, as it moved. Its jaws were moving, but no words came forth, just a whistling moan, somehow old and distant.
“Dear God,” Dawson muttered.
Beside Steele, the President tensed; Ty was halfway out of his chair.
The spectre took a step forward, and Dawson backed away; even the dead man was unnerved. He lifted the flamethrower, and the sight of the small blue flame caused the skeletal thing to stop. It looked from the fire to Dawson, and Steele shivered as she realized that there was still some intelligence trapped within that ghastly frame.
“Who are you?” Dawson asked.
The thing looked at him for several seconds, as if trying to work out the solution to a difficult problem. Its jaws moved and Dawson reluctantly moved closer, trying to hear. It spoke again, and a sepulchral whisper sounded in the Command Center: “Latrobe . . .”
Ty rose excitedly. “Fuck me – it’s Benjamin Latrobe.”
The President asked, “The architect?”
“Yes. I’m sure it’s him.”
On the monitor there was sudden movement. Latrobe had apparently rushed forward, colliding with Dawson, who stumbled back. The image spun and shook as they heard crashes and blows on the speakers.
Ty called out, “Dawson, what’s happening?”
The image continued to shudder. Latrobe reappeared, falling back, and Dawson seemed to right himself. “He attacked me. The poor mad bastard tried to eat me . . .”
Latrobe was chewing something, but he turned aside and spat it out, moaning, eyeing the camera with pain and confusion.
“Are you all right?” Steele asked.
Dawson answered, “He got a chunk of my shoulder, but I can live without it. Afraid I didn’t agree with him, though.”
Latrobe turned his back to Dawson and shambled back into the hidden room, making scratchy, choked sounds that actually made Steele pity that terrible, mad thing.
Dawson followed, warily; although Latrobe seemed to present no threat, the area beyond the storage room was lightless, unknown. The flashlight beam picked out a featureless round chamber, high-ceilinged but windowless, with the doorway the only entrance. The walls were rough stone, the only decoration some sort of rock table set up on one side of the space.
“What the hell is that?” Dawson muttered.
Ty said, “It looks almost like . . . some sort of . . . altar.”
Latrobe avoided the stone table and moved to the other side of the chamber, where a few pages of parchment rested against the curved wall. He gestured at the pages, indicating that Dawson should take them.
“What are those?” Ty asked.
The monitor image bobbed down as Dawson picked up the pages and held them before the camera in one hand, training the Maglite on them with the other. The pages were torn and brown, covered with cramped handwriting in black ink. “They look like . . . some sort of journal or so
mething.”
Behind the pages, Latrobe sagged against the stone wall, a decrepit, sick thing. He looked on dully as Dawson scanned the sheets.
“What do they say?” Steele asked.
“It looks like . . .”
Dawson’s camera image went black.
Leaning forward in alarm, Ty called out, “Dawson? What happened? Are you there?”
Dawson’s sure voice boomed over the speakers. “I’m here, but I need you to come down here, Ty. I’m suspending all other communications.” His voice was replaced by dead air.
Although she already knew the answer, Steele called into her mike, “Harland?”
Nothing.
The President turned away from the screens to look at Ty and Steele. “You two know Dawson better than I do: any speculation on what just happened?”
“Are you asking,” Ty responded, “if this might be a trap?”
“Frankly, yes.”
Ty shook his head. “Dawson’s a hundred and ten per cent committed to us. He wouldn’t turn on us.”
Steele said, “It doesn’t matter either way, because you can’t go.”
“Steele, I have to.”
“We don’t know what’s in there, Ty. You could be walking into a nest of Moreby’s fleas, or some other infectious agent.”
“We’ve got an antiserum—”
The President cut him off. “Steele’s right. Even if you can survive HRV, there might be something else in there that’s lethal to humans. And frankly, you’re too valuable to risk.”
“Well, I appreciate that, Madame President, but I know Dawson, and he wouldn’t have told me to come down there if he thought there was any risk to me. Maybe he’s worried that our lines are being tapped, or—” Ty broke off in sudden realization, and saw that Steele knew, too. “Moreby.”
The President sat up, alarmed. “Moreby? Do we have any reason to think he’s got a direct line to our coms?”
“No,” Steele said, “but he has some mental link to the intelligent zombies. Maybe Dawson’s found something big down there, and he’s . . . I don’t know, trying to block Moreby or something.”
Ty said, “I have to go. I can use a hazmat suit – that’ll protect me from any infectious agents. You can set up a quarantine team right outside the sealed area, have them waiting for me when I come out. And I’ll go in armed, just in case. But I have to go in. This could be the answer we need.”
After a few seconds, the President said, “I don’t like it, but . . . all right.”
Ty rose, shouting back over his shoulder as he left, “Fifteen minutes, and I’ll be ready.”
The door closed behind him, and the two women looked at each other. “I don’t know about you,” the President said, “but I could use a drink about now.”
Steele agreed.
[Recovered transcription of CIA audio recording from White House Roosevelt Room]
MOREBY:
Damnation . . .
CECILIA:
What is it?
MOREBY:
General Dawson seems to be dead. And just when he was making himself useful again . . .
CECILIA:
How was he useful? I thought he betrayed us.
MOREBY:
[sighs, then]: Cecilia, my dear, do not make me regret giving you this position more than I already do.
Chapter Forty-Six
TY PULLED AWAY the last strip of duct tape, took a deep breath and said, “I’m going in.”
He opened the heavy steel door that separated this section of the complex and stepped through, the bulky hazmat suit and the pistol holstered from a utility belt making it difficult to move. He closed the door behind him, and used the roll of duct tape to seal it again from the inside. When he was satisfied that the seal was air-tight, he said, “We’re secure again.”
Steele’s voice came over his earpiece. “We’re with you.”
He began walking towards the storage room. The hallways seemed normal enough – the glow of fluorescent lights was steady, no sound audible through the suit, no movement but him – but Ty’s heart was thrumming with suspense. What had Dawson found? Was he still alive? Would Ty himself make it out again?
Reaching the storage room, he tried to open the door and found it wouldn’t budge. He yanked harder and it moved slightly; he remembered that Dawson had also secured the inside of this room and he was pulling against tape. He pulled with all his strength and the door tore away from its seal. Moving cautiously, he looked into the room.
There was no sign of either Dawson or Latrobe. There was one stack of boxes that had been knocked over, papers scattered about, and there was a fist-sized glob of meat on the floor that made Ty swallow back a wave of nausea.
“Ty . . .?”
“I’m at the storage room, Steele. Nothing yet. Stay tuned . . .”
Stepping into the room, Ty closed the door and sealed it up with tape; then he set the tape roll down and hefted the pistol. He walked to the hole in the wall, stopped when he reached Dawson’s pile of bricks and the sledgehammer, and stared at the wooden door he’d seen on the monitor only half-an-hour earlier.
The door was closed. Dawson had to be on the other side of it.
Ty stepped up to the door and called out, “General Dawson . . .?”
“Is that you, Ty?”
It was Dawson’s voice. Ty felt a small surge of relief . . . but reminded himself to proceed with caution.
“Yes, sir.”
“Come in, Ty, but close the door behind you. Quickly.”
Ty pulled the heavy wooden door open, the hinges grating. He caught a glow from within and saw it emanated from a normal flashlight, not some ethereal device or creature. Dawson held the Maglite, aimed at his own face; it painted his already gaunt features with deeper, menacing shadows.
“The door,” he said, motioning.
Steele’s voice sounded in his headset. “Ty, is that—?” He pulled the door closed, struggling slightly with its weight. Steele’s voice cut out. “Steele?” There was no answer.
“They won’t receive anything so long as you’re in here and that door is shut,” Dawson said.
Ty looked around the room, but could see little by the dim flashlight beam. He stepped up to a wall and reached out to the stone surface, which he realized curved around him.
“Where’s Latrobe?”
Dawson aimed the flashlight beam towards a far corner of the chamber. “There.”
Ty followed the light and saw a pile of blackened, broken bones covered with ash and a few last shreds of clothing. He stepped back, repulsed. “What . . .?”
“He’s been trapped in here for over 200 years. There was almost nothing human left, just hunger. He attacked me but realized too late he couldn’t eat me. I used the flamethrower. He was suffering, and that way anything he might have carried died with him.”
“God,” muttered Ty.
Dawson moved the beam of light from Latrobe’s remains to the walls of the room. “This place was designed to be unassailable, on both natural and supernatural levels. Sound can pass through the door, but nothing else – not our communication devices, and not Moreby’s clairvoyance. In other words, I’m free of the hive mind in here.”
“So that’s why I had to come to you?”
Dawson gestured with some pages, and Ty recognized the ancient parchment sheets he’d seen on the video. “Well, these are why I couldn’t leave here.”
Ty stepped closer, trying to peer at the pages. “What are they?”
“Basically, Latrobe’s suicide note.” Dawson held a sheet up before the light and read: “‘I, Benjamin Henry Latrobe, am yet of sound mind, but my body is now anything but sound. I have been infected by a terrible ailment which, I believe, has killed my body and placed abominable appetites within it . . .’”
“HRV,” Ty said.
“Yes. He talks about being bitten by ‘one of Moreby’s damned fleas’, and when he realized what he was, and that Moreby had meant him to infect
the entire New World, he immediately withdrew from public life and had himself sealed in this chamber, which he made sure was erased from all future plans.” Dawson lowered the papers and looked at the small mound of Latrobe’s bones. “My God . . . he condemned himself to be locked in here, in the dark, alone, for centuries, unable to feed or even communicate. Of course he went insane – anyone would.”
“So why are we here, General?”
Dawson gestured around the chamber. “I think Latrobe knew this room was impervious to exterior discovery; he wanted to put himself away where he’d never be found . . . by Moreby, specifically.”
Something started to tickle at the edge of Ty’s thoughts, but he couldn’t quite grasp it. “Then . . .”
Dawson grinned, and with his dead face, in the half-light of the narrow beam, it wasn’t a comforting sight. “Think about it, Ty: if we could get Moreby in here . . .”
Ty did understand now, “. . . he’d be trapped. Truly trapped – he couldn’t reach out, move on, any of it.”
“Right. And I’m betting it would also sever his connection to the intelligent ones. No more hive mind. Hell, it might even remove their intelligence altogether.”
“But . . .” Ty looked anxiously up at Dawson. “Wouldn’t that mean that . . . you . . .?”
“Not if I’m in here with him.”
In the brief time he’d known Dawson, Ty had come to like him a great deal; like Ames Parker, he took his duty seriously and displayed compassion along with courage. But this was too much – damning himself wasn’t listed on the job description. “You can’t do it. We’re talking about sealing him in here forever, Dawson. My God, you saw what it did to Latrobe.”
“I did, and I’m prepared to accept that fate. I don’t want to find out later on that Moreby found a way out of here when nobody was looking . . . so, I’ll stay and look.” Dawson turned away for a moment, then said, softly, “Besides, if this works and you win . . . it’ll be your world, not mine.”
Ty pushed down his emotions (fury at the unfairness, despair at the chance of ever winning) and focused on the situation. “Okay, fine. That just leaves the biggest question, then: how do we get him down here?”
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