Swallowing, Claire stepped into the room, glad that she hadn’t brought Sherry with her; looking at the private little torture chamber was going to give her nightmares, it was nothing to expose a child to—
“Freeze, little girl, or I’ll shoot you where you stand.”
Claire froze. Every muscle in her body froze as Irons started to laugh from behind her, from behind the door where she hadn’t thought to look. Oh my God, oh, God, oh, Sherry I’m so sorry—
Irons’s deep chuckle rose into the hearty, gleeful laughter of a madman, and Claire understood that she was going to die.
ElGHtEEH
TRYING NOT TO BREATHE TOO DEEPLY, LEON
reached the bottom of the metal ladder and turned around quickly, aiming the Magnum into the thick gloom. Murky water sloshed over his boots, and as his eyes adjusted to the low light, he saw the source of the terrible smell.
Parts of it, anyway. . . .
The subbasement tunnel stretching out in front of him was littered with body parts, human corpses that had been torn into pieces. Limbs and heads and torsos were strewn randomly through the stone pas-sage, lapped at gently by the few inches of dark water that covered the floor.
“Leon? How is it?” Ada’s voice floated down from the circle of light above the ladder, echoing hollowly around him. Leon didn’t answer, his shocked gaze fixed on the terrible scene, his brain trying to add up the shredded parts and come up with a number. How many? How many people?
Too many to count. He saw a faceless head, the long hair streaming around it in a cloud. A heavy woman’s decapitated trunk, one breast bobbing above the rippling darkness. An arm encased in the tatters of a cop’s dress shirt. A bare leg, still wearing a sneaker. A curled hand, the fingers slick and white. A dozen? Twenty?
“Leon?” Ada’s tone had sharpened.
“It’s—it looks okay,” he called, struggling to keep his voice from cracking. “Nothing moving.” “I’m coming down.”
He stepped away from the ladder to give her room, remembering something she’d said before, something about bodies being dumped. . . .
Ada stepped off the bottom rung, splashing into the dark tunnel. His eyes had adjusted well enough to see a look of disgust cross her delicate features—disgust and something like sadness.
“There was an attack in the garage,” she said softly.
“Fourteen or fifteen people died. . . ”
She trailed off, frowning, and took a step past him to get a closer look at the severed and mutilated remains. When she spoke again, she sounded worried. “I didn’t see the attack, but I don’t think they were torn up like this.”
She looked up, scanning the roof of the tunnel, gripping her nine-millimeter tightly. Leon followed her gaze, but only saw algae-thick stone. Ada shook her head, looking back down at the gently rippling sea of broken flesh.
“The—zombies didn’t do this. Something got to these people after they were killed.”
Leon felt a chill go up his spine. That was about the last thing he wanted to hear, standing in the humid, stinking dark and surrounded by savaged bodies. “So it’s not safe down here. We should head back up and—“ Ada started forward, stepping through the tangled limbs, the sound of her careful, sloshing movements seeming very loud in the otherwise silent tunnel. Damn, does she ignore everybody, or is it just me? Watching his step, Leon followed, reaching out with his free hand to touch her shoulder. “At least let me go first, okay?”
“Fine,” she said, sounding almost but not quite exasperated. “Lead the way.”
He stepped in front of her, and they started forward again, Leon trying to divide his attention between the darkness ahead and the sodden pieces of flesh and bone underfoot. Just ahead, the tunnel turned to the right, and there was some light reflected off the oily surface of the water; the passage was clearer, too, with not as many bodies.
Leon paused just long enough to unshoulder the Remington, checking to make sure he’d chambered a round. Whatever had gotten to the corpses didn’t seem to be around, but he didn’t want to be unpre-pared if it came back.
Ada waited without speaking, though he could feel her impatience—not for the first time, he wondered if there was more to her story than she’d told him. He was scared, and he was also cold and tired and afraid for Claire, who might still be wandering the station—he didn’t even know if Claire was still alive; but he hadn’t felt right about letting Ada walk into a bad situation on her own.
Ada, on the other hand . . . she was as calm and controlled as a veteran soldier, expressing nothing but a kind of irritable eagerness to get on with things—and if she appreciated his presence at all, she was taking great pains not to show it. It wasn’t that he needed or wanted her gratitude—
• but wouldn’t most people be happy to have a cop along? Even a rookie?
Maybe not, and it wasn’t the time or place to start asking questions. Leon shut down his thinking and started moving again, stepping gingerly over a chewed-up chunk of flesh that he couldn’t identify. “Stop,” Ada whispered sharply. “Listen.”
Leon tensed, Remington in one hand, Magnum in the other. He tilted his head, straining to hear, but there was only a distant, hollow drip of water—
• and a soft thumping. A rapid but random sound, like padded hammers on a padded surface. Whatever it was, it was getting closer, coming toward them from where the tunnel turned up ahead.
Why isn’t it splashing, why don’t we hear water—? Leon backed up a step, raising both weapons slightly, remembering how Ada had looked at the ceiling before—
• and saw it, saw it and felt his heart stop in midbeat. A spider the size of a big dog, skittering over the wet stones halfway up the inner wall, its bristling, hairy legs tapping—
• and then there was a series of deafening explo-sions next to his right ear, bam-bam-bam-bam, the muzzle flash from Ada’s Beretta strobing the hellish tunnel as she fired. The booming echoes pounded through the dark as the giant, impossible arachnid dropped from the wall, splashing into the inky water. It crawled toward them, wounded, dragging two of its multiple legs through the murk behind it, dark fluids spilling out from its grotesquely rounded body. It humped itself over a human head, the mutilated skull rolling out from beneath its swollen, pulsing abdomen, and Leon could see its shining black eyes, each the size of a ping-pong ball—
• and he squeezed the trigger on the Remington, not even feeling the kick of the thundering blast, his entire focus on the inconceivable arachnid. The round hit it squarely, blowing its alien face into a thousand wet pieces. The spider flipped over backwards with a skidding splash, its thick legs quivering, curling in over its furred body.
His ears ringing, his heart pounding, Leon cham-bered another round, his mind telling him that he had not just blown away a spider that big, the physics was wrong, it couldn’t happen because it would collapse under its own weight—