“I’d like to think so,” I said. “But whoever did this was very thorough.”
“Look,” said Molly, pointing at a huge, burly figure that had been smashed half through a wall and left hanging out of it. “Is that . . . I think they called him the Phantom Berserker, didn’t they?”
“It’s what’s left of him,” I said.
I moved in, for a closer look. A massive Viking figure, complete with horned helmet and bear-skin cape, his whole body was broken and bloodied. He looked like he’d gone down fighting. There was blood dripping from his hands. But one side of his head had been completely caved in, and there was a great gaping wound in his chest where his heart used to be.
“I thought he was supposed to be dead,” said Molly.
“He is now,” I said, more harshly than I’d meant.
Molly stopped abruptly, and looked about her. “Shouldn’t there be alarms going off?”
“Yes,” I said. “There should. There should be all kinds of protections and defences in place, and my armour isn’t picking up any of them. Which suggests . . . someone must have shut all the systems down, to allow this to happen. I’d put my money on an inside job. A traitor, inside the Department.”
“I never wanted this,” said Molly. “I was mad, I was angry, but I never wanted this . . .”
“Of course you didn’t,” I said.
We moved on, through a silent world of blood and bodies and senseless destruction. Doors had been smashed off their hinges, or hung lopsided from splintered frames. Every room and office we looked into had been thoroughly searched, and then trashed.
“Maybe they were angry from not finding what they were looking for,” said Molly.
“Could be,” I said. “A lot of the Department people were armed, but I’m not seeing any bullet holes, or scorch marks from energy weapons. As though the invaders just soaked up all the firepower and kept on coming . . .”
“I’m not picking up even the smallest traces of offensive magics,” said Molly. “Everything we’re seeing here is the result of brute force. As though a whole army went rampaging through the corridors, killing with their bare hands.”
We moved on, very cautiously now. Looking and listening, and checking for booby-traps, or any other nasty surprise left behind by our unknown enemy. But there wasn’t anything. As though the invaders didn’t care what happened after they left. They were just here to do a job, and kill anyone who got in the way. Unless killing everybody was the job.
“They can’t all have been killed, can they?” said Molly, as much to break the awful silence as anything. “Some might have got away . . .”
“It looks like they all stood their ground, defending their positions, and died doing it,” I said. “Brave and honourable, to the last. My grandfather chose good people. But they had weapons! They must have taken down a hell of a lot of their attackers! So where are the enemy bodies?”
“Presumably the enemy picked up their dead and wounded and took them with them when they left,” said Molly. “To make sure no one could identify who they were. But . . . who could be powerful enough to do something like this, Eddie? Who is there left that’s got an army big enough to massacre everyone in Uncanny? I mean . . . we’ve wiped out most of the major bad guys, and their organisations, in the past few years. Who is there left, who could do this?”
“Good question,” I said. “Makes me wonder . . . did we miss someone?”
I stopped, and looked at her seriously.
“You can never tell where an attack will come from . . . I was at the Wulfshead Club earlier, remember? I’d been called in to help, because they were under attack from MI 13.”
“What?” said Molly. “Those useless X-Files wannabes? I’m amazed they had the nerve. No, hold on, wait a minute . . . MI 13 couldn’t have done this. They’re an officially sanctioned Government organisation, just like the Department of Uncanny. Unless some kind of departmental civil war has broken out.”
“No,” I said. “That doesn’t feel right. MI 13 lost most of its higher-ups, and its direction, during the Satanic Conspiracy. It’s just a ghost of its former self. They were only spying on the Wulfshead Club to pick up gossip they could use as leverage, to get back in the game.”
“All right,” said Molly, “How about this? Maybe some part of your grandfather’s murderous past finally came back to haunt him. Who knows how many other people he killed on your family’s orders?”
I wanted to say executed, not murdered, but it wasn’t the time.
• • •
We moved on, climbing over piled-up bodies, splashing through thick pools of blood. Most of it wasn’t even tacky yet. Whatever had happened here, we hadn’t missed it by much. I checked every room we passed, peering in through smashed-in doors. Computers had been ripped apart, safes torn right out of walls, their doors yanked clean off, and papers scattered everywhere. Someone had been looking for something . . . The entire Department of Uncanny had been systematically gutted. Everyone killed, everything destroyed, nothing spared. It was like walking through the ruins of a good man’s dream.
It reminded me of how I’d felt when I walked through the devastated ruins of the Other Hall, home to the other-dimensional Droods, slaughtered by some unknown enemy. I never did find out who. But this was different. I could do something about this.
“Where are we going?” Molly said abruptly. “I mean, are we heading anywhere in particular?”
“We’re going to the Regent’s office,” I said.
“You think there’s a chance he might still be alive?” Molly said carefully.
“There’s always a chance,” I said. “He could have barricaded himself in, and as long as he had Kayleigh’s Eye . . . But no, I don’t really expect to find him alive. Not when everyone else is dead. He wouldn’t have run away, hidden away, and abandoned his people. Even though that would have been the sensible thing to do. He was the Regent of Shadows, and a legend in his own right. But he might have left us a message, something to tell us what the hell happened here.”
Molly looked quickly around her. “Are you sure this is the right way? All these corridors look the same to me.”
“I remember the way,” I said. “Drood field agents are trained to remember things like that.”
“Smugness is very unattractive in a man,” said Molly.
We looked at each other, and tried to smile, but in this stinking abattoir it was hard to feel anything but horror and loss. The need to lash out at someone, anyone, was almost overpowering. I needed a name, an identity, for the bastards that had done this. So I could track them down and punish every damned one of them. And the bloodbath they had made here would be nothing compared to what I would do to them.
When I wore the golden armour, I felt stronger, faster, smarter. More alive . . . But it also meant my emotions were bigger, and ran deeper, for good and bad. Right then, I didn’t care. I would do what I would do, and worry about the morality of it later.
“This wasn’t an attack, or even an invasion,” I said. “This was a massacre. These people weren’t killed because they got in the way; their deaths were an end in themselves.”
“How can you be sure of that?” said Molly.
“Because there aren’t any wounded,” I said. “Every single man and woman here was finished off before the killers moved on. And the sheer ferocity of the attack . . . No bullet holes, no explosions, no high tech or magics, not even any knife marks . . . This was all brute strength and savagery. I can’t even tell whether this was an attack force or just one wildly powerful individual.”
“Judging from the state of the bodies, I’d say animal,” said Molly. “Or people acting like animals . . . Werewolf pack, perhaps?”
“The Department would have been prepared for something as obvious as that,” I said. “They’d have had silver bullets, shaped curses . . . they could have fought off something that straight forward. No, this is different. This is something new.”