And beyond that, there was one other quality. One other thing that was not anything my senses or my personal pain perceived. This woman, this Special Agent Felicity Hope, seemed strange. Sure, I was still rattled by her sudden appearance in the dark, and by her similarity to Grace, but there was something else. She had a quality that made her not…
Not what?
I really had no idea how to finish that thought.
And no time.
Felicity moved away from me and began descending the steps. She moved well in the darkness and if her feet made any sound at all on the metal stairs it was beyond my senses to hear it. With great reluctance and confusion, I followed.
The stairs zigzagged down two levels and I realized that we had to now be at least twenty feet below sea level. Cape May is pancake flat and houses in the center of town had basements. Certainly nothing built this close to the bay would normally have a cellar. But the stairs went down and down.
With each step the smell of rotting meat increased.
I almost said, “There’s something dead down there.” But it would have been inanely obvious. Something was not only dead, it had been dead for some time.
Felicity slowed her pace and took her gun in a two-handed grip.
Sweat was beginning to run down the sides of my face and pool inside my shirt at the base of my spine. It would be nice to lie and say it was because the stairway was oppressively humid, but that would have been bullshit. I was scared. Really damn scared.
Changeling, whatever it really might be, in whatever horrific form the madmen at Koenig had conceived with their perverted science, was down here somewhere. Hopefully it was dead, or it was nothing more than samples of transgenic animals that had died without food and water. I really didn’t want to have to euthanize some kind of mutant rhesus monkey or lab rat. I like animals far more than I like people and I’ve seen what scientists do to chimps and dogs and pigs in labs. Dead animals would be easier to take. Sure, that’s a cowardly view, but fuck it.
Changeling.
What was it? Where were these guys going with research to allow deliberate shapeshifting? Where could they go?
Since signing onto the DMS my optimism for common sense and bio-ethics has taken a real beating. That thing Michael Crichton said in Jurassic Park rang true every time. We spend so much time wondering if we can, we don’t stop to think about whether we should. Or words to that effect. I’ve encountered monsters and mutations already. I wasn’t sure how many more I could face before something inside my head snapped. How long did you have to fight monsters until you really became one?
And how long could I dance at the edge of the abyss?
Bad questions to ask yourself in the dark.
Bad questions.
As we descended, though, the darkness changed, becoming cloudy and finally yielding to the glow of a security light in a metal cage mounted on the wall beside a big metal door.
It was a massive door as solid and ponderous as a bank-vault. There were several high-tech scanners beside it and even though I had plenty of gadgets for bypassing all kinds of security systems, I could see that I wasn’t going to need any of them.
The door stood ajar.
It was held open by a corpse.
I think it had once been a man.
But it was impossible to tell.
The body was swollen and black, the tissues distended by expanding gasses as putrefaction ran rampant.
And… it had no face.
The flesh had all been torn away to reveal the striated remnants of muscle and the white of naked bone.
This hadn’t been done by a knife or any kind of weapon. The flesh was torn in very distinctive ways.
By teeth.
Not small rat teeth, either. And it didn’t look like dog or cat teeth. The flesh was savaged by very large and very sharp teeth. Not fangs, but rows of teeth. There was enough left of the throat to see that much.
“Christ,” I said. “What did that?”
Her voice was very small.
“Dear God,” she whispered. “They’re out…”
-9-
“What’s out?” I demanded, but she shook her head.
“I… don’t know exactly. We’ve only had rumors. But…” Felicity shook her head and set her jaw. Tiny jewels of sweat glistened on her forehead. “Cover me.”
“Hey, wait, dammit…”
But she was already in motion, stepping over the corpse, squeezing through the opening, disappearing inside. With a growl I gripped the edge of the massive door and hauled on it, swinging it wider to give me room to follow.
There was light inside and I ran forward, gun up and ready, into a lab that looked like it was born in the fevered mind of Dr Moreau. The chamber was vast and it must have stretched hundreds of yards under the streets of Cape May and outward under the waters of the bay. The ceiling was twenty feet high and supported by massive steel pillars. The floor was pale concrete that was stained by dried seawater, rust-red old blood, and a dozen chemicals of various sickly hues. There were ranks of computers — the high-end super-computers used for gene sequencing — tables of arcane scientific equipment, and a dozen stainless steel dissecting tables. There were also bodies in the room.
Many bodies.
Most of them were human and none of those were whole. Legs and arms, ragged torsos, bodiless heads, were scattered across the floor.
I knew without counting that the bodies down here and the corpse blocking the door upstairs would add up to an even dozen. The missing scientists.
Not working at a separate site or in another country.
All of them here.
Forever here.
Each missing scientist… but not all of any of them.
Felicity and I stood nearly shoulder to shoulder, gaping at the slaughter.
But then, even with all of that carnage around us, our eyes were drawn to the far wall. How could we not look? How could anyone not stare at what was there?
Row upon row upon row of glass cylinders, each ten feet high and as big around as elm trees. Each filled with murky water that smelled of brine and decay.
And in nearly all of the tanks a body floated.
They were all naked.
Men and women.
Tall. Powerfully built, with corded muscles under layers of gray-green skin.
They floated in the water, tethered by cables and wires attached to electrodes buried in their chests and skulls. Pale hair floated around their faces. Pale eyelids dusted their cheeks.
There were at least fifty tanks.
Three of them were empty, the glass shattered, the wires hanging limp and unattached. Every other tank was full.
Each of them was naked.
None of them were human.
“Holy Mother of God,” murmured Felicity.
I felt myself moving forward, taking numb steps like a sleepwalker. My eyes were wide, burning from not blinking. The sight before me was hideous, appalling in its implications, but I couldn’t look away. I stopped in front of one of the tanks and reached out with one hand to touch the glass. The body inside floated on the other side of the thick glass, inches away from me, but worlds apart in so many ways,
The people — the things inside the tank — did not have hands.
Not as such.
They had long flat panels of flesh in which were segmented bony structures that had once been fingers, and each was connected by rough webbing. The feet were the same. And all along the waterlogged limbs the flesh glistened with scales.
In movies, in Disney pictures, creatures like this are beautiful.
In these tanks, here in the real world, they were hideous.
I looked up into the face of the body that floated inches from me. The mouth was little more than a slash with rubbery lips, between which I could see row upon row of serrated teeth.