Ethan spotted smears of blood along the floor, some of them handprints that trailed finger lines along the tiles, the old blood black in the harsh beams of the flashlights. Ahead the corridor opened out into a large room, the flashlights glinting off darkened monitor screens and what looked like a large yellow sack.
Kurt and his men rushed the room at once and fanned out as Ethan and Lopez followed.
They entered what looked like a command center. The room was round, maybe fifty feet across. Computer terminals were mounted into the walls, overturned office chairs littering the floor. Ethan glimpsed a couple of shattered plasma screens, what looked like freezers filled with vials of obscure, colorful liquids, and two large reclining seats with headphones and large helmets dangling from cables beside them. Three further corridors led away from the room, one on either side and a third that led deeper into the facility. In the center of the room was an oval table covered with discarded bits of paper, files and randomly scattered pens and clipboards.
Upon the table lay Simmons’s remains, the yellow body-bag tossed aside nearby. In the cold, harsh light of the beams his body looked strangely glossy, reflecting the light as though wet. It was only a moment later that Ethan realized why.
‘Oh, Jesus.’
Proctor turned away and gagged a thin stream of bile that splattered onto the tiles at his feet. Ethan just managed to hang onto the contents of his stomach as he looked at the corpse.
Simmons’s body was a mass of flesh and bone that remained intact despite having been methodically stripped of its skin. Like some macabre museum waxwork, the soldier’s entire innards were displayed. In the wavering flashlight beams he could see the glistening shape of the muscles, tendons and even arteries that sagged from the bones. The soldier’s eyes stared like bright white orbs at the ceiling above, lifeless and yet wide open as though alive, and his teeth were white and bared where the lips had receded postmortem.
The dead man’s skin lay in tattered strips and ribbons on the floor or dangled like gruesome banners from the table on which he lay.
Dana Ford stepped up to the corpse.
‘Ritualistic skinning,’ she murmured. ‘I’ve read of this before. Humans have performed precisely the same procedure on victims both dead and alive throughout history.’
‘Why would it do that to him?’ Lopez uttered, her normally dark features ashen. ‘He’s gone. There’s nothing to gain.’
‘Revenge,’ Proctor muttered, gulping down water from a bottle. ‘To deny the victim his skin, to leave him naked and defenseless. It’s another form of stress relief.’
‘Christ,’ one of the soldiers muttered, ‘what the hell is this place?
Ethan scanned the walls of the control center and spotted a fuse box on one wall, the yellow and black warning graphics easily visible. He made his way over and yanked the box open.
A series of columned fuses labeled with locations filled the box, many of them tripped. Ethan tried a handful of them but nothing reacted in the building, the lights remaining dark.
‘Look for an emergency power source,’ Lopez said. ‘Place as remote as this must have run off generators and would have had some kind of back-up system.’
‘Fuel oil,’ Kurt Agry agreed.
Ethan scanned the fuses and spotted two named E1 and E2 at the bottom of the columns. He reached out and flipped them both.
A distant rattle echoed through into the control center from the adjoining corridors, spluttered for a few moments and then leveled out into a steady hum. Above their heads a series of emergency lights flickered into life on the walls, half of them white and half of them red, casting feeble patches of light across the room.
‘Like being in a friggin’ submarine,’ Lopez uttered and glanced at the huge dissection tables. ‘This place gives me the creeps.’
‘You and me both,’ Ethan agreed as he looked around. ‘I’m guessing that this thing wanted us to come here. Question is, why?’
Duran’s old features were grotesquely half-lit by the glow from one of the red emergency lights as he turned to look at Ethan.
‘I don’t care. Either it gives up Mary or it dies.’
‘You’ve changed your tune,’ Kurt Agry said as he looked around the room. ‘Thought we were all for treating it like an innocent animal?’
Duran glared at the soldier. ‘That was before it started acting like a human being.’
Kurt grinned tightly but said nothing in reply. Ethan looked around at the control room.
‘This place must have cost a fortune to set up, and the locals sure didn’t know about it.’
‘Or the sheriff,’ Lopez agreed. ‘Place like this would need some serious finance, good security, a way of keeping people out.’ She looked at Ethan. ‘You thinking what I’m thinking?’
‘Military,’ Ethan agreed as he paced around the room and came to a stop, ‘maybe government sponsored. Either way, I know this wasn’t a corporate gig.’
‘How do you know?’ Klein asked.
Ethan lifted his boot and kicked a large metallic object across the floor. It slid across the polished tiles and clattered against a wall. Klein looked down at the M-16 rifle, the barrel of which was bent over as though twisted in a vice.
‘Could have been bought on the black market,’ Kurt Agry said.
Ethan nodded. ‘And this guy?’
He pointed down to the corner of the room where a body lay slumped against the steel wall units. Kurt’s men hurried around to stare at the remains. The dead soldier was dressed in full disruptive-pattern material combat fatigues, and on his shoulder was a distinctive Stars and Stripes patch. His face was an unrecognizable, bloodied pulp of smashed bone and ripped flesh.
‘Mercenary,’ Kurt replied, turning away. ‘Probably an amateur, that’s why he went down.’
‘Like your lieutenant was?’ Lopez challenged. The soldiers all turned to glare at her, but Lopez stood her ground. ‘Stop bullshitting us, Kurt, you know what this is all about.’
‘I don’t know anything about this place!’ Kurt shouted at her.
The control room echoed with the sound of his voice, stark against the lonely silence haunting the abandoned facility. The echo of his voice rolled away and then seemed to bounce back toward them. Ethan stared at Kurt for a long moment, and then he heard it. A distant voice, something or someone calling out.
‘You hear that?’ he asked.
The group stood in silence for a few moments, and then the distant cry sounded again. A woman’s voice. Duran was moving before he’d gotten her name fully out of his mouth as he charged toward one of the laboratory exits, the one that led deeper into the mountain.
‘Mary.’
49
Kurt Agry leapt over one of the table tops and dropped down in front of Duran Wilkes, bringing the old man up short with the barrel of his rifle.
‘Get out of my way!’ Duran yelled at him.
‘Stand down, old man,’ Kurt growled. ‘We don’t know what’s down there.’
‘Mary’s down there!’ Duran bellowed, and raised his own weapon toward Kurt.
‘Don’t do it!’ Kurt shouted, as the other soldiers turned their rifles on Duran.
‘That’s enough!’ Lopez snapped, and pushed herself between them both. ‘Put your weapons down, now, both of you!’
Kurt kept his rifle up. ‘Get out of my way.’
‘Like hell,’ Lopez shot back at him.
Kurt’s men switched their aim to Lopez. Ethan stepped forward and aimed his own M-16 at Kurt Agry. The soldier glared at him from the corner of his eye.
‘Seriously, Warner? You better be ready to pull the trigger.’