They probed farther, weapons held out at the ready. The corridor angled off to the left and Weston came around the corner fast, ducking down low in a firing stance. Immediately he scanned for unfriendlies. Found absolutely nothing.
“Clear,” he said.
The others came around the corner.
There were four doorways ahead, every one of them closed. The TAC unit took them down one by one. They were all vacant, nothing inside but some old packing crates, a few empty twenty-five gallon drums. Red Team moved to the end of the corridor. There was a heavy iron door blocking their progress and it was locked.
Becker slapped a charge on it, set it, and the TAC unit stepped back.
The charge went with a peal of thunder, nearly stripping the door from its hinges. Red Team moved in, taking up firing positions. It was a big room, dank and chill, about forty-feet in length, thirty in width. The air was rancid with a pall of moist bacterial decay.
And there was a very good reason for that.
Infrared told them there was nothing alive inside and, God, how true that was. The place was like a slaughterhouse. But instead of carcasses of beef, human bodies were hung from meat hooks chained to the ceiling, dozens and dozens of them. Naked and stark, they’d been skinned, disemboweled, carved and plucked. Men, women, children. Some had no limbs, others were lacking heads. They twisted in the air with a slow, dreadful motion, a dance macabre.
Their body cavities had been quite neatly hollowed out.
The TAC unit just stood there, the stink of death rubbed in their faces. All those sightless, staring eyes and empty sockets glaring down at them with an almost primal hunger.
“Jesus Christ,” LeClere finally said. “It’s like a morgue in here.”
“All right,” Weston managed. “It’s bad…but we’ve got work to do here.”
Red Team slid their NV goggles back up onto their helmets, slipped protective goggles over their eyes and clicked on the tactical flashlights bracketed to their weapons. They played the lights around, gigantic shadows jumping over the walls.
Weston reported what they found to AD Silva as the TAC unit moved through the carnage, their faces pale and corded. The bodies were hung in neat rows, the sweeping beams of the flashlights making them seem to move and creep, duck away and dart forward. Shadows crawled over those bloodless death masks, making them grin and leer with a macabre life.
Together, the troopers moved down the rows of bodies and saw there were not just bodies, but arms hanging from those chains as well. Hooks inserted at the meat of their elbows, they were colorless things spattered with dark spirals of old blood.
Nobody was saying anything now.
Only hard-edged discipline, unit integrity, and months of tough training kept the men from bolting out of there. Weston would not have blamed them if they had. Not really. Because he was examining the bodies much closer than they were and he knew what those gashed punctures he was seeing were.
Teeth marks.
These bodies had been gnawed on. Faces and wrists, legs and necks. Something had been at them. And from the arrangement of the bites, Weston had a pretty good idea it hadn’t been animals.
As they moved down the rows, Becker bumped into the corpse of a woman and she bumped into another who bumped into yet another, until that entire row was swinging and twisting and gyrating. It was a horrible thing to see. The shadows pooling and jumping, those bodies filled with a hideous animation, looking as if they were trying to pull themselves free.
The men could barely take it.
Weston had not expected anything like this. He could feel the horror and revulsion coming off his men in raw, sickening waves.
There was another door beyond the dancing cadavers which led into another room much like the first. Instead of a meat locker, this one looked more like a warehouse. Deep shelves ran from floor to ceiling on either wall. But the shelves were heaped with things.
And Weston wanted to know what, despite himself. He just had to know. And not out of morbid curiosity, but because it was his job.
The shelves were stacked with bodies. Dozens and dozens of corpses wrapped in plastic sheeting or stained shrouds. Men, women, children. Cultists and kidnapped victims. Some newly dead and others severely decomposed…maybe dead for weeks, if not months, faces boiled right down to muscle and ligament and knobs of bone. Some were zipped in bags and others…what there were of them…secreted in buckets.
As they went about their grim business, pawing through the remains, making one grisly discovery after another, the TAC unit found worse things. Not just cadavers, but parts of them…hands and heads and torsos.
This place, the entire place, not just a mortuary, but something worse. A dissection room. An anatomical theater…only Weston knew it was far worse than that. For there was a rhyme and reason to this carnage, a secret truth that he feared was so awful it would lick his sanity straight into the void if he had to look it in the face.
And he was not a man who frightened easily.
But something was happening here and it was leagues beyond dead cultists. For he could feel it building in the air around him like a scream, a heavy and electric sense of… activity. The air had gone thin as ether and the shadows were slithering around them like fat-bodied vipers coming out of a snake pit.
Gripping his weapon tightly, he said, “Stand ready…”
*
About the time Red Team announced they had found bodies, AD Silva was on the radio with Blue Team who’d come in the back way. Clark was in command of Blue.
“We got something here,” he was saying over his headset.
“What?” Silva wanted to know. “What’re you seeing in there?”
Clark was slow to respond.
Silva could hear him chatting with Platz, Tuchman, and Seaver. Their voices had an unpleasant, almost frantic edge to them.
“What the hell’s going on in there, mister?” Silva demanded.
Clark said, “We…we’re in a large room here, sir, looks…yeah, looks like some kind of old hospital ward or something…I’m not sure. Beds are lined up against either wall, bodies on most of ‘em, covered in sheets.”
Standing there in the command van, Silva felt his throat constrict tight like a snake. “Bodies?”
“Yeah,” Clark said, his voice oddly thick. “Yeah…gotta be thirty beds here…most of ‘em have bodies on ‘em. Men and women…some kids, too.”
“Dead?”
“Yeah…yes sir, AD, all dead.” He paused. “I got…shit…I’m seeing bullet wounds, entry wounds to the chest, the vitals. All their throats, they’ve been slit ear to ear. Mother of Christ. Some of them, they’ve been dead for weeks, maybe months I’m thinking. Damn, that stink…”
“Any sign of Dade?”
A long drawn-out silence. “Yeah, he’s here with the rest-”
*
And he was.
Clark was looking on that face that he’d poured over for hours and hours in photographs. It was pallid as flour, the eyes wide and staring, the mouth hooked in a contorted gruesome smile. Like maybe Dade knew the punch line to a real funny joke, but he wasn’t ready to share it, not just yet.
“We got a live one over here,” Platz announced, pulling off his helmet and going to a woman who was sitting up.
Clark saw her face in his flashlight beam, in the beams of the others…but she couldn’t be sitting up. Her throat was slit ear to ear. And maybe Platz didn’t seem to realize that or maybe he was realizing it now because she made a hissing sound and took hold of his arm in one gray claw, drawing him closer before he could do much more than scream. Before the others could stop her, she produced a jagged shard of glass and slid it into the side of Platz’s throat.
And then the shit truly hit the fan.
Platz was on the floor, making a bubbling sound as blood washed down his throat and he vomited red to the floor, slipping and sliding in it.
Tuchman opened up on the woman with his MP5, gave her two three-round bursts to the chest. The rounds ripped holes through her, spattered the walls with her meat, but she kept coming, a toothy, demented grin on her face. The TAC unit watched in abject, stunned horror as she fell on Platz. As she pressed her fissured mouth against his own and came away, chewing on a bloody strand of tissue that had once been his lips.