Chapter Sixteen

Security has been breached.

The insurgency is inevitable.

Brenner ducked into his office, fighting horrible thoughts. He threw his office door shut, then searched in his desk for that bottle of bourbon. He hammered back three big-mouthed gulps. The alcohol burned his stomach, yet it did nothing to abate the rage coursing through him. He bypassed his desk and opened the back door to a private room. When he flipped on the light, the beam revealed three dead bodies tied to chairs. They were John Sullivan, shift manager for the vampire floor; Eddie Parker, shift manger of the werewolf complex; and Roberta Gonzalez, ship cargo manager. Each had been bled out by a variety of cruel knife wounds. A woman hung from the ceiling, bound by the wrists. She was Annie Fuentez, a level-one zombie caterer.

The woman still had a spark of life left in her.

He was in the mood to snuff it out.

He’d stripped Annie naked to humiliate her. He’d created inch-long incisions along her entirety and scalped half her skull. Brenner couldn’t see her facial features, for they were obscured under clotted, bloody trails.

She moaned softly at his presence, frightened. He regarded the corpses first. He’d submitted them to torture. He refused to use truth serum. Truth serum ruined the fun. He’d ripped fingernails with pinch clamps. Shot testicles with pellet guns. Burned flesh and cauterized wounds. If he couldn’t force information from them, he decided, then he’d enjoy himself anyway.

He unsheathed his Ka-Bar knife and petted Annie’s face with it. “Richard and I have found one of the monsters’ secret hideouts. Sorelli has everything to do with it. He’s planning an insurgency. But you are the last of the four spies left. Why were you snooping in my office? I caught you each in here. Why? What are you looking for? Tell me.”

Annie didn’t stir. Her eyes were caked shut in gook. Brenner jammed the knife hilt-deep into her collarbone. One thrust, he was so strong. The handle jutted out of her. She tried to scream. He cupped her mouth shut. Muffled screams. Her head writhed. “Why am I being investigated? Tell me!”

He removed his hand. She was coughing up blood. Her words were soft, but he could hear her say, “You’ve been found out, Brenner. A new deal with the monsters has been made.” She said this with pleasure. “And you’re on the outside of it. You’ll be dead in no time.”

Brenner shook her hard, trying to jar the knowledge from her body. “What kind of a deal? What do they know about me? Speak up, you dead bitch!”

Her eyes rolled into the back of her head. She aspirated on blood, and then finally died from the prolonged blood loss.

He stood among the row of corpses in silence.

Were the spies sent to kill me?

This isn’t about me. The bitch is trying to scare you. She knows nothing. The dead bitch doesn’t know shit.

He went to work wrapping each corpse in a yellow trash bag. He hauled them to the drop-off chute two halls down from his office. He called down to the zombies in the sublevel. “Enjoy these, you dead bastards. Relish them piece by piece.”

He returned to clean up his interrogation room, haunted by the fact his secrets were no longer a private matter.

How long would it be before someone finally came along and executed him?