The smell hit Mason squarely in the face. It took all of his concentration to keep from vomiting. He closed the door behind him as quietly as he could. It was every bit as dark inside as it was in the tunnel, only about twenty degrees warmer. And much more humid. The sweat was already flowing under his multiple layers. He held his gun in his right hand and used his left to guide him along the wall.
Beneath the smell of death was something else. Desiccated straw and manure. Maybe earth and mildew. And the faintest hint of chemicals, fuel of some kind. Considering the Hoyl’s proclivity for fire, he had a pretty good idea what it was for.
The walls were polished concrete, with the kind of finish that made them easy to hose down. As was the floor, which caused his rubber soles to squeak despite his best efforts. He found the stairs with his right foot and ascended slowly. Rounded the landing. Continued upward. The stench grew stronger with every step. The last time he’d been in a place like this, he was wearing a respirator mask. He would have killed for one now. The antiviral face mask covering his nose and mouth protected him from exposure to diseases and bodily fluids, but it didn’t do a blasted thing for the smell.
Another steel door sealed the top of the staircase, only this one was flush with the ceiling. It was much older than anything else he’d encountered. The rivets were rusted or missing entirely in some spots. He pressed his cheek against the hatch and listened for anything on the other side, felt for subtle vibrations, then put his shoulder into it and raised it high enough to crawl out. He slowly lowered the lid and crouched against the wall. There was no sign of anyone around him.
He checked his Bluetooth. A single bar was all he needed. And probably all he got.
“I’m inside,” Mason whispered. The sound echoed from a room he realized was much larger than he’d initially thought.
“Right on schedule,” Gunnar said. “Any resistance?”
“Negative. At least so far.”
“This is too easy, Mace.”
“Don’t jinx it. Maybe we’ve finally caught a break.”
“You know that’s not the case.”
“A guy can dream, right?” He turned on his light and cupped the lens in his palm. “Are you in position?”
“Yeah. I’ve got to tell you, though. I’d feel a whole lot better about this if I had some sort of visual on the property. I can’t even find a security system to hack into. This place is totally off the grid.”
“Have you scanned the radio frequencies yet?”
“There’s nothing on the cellular bands. I still need a few more minutes on the lower frequencies. Any sort of short-range handheld is going to utilize such a long wavelength that I’ll practically leave be line of sight to intercept it.”
“Don’t get yourself killed trying.”
“Certainly not foremost on today’s agenda. Besides, I’ve got Alejandra watching my back.” Gunnar lowered his voice. “You ever see a woman handle a grenade launcher? There’s something incredibly sexy about it.”
“I’m going silent now,” Mason said. “Let me know the moment you have ears.”
He started forward, still in a crouch, and swept his light from one side of the large room to the other. The ceiling had to be a good twenty-five feet high. Corrugated aluminum on a framework of rusted girders. Metal support posts flaking with rust. Pipes as thick as his thighs traversing the walls. There was an elevated platform to his left, the remains of the fallen staircase that had once serviced it on the ground beneath it. There was a door up there. The padlock on it looked new. The walls were covered with graffiti. No one had made any effort to paint over it or scrape up the oil stains covering the concrete floor. The only evidence that anyone had been in here recently were the sawhorses, wood scraps, and bags of cement surrounded by gray dust. The smell of death was stronger here, but the source was obviously somewhere else. And it looked like the only way to find it was by climbing the concrete stairs at the far end of the room, which led up to a platform that spanned the width of the building.
Mason started to piece together a mental map. He was in the loading dock. The bay doors were at his back, which meant that the main body of the slaughterhouse was directly ahead of him. When he reached the stairs, he switched off the light. The door was to his left. He figured it should open upon a large preparation room, where the product was readied for shipping.
He opened the heavy steel door as quietly as he could. The hinges creaked loudly enough to wake the dead, but it smelled like they were long past the point of caring. The horrific stench that rushed out to greet him was overwhelming. His first instinct was to duck back into the dock. It took everything he had to slip through the crack and into the room, where he promptly slid down the wall and into a crouch. He heard a buzzing sound from somewhere off to his right. One that he immediately recognized.
Flies.
He listened for any subtle sounds beneath the drone: footsteps, breathing, the click of a safety being disengaged. Anything that might betray the presence of someone waiting in the darkness.
“I have audio,” Gunnar said. “The four hundred sixty-seven megahertz range. Three distinct voices. So far. No verbal identification. No indication of their locations. Are you getting this?”
Mason tapped the microphone twice in acknowledgment. He didn’t want to make a sound. They’d agreed upon a system of two taps for yes and one for no to eliminate the possibility of an inadvertent answer in the affirmative.
“Be careful, Mace.”
Another two taps and he risked turning on the light.
There was a long stainless-steel table to his left, discolored by oxidation and riddled with scratches. Directly ahead was a wall with a scraped Plexiglas insert, through which he could see the rusted blade of a massive saw jutting upward from another stainless-steel table. There were enormous bucket sinks to his right. The floor utilized the same polished coating with textured particles for traction. It sloped downward and away from him, toward a drain with a rusted grate. Everything was marbled with crusted brown streaks.
He crawled underneath the table, through a maze of slender metal legs, until he was able to see around the corner to his left and on the opposite side of the floating wall to his right. There was a closet full of broken wooden pallets and crates. A conveyor chute ran diagonally overhead, presumably to the room with the locked door above the loading bay. Another open doorway directly ahead of him revealed little more than darkness. Maybe a table and chairs at the very farthest reaches of the beam. To the right of the opening was another scored Plexiglas insert, upon which someone had spray-painted a crude face looking back out. The buzz of flies beckoned from his right, beyond the table with the saw blades, past the heavy door of an industrial freezer, and through a pair of swinging doors.
Mason drew in a deep breath. Blew it out slowly.
He crawled out from under the counter and darted diagonally to his right. Passed the worktable. Grabbed the handle of the freezer door. Pulled it open. Recoiled from the stench. Clogged drains in the middle of the floor. Plastic wrap. Hair. Dead mice everywhere. Aluminum peeling from the walls in sections, revealing the discolored Styrofoam insulation. Hooks dangling from the ceiling. Clamped hoses where the compressor had been mounted.
Clear.
He whirled, slipped back out. Faced the swinging doors. Circular Plexiglas inserts. Flies buzzing beyond. The air seeping through the tattered rubber seal smelled worse than anything he’d encountered in his life. He shined the beam through the porthole windows. Large, indistinct shapes cast shifting shadows. He had a pretty good idea what they were and would have been happy enough to leave the doors closed forever.
“Four voices now,” Gunnar said. “Still no names. Two on the second floor. At least one on the third. No idea where the fourth is. Probably outside patrolling the perimeter.”
Mason tapped his acknowledgment.
“Alejandra’s moving into position within range of the building now. The moment she fires that grenade launcher, whether she hits the target or not, we’re out of here. The resulting chaos will only buy you so much time. If there are any survivors, they’re going to see through our ruse pretty quickly, and then they’ll be coming for you.”
Mason wanted to tell Gunnar to get the hell out of there right now. The best he could muster was a double tap. While he was grateful for his old friend’s help, he never should have allowed him to get this close. Coordinating their movements from miles away wasn’t without risk, but the consequences were nothing compared to what these men would do to Gunnar if they caught him out here. Mason wasn’t about to let anything happen to him, though. He’d bring the whole damn place down on their heads first.
He bulled through the swinging doors, low and fast, then rolled to his left. Waited for them to clap shut behind him. Directed the beam straight ahead and through a roiling black cloud of flies, which cast bulbous shadows across the carcasses hanging from hooks all around him. He lowered the light and swept it across the floor, below the bare feet of the victims. There was no one else in the room. Nothing but greasy blobs of decomposition, clumped beneath the suspended bodies and slinking down the slanted floor toward the industrial drains, beside which were the shovels used to unclog them and buckets overflowing with sludge. Four parallel rails crossed the ceiling, automated conveyors from which all of the chains dangled. But these weren’t slabs of beef hanging from the hooks. They were human beings. Or at least that’s what he thought they were. Or had been, anyway.
Now he understood what the blue-eyed man—this monster who called himself the Hoyl—meant by what he’d said to Alejandra.
There’s just one problem we haven’t solved. How do we dispose of all the bodies?
The final tumbler fell into place. The breadth and the scope of their plan was beyond anything he could ever have imagined. The culprits weren’t merely greedy and self-serving; they were downright evil. These were men who thought themselves lords of the land and everyone around them little more than serfs.
No, worse.
These men thought of everyone else as livestock.
There was precious little left of the bodies hanging before him. They’d been absolved of every last bit of flesh. Only their skeletons remained, and it didn’t appear as though it would be long before they disintegrated, too. The bones were eroding in black amoeba-shaped lesions that exposed the intricate matrices of calcium from which they were formed. The victims had been hooked through the holes in the bases of their skulls and the gaps between their ribs. Some had broken or missing teeth, most the color of yellow he attributed to unsanitary drinking water. Others had the kind of cheap dental work with metal crowns and tin fillings that hadn’t been used stateside in his lifetime. These were more immigrants, more undocumented aliens like Alejandra, men and women whose lives had served no other purpose than to herald the impending arrival of hell on earth.
There’s just one problem we haven’t solved.
The bones were covered with a fine layer of pale, almost transparent fuzz from which tiny filaments grew. Some sort of fungal species or bacterial agent that was actively eating the remains. Like the bacteria that cleanup crews released into the ocean to consume the oil after a tanker spill, this species had been engineered to eliminate mankind’s waste, only a waste of a different order.
How do we dispose of all the bodies?
It was a biological agent that consumed its host.
The most immediate and pressing problem that surfaced in the wake of any pandemic was how to handle the mass quantity of remains. They couldn’t be left to rot in the streets. The bodies needed to be collected and incinerated, at great financial cost and at the expense of significant manpower. They threatened the health of the survivors and created conditions that allowed the virus to breed and mutate. To adapt and combat existing vaccines. They became the reservoirs of mankind’s ultimate eradication and the final variable for which to account when designing a biological extinction-level event.
This was the Thorntons’ contribution to the endgame. They’d provided the missing piece of a puzzle they’d started putting together on a lot full of dead pigs a century ago. Maybe even before that. This was about more than money, more than power.
It was about complete and utter world domination.
As he walked between the rows of deteriorating skeletons, passing the remains of human beings who had meant less than nothing to the men upstairs, to people like the Thorntons, he realized that the wheels were already in motion. This was the endgame of a plot that had been passed down through generations of evil men with the kind of patience it took not to realize their dreams in their lifetimes, but to sacrifice their life’s work so that future generations would fulfill their fantasized destiny of becoming a master race.
“Do it,” Mason whispered.
“What?”
“Do it now, Gunnar. Burn this awful place to the ground.”
“What did you find?”
Mason stormed through the cooler and into the precooler, where the bodies hanging from the chains hadn’t been up there nearly as long. He barely smelled the reek of decomposition or heard the buzzing of flies. He didn’t look at the faces that appeared to rot before his very eyes as Victor’s vile organism melted the fat beneath their skin or into the hollow sockets where their eyes had once been. He pretended not to hear the wet slapping sounds of flesh dropping to the ground.
His entire world had flipped upside down. People he’d trusted had looked him in the eyes and pretended to be just like him, while deep down they wanted nothing more than to watch him die. The job to which he’d devoted his life was little more than a puppet show performed on a stage where nothing mattered and no one watched. The men with the power had insulated themselves from the rest of the world. They merely sat by, biding their time until technology caught up with their imaginations. Not only were they going to decimate the global population, they were going to use the virus to corner the world’s wealth in the process. There would be no power they didn’t possess, no government they couldn’t control.
Only those who could afford the cure for the pandemic soon to be released would survive. Or was the plan more insidious than that? Had they figured out a way to weed out certain elements? To choose the survivors based on their skills and jobs? Their bloodlines?
He was so angry, he was positively shaking. His vision throbbed. He wanted to lash out and destroy everything around him. He needed to be more than his wife’s avenging angel. He was going to have to avenge his entire race.
A sudden shift in the air currents.
The squeak of a chain.
The body beside him moved.
A cold barrel pressed against the base of his skull.
“You so much as twitch and these wetbacks are wearing your brains,” a deep voice said from directly behind him.