Soldier (Talon, #3)(29)
“What the hell?” Riley muttered, echoing my sentiments. Scanning the light around the room, which was large and stretched back into the darkness, he shook his head. Beyond the glass cylinders were seemingly endless rows of countertops, aisles upon aisles of flat surfaces holding glass vials, beakers, strange machines and other lab-y things. “This is a Talon laboratory, all right,” Riley said. “I’d heard of these places when I was still with the organization, but I’ve never seen one before. What were they doing down here?” He pinned the beam on one of the containers, revealing a set of tubes and wires hanging down from the inside. “Those vats look all kinds of ominous, don’t they? What do you think was in them?”
I swallowed. All the answers I could think of made my skin crawl. “Maybe Talon was secretly operating a chocolate factory,” I joked, “because they discovered that making chocolate is much more rewarding than trying to take over everything.”
Riley snorted. “If they put something in the bars that turned all humans into mindless drones, I wouldn’t put it past them,” he replied. “But I doubt that’s what happened here, Firebrand.”
“Okay, but if we run into chocolate-fueled zombies, you owe me dinner.”
“Always the zombies with you.”
Our voices sounded too glib, too light and breezy for the surroundings. Silence fell, and the shadows seemed to press in, as if offended by our flippancy. Riley swept his flashlight beam around, his tone grave once more. “Though they were definitely working on something,” he muttered. “I’d give my back teeth to know what Talon was really doing here. And why this place is deserted now.”
My skin prickled. In the movies, the answer to that question was always the same: because the specimens, prisoners, or experiments had all escaped and gone on a killing spree before everything was locked down.
Riley sighed. “Come on,” he told me, turning from the row of vats, as if he didn’t want to stare at them any longer. “Let’s see if we can find some answers.”
As we went farther into the lab, passing the long rows of countertops, the feeling that I’d seen this all before continued to haunt me. Riley and I were the unsuspecting humans venturing into the monster’s lair and, at any moment, some twisted freak of nature was going to come leaping out at us. Of course, those movies never had protagonists who happened to be dragons, and when the raging monstrosity did finally appear, it always sank its claws into a soft, easily-ripped-apart human. I’d always wondered what the monster would do if its prey suddenly turned into a winged, scaly, sharp-toothed monster itself. Probably the reason that there were no dragons starring in horror movies—the real monster wouldn’t be quite as scary in comparison.
Will you stop thinking about that? This isn’t the movies. Focus, Ember.
“Look at this,” Riley muttered, shining his flashlight into the corner of the room. A door stood on the far wall with the words Danger! Authorized Personnel Only in large red letters across the front. “That looks like all kinds of fun.”
Riley strode across the room to push open the door. It swung back to reveal another long hallway, with one wall made of thick glass. The room beyond the glass was a mess: shelves tipped over, chairs knocked down, papers and debris strewed everywhere.
“What happened here?” Riley mused as we traversed the hallway and edged through the door. The hinges groaned as we pushed it back, and I wrinkled my nose. The place smelled of bleach and chemicals and sterilizer, but beneath all that, like a stain soaked deep into the carpet, it still reeked faintly of blood and fear. My dragon growled uneasily as the door creaked shut behind us. Something had happened in this room. Something awful. Continuing my movie comparison, this was the place where the aliens or monsters or clones finally escaped and slaughtered every living soul in a violent, bloody massacre. There were no bloodstains, no skeletons or mangled bodies lying on the floor, but judging from the smell, I guessed someone had cleaned up whatever mess was left behind.
I mentioned this to Riley, who snorted.
“Normally I’d say you’ve been watching too many Alien flicks, Firebrand,” he said, his voice echoing weirdly in the absolute silence. “But it’s kind of hard to argue when you’re staring at that.”
He swept his flashlight beam around, and my stomach knotted. In the center of the room, another large holding vat rose up from the tile, but this one had been smashed and broken, glass scattered about the floor in front of the machine.
“Looks like whatever they were trying to do didn’t turn out like they expected,” he muttered, walking forward. My dragon hissed, reluctant to get closer to that yawning tube, but I strode after him, glass crinkling under my feet as I got close. “What does that look like to you?” Riley asked, shining the beam into the cylinder. A tangle of clear tubes and wires hung from the ceiling, slowly dripping water into the vat, and I shivered.
“Like something broke out.”
“Yep.” Riley backed up, eyes dark as he gazed around the room. “So, the question is...what were they keeping down here? What kind of twisted experiments were they performing?”
“Maybe we can find something. If Wes could get into the computer system—”
He shook his head. “If I know Talon, they didn’t leave any information behind. All data will be wiped, all files removed, everything about this place will be gone. Frankly, I’m surprised we found this much—it’s not like the organization to leave a mess like this behind, unless they needed to clear everyone out as quickly as possible.”