The Living End (Daniel Faust #3)(33)

“Just sit here and rest a minute.” Eric looked deep into my eyes. “I’m gonna go tell the others. I was scared as hell, but man, now that you’re here? Now I know everything’s gonna be all right.”

He left me there, carrying that weight on my shoulders while I waited for my senses to swim back through the fog.

My vision came first. I was in a cell about twenty feet by twenty feet, with maybe a dozen prisoners. No windows, and beige-painted bars straight out of a county jail. The room stank of fear and stale piss. Outside, a corridor ran off in both directions, but I couldn’t see where it led. Now and again a guard strolled past, dressed in fatigues and toting a matte-black rifle that looked like something out of a science fiction movie. He barely paid us any attention beyond the occasional glance of contempt.

Eric came back with two other guys and made quiet introductions. Leroy was a big bruiser with a pug nose while Bull was short with a shaved head and a bad attitude. The kind of guy who starts bar fights to prove himself, and usually wins.

“Guard sweeps by every five minutes,” Eric whispered as we huddled in the back of the cell, “so we gotta talk fast.”

Bull gave me a hard look. “Eric says you can get us out of here. That true?”

“Do my best,” I said. “What are we up against? How many guards?”

“Too many,” Leroy said. “I know these f*ckers. One rolled up his sleeves, and I saw the triangle tat on his arm. Xerxes. I was in Desert Storm, Fifth Engineer Battalion, that’s where I remember seeing that logo. These guys? They’re f*ckin’ mercenaries. They got no right to operate on American soil.”

Bull curled his lip. “They do if this is a government facility. Think about it, bro. It’s a FEMA camp, just like I been warning you for years.”

Xerxes. Now I knew why the Nevada Heritage Coalition was making secret payments to a private military contractor. They needed help keeping their dirty business under wraps. I wondered if the crew that had ambushed us out in Chloride had tattoos on their arms, too.

“These guys are hard as nails,” Leroy said. “Their gear is no joke, either. Those rifles they’re toting? Tavor TAR-21s. Chop you up like a f*ckin’ Ginsu on full auto.”

“What about a bum-rush?” I said. “Wait for them to open the gate, then we jump the guards?”

Bull and Leroy gave Eric a look. Eric turned to me like a doctor about to tell a patient he has terminal cancer.

Eric shook his head slowly. “Look up.”

I followed his gaze to the sprinkler heads set into the ceiling. There were at least four of them in the cell, more than I’d expect for a fire-control system, but innocent enough.

“The guards think we’re all zombies, so they feel safe shooting their mouths off in front of us. They had a new guy who was bellyaching about, you know, what happens if the cops get wind of what’s going down. The other guard said they can always get more bums, so in case of an emergency—any emergency—the number-one priority is getting rid of the evidence.”

“Get rid of it, how?” I said.

Eric nodded upward. “That sprinkler system isn’t for fires. It runs to a pair of hundred-gallon tanks on the other side of that wall. The tanks are full of concentrated sodium hydroxide.”

“Lye,” Bull said. “If the alarm goes off, for any reason, everyone in this cell melts.”

I leaned my head back against the cinder-block wall and closed my eyes.

“Then we need to up our timetable,” I said.

“Yeah? Why’s that?” Eric said.

“Because I’m just the advance scout. The FBI knows about this place, and in less than twenty-four hours, they’re going to kick in the front door. If we’re still in this cell when they do, we’re all dead men.”





Sixteen



A metallic bang echoed from up the hallway, followed by another inhuman screech. Then a scream of pain, this one all too human, ending in a ragged gurgle.

“Containment breach in two,” a placid voice said over a loudspeaker as a klaxon whined. “Calling all hands for immediate termination protocol. Containment breach in two.”

My stomach clenched as we looked up at the sprinkler heads, poised and ready to rain down with caustic death.

“Door’s closed,” Eric said, squinting at the bars. “That’s not for us.”

Something was coming. A slithering wet stomp sounded from the corridor, and the air filled with the stench of rotting meat.

“Not us,” I whispered. “The breach was the other room. The one where they’re taking people.”

Whatever I’d imagined was slouching its way toward our cell, screeching and limping and hitting the walls with meaty thuds, the reality was worse. The creature rounded the corner and came into sight, turning its eyeless head to face the cage and its prisoners like a butcher eying a fresh slab of meat.

It might have been human, once. It walked on two legs, though one dragged behind it, a bloated and rubbery tube of puckered flesh that twisted and bent like a crazy straw. It had two arms, though one wept with pestilent sores and the other, flailing bonelessly, was lined with hungry little mouths whose yellowed and broken teeth chomped at the rancid air. Its head and chest were overgrown with purple and black tumors and pustules the size of golf balls. The growths blistered and swelled, as if breathing on their own.