Cruel World(145)

“I know. I’m sorry.”

“What the hell were they doing here?”

“I don’t know.” She ran her hand up his arm, her touch light and soothing. “Maybe it’s gone like everything else.”

They stepped back into the hall, and his gaze trailed along the shoots of bone that disappeared behind the door. The last unchecked door. One more barrier between him and what he wanted.

He moved toward it, Roman’s card already out of his pocket, the reader beside the door glowing red. His hand was on the knob, card sliding, door unlocking.

He turned the handle and stepped inside.

The room was long, stretching away in banks of stainless steel counters and tables covered in microscopes, square canisters, centrifuges, and several unfamiliar boxy pieces of equipment, their digital gauges still lit with numbers holding no meaning. A partial bank of fluorescents glowed at the far end of the room, throwing cold light like freezing water across the floor. To the left, a wall grew to the ceiling, its lower half solid block and steel while its upper was completely glass. The bone growth spanned the entire length of the room, its twisted calcifications reaching between tables and chairs, encompassing others within its folds like magma flowing around a formidable rock it couldn’t melt. Somewhere rain pattered.

Quinn moved farther into the room, taking small, careful steps over arms of bone that reached everywhere. A growl simmered within Denver’s chest.

“Quinn, what are you doing?” Alice asked from close behind.

“There’s something here,” he whispered. “Can’t you feel it?” She didn’t answer, but her steps followed him as he made his way to the opposite end of the room.

The partition between the rooms held a broad set of sliding doors near the back wall. They gaped open like jaws caught in a death cry. The second room was unlit, and the meager light from the fluorescents reached only feet into its space before succumbing to its void. A cool breeze drafted from somewhere as Quinn closed in on the doorway leading to darkness. He paused as he reached the entry, the smell of rot stronger in the air. At his feet, he noticed a layer of grime trailing into the adjoining room from behind him. He bent closer and saw that the dirt was an overlayment of giant footprints leading into and out of the lab.

He stood, his hands shaking as he searched the lower part of the wall, finding a knob mounted on a steel plate.

“Quinn?” There was an edge of worry in Alice’s voice, a tone of warning. But he could stop the movement of his hand no more than he could control the arc of the sun.

His fingers gripped the knob.

Spun it.

Light spread like a wave from the fixtures in the next room.

He stared at what waited in its center and tried not to scream.





Chapter 30



The Belly of the Beast



Alice stepped up beside him. As her eyes focused on what lay beyond, he clapped a hand to her mouth, stifling the cry that tried to break free.

It was clearly an operating room. There was a medical bed against the right wall, stripped and unused. A large light, hooded by reflective glass, hung from the ceiling by an articulating arm. The far end of the room held a counter and a bank of temperature controlled containers, all of them linked to one another, their doors marked with labels too small to read at a distance.

The rest of the area was occupied by mounds of bone.

It grew outward from the center of the space, great sheets of it climbing the walls and smothering anything beneath. The ceiling was completely gone, pieces of broken tile laying everywhere as if a bomb had detonated nearby. In its place the bone threaded between supports and cables, its white mass spliced with light fixtures and steel struts. But the middle of the room held their complete attention, the sight nearly beyond comprehension. Quinn stared at the spectacle, transfixed and trying to quell the mounting horror that grew like a tsunami inside him.

The bone piled to over five feet at the center of the operating space, and protruding from its top was a man’s upper body.

He was slumped toward them, his neck bent forward, chin on chest, his tangled hair askew. One arm was completely encased by the bone while the other remained free. Below his chest he seemed to be fused with the mass of calcification.

“Oh my God,” Alice whispered as she drew his hand away from her face.

“What is it?” Ty asked. Neither of them answered.

Quinn stepped through the open doorway, pausing for an eternity as he listened. Only the dripping of water met his ears. Slowly, he made his way across the room and approached the corpse, Alice and Ty’s footsteps following his. He stopped a pace away from the man and dropped into a crouch, tipping his head to one side to get a better view of the dead man’s face.