Island 731 (30 page)

Security cameras, but no locks?

Cool air rushed out of the building, quickly drying the sweat coating his body. His skin grew stiff, but the air-conditioning was a welcome change. Hawkins stepped into the dimly lit building, rifle at the ready. His eyes quickly adjusted to the lower light provided by the windows wrapping around the building and he nearly fired off a shot.

He was surrounded by monsters.

But they weren’t moving. Or even living. Like the ancient, jarred specimens at the abandoned laboratory, the figures surrounding him were suspended in liquid. Unlike the old lab, these tall glass containers were powered. The hum of electricity and air-conditioning filled the space. Bubbles rose slowly through the gel-like liquid surrounding the bodies, which were mostly concealed in shadow. Tubes dangled down from the black covers like jellyfish tendrils, some floating free, others connected to flesh. Hawkins could see that most, if not all, the specimens had once been human beings, but exactly what had been done to them was concealed by gloom.

He stepped farther in, gaping at the scope of the building and the number of horrors it contained. The circular building was open in the middle, but had three floors of metal grates around the circumference. Metal stairs provided access to each floor, as did a service elevator at the back of the space. The outer walls of each level, including the bottom floor, were lined with specimen tubes. Hundreds of them.

The center of the lowest floor held four oversize glass tanks arranged like a four-leaf clover, creating a kind of hallway around the room. Hawkins headed right, looking for cameras or a living occupant. He didn’t think he’d find Joliet here, but there might be some clue about who had been operating the facility since the Second World War.

Warped faces concealed in shadow seemed to stare at him as he passed. Who were these people? How did they get here? By the time Hawkins reached the far side of the surreal storage facility he had far more questions than answers.

A dull
clunk
spun him around. He nearly called out, “Who’s there?” but thought better of it. He ducked down and moved against one of the tall glass cylinders at the center of the space. It wasn’t exactly a prime hiding spot, since all the containers held clear liquid, but this one also held something large that provided some small amount of cover, though it also blocked his view of the doors.

The room lightened for a moment as the entrance swung open. Hawkins watched the light shift as someone entered. An ominous click echoed off the glass cylinders. Feet shifted over the concrete floor. Whoever had joined him was either really bad at being quiet or had no idea he was there. When a bell jingled, Hawkins was almost certain that the intruder wasn’t aware of his presence. He considered the idea that a goat had somehow opened the door and entered, but he could hear someone whispering to themselves. The words were impossible to make out, but the tone was clearly frustrated. Had he managed to elude the cameras after all?

Something clanged. A whispered curse followed the sound. And then, light.

The interior of the building exploded with light as bright as day. The sudden illumination made Hawkins squint. He looked at the floor while his eyes adjusted. When he turned his eyes up again, a face stared at him, just a few inches away.

Hawkins shouted in surprised and spilled back, dropping the rifle.

A battle cry filled the chamber as the person by the door charged around the hallway. A bell jangled with each heavy step.

Hawkins scrambled for the rifle. He snatched the barrel, dragged it to him, and spun to face his attacker.

But the man had already stopped his assault. He stood in the aisle, ax raised above his head, a look of relief spreading across his face.

Hawkins lowered the rifle. “Bray!” He jumped to his feet as Bray lowered the ax.

“You’re alive!” Bray said.

“I was going to say the same thing about you. I thought you went over the falls.”

Bray shook his head. “Woke up on the riverbank at dawn. Followed the path in the direction I saw Joliet taken. Figured that’s where you would have gone. Did you see Cahill?”

“I was unconscious beneath him,” Hawkins said. “In the ferns.”

“God,” Bray said. “I must have walked right past you. I steered clear of the path until I was beyond him. Was wicked sick. Nearly lost it.”

Hawkins looked Bray over. He looked in no worse shape than he had the night before. “How did you get here?”

“You mean, how did I get past the drakes and King Cow?” Bray held up a bell and gave it a shake. “You were right. Works like a charm. Give it a ring every few seconds and it’s like you’re invisible.”

Hawkins would have preferred to stay focused on Bray, but his attention slowly shifted back to the face he’d seen. He turned to the large tank behind which he’d hidden and felt his stomach twist.

Bray followed his gaze and jumped back. “Ahh!” After recovering from his surprise, he said, “You know, I was starting to hope I’d become jaded to this shit, but it just gets worse and worse.”

Hawkins stepped closer to the tank, trying to count the number of naked bodies jammed inside. He stopped at twenty-three. The men and women inside the tank had looked like a ball of multicolored flesh. Intertwining limbs mixed with the thin tubes descending from the tank’s top made the various people look like a singular organism. When Hawkins saw the stretched skin and thick stitching binding them together, he realized that’s exactly what they’d been turned into.

“Where did all these people come from?” Hawkins asked.

“I don’t know,” Bray said, “But they haven’t been here very long.” He pointed to a tattoo on a man’s shoulder. “That’s a Patriots logo. Flying Elvis. They didn’t start using that design until 1993. And honestly, the Pats weren’t really tattoo material until at least 2002.”

Hawkins leaned closer, looking at the faces. “Some of these people are Japanese, I think.”

“Really?” Bray put his hands against the glass. “You’re right. Why would they do this to their own—”

Pulse, pulse, pulse
.

Bray rubbed his ear.

Hawkins flinched back.

“What is it?” Bray asked.

“Did you feel that? In your ear?”

“Yeah, but—”

Pulse, pulse, pulse
.

Hawkins scanned back and forth with the rifle. Was something in here with them? Was Jim just outside the door? Finding nothing, Hawkins lowered the rifle and looked back at the large tank.

Twenty-three pairs of eyes now stared back at him.

37.

“Oh shit, oh shit,” Bray said, staring at the tank full of bodies bound together. “They’re alive!” He backed away from the large tank until his back struck a smaller tank at his back. A
thunk
on the glass spun him around. A suction cup with a gnawing mouth inside was stuck where his head had been.

Hawkins saw the man-thing—a human body lacking arms, but with the face of some kind of bottom-feeding fish—lunge at Bray. He jumped forward and caught the man as he stumbled away. Had the creature not been contained in the glass, it would have easily caught Bray.

“They’re waking up,” Hawkins said. All around the room, monstrous creations were beginning to move. Some, with limbs, pounded on the glass. Some were enraged, others horrified. But they all wanted the same thing. Out.

Hawkins took two steps toward the exit, pulling Bray behind him, when one of the containment units tipped and shattered on the concrete floor. Viscous gel exploded across the floor, turning the path to the double doors into a slick mess. The freed creature just writhed, its large, limbless body useless.

These are the failures
, Hawkins thought.

He pushed forward, intending to slosh through the gelatinous puddle, but a second explosion of glass and gel stopped him in his tracks. The creature that emerged had a powerful chimplike body. Its face was distorted, like some kind of pushed-in pig’s snout. It turned toward them as gel dripped from its black fur-coated limbs. The creature snapped its jaws open and closed, revealing a mix of long incisors and canines—like a beaver’s teeth combined with a wolf’s. A nasty bite.

Hawkins raised the rifle to fire, but a sudden alarm sounded, distracting him and the creature. Warning lights flashed all around. A voice spoke, in English. “Warning. Containment breach detected. Burn will commence in one minute. Please vacate immediately.”

Hawkins pulled the trigger.

The creature spun with a squeal as the round punched through its chest and burst out its back.

“Let’s go!” Hawkins resumed his charge for the door, but more shattering glass stopped him. Something large stepped out of one of the center tanks, cutting off his path. He fired twice, but only managed to get the monster’s attention. With a grunt, it turned toward him. The bulbous body was hairless. Sagging gray flesh covered much of its features, but not the tusks protruding from beneath its jowls, or the claws on its hands, which looked more like talons than actual hands.

Hawkins backed away and shouted in surprise when Bray took his shoulder.

“We can’t get out that way,” Bray said. “But maybe up there!” He pointed to the ceiling above the third-floor walkway, where a ladder led to a hatch in the ceiling. “I saw a ladder running down the outside.”

Hawkins didn’t wait. By his count, they had just thirty seconds to escape the “burn,” and it didn’t take a genius to figure out what that meant. The path to the elevator at the back of the room had been blocked by a spreading layer of gel and waking creatures that either flopped on the floor or gathered their wits. “The stairs!” he shouted, charging up the metal steps.

As they rounded the top of the stairs, a resounding crash split the air over their heads. Clear gel rained down from the floor above, coating the men. Hawkins winced as the scent of noxious chemicals and excrement covered his body. But still, he ran. The countdown would not wait for him to clean himself off.

At the top of the third floor, the creature that had escaped its containment vessel and covered Hawkins and Bray with fluid got to its feet. It had the body of a lynx and the head of a lop-eared bunny. At first glance, the thing appeared pitiful and harmless, with its water-logged, long ears. But it had the cat’s aggression, and dove for Hawkins’s leg, retractable claws extended, sharp incisors ready to puncture flesh.

Bray swung down hard with a shout, separating rabbit from cat. As the body convulsed, the pair ran to the ladder.

Glass shattered all around them. The cries and shrieks of the escaped chimeras began to sound like a zoo full of agitated animals—which wasn’t far from the truth.

“Ten seconds,” came the feminine voice. “Nine.”

“Go!” Hawkins shouted.

Bray started up the ladder rungs. Hawkins followed close behind. Bray paused at the hatch. He fought with the lever for a moment, but then tugged it ninety degrees counterclockwise, unlocking the hatch.

“Five.”

Bray pushed up the hatch with a grunt and climbed quickly up.

“Three.”

A loud hiss below Hawkins turned his eyes down as he climbed. A mist of liquid shot from nozzles all around the large chamber.

“Two.”

Hawkins emerged into the light of day, yanked his feet out of the hole, and rolled to the side.

“One.”

Bray slammed the hatch shut, but didn’t lock it. Instead, he dove away from the hatch and covered his head.

A muffled
whump
rippled through the concrete. The roof shook beneath Hawkins.

The unsecured hatch rocketed open and then, torn from its hinges, launched into the air, chased by a forty-foot-tall column of fire. Heat washed over Hawkins. He covered his face and rolled away from the flames.

Then, as quickly as it began, the flames shrank away. Whatever fuel had been sprayed into the building’s interior had been burned away. And since the majority of the building’s contents—concrete, metal, and glass—didn’t burn, the building structure remained intact. Black smoke—all that remained of the twisted menagerie—billowed from the open hatch.

“If they didn’t know where we were before,” Bray said, climbing to his feet, “they know now.”

Hawkins stood. “They knew before.”

“You think the pressure we felt was some kind of signal?”

With a nod, Hawkins said, “I felt the same thing before Jim attacked. He had some kind of implant where his ears should have been.”

Bray winced.

“I think that pressure we’re feeling is actually a sound. A tone maybe. Just out of the range of human hearing. I think most of the chimeras here, with the exception of the crocs, have been trained to obey audio commands. The tones. The bells. The—”

“—horn,” Bray finished. “We heard it just before DeWinter was taken.”

“And before Joliet was taken.”

As though on cue, the horn ripped through the air. The deep bass tremble of the horn sounded louder than ever. Both men covered their ears until the five-second-long blast finished.

Hawkins raised the rifle. He’d lost count of the number of rounds he had left, but thought there were at least three or four. But there was nothing to shoot. They stood alone atop the massive, slightly domed roof. Most of the 360-degree view was jungle, but Hawkins could see the orchard, garden, and farm beyond. On the other side of the building was a dirt road that wrapped around a bend. Hawkins drew an imaginary line where he thought the road would lead and found a bit of light gray concrete that signified the presence of another, newer building. He pointed to it. “Let’s go that way.”

Bray headed to the building’s side. “The ladder is over here.”

Just a few steps into his dash for the ladder, Bray flinched and grabbed his shoulder. “Ow!”

Hawkins rushed to his side. “What happened?”

“Felt like something stung me,” Bray said.

Hawkins knew that bullet wounds could sometimes feel like insect bites when the victim had no context for the pain. It would hurt like hell a few seconds later, but the initial pinch of bullet piercing skin could be deceptively minor. He pulled Bray’s hand away from his shoulder and was happy to see no blood. What he did find was a small, oily stain and the remains of a small plastic capsule.