The Dying of the Light (Book 3): Beginning (42 page)

Nothing. Silence. No shots, no nothing. She glanced around the door, and when nothing happened, she rushed into the room. She ended up in a crouch against the wall and looked around the spacious quarters. Spacious for a bunker, anyway.

Empty.

She cleared the small suite fast, knowing the layout from the similar quarters her parents shared in Bunker One. She could’ve navigated the rooms blindfolded in the dark if need be. There was no one here. This worried her, because they still hadn’t found Dagger yet.

“Hunter One, negative contacts. He’s not here.”

“Roger, Four,” Marquez replied. “Proceed at your discretion.”

She couldn’t help but hear some unknown strain in his voice. Something was going on. Where the fuck was this Dagger guy? She moved back out into the hallway, knowing that whatever was up Marquez’s ass, she still had a job to do, and they had the shit-smelling room to clear yet. She walked over to stand beside the last door, on the other side of it from Foretti.

“What the hell is in there, do you think?” she asked.

Foretti shook his head. “Fuck if I know, but it ain’t gonna be pretty, that’s for damned sure.”

Eden sighed. “Let’s get it over with. Get the door?”

Foretti nodded, and his eyebrows shot up when the handle turned in his hand. He glanced at her and shrugged, and she readied her rifle. Foretti turned the handle all the way and pushed the door open. A wave of noxious odor wafted out, and Eden coughed and covered her mouth.

What had been horrible with the door shut was now toxic.

“Hunter One, be advised, MOPP gear recommended. Something fucking died in one of these rooms, and you’ll need it.”

“Understood, Four.”

Eden reached down to the pocket on her leg and pulled her MOPP mask from its storage. Sliding the full-head mask on, she adjusted the collar and filter and looked out the plastic eyeholes. She saw Foretti doing the same thing and nodded. There was no way either of them could go in there without protection. The smell was just too bad. When she was sure that Foretti was ready, she turned through the doorframe and covered the room. It was a small suite, similar to but not as large as the commander’s quarters.

The living room with a built-in desk area to one corner appeared normal, if old and dirty. Unknown stains and trash lay strewn about, and the furniture was torn and broken in places. Even one of the lights was out overhead, but nothing they’d found explained the smell. Even trash left to rot for years wouldn’t be
that
bad. The door to what Eden knew was the bedroom was closed, and the kitchenette was empty except for, again, trash. The single bathroom door stood open, and Eden motioned for Foretti to take that as he came through the door.

She maintained cover on the bedroom door while her partner investigated the bathroom. The light clicked on and off as Foretti glanced around, but when he came out shaking his head, she knew that whatever it was had to be in the bedroom. They both approached the single door in the wall, and the smell got much worse, even through the filters. She felt her gag reflex start to act up, and she swallowed hard to overcome it. There were few worse things than losing your lunch in full MOPP gear.

Foretti didn’t appear much better, his eyes tearing up from what she could see through the mask. But he was there with her, ready to open the door and find whatever horror lay within. She squared her shoulders and almost took a deep breath before thinking better of it. She held up three fingers, counting down for her partner, and on one, they burst through the door, each taking a side and covering the room.

Eden’s mind couldn’t register the scene right away. It came to her slow, as though her brain were filtering out the worst in bits and pieces so she wouldn’t run screaming. The room was dark, only a single lamp to her right in one corner providing dim illumination through a red shade. What little light it provided was enough to show what she thought at first was dark maroon paint on the walls until she realized it was dried blood.

The carpet was gone, and the concrete flooring underneath was stained the same color. There was a layer of human waste covering most of it. The only furniture was the lamp in the corner. Some sort of metal contraption hung against the wall opposite the door, with the framework extending onto the ceiling midway across.

Her mind finally filled in the gaps and let her see what it had been protecting her from. What had once been a man was naked and hung by his wrists from shackles fitted into tracks on the ceiling framework. His feet were shackled to tracks on the wall, running vertically until both sets of tracks met at a curved section near the ceiling.

The man could be rotated from a vertical position to one hanging face-down from the ceiling. Not that the word “man” applied in this case. He was dead, his skin dried and paperlike, almost like the images of mummies she’d seen in old movies. His hair was gone, as was most of his scalp.

She noticed other things in flashes. He’d been castrated. His fingers were almost gone, except for nubs. Same with the toes. Tubes entered and exited his body through multiple orifices, all tied together with neat zip-ties, leading across the metal framework and down to a hole in the wall that must’ve led to the kitchen on the other side.

His teeth were missing, at least as far as she could see, and both ears. The eyes were gummy and white, staring out of his skull at nothing. He wore a spiked dog collar with a tag. A flash of gold on his forehead drew her attention, and she found an AEGIS uniform nametape stapled to his forehead. The gold stitching of his name and on the border of the badge was what had drawn her attention, and the name matched that on the collar’s tag.

“Celero, Alpha Four, how copy?”

“Little busy here, Four. What can I do for you?”

“Can you have one of your guys run a check in the bunker roster for someone named Davies? I’ve found his body.”

“On it. I’ll get back to you. Ops out.”

Eden hadn’t moved from her position near the door. Movement caught her eye and she spun to face the door, where she saw Foretti coming back in, even though she hadn’t seen him leave. He was coughing and adjusting his mask.

“Sorry,” he said, shaking his head. “Couldn’t take it. Almost got my mask off in time. At least the sink still had running water.”

She nodded, a small part of her envious that he could just get past it like that.

“What do we do with him?” Foretti asked.

“You leave him there, Hunter,” a new voice from behind them said, and Marquez strode into the room, his MOPP gear in place. “Who knows what that son of a bitch did to this poor bastard, but we have more important thi—”

A gasp and moan from the figure chained to the wall cut off whatever the captain had been about to say as all three of the Hunters spun around. Eden only just stopped herself from pulling the rifle’s trigger.

“Holy fuck, he’s still alive,” she said. “No fucking way.
No fucking way
!”

The thing that had once been Davies thrashed on the metal framework, and where it got the strength, Eden had no idea.

“Hunter Four, this is Celero. Got that info for you.” When Eden didn’t respond, Celero continued. “Get this, he was Dagger’s XO up until about ten years ago. There’s nothing more about him in the files after that. What killed him?”

“Uh…” Eden didn’t know what to say, but it didn’t matter.

“Never mind that, Lieutenant,” Marquez said. “Get back to what you were working on.”

“Yes, sir. Ops out.”

Marquez stepped closer to Davies, who thrashed harder, biting and moaning at the Hunter. “Did you see this? This bite?”

Eden stepped closer, willing herself not to look away, to look where her CO was pointing. There, on the side of the man’s neck, a clear walker bite that she’d somehow missed. It didn’t surprise her, given the horror of the scene, but it made sense. No wonder he—it—was still thrashing around. She was surprised it hadn’t torn itself loose somehow.

“Dagger chained this guy to this… whatever this is, tortured him for who knows how long, and then made him into a walker. Probably tortured him after that too. How did this fucking guy ever pass the AEGIS psych evals?” Marquez stared at the chained walker as he spoke.

Eden knew it was a rhetorical question and didn’t bother answering. But she also knew what had to be done. It was, after all, a walker. Before either of the men in the room could react, she drew her knife and plunged it into the temple of the dead man, releasing him from the hell to which Dagger had consigned him.

Marquez cleared his throat and spoke. “All right, fall back to the hallway. We don’t need to be in here. Who knows what the fuck else the man did in here. Good call on the MOPP gear, Blake.”

“Yes, sir,” she said and followed Foretti back to the hallway. As soon as Marquez had exited and closed the door behind him, she slumped back against the wall farther down the hallway, out of reach of the stench. She let the rest of the Hunter team Marquez had brought with him secure the area. She needed a break.

Eden pulled off her mask and breathed deep of the fresher air in the hallway. Between stories she’d heard of Henry Gardner and Jack Warner from her parents, she thought the worst humans in existence were long gone. As it turned out, they were nothing compared to Malcolm Dagger.

Marquez stopped a few feet away, looking troubled without his mask. He spoke into his mic. “AEGIS Actual, Hunter One. Sir, I’ve got something… It’s horrible, sir. We need you on Level Six, officer country, sir.”

“On my way, Hunter One. Stand by.”

Marquez slid down the wall to rest next to Eden. “What the fuck.”

Eden couldn’t help but agree with him. What the fuck indeed.

Operations Center
Bunker Four
Charlotte, Iowa

The tension in the air was thick as Celero and his team worked hard to overcome the lockout that Dagger had placed on the missile’s control systems. Anderson knew they were doing their best and left them to it. There was nothing more he could do here, so he walked out of Ops to the main elevator area. It had been in constant motion for two hours, ever since he’d realized the depths of Dagger’s depravity and exactly what the man had planned.

A shout from the elevator caught his attention as the huge platform rumbled up from the floor below. Refugees packed the lift, standing shoulder to shoulder and parents carrying their children in makeshift slings on their backs or on hips. It was a wonder that even that great machine could haul that many people at once, but it did so without a hitch. They were evacuating upwards of 250 people at a time with the main elevator. As he pressed through the throng waiting their turn to head upward, he saw that the emergency ladders were also in use as well as the secondary elevator banks at either end.

It would be close, but they’d get everyone out in time, according to their best estimates. The planes, trucks, and vehicles of every shape and size that they’d enlisted covered the ground outside the base entrance. The video from the surface showed organized chaos, with refugees fleeing in anything that would or could carry them. Though the bunker no longer had its full complement of inhabitants, what with the depredations of Dagger and his crew over the last twenty-five years, there were still thousands of people to get clear, and that was no small feat.

What Anderson was most happy to see were the evacuated folks returning in whatever they could scrounge to save even more people. It did his heart good to know that not everyone who’d been subject to the evil here had become evil themselves.

“Sir, I’ve got something… It’s horrible, sir. We need you on Level Six, officer country, sir.” Marquez had gone down with his Hunter teams to search for Dagger, and now he’d found something, Anderson guessed.

“On my way, Hunter One. Stand by.” Anderson strode over to one of the secondary elevator banks and held the door of the next car that opened. Its occupants poured out—more refugees from the lower housing levels—and he stepped in. Inserting the ident card Peltmeyer had given him, Anderson overrode the elevator’s standard operations and headed straight for Level Six.

When he exited the elevator, he immediately noticed the smell. The secondary elevator banks were closer to officer’s country, and he wondered just what Marquez and his team had found. He had no need to ask where they were. He just followed his nose.

As he entered the hallway leading to what he now recognized as the commander’s quarters, he put a hand to his nose to block the stench. Marquez noticed him and walked over.

“It’s what’s left of Davies, sir. I might have… misspoken, sir. You don’t really need to see this. We can clean it up or just toss in a grenade and shut the door.”

Anderson frowned. “Find anything important other than the body? Like where our friend Dagger might be hiding? Or how long ago Davies died? Or any other intel from the room? He must’ve spent time here.”

“Those… Those are all good questions, sir, and I should have answers for you. We were all a little distracted by what we found. Davies, I mean.”

A female voice called out from inside the room. “Sirs, I found something.”

Anderson started to walk into the room, but Marquez stopped him with a hand on the general’s shoulder. Anderson looked at the hand, then back at the captain, who snatched it back as if burned.

“Sorry, sir, but you’ll need MOPP gear. We don’t know what pathogens could still be inside.”

Anderson leaned around Marquez to look down the hallway and saw Blake resting against the wall with the others who were closer to the door in question, all still wearing their masks. Even from here, he could smell why.

“Roger that,” Anderson said, turning to the nearest soldier and holding out a hand. “Your mask, soldier.”

Foretti shook his head and stuffed his mask back into his leg pocket. “Sorry, sir, but you really don’t want that one.”

He looked ashamed, and Anderson raised an eyebrow. “Excuse me?”

“Well, sir, I… uh… I got sick in that one, sir. Trust me, you don’t want it.”

Anderson grunted and turned back to Marquez. “Let’s go, Captain.”