The gate rattled shut behind the squad car, sealing us inside.
A garbage truck backed up to a dimly lit loading dock. Electronic beeps split the cold night air. Men in blueprint-colored overalls were milling around, lugging barrels and boxes, directing more trucks along the asphalt lot. Donaghy’s night crew had bloodless, slack faces and sunken eyes. They lurched and lumbered, like their brains couldn’t quite deliver the orders to their arms and legs, something lost in synaptic translation.
I’d seen moves like that before, from dead men walking. Damien Ecko, the last emissary of the King of Worms, raised corpses to serve him. I wondered if his would-be successor had the same bag of tricks. I was studying the workers on the loading dock, trying to get a read on them, when I saw two of them pause for a short conversation.
Not zombies, then. Ecko’s creations were relentless, not to mention capable of punching a hole through a man’s rib cage, but they were basically machines made of meat. Still, something was off about the night crew. I tried relaxing enough to stretch out my psychic senses, then yanked them back like I’d touched a red-hot stove.
This place was radioactive. Maybe literally. A giant, festering boil of toxic power seeping into the ground, the sky, poisoning my city. The squad car pulled around the back of the building, and Santiago killed the engine.
Whatever was in there, I was about to meet it.
14.
At night, the recycling plant slumbered. Faded bars of light, sheathed under plastic grills, cast a dim glow along vast galleries of stained concrete. Machines for sorting and shredding sat motionless; the rusted metal bulks let out faint rumbling sounds, small things scurrying inside the fat and twisting pipes. An ammonia smell clung to the air, strong enough to burn the back of my nose, like the night crew had poured out bucket after bucket of bleach and left it to dry.
Santiago and his partner flanked me as they marched me through the complex, each one taking hold of an arm. The slack-faced watchmen didn’t even look our way. They shambled along with their uneven, twitchy strides, heads swaying like their necks were on steel springs.
This place was a maze of faceless corridors. Emergency lighting cast long, angular shadows across bare stone and unmarked doors. Pipes ran along the walls, bulky and marred with tarnish, corrosion spreading like black mold at every welded seam. The farther we walked, the more patches I saw on the pipes, slabs of misshapen metal welded over blotches of rust.
There was something sick inside this place, an illness running behind its walls, through its pipes, and keeping it contained was a losing battle.
I was feeling sick, too, as the ammonia smell surrendered to the odor it was trying to conceal. It was the stench of roadkill on a sweltering summer day. Like someone had filled a bucket with rotten meat, poured in a gallon of sour milk, and mashed it together into an unholy meal. Bile rose in my throat and I swallowed it down, focusing on my breath.
I wasn’t the only one having a hard time. My escorts were looking green, lips tight, a few flecks of sweat glistening on Santiago’s mustache.
“Almost there,” he breathed. I wasn’t sure if he was telling us or reassuring himself.
Our final stop waited beyond an unmarked door clad in hammered metal sheeting. It was a vaulted chamber of bare concrete, long, dotted with a trio of pits. The holes were maybe ten feet across, smooth cylinders carved into the stone. A dirty yellow ring of paint surrounded each pit, and stenciled letters read Minimum Safe Clearance.
Beyond that, the room was spartan. By the door stood a card table, a couple of folding chairs, and a desk lamp that shed a puddle of hard white light. Santiago grabbed one of the chairs. It scraped, shrill, as he dragged it across the chamber. He plopped it down on the edge of the middle hole, right on the yellow clearance line.
They sat me down with my back to the pit.
“Go tell him,” Santiago said to his partner. The other man left, fast, not bothering to hide how badly he wanted to get out of this room. That made two of us. I started planning my exit strategy.
Santiago tossed my deck of cards, my wallet, and my phone onto the table. Out of reach, but once I got the cuffs off, a good two-second sprint would close the gap. A quick spark of magic to wake the cards up, and I’d have a weapon. That said, two seconds was less time than it would take for Santiago to draw his sidearm and shoot me dead.
I couldn’t be reckless. But with the air caked in that rancid, breath-stealing stench, and faint rustling sounds drifting up from the pit behind me, it took everything I had to keep my nerves in check. I focused on Santiago, trying to give my brain something to do besides worry.
“One question,” I said. “You a real cop, or is that uniform bogus?”
He started poking through my wallet. “Real as the cruiser I drove you in.”
“I’ve seen fake squad cars before.”
“So have I.” He plucked the cash from my wallet, a couple hundred in loose bills, and curled them around his index finger. “Hey, thanks for the donation.”
“You ever hear the phrase ‘adding insult to injury’?”
He shoved the cash into his pocket and flipped the wallet back onto the table.
“You’re about get a lot more than injured, pal.” He glanced my way. “Not by me. I’m just the babysitter.”
“Do you even know who you really work for?”
“Sure,” he said. “The winning team.”
“You used your boy Todd to murder over a dozen innocent kids. That what you call ‘winning’?”
Santiago rolled his eyes. “That’s what I call ‘overcomplicated,’ but I don’t give the orders around here. If it was up to me, you’d already be dead in a dumpster with two shots in your noggin. I like to keep things simple. But my boss has very specific plans to end your ass in a very specific way—don’t ask me why, it’s above my pay grade—and that meant luring you out and taking you alive and undamaged. Speaking of living, can I assume Todd’s not coming back to work?”
“He died slow,” I said. “Not as slow as you’re going to, though.”
“Look at me, I’m shaking.”
The metal door whistled open and Santiago jerked his spine straight like a soldier snapping to attention. His partner hadn’t come back. The new arrival, alone, rustled over the doorway on mismatched legs, one an inch or so shorter than the other. His entire shape was mismatched. Torso too squat, arms too long, a bulbous head oscillating on a spindly neck. He stepped into the light.
He was maybe sixty or so, wearing tufts of salt-and-pepper hair like a crown around his bald and wrinkled scalp. His amber eyes were moons set into his face, his chin a bony spear. He wore a three-piece suit, too big for his frame, and the sleeves dangled halfway down his narrow hands like he was a kid trying to wear his father’s jacket.
Santiago grabbed the other folding chair and rushed it over, setting it down about six feet from mine. Facing me. The man folded himself onto the seat. He curled his knees against his chest and perched there like a bird.
“Hello,” he chirped.
I wasn’t sure what to make of him. Or any of this. “Uh…hi,” I said.
“You can go now.”
He was staring at me, but seeing as nobody moved to get my handcuffs off, I figured he meant Santiago. So did Santiago. The cop gave a nervous little nod of his head as he scampered for the door.
Just the two of us now.
“I’m being terribly rude,” he said. “My name is Elmer Donaghy. It’s a pleasure to meet you, Mr. Faust.”
“Call me Dan. So…this is your place.”
“The business I’ve been entrusted with, yes.” His twitchy fingertips snatched at the air. “Of course, it’s a front, but that doesn’t mean we don’t deliver quality performance! I’m very insistent on things being run properly. Your city’s refuse is in good hands here. You could say that I…refuse to cut corners.”