Harry Grimes collapsed to the sidewalk, glassy-eyed, dead. He never knew what hit him. Just like I promised. He’d figure it out when he woke up in hell.
My crew swarmed in, guardian angels with lockpicks and guns. Bentley went to work on the deli’s front door and Jennifer popped the side of the panel van. We grabbed Harry’s corpse under each arm and hauled him along the sidewalk, leaving a slug smear of scarlet behind.
“How much of that blood is yours?” she asked, nodding at my face.
“All of it. Why? Bad?”
We heaved, once, and tossed the body into the van. The door rattled shut. He’d keep for a couple of days, until somebody noticed the smell and called it in.
“Nothing’s that bad if you’re still breathin’. All the same, oughta get some stitches on that cut.”
“If we have time,” I said. “If Elmer’s not here, there’s a good chance Harry got a warning out to him. I want this whole operation mopped up tonight.”
Tonight was turning into today, with the glow of dawn on the horizon. Bentley got the door open—faster than my best time, the man still had a magic touch—and we got off the street. The deli was stripped bare, just a long counter, a dusty glass case, and stark light from a couple of humming fluorescent tubes over our heads.
On the far side of the abandoned shop, a backroom door hung open with a keypad lock set into the wall beside it. Harry was in too much of a hurry to close up properly. Either that, or Elmer was just beyond the doorway, waiting for us.
“Jen, Cait, you’re with me. Bentley, Corman, and Pix, hold until we give the all-clear.”
I slid a fresh magazine into my gun. No more play-acting tonight.
We crossed the threshold in single file, Jennifer and Caitlin splitting left and right, all eyes hunting for danger. What we found was half private apartment, half mini laboratory, where a wall-mounted cot and a chemical toilet shared space with computer tables and racks of analytic equipment. My gaze drifted to a rounded platform of metal with a drain in the floor, ringed in Plexiglas. I thought it was Elmer’s shower, until I saw the dangling, open manacles.
“The hell were you doing in here?” I muttered to the empty room. Hand-written notes lay scattered across a folding table, with incomprehensible graphs etched onto green-lined graph paper. A camcorder stood on a tripod, pointed toward the empty plastic-walled cell, and a scattering of cassettes joined the clutter beside it. Each tape was marked with symbols, not words or numbers, spiky, boxy glyphs that spoke to some kind of common hierarchy.
Language, I realized, as I saw more of the symbols adorning his charts and notes. Elmer Donaghy was an alien, not from outer space, but a parallel Earth. He’d learned to speak English at some point, but he naturally kept his personal records in his native tongue.
“Clear over here,” Jennifer called out.
“We’re clear,” Caitlin said. She waved the others inside.
Pixie made a beeline for Elmer’s personal computer. She ducked under the desk, yanking cables, tugging his boxy tower out onto the floor and going after the back-panel screws with a multi-tool.
“Touch nothing electronic,” she said. “Leave it for me. If it’s anything like the gear at the waste plant, it’s all booby-trapped ten different ways.”
I pointed to the tripod. “How about the camcorder? This thing looks vintage.”
“Huh?” She glanced over, uncertain for a second, then nodded. “Sure, knock yourself out.”
I picked up a random tape from the pile, fed it into the bulky camcorder’s slot, and leaned into the eyepiece. I rewound and set it for playback. I wanted to see what Elmer had been up to while we were chasing our tails all over the city.
I saw it, all right.
“You sick bastard,” I breathed.
38.
Elmer had a twelve-inch monitor on a rolling cart near the back of his lab. Pixie scrounged some cables, and we hooked up the camcorder for playback so we could get picture and sound. Everyone gathered around the screen and I played projectionist.
“I fast-forwarded through five of the tapes,” I said. “As far as I can tell, this one is the first.”
The camera’s eye was fixed on the cell with the Plexiglas walls. A man, bleary-eyed, wavering on his feet, stood with his wrists in the dangling manacles. They were almost too big for him. He had spindly arms and a shirtless, emaciated chest, ribs poking through his jaundiced skin. The feed was too grainy to show the tracks on his arms, but I knew they were there; I knew a junkie when I saw one, and this guy was a long-term member of the heroin weight-loss program. He had blurry tattoo squiggles on his hip, another over his right nipple that looked like Minnie Mouse. Amateur ink, maybe prison-grade.
“I told you,” he drawled, sounding half-asleep, “this kinky shit costs double.”
Off camera, Elmer’s voice drifted over the speaker like he was trying to put a baby to sleep. “Of course, of course,” he soothed. “Just like I promised.”
His hand appeared in the corner of the frame, opening a leather case. He tugged out a syringe and a band of rubber tubing. The guy in the cell opened his eyes a little wider.
“We gonna party? All right, man. You’re pretty cool.”
“Sure,” Elmer told him. “Let’s party.”
I pressed eject and fed in a second tape.
“This one’s later,” I said, “but I can’t read his writing and these aren’t time-stamped, so I can only guess how long he had this guy locked up in here.”
The prisoner’s hair was one clue. It had been scruffy in the first video; now the tangled locks brushed his shoulders. And now the manacles were just right. He’d put on weight, growing out, and his skin had a healthy sheen to it. He still seemed half-asleep, though, disoriented, his eyes refusing to focus as his head lolled from side to side.
“Subject is…healthy,” Elmer murmured from off-screen. “Taking to the supplements, no rejection of initial treatment. Having to hose him down and shovel out his feces every morning is laborious and irritating, but I can’t risk losing him to a bacterial infection. The humans of this world are fragile. Then again, if they’d had to survive three generations of nuclear fallout, plague spores, and weaponized necromancy, I suppose they’d grow into a more resilient species. One can only hope for the future.”
He chuckled. His hand came into focus, holding up another syringe. Something oily and yellow burbled inside, flecked with gnat-sized black specks.
“No more o’ that stuff,” the prisoner mumbled. “Makes me sick.”
“Oh, it’s just a little something to help with the rigor mortis,” Elmer told him.
“Huh?”
“You’re dead.” He tittered. “You’ve been dead for two hours and fourteen minutes.”
“Man, tha’s…s’not funny.”
“Six times I’ve attempted this experiment. First five subjects were all nonviable long before this point. You, sir…you’re a prize.”
I ejected the tape and reached for the last one. “Brace yourself,” I warned them.
All the same, once it started rolling Pixie grabbed my arm and squeezed, hard.
The man in the cell had gained at least two hundred pounds. His gut, solid flab, hung over his sweatpants and he’d sprouted a double chin. His beady eyes poked from folds of fat, his face swollen. His hands were blue, curled and dead, circulation murdered by the manacles that had buried themselves in the flesh of his engorged wrists.
“Success,” Elmer’s voice whispered, trembling, proud. “Candidate six is a quantified success. We have full bio-factory conversion.”
The man raised his head, as far as his wobbly neck would allow, and let out a faint, wheezing moan. His bulk jiggled, and as the camera zoomed in, we saw movement under his skin. Fist-sized forms scurrying, crawling, infesting his body.
“What Santiago was trying to tell us when he died,” Jennifer said, her voice low. “The breeder is a—”
“Human,” Caitlin replied. “The breeder is a human being.”