Son of Cerberus (The Unusual Operations Division Book 2) (13 page)

It wasn’t until he got back into the woods he realized things had changed again. He didn’t care though. Derek would run and run through the woods without his friend, without his backpack which he had shed and without any thought of food or water until he got back to the car. There, he would call the police and have every single cop, priest, and exorcist that existed descend on the area.

Unfortunately, his friend would never live to see another day.

Brenda had stepped away from the control room in the headquarters of the UOD just moments before the bullets started flying. She didn’t know anything about what had happened or what peril the team was in. Instead, she was very concerned about how large the cup of coffee she had just poured had turned out to be. It was nearly the early morning and she was tired. In fact, she had been so tired she hadn’t even bothered staying awake for most of the slow ride into the Nigerian jungle, as seen by U2 spy plane from far above.

Now, knowing that they were on the cusp of some sort of discovery or other she decided she should stay awake. The only way she was going to do that was by choking down ample amounts of tarry, black coffee. It was dense enough to keep a spoon standing straight up, she was sure.

I’m going to need to bleach my teeth after this crap,
she thought to herself.

“Miss Vaughn?” a mousy woman said behind her. She nearly dropped the coffee, which made her curse out loud before recomposing herself. The nametag on the very short, extremely petite black woman said Sheila. Though her skin was the color of milk-chocolate, she had gentle features and straight hair. The nice clothing she wore told Brenda that she was most likely a senior analyst, or some other subset of more-skilled asset to the UOD.

“That’s me,” Brenda said through her sleepiness. “What’s the big idea?”

“I was hoping to find you here,” Sheila smiled. “I came across some pretty important information I wanted you to look at before I presented it to the rest of the Division higher-ups.”

“Who exactly are you?” Brenda asked, wondering why the woman was trying to find her instead of her own supervisor.

“My name is Sheila Davis; I’m one of the senior medical examiners here.”

“Sounds like a tough job,” Brenda said between yawns. “Do you ever hear from Tiffany Flipske?”

Sheila smiled. Brenda was referring to the damaged woman and sole survivor of the last case their department had worked to solve. Her brother had tied her naked to the floor of a cave in preparation to sacrifice her and bring an end to humanity. He had already killed her entire family and sent her through hell and back before then. She had been given a spot as a senior surgeon in the extremely secretive agency.

“Sometimes I do,” Sheila admitted. “But that’s not what I’ve come to talk to you about. I was present during the autopsies done on the bodies from that ship.”

“So we have you thank for such gruesome pictures?” Brenda chided. “Don’t look too serious, I was only joking. We heard there were some very distinct abnormalities in one of the victims. Did you ever find out any more information on what those abnormalities might be?”

Sheila’s smile widened and an unnatural light filled her dark brown eyes.

“That’s why I’ve come to find you. I think I may have stumbled upon something that could help you in your case to find the girl and figure out what that box is.”

“Both issues resolved at the same time?” Brenda was genuinely intrigued. “Do tell.”

The two grabbed a table together in the break room and Shelia started spreading files out before her. Some seemed old while others had just recently been filled with page after page of technical and medical data.

“Well,” Sheila started, “it begins with World War II and a document called the Cerberus Project. It’s from a British source and it simply claims that men and women were dying too rapidly during the war. The project, operating under the guise of saving thousands or hundreds of thousands of lives, was given the thumbs up in late October of 1941.

“What followed was an exciting new look into the prospects of medicine in their time. They used calculations to factor in the worst areas in the war and moved the entire project to a discreet location that was tallying up an enormous amount of casualties.”

“Shouldn’t have been too hard for a war that killed over 70 million people,” Brenda said between sips of coffee. “When does this get interesting?”

“Well,” Sheila continued, unabashed. “Do you know much about Greek and Roman mythology?”

“I guess,” Brenda said. “Cerberus was a three-headed dog, right?”

“That’s right.” Sheila had fire in her eyes. “Cerberus was the three-headed dog that guarded the River Styx. He was charged with never letting a soul cross the river back into the realm of the living.”

Brenda was starting to feel the importance of the project’s name.

“Doctors were trying to bring the dead back to life?” Brenda asked.

“Not exactly,” Sheila went on. “The truth is far more gruesome than that. The plan that doctors had devised included first killing patients—”

“Killing patients?” Brenda asked incredulously.

“They theorized that since the human body produces an extremely small amount of electricity, that electricity must be somehow correlated to the soul. What they hoped is that they could simply store the life-force of a human being in giant capacitors. This way, the corpse would be dead while doctors worked to stop bleeding or reattach limbs while the life-force of the person remained intact within the capacitor.”

“Sounds like a longshot to me,” Brenda joked. “So how did they plan on charging the capacitors?”

“By passing huge amounts of electricity through the dying soldier. While they were electrocuted on one side, a battery collected the current and stored it on the other.”

Brenda remained silent. The mere thought of coming in off the battlefield only to have your own people kill you via electrocution was enough to make her feel something other than good. She wondered immediately how many people had had to endure such treatment.

“No more than a couple dozen,” Sheila answered the unspoken question. “They figured out pretty quick how stupid they had been and scrapped the entire mission. The paperwork was kept intact, however, which made for a pretty interesting read.”

“Go on,” Brenda was very much involved in the story now.

“Well, those present often referred to some of the components as ‘parts of the crazy machine’. It was used so much that they put the nickname in the paperwork along with a description of why. You see, one of the machines that were supposed to be focusing the ‘life-force’ of the individual ended up emitting high amounts of energy. The energy coming out of this thing was so intense it gave many people hallucinations which lasted only as long as the machine was turned on.”

“Sounds a little too familiar to be a coincidence,” Brenda said, slurping down another large slug of coffee. “Any documentation on where the machines might have ended up?”

“This is where it gets interesting,” Sheila said. “The machine itself is comprised of a few different components—the crystal inside only being one of many. Apparently it’s already common knowledge that the crystals come from a failed diamond mine in Nigeria. What you may not know is that the patent to the machine was sold to a former colleague of Mr. Lambert Frederickson. He acquired the rights back in the fifties. Nothing ever came of it and this is the first recurrence we’ve seen of any machines that even resemble the ones used in World War II, but it just seems a little odd.”

“Does the former colleague also hold stock in the diamond mine?”

“No,” Sheila said flatly. “In fact, he died in nineteen seventy-three. The cause of death was never quite figured out, but there is yet another coincidence we can’t pass up.”

Brenda was starting to bite the inside of her lip. There was too much information for her to guzzle down at once and she felt as if she needed a pen to keep her thoughts in order. Whatever the situation, she was getting information that would have to be passed onto Gregory and the rest of the team. It might even be beneficial to her colleagues in Nigeria at this very moment.

“Spill it.” Brenda wanted to forge ahead. “What was it?”

“The man, Roscoe Billings, died from an intense fever at the ripe old age of fifty-one. He had been seeing doctor after doctor for years about a fever he couldn’t control that just kept coming back. The tests done on him never indicated he was anything but healthy. In fact, the doctors just blamed the entire ordeal on his immune system. Apparently Roscoe got sick a lot, and had a hardly noticeable temperature abnormality.

“When he died, the doctors did an autopsy on Roscoe. What they found was a body that had been mistreated by what they figured might be alcohol for years. Wrinkled, diseased-looking organs were all that they found.”

Brenda froze. The implication had finally hit her. The similarities between the man they had pulled off the ship and this man were too obvious. She would have never seen the symptoms as part of a larger illness without Sheila. Now, she had too much information to syphon through in the short time that she had to present it to Gregory.

“You’re going to have to come let my boss know all of this,” Brenda said flatly. “He’ll want to know immediately.”

“So you don’t think this is some crazy coincidence?” Sheila looked genuinely relieved. “I wanted to ask you because you used to be an analyst and you work so closely with the field agents. I would hate to present something that Mr. Scott might find irrational.”

“You may have solved a rather large part of this puzzle,” Brenda said, patting Sheila on the arm. “Have you been able to figure out anything more about why these organs look so diseased, yet function properly?”

“No.” A look of disappointment passed over Sheila’s face. “It’s not like anything we’ve seen before. They aren’t really diseased in any sense of the word. The discoloration looks as if they may have some sort of chemical burns, or like they’ve been cooked quite honestly. It doesn’t stem from any underlying illness, though, nor does it come from excessive alcohol intake or any other drugs that we can see.”

“Maybe it’s something new?” Brenda prodded. “I’ve seen reports lately of a new drug circulating the world that’s capable of burning entire hunks of flesh off if done too much.”

“We did an analysis on blood, stool, urine, and the flesh itself. There are no foreign chemical agents present. That also wouldn’t account for the man who died in the seventies. If there were enough drugs inside these people to cause this kind of damage in the intestines, you’d best believe we would be able to trace them down.”

Brenda sucked her teeth. She knew there had to be some underlying cause that would damage tissue inside the human body, but had no idea where to start. Perhaps it was because of the high amount of energy pouring off of the machine, or maybe even because of some occult practice the group might be delving into. Regardless of what she thought, she needed to get the information to her boss as quickly as possible.

She sighed heavily and sucked down another big sip of coffee. She wouldn’t be finding any sleep during the day and quite possibly the following night. It meant that she would be drinking huge amounts of coffee to keep her awake for what could prove to be days, not hours. She knew then why the military had experimented with methamphetamine.

Gregory can do it,
she thought to herself.
If that old oaf can, then so can I.

The sudden sound of running footsteps broke her out of her thoughts. An analyst who had been helping Phillip and Brenda set up the communications for the drone and U2 spy plane feeds came running around the corner. As he did, he slipped and slammed hard onto the ground, soda can flying from his flailing arms. His white shirt and yellow tie were immediately covered in the dark liquid, yet he didn’t seem to mind.

He had his eyes dead set on Brenda.

“You need to get back to the control center,” he said in a very serious voice, which was high for his age. “Phillip said the team has come under attack. Marcus and Henry are both missing.”

Marcus hadn’t seen the death of Stewart coming, but his powers of intuition had kicked in quickly enough to keep him from plummeting to his own death. When the dying man had stumbled into him, knocking him over onto his backside and then backwards into the well, his mind was already working a thousand miles per hour. The inside of the well was roughly hewn from the natural bedrock, but provided no purchase for the rapidly falling Marcus. He didn’t see any way out of his immediate predicament, yet knew that somehow he would come out of this particular incident without harm.

His foresight proved right, for the most part. After about twenty feet he came down hard directly on top of a pile of dead bodies. Their bloated corpses made his impact less severe, yet the hard skulls, elbows, and knees jutting out in every direction meant that he didn’t come out of it unharmed. In fact, Marcus found it hard to move his legs for the better part of five minutes due to the large amount of well-placed bruises he received all at once.

Though it was nearly pitch black, Marcus quickly realized he was lying in a pit of bodies. He scrambled to the side and off the mass as quickly as he could, trying hard to keep down the large amounts of bile he felt rising in his esophagus. The men and women who had taken the town had massacred everyone they could get their hands on. It made him feel sorry for the ones who lived to see their loved ones thrown down this stinky hole.

Wind tousled his hair from behind. Marcus remembered a similar incident when the dead were not so happy to see him. With that thought in his mind, he pulled his shoulder-holstered pistol out and flipped on the light. His carbine had been lost, somewhere, and he wasn’t about to go digging through corpses to find it when bullets could start raining down on him any second.