“Do what you want. It doesn’t matter,” he said. “I’m dead. You’re dead. We’re all dead, everyone in here.”
“Why would you say that?”
“There are things down there. Worse than you.”
Cade leaned in close and showed his teeth. “There’s nothing worse than me.”
The soldier grinned so hard Cade could see his back teeth. There was a crunch from the soldier’s mouth. A scent of bitter almonds.
The soldier went limp. A cyanide capsule in a false tooth.
Cade dropped the body.
These men were very well equipped, indeed.
He peeled away the scorched shirt, then scavenged a new one from the corpse. From the others, he collected the items he thought he’d need and loaded them all into a backpack.
He kept walking, deeper into the Site.
THIRTY-FIVE
Some of my colleagues question why Cade doesn’t drink human blood when it would make him stronger. I think the more interesting question is, Why is Cade so strong when he refuses to drink human blood? We already know from our studies of Cade and his kind that vampires gain power as they age—whatever processes are at work in them only grow more efficient at survival over time. But we also know that these biological engines are designed to run on human blood, and that animal blood is a lower-grade substitute. Yet, at over a hundred and twelve years since his transformation, Cade shows no signs of disease or degradation. (Indeed, he has already killed vampires stronger than he is.)
—Dr. William Kavanaugh, Sanction V research group
LEVEL FIVE
T
he Snakeheads worked their way through the guards on Level Five quickly. There were only a few of them, and their calls for the ERT were not answered. They were overwhelmed as the Snakeheads came streaming from their cells.
That wasn’t much meat for so many to be fed. Their frenzy ebbed as the facts of their situation began to sink into their brains. Like reptiles, they could feel the vibrations running through the floors of the Site. Like fish, some of their new organs were more sensitive to smell and taste. With their tongues, they could scent bodies filled with warm blood. Instead of turning on one another in a frenzy, the Snakeheads did something new for them, as old instincts woke up in response to their new situation. They began to hunt.
THE DOORS SLID open so easily Zach thought his eyes might be playing tricks on him.
He stood up. He heard a siren squawk and go silent, and then watched as the lights flickered.
He wondered if this was a trap, then felt stupid. Any trap that started with letting him out of a prison cell was very badly designed.
Still. Something was wrong here.
He stepped outside the door. He heard a hissing again.
But this was not the prisoner in the next cell. This came from down the corridor, around a bend.
It was not just one hiss, either. It was the sibilant noise of many snakes rising in chorus. Not all at once, but all together, hissing, as if talking to one another.
Zach noticed all the doors on the cell block were open.
The hissing got louder.
It didn’t take him long to understand. Snakeheads.
All the doors were open.
The hissing got even louder. It was the sound of dozens—maybe hundreds of them—stepping across the threshold of their cells, just as Zach had.
They were all free.
It was only then he noticed the other prisoner in his cell, one door down the hall, one across.
He sat in a restraint chair, a jailhouse appliance that looked like something from a medieval torture chamber. Zach had seen this before, too.
The prisoner was strapped in, unable to move.
“Please. Let me out.”
Zach looked at him, then back over his shoulder. The hissing was getting closer. He could have sworn he heard the clicking of claws as well.
“I know what is happening,” the prisoner said. “They’re coming. Aren’t they?”
Zach looked down the hall. He heard gunfire and a short, strangled scream.
“Please,” the prisoner said, panic creeping into his voice. “Do not leave me in here. You can’t leave me to face those things alone.”
Zach hesitated.
“I swear I will not harm you.”
A human being or a monster. It was really no choice at all.
I am ten different kinds of stupid, Zach thought, even as he ducked inside the cell. He began unbuckling the restraints.
As soon as his right hand was free, the prisoner clouted Zach in the head, knocking him backward and to the floor. He bounced off the wall on the way down, and his vision blurred again.
He lurched upward just as the prisoner got his feet free. He staggered out the door, getting a kick to the side on the way.
Zach’s head still ached from Bell’s blow. Now he was dizzy and sick. He hit the floor hard.
The prisoner hopped out of the cell, moving quickly and surely. In one hand was a shard of metal, a jailhouse shiv, sharpened along one edge.
Zach put his hand up, and the prisoner stabbed at him.
“Idiot,” the prisoner hissed, holding the shard like a knife in front of him. He giggled. Zach had heard the phrase “laughing like a maniac” before. But he’d never actually heard the sound until that moment; a horrible, high-pitched noise like a bird strangling on a worm.
“Don’t do this,” Zach said, struggling to keep his voice calm. “You don’t have to do this. We can still get out of here.”
There was a weird gleam in the prisoner’s eye. “What do you think is happening here? God is coming. He will judge. It’s finally time.”
“You’re wrong,” Zach said. “You don’t know how wrong. It’s not God. Not even close. Come on, man. Don’t be stupid your whole life. You can at least choose a better way to die.”
The prisoner snarled and slashed at him again with the knife. He tensed to leap, to cover the distance between them.
Zach saw it then. Behind the prisoner, light played over a group of round, wet objects, just beyond his shoulder. It looked like a stream running over pebbles.
It took Zach a moment to realize the pebbles were eyes. Lidless eyes with diamond-slitted pupils. Snakeheads. Moving quietly, stalking prey.
Some still had prison uniforms. Others had the A/A corporate fatigues, torn in places, sagging like old paper bags on their changed bodies.
The Snakehead at the lead tensed and prepared to strike.
For a split second, Zach considered warning the prisoner. He could see the low comedy that would ensue, something out of an old movie or cartoon—“Look behind you.” “Oh, no, I’m not falling for that one.” And so on.
But as the Snakehead levered open its jaws, Zach stayed quiet.
The prisoner must have seen something in Zach’s eyes, however. He turned just as the jaws snapped shut.
Zach heard the scream, cut short by the sound of crunching bone. He didn’t see any more, because by then, he was running for his life.
LEVEL FOUR
Sims and Miller were on their way back from the dining hall, locked in their usual struggle. The rest of their squad listened, cheering them on, tallying points.
Like all the A/A employees assigned to the Site, they lived totally belowground for the duration of their tours. It wasn’t too bad, but it could get boring. They had to find their own ways to fill the time. Miller liked to bullshit.
Miller didn’t mean to be a dick, Sims told himself. He was just a little delusional. He told amazing, fantastic, awesome stories—with Miller himself as the hero of each one. The moral of every one of Miller’s stories was how Miller was the most incredible human being in existence. Somehow there was not an incident in his life that didn’t end with him winning a fight, banging some gorgeous chick and meeting some celebrity.
For a long time, Sims listened, half irritated and half entertained, like the others. But it just got under his skin. So he started calling Miller on his shit.
That led to a ritual even more entertaining for the rest of the Archies: watching Miller try to plug every hole Sims found in his lies, and watching Sims’s frustration mount as he did.
Sims tried to ignore it. He really did. But sometimes, it was just too much.
Like right now.
“So I’m banging this chick, who was, I remind you, Miss Nevada USA, right there in the casino—”
“Oh come on,” Sims said. “You mean to tell me, she vanishes for hours while the Miss America pageant is going on and nobody notices?”
“Miss USA pageant,” Miller reminded him. “Much sluttier than the Miss America pageant. Everyone knows that.”
The other guys all nodded, as if saying, sure, everyone knows that.
Sims rolled his eyes. This one looked like it was going to land in familiar territory. Sims would bet anything this adventure ended in another three-way.
“So yeah, I’ve got her ankles locked behind my neck, she’s screaming ‘Harder, harder!’ at the top of her lungs, and I don’t even know where she got the vinyl suit. Of course, this is when her roommate opens the door—”
Called it, Sims thought.
Then sirens wailed to life, at a decibel level designed to induce earsplitting pain. Even Miller had to shut up. Then they cut out with a squawk, leaving them all slightly stunned.
“What the hell?” one of them said.
Some kind of major equipment failure. Something was fucked up, that was for sure.
They milled about near one of the sally ports, unsure if this meant they should return to their stations or their posts.
Then the shutters came down. It was like the air turned to steel over their heads. They all had to jump for it. Sims and Miller just missed being crushed.
That was when they really should have known they were dead. The shutters were designed to come down, to seal off the tunnels, only if there was a breach. It was a fail-safe, hardwired deep into the security systems of the Site.
They weren’t worried about just the prisoners getting out. Any of them could have handled that. But there were pens that held much worse things. The shutters were only supposed to come down if those got out.
It was one of those things in the manual nobody could ever bring himself to really believe. Nobody ever thought any of them would get out. It was, really, too horrible to consider.
On an animal level, they knew it. But in places in their minds, they still had to be convinced. They had to hear the rest.
Down in the dark, at the other ends of the tunnels, they heard something else, faint but unmistakable. The sounds of metal moving against metal, the clanging noise of a hundred doors to a hundred cells opening at once.
Sims finally put his hand on his holster and popped open the snap. The others had already done the same.
The lights flickered. The shadows seemed to get deeper.
Sims’s heart pounded. They were all staring the same way, all waiting to draw.
He heard a noise coming from the dark, like the last stubborn kernels of popcorn in the microwave. A kind of clicking on the concrete floor.
It got louder, and faster.
They all had their guns out now, aimed down the hall. It wouldn’t help. They knew it. But they had to do something.
Sims thought of something that almost made him laugh out loud. He wondered, if he asked, would Miller be able to finish his story?
The first one came skittering around the corner, low and fast. Miller froze where he stood, and it took him down to the floor.
The rest of the Snakeheads came around a second later. Only three of them, but it might as well have been dozens. Something had gone very wrong. Where was the Emergency Response Team? What had happened to the locks?
Even as he thought this, Sims and the others were shooting. They had to do something, even if they knew it wouldn’t work. The Snakeheads were impossibly fast. They leaped up the walls and angled down at the men. Sims watched one whisk a claw past Choi, and then saw Choi’s carotid artery spurt open a second later.
Before he knew it, Sims realized he was on the floor. He wondered when his legs had gone numb.
The creatures stood over him for a moment. He looked up into their blank eyes and wondered what they were waiting for. He was bleeding out.
Whatever it was, he wasn’t going to waste the opportunity.
Somehow he still had his gun. He put it under his chin and pulled the trigger.
Piranhas, when starving, have been known to reduce an entire cow to a skeleton in under a minute. The Snakeheads did the same thing to Sims in just under five, but there were only three of them.