“Thank you,” Andrew said.
As he turned to leave, Moore clapped a hand against his arm. “They’re inside the building,” he said, his voice grave and oddly gentle. “She’s already dead, son.”
Andrew frowned. “I’m not your son,” he said, jerking free of Moore’s grasp. “And you’re wrong.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
“Dani!”
Ten minutes later, hopelessly lost in the belly of the laboratory building, Andrew turned in a clumsy circle, screaming his damn fool head off.
“Dani,” he cried again, his voice hoarse, bouncing off the white-washed walls, industrial-grade linoleum floors and ceiling tile panels. He’d tried to remember Moore’s directions, had muttered them over and over again to himself after he’d left the storeroom, but had lost track of just how many rights he took before hanging a left, or down which corridor he was supposed to turn when.
One twenty-seven. He remembered the office number Moore had given him, but to that point, all of the doors he’d seen had looked alike and non-descript, and those that had been numbered all seemed to fall in the one hundred-eighty-something range.
At some point along the way, the emergency lights had winked out, plunging the house of pain into abrupt and absolute darkness. Whether the back up generator had given out, or something more sinister had happened, Andrew didn’t know. But he’d frozen, eyes flown wide, gripped with an overwhelming, child-like fear of the blackened hallway, the unshakable certainty that something was out there, screamers hunkered down and lurking, watching him.
Once he’d snapped out of that initial, terrified paralysis, he had inched his way forward. Now, still submerged in darkness, he swung the pistol back and forth in one hand, panning his aim nervously ahead of him. With the other, he fumbled along the nearest wall, using it to guide him.
“Dani,” he shouted out again. His voice cut short when he felt his foot connect with something heavy, solid and semi-soft on the floor in front of him, almost like an oversized sand bag.
What the fuck? He danced to the left, nearly falling over in panicked fright. His heel settled again onto something firm but yielding underfoot, lumpy enough to trip him.
“Jesus,” he yelped as he crashed onto his ass, sitting down hard against the floor. The pistol jarred loose from his hand upon the impact, and he heard a loud clatter as it hit the floor, then skittered away, unseen.
Shit! He groped blindly for it for a long, desperate moment before uttering a frustrated cry and slamming his fist against the floor. “Shit!”
Only his fist didn’t hit the linoleum tiles. Instead, he hit that heavy, motionless lump beside him again, and this time he felt the coarse texture of heavy fabric, heard it rustle as he struck.
Shit, he thought, realizing what he’d tripped over, what was sprawled on the floor beside him.
A dead body.
He scrambled back until his back hit the wall, and sat there, gasping for breath, teetering on the verge of panic-stricken hyperventilation. Not good, not good, oh, this is not good at all.
Clapping his hands over his mouth to keep himself quiet, he strained to listen for any tell-tale snuffling or rustling sounds. Because if there’s a dead man on the floor, chances are, whatever killed him is still somewhere close by.
Though he didn’t hear anything, he remained rooted in spot another moment or two, trying to make sure. Now without a gun, he wouldn’t stand a chance against one of the screamers even in the best of lighting conditions, let alone in the dark.
I’ve got to find that pistol.
Forcing himself to move, Andrew crept forward on his hands and knees, hands outstretched as patted down the length of the soldier’s body. Near his feet, he felt the cool press of metal, and felt a momentary thrill as he grabbed for it, thinking it was the nine-millimeter. Instead, it was some kind of cylindrical shaft, somewhat heavy despite its slim circumference. A flashlight, he realized. I’ll be damned. This guy had been carrying a flashlight.
Hoping like hell that it hadn’t broken in the fall, Andrew fumbled along the shaft until he felt the on-off button. When he pushed it, a bright beam of golden light speared across the corridor and he uttered a happy little cry. It cut abruptly short when he saw what the flashlight’s beam had pinned in its stark and momentarily dazzling glare—more soldiers lying near the wall, sprawled together, one nearly atop the others, all of them dead and battered.
“Oh, God,” he gasped, recognizing their faces—Maggitti, Reigler and Spaulding, three from Dani’s company.
He realized what had happened to the lights. They’d been shot out, the bulbs splintered by stray bullets. The wall was riddled with automatic gunfire, pock-marked in wildly erratic patterns, as if several armed men had spun in manic circles, shooting all the while.
He’d seen something else near the dead soldiers—their assault rifles. Crawling forward, tucking the flashlight beneath his arm to direct its beam ahead of him, he reached for one of the fallen M16s. When he went to push a leg aside to grab the nearest stock, he realized it was severed from its corresponding torso. He’d been expecting resistance from the deadweight of a corpse. Instead, the leg slid with surprising ease away from him. It made a squishy sort of sound as it moved, like a mop that hadn’t been wrung out well being slopped across the floor, and he jerked his hand back, feeling his stomach roil.
This is crazy, he thought. God, what am I doing? I’m supposed to be in a motel room in Pikeville right now, watching pay-for-view porn and plugging tree counts into my laptop to email back to the office.
Nevertheless, he uttered a triumphant little cry as he wrestled the rifle loose from beneath the tangled heap of dead soldiers. Once he had it free, he scrambled back to the wall. Shrugging the gun strap over his arm, he shouldered it long enough to sweep the flashlight along the corridor in either direction, surveying his surroundings. He saw another one of Dani’s squad mates dead on the floor nearby, Barron, the young man from Anchorage who’d bet Andrew ten bucks the Seawolves would win out in that year’s college hockey face-off against Fairbanks. It had been Barron’s body that Andrew had first tripped over, Barron’s flashlight that he now held in hand. And it was beside Barron’s outstretched and motionless hand that Andrew’s pistol had come to rest when he’d dropped it.
“I’m sorry,” Andrew whispered as he leaned down, retrieving the nine millimeter, shoving it beneath the waistband of his pants. He spoke not just to Barron, but to all of them, because although they hadn’t been close enough for him to consider them friends, per se, they’d been more than mere acquaintances, and they’d made him feel welcome among them, a part of their group.
He tried not to look at them again as he started down the hallway again, carrying both the rifle and flashlight at the same time so he could keep the beam of bright illumination trained ahead of him. He focused his attention on each closed door as he passed, each stainless steel knob glittering coldly in the flashlight’s glow.
One forty-two, one forty, the numbered placards outside the nearest read. Because these were the lowest numerals he’d found so far, he felt a momentary, fledgling hope that it meant he was finally heading in the right direction.
One thirty-eight, one thirty-six, he saw to his right, while on the left, one thirty-seven, one thirty-five.