"Then let's go to the source." Ru grinned. "DEA with FBI backup? We can glide into anything tonight."
***
Operations Control Center, nicknamed OCC, was in South Boston. Flashing badges, his team and Indigo bullied their way into the building, sans any of the Pack—but only after being sure it was innocent of Ontongard. The bulk of the building was dedicated to keeping watch over the intricate roadway. In one huge room, employees sat bathed in the glow from over a hundred monitors, dominated by blue images of light gleaming off ceramic tiles lining miles of tunnels. It felt like walking into a missile command center. It was running on a skeleton shift of three employees.
"I don't understand," the nominal supervisor stuttered as Kyle made nice with the two techno geeks. "What exactly is the nature of this alleged emergency?"
Obviously this guy was in charge because he had a degree in political babble.
"We've been dealing with a dangerous religious cult, the Temple of New Reason." Ru wove his half-truths. "We believe they're linked with the bombings that took place earlier today. We've learned they might have plans to attack the tunnel system."
The man gasped and waved toward a bank of monitors, all of which seemed to be dead. "The camera system on the ventilation buildings went out this morning. We've been running diagnostics on it all day. It looks like some kind of virus."
"There's a possibility, then, that they've gotten into the maintenance access areas," Ru said, as if he knew for certain there were such things.
"We've pulled together some undercover agents who are familiar with the MO of these perps," Atticus said, using copspeak to confuse. "I'm going to lead a team of them to sweep for signs of forced entry and sabotage. We're going to need your full cooperation."
"Yes, of course."
Kyle held out a headset to Atticus. "Here, this is ready to go. I've added a low-light camera to our two-way radio, in case I need to see what you're looking at."
Atticus clipped the headset onto his ear.
Indigo took a sharp breath, but said nothing.
What was that about? No time to ask, though.
Ru walked him to the door, murmuring, "I still say I should come with you."
"Ru, if these were humans, I'd want you with me. But these monsters—it's like trying to stop floodwaters with bullets. You'll be in over your head and dead without making a scratch on them."
Ru looked away so Atticus couldn't read any hurt or resentment on his face.
"Ru, you're a last line of defense here. I think Indigo kept silent all this time about what she knows because of my brother, but I don't want to count on her alerting the right people if the shit hits the fan. Kyle wouldn't be able to do it. You'd be able to make people listen to you."
Ru looked at him then, eyes full of pain.
"Besides," Atticus forced himself to joke, "you know how Kyle is at giving directions."
And Ru forced himself to smile. "Yeah, there is that."
***
They avoided the Ted Williams Tunnel so as not to give warning to their approach, instead going the long way around the bay. The Pack raced before him on motorcycles, like hounds before the hunter, while Ru murmured in his ear.
"OSHA inspections—got to love them. Apparently our friends haven't been able to infiltrate them or block them, so the inspectors had full access to the construction site. After every inspection, new areas are added onto the as-built drawings. Unlike the other ventilation buildings, the one you're heading to—VB-Seven—has a rat maze under it. No wonder this project is so overbudget and late being completed."
"You've got an entrance for this rat's nest?"
"Yeah. Here." Kyle demonstrated the need for Ru on his end.
"Take the next left," Ru clarified, giving detailed instructions for the desired door. "The electrical as-built schematics show a camera on that door, but there's no monitor for it. It's possible, though, that someone rerouted it for their use."
"Understood."
***
The entrance was a heavy steel door on the blind back corner of the building.
"We're going to need a battering ram," Atticus called to Rennie as he got out of the Jaguar.
"We've got a battering ram." Rennie worked the pump on his shotgun as a tanker truck with a steel I-beam welded to its prow turned the corner and roared toward the door. "Get ready; we're going in."
The Pack gathered around the doorway as the truck sped toward it, weapons ready. The ram slammed into the steel door, which folded under the blow, its hinges popping. The bent door fell inward, followed by the frame and parts of the wall around the opening, revealing a dark stairwell. The Pack flowed into the jagged hole. Muzzle flares strobed the darkness.
The stairwell was bare cement with two flights of steel stairway. The gunfire thundered and echoed in the close confines, the ricocheting bullets sparking as they whined off the walls. By the time they hit the bottom, the steps were slick with roiling blood. Atticus sensed that the fight continued on that cellular level, Pack blood fighting Ontongard. Even as the dozen Gets on the stairs lay dead, the blood-spattered walls and steel seethed in anger.
They needed another ram for the door at the bottom. As a police-issued ram was passed down from above, Atticus noticed that the bodies, body parts, and forming rats of the Ontongard Gets were being dragged back up to ground level.
"What are they doing with them?" Atticus asked.
"We're putting them in storage," Stein, one of the Dog Warriors, told him as the Pack male reloaded. "We're sticking them in the tanker so we don't have to fight them a second time."
"Is there an opening on the tanker large enough to shove a body through?"
"Does it matter?"
"Forget I asked."
The leather of Stein's jacket was chewed away by shotgun blasts to expose body armor. Atticus glanced around him, noticing that others who led the charge wore bulletproof vests, all heavily damaged.
"Body armor?"
"Keeps you kicking butt longer." Stein grinned. "A little trick we learned off the Cub."
The ram reached the door and Atticus tensed, readying himself for the upcoming fight.
The door smashed open into a large, bare cement room, cold as a grave, littered with sleeping bags, heavy with the stench of sickness and death. Another twenty Ontongard Gets tried to stand against the flood of Pack.
"Get the doors!" Rennie shouted. "We've managed to take them by surprise, but we're about to lose that advantage!"
As the Gets disappeared under the snarling Dog Warriors, the other fighters sprang to the other exits from the room to bar the doors shut. All around them, the Ontongard gathered in an angry swarm, like bees from a kicked hive.
Atticus cupped his earpiece to lessen the noise of the fighting. "Ru, we're down the steps! Can you tell which way we should go next?"
"Big room, six exits total?" Ru asked, and then clarified with, "Counting the door you came in?"
The door directly in front of him boomed as Ontongard threw their bodies against it.
"Yes!" Atticus shouted over the din.
"They're in this room," Ru murmured to the others with him.
"Which way?"
Some of the dead had been there before they arrived. Atticus recognized the cultist Ether, stripped of her clothes, sprawled in a puddle of vomit. Mice had chewed holes out of her abdomen, the transformed flesh escaping the dead body.
"Looking, looking, looking," Ru chanted.
"This area is deeper, more extensive." Kyle's voice carried over Ru's side of the connection. They had to be hunched close together, poring over the same architectural drawings.