“Hey.” I called back up to them. “You should come and see this.”
“What?” Duke called back.
“There’s a bunker.” I took a little tube of Vicks from my jacket pocket, squeezed some out onto my fingers, and rubbed it under my nose. “And it smells like something died in there.”
That got their attention. I had only just put the menthol rub away by the time the three of them came skittering down the path.
“Jesus Christ,” Duke said. “That stinks.”
I took the lead, knife held at the ready. The stench that hung thick in the air beyond the threshold was not as bad as the smell at Falkovich’s house. It was the characteristic latrine-and-stale-ground-beef smell of a relatively fresh corpse. The entry tunnel led in and down, and the air became exponentially less pleasant the further we went. I heard someone choke behind me, and turned to see Duke dash out the door to vomit noisily into the grass.
“Get out of the way, Rex!” Jenner shoved up behind me. “That’s my old man in there!”
“Please… hold on.” I was scanning the walls and ceiling, moving forward with cautious attention. “It could be trapped.”
“Fuck traps!” Jenner snarled and seized the back of my jacket, jerking me off-balance. I was so tired that she’d pushed me aside by the time I got my guard up, and could do nothing but watch her stalk off into the bunker ahead of me. The entry wasn’t wide enough for the two of us to move side by side, so I followed up with my flashlight pointed at her back like a weapon.
The tunnel ended in a small, domed room with two doors on the same wall. One was open, the other locked. Inside the open door was a room where the stench was thickest. Jenner barged ahead, while I searched the wall for a light switch. There was none, and so I turned my flashlight back to look over things as Zane stepped in beside me, his hand over his mouth.
The bunker looked like a Cold War survivalist relic. Besides the lack of light, the interior was surprisingly modern, though Spartan. It was also quite large for a building of its type. The walls were smooth but unfinished, nothing but stained concrete. There was a shabby lounge suite interspersed with dining chairs set in a ring around a rug, a kitchenette with no visible food, and closed doors along the walls. A stack of bibles on a coffee table came into sharp relief as I swept the beam of light across. When I turned the light down to the floor, I saw something that made me pause in consternation. Bloody paw-prints that were larger than my head, the distinctive pinched triangle and jelly-beans pattern of a feline foot.
I was headed from the first when a piercing cry of rage echoed from the open door at the other end of the underground longhouse.
“God dammit, Rex.” Zane muttered. “GOD help us, she had to find Mason like this, of all people…”
We drew up to the doorway to see Jenner crouched beside the bed, her mouth twisted in a pained expression of grief.
“I… I…” Jenner was in tears, eyes huge in the beams of the flashlights. “I don’t understand.”
Chapter 26
The corpse of what could only be John Spotted Elk was torn open like a sacrifice, his body trapped in a hideous state between human and deer. His eyes were gone. His chest and belly were torn open, ribs cracked apart, and everything above his diaphragm was simply missing. The rest of his internal organs were scattered on the bed and floor around him. His hoof-like hands were still up by his face in a posture of defense, the dark flesh ripped open by claws.
The mattress he lay on was gouged, the springs crazed. The mingled smell of rotting meat, urine and feces was so powerful that it made my eyes sting. As difficult as it was to think, the defensive posture of his hands, the expression on his face, his spilled abdomen and the deep puncture wounds on the side of his neck all spoke of the same thing. He’d been mauled by an animal far larger and far stronger than he was. It had happened quickly, and death had taken him by surprise.
Numbly, I turned the torch up to check the ceiling and the wall. Above the bed was a sigil, far more crudely rendered than the one discovered over Lily and Dru’s: An eye with a blank iris drawn through with a cross. The flashlight dipped as I stared at it in dawning recognition.
The day that Vassily had gone to prison, I’d had a dream with Zarya and this very same mark: the cross and eye. Jana, the psychotic sorceress who had tried to enslave me for an unknown Master, had displayed this symbol in her downstairs basement oratory over a blank black altar.
“Mason… Mason wouldn’t do this,” Jenner said. She got to her feet, nearly tripping over the upended dresser behind her. “He wouldn’t do this!”
“Jenner…” Zane called to her from the doorway.
“He wouldn’t. He never killed anyone without good reason. Ever. He wouldn’t kill him. Neither would Michael.”
“I know that symbol.” I also took a step back. The reek was making my face hurt. “I have spare gloves if you want to search the room… but don’t touch the body. If someone reports it, we need to make sure we can’t be traced.”
“If we tell Ayashe we found this… Oh fuck.” Jenner moved back, her hands clenched in her hair. “Mason, Michael. What the fuck?”
“What do you mean, ‘if’?” I turned to find Zane clenching the edge of the doorframe. He was pale and sweaty. “We have to report this, Jenner. He’s the oldest fucking Elder in the city.”
“If the Vigiles get wind of this, they’ll kill him!” Jenner said. “They’ll kill both of them. We won’t know… we won’t have any way to find out why, or… or how.”
“We need to leave now,” Zane snapped. “This isn’t a job for us, Prez.”
“We have to find something. This is no way for an Elder to die. Rex. Give me the gloves.” Jenner held her hand out.
“Jenner, come on.”
“ZANE.” Jenner flashed him a hard look over my shoulder. “Shut the fuck up and see if you can find anything in the rest of this place. Both of you. I need time to think.”
Without a word, I passed one of my pairs of latex gloves to her, squared my shoulders, and headed for the main room.
“This is so wrong. Fuck… I can’t believe this.” Zane scruffed his hair and pulled away from the door, coughing.
There was no sign of the missing Spook. While Jenner sorted through the remains of the bedroom, I padded back out and did my amateurish best to put everything together. The paw prints were everywhere, meandering around the floor. There were human footprints, too. A few cupboards were smashed, a few bookshelves fallen. There were murals on the walls that I hadn’t seen on entering the bunker: Apocalyptic murals depicting nuclear war and the Rapture. The sky was gray and orange and dull red, with a formation of stars that had a crimson star glowing at the center.
Beware the Red Star in the Morning… beware the time when the sky screams…
They have begun the Third War, a War as old the ManLands which bore you.
You will see the Star, HuMan Hound… He comes for you again.
My stomach jerked. Rubbing it, I moved away to search for other clues.
There was a gun safe near the prayer circle – I assumed that was what the furniture arrangement was – but it had a two-ring combination lock and there just wasn’t time to puzzle it out. The first door I opened was a bathroom. The second was a bedroom lined with bunks. Six bunk beds, enough to sleep twelve people. It was set up like a military dorm, with trunks at the end of each bunk. I looked inside: they were full of children’s clothing, most of it soiled. I rifled through it, but there was nothing of interest.