Subject 523 stuffed the folder inside his desert camouflage jacket and half-turned toward the door. Dr. Dubois ducked below the wire glass window, straining his ears for the sound of Subject 523 moving toward him.
Silence.
He needed to distract the man for only a second, long enough to get into the corridor so he could make a break for the exit to the outside. A smooth rectangular object in his pocket had all the answers. Quickly, he lifted it out. His cell phone.
He called the only person who could help him right now. Her phone chirped.
From the incinerator.
Subject 523’s footsteps hurried to the sound. Dr. Dubois slid out from behind the door and made for the corridor.
Dr. Johansson’s shrieks sounded behind him.
He stumbled over the soft hand of Private Henderson in midcorridor. The young soldier lay flat on his back on the polished concrete floor. A red slash ran across his throat, a wound so deep the knife must have gouged his spine.
His head rested at an impossible angle in a pool of blood, and his sightless eyes stared at fluorescent lights embedded in the ceiling. The meaty smell of a butcher’s shop hung in the air. Five minutes later and the private would have been on his lunch break.
Dr. Dubois ran past the corpse and two more blood-soaked bodies sprawled on the hard floor, throats slit. Blood had splashed against the brown doors on either side of the corridor. Those doors led to secured rooms full of other test subjects. He would find no safety there.
Men pounded against the steel doors, hurling profanities at him.
A crash from behind him. Subject 523 was close.
His foot slipped in a pool of blood, and he fell against a door. The man inside smashed his fist into the thick glass inches from Dr. Dubois’s head. The glass held. He pushed himself off and ran, expecting to feel Subject 523’s blade against his throat at any moment.
He burst out the exit door and into the humid Cuban afternoon, glad of the sunshine on his face and even gladder for the armed soldiers running toward him.
The door slammed back against the side of the building as Subject 523 cleared the corridor behind him. Two options: He’d leave Dr. Dubois alone, or take his revenge before the soldiers could stop him. The doctor redoubled his pace.
His right leg gave, and he collapsed onto the stinking tropical dirt. With a cry, he rolled over onto his back. Red spread across his thigh. He’d been shot. Subject 523 had shot him. The bastard.
Dr. Dubois looked back toward his building. The freed man sprinted into the jungle, his own safety clearly more important than his need for vengeance against the doctor, at least for the moment.
Hot pain shot up the doctor’s leg. His heart raced and skipped in his chest. Was he having a heart attack, too? He was a middle-aged man who hadn’t taken care of himself the way he should. He should have spent more time in the gym as Dr. Johansson always nagged him to — his mind sheered away from her final moments in the incinerator.
Armed soldiers surrounded him, shadows falling across his face.
“Orders, sir?” asked a burly sergeant whom he didn’t recognize.
“Follow,” he wheezed. He pointed in the direction Subject 523 had taken into the trees. “Don’t let him leave the island.”
“Yes, sir.” The soldier saluted and pivoted to direct his men.
One man dropped to his knees next to the doctor and dropped a first aid kit onto the ground. A medic who barely looked old enough to be out of high school. “Are you OK, sir?”
“No,” the doctor yelled. “I’m shot. Shot in the leg.”
“I see that, sir.” The young man’s voice was infuriatingly calm. His hands fussed with a hypodermic syringe.
“Hurry, God damn it!”
“Yes, sir,” he said.
The doctor barely felt the needle, but he felt the drug enter his system. The pain gave way to warmth, to a feeling of well-being. He couldn’t give in to it. They had to catch Subject 523.
But he was too smart to be caught. If he didn’t come back for revenge, Subject 523 would be off the island in hours. He had the training to evade capture, and he’d figure out a way to steal a boat or a plane or God knew what else. He was a skilled man, still.
Dr. Dubois must control this situation — starting with dealing with the rest of the 500 series, then hiring a man to find and sacrifice Subject 523. As bad as things were now, they would soon get much worse.
Subject 523 was infected.
And the file in his shirt would lead him to the most-populous city in the United States — New York.
Chapter 1
Subway tunnels breathe. They exhale when trains come and inhale when they leave. Their concrete lungs fill with smoke and soot and rubber and the scents of a hundred ladies’ perfumes. When trains aren’t running, the tunnels hold their breath. They might let wisps of warm air drift into the cold night, draw in slow nips of bracing frost, but mostly they sit still, waiting for trains to bring them back to life.
A thousand times a day their breath coursed over Joe Tesla’s body. It was not so warm as human breath, nor yet so cold as stone. He was used to it, now.
Because he lived here, underground, in the tunnels of New York City.
He had not felt sunlight on his skin for 181 days, and he might never feel it again. His skin, long pale, had whitened. He looked like a vampire, except that he didn’t have the teeth for it.
He didn’t have the teeth for a lot of things these days.
Not so long ago, he’d had plenty of teeth. Sharp ones. Now he wasn’t much use to anyone.
Edison nudged his hand with a cold nose, brown eyes concerned. Edison was his psychiatric service animal — a patient and affectionate dog who’d inherited the best genes of his Labrador mother and golden retriever father. When Joe got upset, the dog brought him back, brought him home. Edison pulled Joe through the darkness. He’d have been lost without him.
He scratched Edison in his favorite spot behind his ear. The dog’s tail thumped the hard train ties. As always, Joe counted, and with each number its corresponding color flashed through his mind: the number one was cyan, two blue, three red, four green, five brown, six orange. Edison stopped wagging his tail, and the colors and sound faded. This late, quiet filled the empty tunnels, broken only by the occasional squeak of a rat, or the rustle of tiny paws across paper blown down from a platform.
No passenger trains ran this late — Joe had long since committed their schedules to memory. Of course, trains were occasionally moved to new stations or out for servicing at night, so his system wasn’t foolproof, but with Edison’s keen hearing and Joe’s knowledge of places they could hole up along the tracks while trains went by, it had been pretty safe.
Joe didn’t need much to keep them safe down here: a metal flashlight he’d discovered on the mantel of his new home, a pewter badge to show transit workers, and the heavy ring of old-fashioned keys hooked to his belt and covered with a polar fleece bag to quiet the jangling. Those keys were said to grant him access to every underground door and platform. So far, they had.
Right now he stood in a vast room deep underground northeast of Grand Central Terminal. Here the tracks merged together under Manhattan before reaching the station’s forty-four platforms (green, green). Since they had been built a century before, many of the tracks were no longer electrified. It was a good place to let Edison explore without worrying that he’d electrocute himself on the third rail.
Joe rummaged through his backpack. His questing fingers found a roll of duct tape, a bag of dog treats, and, at last, the glow-in-the-dark tennis ball. He pulled it out. “What do you think, boy?”