Джозеф Нассис - SNAFU - Heroes [An Anthology of Military Horror]

“When your task force shut down this place,” she said, “they made a thorough video inventory of everything. High-res footage that showed where every piece of paper was all the way down to the way pencils sat in a pot on each desk. Everything, with a second camera filming what the first camera was doing in order to firmly establish the integrity of the scene and contribute the first real link in the sacred chain of evidence. Am I right?”

Church had told me about that, but I hadn’t seen it. I nodded anyway.

“So we can’t take or touch anything recorded on that video.”

“That’s the size of it,” I agreed.

“The federal order sealing this place contains an authorized copy of that video.”

“Yup.”

“And the teams who were here agreed that absolutely everything has been documented – at least in terms of its existence and placement.”

“Sure.”

Her smile brightened. “Therefore, anything that isn’t on the video technically doesn’t exist in terms of that Federal order.”

“Sure,” I said again, “but how does that put us back in a discussion with werewolves? ‘Cause, quite frankly I’m having a hard timing shaking loose of that conversation.”

The smile dimmed but did not go out. “Not werewolves,” she said quietly.

“What?”

“They’re not werewolves. That’s not what they were doing here.”

Felicity turned and walked a few paces away, going along the hall in the direction I’d come. She stopped, looked through the shadows. “You were in the storage room?”

“Maybe.”

“You were in the storage room,” she repeated, not making it a question this time. “Did you look inside the bathroom?”

“Sure. Nothing there.”

She sighed audibly.

“I wish I could say you were right about that, Captain.”

Without another word she began walking down the hallway toward the storeroom. She didn’t have a flashlight and my beam was currently pointed at the floor in front of me; however she seemed quite at home in the dark.

I felt like I’d walked into the middle of a play for which I had no script and no stage direction.

She paused once in the very outside edge of the light and looked back at me. I had seen Grace turn that way, stand that way.

Look that way.

Then Felicity Hope turned and vanished into the black.

My eyes tingled at the corners and I knew that given half a chance I was going to break down and cry.

“Oh, Grace… ” I said very, very quietly.

I caught up with her at the entrance to the storage room and followed her over to the small bathroom. As she approached the door she drew a small gun from a shoulder rig.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“Getting ready,” she replied crisply, “and I suggest you do the same. I don’t know exactly what’s down in there but things could get very bad very quickly.”

I almost smiled. “In a toilet?”

“I trust you have enough faith in Barrier agents to know that we don’t typically feel the need to arm ourselves to take a piss.” She opened the door and we looked inside. Toilet, sink, white-tiled wall, plastic trashcan. And the partial handprint on the back wall.

I said, “Secret door?”

“Secret door,” she agreed. “And your Federal task force missed it.”

“Balls.”

With her pistol in her right hand she placed her left on the back wall, right over the partial print. She moved her hand to one corner and pressed. The tile tilted inward and there was an audible click.

The whole rear wall swung inward on silent hinges revealing a set of metal stairs that went down into blackness. A smell wafted up at us.

Rotting meat.

Human waste.

And… something else.

A fish stink. Not actually unpleasant, like the way an aquarium supply store smells; or the kitchens at a low-end fish and chips restaurant.

There were sounds, too.

Machines. Whirring motors. Rhythmic pumps. Other mechanical sounds, all soft, all muted.

“How do you know about this?” I asked quietly.

Felicity shrugged. “This information was hard-won, believe me. Literally blood, sweat and tears.”

She moved to the top of the steel steps.

I drew my Beretta. “What’s down there? I mean really, no bullshit about werewolves or boogeymen. What the fuck are we going to find down there?”

Felicity turned toward me. In the crowded confines of the bathroom she was very close to me. I could smell her perfume. It was the same brand Grace used. What the hell was it, standard issue by Barrier? Or maybe it was the top-selling scent in England and I was out of the stylistic loop.

Her body was achingly familiar and devastatingly female. It was the kind of body that no matter how well-balanced and normally un-sexist a man is, he can’t help but be profoundly aware of it. Of hips and breasts, of long legs and a slender, graceful throat, of animal heat that was purely, inarguably, powerfully female.

And yet…

Standing this close to her, there was something wrong about her.

Maybe it was because she was so like Grace that knowing she wasn’t Grace made her feel fundamentally wrong. It was meeting a deliberate fake, a double or stand-in for someone I loved. Everything similar suddenly felt like a cheat, like a fraud perpetrated on my broken heart by a cruel and vindictive universe.

And beyond that, there was one other quality. One other thing that was not anything my senses or my personal pain perceived. This woman, this Special Agent Felicity Hope, seemed strange. Sure, I was still rattled by her sudden appearance in the dark, and by her similarity to Grace, but there was something else. She had a quality that made her not…

Not what?

I really had no idea how to finish that thought.

And no time.

Felicity moved away from me and began descending the steps. She moved well in the darkness and if her feet made any sound at all on the metal stairs it was beyond my senses to hear it. With great reluctance and confusion, I followed.

The stairs zigzagged down two levels and I realized that we had to now be at least twenty feet below sea level. Cape May is pancake flat and houses in the center of town had basements. Certainly nothing built this close to the bay would normally have a cellar. But the stairs went down and down.

With each step the smell of rotting meat increased.

I almost said, “There’s something dead down there.” But it would have been inanely obvious. Something was not only dead, it had been dead for some time.

Felicity slowed her pace and took her gun in a two-handed grip.

Sweat was beginning to run down the sides of my face and pool inside my shirt at the base of my spine. It would be nice to lie and say it was because the stairway was oppressively humid, but that would have been bullshit. I was scared. Really damn scared.

Changeling, whatever it really might be, in whatever horrific form the madmen at Koenig had conceived with their perverted science, was down here somewhere. Hopefully it was dead, or it was nothing more than samples of transgenic animals that had died without food and water. I really didn’t want to have to euthanize some kind of mutant rhesus monkey or lab rat. I like animals far more than I like people and I’ve seen what scientists do to chimps and dogs and pigs in labs. Dead animals would be easier to take. Sure, that’s a cowardly view, but fuck it.

Changeling .

What was it? Where were these guys going with research to allow deliberate shapeshifting? Where could they go?

Since signing onto the DMS my optimism for common sense and bio-ethics has taken a real beating. That thing Michael Crichton said in Jurassic Park rang true every time. We spend so much time wondering if we can, we don’t stop to think about whether we should. Or words to that effect. I’ve encountered monsters and mutations already. I wasn’t sure how many more I could face before something inside my head snapped. How long did you have to fight monsters until you really became one?