walls black from the heat and smoke damage. The base had its own power supply and it was still running. A few lights were on overhead, but most were not. It was gloomy in there, their footsteps echoing out. At the end, they passed through a door and came into some sort of lobby. There were a bank of elevators, but you needed an ID card to operate them. But there was a directory on the wall. And although the complex was only single story, there had to be four or five levels below ground. The lowest, no doubt, being the most secure and contained.
Tommy read from the directory. “Let’s see…do we want biochemistry or embryology? That’s downstairs. Then we got developmental biology and cell biology, bioengineering and nanoscience…what are we looking for?”
“Nanoscience?” Harry said. “I saw that shit on the Discovery Channel. They let little mechanical bugs loose in you to repair things, repair your cells.”
“I’m betting what these eggheads have been doing here won’t make the Discovery Channel…except maybe on Halloween night,” Tommy said.
They found the stairs leading below, but the doors were locked and again you needed an ID card to get down there. The doors were three-inch steel and there was no way in hell a four-ten or twenty-gauge shotgun would do more than scratch them.
“What now?” Tommy said.
Harry had that one covered, though. “That woman out there…she had an ID card in her hand.”
“You wanna get it?” Mitch asked him. “I don’t think I want to touch her.”
“Shit, I worked the prison mortuary, that stuff don’t shake me.”
“Use a rag or something to grab it, Harry,” Mitch warned him. “She might be contaminated with something.”
“Got ya.”
Harry raced off. Despite his soaking wet clothes, he moved off very fast. But unlike Tommy and Mitch, here was a guy who worked the weights every day and did a hundred-and-fifty pushups before breakfast. He was in peak condition. Fighting condition, as you had to be to survive in his world.
Tommy and Mitch lit cigarettes, avoiding looking at each other.
“If I was Harry,” Tommy said, “I’d run and keep running. Steal the truck and get the hell out of here. That’s what I’d do.”
“He won’t.”
“No…I don’t think he will.” Tommy pulled off his cigarette. “What about Chrissy, Mitch? I mean, yeah, I want some answers, but what about the kid? This isn’t helping us find the kid.”
Mitch didn’t say anything to that.
What was there to say? Should he try and make Tommy realize that this was important in ways he couldn’t adequately put into words? That like Wanda Sepperly had told him this was very necessary, them coming here? She had said it was all circular. That all roads would connect in the end. That to get to Chrissy he would have to follow roads that seemed to lead nowhere, but they would link him to her in the end. There was no point trying to explain things he didn’t even understand himself. He trusted in what Wanda said. He had to; he simply didn’t have any other choice.
None of it made sense and yet, in his guts, it all did. Somehow.
Just as Harry Teal was part of it, so was this.
“We’ll find my girl, Tommy. I know we will.”
Tommy exhaled smoke. “You know this is going to be bad, don’t you? What we see below?”
“Yeah, I know.”
“You can feel it like I can?”
“Yes.”
And he could. It was thick in his mouth, that taste of fear, like sucking on copper pennies…metallic and sharp and unpleasant. There was a smell here that had little to do with putrescence or death, this was bigger than that, older than that. The smell of blackness and pain, insanity and spiritual evil.
Harry came back with the card which looked shiny and new. “I wiped it off with a rag,” he said. There was a barcode on the back. He inserted it into the slot and the door clicked. “There we go.”
Mitch led the way through and down the iron steps to the next lower level. Again, Harry had to insert his card. The door opened and they passed into a corridor that was completely dark. They lit the lanterns right away, hoping they’d see some light switches ahead. The air was decidedly foul and corrupt, moist and hard to breathe. Something had gotten out of control here and this was its smell.
Holding the lanterns, they moved down the corridor. There were no doors on either wall, just a set of heavy steel doors at the end. Again, the ID card opened them and out came a nauseating, hot wave of decomposition that made them turn away, swallow their guts back down.
“Oh, Jesus,” Harry said. “That stink.”
They moved in there, each wondering what sort of awful vapors they might be breathing, but none of them wanted to turn back. There was discovery ahead, the sort of things no man…or precious few…had ever been allowed to see. The room they were in was large with white walls, three doors set into it. They used the card again and went off through the one on the right that said PATHOLOGY over the doorway. The room was circular and tiled in green, set out with trays of surgical instruments, stainless steel slabs with drains set into them, cabinets of chemicals. Scales and specimen jars.
“Looks like an autopsy room,” Tommy said.
There were no bodies or anything in there, but lots of tell-tale stains on the floor and on those slabs. The air smelled of alcohol and preservatives. You could just image the sort of nasty things that went on there, but there was nothing much to see. They went through a set of double doors at the back like the kind that lead into restaurant kitchens. This room was even bigger. Set along one wall were the mouths of brick ovens and along the other were huge circular iron doors set into steel faces that gleamed. The smell in there was old, but unsettling. The stink of burned things and ashes.
“This is a crematorium,” Tommy said. “I don’t know about those brick ovens, but those steel hatches are for sliding bodies into…to cremate them.”
Nobody doubted what he said.
They moved around with their lanterns held aloft, shadows jumping around them. There was a coating of fine gray ash on the floor. They didn’t open the circular iron doors, but inside those brick ovens there were great heaps of cinders and blackened remains. You got the feeling that somebody had been burning a lot of something and very quickly, hadn’t cared much about the mess they were making. Which made Mitch think of those concentration camps in Europe, how the Nazis has been incinerating bodies as fast as they could before the Allies moved in. The air was dusty and gritty, left a dry film on your tongue.
“Can we get out of here?” Tommy said.
Mitch led them through another door and this room was narrow with shelving running from floor to ceiling along both walls. There were leaden, rubberized coffins heaped all over the place. But the shelves themselves were crowded with zippered body bags. Harry went right over to a few of them, took hold of the straps.
“There’s remains in these,” he announced.
Many were full and many were not. But nobody had to tell them that these were the remains of soldiers shipped back from Iraq and other terrible places where American sons and daughters were dropping like flies. This is what the government was doing with them. Not all of them, of course. Many were shipped to their families, but many were not. They ended up here to be used as raw materials for whatever line of research the Army Medical Command was pursuing. The nature of which must have been shocking beyond belief.
“This is sick,” Tommy said. “I mean, this is really fucking sick. You die for your country and this is the respect they show you in the end.”
“Are you surprised?” Harry said. “Are you really surprised?”
But he wasn’t, none of them were. You tried to be a good American, you tried even to be patriotic at times. You hung your flag out on Veteran’s Day and Memorial Day, the Fourth of July. You tried not to be too hard on your leaders even though you knew, down deep, that they were dirty and manipulative, spinmasters and bureaucrats and out-and-out liars. But you tried to trust them, you tried to believe in them, you tried to tell yourself that there were not dirty backroom politics going on. You did your best to support wars that were unnecessary and bloody and costly, had no true purpose that you could see. And this is what it got you. This is how the puppetmasters pulled
