had no trouble making out the shapes of the hallway and the doors, some of which were standing open. And I wasn’t too surprised to find one leading to stairs, since I’d figured there might be as much of this building underground as there was above.
It wasn’t a new building, although sometime in the last year or so the walls got a coat of paint and the linoleum was scrubbed. I couldn’t tell what the place had been in a previous life—out here, it probably wasn’t anything legal.
It wasn’t now, either. That ad in WeWeb promised easy money, but what the SalaMen who answered it got wasn’t money, and there was nothing easy about it. My recent library crawl, hunting down Harry’s names, had given me some things they had in common beyond their genetic structure.
For one thing, an awful lot of them were strapped for cash. A couple had lost their jobs, others had mortgage problems or a divorce or kids to support (adopted kids, but still family). And as near as I could tell without going into Harry’s home computer, they’d all belonged to Harry’s WeWeb group. Every one of them was on WeWeb— which meant nothing in itself, most of the country was on WeWeb—but every one of Harry’s names had a page where portions were blocked from view.
If his sister was right, it would be tough to infiltrate the group. However, I had no doubt that a clever and patient person could come up with an ad targeting customers of a brand of lotion soothing to SalaMan skin, or supporters of certain political candidates, or any of a hundred other possible arrows and send them the ad.
And when the poor bastards responded to it, they’d ended up here.
A research facility.
At the bottom of a flight of metal stairs was a door. It was closed, although the stink that came around it made my eyes water. I took a deep breath and went through it.
Another long corridor, with steel doors on both sides. Every door had a small barred window in it. Eyes glistened from behind some of the bars.
I took care of the camera above the door, then eased forward to the first door and breathed, “Are there any guards down here?”
“Who . . . who are you?” A man’s voice, hesitant.
“Answer me!”
“Guards? No, but there’s a camer—”
“Where are the keys?”
“Keys?” He was either confused or frightened by the question. It occurred to me that his captors might have played games with him, and he was afraid this might be one of them. But I didn’t have time to pat his head.
“I came to get you all out of here, but you’ve got to help. Harry’s sister sent me,” I tried.
I might as well have said Jesus and the Virgin Mary for all his astonishment. “The keys, man!”
“One key for all, on a ring near the door,” he shot back.
I leaped for the door, found the simple key, and stabbed it into his door. I thought I might have to drag him out, but he came willingly enough. I shoved the key at him. “Let the others out,” I started to say, but the key fell to the floor. I snatched it up, cursing his clumsiness. Then he held up his hands for me to look at.
His hands looked strange in the dim light, more like stubs. And in growing horror I saw that they were stubs. He had no fingers. No fingers at all.
“Regeneration experiment,” he said, in a voice so tight, it didn’t sound human.
My skin suddenly felt a size too small. I swallowed, and turned to open the next door.
There were eleven prisoners in that cellar. All of them were missing something. One woman had fingers about an inch long; God knows how many months she’d been down there. Another woman had a face that even in the near dark I could see was beautiful, but for her ruined eyes—
A thin man whose beard was either blond or gray shoved past me to embrace the blind woman, who jerked away and then cried “Bill!” and flung herself at him.
“Quiet!” I ordered, and to Bill I whispered, “Take her over to the door, we’ll all go up at once.”
I got the last two cages open, but one of the prisoners did not emerge. When I stepped in, I could see why.
I don’t know how long I stood there, torn between abandoning a person who was going to slow us down dangerously, and the impossibility of leaving anyone in this terrible place. But eventually I became aware of someone standing next to me. It was the first man I’d freed.
I said, “You’re Harry?”
“That’s right. You?”
“Mike Heller. Your sister hired me. Did you find your girl here? Eileen?”
“She died.”
“Ah. I’m sorry.”
“Before I got here. Do you want me to carry her?” he asked, gesturing at the girl on the cot.
“Can you?”
“I’ll sure as hell try.”
He’d been down here only a couple of weeks, which gave him a lot more reserves than some of the others. I helped lift her onto his back, and although he let out a sound when his hand brushed her knee, he clamped his arms against her legs and turned to the door.
Eleven of them—no: twelve, of
“And when you get closer to town, take my laptop out of the trunk and turn it on. The last e-mail it sends will give you a safe contact in the police department. Tell him to get someone here, fast. Now, ready?”
At least six of them started talking, with questions or protests, but Harry interrupted them. “There’s no time for this. We’ll do as he says.”
And they did. My gun leading the way, I crept up the steps, wincing at all the creaks and groans the crew behind me made. At the top, I had them all stand very still and got the door open, again sticking the gun out first, then my nose.
No one there.
I went into the hallway, and they came after me, limping and stumbling. I kept to the right, trying to look both ways at once, my heart in my throat. I mean, I’ve been in tight places before, even been shot at, but with eleven innocents on my back? That was a whole different ball game.
The damned door creaked as I opened it. Why, I don’t know, it hadn’t on my way in, but maybe I was a little more impatient this time. Anyway, it creaked, and then they were pouring past me into the darkness, little cries of disbelief and pleasure, surprise that it was dark, shuddering gasps of clean, night-scented air.
And then the lights went on.
“Go!” I said. Harry was last, with the woman on his back, and he hesitated. “Go, get her out of here!” I shoved him into the night, and then reached forward to slam the door shut, closing him out. Closing me in.
I jumped for the nearest side door, which was closed but not locked. An office of some kind, windowless of course, nice and dark. I left the door open a crack, pressing my ear to it, and about three seconds later I heard voices.
“—like the outside door.” A man, his voice high, by nature or with tension.
“I’ll check it.” This man sounded big, his voice deeper and slower; younger, maybe. I heard footsteps approaching; they sounded heavy; my hand got ready on the gun.
“Not the door,” snapped the first one. “Downstairs first, so we know if any of them are loose.”
The footsteps paused; a door opened and I heard a pair of feet descending the metal stairs. The older man stayed at the top, but the voice that rang up from below was perfectly clear:
“They’re gone! All of them!”
The older man’s curses retreated down the corridor until they were drowned out by the racket his partner made, pounding up the steel stairs. When he reached the top, he shouted, “You want me to go after them?”
