“Hoo-fricking-ah,” agreed Skip.
That was half an hour ago; now we were in the sewers and as we walked I had to fight to keep my whole attention on the matter at hand. If there was ever a better definition of too much too soon I don’t want to hear it. I wondered how unsettled the others were, and how that would affect them once things got hot.
Ollie stopped, one fist raised, and we froze in place. He pointed to our ten o’clock and I saw the rusty iron ladder bolted to the wall. It was covered in moss and rat shit and it ran up into a black hole in the ceiling. Thick frigid white mist snaked down through a grille set into the concrete.
“Scope,” I whispered to Skip and he produced a fiberscope camera that was attached to the display screen of a miniature tactical video system. We clustered around and studied the screen display. It showed an empty room lined with stained metal tables. No movement except for the mist.
“Must be cold as hell up there,” Top said. He glanced at me. “Them walkers need to be kept on ice, right?”
“Let’s hope so; but even if it’s cold up there let’s not take anything for granted.”
“Skip,” I said, “up the ladder. Look for trips and traps.”
But after he was up there for a minute he quietly called down, “Clear. No electronics. Just a padlock. I need the bolt cutters.”
Bunny pulled them from his pack and handed them up. There was a sharp metallic snap and then Skip was handing down the chain in sections. That was good news as far as it went, but it still spooked me. Any time something is too easy, it isn’t.
“Go, go, go,” I hissed as one by one Echo Team climbed the ladder and took defensive positions inside the room. I went up next to last and gave the room a quick eyeball, but it really was empty, just an old meat-cutting room with roller tables and hooks on chains so that sides of beef or pork could be swung in on ceiling-mounted rails from the killing rooms, then once cut they would be rolled along the metal tables into an adjoining room for cleaning and packaging. Waste and blood was flushed down the floor gutters to the sewers. The function of the room was obvious and I don’t think any of Echo Team missed the irony of being in a room made for butchery.
The mist was ankle deep and clung to the floor, obscuring our feet. It stank of raw sewage and decay. The ambient temperature had to be right above freezing although the air was oppressively humid. There were doors on either end of the room. One led to the disused packaging shed, which was empty except for old heaps of dirty Styrofoam meat trays and rolls of plastic wrap; the other door was locked.
“I got it,” Ollie said, and as he knelt in front of it he pulled a very sweet set of professional lockpicks from his thigh pocket. It was as good a set as I’d ever seen and he handled them with practiced ease. It wasn’t the sort of thing soldiers carry; I’d have to ask him about it later.
There was a soft buzz in my ear and I held up my hand for silence. There was some static on the line but Grace Courtland’s voice was clear and strong. “Thermal scans show multiple tangos.” “Tango,” or “T,” was field code for “terrorist.”
“Count how many?”
“Clustered. Maybe twenty, maybe forty.”
“Say again.”
She repeated it and asked me to confirm reception.
“Echo One copy.”
“Alpha on deck,” she said, “local law on standby.”
“Copy that. Orders?”
“Proceed with caution.”
“Copy. Echo One out.”
I called the men over and we crouched down, heads together. “Thermal scans say that we have upward of twenty warm bodies in the building. No way to know how many walkers-their heat signatures are too low.”
I saw the news register on each man’s face. Skip looked scared, Bunny looked mad. Top’s eyes narrowed and Ollie’s face turned to stone.
“Five men in, five men out,” I reminded them.
They nodded, but I added, “This isn’t the O.K. Corral. We don’t know for sure that everyone in here is a hostile. Check your targets, no accidents, and I don’t want to hear about ‘friendly fire.’ ”
“Hooah,” they said, but without much enthusiasm.
“Now let’s go kick some undead ass.”
Chapter Forty-One
Claymont, Delaware / Tuesday, June 30; 6:23 P.M.
OLLIE FINISHED PICKING the lock and Bunny teased the door open, wary for trip wires and alarms, but no bells rang and nothing blew up as the door swung inward on rusty hinges. There was no other sound except the distant hum of motors.
I took point this time. My soaked sneakers wanted to squelch so I placed my feet carefully, taking my time to stay silent. The hall was empty and long, filled with gray shadows and the ever-present mist. We hugged one wall and moved forward in line, staying low, watching front and back, checking every door we passed. When the corridor ended at an L-junction I paused and peered carefully around the edge, keeping my head well below the normal light of sight. I made a “follow me” sign and we turned left to follow the hall. We found one locked door, which Ollie opened without effort, but it was just a storeroom.
I lingered for a moment in the doorway trying to estimate the probable enemy numbers based on the amount of stored goods. I noticed Top nearby doing the same thing. He gave me a raised eyebrows look. Either there were twenty really hungry terrorists in this place or the count was closer to forty, maybe twice that.
We backed out and closed the door.
The hall took on a curve and we followed it for another twenty yards until we reached a set of those big vinyl double doors of the kind that flap open when you push a cart through them. We flanked the doors, staying low, and listened.
It took a second to settle into the vibrational rhythm of the place, mentally filtering out the sounds of compressors and other ambient noises that you might expect in a dilapidated old building. Then we heard it.
A low, inhuman moan.
It suggested a dreadful hunger and it was on the other side of the door.
Skip shot a nervous glance at Top, who gave him a wink that was supposed to look casual and light, and didn’t. I saw the looks on everyone’s faces and I made them meet my eyes. It would reinforce the orders I’d given them. Prisoners-if possible.
Then there was a sound to our right farther along the curving corridor and as we looked there was a dark movement and then the weak overhead lights threw a shadow on the wall. A silhouette of a guard with a slung assault rifle. A guard, not a walker.
Ollie was closest so I gave him the nod and he went down onto the floor like a snake and eased into a low shooting position. I saw the guard’s booted foot round the corner first and then his whole body, and then there was a phfft-phfft sound as Ollie squeezed off two silenced shots. The man’s head snapped back and he sagged against the wall; Bunny ran past me and reached the guard before he had a chance to collapse onto the floor. Between Ollie’s shot and Bunny’s quick feet the whole thing looked choreographed, practiced. In human terms it was terrible, but in the way of warriors it was beautiful, a demonstration of the soldier’s art taken to its most polished level.
The cop part of my mind noted that Ollie’s handgun of choice was a silenced.22. An assassin’s weapon. The low weight of the bullet made a dot of an entry wound but didn’t have the mass to exit the skull, so the bullet just bounced around and snaped off all the switches. Ollie had taken him in the head with both shots. Most shooters, even the very good ones, are not good enough to confidently try two in the head without a double-tap to the body to stall movement; and he’d taken the shots from thirty feet. Ollie had brought his A-game with him.
Back at the vinyl door we set ourselves for our entry. Foggy mist curled out from under the door like the tentacles of some albino octopus. The smell was worse here. The sewers had been bad but the stench here was of meat rotting on the living bone, a vital corruption I’d only smelled once before-when I killed Javad. The second time.
