“Jesus,” Skyler said. “Davi.”
“I see it.”
“They captured a sub.”
“I fucking see it,” he hissed. The young man glanced back at Ana.
Skyler looked, too. Twenty meters away, her back to a tree trunk, the girl worked methodically to load the new weapon he’d given her. The compact assault rifle fired small .22-caliber rounds, easy to handle but lacking punch. That shortcoming was made up for by the grenade launcher slung under the barrel.
Skyler broached the question he so desperately wanted to keep inside. “Are you sure you want her to come with us? She could guard our bags.”
“She comes,” Davi said. “Trust me, she gets very upset if you try to shelter her.”
“Okay then.”
“But,” Davi added, “if you could give her the least dangerous part in the plan …”
“I understand,” Skyler said. He meant it, even though he knew it would be impossible to do. There were too many unknowns. But it couldn’t hurt to give Davi a little reassurance.
He made a took-took sound through pursed lips. Ana glanced up and waved back. She finished loading the gun and jogged up the hillside to join them on the ridge, crawling the last few meters before lying next to Skyler. The corners of her lips were curled up in the hint of a smile. She was, Skyler realized, enjoying this. Her mirth drained when she saw the men below with their captive subhuman.
Davi fiddled with the scope on his sniper rifle and took a long, measured breath. “What’s the plan—”
The subhuman prisoner, now twenty meters from the lodge, clutched at the bar that held her torso and began to howl, her nose held high in the air.
“She smells something,” Skyler whispered. Us?
A response came from somewhere inside the lodge. Ten voices, maybe more, took up the same, wild, subhuman cry. Something rang different about it, though. Skyler had heard such cries all over the world, and they always sounded the same. These, from the building, sounded feeble. Weak.
Skyler swallowed hard and said, “I’ve got a really fucking bad feeling about this.”
The two immunes who held the female captive in the valley below struggled to keep her under control. She began to buck violently, left and right and again. One of the men slipped. The leader, in front, turned and walked back to them. He was shouting something, impossible to make out against the wailing of those within the lodge.
“Here’s the plan,” Skyler said. “We’ll surround the lodge—”
Ana leapt to her feet and rushed down the hill. She ran hard, holding her rifle across her chest. Not even a glance back.
Skyler started to shout after her, but reason won out. The immunes were too busy with their prisoner to notice the woman racing toward them. She would cross the distance in no time at her adrenaline-fueled pace.
If she had some kind of death wish, Skyler hadn’t caught it before. Though in hindsight, her dancing alone in that courtyard had a suicidal aftertaste to it.
“Ana, Jesus!” Davi hissed through clenched teeth.
“Don’t panic,” Skyler said. “Take a shot before they spot her.”
Ana was less than fifty meters from the men now. Davi took a deep breath. He sighted downrange, and on an exhale let off a round.
The big leader’s head jerked wildly. He sank to his knees and toppled over.
The thunderous sound from the rifle brought a brief shocked silence from all around.
Davi wasted no time, unleashing two more bullets in rapid succession. Panic filled the valley. The second of the three men dove to the dirt, letting go of his metal pole in the process. The bullets meant for him did nothing more than generate two puffs of dust from the trail.
Skyler watched as Ana crouched down. She raised her rifle and began firing at the third enemy.
The man shoved the subhuman toward Ana, turned, and hustled away for the safety of a small mound. The subhuman spun in circles, poles still attached to her, moving like a frenzied animal.
Another deafening clap from the hunting rifle dropped the subhuman in a whoosh of dirt and outstretched limbs. She twitched on the ground only for a second, and then nothing.
Skyler heard the sound of breaking glass, coming from the lodge. He saw a shotgun barrel poke out of a window on the side of the building facing the valley. It was far enough away from all of them to be of no concern, but it meant the three immunes were not alone here.
Battle instinct took over.
“I’ll flank,” Skyler blurted. He was up and moving, keeping low behind the edge of the ridge.
As he ran, he heard the battle continue. Another salvo from Ana’s gun. Two shots from a gun he hadn’t heard yet, from somewhere in the valley. Davi answered those with another booming shot.
Skyler angled for a thin copse of trees that bookended one side of the lodge. He kept his machine gun angled low, at the ready. As he rounded the edge of the wooden house, the sounds behind him faded, until he heard nothing but his own labored breath. He paused to gather himself, just for a few seconds, then crouched below the window height and moved along the back wall of the structure.
At the far edge, he took a quick look around the building before bouncing back. Two more of the immunes stood next to an open door. One held a pipe wrench. The other’s hands were not visible, but from the way he stood, Skyler suspected he had a handgun.
Best not to take any chances.
Skyler jumped around the corner and lined up the holographic dot his gun provided on the second man’s back. He squeezed off a controlled burst, adjusted, and followed it with another. The two men were dead.
Surprise no longer on his side, Skyler moved up to the door the men had come through. He peeked quickly inside, but found it too dark to make much out.
Then the howling started again, from within. The sound was gut-wrenching. More pitiful than frightening.
There were, he realized, other shouts mixed in. Human cries for help.
Skyler flattened himself against the wall by the door. Off to his left, he saw nothing along the trail except dirt. The occasional echo of a gunshot rolled down the valley floor to him.
Then Ana appeared, running toward him, her gun pointed down as he’d shown her.
He motioned for her to stop and luckily she saw him. The girl crouched next to a shrub beside the trail.
Skyler pointed at his gun, then at her, then at the barn. Secure the barn, he mouthed.
She looked from her weapon to the large wooden structure and nodded.
Satisfied, Skyler renewed his focus on the door to the lodge. He readied himself to rush in when Ana’s movement caught his eye.
Or rather, her lack of movement. She wasn’t moving toward the barn—she was taking aim on it.
Realization hit him just as she fired the grenade launcher.
Skyler covered his ears as the massive rolling door on the front of the barn exploded into a million shards of thin wood.
Then a second, much bigger explosion hit. Skyler was slammed into the wall of the lodge by the force of it. He dropped to a fetal position and threw his arms over his face as shrapnel peppered the entire area. Even from here he could feel a flash of intense heat.
Every window on the lodge shattered. Bits of flaming debris smacked into the walls and roof.
More blasts followed. Skyler peeked between his elbows and saw nothing but a cloud of smoke where the barn had stood a moment earlier. Gabriel’s people must have been storing explosives inside, or fuel of some sort. Hopefully no one friendly was in there.
The worst of it over, Skyler leapt to his feet and ducked inside.
The main hall ran deep into the building, into darkness. On either side were empty door frames, every three meters. Anyone waiting inside would expect an intruder to enter the first room, so Skyler bolted right past the first two openings.
The tactic worked. Two gunshots, one from either side of him, both late. They shook the walls of the old building, nothing more. Skyler saw that the next door on his right was a bathroom. He ran into it, stopped abruptly, and pressed himself against the tiled wall.
He closed his eyes and counted to ten. When he opened them, his vision had adjusted to the darkness.
Skyler realized that the subhuman wailing came from below. A basement, then. Cries for help came from both below and above.
A creak from the floorboard in the hall focused him. Skyler half-spun out of the bathroom. He gave himself a split second to make sure Davi or Ana hadn’t followed him in. They hadn’t.
An older woman stood in the hallway, overweight, dressed only in a threadbare nightgown. She raised a shotgun, aiming from her waist—a clumsy motion. The weapon discharged into the wall a meter from Skyler.
He answered with two rounds. One took her in the gut, one in the chest. She gurgled as she slumped to the floor.
Eyes adjusted, Skyler now saw the interior of the main hall. He stalked toward the front of the house, stepping over the old hag’s corpse.
He’d heard two shots when he first entered. Someone was still there, he knew; he did a somersault across the entryway.
A shot rang out, hissing through the air above him, where his head would have been. He came up firing, a rat-tat that shook the very walls. The bullets hit the chest of a teenage boy, adding two red holes to his dingy shirt. The kid fell backward with the impact, lifeless, landing on an overturned milk crate, smashing it with his weight.
A damn kid! Skyler had no time for remorse and shoved the look on the boy’s face aside. The sound of footsteps drifted down from above. From the second floor.
“Skyler?”
He turned at Davi’s low voice, coming from the doorway. “In here,” he replied. “Two down, more upstairs. And subhumans in the basement.”
“I’ll take the basement,” Davi said, readying a pistol.
“No,” Skyler said, “I’ve got it.”
“You sure?”
Skyler nodded. “Where’s Ana?”
“Stunned from that explosion. I told her to guard the door in case we flushed anyone out.”
“Good,” Skyler said, genuinely. “Right. Shout an all-clear when you can, and exercise caution. We still don’t know where your friends are.”
Davi nodded and led the way down the main hall. They came to a narrow stairwell. To one side of it, an open door gave way to another set of steps leading down.
Skyler stopped only to take a brief look down the stairs. The steps looked aged: cracked wood nailed atop older rotten planks. He crept forward, leaving Davi to deal with the second floor.
The smell from below overpowered him—worse than the bathroom. A mixed scent of death and human waste. Skyler stopped halfway down and vomited. He could not hear his own retching above the agonizing cries from below. After a time, the nausea passed. Another four steps, taken slowly, and Skyler reached the basement.
When his feet hit the floor, the wailing stopped.
It felt markedly cooler in the subterranean room, enough to make him shiver. He placed an arm across his mouth and nose to quell the odor, and moved inside.
His shoes encountered a sticky, wet patch. Skyler thrust out a hand to brace himself, just preventing a slip and fall. He paused to gather himself, to let his heart rate slow.
The room spanned ten meters on each side, following the footprint of the building above. In the near darkness, Skyler could see poorly erected rooms—pens, or cages, he sensed—lining the other three walls. In the center of the space, an area three meters square was marked off by sections of chain-link fence.
Inside the center cage, a naked woman was crouched on hands and knees. Her head tilted slightly when Skyler’s eyes met hers. The movement reminded him of a cat. She had the wild eyes and unkempt hair of a subhuman, but not the starved leanness. Her hands and feet were held in place by metal braces. A section of fence behind her had been cut away, allowing … access.
Skyler swallowed, a knot of realization forming in his gut even before the thought came fully to mind. The restrained subhuman woman was filthy save the part of her pressed against the gap in the cage. A steel bucket sat on the ground just outside, a soiled towel hung carelessly over the lip.
He shot a glance at the cells along the far wall. A female subhuman form loomed within each, save one that was empty, the door slightly ajar.
The knot within him tightened. Skyler turned to the opposite wall. More cells, more prisoners, though these were different. He saw six naked men and women, all devoid of that animalistic glare. Immunes. Two slept or were, perhaps, dead. The others stared at him with hope in their eyes.
Skyler didn’t need to see any more. He’d heard enough about Gabriel and his followers to guess what was going on here: breeding.
The subhuman woman hissed at him. Within seconds, the shrieks and wails from the other cells began anew.
Time to end this.
He shot the subhuman woman in the cage at point-blank range, between the eyes. She made no effort to avoid it. Skyler had a vague sense that she wanted him to do it, the way she closed her eyes just before he fired.
With a methodical march along the far wall he found six more of the poor creatures. Skyler put a bullet in each, ending their misery. The anger in him morphed, became resolute, a white-hot coal. This was evil, pure and simple, and whatever else happened he would make sure Gabriel paid for it. The world had enough problems without this kind of shit.
Turning back toward where he’d entered, Skyler faced the immune prisoners.
“I’m here to help you,” he said.
Combination locks secured each cage. Skyler made a cursory search of the room for bolt cutters or anything of the sort, but found nothing. “Get back,” he said to the prisoners. The order registered for those awake and they hobbled toward the wall.
Four gunshots later the cages were open.
“Carry them,” he said, pointing to the sleepers. “Get outside and wait for us. I’ll try to find you some clothes.”