Chapter Forty-Nine

Private airfield, Denver, Colorado

Saturday, August 28, 10:59 P.M.

Time Remaining on the Extinction Clock: 85 hours, 1 minute E.S.T.

Jerry Spencer reached the airfield just as we were loading the last of the Haeckel records onto the C-130. I waved him over and we shook hands.

“What the hell’s going on today, Joe?” he asked in his usual gruff voice. “You look like you just got kicked in the nuts. What is it?”

I told him about the ugly secrets we found down there in the dark.

He paled. “First Russians and now frigging Nazis? Are you shitting me?”

“Wish I was. Look, we had to mess up the crime scene-Church wants those records back in Baltimore-but try to find me something to go on. We’re starting to make headway, but we could still use a few more answers. One of the Hub boys will run you out to Deep Iron. Go down there, man… do your magic.”

Jerry took a pipe out of his pocket and tapped the stem on his thumbnail. He gave up smoking a couple of years ago, but he carried the pipe so he could fidget with something. It beat biting his nails.

“You didn’t find any trace of Jigsaw Team?” he asked.

“Nothing. Maybe you will…”

From the look on his face I was sorry I said it. At this point there was a good chance that anything he found would be bad news.

“I’ll do what I can, Joe,” he said. “Call you when I have something.”

He headed off, head down, his cold pipe tight between his teeth.

I headed across the tarmac to the C-130. We were wheels up in ten minutes.

Chapter Fifty

The House of Screams, Isla Dos Diablos

Sunday August 29, 12:43 A.M.

Time Remaining on Extinction Clock: 83 hours, 17 minutes

The compound was never silent. Even here in the middle of the night there was noise. Cries of the jungle parrots, the incessant buzz of insect wings, the rustle of leaves as the breeze pushed its way through the palms. And the screams.

Eighty-two crouched in the dark and tried to remember if he had ever heard real silence here, if there was ever a time when someone wasn’t shouting, or weeping, or screaming. He was sure there must have been times, but he couldn’t recall. It wasn’t like living at the Deck. Sure, there were screams there, too, but not all the time. Eighty-two had watched a lot of TV-even regular stuff he downloaded from satellite feeds-and he knew that hearing screams was not part of ordinary life.

Then again, he already knew he was a freak.

After he’d snuck out to recover the stone, Eighty-two had climbed back into his bedroom so that he’d be there for the midnight bed check. When the nurse and guard-there were always two of them-were sure he was in bed and asleep, they closed and locked the door. That left him four hours until the next bed check.

Eighty-two lifted the corner of his mattress and removed a small tool kit. The cover was part of a leather work apron he’d picked out of the trash, and the individual tools were things he had collected over the last two years. None of them were proper tools, but each of them was carefully made. Eighty-two was very good with his hands. He had learned toolmaking by the time he was ten and had even assisted Otto in making surgical instruments for Alpha. It wasn’t something the boy enjoyed, but then again there was almost nothing he enjoyed. Toolmaking had been a thing to learn, and Eighty-two never passed up an opportunity to learn something. He believed that his willingness-perhaps his eagerness-to learn was one of the reasons Alpha hadn’t let Otto kill him.

Alpha had hopes for him. Eighty-two knew that much, although he didn’t know what those hopes were or why Alpha held on to them with such aggression. It wasn’t out of love; the boy knew that much from long experience. There were a lot of other boys at the Deck, and Eighty-two had seen Alpha’s mood change from approval to disapproval of many of them over the years. Alpha’s disapproval was terrifying. Six weeks ago, Alpha had made Eighty-two and a dozen other boys sit and watch as One Thirteen was fed to Isis and Osiris. One Thirteen had not been clever enough at numbers, and his hand sometimes trembled when he held a scalpel. Alpha had been very disappointed in him.

Eighty-two used a pair of metal probes to undo the lock to his bedroom door, slipped out, and relocked the door. Then like a ghost he drifted along the empty corridors of the main house and along an enclosed walkway that led to the guardhouse. Twice he passed crosswalks that had cameras mounted on the wall, but he kept to his memorized timing schedule and no one saw him. To get to the House of Screams he had to pass through the guardhouse or go outside-and that wasn’t likely with the dogs out there. From his window Eighty-two had seen four of the dogs-two big tiger hounds and a pair of some new breed he didn’t know and didn’t want to know. No thanks.

The guardhouse smelled of beer, sweat, sex, unwashed clothes, and testosterone. Eighty-two would love to have doused the place in gasoline and tossed in a match. Or thought he would. It was easy to think of doing that because the guards made him so mad.

But could he ever do that? Take lives?

He knew he was expected to. He knew that soon he’d be asked to. Told to. Made to.

God.

He slipped inside and hid in the shadows by the door, watching the rows of beds, listening to the snores.

There was a sound to his left-soft and weak-and he edged that way. It wasn’t a male sound, not a guard sound. He thought he knew what it might be.

She was there, lying on the floor in a puddle of moonlight.

The female.

She was naked, knees drawn up to her chest, head half-buried under her arms. Her red hair was sweat soaked and tangled; her hunched back was crisscrossed with welts. Belt marks, with cuts here and there from the buckle. Eighty-two recognized them.

Carteret.

The female shivered despite the heat. The boy could smell urine and saw the glint of light on a small puddle. The female had wet herself. Either too afraid to move or too hurt, she just had wet herself. Eighty-two felt his heart sink. He knew that when Carteret woke up and saw the mess he would hurt her some more.

There was an expression Eighty-two heard in a couple of movies: “damned if you do, damned if you don’t.” That’s what the female must have felt. What she must feel now. There was no way to be right, to act right, to do right, in the eyes of the guards. Even obedience was sometimes punished. It was all about the punishment, about the breaking of the will. Eighty-two knew this, and he knew why it was important to Otto and Alpha, why they encouraged the guards to do whatever they wanted to the New Men. Especially when other New Men were watching.

The female opened her eyes and looked at him. The naked clarity of her gaze rooted Eighty-two to the spot. Her eyes searched his face and he could tell that she recognized him. Then her gaze shifted away toward the cot where Carteret slept, lingered for a moment, and shifted back to the boy. Slowly, being careful of her injuries and not to make a sound, she raised her hand, extended a finger, and touched it to her cheek. Then she drew the finger across as if wiping away a tear. Eighty-two instantly recognized the gesture-it was what the two male New Men had done after they’d seen him wipe away a tear after the female had been beaten.

Eighty-two’s mouth went dry. He reached into his pocket and removed the black piece of volcanic rock and held it in a shaft of moonlight so she could see it. Her eyes flared wide in horror and she cringed, but Eighty-two shook his head. He closed his hand around the rock and mimicked throwing the stone at the sleeping Carteret. Eighty-two then pretended to be struck with a stone and reeled back in a pantomime of cause and effect.