Feeling irrationally old and irritable, I unzipped my windbreaker and whipped out my Heckler & Koch Mark 23 .45 ACP pistol from my shoulder rig and pointed it at Halverson’s head. “Tell me we’re not here to clean up more mutant cockroach soldiers.”
Beads of sweat popped out on his forehead. “No, of course not. You destroyed all the research on those things.”
He was holding something back, but I couldn’t tell what. Nothing good, that’s for sure. “Then what do we have?”
“Better if I just show you.”
I stared him down for a moment, but after a nervous glance at my weapon, he turned and stepped into an open elevator. The metal elevator car looked oddly out of place among the graffiti-covered concrete skeleton of the unfinished PAR site, but I had no doubt its existence would somehow be concealed the moment we dropped belowground. I holstered my gun, then followed him, Top and Bunny joining us without a word.
As we descended, I opened the equipment bag I had slung over my shoulder and indicated for Top and Bunny to do the same. “Might as well get our helmets on now,” I said. “I have a feeling we’ll need our night vision before long.”
Halverson shook his head confidently. “Don’t bother, Captain Ledger. After what happened at the Vault, one of my first priorities here was beefing up the security on the power grid. Nothing will be able to get to it, I guarantee it. And we’ve got video cameras everywhere, so you won’t need your helmet-mounted ones.”
I refrained from saying what I felt his guarantee was worth. Not because I cared about hurting his feelings, but because I was distracted by his choice of words. He’d said “nothing” rather than “no one” and I didn’t like that slipup one bit.
Nope, not one bit.
“What’s this place used for?” I asked.
Even with the hard edge my voice had taken on, I expected Halverson to repeat his claim that it’d be better if he just showed us, so I was surprised when he answered right away. “The egghead in charge has a Ph.D. in psychology and he designed a labyrinth—”
“A maze?”
“Yeah. A big-ass one. The doc’s studying the psychological effects of being trapped in a seemingly endless maze, as a potential way to break down a prisoner’s will. It’s actually proven to be quite a useful interrogation technique.”
“Sounds more like psychological torture,” Bunny said. He sounded genuinely disturbed that our government would do such a thing. After the things we’d encountered running black ops for the DMS, particularly after discovering American soldiers were being turned into human-cockroach hybrids, I doubted anything would surprise me anymore.
“How is the maze ‘seemingly’ endless?” I asked.
“You’ll see,” Halverson said.
I’ll be damned if his voice didn’t sound ominous as all get-out.
Before I could ask him what the hell he meant by that, the elevator reached the bottom with a jolt and the doors opened.
“Now if that isn’t déjà vu all over again, I don’t know what is,” Top muttered as his gun appeared in his hand.
Just as in our first time exiting an elevator with Halverson, we encountered a steel tunnel splattered with bright red blood. That time there were five bodies, this time only two. Not that that made it any better. Both victims were male, one dressed in a security uniform, the other wearing khaki prison scrubs. The bodies each had twin sets of beer can–sized holes in their torsos.
Top stepped out of the cart first, sighting down the tunnel, while Bunny checked to the left and I moved to the right. The elevator was at the end of the tunnel, so it took Bunny and me all of half a second to clear our corners. We turned back to Top as he called out, “Clear!”
“They’re not supposed to be out of the maze,” Halverson said as he stepped tentatively out of the elevator, Glock in hand. Fortunately for him, he wasn’t pointing his gun at any of us this time.
“Who’s not?” I said sharply. Halverson didn’t reply fast enough for my liking, so I got right in his face. “Who did this? There are no damn terrorists, are there?”
“No, but I needed to get you here.”
“Me specifically? Or just someone like me and my team?”
Halverson stepped back, looking skittish. My instinct was to keep crowding him until he gave me a straight answer, but he held up his hand and said, “Wait! I heard something. Listen.”
I did. He was right. I heard a soft scuffing sound. Then immediately another.
Footsteps. Two sets.
Top and I looked down the hall at the same time, the red dots on our laser sights each finding an approaching man’s chest.
No, that wasn’t quite right. The chest I’d targeted, though not particularly large, was definitely female. Like the man beside her, she wore a security uniform and carried a Glock pointing downward. They were both wise enough not to raise their guns.
“It’s okay, they work for me,” Halverson said. He started to reach out, as if he’d intended to push my gun arm down, but then thought better of it. Smart choice. He turned his attention to the guards. “Sanders, Gale, what the hell happened here?”
The pair stopped just a few feet short of us. I don’t know if they even realized Top and I had a bead on them. That’s when I noticed they only had eyes for the corpses and their superior. They kept looking back and forth from the bodies to Halverson, as if silently imploring him to explain what was going on.
He didn’t.
That made me want to point my gun at him again. Instead, I just lowered it, motioning for Top to do the same.
“Your orders were clear, Sanders,” Halverson said to the man. “I told you to stay in the cell block with the prisoner. None of you were supposed to be in this wing at all. You most definitely were not authorized to go into the maze.”
“It was all Johnson’s doing,” Gale said, pointing at their dead co-worker. Convenient. “He was frustrated that the prisoner wouldn’t confess. Turned out the bastard killed a bunch of tourists in Mexico that included Johnson’s cousin. Small world, huh?” When her weak grin didn’t garner any return smiles or head nods, she added, “Johnson wanted to personally throw him into the maze and leave him there without any food or water. We refused to help him, but … we didn’t stop him, either.”
“Not long after he led the prisoner away at gunpoint, we heard shots,” Sanders said, picking up the story. “We thought Johnson had executed him. Instead, we found a blood trail leading from the maze entrance to here. When we realized that whatever had killed them had gone back to the maze, we raced back and closed the door. Then we heard the elevator and here we are.”
Gale glared at Halverson. “What’s in the maze, boss?”
“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you,” Halverson said.
“Maybe they wouldn’t,” I said, “but you know I would.”
“Still, it’s better if I just show you all.” Then, as if afraid I’d force him to change his mind, Halverson strode forward.
I immediately followed him, Top and Bunny falling in behind me. I glanced back and saw Sanders and Gale reluctantly bringing up the rear. “Stay alert,” I said, mostly for their sake.
A few hundred yards down the hall, we came to a T-junction. A long corridor with several closed doors branched off to the right. To the left, a short, dead-end hallway greeted us. Yet Halverson turned that way. He swiped his personnel badge on a scanner on the back wall near the corner. With a low hum similar to the elevator engine, the wall at the end of the hall slid to the right, creating an entryway into the maze.
He motioned for us to go in. Aside from the blood trail that disappeared a few feet in, there was no sign of whoever—or whatever—had killed the men, but I followed my own advice to stay alert. The murderer could be lurking beyond any of the maze’s twists and turns.
The labyrinth was brightly lit, with steel walls reaching up a good twenty feet to a concrete ceiling. There were jagged spikes of dried cement hanging down—like a popcorn ceiling on steroids. It was prob
ably done to give the illusion of stalactites in a giant cave, but it also gave the unsettling feeling that the stone spikes could drop on us at any moment, crushing our skulls.
“The psychologist who came up with this place has a disturbing mind,” I said, turning back toward Halverson, who’d yet to enter the maze. “What did you say his name was?”
“I didn’t say, actually.” A disconcerting smirk flickered across Halverson’s face. “It’s Dr. Goldman.”
“Son of a bitch.” That was the name of the madman who created the cockroach soldiers. “You somehow working for a ghost now?” I said. With the things I’d come up against at the DMS, I didn’t completely rule that out.
Halverson chuckled. “Not quite. But like Gale said earlier, it really is a small world. This”—he indicated the maze—“is the creation of Goldman’s twin brother. Interestingly, this Dr. Goldman also studied bioengineering, psychology just being more of a hobby for him.”
I had a very sick feeling in my stomach, and I had to suppress the urge both to vomit and to shoot Halverson in his smug face. “How much did Goldman pay you to lure us here?” I asked. Clearly, this was about revenge for my killing the scientist’s twin.
Halverson wiped a hand across his forehead, as if trying to remove the red dot my gun’s laser had placed there. “Look,” he said, no longer appearing so smug, “I had no idea he’d lure you here. Really. I just thought he wanted his brother’s research as a memento of sorts. I didn’t know what else to do with the files I smuggled out of the Vault—I’m no traitor, so selling them was never my goal. Although, the doc did insist on rewarding my resourcefulness. Plus, I’d just started here, so I didn’t know the medical wing was equipped for genetic experiments from a previously failed project—”
Halverson clamped his mouth shut, as if realizing he’d said too much.
“I destroyed everything,” I said, though my voice didn’t have much conviction to it. Son of a bitch.
Halverson raised his left hand in a calm down gesture, wisely leaving his right hand with the Glock pointing at the floor. “You did destroy all the cockroach research,” he said. “But that was far from everything.…”
A loud thump from down the corridor almost made me turn away, but I trusted Top or Bunny would alert me if a threat presented itself. Halverson, however, must have expected the sound to distract me, as he immediately sprang into action, swiping his badge across the scanner and pivoting away from the already shrinking doorway.
Shooting him wouldn’t keep the wall from sliding closed; instead, I unslung my equipment bag and hurled it toward the gap. It landed perfectly, half in and half out of the entryway. An instant before the wall hit the obstruction, the bag was yanked away from the other side. I never would’ve expected Halverson to have such quick reflexes, but I guess you didn’t get to be head of security for a top-secret base without having some skills.
In the same motion as I’d thrown my bag, I launched myself toward the entryway. With no propped-open gap to force my way through, I considered putting on the brakes, but instead channeled my anger at Halverson into a bone-rattling shoulder slam. The thick, sliding steel wall didn’t budge.
I let out an impotent growl of frustration, then turned to face the others.
Top was unzipping his own equipment bag, and as he reached into it, a quick procession of confusion, realization, and frustration crossed his features.
“The C4…,” he said.
“Gone,” I responded with a nod.
Normally we’d each have a couple bricks of C4, blasting caps, and det cord in our packs, but I’d been the only one who brought along explosives this time because the Warehouse’s armory had been low on stock. DMS missions often involve blowing shit up, so it’s no surprise that we’d run out. Still, I’d planned on giving the responsible pencil pusher a piece of my mind when I got back to headquarters, but seeing as how I’d literally just thrown away the only explosives we had, I decided it’d be best to just call it even on the fuckups.
We couldn’t blast our way through the wall, but maybe we didn’t need to. We did, after all, have two members of the base’s finest with us. I looked at Gale and Sanders expectantly. “Please tell me you know the way out of here.”
“There aren’t any scanners on the inside of the maze,” Sanders said, waving his personnel badge, “so this thing is useless. We’re just as stuck as you are.”
“How do you normally get out?” Bunny asked.
He pointed at a video camera mounted near the sliding door. “We usually just wave at the camera and the person in the control room lets us out. If for some reason the door doesn’t open right away, we use our radio.” As if just realizing he had a way of communicating, he unclipped his radio from his belt and spoke into it, looking hopefully up at the camera. “Halverson, you piece of shit, let us out of here!”
No response.
Gale lifted up her radio, but took a considerably more conciliatory tone. “Come on, Halverson. Someone killed Johnson. We don’t know what we’re up against. You gotta let us out.”
Surprisingly, Halverson replied. “I’m sorry you and Sanders got caught up in this, Gale. I really am. I’m just following Goldman’s orders. You should’ve followed my orders and stayed put in the prison wing. But, hey, at least you got laid one last time before—”
“You bastard!” She threw her radio at the video camera, shattering the lens. She had a good arm on her. She turned away from the camera to find the rest of us staring at her. “What?”
“You slept with the boss?” Sanders said.
Gale shrugged. “I was bored. But if I get out of here alive, I’m going to shoot him in the balls.”
“Speaking of getting out of here, is there like a back door or something?” I asked.
Both guards shook their heads miserably. “Not that we know of, anyway,” Sanders said.
“I could take Farm Boy and do some recon,” Top offered.
“This place is a maze, literally,” I said. “We should stick together.”
We heard another loud thump from somewhere in the maze. We had bigger problems than just finding a way out.
“We need to find out what we’re up against,” I said. “Move out.”
Top took point and I motioned for the guards to follow him so I could watch their backs, while Bunny brought up the rear. All of us had our necks on a swivel, our gun barrels moving in sync with our eyes. I got the feeling the place was massive, but with my view being contained to one corridor a time, I couldn’t be sure.
I stepped up beside Sanders. “Halverson said the maze is ‘seemingly’ endless. What’d he mean?”
“It’s the walls, they—”
The elevator engine sound returned and Bunny let out a startled cry.
I spun around to see a wall sliding across the corridor behind me as the big staff sergeant dove forward into a roll, just barely squeezing through the diminishing gap.
As the moving wall connected with the opposite side of the corridor, it locked in with a thump—the same sound that we’d heard earlier. One mystery solved.
“Yep,” Sanders said, “the walls move. I don’t know if there really are an endless number of configurations, but to the prisoners it probably feels that way.” He looked around hopelessly. “And to us, too, now, I guess.”
I studied the walls and noticed there were barely visible seams every fifty yards. “Okay,” I said, “stay close and keep alert for moving walls.”
We walked on for several minutes with nothing happening and my mind wandered to what Halverson said about selling research files to Goldman’s evil twin. I was thankful that we wouldn’t have to deal with soldiers mutated with cockroach genes again, but I had a bad feeling this would be something worse.
I mean, we were in a labyrinth after all.…
As if to confirm my fears, I heard a loud exhale of breath, like a horse would make … or a bull.
Gale looked back over her shoulder. “Don’t worry,” she said, “tha
t’s just a recording the doc uses to freak out the prisoners.”
The animal sound came again, louder. Closer.
“Well, it’s working,” I said, feeling pretty damned freaked out.
Gale smiled reassuringly. “Just wait until he switches to the—” Her expression instantly changed to abject terror as she saw something behind me.
“Bunny!” I shouted as I turned. “Watch your back!”
Bunny instinctively sidestepped before turning to look behind him. “You’ve got to be shitting me,” he grumbled.
The bastard had actually done it. Dr. Goldman had created a human-bull hybrid.
A freaking Minotaur. In a maze. Barreling at me, head down, horns first.
Bunny didn’t shoot. I didn’t shoot. Mostly because the last time we encountered mutants like this, they were our brothers in arms, misled into believing they’d be turned into supersoldiers, not monsters.
I also didn’t shoot because the thing was damn fast.
I was faster. Gale wasn’t.
A split second after I pivoted out of the way, Gale screamed as the Minotaur’s horns impaled her. The creature was tall, so even hunched over with his head down, his horns hit her chest, puncturing her heart and lungs in unison.
The Minotaur shook his head and flung her away. She was already dead. For a brief moment, the Minotaur stared at her with a look of sadness. Grief. He had horns sticking out of his forehead and his nose looked all bull, but his eyes were still human.
He hadn’t wanted to kill her. He hadn’t even glanced at Bunny. He’d been aiming for me.
Confirming my suspicion, the man-bull turned toward me, his nostrils flaring as his breaths came quickly. He looked agitated, confused. It seemed clear I was his target, yet his heart wasn’t in it.
A red dot appeared over his heart, on the thick brown hair that covered his shirtless chest.
“Should I take the shot, Cap’n?” Top asked.
“Wait,” I said, once again getting a feeling of déjà vu. I looked into the mutant’s human eyes and said, “U.S. Army. We’re the good guys. And I think you’re a good guy, too.” I glanced down at the tattered remains of medical scrub pants on his powerful, hairy legs. He hadn’t been a prisoner, he wasn’t a terrorist. “I don’t think you meant to kill Gale, or the other two, either.” He nodded emphatically; I was on the right track. “And you don’t want to kill me, either.”