Chapter One Hundred Twenty-Five

The Dragon Factory
Tuesday, August 31, 2:58 A.M.
Time Remaining on the Extinction Clock: 33 hours, 2 minutes E.S.T.

I pushed through into the stairwell, cleared it, and then began climbing. There were two floors above the main level, and I would have to check them both. My heart was racing and my nerves were screaming at me. Images of Grace, alone and hurt in the dark, kept trying to climb into my head and I kept forcing them out.
The mission comes first.
The pressure I felt was almost unbearable because the cost of failure was too high to calculate. Global ethnic genocide. How is that concept even possible for a human mind to grasp, let alone attempt to undertake? Even if someone was a racist, the concept should be so alien to the mind that it would never form, and yet these maniacs were within minutes of setting it into motion. Evil should never be allowed to flourish, but this transcended evil. I don’t know if there’s even a word for what this was.
That’s what put the power in my muscles; that’s what gave me focus.
At the first landing I pushed the door open slowly and quietly. The hall was dark as pitch. I risked my flashlight, casting the beam up and down, and then shut it off and shifted quickly away from where I’d been standing.
No shots tore through the doorway.
So far, so good.
I turned the light back on and moved down the hallway at a light run. Seventy feet in I found a body. It was a Russian and even from ten feet away I could tell there was something wrong about him, but it wasn’t until I was right on top of him that I could see that he had no arms. They had been ripped out of their sockets.
A second man lay against a wall a few yards away, and from the damage done to him and the smears of blood it looked like someone had beaten him to death with.
Holy shit.
Someone had torn the first Russian’s arms off and used them to beat the second man to death. As soon as I understood it, I knew that it had to be-
Something hit me in the side hard enough to pick me up off the ground and send me crashing into the wall. My gun and flashlight went flying. I hit, dropped, and rolled away, and if I hadn’t then a booted foot would have crushed my skull.
I scuttled backward as something huge and monstrous rushed at me from the shadows. It was roughly man shaped but way too big.
One of the Jakoby Twins’ transgenic soldiers. A three-hundred-pound killing machine with the face of an ape and a chest twice as massive as Bunny’s.
The soldier raised his foot to take another stamp and I swept his standing leg. He crashed with a sound like a clap of thunder, and I side-rolled back to my feet. My gun was on the floor fifteen feet away and I started to dive for it, but the ape-man grabbed my ankle and tripped me. As I fell he clawed at me with his other hand and grabbed a strap of my Kevlar.
I rolled sideways toward him and chopped him across the face with an elbow smash that cracked bone. It knocked his head back against the marble floor, and I pivoted on my back to bring my legs to bear and ax-kicked him on the mouth. The heel of my boot smashed in his front teeth and suddenly he was choking and gagging on bone fragments.
I got to my feet and drew my Rapid Response knife. I’m not one of those idiots who wait for their opponent to get back to his feet so there can be a round two. I threw myself at him and buried the knife into his eye socket. Then I cut his throat because I was having a bad fucking day.
Blood geysered up and splashed my face and arm. Screw it.
I got to my feet just as a second Berserker came running at me out of the shadows.
A gun would have been so much easier, but there was no time.
As he closed on me there was a moment when he passed through the flashlight’s glow and I realized that Bunny had been right and Top wrong when assessing the two men we’d fought in Deep Iron. These weren’t exoskeletons. Bunny had simply used fists against something so damn big and strong that his blows did little useful harm.
We’d all been right, though, about the body armor. These guys were dressed head to toe in it. I doubted that it was anything cutting-edge that stopped the PSI of bullets. These guys just bulled through it. It wasn’t that they were big-if they had ape DNA, then they were also much stronger and with far denser muscle tissue.
This passed through my mind in a microsecond. While those pieces were clicking into place I was moving forward to meet the brute.
He tried for a grab, but I figured him for something like that, so I dropped into a low crouch and drove the knife into the top of his foot and then slammed my shoulder into his crotch. He howled in surprise and pain and instinctively shoved at me. I kept a solid grip on the knife and yanked it free as his shove sent me skidding ten feet down the hall. At the end of the skid I brought my knees up and tucked into a backroll, so I ended up on my feet right next to the Russian’s dismembered arm.
The Berserker took a step and his foot buckled. I scooped up the Russian’s arm and threw it at the ape-man and as he batted it aside I was already moving forward. I slashed him from eyebrow to jawline in a hard diagonal slice that cut right through his nose. He shrieked in pain and clamped both hands to his face. In the narrow gap between his forearms I lunged in and stabbed him in the throat, gave the blade a quarter turn, and tore it free.
He fell.
I picked up my pistol and slapped my pockets for magazines, found that I had one plus what was in the Beretta.
It would have to do.
I wiped and folded the knife, picked up the flashlight, checked the action on the pistol, and ran like hell.
I got to the end of the hallway without finding a single room that looked like an office. There were workrooms and a lunchroom and some computer labs but nothing else. Shit. At the far end I found a stairwell and crashed through. Hecate’s office had to be on the top floor.
I was halfway up the stairs when I heard men shouting and screaming and firing. Flashlight beams cut back and forth and I risked a glance over the edge of the stairs. Two flights below, a group of Russians were fighting a losing battle against a pack of the scorpion-dogs.
“Son of a bitch,” I muttered, and ran upward. If I’d had a grenade left I’d have sent it down as a “hello” from Uncle Sam. Pity.
I took the steps two at a time and then came out onto the top level. My flash showed a much more elegant hallway, with brass fittings, expensive art on the walls, and a décor that tended toward style rather than function. Hecate’s office had to be here, but as I shone the light down the hall I could see at least twenty office doors.
My flashlight also swept across the simian faces of a half dozen of the Berserkers.
They saw me and grinned.
And then they rushed me.