A buzzing started in her head, numbing her, separating her from herself as if she was watching a movie, not living it. A heavy, warm arm slipped around her. She looked up to see Merc watching her with worried eyes. He checked out the crowd, then guided her away from the bloody heap that had once been a person.
She was shaking, and when she looked back, she saw Jack looking for her. When he didn’t find her, he smiled then made a spectacle of himself as he shouted into the terrified crowd about the devil coming for his due because the town had been calling the deeds that the devil’s agent had done miracles.
Merc shook his head. “Probably just got too close to a big cat in the jungle. Not the devil. Not God. Just nature.”
Ash shook her head. “No. It looked the same as what happened to you.”
“Like I said. A big cat.”
She looked back, but Merc was moving fast—it was all she could do to keep pace with him. “We were right next to Jack. Why didn’t he see us?”
“Too much chaos. And he was getting his rocks off scaring the crowd with his demon shit.”
They reached their room. Inside, he grabbed her backpack and dropped it on the bed. “Pack up and get ready to leave. Don’t let anyone in. Don’t go out. I have one thing I have to do, then I’ll be back for you.”
“How long will you be?”
“A couple of hours, at the most.”
“You’re going into the woods. Don’t do it.”
“Nothing’s coming out before nightfall. I have several hours. And if something’s lingering in there, better I find it than the villagers.”
Ash stared at him. “You know what it is.”
He gave her a nod. “Like I said. Big cat. They mostly hunt at night.” He looked at her with concern, somehow communicating strength and a calmness she wouldn’t have otherwise felt. “After this, I’m going to take you home. Gather up your stuff so we can head out when I get back.”
She frowned. “Leave in the dark? We should leave in the morning.”
He smiled. “Nothing’s going to get us.”
Ash watched him walk out. She rushed after him. “Merc—I’m not staying here if you don’t come back.” She couldn’t stay here, waiting, if she didn’t know for a fact that he was coming back for her.
He pivoted and walked back to her. He caught her face in both hands. A flood of words gathered in his eyes, like water collecting at the top of a dam. “I will be back. For you. For us.”
“But you said you didn’t want me.” Ash could only whisper those words.
“I lied.” He stepped back, releasing her.
Merc compelled Ash’s mind to observe him getting into his Jeep and leaving, when in fact he never drove away. He put a protection over his car, hiding himself and it from view, while also protecting the space he was in so no one else tried to park there.
He needed to enter his meditative state uninterrupted.
His primary host was still on shift at the mine. Merc reconnected with him, his consciousness slipping from his own body into the worker’s. The man was a janitor. At the moment, he was mopping a hallway. The corridor was long, lit only by wall scones placed fifteen feet high, alternating on each wall. There were no windows, no transoms, nothing that let in natural light. The walls themselves were constructed from what looked like industrial landscaping bricks—two feet high and wide, three feet long. This place really was a fortress.
Given the situation unfolding in the village, Merc didn’t have the luxury of riding his host through the man’s normal routine. He had to force him to move around the place so Merc could see what was happening. He made his host set the mop aside and take a stroll down the hallway. No sound at all came from the rooms they passed. Each door was made of steel, with its own biometric control panel.
His host was still full of fear. Merc asked him what it was causing that.
The cages.
Show me, Merc ordered him.
I cannot. I do not have access. I only clean up after them.
Let us go everywhere we do have access.
The man went back for his mop and bucket, then walked to the end of the corridor and made a turn. A few more turns brought them closer to an awful scent Merc was far too familiar with.
The stench of ghouls.
Not surprising that ghouls were there, given the need to guard the minerals the mine produced. But this was nothing like any mine Merc had ever seen.
His host paused for a moment over a biometric reader that scanned his eye. The steel door slid back in its pocket track. The man entered a sterile white corridor with rooms on either side encased in half-glass walls so that the work being done inside the rooms could be observed.
The sight of the lab-coated scientists, the operating tables, and the humans and mutants being worked on spun Merc’s mind all the way back to his mutant beginnings. Was this where it had happened? It wasn’t that far from the camp he and the others had been sent to for recovery and training.
Merc made his host look at everything so that it could be communicated back to Liege.
One of the room’s occupants hurried to bang on the window and gesture angrily to Juan to move along. Merc kept his host from responding. Someone from an empty lab they passed did come out into the hallway and berate Juan for accessing the lab from the door they’d used.
From inside his host’s body, Merc sent the lab worker a compulsion to ignore Juan and let them pass.
They made their way to an elevator. The doors opened. Juan pushed the down button. Merc could feel the man’s fear response building. Where they were headed had to do with his normal job activities, but no matter how often he’d seen to his tasks, he still hated this part of his job.
If it didn’t pay as well as it did, he would quit on the spot, probably would anyway if his family didn’t need him to do the job.
He kept repeating that statement like a silent mantra.
The space the elevator opened onto was nothing like the space above. The stink here was nearly suffocating, even for a regular’s sense of smell. It was like a butcher shop that featured putrid meat.
As on the floor above, there was a central corridor intersecting secure workrooms, but these rooms were not sterile or glass-walled. The floor was polished concrete that sloped down to drains outside each heavily barred door. The walls were made of steel bars that looked like something a circus would use to cage elephants or big cats.
The stink here wasn’t just animal waste, but blood too. Beyond the stench were the screams of broken things hurting.
Merc forced his host to walk the length of the corridors so that he could observe everything happening, everything his eyes and soul would never be able to unsee.
This was Flynn’s ghoul factory. Lautaro had said it was nearby.
Juan told him the ghouls who died became food for those that lived. And the humans from above who failed in their transitions to mutants also became food for the ghouls, giving them a taste for human flesh.
At the end of the corridor were the cages that housed individual ghouls. Juan called them the Tundas. They were set loose at night to patrol the whole compound.
Who controls them when they are loose? Merc asked. It had been his understanding that only Flynn and a handful of his deputies could manage the monsters.
Their keepers are up on the third floor of this building. I am never allowed up there, Juan said.