Nobody here but us monsters now, I thought.
I half expected Zev’s voice to join the sound of my own, but if he was there, he was silent. Turning my attention from the inside of my head to what was going on outside it, I registered the ongoing ringing of alarms. I pressed another button on the Taser, and they stopped.
If anyone didn’t know I was here before, they knew it now.
But as I tossed the Taser to one side and began walking down the single hallway, I couldn’t shake the feeling that there wasn’t anyone else.
Just me and the monsters.
I could feel them—close, but not too close, more of them than I could count. And yet, in this one, scant hallway, there was nothing but me and silence and the men I’d killed.
The ones who’d killed Skylar.
No. I wouldn’t think her name. I wouldn’t think anything—but no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t find my way back to that place of pure rage. I couldn’t pretend that I wasn’t frightened of the thing I’d done.
The thing I was.
Unarmed but for the gun at the small of my back and my smallest knife, I walked forward, my hands held out to the side, like I was some kind of dancer, like this was a tightrope instead of a hallway, and all eyes were on me.
I noticed a blinking red light in the corner. A camera.
“You wanted me,” I said. “Now you’ve got me.”
I waited for my words to sink in, then broke the camera.
My body warm with human blood, it took me two minutes to pace the entire length of the building.
Nothing.
No people.
No monsters.
No Zev.
There was, however, an elevator, and seeing it allowed me to make sense of the things I was sensing, feeling.
The hunter in me sensed prey, but no matter which direction I walked, the siren call of the preternatural stayed exactly the same.
I wasn’t getting any closer or any farther away, because getting to the beasties wasn’t a matter of turning right or left.
I went back to the entryway and snagged one of the guards’ IDs.
“Going down.”
The elevator door opened, feeding me out into another hallway. Unlike the first, however, this one boasted a light at the end of the tunnel—metaphorically speaking. Actually, the “light” was dark and shadowed, and the farther I walked through the hallway, the darker it got. As I rounded the corner, I realized that as ruined and rotting as this building looked from the outside, here, underground, it was immaculate. White walls lined a tile floor, and the room at the end of the tunnel wasn’t just a room.
It’s a mausoleum.
Or at least, that was what it looked like. The antiseptic white of the hallway gave way to walls made of marble and stone. I stepped forward, feeling like I’d invaded the sanctuary of the dead, and fluorescent lights flooded the room.
Almost immediately, I located a camera identical to the one I’d destroyed, and I wondered if they’d brought up the lights for my benefit, or if the cameras were attached to motion sensors. Either way, I could make out a door on the other side of this cavernous room.
I could also see the shadows on the floor, each one vaguely human in shape. I retrieved my lone remaining knife, and then I looked up.
The ceiling was twenty feet high, maybe not quite that, which meant that the creatures hanging upside down from the rafters were eight or nine feet above my head. There were dozens of them, each with a human head, human limbs, a human body.
Each put together wrong.
“They’re called the Alan,” a voice said. I looked up and saw that the door on the far side of the room had opened. “We didn’t make them, if that’s what you’re thinking. We found them in the Philippines. They’re hybrids, natural ones—between our kind and yours.”
Overhead, one of the Alan opened its eyes. They were startlingly blue. It dropped down to the ground beside me, and my mind processed the reason its body had appeared nearly human, but not quite.
Its arms and legs were on backward, its neck so thin it could barely support its head.
“They die young and can’t reproduce without assistance.” Rena Malik leaned back against the doorway. “Two- and three-helixed organisms can’t naturally crossbreed with anything approaching success.”
The Alan stuttered toward me, heels first.
“Watch out,” my mother said. “It bites.”
The creature didn’t bite me. It came right up to me and nuzzled me, its skin so thin I could feel the contours of its bones.
I stepped back.
“You can kill it if you like,” Rena said. I wouldn’t think of her as my mother, not ever, not now. “I won’t mind.”
Can you say gun?
I thought of all the games, all the tests, and I dropped my knife arm to my side.