Hardbingers

4

"What are we going to do with the bodies?" Miller said.

Cal looked up from his checklist. He needed to be sure that anything that could give a clue as to who they were and where they'd gone was removed.

They stood by the security console on the first floor. The air still reeked of blood. All around them the yeniceri combed every crack and crevice for anything that might connect them to this place.

The bodies… he'd been wrestling with what to do about them.

Portman squatted at the rear of the space, moving from corpse to corpse. He'd been assigned the distasteful task of emptying the pockets of the dead. Not of just what might be used for identification—everything, no matter how seemingly inconsequential.

"Got to leave them. I don't see that we have a choice."

Miller shook his head. "Never leave anyone behind. It's the code. You know that."

"Never leave anyone living behind."

"You interpret your way, I'll interpret mine. But either way, the 0 and those guys deserve a decent burial."

Cal felt a spike of anger. The stress of being in charge of this move, making sure every i was dotted, every t crossed, was eating him alive. But Priority number one was moving Diana—the Oculus—to safety ASAP.

"You think I don't know that? Don't you think it's tearing me up as much as anybody to have to walk out on them? But what choice do we have? We can't risk driving up the Connecticut Turnpike with seven mutilated corpses in our cars."

Miller looked down. "Still… it's not right."

Cal slammed his hand on the counter. "Then you come up with a plan! You figure out how we can get them upstate, dig seven graves in frozen ground, and still protect Diana. Go ahead. Tell me. I'm all ears."

Miller sighed and said nothing.

"Here's what I think we can do," Cal said. "What we have to do. They stay here, but only temporarily. We turn off the heat—and turn off the water too, in case the pipes freeze—and leave them. The cold will preserve them. Pretty much like being in a cooler at the morgue. When we get settled at the new place, some of us come back and bury them."

For centuries the MV had owned a hundred acres of wooded land upstate in the Putnam County wilderness. The final resting place of all the New York yenieeri.

"But right now, soon as we're packed up, we're out of here. I want to catch the first ferry out tomorrow morning. That means we've got to be in Hyannis before nine."

"All right, then," Miller said. "But I'm coming back—for them and for him. Some day, some way, he pays."