Island 731

28.

“Stay close. Stay quiet. And Bray”—Hawkins pointed to the fire ax lying on the floor next to Drake—“I don’t think the captain’s going to get much use out of that now.”

Hawkins glanced out into the hall, then shed his backpack. “Where are your packs?”

“First room in the hall,” Joliet said. “With the speargun.”

“Stay here,” Hawkins said. He turned to Bray. “Watch the hall.”

Hawkins tiptoed into the hallway. Bray stood behind him, ax in hand. He passed the first door only after sweeping the room with his rifle. He performed the same check on the room nearest the exit and quickly spotted three backpacks and the speargun piled next to the door. He grabbed everything, then hustled back to Bray. He placed the packs on the floor next to Drake and handed Joliet the speargun. “Stay here.”

He knew Joliet wouldn’t like being told what to do, or being left behind, but it was necessary. Before she could speak, he added, “Someone needs to guard Drake.”

She looked down at the immobile captain and nodded. “Go.”

Hawkins motioned with his head for Bray to follow and crept toward the end of the hall. He quickly checked the last room on the right and found only more barred cells with rotting pallets, disintegrating walls, and a large dark brown stain on the floor that could have only been blood.

At the end of the hall were a staircase leading up and a closed door. Hawkins paused at the stairs. He didn’t want to go up without first knowing if the last room was clear. He turned to Bray, pointed to his eyes, and then to the stairs. Bray nodded, turning his eyes to the top of the staircase and winding up with the ax.

The door creaked when Hawkins pushed it open with the rifle’s barrel. The interior of the room was lit by a single, small window that still held a thick pane of glass. The first items he saw—metal buckets, mops, glass jars, and a variety of rotting containers—mixed with a faint smell of detergent, identified the space as a simple storage closet. But scattered among the common items were more rubber aprons, gloves, and boots, and manacles and chains. Looking closer, he saw that some of the wooden poles he thought were broom handles were actually clubs, many of which held single half-inch-long nails—not long enough to kill, but certainly long enough to add an extra level of agony to each strike.

As disturbing as the room’s contents were, Hawkins felt relief that it wasn’t occupied by anything living. As he turned toward the staircase, that small amount of relief quickly faded. He led the way up, stepping cautiously to avoid the occasional dry leaf. In the silence of what felt like an oversize crypt, the slightest sound could give away their position.

At the top of the stairs, there was another staircase leading up to the third floor, and a hallway that wrapped around the second floor. Hawkins motioned for Bray to once again watch the staircase. There was no way to know if the person they’d heard had headed up, or even if he, or she, were alone. Hawkins would have preferred to have the big man with the ax at his back, but he didn’t want to risk someone getting down to Joliet, and Drake.

The hallway around the corner wasn’t a hallway at all. While the first floor had been divided into a long hall with four rooms on one side, this space was just one large room. Eight metal operating tables stretched down the center of the room. Each table was accompanied by a small, empty supply tray. Hawkins had no trouble imagining the trays’ contents. They were probably very similar to implements used to dissect the loggerhead.

Except the people dissected here were sometimes still alive, Hawkins thought, remembering Bray’s tales of vivisection and experimentation. Was this where it happened? Was this where the people on the beach were taken apart and reshaped? Hawkins suspected as much, but could only be sure of one thing: This was a torture chamber.

Hawkins moved down the center aisle created by the twin rows of operating tables. Details jumped out at him. The tables weren’t flat. They had a slight bowl shape with a drain at the center. Dark stains covered the floor under each table. He wondered if they just let the blood pour onto the floor, but found rows of similarly stained metal buckets lining shelves on the wall opposite the still-glassed windows.

The room turned left at the end, extending out over the bottom floor’s entryway. He inched forward, looking for anything alive. Nothing moved, but he saw evidence of habitation, though not human. A nest had been built out of leaves and shredded lab coats. It looked similar to what a rat in a cage might make, but was far too large. It looked large enough for a medium-size dog.

Hawkins turned away from the nest and inspected what he thought were two more operating tables. But the angled, chairlike shape, twin sets of stirrups, and buckets at the ends identified these as birthing chairs. Hawkins winced when he saw more bloodstains on the floor beneath his feet. His face twitched with anger and revolt until he could no longer handle the conjuring of his imagination. He turned away from the table, muttering a string of curses.

Ting, ting.

The cautious tap of metal on metal sounded like an explosion. Hawkins flinched, but realized the sound had been slow and deliberate. Bray was calling him back. Hawkins double-timed his retreat, happy to be leaving the operating suite.

When he rounded the corner, he found Bray still standing guard at the bottom of the stairs. But the man’s face had gone pale.

“What is it?” Hawkins asked.

Bray’s eyes flicked toward Hawkins, but then quickly returned to the top of the stairs. “Something growled at me.”

“Did you see it?”

“No… but it sounded like…” Bray shook his head. “It sounded like a kid. And I don’t mean a baby goat.”

Hawkins remembered the oversize nest. Could a child be living here? He decided against the idea. A human child couldn’t survive on this island. Not alone. And he hadn’t seen any indication that there was anyone else here. At least not on the first two floors. Raising the rifle, Hawkins ascended the staircase.

The first thing he noticed was that the glass on the windows along the outside wall had been coated with a layer of mud—he smelled the rancid air—or was it feces? He decided he didn’t need to know the answer to that question. All that mattered was that most of the sunlight that lit the lower floors had been blocked out. A few shafts of light made it into the room, allowing him to see the most basic details, but he was at a serious disadvantage. He scanned back and forth, looking down the barrel of the rifle. He stepped cautiously forward, finger wrapped around the trigger. Safety off.

When the window to his right shattered, he spun and nearly fired. But the form of Bray, bathed in sunlight, stopped him short. He was about to chastise the man when he realized he could now see much of the room. And what he saw made him want to back up and haul ass back to the Magellan.

Like the second floor, this was one large room. But instead of being divided by operating tables, or cells, this room was a maze of shelves, each covered in glass jars of various size. Some were as small as baby food jars. Others, resting on the floor, looked large enough to hold a grown man.

And some of them did.

Many of the glass containers had broken over time and the bones of what they once held littered the floor. But others had weathered the past seventy years, blemished only by dust.

“Holy fuck,” Bray said.

Hawkins agreed with the sentiment, but couldn’t find his voice. The jar nearest him, perched on an eye-level shelf, glowed yellow, struck by the full light of day. And suspended in the amber liquid was a baby, curled up in a fetal position as though still in the womb. He stepped closer and lowered his weapon. “The baby,” he said. “It has a tail.”

“And not a vestigial tail, either,” Bray added. “I think that’s a rat tail.”

“Is it a chimera?” Hawkins asked.

Bray shook his head. “Looks like it was stitched on, maybe at birth.”

Hawkins ran a hand over his head. He knew that humanity had committed atrocities over the years, especially during wars, but this was beyond reason. What good would a human being with a rat tail be? How could someone do this to a newborn baby?

“Hey, Ranger,” Bray said.

Hawkins looked at Bray, who nodded toward the rifle.

“Mind keeping that up in case something tries to eat us?”

Hawkins’s distraction disappeared. He raised the rifle and scanned the room again. “We’ll move forward slowly and together. Break the windows as we reach them.”

Hawkins moved forward, trying hard to ignore the different animals and people of various ages kept in jars of formaldehyde. Some looked unaltered, but others had limbs, and eyes, and teeth, and digits that clearly did not belong to them.

A window shattered, spilling more light into the room and revealing more horrors. Hawkins ignored them now. He heard something a moment before the window broke.

Breathing.

“If you can understand me,” Hawkins said, “show yourself now. If you don’t, I will shoot you.”

“I don’t see anything,” Bray said.

“It’s there. Trust me.” Hawkins picked up an empty jar and threw it toward the back of the room. The sharp sound of breaking glass was accompanied by a shrill cry of surprise. And then a growl.

Bray is right, Hawkins thought, it sounds like a child.

And when their quarry stepped out from behind a shelf, Hawkins thought for a moment that it was, in fact, a five-year-old boy. But then he saw the hair covering its naked body, the tail thrashing about behind it, and the awkward way it stood. Still, he thought he saw a trace of humanity in its yellow eyes. But all doubt was erased when it snarled and showed its teeth.