The Soul Collectors

85

Halfway through the tunnels, Darby got dizzy. Not from whatever was in the air; she wore a gas mask, as did everyone who was down here. The dizziness came from dehydration. Her body hadn't bounced back yet and she had ignored it, pushing herself too fast; her body was now pushing back. Sergey had to hold her arm the rest of the way.

They walked into what Sarah Casey had called the great hall and found it packed with bodies. A hundred, maybe more, it was impossible to tell. Dead from sarin gas.

Casey was no longer tied to the wheel. The device that had held his daughter lay on the floor, spotted with blood.

Sergey glanced around the room packed with bodies. 'I can't… This is…'

Darby moved to her right and searched through the bodies for Jack and Sarah Casey.

She didn't find them.

She was thinking of the smiling faces of those missing children in the photographs when she turned around and saw Sergey studying the metal device Sarah Casey had been forced to wear around her neck: the rusted O-ring with four metal rods leading to a horizontal one with two half-moon rings.

'I didn't find Jack or his daughter,' she said. 'You?'

'No, nothing here.' Sergey's voice was muffled behind the gas mask. 'This thing is called the Scavenger's Daughter. I first saw it, along with some other torture devices, when I toured the Tower of London. Henry VIII used it: prisoners would be forced to kneel with their chins on their knees, and then they'd be locked into the device, which crushed them into a foetal position.'

Darby looked away, her eyes wet. They settled on the steps leading up to the throne where the masked Archon had sat, watching the spectacle.

'Lot of pain,' Sergey said. 'Cracked ribs and collapsed lungs, and if enough time passed, the capillaries would burst and blood would start pouring from every orifice of the body. I pity the poor son of a bitch who had to endure this.'

She turned back to him as he leaned the device against the Catherine Wheel, its thick wooden spokes splattered with blood — Jack Casey's blood.

'Jack,' she started to say, and her throat closed up.

Sergey gave her his full attention and she told him about what had happened in this room, everything she had heard and seen.

A tall man dressed in a biohazard suit stepped inside the room and waved to Sergey. She went with him, and they followed the man down through the dirt-floored tunnels lined with bones and skulls.

The man stopped halfway down one tunnel and then fell to his knees and faced a grille. No, not a grille — the iron bars of a cell. She saw an ancient padlock flecked with rust.

The man shone the beam of his flashlight on whatever was inside and she also fell to her knees and looked, saw the tiny cell holding a tangle of broken limbs and dirty skin covered with fresh abrasions and welts from whippings — Neal Keats, the Secret Service agent, curled into a foetal position and hugging his dead son fiercely against his chest.