Extinction Agenda

Chapter Eight

Louisville, Kentucky

When the sun went down on a war-torn country, nearly every city felt the same. After the Breaking Moon, dusk became a universal warning for all living things without claws to seek shelter before the monsters emerged from their holes. There was no shame in running anymore. No pride to be lost at jumping when an unexpected noise rang out. People still conducted their lives, trying not to think about the horrors that had engulfed their former lives. A trickle of humanity went out to eat or worked at jobs they could ill afford to quit. Some children went to school where drills were conducted to teach them where to run if Half Breeds charged toward the playground. The rest sat behind bolted doors, praying.

Rico had given up on anything as comforting as prayer. He sat inside the sloped building on the corner of Spring and Payne, hunched over the keyboard of one of many Vigilant computers, angling his head so the other nearby Skinners couldn’t easily hear him as he spoke into a hands-free phone receiver. Since the windows were all blacked out and barred, he watched the outside world through a small bank of monitors displaying feeds from cameras set up on posts, rooftops, and windowsills within three square blocks of his location. Every so often he would check the faces of the Skinners watching him, and then look back down to the work he was doing. “All right,” he whispered. “What do you want me to do?”

“Are you at the computer?” Cole asked through the headset.

“Yeah, but I ain’t no hacker. If anyone’s tryin’ to hide something about that prison in Colorado, I sure as hell won’t be able to find it.”

“Just type what I tell you and let me know what you find. Look for Hal Waylon. He was the guy who ran the place where I was locked up.”

Rico did as Cole instructed, but Hal Waylon’s name wasn’t easy to find. A little digging into e-mail histories, downloads, and user interface registrations was enough to pull up the name four times. Denver, Colorado, was mentioned, but mostly in connection to the two Full Bloods who’d leveled a supposedly abandoned packaging facility. It was the same bullshit that had been handed to the press, and mentioned nothing of Cole’s escape. The fragments he’d found where Hal Waylon was mentioned were too small to count for anything.

“We need more than that,” Rico grunted.

“Hal Waylon was a Skinner,” Cole insisted. “He mentioned the Vigilant by name and acted like someone who took his sensitivity training from a douche bag like Jonah Lancroft.”

“There are other Vigilant branches out there. I only got a few minutes before I’m noticed here, so make it snappy.”

The two closest to him were from the younger batch who’d been called in to help with Cecile. They were twitchy due to frayed nerves, pale after being out of the sunlight for the better part of a month, and never far away from a shotgun or assault rifle. A few more Skinners walked back and forth between other rooms. Most of the activity was centered on the basement now that there was a live Full Blood to cut and prod as they pleased. Rico didn’t even want to think about what sorts of experiments were being run on Cecile or what samples were being taken.

“Okay,” Cole sighed. “Let’s try a few other keywords. What about ‘tendrils, infected’ or ‘spore’?” He then told Rico how to run the search to look for instances where those words showed up in conjunction with his own name.

Leaning back in the squeaky old office chair he’d been given, Rico said, “Nada.”

“Hey,” one of the younger Skinners said. “You find anything yet?” She usually sat in the spot Rico was using, but wasn’t high enough on the totem pole to do much of anything when he waved her off.

He searched for prison and cells, only to find some notes related to building the holding area in the basement where Cecile was being held.

“Okay,” Cole said. “We need to search for something specifically related to that Colorado facility where I was locked up, but isn’t a high enough priority to be wiped out in an attempt for these guys to make themselves look innocent. Something not very important in the grand scheme of things but that’s still in the system. Maybe something mentioned in low-level messages or a document that wouldn’t have been wiped off the hard drive.”

“You got ten more seconds,” Rico said.

Cole only needed four. “Try ‘Lambert.’ ”

“That’s the other prisoner that broke out with you, ain’t it?”

“Yep.”

“Where’s he been?”

“Good question,” Cole replied. “Haven’t seen him since about a week after Atoka fell. He’s probably holed up someplace to stay out of the line of fire.”

“Join the damn club,” Rico grunted.

Some hits showed up right away. When Rico clicked on them, he got a few e-mails regarding a scrawny man claiming to be a psychic who was brought up on charges for assaulting two people at a bar in West Texas. A half-garbled link to a website brought his attention to a news story about a man arrested for robbing a woman outside a tattoo parlor and trying to escape into the Rocky Mountains.

Cole sifted through his memories of those days he’d spent behind bars. The next few searches were quick and easy.

Frank.

That one came up empty, which wasn’t a surprise. Cole doubted anyone running that prison gave a damn about what Frank’s name was.

Squamatosapien.

Squam.

Lizard man.

None of those words sparked much of anything either. Rico could feel his time at the computer dwindling. It wouldn’t be long before one of the others took it upon themselves to step closer and take a better look at what he was doing. When Cole gave him the next search item, the smile shone through in his voice.

“Try ‘Sweet Sarah Sunshine.’ ”

The computer chugged through its own memories before spitting up one note from a file that resided in a buffer where old documents sat after being placed in a bundle and then stored without being opened for an excessive amount of time. It was an e-mail marked, Prioner description. The simple misspelling in the title was probably the only thing that had saved it from being deleted with all of the other prisoner-related stuff.

“We have a winnah,” Rico declared. It read:

Subject in Holding Cell 4: Adult male, Hispanic, approx. 30-35 years old, 5’9’’ tall, 168 lbs. Tattoo on rib cage reads “Sweet Sarah Sunshine” adorned with lip marks and ladybugs. Low-level psychic ability at close range. Can read thoughts and short-term memories which make him particularly valuable in questioning and categorizing other prisoners. No known family. Recommend he be left in vicinity of cells and terminated when becomes too much trouble. Dissection of brain matter may be useful.The victory Rico felt at finding something faded the moment he realized what it meant. “You were right,” he said under his breath.

“What is it?” Cole asked. “What did you find? Can you e-mail it to me?”

Once quick glance at the young woman who normally haunted that computer was enough to tell Rico that she would be sifting through that terminal the moment he got up. “No,” he said as he deleted everything he knew how to delete. “But it’s enough. Meet me outside. I got something you need to see.”

While going through the motions of shutting the computer down, he jabbed a beefy finger toward the young woman and barked, “Go check on the crow’s nest and secure the armory!”

She, along with half of the Skinners in the immediate area, jumped up and hurried upstairs to follow through on the orders. Once they were out of the way, Rico stomped over to the rune-encrusted panel in the floor and dropped to one knee so he could tap some of the runes on the square door that Jessup had opened earlier. When the trapdoor came open, Rico pressed his finger against the earpiece as if about to shove it into his brain. “It’s not here,” he said in a hushed voice.

Cole’s response was measured and calm. “I may know something about that.”

“You got a hold of that box?” Rico asked. An ugly smirk crawled across his face when he asked, “How the hell did you manage that one?”

“I don’t have it, but I know where it is.”

“I’m coming out there and you’re givin’ it back to me.”

“I can’t,” Cole said. “Paige and I need that thing.”

Rico shut the door, set the runes to remain locked no matter who touched them next, then nodded casually to the Skinner on guard duty carrying an AK-47. “You’re damn lucky that box is still in there. Were you the one that didn’t shut it right?”

“No!” The guard reflexively replied. “Wasn’t me!”

“Good. Don’t go warnin’ any of the other newbie twerps,” he snarled. “When I find out which it was that did that, I want it to be a surprise.”

The expression on the younger man’s face showed that he was relieved to be grateful he hadn’t touched the floor panel, and his quick turn on the balls of his feet showed how anxious he was to get the hell away from the big man.