Redemption Alley

Chapter Twenty-one

The aftermath of a scurf fight isn’t pretty. There’s slime all over everything; most of it breaks down into powder but it will steam on any night under seventy degrees. The footing is treacherous, and everything that can be broken probably is. Weres are very rarely messy, but scurf are not the neatest kills in the world.

They just won’t stop wiggling.

We arrived too late for any of the fun, and the Weres were gone. Instead, the warehouses were a shambles, the rail doors dented as if stroked a good one from inside by a huge hammer. There was a smell of fur and clean fury lying over the choking terrible candied sweetness of scurf, and Leon was pale as we started checking, covering each other.

Nothing living remained. The Weres had done a good job, and I could see where the battle had been particularly fierce. I hoped nobody else had died.

“Huh.” Leon lowered Rosita. “Would you look at that.”

The slime was merely a thin scattering near the rail doors—a spur here joined a yard about a hundred feet away. One of the doors was half-open; we ducked out into the cold and examined the tracks.

They weren’t brand spanking new, but they weren’t disused either. Our eyes met, and Leon’s mouth firmed. We slid into the warehouses and he held Rosita pointing straight to the ceiling, gapping his mouth a little bit as he breathed to try and relieve some of the stink. “You thinkin’ what I’m thinkin’, darlin’?”

I pointed. “Pens, to hold them? You could herd them out through here.… If you were stupid enough to do so, I guess. But why? And where the fuck are the Weres? There should have been one or two here hanging around, waiting for stragglers—or for me.”

He nodded, curling dark hair flopping into his face. “Yeah. And look here.”

Part of the wreckage was metal gates, chain link knocked down in sheets—and a row of pegs holding slim black cattle prods. Some of them had been knocked down.

“Oh Jesus,” I whispered, nausea biting under my ribs.

“Yeah. This definitely qualifies as big fuckin’ problem.” Leon shuddered like a horse scenting a snake. “What the fuck?”

I touched one of the cattle prods, lifted it down. The end crackled slightly when I depressed the trigger. One hell of a magic wand. “This is getting weird. Where are the Weres? One or two should be here.”

He shrugged. “Suppose we look around after we give the rest of this the eye. Maybe…” But there was no way to make the situation any less odd. Neither of us said what we were thinking.

This has got to be a trap.

Nothing happened as we checked the rest of the building. Three interconnected warehouses, an L-shaped nightmare; we’d check the bottom of the L next. Even the roof was spattered with powder-slime.

Why weren’t there more disappearances? This much scurf, there had to have been something, someone else missing! Unless they were shipping them in quantity—but how were they feeding them? Scurf need the hemoglobin or they go into brainrot.

There was a foreman’s office up a rickety, smashed staircase neither of us could trust our weight to. Leon scabbarded Rosita and gave me ten fingers, lifting with a grunt, and I caught the edge of a window that might have sliced my fingers down to bone if glass had ever been put in it. For once, cheap shoddy work was to someone’s advantage.

It was a moment’s work to muscle myself through into the office. The light was uncertain, the few unbroken fluorescent fixtures buzzing like Helletöng through broken teeth.

The office was torn to shreds too, claw marks dragged into the cheap rotting drywall. Were claws—and others. Once you’ve seen them a few times, it’s easier to differentiate claw marks than normal people would ever believe.

“Shit,” I breathed, and started casting around. The candy-reek of scurf covered up the rotten smell of hellbreed, but once I scented it the aroma of Hell moved front and center.

And I hadn’t been here to protect my Weres, goddammit.

Drifts of slime-spattered paper covered the floor. A metal desk sat in one corner under a refrigerated cabinet; I looked it over and gingerly swung the powdered door open. Bottles of a rusty-dark liquid stood neatly on the shelves.

My gorge rose, pointlessly. Blood. But not nearly enough for the number of scurf formerly housed here.

Not to mention the obvious question—who were the donors, and were they willing? “Leon? Any refrigerators down there?”

“I’ll look. What’s up there?”

“Blood canisters stacked like Bud Lights. And a desk. There was at least one hellbreed here.”

“Sheeeeee-yit.” Maybe it was the Texas in him, but he could put an incredible amount of disgust in two stretched-out syllables.

The desk drawer was locked, but a simple yank took care of that. It was almost frightening, how casually I tore the reinforced metal apart.

The scar skittered with unhealthy heat, flushed and full. It was getting disturbingly easy to rip things up. I yanked a handful of folders up out of the drawer and flipped one open.

Nothing but shipping manifests. I eyed them, a sick feeling beginning under my breastbone. The information in them started to click over into the coldly rational part of my brain, and intuition kicked in. I scattered more papers, found pictures—eight-by-tens of an airfield. The picture started revolving inside my head, and I began to feel sick.

Oh, God. I spent at least ten minutes moving around, digging through paper. Bureaucracy is a bitch. You can’t run an operation without it, but it leaves slimy little pawprints all over everything.

“Jill?” Leon, moving downstairs. “You should come take a look at this.” Sound of movement. “Jill?”

My throat was dry and my hand actually trembled. “Jesus,” I whispered. “Jesus Christ.”

“Jill, get the fuck down here, darlin’.” Leon’s voice didn’t tremble, but it was firm. “Come on.”

“One second,” I said around the rust in my throat. The pattern was clear. Infrequent shipments from down south and slightly to the west, Viejarosas way. Mostly regular shipments from due south, with notations attached to the irregularities that I could well imagine. Smaller, more frequent notations in another column for shipments to ARA, wherever that was. I had a sinking, chilling feeling that I knew.

Oh, Jesus. Jesus God. No wonder there haven’t been disappearances I could track.

“Goddammit, Jill! What the fuck’s going on?” Leon looked relieved when I appeared at the window. He looked a little less relieved when I landed right next to him, boots thudding and the force of the landing almost driving me to my knees. The jolt was a bitch—three-quarters of a story isn’t enough for me to brace myself, there just isn’t time.

“I’ve got an idea. What are you bellowing about?”

He pointed. “This way.”

As we worked our way down into the bottom of the L-shape, the pens got more and more reinforced—and more terribly shattered. How many scurf had been here, rattling against the chain link, tearing at the metal that held them?

Jesus. I had a good idea what we’d find around the corner.

Leon had already checked it, but we still covered each other as we slid around into the bottom of the L-shape. The light was a little better here, not so many fixtures damaged, but it wasn’t the sterile white glare it would have been before the fight tore through.

More pens on one side, not torn apart, but with each cage door open. These weren’t reinforced like the other ones. At the end was another rail door, with a line of tasers hanging along the side.

On the side opposite the cages were huge industrial refrigerators, their slick chrome sides dewed with scurf slime… and blood. The scurf powder was running in thin crackling trails across the tacky-wet handprints and whorls of human claret. I knew what fridges this size were used for, but I was still miserably compelled to open one cautiously, with Leon and Rosita covering me.

Racks and racks of bottled blood. Hanging corpses, just like sides of beef, swaying gently when I touched them. Each fridge could hold about twenty bodies on neat rows of hooks, each cased in crackling plastic—and each with brown skin, an undertone of gray death to them. When I approached I could see the neat excisions—organs taken out, the cavities of the belly and chest opened with surgical precision, the rest of the body just plain muscle mass to be disposed of. The thighs were flayed, probably for bone marrow harvest.

“What the fuck?” Leon was having a little trouble with this.

So was I. “These are probably all illegal immigrants. The manifests up in the office have them shipped over the border by coyotes, by the truckful. They’re transferred to a rail line and shipped in. Held in the pens with the doors there. We’ll find surgical facilities here—”

“For what?”

“Organ donation, definitely unwilling. The scurf take care of the remains. They were in the other pens. There’s hellbreed involved, and cops. The organs are taken to an airfield about twenty miles out in the desert if the gasoline receipts are any indication. With the initials ARA. Shouldn’t be too hard to find.”

“Huh.” He didn’t ask the next question, knowing I’d answer it anyway.

“Selling to rich people who don’t like waiting in line for transplants.” My stomach twisted again. Each crackling plastic bag was a life, goddammit, someone who had wanted the American dream badly enough to risk being shipped over the border one way or another. If they hadn’t ended up here, they probably would have ended up working dead-end jobs, trying like hell to keep their heads above water. Maids, construction workers, fruit pickers, yardworkers, carwash hands—all those jobs people with my skin color couldn’t be bothered to do for themselves or pay someone decently for.

And this is where it ended up. Used and discarded one way or another, human beings reduced to empty soda cans.

“Why the scurf, though?” Leon shuddered. “There has to be more. Has to be.”

“Getting rid of evidence? And it’s a good way to keep me occupied and off their back. Not to mention if someone has a grudge against me.”

“And the cops trying to kill you?”

“Probably without the hellbreed’s knowledge, whoever it is. If the ’breed knew they’d have ’em use silver bullets and I’d’ve been in much worse shape.” My own shudder ran below the surface of my skin. “Let’s finish checking and get the hell out of here.”

“You got it, darlin’.”

Checking the other fridges was a matter of minutes and nausea. Leon was definitely green by the time we finished, and I wasn’t far behind.

I stepped out of the last fridge, my eyes on the pen opposite, its gaping door. The padlock was busted—probably Weres. If anyone survived this mess, the Weres would test them for scurf, and probably try to get them home.

Not that it mattered much. Whoever was locked in these cages would have nightmares the rest of their lives, survivor’s guilt, and probably be back over the border within a month working at a low-paying dead-end job because their family had to eat.

Jesus.

“I’ve heard of some goddamn stupid things in my life, but this takes the cake and the whole fuckin’ picnic too. What sort of shortsighted idiot would ship scurf into a clean territory? Even hellbreed ain’t that stupid.” Leon touched a busted padlock, watched as the whole chain-link cage shivered.

I closed the fridge door. The sound of it clicking shut was loud in the stillness. Something still isn’t right here. Something—

I’d opened my mouth, but Leon and I both froze, our eyes meeting. I didn’t have to ask if he’d heard it.

A footstep, sliding and soft, and definitely not human. Instinct placed it—around the corner of the L, someone had come in the main door and was picking their way, quietly, over the rubble.

I slid a gun easily from its holster. Drew silence over myself like a veil, and started considering my options just as other sliding sounds told me our guest, whoever and whatever it was, had brought company.