C14 Chapter Fourteen

Behind a door on the other side of the generator room, a staircase led upward. Ortega had found it during the initial sweep of the room and it was to this that Cade led his men when it was time to resume their investigation. He was uncomfortable with the confining nature of the stairwell, but it was a damn sight better than trusting the elevators to carry them to the upper floors.

There were four sets of steps between each floor with a small platform between each opposing staircase. The dim lighting allowed them to see what was ahead of them clearly for the first time since entering the underground section of the base and for that Cade was grateful. The stairs disappeared upward as far as he could see, which suggested that they extended all the way to the top floor of the facility. That posed an interesting tactical problem for him, as he wasn’t sure how he was going to keep anything from slipping down the stairs passed them while they explored each level. Posting a guard at the stairwell was the likely solution, but he was against leaving any one man on his own and that would mean the point team would be two men short. Still, it didn’t look like he had much of a choice.

He sent the team upward in groups of two, with a few feet between each group. Flynn and Riley went up first, with the latter in the lead. He and Duncan followed next. Behind them came Chen and Davis, while Ortega brought up the rear.

They climbed the stairs to the second floor without incident. Cade contacted Davis and Ortega over the tactical channel. “I want the two of you to stay here and keep an eye on the stairwell. If you get any kind of movement, let us know immediately. I’ll let you know when we’ve secured the level and have you rejoin us then.”

With that issue resolved, Cade turned back to the others and gave the signal to advance.

Knowing the enemy was still out there somewhere, they came through the door leading to level two as if it were a hot entry, moving fast with guns drawn. The lights, dim though they were, made it much easier for them to rule out potential threats and it wasn’t long before the calls of “clear” reached Cade over the tactical channel, letting him know that there weren’t any immediate problems they needed to deal with. After that, Echo began to make a slow, detailed search of the level before them.

The first six doors on either side of the corridor led to a series of storerooms, each one filled with an amazing variety of materials, twelve storerooms in all. It was as if Vargas had believed they would be down here for some time and wanted to limit contact with the surface as much as possible. Cloth, lumber, dried foods, medical equipment, potting soil, plastics; you name it and it was there, packed up and stored for later use. Most of it was in marked crates and after verifying that the markings matched the contents on the first few in each room, Cade ordered that the crates be left alone. They gave no real indication of what the facility had been designed for and they didn’t help them uncover the nature of their enemy, so as far as he was concerned they were superfluous.

The corridor turned left after the storerooms and Echo found itself standing at one end of a massive kitchen area. Large preparation stations ran through the center of the room, with racks full of shiny steel pots hanging above them, and a row of ovens stretched down the left wall. On the right, four refrigeration units stood next to the entrance to an industrial size walk-in freezer.

“All right, you know the drill. Top to bottom and let’s be swift about it.”

The men of Echo moved into the kitchen.

As the others began hunting through the pantry and cabinets, Duncan stepped up to the freezer. Cold air wafted out when he opened the door, surprising him. The power hadn’t been restored for that long; there was no way the freezer could have gotten this cold in such a short time.

The place had obviously been stocked for the long haul. Large steel shelving units stood on either side of the central aisle and many of these were covered with foodstuffs, from large bags of vegetables to frozen turkeys. To Duncan, it looked like enough food to feed a good-sized group for several months.

He grabbed a carton off the nearest shelf and used it to prop open the door. Satisfied that he wouldn’t be accidentally locked inside, he cautiously moved deeper into the space.

If the power had been turned off for any length of time, most of the contents here would have defrosted and begun to rot by now. Duncan could immediately see that that wasn’t the case. Water dripped off many of the packages, pooling on the floor beneath his feet in wide puddles, but the few items he touched were still mostly frozen.

Which meant whoever had trashed the generator had done so only a few hours before their arrival.

The thought was not a welcome one, for it was another clue that pointed to the fact that their arrival had been anticipated.

Past the shelving there was a large section of the freezer serving as a meat locker, with more than a dozen slabs of beef hanging from hooks in the ceiling. Here, too, the puddles were forming, but the beef was still coated in many places by a thick sheen of frost.

Just beyond the meat, Duncan found the first body.

The man had been in his mid-fifties, with a wide doughy face and only a thin wave of hair covering his scalp. He had pulled himself into a corner but kept his face turned toward the door; as if afraid something would follow him inside. His eyes were open wide and staring; Duncan could see ice crystals still formed over their surfaces.

He was dressed in a blue jumpsuit and had black athletic shoes on his feet. On his right shoulder was a patch showing a green and vibrant earth over which the word EDEN was superimposed. Duncan couldn’t see any wounds on the body, nor where there any bloodstains on the floor nearby. It looked as if the man had simply frozen to death.

A quick call over the radio and seconds later Cade and Riley had joined him beside the body.

“You haven’t moved him at all?” Cade asked, as he moved around the body, studying it carefully.

“No, haven’t touched him. That’s just how I found him.”

Riley pulled a digital camera out of a pouch on his belt and took a couple of shots, documenting the find and gathering evidence that they might need later to reconstruct what had happened.

Once he was finished, Cade squatted down in front of the body and stared at it for several long moments and then, after checking to be certain his gloves were firmly in place, reached forward and tried to move it from its position against the wall, without any success. “Give me a hand,” he said and Sgt. Riley stepped forward. Between the two of them they were able to peel the body away from the wall to which it had become frozen and lay it gently on its side, legs sticking out, on the floor. Cade then began going through the man’s pockets, looking for identification or anything that might tell them who he was or what he was doing here, but came up empty.

“Ever seen that patch before?” Duncan asked and both of his teammates shook their heads.

“Considering the quote we found back at the entrance, I’m guessing it’s the name of the project or of the facility itself,” Cade replied absently, his attention still occupied with the corpse in front of him.

Riley snorted. “Yeah, a real garden of paradise. And this one apparently comes with its own serpent, too. Why am I not surprised?”

Cade stood suddenly and walked back over to the freezer entrance. Putting his foot against the carton Duncan had placed there, he kicked it free and watched the door swing shut in his face.

“Hey!” Duncan cried, rushing over. “You’ve locked us in!”

“No, I didn’t,” Cade said without turning and reached out and opened the door from the inside to illustrate his point. “See?”

“Oh,” Duncan replied sheepishly and then hesitated, turning back to look at the corpse behind them with a puzzled expression on his face. “Wait a minute,” he said. “If the door isn’t locked from the inside, why didn’t he just get up and leave?”

No one had an answer and they remained lost in their individual thoughts for several long moments until Riley voiced the question that was hanging unspoken in the air between them.

“What makes a man so scared that he would rather remain in here and freeze to death than face whatever was on the other side of those doors?”

“I don’t know, but I think its time that we find out, don’t you?” Cade said. He propped the door open again and then, turning, walked back over to the body. Kneeling beside it, he pulled the flesh colored gloves he wore off both his hands.

Riley said a few words into his throat mike and while Duncan was too far away to hear what was said, he figured he knew the gist of it. Their commander was about to use his Gift and their exec was letting the other men in the unit know that they needed to be extra vigilant while they were otherwise occupied in here.

Duncan had seen Cade use his so-called Gift shortly after joining the Echo Team. As he understood it, the commander had received a few extraordinary powers in his confrontation with the supernatural entity known as the Adversary. His ability to look into and actually travel through the Beyond, that purgatory-like realm between the lands of the living and those of the dead, was one. This was another. Following that fateful encounter, Cade had lost the ability to touch anything without picking up psychic impressions left behind by whoever had last touched the object or what that person had last seen. Psychometry, it was called. Because of it, the Knight Commander was forced to wear thin gloves at all times to protect him from accidental, and unwanted, readings.

The last time Duncan had been present when Cade had used his Gift, he’d ended up with a chunk bitten out of his arm when the commander had lost control and succumbed to the psychic residue he was channeling. This time, Duncan made sure he was standing off to one side, out of reach.

He needn’t have worried however; after laying his hands on the corpse for a time, Cade sat back and shook his head. “Nothing. He’s either been dead too long or the cold is interfering somehow. I’m not picking up anything.”

Unnoticed, Duncan breathed a sigh of relief. Despite knowing that Cade used his “gifts” for the good of the Order and that if he could, he would be rid of them in a heartbeat, Duncan was still creeped out when they were used around him. There were some things in Echo that were just going to take some getting used to.