Project Zero: Evolution Protocol

Dead Men's Tags

On the monitor, two thousand heads stayed turned toward the office.

Cyrus killed the feed.

His hand was shaking when he pulled it back. He pressed it flat against his thigh and waited until it stopped. Forty buses. Doors sealed. Whatever was in those windows couldn't get out.

Not yet.

"Okay," he said to the empty room. "So the front door's a f*****g no. Find another one."

He pulled up the building map and read the exits like a man reading his own death notice.

LOADING DOCK: SEALED. OPENS ONTO STAGING AREA DELTA.

ROOF HATCH: KEYED. LEVEL 4 CLEARANCE REQUIRED.

STORM DRAIN: LEVEL 1, SUB-BASEMENT. STATUS UNKNOWN.

Three doors. One of them had two thousand people behind it. One of them needed a key he didn't have. And one of them was a hole in the ground, which was the kind of option that usually had something living in it.

"Fantastic," he muttered. "Pick your poison, you dumb son of a bitch."

He dropped into the chair and woke the security terminal. It took three tries and the gold keycard, and when the screen finally loaded, the same amber list he'd seen downstairs stared back at him. LANTERN SITE: PERSONNEL STATUS LOG.

He scrolled past the technicians. Past the guards. Past HARLAN, T., STATUS: DECEASED.

He stopped at the bottom.

MERCER, J. STATUS: DECEASED. LOCATION: MORGUE, LEVEL 2.

OKOYE, A. STATUS: DECEASED. LOCATION: MORGUE, LEVEL 2.

BRANDT, S. STATUS: DECEASED. LOCATION: MORGUE, LEVEL 2.

LOPES, D. STATUS: DECEASED. LOCATION: MORGUE, LEVEL 2.

He had known. He'd known the second he saw the four sets of tags laid out on that tray. But knowing was a thing you did in the dark. Seeing it in neon green was something else.

"s**t," Cyrus whispered. "s**t. f**k. Fuck."

He stood up too fast and the room tilted.

The morgue was one floor down the same corridor, according to the map. Sixty meters. No stairs. No buses.

He didn't need to go. He knew that. He needed an exit, a weapon, a plan, and every one of those was a better use of his time than staring at the bodies of men who couldn't help him.

He went anyway.

The corridor was dark and quiet, the fluorescents dead except for a few flickering tubes. His thigh had stopped bleeding but the cut still gaped, wet and ugly, and every step sent a hot ache up his spine. The organ in his waistband pulsed once against his stomach, cold, as if it were thinking about him.

He ignored it.

Under his feet, through the concrete, he could feel something else. A faint vibration, slow and regular, like a heartbeat in the foundations. Thousands of feet, shifting their weight in the dark.

He walked faster.

The morgue sat behind a steel door at the end of the hall. A keycard reader. A stenciled sign. The gold card slid through and the lock clicked, and a wave of cold air rolled over him, smelling of chemicals and old meat.

He stepped inside, axe low, and waited for the letters.

[BIOLOGICAL SIGNATURES: 0]

Nothing. No heartbeat, no breath, no hungry shuffle in the dark. Just the hum of a failing compressor and the soft tick of his own blood hitting the floor.

It was a long, white room. A wall of steel drawers, three high, stretching into the dark. A single metal table in the middle, stained. A bank of dead lights overhead, except for one that buzzed and flickered over the far wall.

Four drawers were labeled in black marker.

MERCER.

OKOYE.

BRANDT.

LOPES.

Cyrus stood very still.

"Hey, guys," he said, and his voice cracked in half. "Sorry I'm late."

He opened Mercer's drawer first.

The rails rolled out with a long, grinding sigh. A body bag. A zipper. He didn't let himself hesitate. He pulled it down.

Mercer's face looked younger than he remembered. Forty, with a salt-and-pepper beard and laugh lines carved around his eyes. A man who told the same stupid story about a goat in a Kandahar bazaar every time they were bored, and somehow made it funnier each time. His eyes were closed. His mouth was a little open, as if he were about to start the story again.

"You son of a b***h," Cyrus said. His throat locked. "You never did finish it."

He opened the bag a little wider.

And frowned.

Mercer's chest was wrong. The left side of his ribcage sat flat, collapsed inward, the skin a deep ugly purple. As if something enormous had come down on it all at once.

Cyrus's own hand drifted to his ribs.

The place where he'd pressed, in the tank, waiting for the break.

He zipped the bag shut, jaw clenched, and moved to the next drawer.

Okoye. The quiet one. Their medic, thirty-four, a man who whispered prayers over every wounded soldier and never once told anyone what he believed. His face was peaceful. His left ribs were flattened.

Brandt. Twenty-three. The new guy. He'd called Cyrus "sir" every day for a year, no matter how many times he'd been told to cut it out. A baby face. Freckles. The kind of kid who still sent his mother postcards.

Left side. Collapsed.

"f**k," Cyrus whispered. "f**k, kid."

Something had crushed them. Something enormous, all at once. He remembered the weight on his own chest, the wet c***k, the building deciding to sit on him. A wall? A floor? A hand?

He leaned against the cold steel and shut his eyes, and for a minute he let himself feel it. The helicopter. The laughter. The white hallway. Then nothing. And three men dead of the same injury, in the same place, on the same day.

Same injury as his.

His ribs had healed. Theirs hadn't.

[PHYSIOLOGICAL TRAUMA MATCH: 100%]

"I know," he muttered. "I f*****g know."

His stomach growled.

Right there. Standing in a cold white room, surrounded by the bodies of three men he'd loved, and his stomach clenched with a hunger so sharp it bent him over the table.

He gagged. He wanted to throw up. He wanted to rip his own guts out.

"Don't," he snarled, to nobody, to himself, to the thing under his ribs. "Don't you f*****g dare. Not them. Not ever them."

The hunger didn't care. But after a long moment, it backed off, and he straightened with his hands shaking.

He took the three sets of tags from around his neck, the ones he'd looped over his own on the lab tray. One by one he laid them on the chests of the men they belonged to.

Mercer's. Okoye's. Brandt's.

"Rest easy, you dumb f***s," he said. His voice broke clean in half. "I'll find out who did this. I swear to Christ I will."

That left one.

Lopes's tags. Four sets on the lab tray. Somebody had taken the trouble to lay out his friend's tags too, and then left his friend's body in a drawer.

Why bother? Why make sure Cyrus had proof?

LOPES.

He had saved it for last because Lopes was the one he'd been closest to. Danny Lopes, thirty-one, the loud one, the one who'd dragged him out of a burning truck once and never let him forget it. Cyrus had never paid for a beer around him.

He wrapped his hand around the drawer handle, and for a moment he was somewhere else: a burning truck, black smoke, a hand clamped around his collar, a voice screaming in his ear, "I got you, you dumb prick, I got you!" Lopes had carried him sixty meters under fire with a broken wrist and complained about it for three years.

Cyrus owed him a lot more than beers.

It slid out too easily.

The rails glided like they'd been oiled. The steel tray came all the way out, and the body bag lay on it, unzipped from the inside.

Empty.

"What the f**k?" Cyrus whispered.

He stared.

The zipper had been torn open, not pulled. The bag hung in ragged strips. Inside the drawer, on the steel walls, ran four long gouges. Fresh. Bright against the dull metal. Scratched from the inside out.

And on the toe tag, still tied around nothing, was a line of printed text.

LOPES, D. DECEASED.

Beneath it, in blue ballpoint, in handwriting he didn't recognize, someone had written two more words.

Cyrus read it twice.

Somebody had stood here, in the cold, with a pen, and decided those two words were worth the ink.

NOT YET.