Hellbender

  But before the place shut down that night, a targeted ad had popped up on the side of the shiny new WeWeb page for my made-up SalaMan, Julio Rogers. Julio was new to WeWeb for undisclosed but hinted-at reasons (“I been away, if you know what I mean . . .”) and had lousy writing skills, some ill-disguised anger, and a considerable interest in SalaMan rights.

  The targeting algorithm had caught Julio’s SalaMan references and sent him an offer for QUICK, UNOBTRUSIVE, PRIVATE cash.

  Julio’s offer had gone up to $7,500. Which could mean they had come into serious funding, or that they were getting desperate. Either way was fine with me. It was fine, too, with Julio, who shot off an e-mail to the address.

  I slept in a different motel that night, and had a dream about blue eyes.

  The next morning I went to another library, logged on to Julio’s page, and sat back with a smile on my face.

  Thank you for your interest in SalaMan Research Enterprises (SRE). If you hold SalaMan heritage, welcome! Our researchers are affiliated with the University of California, Stanford, Yale, and other medical schools, and are thoroughly trained in the protection of privacy rights. Our project is aimed at helping the particular health needs of the SalaMan community, and in the preliminary stages requires only a fifteen-minute questionnaire and a simple blood test. If you are interested in hearing about our work and how you can help us, we have public meetings across the country, for which you will be paid to attend, without making a commitment to participate further.

  (PLEASE NOTE: Applicants’ DNA will be tested immediately on arrival, before any payment is made. False applicants will be reported to WeWeb.)

  The form e-ail was signed by a man with a lot of letters sprinkled after his name, and the list of public meetings included—surprise, surprise—one at two o’clock Saturday afternoon, the day after tomorrow, at a big conference hotel less than thirty miles from the library Julio had been working at.

  Julio sent his acceptance of the offer, then logged off and left that library in a hurry, never to return.

  I spent the rest of that day and most of Friday moving from one library to another, putting on a lot of miles between each one, as I tried to duplicate Harry’s research about the people whose names ended up in his envelope.

  Saturday afternoon I was at the conference hotel, looking forward to that SRE information meeting, wondering whether they intended to pull a gun first, or just go with the tranquilizers.

  I hadn’t been able to get a camera inside the meeting room itself, but the one I’d tucked behind the hallway flower arrangement worked fine. At half past one on Saturday, three men came down the hallway, their faces nice and clear in the camera, their heights marked by a tick I’d put in a picture frame on the wall. Two of them were clearly muscle, one a boss type. One of the big guys carried a notice board with a tripod, which he set up facing the other way, although I’d seen when he was moving around that it was the sort of corporate intro you’d expect to see when you came toward a public meeting room. The other big guy was carrying a carton, no doubt filled with the kind of meaningless forms and equipment that would reassure a sucker and get him inside the doors.

  That day’s only sucker, it would appear, was Julio. Whose last act on this earth was to send an e-mail at 2:04 to say that he was sorry, he’d changed his mind, maybe in the future . . .

  At 2:12, the three men came out, looking considerably less friendly than they had going in. One carried the carton, now jammed every which way with stuff. They walked away from my viewpoint, and then the boss man jerked his thumb back and the other big guy whirled around and went back for the tripod sign. If I’d been standing behind the flowers instead of my camera, he’d have smashed the sign over my head.

  At 2:14, the three men came out of the hotel’s side doors, dumped their armloads into the trunk of a shiny black car, and drove away. I hit the send button on the laptop I’d been watching all this on, tossed it onto the passenger seat, and put my own car into gear.

  Interesting fact: Cops pay attention when you send them traceable evidence of what you claim is a crime in progress. Phone calls can be about anything, post office letters can disappear, but when you tell them you’re sending them an electronic file, and then you send it, that makes a trail they hesitate to ignore entirely.

  The e-mail with the video attachment was to Frank, my cop . . . well, maybe not friend, but we’d worked together a couple times, and drunk together a few more times. I liked Frank fine, and I knew he was honest, but I also wanted a little insurance. No cop wants to go into a courtroom against a lawyer who has evidence of a murder the police could have prevented.

  Mine, for example.

  I followed, keeping well back thanks to the little blip on the GPS screen. While they were waiting for Julio, I’d had plenty of time to press a bug under the fender. Ain’t technology great?

  But not so great when the people you’re following change cars, and leave your clever blip standing at the same point until the transmitter’s battery runs down. Which was what I thought was happening when they went five miles and pulled into a coffee house.

  But I lucked out. The two goons did take their equipment from the trunk and got into a second car, but my shiny black target pulled immediately out of the parking lot, signaled for a right, and in two minutes was on the freeway north.

  After two hours, we’d left the freeway far behind, traffic on the smaller road was so thin I didn’t dare come closer than half a mile, and it looked like the guy was planning to drive up the backside of Nevada without even a coffee break. I, on the other hand, was yawning fit to break my jaw, my bladder had gone past uncomfortable to the brink of needing attention, and the pink blip on my screen had hypnotized me into stupidity.

  I only noticed it had stopped moving when I was already too close to do anything but barrel on by.

  The driver—still wearing both the jacket and tie—was just getting back into the car after unlocking a gate at the side of the road. He glanced at me, seeing only a dusty car whose bored driver was rubbing his eye. In the rearview mirror I saw him pull ahead into the side road, then get out to go back and close the gate. My foot didn’t move on the pedal until he had disappeared around a curve, at which time I swerved to the side and killed the engine.

  I grabbed the knapsack from the seat and forced my stiff legs and screaming bladder up the nearby rise until the dust plume from the once-shiny car came into view. I kept a naked eye on it for a couple of minutes and then, when my hands were free and my bladder happy, I took a pair of binoculars from the knapsack. Just in time to see the car vanish behind some low hills.

  This far from civilization, I did not expect to find a connection, and I was right. However, I wrote an e-mail on the laptop, hit send, then closed its lid and locked the thing in the trunk. If I failed to make it back, someone would eventually find it, and when it was fired up, Frank would learn where I had last been.

  I pushed some things I thought I might need into the knapsack, then walked across the road in the direction of the black car.

  For a dirt road in the middle of nowhere, it had a surprising amount of traffic. By the time darkness fell, I had seen three vehicles go past: a white van, delivering some cartons and full grocery sacks, then leaving; a small red Jeep, driven at speed by a thin man with white hair; and an hour later, at dusk, the black car on its way out.

  Their goal was a wide, single-story building made of poured concrete with a faded blue steel roof. The only windows were on either side of the front door, although when I circled the place, I found two other doors, one on the back and the other on the western side. All three doors were steel, and solid looking. I wouldn’t know if their locks were as good until I got my hands on them.

  The two windows were covered from within, by slatted blinds on the left and curtains on the right. The blinds went dark about ten o’clock; the curtains snapped out of sight around half past eleven.

  At one in the morning, I slipped out from the trees facing
the western door. I couldn’t see any security cameras, and although the light over the door was on, a quick poke with a branch changed that.

  It took me a while, even with my illegal-to-own, cutting-edge cracksman tool. When the lock finally gave, I vowed to write the guy who’d invented the thing a personal letter of thanks.

  I took out my gun and moved forward. Before I was fully inside, I knew: there were SalaMen inside. The air was damp, and carried on it the stink of fear and suffering.

  I let the door whisper shut and went in search of them. Went in search of—okay, damn it—of my people.

  Hellbender isn’t a salamander that spends its life underground, so its eyes aren’t as sensitive as some. Still, I had no trouble making out the shapes of the hallway and the doors, some of which were standing open. And I wasn’t too surprised to find one leading to stairs, since I’d figured there might be as much of this building underground as there was above.

  It wasn’t a new building, although sometime in the last year or so the walls got a coat of paint and the linoleum was scrubbed. I couldn’t tell what the place had been in a previous life—out here, it probably wasn’t anything legal.

  It wasn’t now, either. That ad in WeWeb promised easy money, but what the SalaMen who answered it got wasn’t money, and there was nothing easy about it. My recent library crawl, hunting down Harry’s names, had given me some things they had in common beyond their genetic structure.

  For one thing, an awful lot of them were strapped for cash. A couple had lost their jobs, others had mortgage problems or a divorce or kids to support (adopted kids, but still family). And as near as I could tell without going into Harry’s home computer, they’d all belonged to Harry’s WeWeb group. Every one of them was on WeWeb—which meant nothing in itself, most of the country was on WeWeb—but every one of Harry’s names had a page where portions were blocked from view.

  If his sister was right, it would be tough to infiltrate the group. However, I had no doubt that a clever and patient person could come up with an ad targeting customers of a brand of lotion soothing to SalaMan skin, or supporters of certain political candidates, or any of a hundred other possible arrows and send them the ad.

  And when the poor bastards responded to it, they’d ended up here.

  A research facility.

  At the bottom of a flight of metal stairs was a door. It was closed, although the stink that came around it made my eyes water. I took a deep breath and went through it.

  Another long corridor, with steel doors on both sides. Every door had a small barred window in it. Eyes glistened from behind some of the bars.

  I took care of the camera above the door, then eased forward to the first door and breathed, “Are there any guards down here?”

  “Who . . . who are you?” A man’s voice, hesitant.

  “Answer me!”

  “Guards? No, but there’s a camer—”

  “Where are the keys?”

  “Keys?” He was either confused or frightened by the question. It occurred to me that his captors might have played games with him, and he was afraid this might be one of them. But I didn’t have time to pat his head.

  “I came to get you all out of here, but you’ve got to help. Harry’s sister sent me,” I tried.

  “Lizzie?”

  I might as well have said Jesus and the Virgin Mary for all his astonishment. “The keys, man!”

  “One key for all, on a ring near the door,” he shot back.

  I leaped for the door, found the simple key, and stabbed it into his door. I thought I might have to drag him out, but he came willingly enough. I shoved the key at him. “Let the others out,” I started to say, but the key fell to the floor. I snatched it up, cursing his clumsiness. Then he held up his hands for me to look at.

  His hands looked strange in the dim light, more like stubs. And in growing horror I saw that they were stubs. He had no fingers. No fingers at all.

  “Regeneration experiment,” he said, in a voice so tight, it didn’t sound human.

  My skin suddenly felt a size too small. I swallowed, and turned to open the next door.

  There were eleven prisoners in that cellar. All of them were missing something. One woman had fingers about an inch long; God knows how many months she’d been down there. Another woman had a face that even in the near dark I could see was beautiful, but for her ruined eyes—

  A thin man whose beard was either blond or gray shoved past me to embrace the blind woman, who jerked away and then cried “Bill!” and flung herself at him.

  “Quiet!” I ordered, and to Bill I whispered, “Take her over to the door, we’ll all go up at once.”

  I got the last two cages open, but one of the prisoners did not emerge. When I stepped in, I could see why.

  I don’t know how long I stood there, torn between abandoning a person who was going to slow us down dangerously, and the impossibility of leaving anyone in this terrible place. But eventually I became aware of someone standing next to me. It was the first man I’d freed.

  I said, “You’re Harry?”

  “That’s right. You?”

  “Mike Heller. Your sister hired me. Did you find your girl here? Eileen?”

  “She died.”

  “Ah. I’m sorry.”

  “Before I got here. Do you want me to carry her?” he asked, gesturing at the girl on the cot.

  “Can you?”

  “I’ll sure as hell try.”

  He’d been down here only a couple of weeks, which gave him a lot more reserves than some of the others. I helped lift her onto his back, and although he let out a sound when his hand brushed her knee, he clamped his arms against her legs and turned to the door.

  Eleven of them—no: twelve, of us—gathered at the door. I lifted the gun, and whispered, “There’s stairs up and then a hallway. Go down it to the left about thirty feet, and the outside door’s at the end. Keep to one side in the hallway so I have a clear line of sight. If you head out the door at the angle of two o’clock you’ll be in the trees quickest. Up the hill and down, my car’s on the road with a key in a lockbox near the driver’s tire. If we’re discovered, I’ll keep these bastards in place and you move as fast as you can. Don’t worry about me, just go.

  “And when you get closer to town, take my laptop out of the trunk and turn it on. The last e-mail it sends will give you a safe contact in the police department. Tell him to get someone here, fast. Now, ready?”

  At least six of them started talking, with questions or protests, but Harry interrupted them. “There’s no time for this. We’ll do as he says.”

  And they did. My gun leading the way, I crept up the steps, wincing at all the creaks and groans the crew behind me made. At the top, I had them all stand very still and got the door open, again sticking the gun out first, then my nose.

  No one there.

  I went into the hallway, and they came after me, limping and stumbling. I kept to the right, trying to look both ways at once, my heart in my throat. I mean, I’ve been in tight places before, even been shot at, but with eleven innocents on my back? That was a whole different ball game.

  The damned door creaked as I opened it. Why, I don’t know, it hadn’t on my way in, but maybe I was a little more impatient this time. Anyway, it creaked, and then they were pouring past me into the darkness, little cries of disbelief and pleasure, surprise that it was dark, shuddering gasps of clean, night-scented air.

  And then the lights went on.

  “Go!” I said. Harry was last, with the woman on his back, and he hesitated. “Go, get her out of here!” I shoved him into the night, and then reached forward to slam the door shut, closing him out. Closing me in.

  I jumped for the nearest side door, which was closed but not locked. An office of some kind, windowless of course, nice and dark. I left the door open a crack, pressing my ear to it, and about three seconds later I heard voices.

  “—like the outside door.” A man, his voice high, by nature or with
tension.

  “I’ll check it.” This man sounded big, his voice deeper and slower; younger, maybe. I heard footsteps approaching; they sounded heavy; my hand got ready on the gun.

  “Not the door,” snapped the first one. “Downstairs first, so we know if any of them are loose.”

  The footsteps paused; a door opened and I heard a pair of feet descending the metal stairs. The older man stayed at the top, but the voice that rang up from below was perfectly clear:

  “They’re gone! All of them!”

  The older man’s curses retreated down the corridor until they were drowned out by the racket his partner made, pounding up the steel stairs. When he reached the top, he shouted, “You want me to go after them?”

  “Get a shotgun, and wake up Andrew and Mannie. Christ,” he said in a lower voice, “I knew we should have a dog.”

  I was glad about the dog, not so happy about the shotgun. I shifted to put my eye to the crack, and eased it slightly wider until I could see a large back going away from me. My legs twitched with wanting to dive for the door, but I stayed put.

  If I was on the outside, I couldn’t know how many of them there were. Outside, I could keep them from coming out that one door, but there were two others, and in no time at all, they’d circle around me. Outside, I’d be safer, but the others wouldn’t.

  Oh hell, admit it: I’d shut the door to force Harry and the rest to run.

  I’d shut the door because I wanted to climb down the throats of these animals and tear them apart from within.

  In fact, although I hadn’t exactly been thinking clearly when I made my choice, it wasn’t altogether idiotic. There was a good chance these guys would all make a dash for the door at once, allowing me to pick them off, or at least pin them down. I’d brought enough bullets to keep things hot for a while.

  And for a minute, it looked like it would be okay. A clot of men appeared at the far end of the corridor, milling around and shouting at each other. Then they started in my direction.

  I waited, counting heads: four. It was hard to tell exactly where they were in relation to the building’s front door, but I could see enough to know when they passed the door to the prison stairs. I gave it a few seconds, then opened the door wide enough to fit my gun arm through.