Page 253 of Golden Eagle

“Yes, well, pride does tend to come before a fall. Don’t make the same mistake tonight. They are few, and we are many. We can crush them, and it’s high time we did so.” He moved past the vampire, toward the door. “Oh, and, Gustav? Recapture LC-7. That’s an order. And if you get the chance to kill Basil Norrie” – another smile, because he felt like it, because it was a good outlet for the energy thrumming through his veins – “make it hurt.”

~*~

Before he left the building, Dr. Fowler went down to the subbasement. He went through the basement, through both labs there, past the loose huddle of Gustav’s recruited vampires, a motley group of thugs, street-fighters, pickpockets, and predators, men and women, most of them muscled and tough-looking. A few sent him hostile glances, which he ignored. He’d grown used to vampires, and their territorial ways.

He’d learned, immortal or not, that they screamed just like humans when you applied the right sort of pressure.

He used his keycard – a unique one, with special codes written into its chip – to access a stairwell built to look like a section of metal wall-paneling, and headed down.

The idea had come from Virginia, from its two subbasements. It was one thing to have a basement for normal security purposes – but sometimes you needed somethingmore. A deeper hole to bury something truly awful. Before this branch of the Institute had been opened, its front façade of a pleasing, soothing hospital environ in place, construction had begun: long months of digging down, bracing up, installing plumbing and electric, and installing heavy,heavydoors in the right places. A freight elevator provided the means to shift down crates – or cages. And the floor hosted dozens of drains which allowed for drainage of all sorts, some of it aided by the powerful hoses coiled up on the walls.

The subbasements in Virginia were useful, but terribly antiquated, like the dungeons in an Old World castle.

The subbasement here was a thing of efficient, sterile beauty, much more serviceable.

The stairs switched back several times, and dumped him out in the center of a rectangular, concrete room, lit with caged lights, circled by heavy steel doors set with small, barred windows at their centers. He’d heard the noise by the last landing, and now that he was here, surrounded by it, he knew a fleeting, uncharacteristic pulse of fear.

Their new acquisitions wereloud.

Shrieks, howls, growls, snarls, and the occasional leonine roar, all muffled by the steel and concrete; some of the acquisitions pounded on the walls and doors of their cells, scrabbling like they were trying to claw their way out.

“Sir,” the young guard on duty greeted him, snapping to attention. If Fowler remembered correctly, he’d been a sergeant before his injury, discharge, and subsequent treatment at the Institute.

“Do they do this much?” Fowler asked, motioning to the cells.

The sergeant swallowed, throat jumping, his face too pale. He’d seen war, seen his own body blown apart, but clearly, he’d never seen anything likethis. “All the time, sir.”

“Hm. And where are the handlers?”

“Having dinner, sir.”

“Go and get them. They need to be ready in the event our new friends need to be put to use tonight.”

“Sir.”

He trotted off, and returned ten minutes later from a side door with a disgruntled Dr. Hawkins, who’d once been a vet, and now was handling a very different kind of animal. He started to say something, frowning, some complaint about having his dinner interrupted – a belligerent, stupid man, heedless of the good work they were doing here – and Fowler cut him off.

“Gather your team, Dr. Hawkins, any who can be spared from here, tonight, and prepare as much sedative as you’ll need to transport five of them.”

“T-transport?” Hawkins spluttered. “Are you fucking – it was hard enough getting them in their cages!”

“Yes, I imagine so, but they aren’t here to be used as decoration. Get what you need to move five. I don’t want to be late.”

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