Division 13 Case File 013-007: The Tomb (Part 2)

A secret CIA black site in Alaska has gone dark.

No contact.
No survivors.
And no explanation.

When Division 13 is sent to investigate the facility known only as “The Tomb,” the team expects an containment breach involving the Nullborn prisoners held deep underground.

What they find instead is far worse.

The Tomb is a special three-part story arc.

The nightmare continues.

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:00

My name is Hannah Keegan. I'm a lead detective for a top secret New York Police Department Task Force. We're assigned to the unexplained cases that border on the paranormal. This is Division 13, and here are our case files.

SPEAKER_00 0:15

There is a particular kind of silence that gets under your skin. Not the silence of an empty room or the quiet of a sleeping city. I mean the silence of a place that should not be silent. The kind that tells you something is wrong before your brain has the words for it. That was level two. The stairwell down from reception dumped us into a long corridor. Living quarters, rows of doors, most of them hanging open. The emergency lights here were dimmer than upstairs, some of the fixtures dead entirely, which meant our rifle lights had to do most of the work, cutting pale channels through the dark. Kendrick moved up beside me, voice low. Smells different down here. He was right. Upstairs had been the copper and rod of blood, a smell I knew too well, thick and metallic. Down here it was something else. Sour, spoiled, the smell of food left out for days, of coffee gone cold, of milk curdling in a mug on a table where somebody had been sitting when the world ended. Overton eased open the nearest door with the toe of her boot. A break room. Round table, four chairs, a plate of eggs, long since congealed and gray at the edges, a mug of coffee, a film of white mold beginning to bloom across the surface. A half-eaten piece of toast, stiff as cardboard, still on its napkin. Four days, Overton said quietly, surveying the table. She didn't touch anything.

SPEAKER_03 2:00

But look at this. Food half-eaten. Not even a plate in the sink.

SPEAKER_00 2:05

She looked up at me.

SPEAKER_03 2:07

They were taken mid-meal. Whatever happened, it happened without warning. No time to react.

SPEAKER_00 2:15

We cleared the rooms one by one. Each told the same story. A book left open on a marked page. A game of solitaire, half finished. A letter started and abandoned on a small writing desk, the pen still uncapped beside it. Whoever had lived and worked down here, the support staff, the medics, the admin workers who kept this place running, they had been in the middle of their ordinary lives when everything stopped. What we didn't find was blood. Not here. Not yet. That absence, somehow, was worse. Castillo emerged from a room at the far end of the hall. Her expressions dripped down to the bone.

SPEAKER_01 3:03

No bodies. No sign of struggle in any of these rooms. They were taken from their beds, from their meals, from wherever they happened to be standing.

SPEAKER_00 3:14

A pause.

SPEAKER_01 3:15

Taken, not killed. At least not here.

SPEAKER_00 3:21

Moved, Kendrick said, his voice flat. To God only knows where. Nobody answered that. We all had the same image in our heads. The hanging figures in the reception hall, one level above us, eyes gouged out, throats cut, arms stretched wide. I was about to give the order to descend to level three when Kendrick stopped in the middle of the corridor. His light had found the far wall. Three words painted in broad, ugly strokes. Not blood this time. Black paint or something close to it. Letters a foot tall, the brushwork almost casual, like a note left for a neighbor. Abandon all hope. For a moment, none of us spoke. I sensed it. The feeling of the team fraying at the edges. Castillo exhaled through her nose and turned away from the wall. Overton's jaw was set hard, but her eyes had gone somewhere else, staring almost vacantly into the distance. Kendrick stood with his rifle pointed at the floor, posture deflated, staring at those three words like they were aimed specifically at him. I let the silence sit for exactly two seconds. Then I stepped forward until I was standing directly in front of the wall, my back to the words, facing my team, making sure I had every eye in the room. This was painted for us, I said. My voice came out level. Or whoever came looking. I looked at each of them in turn. Think about that. This is psychological warfare. Somebody wants us rattled. They want us second guessing, hesitating, making emotional decisions instead of tactical ones. I shook my head slowly. That's the whole point of this. The crucifixions upstairs, the meals left on the tables, and now this. It's designed to get inside our heads, cloud our judgment, and make us easy to defeat. I held their eyes. So here's what we're going to do. We're going to recognize it for what it is, and we're going to keep moving. Clear heads, weapons up, eyes forward. We don't give them the reaction they're counting on. I paused. Understood? The silence that followed was different from the one before it. Kendrick straightened. Castillo rolled her shoulders. Overton's eyes came back into focus, sharp and cold. Descending to level three, I said. Stay tight. Nobody looked at the wall again. The stairwell to level three ended at a heavy door, stenciled in red block letters. Hades Gate. Authorized personnel only. No other information. No description of what waited on the other side. Smith had mentioned the name in the briefing, almost in passing. A security level between the living quarters and the labs. She hadn't elaborated, and I hadn't pushed, assuming that she didn't know more. I regretted that assumption now. Hades Gate, Jack said, reading the stencil. He tilted his head. Reassuring name. Lock and load. Three shot bursts, I said. We go in fast and low, and we spread immediately. No clustering. Castillo, you're on the left wall. Kendrick, right. Overton, center with me. Jack, blow this lock and be ready to sweep the rear. Kendrick, toss a flashbang as soon as we breach. We assess and adapt. Whatever's in there, we do not stop moving. Jack quickly rigged his C4 as we found cover. Fire in the hole! The second the door cracked, Kendrick tossed his stun grenade to disorient whoever might be waiting on the other side. Not waiting for the smoke to clear from the explosions, I moved forward in a low crouch, pushing the doors open. It took me a single heartbeat to assess the situation. Wide, low ceiling, 60 feet across, maybe more, the far wall lost in shadow, an empty kill zone, the floor bare concrete, no cover. Mounted to the ceiling in a staggered grid, eight weapon housings. Four of them were the compact, multi-barreled silhouette of automated machine gun arms, each one anchored to its own compact relay unit, blinking with a low amber light. Separate power sources, I registered, one per gun. The other four housings were wider, lower, flamethrower units. Nozzles angled downward. In the center of the room, a single yellow indicator light pulsed slowly. Then it turned solid red. Relaith! Kendrick shouted. He'd clocked them a half second before I did. Each gun has its own. Take them on the move. Go, I commanded. The room erupted. All four gun arms swung and opened up simultaneously. Infrared motion detectors locked on and tracking our heat signatures. I was already moving, hard left center, cutting at an angle, drawing the nearest arms fire across empty floor as I sprinted for the first relay unit on the left wall. Kendrick went right, doing the same, forcing two of the guns to split their targeting. Castillo went low and fast down the left wall, drawing fire while Overton cut wide right behind her. Then the flamethrowers ignited. A gout of fire swept the center of the room in a broad arc, and the temperature spiked instantly. Heat you don't just feel on your skin, you feel in your lungs, behind your eyes. Kendrick went flat, rolling under the arm. Castillo had already cleared it by a step. Overton cut sharp right, the flame grazing the air inches behind her heel. I reached the first relay and raised my rifle, hitting it at point-blank range. The housing sparked and the gun arm above it spasmed, barrel swinging wide, firing into the ceiling before going dark. One down. Across the room, I heard the crack of Kendrick's rifle. A single-aimed shot, cool and deliberate even in the chaos, punching through the relay casing on his side. The gun arm seized and died. Two down. Two left on guns, Overton called, already moving on the third, drawing fire as she closed the distance, making herself a moving target too fast for the tracking system to lock cleanly. She hit the relay at a dead run, firing point blank into the casing. It held. She hit it again. It sparked and died. Three down. The fourth gun arm swung toward Castillo. She went into a combat slide under the burst, came up inside the arm's minimum tracking range, too close for it to angle down, and drove her rifle straight up toward the relay casing, firing until the casing gave way in a shower of sparks. The arm shuddered and went dark. Four down. The flamethrowers swept one final arc and then cut off, their circuits apparently linked to the gun systems. The room filled with the acrid smell of scorched concrete and spent propellant. Silence. Five of us. Still standing, breathing hard. I did a quick scan. Kendrick, rolling his right shoulder but upright. Castillo, a burn graze along her left forearm from the flamethrower arc. She was already looking at it with a professional eye, deciding it was manageable. Overton, untouched, already moving back toward the center of the room in a tactical sweep. And Jack. He was standing by the far wall, and I could see from the way he was holding his right arm that something was wrong. He had his sleeve pushed back. During his sweep of the rear, one of the gun arms had caught him. A grazing hit, not a clean shot, but deep enough to hit bone. The wound ran across his right forearm, bleeding steadily. Miller, I said, crossing to him. He looked up, met my eyes. I'm good, Cap. It wasn't Bravado. It was a report. And I believed him, because the alternative was leaving him here. Overton, dress that wound. Two minutes, I said. She was already on it. Jack submitted to the field dressing without complaint, watching the far door while she worked, staying useful with his eyes even when his hands were occupied. I stood in the middle of the room and looked at the dead weapon housings, the darkened relays, the scorched lines on the floor. This level had been built to stop people. Professional, determined, well-armed people. It had not stopped us. I thought about what it had cost us to get through it. Miller's arm, Castillo's burn, the reserves of focus and nerve it had taken to stay precise under that kind of fire. I felt a momentary surge of pride in this team. My team. Then I refocused. We had more levels to go. Level four, I said. Move out. I had been in combat. I had been in war. I had seen things in Afghanistan that I did not have words for, and things in this city, in the months since Division 13 was formed, that I never could have imagined before. I thought I had calibrated myself to horror, learned to see it clearly without letting it reach the part of me that still needed to function with detachment. Level 4 recalibrated me. The labs occupied the entire floor, a wide open space sectioned by low partitions and workstations, the kind of research environment that probably hummed with purpose and fluorescent lighting on a normal day. Today the emergency lights painted everything in dull red, and the smell reached us before we were fully through the door. Sharp, unsettling, the smell of sickness and sweat. The staff of the tomb's medical and research division, eight people, according to the briefing, were here. I won't describe it in detail, not because I'm protecting anyone reading this, but because some things, once you've put them into words, you carry them in the words as well as the memory. What I will say is this. They had been arranged, like the security personnel upstairs had been arranged. This was not chaotic violence. This was the deliberate, patient work of someone or something, that wanted us to understand it had all the time in the world. Castillo averted her gaze. I didn't blame her. Kendrick was stonefaced, jaw tight, working through it the same way I was, converting the horror into something colder and more useful. Overton crouched beside the nearest workstation and began methodically checking for recoverable materials, for anything the lab had been working on. Professional, focused. I was grateful for her. Jack said nothing. He stood at the edge of the room and watched the corridor ahead, and I understood that was his way of handling it. Standing guard, staying useful, not letting it in. Lab notes, Overton said, her voice stripped of emotion.

SPEAKER_03 16:01

Handwritten. They were conducting analysis on the neon samples and on tissue recovered from the Nullborn captives.

SPEAKER_00 16:08

She turned pages slowly.

SPEAKER_03 16:10

References to the nanobots Russo identified back home. They were close to a full breakthrough on the replication mechanism, method of transmission.

SPEAKER_00 16:20

She looked up.

SPEAKER_03 16:22

This is valuable.

SPEAKER_00 16:23

Take everything you can carry, I said. That was when Kendrick said very quietly, Kemp. He was looking toward the far end of the lab, past the last row of workstations, where the corridor continued into shadow. His rifle light was trained on a figure standing motionless in the dark. A woman. Head tilted downward, glowing orange eyes barely visible under the spill of her hair, still as a photograph. I recognized her immediately, and the recognition hit me like cold water. Evelyn Carter. She had been dead. I had watched her die, watched the blood pour from her ears and mouth on a mission weeks ago. Watched her go limp on the concrete floor. I had given the order to bag her remains myself. I was there when her remains were scheduled for transport. She was supposed to be gone. She stood at the end of the corridor and looked at us. Her head tilted slowly, the way a person's head tilts when they're concentrating on a voice speaking in a whisper. Her glowing eyes caught the edge of our rifle lights, smoldering like embers. Then she shifted with a stiff, jerking motion, like something trying to remember how to be alive. Carter, I said. She didn't answer. She took one stuttering, jerking step backward into the shadow. Then another. Then she was gone, swallowed by the dark at the end of the corridor, as quietly as if she had never been there at all. The team held position, eyes locked on the empty space where she had stood.

SPEAKER_03 18:12

That's not possible, Overton said.

SPEAKER_00 18:15

Her voice was steady, but only barely.

SPEAKER_03 18:19

She was dead. We all know she was dead.

SPEAKER_00 18:23

She was, I said. I stared at the empty corridor for a long moment, turning it over in my mind, filing it where I filed everything I couldn't explain yet. Not dismissed, not accepted, just held. Whatever she is now, I said quietly, she isn't what she was. I looked at the team. Level 5, I said. We go down. Case file note. Level 2 cleared. No survivors located. Miller sustained gunshot wound to right forearm. Castile sustained minor thermal burn, left forearm. Both continue on mission. Level 4 labs cleared. Eight staff members deceased. Biological research notes and lab files recovered. Unconfirmed visual contact with subject Evelyn Carter, previously declared deceased. Status unknown. Team descending to level five. End case file zero one three dash zero zero seven.