AMIDST THE CATS' CRADLE - 22

C H A P T E R T W E N T Y - T W O - - - - J O R D A N

Jordan could only infer from a distance that Mitch was now standing next to him and mortified by the sight of him.

Jordan's heart was pounding slowly somewhere towards his ankles and appeared to be planning suicide. He was losing all will to live because of what he was seeing, and he had no idea how to stop it.

He was calmly evaluating the issue with the logical mind of a doctor, cocking his head to the side, and taking notes. He was being torn apart by the cougar inside of him, which was urging him to set it loose so it could obliterate all traces of this godforsaken place. the man, too? He was at a loss for words.

Finally, Mitch muttered, "Jordan," and Jordan turned to face his brother after feeling his strong touch on his shoulder. "We must execute this out. Dawson and Duncan."

Jordan saw that Mitch's eyes were teary, and when he did, he knew that he must have been sobbing as well. Jordan gave a sluggish nod before shaking his head to dislodge the cobwebs. He pulled the knife from his waist and stepped inside the eerie room that was shining, fortifying himself against all he was witnessing.

Nothing in the vats in the unnamed Cebu complex appeared to be alive, in contrast to Ilocos. There were tubes, jars, and containers of every description packed with preserved human and animal baby corpses, most of which were caught in a perverse zone between shifted and not shifted. None of them could have been older than a few months; the majority were obviously too young to have even survived the birth canal.

Jordan and Mitch had somehow ended up in a hall of horrors that was beyond anything they could have ever imagined seeing. Although many of the containers were connected to various temperature and consistency control equipment, the space wasn't particularly large—roughly twice the size of the center hall upstairs—and the buzzing was coming from much deeper.

Jordan tried his best not to see the dead corpses' contorted shapes, the tufts of hair covering them, the small tails, and the shattered ears. The doctor in him quickly identified what it was. All the super warriors in production who didn't quite "cut it" were held here as study subjects.

No preserved body was even close to being as ancient as the twins were, which seemed to support Bishop's claim that Dawson and Duncan were unique. His stomach felt as though a knife had been twisted, promising if not frightening that soon his own children might only exist as a mark on the pages of some failed research.

After a short distance, his mind was once again fully his own. Mitch moved front of him while holding the weapon since he was far more equipped than Jordan to do so. The original idea had been to kill the guards, steal their weapons, and advance, but the combat had been so fucking brutal that by the time Jordan had defeated the final opponent, the light of the wide space had been too alluring to resist.

And now here he was, trapped in a nightmare with just his knife in hand, his tongue smelling like copper, and barely enough adrenaline pumping through his veins to keep him pushing forward.

He let out a sigh of relief as they came to another door, Mitch pausing on one side of it while Jordan took the other. They wordlessly counted down from three before Jordan pulled the door open and Mitch swung himself inside. The words he yelled were mostly unintelligible but when Jordan wheeled around the corner, he saw a woman and a man, flattening themselves against the tiled floor in a brightly lit, cold-as-fuck room.

There were several large, roughly pyramid-shaped copper canisters in the room, about eight feet in height and maybe ten feet wide. Countless tubes and wires ran into them, all hooked up to a rack of computers, and the screens were spitting out data faster than Jordan could attempt to read it.

Put he could understand something else. He could see shelves lined with shiny metal containers, all with pressure valves, color coded and neatly stacked. And they looked a lot like the ones he’d seen on the plane.

“Hands behind your fucking heads! Is there anyone else here?” Mitch hissed, the two scared-looking, but blond and blue-eyed techs flattening themselves and trying to become as tiny as they could, as if that would save them.

“N-no,” the woman said. “Please don’t hurt us!”

“Don’t hurt you like you didn’t hurt those fucking children out in your little morgue?!” Mitch asked, incredulous, and even with his back to him, Jordan knew that Mitch’s face was twisted in rage right now.

Jordan looked at the containers, reading the tags on them. They were definitely either the same or close to what they’d had on the airplane, PX-45 as Bishop had called it. Finally, Jordan could take a slight breath. The canisters were not big, maybe two pounds each, and Jordan could feel his body leaping into action even if he consciously couldn’t really keep up.

He made a beeline for one of the work spaces, long tables littered with notes and test tubes and blood samples, and rummaged through the shelves underneath them until he found two thick sacks. He walked back to the lined up canisters, noting that there were three different kinds, and started throwing them into the bags. He only took four of each, leaving the vast majority of the stores untouched.

“Tie them up,” Jordan said as he went back to Mitch, depositing the bags on the floor next to the door.

It was obvious now why upstairs had been so cold. He couldn’t stand next to the copper pyramids without feeling the intense chill wafting off of them, massive vents covering the tops and moving cool air up to the higher floors. Whatever was being done in those containers required a supremely low temperature, probably to keep the chemicals stable instead of violently dangerous.

Mitch zip tied the woman while Jordan did the same for the man. Then, Jordan leaned down, tugging the woman up by her ponytail, making her screech until she was on her knees. There was a faint line of pinkness around her pupils and that hardened Jordan. They were using that stuff on themselves too.

“Are The Arctics trying to breed soldiers now? Is that why all of those… those… tissue samples are out there? Failed pregnancies?” he asked, wrestling with himself to get the words out, to keep it as clinical as possible.

She hesitated for a moment, but when Jordan yanked her hair back, she gasped, tears rolling down her cheeks now though they seemed less than convincing to Jordan.

“Yes! Yes. We’re trying to get the dosing right. It’s an offshoot of some work we’ve done in Detroit earlier,” she stammered.

“But you’re using pregnancies instead of soldiers now?”

“We think it’ll work better if the subjects are used to having it in their bloodstreams from the beginning. In adults, it makes them… unhinged,” she said, her eyes going wide as Jordan’s expression went blank.

“Where are they?”

“Who?”

“The women?” Jordan asked, forcing the words out through clenched teeth.

“The last batch all had complications and had to be… um, put down. We haven’t started new trials yet,” the man piped in, sounding almost proud.

Jordan looked up, sharing a moment with Mitch. His brother looked as disgusted as he was.

“Good,” Jordan said blankly, slamming the woman face-first down on the ground again.

“Delta Three, we have the goods. Repeat, we have the goods. Delta Seven, come in for pickup," Mitch spoke into the headset, his words slightly slurred, coming out pained.

It didn’t take a genius to figure out why that was. The sheer vileness of what Mitch and Jordan had witnessed was enough to send anyone reeling. The Arctics weren’t just monsters, they were trying to create more, bringing up a new generation of fanatics straight from the womb. And they didn’t care who it hurt.

“Delta Six, mopping up,” came Tim’s voice over the comms, allowing Jordan to let out a small breath of relief.

At least his team was still alive.

Standing up, Jordan surveyed the room one more time. A lab, cold and sterile, with more high-tech equipment than most scientists could hope to ever see, let alone afford. All of it used for evil. An idea struck him.

“Is this the only place that’s working on this project?” Jordan asked, kicking the man in the side with his boot.

He gurgled a groan but then nodded when Jordan moved to kick him again.

“Yes, I think it is,” he gasped, obviously in pain from the deftly placed hit to the kidney.

“Good,” Jordan said, as if his vocabulary had shrunk to a wisp of its size.

“Delta Six, I think we have a job for you,” Mitch said, addressing Tim.

The sly smirk on Mitch’s lips told him that his twin was thinking what Jordan had been thinking. And it was just in time too, when Gwen’s voice came over the line, flickering with static and obviously frantic.

“You guys won’t fucking believe what’s coming your way.”