Page 67 of Cole: Bloodlines
Daniel curled his fingers around Byrne’s wrist and calmly forced his hand down, drawing the knife away from his throat. “Deal with ourvisitors,”he said. “Iwill deal with Henry.”
His dad turned away in the opposite direction and walked off. Byrne watched him as the shadowy corridor gradually swallowed him. His hand twitched against his sidearm, while thoughts of shooting his father in the head crossed his mind. But the idea went no further than a thought. Byrne turned his back on the retreating man and continued along the corridor in search of the intruders.
Clint raised the radio to his mouth, the cold plastic slick against his calloused thumb as he pressed the button. “What's your status?” Static crackled through the speaker like distant gunfire. They had opted for radio communication over cell phones, as the steel machine factory—a hulking monstrosity of corroded metal and forgotten industry—would swallow cell signals in its iron belly.
“Nothing yet,”Cochise's voice came back, tinny and distant. “I'm headed toward the central machinery stations.”
“Watch your back. They could be anywhere,” Clint said, eyes scanning the shadows that pooled in every corner. “I'm going to check the lower level. I'll let you know if I find anything.”
“Be careful.”
“Always.” Clint clipped the radio to his belt with a dull click and pushed open the heavy, corroded door. It protested with a banshee-like shriek that set his teeth on edge. He shot his flashlight beam down the rusted, steel-grate stairs, illuminating a spiral of decay descending into pitch blackness. Each step released clouds of orange-red rust flakes that danced in his light beam like toxic snow. The stairs creaked and groaned under hisweight, the sound amplified in the hollow space below, but the old metal held firm beneath his boots.
At the bottom was another door, latched closed from the outside with a rusted iron bar that had oxidized to the color of dried blood. Clint lifted it with both hands, muscles straining against the weight, and the metal scraped against its housing with the sound of nails on a chalkboard. When he pushed the door open, the corroded hinges let out a high-pitched shriek. His flashlight beam sliced through the darkness, revealing glimpses of the cavernous chamber beyond: concrete floors stained with substances he didn't want to identify, metal tables with leather restraints hanging loose, tools of torture hanging on hooks drilled into brick walls that seemed to absorb light rather than reflect it.
The cold hit him like a physical blow—not the bracing winter chill, but something septic and unnatural that penetrated his clothes and settled in his joints with arthritic malice. His breath billowed in front of his face in thick, ghostly plumes that hung suspended before dissolving into nothingness. The walls wept with condensation, rivulets of moisture threading down the concrete like tears on a tortured face. Patches of black mold bloomed in the corners, their edges rimed with crystalline frost where the subzero temperatures battled the room's fetid humidity. The stench—a nauseating cocktail of human waste, chemical preservatives, and the copper-penny reek of old blood—made his eyes water and his throat constrict.
In one corner of the room, the remnants of a filthy blanket—once white but now stained a yellow-brown with sweat, urine, and God knows what else—stuck out from beneath a locked cage door, its frayed edges frozen stiff. More cages lined the walls like iron coffins, boxes of absolute blackness that swallowed his flashlight beam.
On the far wall, crude tally marks were etched into the rough brick using what might have been fingernails or perhaps a scavenged nail, some shallow, others gouged deep enough to chip the mortar. The numbers climbed with a compulsive, desperate logic—first in neat rows, then increasingly frantic and uneven toward the end. Each vertical line represented a memorial to someone who had occupied space, each group of five marked a chapter of captivity, a calendar of suffering scratched by those who'd lost everything except the ability to count.
Clint entered, boots cracking through a thin layer of frost that coated the concrete floor like a funeral shroud. The vast, frozen chamber swallowed his flashlight beam, and the darkness seemed to recede only inches before rushing right back in. He pulled his collar tight around his neck with numb fingers, but the gesture felt as feeble as striking a match in a blizzard; the chill here wasn't just physical but existential—a primeval coldness that gnawed at the very idea of warmth, seeping through his clothes and settling into his marrow. He paused just inside the threshold, nostrils flaring at the stench of urine and despair, eyes struggling to adjust to the intermittent patches of glare and gloom that his flashlight carved out of the darkness.
The metal cages were mostly empty, their interiors scuffed with desperate fingernail marks and stained with dark spots he didn't want to identify. In one, he saw a tuft of matted blonde hair pressed against the corroded bars, unmoving as death. He counted the rows: twelve cages in total, arranged like coffins in a mausoleum. As he shone the light across the row of bars, fearful faces appeared in the harsh beam—hollow-cheeked prisoners huddled in the back of three cages, knees drawn to chests, eyes reflecting his light like those of trapped animals—young boys in their mid-teens, one possibly preteen, with tear-streaked cheeks and lips bitten raw.
Clint moved forward cautiously, his footsteps silenced by the damp, uneven floor. Halfway across the room, he heard a faint chuff—more of a sigh than a cry—and a pale hand reached out from the darkness, fingers spread, palm raw and red. Clint hesitated. The hand hung in the air for a moment before pulling back, as if the owner had abandoned hope of rescue and withdrawn into the safety of their own shadow.
He first inspected the unmoving boy, crouching down to peer through the rusted bars. Light spilled across the child's face, and the cowboy's heart sank like a stone. The kid's face had a bluish pallor, skin waxy and taut against his cheekbones. His eyes, half-open, were milky and vacant like frosted marbles. Dried blood crusted the corners of his mouth and nostrils. Bile rose in Clint's throat, acid burning at the back of his tongue, as he moved on to the other cages.
“Don't be frightened,” he said quietly, forcing steadiness into his voice. “I'm going to get you out of here.”
The surviving boys flinched at his words. One pressed against the back wall, knees pulled to his chest like a pill bug. Another's eyes darted between Clint and the door, pupils dilated into black pools in sunken sockets. The third trembled visibly, lips moving silently in prayer or plea. None of them believed him.
Clint swept his flashlight beam across the room once more, the harsh light catching on a door with peeling gray paint and a tarnished brass knob. He crossed the floor in long strides, boots leaving wet impressions on the grime-slicked concrete, and twisted the knob with a metallic grind of neglected mechanisms.
The hinges protested with a rusty whine as he was struck with an unexpected waft of warmth. The small room appeared to be a makeshift office and living space: a metal desk covered in cigarette burns and coffee rings, three mismatched folding chairs with torn vinyl seats, a stained cot with tangled sheets,and a space heater that glowed orange in the corner, the only source of warmth in this frozen hell. Against the back wall sat a massive wooden crate, roughly the size of a coffin, constructed of splintered cedar planks darkened with age and moisture. Clint started to step back when something inside the crate shifted with a dull thud.
“What the fuck...?” Clint whispered, his breath catching in his throat as he slowly moved toward the wooden box. A large, heavy-duty padlock—the kind used for shipping containers—secured the crate, its brass body gleaming dully in the flashlight beam. The padlock was attached to thick galvanized metal bands that wrapped around the box like prison bars, secured with bolts driven deep into the wood. Clint squatted down and leaned closer to the crate, nostrils flaring at the acrid smell of urine and fear seeping through the wooden slats. “Hello?” he lightly rapped his knuckles on the wood, the hollow sound echoing in the small room. “Is someone in there?”
Another shift from inside—more deliberate this time—followed by what might have been a muffled whimper.
“Shit,” Clint muttered through clenched teeth and rose to his full height, joints cracking in the cold. He walked back to the other room, eyes scanning the debris-littered floor for anything that might serve as a pry bar. A jagged length of rusted pipe gleamed dully in his flashlight beam. As he bent down and his fingers closed around the frigid metal, a gunshot cracked the silence like a bullwhip, the sound reverberating off the concrete walls until it seemed to come from everywhere at once.
White-hot pain exploded through his left shoulder, the impact spinning him like a marionette. His body slammed against the grimy concrete, the taste of copper flooding his mouth as his teeth clicked together. Even as he fell, muscle memory took over—his right hand clawed at his holster, yanking his weapon free. He squeezed off two wild shots toward theexit door, the muzzle flash briefly illuminating a stout silhouette before darkness swallowed it again.
The heavy steel door slammed shut with the finality of a coffin lid, followed by the grinding screech of the external latch being cranked down.
“Fuck!” Blood seeped between Clint's fingers as he pressed his palm against the wound, warm and sticky against his frozen skin. He staggered to his feet, each movement sending fresh waves of agony through his shoulder, and lurched toward the door. The handle refused to give under his bloodied grip, cold metal slick beneath his palm.“Fuck!”His voice echoed in the frozen chamber as he fumbled for his radio with trembling fingers. “Cochise! Come in!”
“I heard shots,”Cochise's voice crackled through static, tension evident in every syllable.“Are you okay? What happened?”
“The fucker got the jump on me,” Clint hissed, watching his breath form clouds in the frigid air. “Clipped me in the shoulder. I’m okay.” He gave the door another futile yank, leaving a crimson smear on the handle. “But he locked me in.”
“I'm headed your way,”Cochise replied, the sound of running footsteps coming through the radio.
Clint’s eyes darted to the terrified faces watching him from the cages, and he murmured, “Be fuckingcareful.”
CHAPTER 30: DARK DELIBERATIONS
