Rise Of The Hunters - Chapter 91

Almost being pushed down the stairs, it got darker and darker. He was starting to wonder if he needed to keep going, but he had already come this far, and he could see a light down below. It looked like one of the emergency lights, but it was still a light.

The cold and drifting snow followed him, but the wind died down drastically, and he was able to walk without holding the railing. Glancing back up, he hoped there wasn’t anyone looking for him. That storm was scary.

At the bottom of the stairs, he found a metal door that was propped open with a stick. As he pulled it open, he saw that the stick had a key tied to the end of it. The door was still locked. A bad feeling was starting to form in his gut. There was not key hole on the inside of the door, which meant someone had opened the door with the key, then propped it open while they were inside, to keep from getting locked in.

Debating whether to go inside, he finally decided he needed to know as much as possible as the leader.

The hall on the other side of the door was dim. The only emergency light was not as bright as the one outside the door, and it flickered occasionally. Either it was dying, or was running on a separate power source. Honestly, he didn’t understand much about the power in the compound yet, despite all the information that had been thrown at him.

There were only three doors down this hall, one on either side, and one at the end. The one on the end was open, and he could hear a slurping noise, as of something eating. Walking as quietly as he could, he moved where he could see what was inside.

The back of Gavyn, Lisa’s son, could be seen, hunched over a table. It looked like there was a dead rat the size of a large dog, spread out on the table, belly up. As Xun watched, he reached out and took a scalpel from a tray laying on the end of the table.

Swallowing, he watched silently, as Gavyn pulled something from the corpse, and placing the scalpel back down covered in blood, he turned, holding a squirming bundle in a white towel. It looked like a baby!

Hearing his gasp, Gavyn looked up, not fully facing him, and grinned. “Hey Xun! You’re just in time! Did mom send you?”

Xun took a few steps into the room, and verified that it looked like the baby had indeed just come from the rat. What was going on??

“Mom had mentioned she was going to try and get you on board, but wasn’t sure how you would feel about this. I’m glad you agreed to come. I could sure use the help! No one’s been down in almost a week.”

So, no one knew he was here, because he was sure someone would have mentioned this, and he probably didn’t know what all had happened. Could he pull off lying?

“She said you were pretty busy, and that you would appreciate the help, but she didn’t tell me anything else. Mind filling me in?” He silently congratulated himself on sounding so calm.

“Wait, she didn’t tell you anything?” Gavyn turned to look at him, his wild hair draped over his mangled face, and Xun gasped.

“I guess she didn’t,” he said, chuckling. Tucking the blanket around the baby and shoving a piece of plastic into its mouth for it to suck on, he moved back to the rat.

“What happened? Your mom was in a hurry to check on something outside the compound, something about a lab? She didn’t have time to say much, Mary said it was too important that she hurry.” Xun was hoping that by throwing in bits of truth into his lie, he would sound more believable.

“Mom hated that Mary was going to be the leader, I wonder if it was a trick by Mary? I’ll check on it when I get done here. So, the rats that live down below used to be leftover from a failed experiment the old ones had left running loose years ago. Mom came up with the idea of putting them to use, and had me helping her with it. This one managed to get ahold of me when I went to harvest the babe from it, and tore me up a bit, but nothing to worry about, it didn’t hurt my hair.” He chuckled, throwing his head to the side, to flip the hair out of his eyes, a move that he did almost by habit.

Xun started to wonder what had happened to mess his mind up so much. He didn’t seem dangerous at the moment, as long as he was able to play along, but what would happen if Gavyn saw through it? With his mind so unstable, he could become deadly very quickly.

“Well, it’s kinda hard to explain. Umm, okay, let’s try this. You know during the war, the compound was formed by some government people, right?”

“Kinda, yeah,” Xun said, moving forward to check out the baby. Pulling the blanket back, he could see that it was a baby boy. It’s silver blue eyes, moved to him a little, still mostly blind as all newborns are.

“Well, those leaders had a bunch of babies that had started to grow, but were frozen in time, brought over and stored down here. It was hoped, according to mom, that they could be used to bring people back from the brink of extinction after all the vampires and monsters were gone.”

“Wait, how is that even possible?” Xun asked, watching him wrap the rat up in the piece of paper it was laying on, and shoved it down a shoot in the wall.

“I’m not sure how it’s possible, but I can show you in a minute, all the babies we still have frozen. They’re smaller than seeds. It’s kind of cool.”

Picking up the baby, and wrapping it with the blanket again, he headed out the door. Xun followed him through the door to the right. Inside, there was another hall. He turned to the first door, and pushed it open. Inside, the sound of wailing filled Xun’s ears.