Pop.
Pop.
His breathing grows heavier. The sound of a man who’s been handed unchecked permission to indulge his worst impulses.
And terror unlike anything I’ve ever known floods through my veins.
56
BASTIAN
cold storage /kold 'stôrij/: noun
1: refrigerated space for preserving perishables.
2: where they hang you from a hook and the only warmth left is the dream world in your head.
The cruiser takes a left where it should go straight.
I notice it immediately. Fuck knows I picked up Aleksei enough times in our teen years to remember the way. I know the route to every precinct in Chicago. Central booking is east. County lockup is south. Federal detention requires a highway merge that we passed three miles ago.
We, on the other hand, are heading west. Toward the industrial district, the home of abandoned warehouses and empty lots where screams don’t carry.
“Wrong turn,” I say to the partition. “County’s the other direction.”
Neither cop responds.
I lean forward and scan what I can see of them through the cage divider. No name tags and no badge numbers visible. The one in the passenger seat has a tattoo peeking above his collar.
It looks a lot like Aleksei’s.
“Hey.” I knock my forehead against the partition to draw their attention. “I said you’re going the wrong way.”
The driver’s eyes find mine in the rearview mirror.
He smiles.
It’s the coldest expression I’ve ever seen on a human face—reptilian, empty, like something alien wearing a person suit. Then he reaches up and clicks off the dashboard camera.
Fuck.
The cruiser pulls into what used to be a meatpacking plant, judging by the smell. Even with a car window between me and it, the taint of old blood and rendered fat curdles my stomach.
The factory’s walls look like they’re as sick of the stench as I am. They’re sagging toward the ground, weary, worn, disgusted.
We stop and the cops come around to haul me out by my cuffed wrists. “Gentle” is not a term they’re familiar with. My knees scrape concrete and start to weep blood as they drag me through a loading bay.
The smell gets worse and worse as we go. Years of disuse haven’t erased it.
We descend a concrete stairwell into a basement that has no business existing in a place like this. It’s too new, too clean. The walls are freshly painted, the floor recently poured, the fixtureshumming with electricity that shouldn’t be running to this dilapidated shithole.
Aleksei renovated this space for a specific purpose. No prizes for guessing what that purpose might be.
The cell they throw me into is barely ten feet square. A big, square drain sits in the center of the floor. Huge meathooks dangling from the ceiling gleam in the low light.
I’ve seen rooms like this before, back when I ran jobs for my brother.
I know exactly what those hooks are for.
