“Mr.
Warwick, I need everything you know about what happened inside that mill,” Orion Locke said from inside the guardhouse, his tone leaving no room for argument.
“Not just confirmed facts.
Rumors, guesses, witness statements, anything strange that might matter—I want all of it.” Warwick nodded, but neither he nor the four armed men around him were actually looking at Orion anymore.
Their attention had shifted toward the doorway behind him.
Orion glanced over his shoulder and immediately understood why.
Hannibal stood silently at the entrance, his nearly eight-foot frame blocking most of the daylight and making the already cramped guardhouse seem noticeably darker.
The mutant’s tactical helmet concealed most of his face, but even through the dark lenses, Warwick and his men could sense something deeply unsettling in the way he watched them, as though the giant were deciding which one would make the easiest meal.
“This is Hannibal,” Orion said calmly.
“My partner.” That explanation didn’t exactly make anyone comfortable, but it did reduce the tension slightly.
Whatever Hannibal was, the enormous mutant was clearly under Orion’s control, and his size alone made ordinary bodybuilders look small.
Warwick swallowed once before finally turning his attention back toward the investigation.
“There is definitely something inside that mill,” Warwick admitted.
“And I wasn’t completely honest with Peters about how bad it’s gotten.” He loosened his collar and continued, “Twenty-nine people have actually disappeared there over the last several days.
The first group was from a cleaning company, and when they didn’t come back, four armed security guards went in after them and vanished too.” Orion’s expression didn’t change, but the number was significantly worse than the report Backman had given him.
Warwick continued, “After that, I hired four veteran pest-control contractors who sometimes work military facilities.
They deal with rats, snakes, insects, toxic infestations, that kind of thing, and they’re all former service members with proper equipment and weapons.” His face tightened.
“Only one came back out.” The contractors weren’t active-duty military personnel, but they were experienced veterans who took specialized extermination and hazardous-removal work under government contracts.
Men in that line of work were usually careful, heavily equipped, and accustomed to entering places filled with venomous animals or contaminated environments.
If three had disappeared and the fourth died trying to escape, whatever was inside Bachman Mill clearly wasn’t an ordinary infestation.
“He was barely alive when he reached the gate,” Warwick said.
“Before he died, he kept trying to say something about a monster.” He turned toward one of the bodyguards nearby.
“Jack, you were here when they found him.
What exactly did he say?” Jack frowned as he searched his memory.
“His mouth was full of blood, so it was hard to understand him.
But I’m pretty sure he kept saying ‘rat.'” “A rat?” Orion repeated.
“He was the only person who ever made it back out?” “That’s right.” “You have pictures of the body?” Jack pulled out his phone and scrolled through several files before handing it over.
Orion studied the photograph carefully and saw a man covered in blood from head to toe, with both arms torn off near the shoulders and deep wounds scattered across his torso.
The injuries didn’t resemble anything a normal rat could inflict; the limbs looked as though they had been ripped away by tremendous physical force.
There was another detail Orion noticed immediately.
No bite marks covered the body.
If the dead contractor had really been attacked by a large swarm of rats, Orion would have expected extensive gnawing damage, especially around exposed flesh.
Either Jack had misunderstood the dying man’s final word, or the “rat” he had been talking about was something far larger and more dangerous than an ordinary rodent.
“That’s everything we know,” Warwick said, irritated enough to throw away a cigar he had barely smoked.
“Nobody who’s gone farther inside has come back with anything useful.
I don’t even know what the hell the place looks like anymore.” He glanced toward Orion and added, “You should already have the two-hundred-thousand-dollar deposit.
If you clear that mill today, I’ll add another hundred thousand to the final payment and make the total five hundred grand.” The four bodyguards visibly reacted to the number.
Five hundred thousand dollars was tempting, but none of them volunteered to accompany Orion.
They had already seen what happened to professional contractors inside the mill, and money was useless to anyone who didn’t survive long enough to spend it.
Orion simply nodded and headed back toward the Suburban.
From the rear cargo area, he removed a Mossberg 590 shotgun and checked the weapon before slinging it across his chest.
His fight with the Collector had taught him that unusual targets could sometimes continue moving after taking rifle rounds, so having a powerful close-range weapon available seemed sensible when entering another confined structure.
A few minutes later, Orion and Hannibal passed through the factory gates.
The old brick walkway had nearly disappeared beneath weeds, and every step snapped dry stems beneath their boots.
Orion followed the traces left by the previous teams until the old stone tomb Charles had mentioned came into view near one side of the mill property.
It was a squat rectangular structure, barely two hundred square feet above ground and roughly ten feet high, built from heavy stone blocks covered in faded symbols and strange carvings.
Orion stopped and studied it for several seconds.
Then he changed direction.
The grave had clearly been neglected for decades, and weeds and brush nearly buried the entrance.
Hannibal drew the oversized kukri from his belt and began clearing the vegetation with several heavy swings, creating a path in moments.
Once the doorway was accessible, Orion stepped inside and found a narrow stone staircase descending beneath the hill.
He counted more than twenty steps before reaching the burial chamber.
Water had seeped through the walls over the years, leaving mud and shallow stagnant pools across the stone floor.
A single heavy sarcophagus occupied the center of the room, and there was no sign of any hidden machinery, Loom, or supernatural activity.
Orion gestured toward it, and Hannibal immediately moved forward.
Bang!
The ogre shoved the stone lid aside with brute force, sending it crashing into the muddy floor.
Orion stepped closer and looked inside, finding only a badly decayed skeleton whose blackened bones had been disturbed and scattered.
Someone had clearly searched the coffin long ago, likely during the original construction of the textile mill.
Orion circled the sarcophagus once, studying the chamber and the remains carefully.
He sensed nothing unusual from the bones and found no hidden compartment or object connected to Charles’s story about the Fraternity.
After another minute, he shook his head and headed back toward the factory.
Before they even reached the main entrance, Orion heard it.
“Squeak… squeak… squeak…” The sound came from everywhere.
His enhanced hearing separated hundreds of tiny movements beneath the creaking building: claws scratching wood, bodies slipping through walls, teeth scraping against something unseen.
Rats were common around abandoned industrial sites, but an infestation this large made little sense because the mill contained almost no obvious food source.
“Strange.” Orion pushed open the factory entrance.
Rats immediately appeared in every direction.
They crowded along pipes, broken machinery, beams, stairways, and holes in the walls, many of them unusually large, with bodies measuring close to a foot before the tail was even counted.
What truly bothered Orion wasn’t their size, however, but their behavior.
None of them ran.
Every rat turned toward him.
Hundreds of tiny black eyes reflected Orion’s figure in the dim factory light, watching him with an eerie level of attention.
The longer Orion stood there, the stronger the sensation became that he wasn’t facing hundreds of separate animals at all.
Something was looking through them.
Orion stopped near the entrance and let his senses spread across the building.
A heavy, undisguised hostility surrounded him from every direction, almost as though the entire mill had noticed his arrival.
The rats remained still, their bodies tense, waiting for some command that had not yet been given.
“No,” Orion murmured.
It wasn’t the rats themselves.
Something deeper inside Bachman Mill was using them as eyes.
A faint smile appeared on Orion’s face.
With a thought, the Mask of the Faceless materialized over his head, automatically tightening around his features as the blue-green surface settled into place.
His emotions faded into perfect calm, pale blue light appeared behind his eyes, and the ordinary human presence surrounding him seemed to vanish.
Hannibal followed silently behind him.
Orion looked toward the stairway leading underground.
“Interesting.” Then he walked straight toward the basement.
(End of Chapter)