Chapter 180: The Armitage File

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Soren dragged the entire town into Silent Hill.

Every puppet buried in the dirt, hidden in abandoned houses, or rotting in the sewers lit up in his senses like beacons. Iron wires erupted from the ground, coiled around the dolls, and yanked them into the air in front of him.

He looked at the dense swarm of wooden bodies hanging like fruit on a dead tree and smirked.

“You’re already dead once. Still this scared of dying?”

The wires tightened.

Crack. Crack. Crack.

Hundreds of puppets shattered into splinters in the same heartbeat.

“No! My children!”

Mary Shaw’s scream tore through the fog. Her translucent form materialized high above the ruined streets, pure spite and fury. This time she didn’t need a scream from him. She was going to rip his jaw open and make him her masterpiece whether he cooperated or not.

She never got the chance.

Purple light flared behind Soren. A spectral hand punched through the air, clamped around the old woman’s spirit, and held her fast. Demonic power detonated inside the grip, blooming into violet flames that swallowed her whole.

Mary Shaw thrashed and shrieked as the fire ate her. Her shape dissolved like smoke in a hurricane.

Soren closed his fist. The hand vanished.

He stood in the middle of the dead town and let out a quiet breath. This was the last thing he would ever do for McClane. No paycheck. Just a debt closed.

Outside the gates, the taxi driver was still singing along with the radio.

“Country roads, take me home…”

Static ripped through the speakers.

“Damn it, what the hell’s wrong with the signal?”

He smacked the dash and glanced toward the town. The color drained from his face.

The place looked like it had been sucked dry. Fog swallowed the streets. Twisted shapes drifted inside the mist.

“Shit!”

He twisted the key. The engine clicked and died. Again. Again.

Something was getting closer. He could feel it. Sweat poured down his neck as he hammered the wheel.

“Fuck! I’m replacing this piece of junk the second I get home—”

Knock. Knock.

He nearly jumped out of his skin.

Soren stood outside the window, looking in like nothing had happened. Behind him the town was quiet and gray again. No fog. No shapes. Just the same empty ghost town he’d driven into twenty minutes earlier.

The driver stared, face bloodless. “What the hell are you? What did you do in there?”

Soren glanced back at the iron gates.

“Maybe you imagined it. I just went in to pay respects to an old friend.”

The driver muttered a prayer under his breath, wiped the sweat off his neck with a napkin, and unlocked the door.

“Get in. God as my witness, I am never setting foot near a place like this again.”

The engine turned over on the first try. He floored it and didn’t look back until the town was a smear in the rearview.

They rolled into the next city and stopped near a bus station. Soren’s phone buzzed the second his boots hit the pavement.

Morrison.

“Where are you right now?”

“Virginia. Just finished some personal business. What’s up?”

“That family you wanted looked into—I got results. A lot of them. Want me to dump everything in your inbox?”

“Do it. Send the bill when you’re ready. I’ll transfer.”

The call ended. Thirty seconds later an encrypted email landed.

Soren opened the first attachment.

A clear, slightly grainy photo of a middle-aged white man with a thick white beard, balding, black-rimmed glasses. Beside him stood a woman with big, carefully styled waves. Both of them looked ordinary. Casual clothes. The kind of shot a delivery guy or house guest might have taken without thinking.

Underneath the photo:

Dean Armitage

Renowned neurosurgical authority.

The rest of the file was thorough. Morrison had earned his fee.

The Armitage family was an old medical dynasty that wore charity like a second skin. They owned more private sanatoriums, psychiatric research centers, and biotech firms than any other single group in the country. Specialists in trauma. Collectors of the broken and the discarded. People who slipped through the cracks of normal society ended up in their facilities and rarely left.

Their reach stretched deep into politics, business, and the quieter corners of official power. Anyone with money and a very specific problem eventually found their way to an Armitage door.

Soren kept scrolling, connecting dots.

Ada had told him the underground facility beneath the psych hospital belonged to this family. Brain-swap experiments. Partnerships with cults that jammed demon cores into human skulls. Human stock used to manufacture things like Valak.

The team that had gone after Patty almost certainly answered to them. He’d spent weeks burning their observation posts. Someone had to pay for that.

The file matched everything Ada had said and everything he’d already guessed.

Then he hit the problem.

Dozens of pages. Not one concrete address.

The closest the report came was a vague note at the end:

Border region between Washington, D.C. and Virginia.

Needle in a haystack, and maybe a fake needle at that.

Soren called Morrison back.

The older man answered on the first ring, already knowing the question.

“I know what you’re about to ask. What I sent you is the ceiling. These people are bigger than they look on paper. A lot bigger.”

A long drag on a cigar.

“I can dig deeper. There’s no shortage of guys willing to risk their necks for the right number. Question is whether you can live with the price.”

Morrison paused.

“My advice? Start in Washington. A family like theirs doesn’t exist without friends in high places. Their money and their secrets both flow through that city. You might find something useful there.”

read lotsstory inpatre** : belamy20