Scarlet Dream. James Axler
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the wall, the former archivist reared away, watching as the ghastly thing took another staggering step past her, reaching out toward Kane.
“On your knees,” Kane repeated, gesturing with the muzzle of the Sin Eater pistol in his hand. “You take one more step and I will shoot.” He didn’t have any authority here, that was true, but Kane was pretty damn sure that the dead thing that stumbled in front of him didn’t, either.
Behind the creature, the fire door had eased itself closed on its slow hinges, effectively shutting off the noise of movement here from the rest of the redoubt. The rotting thing took another lurching step toward the ex-Mag.
Kane gritted his teeth. “You’re about to end up a whole lot deader if you don’t back off,” he snarled.
Then, with a surge of incredible speed in the dim lighting of the tight stairwell, the corpse-thing lunged for Kane. More literally he fell at Kane, arms outstretched, using weight and gravity to propel himself at the ex-Mag.
Kane depressed the trigger stud of his Sin Eater and a stream of 9 mm slugs rammed into that cadaverous body even as he fell forward. The sounds of gunfire echoed throughout the stairwell as Kane was slammed backward by the falling corpse, and he felt his feet slip off the step, throwing his balance. Then Kane found himself crashing against the metal-barlike banister that ran around the inside turn of the stairwell, striking it with his lower back in a spasm of sharp pain.
Kane’s feet kicked out as he finally lost his balance, and suddenly he was toppling backward, the corpse still flailing at him as they both began to drop over the side of the stairs.
Moving on instinct alone, Brigid reached out and grabbed for the undead thing that was pushing Kane, seizing the creature’s legs as she watched Kane descend over the banister. Held in Brigid’s grip, the corpse-thing found himself dragged off his victim, and he turned to face her even as his head slammed into the metal banister with a resounding clang. In that instant, Brigid produced her TP-9 and drilled a cacophony of bullets into the thing’s decomposing face, reducing it to pulp. Chunks of rotted flesh sprayed the walls around her as bullets mashed into the remains of the thing’s hideous features.
At the same time, one floor below, Kane dropped head-first toward the next flight of stairs. Twisting frantically in midair, he stretched his arms out in front of him in an effort to break his fall. He landed badly—it was hard to do otherwise, landing as he did on the uneven incline of the stairs—taking the impact in his strong arms and rolling over onto his back with a grunt of pain.
“You okay?” Grant asked, peeking down the stairwell at his partner as Brigid continued struggling with the corpse on the floor above.
“Help Brigid,” Kane replied without hesitation.
Grant didn’t question the order—he knew that Kane only used Brigid Baptiste’s first name when he was really concerned for her. He figured that being knocked over a balcony by an animated corpse will do that to you.
Brigid, however, had matters well in hand. The corpselike figure staggered in place as she peppered his decomposing body with bullets, until he finally slouched against the banister and sunk to the floor in a heap, emaciated limbs flailing in all directions.
“I think it’s dead,” Grant said as he hurried up the stairs to join Brigid.
Brigid looked at him, one ginger eyebrow cocked in amusement. “I think it was dead before it met me,” she said.
Grant leaned down, getting a closer look at the messy, foul-smelling remains of the creature. Clearly human but visibly decomposing, he reeked of death. Using the barrel of his gun, Grant prodded the corpse a few times, but the dead thing didn’t react.
As Grant pushed at the unmoving corpse in the dim lighting of the stairwell, Kane trudged back up the stairs, a spatter of blood marring his forehead. “Did we get it?” he asked.
Grant nodded while Brigid checked Kane’s wound. It was just a graze; the thin line of blood made it look worse than it really was. Once she wiped that away, Brigid could see the scratch, and it had already dried.
“If Stinky here has buddies,” Kane noted, “that shattered window is going to draw their attention. But if we move quick, maybe we can get the jump on them.”
With that, the Cerberus trio headed for the fire door, leaving the remains of the dead man sprawled across the stairs. They didn’t notice him flinch, struggling to pull himself up from the floor after the heavy fire door had inched closed, his ruined face dripping away in gobs of muscle and dried-up skin.
AN ALIEN RACE called the Annunaki had first visited the Earth aeons ago and had been surreptitiously involved in human affairs ever since the emergence of humankind. To man, these beings from the stars, wielding technology far in advance of anything he could comprehend, had seemed divine, and so man had served and worshipped them without question.
But the Annunaki, alarmed at the proliferation of humans, initiated a wave of destruction to purge the Earth of humankind and start afresh. Recorded by various historical documents, that purging is perhaps best known as the Great Flood of Judeo-Christian tradition, and although it decimated the local population it failed to totally destroy it.
The Annunaki had spent the subsequent millennia observing from the shadows as man had grown bold, had proliferated at an alarming rate and learned how to tame his environment for his own ends. While the Annunaki had weaponry that had seemed magical in its capability, they had been fascinated to see how man developed his own terrible weaponry, things that could hurt and maim and kill.
Ultimately, the Annunaki had played their hand once more to begin the second great purging, utilizing fire this time where water had failed before. The brief nuclear war of 2001 had utterly changed the landscape of the planet Earth, creating vast tracts of irradiated land known as the Deathlands, and all but destroying the population. This was the world’s legacy that the Cerberus rebels inhabited.
But while the nuclear bombs had marked the end of civilization, they had not been the only means of destruction developed by man. In fact, in the centuries since the Annunaki had first tried to extinguish him, man had excelled in developing the means with which to kill his fellow man, and many and varied ways had been created that might be used to that terrible end.
Deep in the subterranean complex of Redoubt Mike, Ezili Coeur Noir had just uncovered one such terrible weapon. The queen of all things dead, Ezili Coeur Noir had an inherent ability, something like a homing instinct, that drew her to the things that would destroy life. She had sensed this thing down here, deep beneath the Louisiana bayou, and she found herself drawn to it. In her mind, it was like some almighty magnet drawing her down into the earth, down where the dead men lay.
MOVING STEALTHILY, Kane led the way into the corridor with Grant and Brigid just behind him. The undead thing that they had encountered had shaken them all up, and Kane felt unsettled as he trekked down the corridor.
The overhead lights flickered here, and though the motion sensors responded to the presence of the Cerberus rebels, several of the fluorescent tubes had blown. In places the lights flickered in staccato bursts, leaving the corridor in a sort of half-light of lightning flashes. Like the ones they had encountered on the lower levels of the redoubt, the corridor itself was painted off-white, with a boldly colored stripe lining the bottom third of the walls. This stripe was finished in a bright sky blue, and with the flickering illumination it gave Kane the eerie illusion of being below water.
There were no other corpse-things, but the corridor was littered with broken crates and boxes, with ancient paperwork strewed across the carpet tiles of the floor.
“Looks like they used this level as a dumping ground,” Grant muttered.
“Guess they wanted to get rid of this stuff,” Brigid pointed out, kicking at one of the stacks of paperwork with her toe. The topmost papers of the stack slid to the floor, and Brigid saw a bold red stamp marked Top Secret across several fluttering pages. “It’s just so much landfill now.”
Kane moved on, passing two open doorways to his left, both of them opening