Scarlet Dream. James Axler
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chairs with broken backrests and wheels missing from their runners, computer desks stained with centuries’ old coffee.
This corridor proved much shorter than the ones he had explored on the preceding levels, and it ended in a solid wall on which hung a lone fire extinguisher painted a bright bloodred. Beneath the flickering light, the extinguisher seemed to flash like some fleshy cut in the wall, vying for Kane’s attention.
Off to the right, Kane saw a wide corridor set at a right angle to the one they were in. The corridor stood in darkness, and Kane peered into it trying to make out details. He could discern faint noises coming from its far end, distant shuffling sounds. With a swift hand gesture, Kane led the way silently down the corridor, his companions following at a wary distance, their guns ready.
The white-blue corridor ended in a sharp turn that opened directly into a large room the size of an aircraft hangar. The exit came so abruptly in the intermittent tube lighting that Kane very nearly stepped straight out into the open before he realized what he was doing. The sole of his boot scraped against the floor as he came up short and pulled back to the edge of the wall. He had managed just the briefest of glances ahead, but in that half second he had seen plenty, his regimented brain automatically taking in details from years of discipline.
It was a vast room, perhaps eighty feet square with scratched metal decking that glinted beneath harsh spotlights hanging on high catwalks. There were figures moving around the vast room—fleshy, shambling figures like the corpse-thing that his team had tangled with in the stairwell.
Grant and Brigid caught up with Kane and he gave them a look, indicating that someone was on the other side of the wall. Brigid lowered herself behind Kane until she knelt in a crouch by the near wall. Grant, meanwhile, silently eased himself across the wide corridor until his back was flush against the far wall, just out of sight of the opening but with the gap firmly in the sights of his poised Sin Eater.
Kane inched forward, bringing himself in low to peer once more around the edge of the whitewashed wall. He saw now that the room beyond was lit in patches, but it was enough that he could make out even the far corners, where stacks of crates towered haphazardly against gray-licked walls. Three aging Army vehicles were parked off to the left of the room. Two were jeeps, their tires long since perished or removed, one with its engine on blocks in front of its open hood, and the third was a heavy artillery truck, its olive paintwork caked with mud that had dried there two centuries ago, its tires flat.
At the rear of the room, Kane spotted the twin metal doors of a goods elevator. They opened like jaws, and the elevator looked wide enough to hold a truck. This was doubtless how the vehicles had been brought here, Kane realized, and presumably they had been left when the redoubt had been closed down.
The central strip of the room was empty. Painted lines marked out a “road” and designated safe walkways. Corpselike figures wandered around this vast arena, some of them carrying bulky crates in what seemed to be an effortless manner despite their wasted musculature. Kane counted more than a dozen zombies, for want of a better term, before his attention was drawn to the far side of the room. There, off to the right, a large glass-walled area took up almost one-third of the floor space, and Kane could see movement within. A towering figure strode among the other corpses, rotting like them and yet somehow demanding Kane’s attention. As he watched, Kane realized it was a woman, her flesh almost entirely rotted away, what remained a dark shade of brown like licorice beneath scraps of clothing.
There was an incessant buzzing coming from the hangar, low but present all the same, from the insects that flew close to the dead things, drawn to their rotting stench. It was incessant, like the sound made by someone running a finger around the rim of a wineglass. But for the woman it was different. Nothing flew around her.
Kane stepped back from the opening, swiftly attracting the attention of his companions. “There’s something going on out there,” he told them in a sharp whisper, “but I need to get closer if we’re going to find out what it is.”
Grant nodded sternly once and, after a moment’s hesitation, Brigid did the same. Briefly, Kane outlined the layout of the room and explained where everyone was to go before he led the way on swift, silent tread, into the vast, hangarlike chamber.
All the while, Kane couldn’t shake the feeling that there was something very familiar about the corpselike woman he had spied in the glass-walled office. Emaciated and almost fleshless, she had a certain presence he recognized, a certain bearing he felt that he somehow knew.
Quickly, his head ducked low between his shoulders, Kane sprinted to the nearest wall of the glass-lined area, crouching where a bank of filing cabinets had been placed against the wall on the far side.
Across the hangar, Brigid and Grant made their way through the shadows at the edge of the room, posting themselves among a pile a dismantled crates atop which a crowbar had been discarded. From here, they could see the doorway to the glass-walled area, as well as most of the vast, hangarlike room without exposing themselves.
Now poised beside the glass wall, Kane edged himself up from his crouch and peeked through the glass. This close up he could see that it was smeared with dust and grime, but he could still see through it clearly enough to observe what was going on within. The room itself seemed to be some kind of office with a laboratory attached, and files of paper had been left haphazardly over several surfaces while the lab was now in an obvious state of disrepair. The spindly corpse woman who had drawn Kane’s attention continued flicking through the pages of the file she held in her clawlike hands as other undead figures wandered throughout the room.
Kane watched incredulously as a fly, its bloated black body like a blob of ink, left the gaping eye socket of its host, a dead child no taller than Kane’s navel. It flew around in that strange, hard-angled-turn manner that flies will until they find somewhere to go. Then, the inkblot fly seemed to spot the woman, darting in the air to buzz toward her. But as it neared her, attracted by her reeking decrepitude, the fly’s wings ceased moving and it simply dropped, plummeting to the ground where it landed with a sharp whisper, now just a dried-up husk. Kane saw another fly do the same thing a moment later, this one a fat bluebottle with body like shimmering glass. This, too, dropped in the presence of the corpse woman, falling to the floor as though in supplication.
Machinery whirred behind her within the glass-walled room, ancient lab technology that was being operated—perversely, it seemed to Kane—by another of the shambling undead figures, this one a short, stocky woman whose skin had wrinkled into a black smear that clung like tar to her dead flesh. She was operating some kind of mixing device, Kane realized, and he moved a little to his right so that he could see what the device was doing. He watched as test tubes spun, their luminous contents bubbling and frothing with each rotation of a spinner arm. There were four test tubes at each end of the arm, eight in total, each clamped there by holding pincers, a stopper cap preventing their contents from spilling free as the arm rotated.
“What the hell are they mixing up in there?” Kane mouthed, his voice something less than a whisper.
Kane watched as the eight glass tubes were whirled around once again within the centrifuge unit, like a tiny funfair ride. The spinner arm itself was located behind reinforced armaglass, like a little glass display cabinet at the side of the room. Presumably, the cabinet was designed to both dampen the noise of the machinery and to protect the user from dangerous chemicals, for the door could be sealed to prevent any leakage. However, Kane spotted a crack in the glass and the lock appeared to have been wrenched off, a brown smear across the front panel—the woman’s flesh, he acknowledged with a growing sense of nausea.
A digital timer at the top of the mixing unit glowed, proudly counting down from a little over twelve hours, its green numbers marching slowly toward an inevitable zero. Whatever it was that was being mixed there, it would be ready at sundown, Kane calculated.
His interest piqued, Kane shifted his position, turning his attention back to the taller, corpselike figure who seemed to dominate the room. The corpse woman was working through a file of papers, and Kane swallowed hard as he saw the pages begin to crumble in her hands, tiny flecks of paper sailing away on the air, now nothing more than dust. Wrapped in its brown cardboard sleeve, the