The swishing and clicking drew closer until he could hear it just on the other side of the glass but there was nothing there. He stood up straight and he turned up the flame just in time to catch movement along the floor.
Pressing his face against the cold glass, he tried to see the thing again, but it was gone into the dark and out of the dim light of his lantern. He breathed hard and he eased the door open and popped his head around it.
A large, dark, and definitely reptilian tail took a right turn. The animal it was attached to remained evasive, however. Quickly folding the map in half, he stuffed it into his back pocket, raised the lantern high overhead, and slipped his hand through the loop on the end of his axe, raising it over his head, too.
He moved as quietly as possible and then he stuck his head around the corner and was stunned and terrified to see the shape of an alligator, a very large one, turning into a room. He rushed to that room and pulled the door shut, the axe clanging noisily against it.
An alligator of that size could easily kill and eat him. He thumped the door with his hand and gave a short bark of laughter. Keeping his voice low, he said, “Trapped you, you filthy bastard.” He pulled a can of spray paint from the duffel and painted a large X on the door.
He stood with his back to the door and listened for a moment as the alligator scooted chairs and bumped desks. He grinned triumphantly, feeling as if he had accomplished a grand feat. And, in a way, he had. How many people could brag that they had been stalked by an oversized alligator and then trapped it in a room? Not many, was his guess.
The rumbling snort came again, and a memory of being in the woods, hunting deer with his father came to him. From the tree stand, he had his rifle aimed at the head of a huge buck. The animal was completely unaware of the mortal danger he was in. Robert breathed evenly but his finger trembled on the trigger.
His father had whispered instructions in his ear. Breathe deep and then hold your breath, son, he had whispered, and pull the trigger smoothly.
Little puffs of white mist floated before his eyes. The cold had settled into his hands and feet. He Breathed Deeply and watched the buck’s ears flip, his eyes moving over the landscape constantly, and the bellows action of his sides as he scented the air. Robert took a breath and held it, tightening his finger around the trigger.
The buck had snorted then, alerting the does still hidden. The sound of many feet tramping away from them was loud. The buck turned and looked straight at Robert in his tree stand. Robert froze. There was intelligence in those eyes. The game was up. After a brief pause, the buck snorted again, stamped the ground a couple times, and then turned.
Robert’s dad nudged him with his elbow and whispered for him to pull the damn trigger. But Robert couldn’t do it. He kept his sights on the deer until all he could see was the white flip of its tail fading into the dense forest.
His father had been furious. That was the second time he had suffered what his father called buck fever. He let his father think whatever he wanted, but Robert knew he would never be able to take the life of a deer, and probably no other animal, either.
With his back still against the door, and the alligator crashing items to the floor on the other side of it, Robert thought about the creature that had been hunting him. The one that chittered and mangled metal lockers.
He didn’t think buck fever would be a problem if, or when, he came face to face with it.
Finding a painted arrow, he set to his course again. A few turns ahead, the lantern’s flame guttered and dimmed. Panicky, he shook the lamp lightly. He could still hear oil sloshing in the tank. There wasn’t much. Turning the little knob to raise the wick higher, he let out a pent-up breath that he had not realized he had been holding. The flame brightened and steadied again.
Not long after that, he came to a hallway but could find no painted arrows on any of the walls and so he turned back and retraced his steps. There were no painted arrows at any of the doors. He went back to the hallway and walked a few steps to the right, turned and walked the other direction for a few steps. Both directions looked the same. Nothing stuck out as familiar.
With the Map in his hand, he propped against the wall and scanned the paper. It was no use. The place was like a labyrinth and his head throbbed too bad for him to be able to make sense of it. He took a deep breath, Robert noticed the smell of water. Fresh water.
He drew in another breath. The odor was faint, but definitely present. His thirst raged as he followed the smell down the left-hand corridor.
As he walked, his surroundings changed. Slightly at first with just a hint of mold on the walls near the floor. It had crept outward, stretching like black veins along the blocks. The lines of mold grew thicker, bolder, and denser as he continued. He was walking toward the source of the mold. He would undoubtedly find water there, too.
Jittery with renewed hope, he whispered, “If water can get in, maybe I can get out.”
Moving along at a good clip, he turned a corner, still tracing the mold, not paying much attention to anything else. After all, freedom was probably around that corner. Grinning like a fool, he stood in front of another security gate. Water puddled into the hall, and soon he was standing in it. The room on the other side of the security gate was flooded.
Immediately, he knelt. Dropping his axe, he thrust his hand through the bars of the gate to get at the deeper water. He scooped up a handful and carefully brought it to his lips. The coolness hit his parched lips and tongue eliciting a moan of deep relief. The aftertaste gagged him. He stretched his hand between the bars again and took another handful of the water, hoping there was nothing deadly going into his system as he swallowed and gagged again.
A stealthy splash from inside the room drew his attention. He listened for a moment but heard nothing more. With the worst of his thirst slaked, he searched for the source of the water. The security gate was missing two bars on the left side. The gap was large enough for him to slip through, but the murky water beyond gave him pause. He knew snakes lived around water, and in Louisiana, most of those snakes were poisonous.
The deepest point he could see looked to be about knee deep. He turned the flame up on the lantern. His stomach turned when he saw the nasty, grayish-brown water. He had drunk that filth. He heard another low splash and turned his attention to the right side of the room beyond the gate.
A shadow moved under the water and he gasped. Then another appeared. The eyes and snout of an alligator appeared ten feet from him. Robert backed slowly away from the gate as another set of eyes surfaced. Glancing at the gap in the gate, he cursed himself for a fool.
He had not thought of where the alligator he trapped had come from. Thinking of it only as a triumph for him, a victory, he had ignored the obvious—if it had gotten in, others could follow. The good news was that alligators normally are not aggressive toward humans, unless they have babies, or feel threatened. Crocodiles were a different story, though. They were notoriously bad-tempered toward everything, including humans.
Hoping there were no crocs in the mix, he continued to back away slowly. The last thing he wanted was to seem threatening. Rounding the corner without hearing or seeing any gators following him, Robert turned and walked in the opposite direction, leaving behind a possible exit. With the water full of gators, the passage might as well have been cemented solid as far as he was concerned.
With no arrows to follow, and still unable to make sense of the map, he walked aimlessly, and sprayed arrows at even intervals as he kept moving. He had stopped going into the rooms; they had all been nearly identical, and none of them had any useful items except the supply rooms.
Feeling as if he had walked miles, Robert was simultaneously glad to see a set of double doors at the end of the hall, and a little hopeless, too. All the other doors that had resembled exits had been welded shut, or otherwise sealed. Dragging his feet, he moved toward the doors. He was prepar
ed to find them sealed.
Each door had a tall skinny window above the door handle. Experience had taught him that it was nearly impossible to use the lantern to see beyond those narrow windows. He could see the thin gap between the doors, though, and there was no strip of weld showing, there was only an empty gap.
He pushed the door with the hand holding the lantern. Its hinges had rusted, and it didn’t open smoothly as other doors in the facility had, but it did open. The metal scraped against the concrete floor and he pushed harder, keeping his eyes on the room beyond. The door stopped moving with a loud grating of its bottom and it didn’t move when he took his hand away. The concrete had scotched it open.
The room was a large hub with single and double doors positioned around the perimeter. Old cameras, still mounted high on the walls, stared blindly down at him. The concrete had broken upwards in several places as if the ground had swollen, forcing it up.
Roots from unknown plants had worked their way in through those broken places and green, leafy vines snaked across the floor and up the walls. The foliage had completely covered a set of double doors and the camera above it and had even started to cling to the ceiling. Tendrils stretched toward the center of the ceiling where an empty ballast still hung from chains. The silver end of one fluorescent bulb stuck out of the greenery on the floor.
Nature was taking back what had once belonged to her. Robert wondered how many years the building would remain before she completely obscured it again.
Plants need water and light, he thought as he turned in a circle, noting where the vines were thickest. There were only a few thin tendrils at the doors he had entered, but across the room, to the right, the vines had grown thick over another set.
Watching for snakes hidden among the tangles, he moved to that set of doors. The plants could draw water from outside, but they could not draw light in. They had to grow toward light. All the hunting trips with his father that he had grown to hate so deeply, had proven to have imparted bits of useful wisdom to him.
He shook the lantern and listened for the slosh of oil. Not hearing it, he shook the lantern again. It was nearly empty. Thinking for a moment, he set the lantern on the floor and leaned the axe against the door. He opened the duffel and took out a roll of twine. The hole through the center wasn’t large enough to slide it onto the handle of the axe.
He used the sharp makeshift blade on his axe to cut a long piece of twine and then he threaded it through his belt loops. When he reached the ones at the center in back, he put the twine through the center of the roll, and then finished feeding it through the other loops. He tied it loosely in front and then tugged at it to make sure it would stay in place. The roll of twine flopped against his ass.
Nodding; satisfied his plan would work, he tied the loose end of twine to the door handle and picked up the axe. Working quickly, he cut the vines away so he could open the door. Whatever light they had been growing towards lay beyond. Light equaled escape in his mind.
A dank, musty odor greeted him as he opened one of the doors. It almost smelled like an old book that had not been opened in years, repugnant, yet inviting for reasons beyond his conscious comprehension.
He took the first few steps gently and slowly, feeling the roll of twine unravel at his back. After a few feet, he turned to check that the line was secure. If the lantern ran out of oil, he would be able to follow the line back to the hub room.
The hallway had small observation chambers on either side. The ceilings of most had caved in, leaving nothing to see. The glass fronts of all the rooms had been broken out and crunched under his feet as he walked. Each room had been tiled over in small white tiles. A slightly raised portion of floor at the back of one held the remains of a hospital mattress. A camera hung crookedly from a bracket high above the window. Two of the rooms on the right sported two-foot mirrors set into their ceilings. He could see no use for the mirrors. They were too high to be of use to anyone in the rooms.
Counting twelve of the observation chambers, an uneasiness settled in his gut. What the hell had been going on at that facility? Why would the military need those rooms? Who had they kept in them?
“People who needed observation.” He answered his own question as he moved past them and into a wider part of the hall where a long counter held twelve, six-inch square monitor screens. The end of the counter had been pinned under another cave-in.
Robert could make out the corner of a large slab of concrete jutting through the dirt over the counter. The upper floor would soon become part of the underground level.
He turned and headed back toward the hub room. He would search behind another door. Whatever source of light the vines had been growing toward was gone along with a good chunk of his hope.
Deciding he would move from door to door to avoid confusion, he used the axe blade and cut the twine, leaving a few inches dangling from the door handle and moved to the next door on his right. It was a single door. He tied the twine to the handle and set off into a narrower hallway.
A few steps in, stairs rose in front of him. That’s all that was there. They rose steeply. At the top, he could see a single small desk. He walked over to it. On either side of the desk was a mirror in the floor. He could see down into the chambers below.
A notebook lay open on the desk. The pages had been filled with small, cursive writing. The ink had bled through the pages, making most of them impossible to read. He could make out the top portion of one page. It had been labeled ‘Specimen 79’ and signed by a Dr. Weigert. The date had been recorded as August 11, 1982.
The entry read: S79 has maintained life for 72 hours and seems to be growing at twice the rate of its predecessors. How much human nature is intact remains to be seen. S79 becomes violent when approached but remains calm in isolation as long as food is dropped in from above. Each time it feeds, it makes a loud insectile noise to alert S78 in the next chamber. S79 does not eat until S78 answers.
Robert dropped the notebook. “What the fuck kind of specimens did you keep in here, Dr. Weigert?” He backed toward the stairs. He didn’t know what kind of specimens they had been, but he would have bet his life that the insectile noise was exactly the same as the chittering he had heard.
Chapter 6
S80
The next corridor lay behind a set of double doors. The smell of long rotten meat and sulfur takes his breath. No vines had invaded the path. Offices lay on the right side of the hallway and the left was only a blank wall studded with caged bulbs about seven feet up. There was a light opposite each door. He wished those lights still worked. Only a few would alleviate the darkness. But those were useless wishes.
Some of the doors had been ripped off the hinges. The interiors of those rooms were destroyed. The offices had equipment, papers, and even some personal items such as coats, purses, duffels similar to his own, and rats.
The rats seemed to multiply the deeper he edged into the hallway. He could hear their squeaking and sometimes caught sight of a tail as rats scurried away from him. One of the offices’ contents had been destroyed and scattered through the hall. He stepped carefully over and around broken chairs, file cabinet drawers, pieces of a typewriter, and a woman’s dress shoe.
Farther up the hall, a dark stain stood out starkly against the pale floor. A pair of glasses lay broken and discarded against the wall, the good lens reflecting shards of lantern light. He was reminded briefly of the store attendant with only one good eye.
An I.D. badge lay in the middle of the hallway at a sharp turn. Robert paused, eyeing the badge. Do I really want to look at it? He wondered. He bent and scooped it up quickly, turned it over, and saw a thumb-size picture of an older lady with perfectly coifed, gray hair, deep set eyes, and enough wrinkles to mark her as well past retirement age. She wore glasses just like the broken ones he had seen on the floor. The badge said her name was Dr. Rosenberg. Under her name, it read: Clearance 10/10, Esc
ort: none, Restrictions: none.
He had never seen a government issued badge like that one before. Admittedly, he had seen very few government issued badges of any kind, but he had seen a few during his time in Chicago. His work had taken him to a low-level branch building that housed a few investigators from the FBI. They had all worn badges, but none like the one he held.
He let the badge fall back to the floor. “I don’t want to meet the same end as you, Dr. Rosenberg.” His voice was barely a whisper.
He moved forward until the sickening odor of decay stopped him. Moving to a closed room, he turned the knob and pushed the door. It barely budged so he put his thigh against it and shoved inward. The rush of cleaner air welcomed him, and he stepped in, pushing the door almost closed.
The few minutes of breathable air was refreshing. He could think straighter as he moved back to the hallway. A fat rat scurried against the far wall and continued in the same direction he was headed. “Yeah, you had to get in here somewhere, didn’t you?” He aimed his question at the large rodent, who ignored him and kept trotting away.
If rats were inside, they had to have gotten in somewhere besides the flooded room full of alligators. He wasn’t all together sure he wanted to see where they were coming in. Especially if it was the source of the putrid smell that grew in intensity with every step forward.
The debris petered out and the floor was free of clutter as he continued to follow the fat rat. He could see a few more doors ahead, but the rat disappeared under the swinging doors of the room on the left. Robert stepped past the doors, holding the lantern far out from him, and noted the hallway ended not far ahead. He turned to the doors again and started to push it open cautiously.
The familiar sandpaper sound nearly made his heart burst. Spinning to face the hall again, he spotted a big fat snake. His movement had startled the snake and it coiled. His heart dropped to his knees. He was more terrified of snakes than gators or thieves. Snakes had been his lifelong phobia, much to the chagrin of his macho father.
S79 The Horror in the Swamp Page 8
