Labyrinth

by James Axler

  J.B. squeezed through opening, pistol-first; Ryan and Jubilee followed.

  They found themselves in a smooth, circular, concrete channel, ten feet in diameter. To the left, it angled down into the dark.

  At the end of the cylinder to the right, less than thirty feet away, was a massive screened grate.

  Through which daylight streamed.

  J.B. watched the other end of the channel while Ryan and Jubilee hurried to the opening. The view through the circle of heavy steel mesh was of the corn fields and lake, and the sky and canyon beyond from a height of maybe three hundred feet. Ryan could smell freedom.

  It was that close.

  Wicklaw and the other two men squeezed through the crack and joined them in front of the grate. At Ryan’s direction, they tried to shift the screen out of its frame. No go. J.B. hurried over to help. But all of them grunting and groaning together couldn’t budge the grate. On closer inspection, they saw it was secured with a couple of dozen, badly rusted four-inch-wide bolts.

  Wicklaw stuck his fingers through the mesh and vented his frustration by screaming out over the canyon, “Damn you bastards! Damn you all to hell!”

  Ryan could see that others had made it this far. That was clear from the words they had scratched into the channel walls. Having screamed themselves hoarse, those offered to the demons carved curses into the sides of their tomb, curses upon the people of Little Pueblo.

  “From that screen, I’d say this was a water intake channel,” J.B. said. He pointed into the darkness behind them. “That probably leads down into the belly of the dam.”

  “We could follow it out of here?” Ryan said.

  “Mebbe, mebbe not. Depends on whether it’s a main intake or a diversion channel. If it’s a main, it’ll lead right into the turbines, and we’ll never get past the blades. Looks to me like it starts to angle down in a big way. Floor is smooth as a baby’s butt. Nothing to grab on to, either. Without ropes we could end up freefalling two, three hundred feet.”

  “We gotta get lower,” Ryan said. “Gotta find a way down.”

  “Yeah. That’s our best bet.”

  Ryan, Jubilee and J.B. started for the fissure, but the three wounded men remained huddled by the light, their fingers and faces pressed to the inside of the grate.

  “You can’t stay here,” Ryan told them. “Not if you want to live.”

  “Demons don’t like the sun,” Wicklaw informed him. “They won’t come in here after us.”

  “Not until it gets dark outside,” Ryan said. “And then you won’t be able to stop them.”

  “What are you going to do when it gets dark?” Wicklaw said.

  “I don’t plan on being here that long.”

  When Ryan, J.B. and Jubilee started back to the main corridor, the wounded men followed.

  “These critters have got to be faster than shit,” J.B. said. “Running away doesn’t seem to do any good.”

  “Can’t tell if any of the dead stood their ground,” Ryan said. “If they did, it didn’t help.”

  “The thing that bothers me most is we haven’t seen any demon corpses laying around.”

  Ryan shrugged. “So either there aren’t any, or they make a habit of burying or eating their own.”

  “They don’t strike me as the burying kind.”

  “Me, either.”

  When they regained the main corridor, it was decision time. They could either keep moving in the direction they were headed, or backtrack. J.B. figured they were more than halfway across the dam, and as they hadn’t seen a stairwell so far, they decided to forge ahead in the hope that they’d come across one before they got to the end.

  They had covered no more than a hundred feet of corridor when the clicking sounds started up.

  Distant. Muffled.

  “Where is that coming from?” J.B. said.

  Ryan stopped short and made the others stop, too. “Quiet. Listen.” he said.

  There was a pattern to the noise. A pattern in the number of clicks, the space between them and their pitch. A pattern that repeated. A cycle. It seemed to come from all sides.

  “They’re in the walls,” Ryan said. “It’s coming from the walls.”

  “Bob and Enid protect us!” Wicklaw cried.

  “Your demons are talking to you,” J.B. said.

  “Or to each other,” Ryan suggested.

  “They don’t sound like four-legged animals to me,” the Armorer said. “Never heard a four-legged critter make a racket like that.”

  “It sounds more like birds or bugs.”

  “Only big.”

  “Yeah, big.”

  Ryan pushed forward, holding the torch as high as he could, trying to make the light penetrate the tunnel more deeply.

  “Got another gash coming up on the right wall,” J.B. said.

  Ryan saw it. A dark oval two feet above the level of the floor. Beneath the opening lay a pool of acid slime. He moved to the opposite side of the hall, and with his assault rifle aimed at the hole, prepared to give it the widest possible berth.

  The clicking stopped.

  Before he could take a step back, air exploded from the wall like a cannon shot, shaking the floor underfoot. The force of the explosion blew a mist of yellow all the way across the corridor.

  Ryan’s first thought was stun gren. But there was no smoke and no flash. The phenomenon wasn’t thermo-chemical. It was simpler than that. Something tightly plugging the burrow had moved forward so suddenly and with enough force to blast the air from the hole. Like a gigantic plunger. The power required was almost inconceivable. Over the ringing in his ears he could hear a mad scrabbling noise.

  Something was coming for them.

  And they had no cover.

  “Run!” Ryan snarled, pushing Jubilee ahead of him. He shouted to the others, “Back to the intake! Run!”

  Wicklaw and the gren-wounded man took off with a speed they hadn’t seemed capable of before. J.B., Ryan and Jubilee ran on their heels, forcing them to go even faster. Despite the threat, the third man couldn’t keep up and quickly fell behind.

  As Ryan heard his footfalls drop back several very strange things happened in rapid succession.

  First, there was a yelp, cut short.

  The torch the third man was carrying cartwheeled overhead and landed on the floor in front of them.

  And then something zoomed past so quickly it was hard to believe it was real. High and tight to the ceiling. Bounding through the air. Ryan got the impression of stripes, brown on brown. And then it was gone. If it landed ahead, it landed without making a sound.

  The third man started screaming behind them.

  Ryan stopped and turned. He could see the man sitting on the floor with his back to the wall. No longer screaming. He wasn’t far. Ryan went back for him. When he jerked the man to his feet, a mass of slippery gray coils dropped out from under his robe and flopped around his ankles. Ryan saw the blood on the front of the robe, and the gaping, half-moon slice from hip point to hip point. He let go of the warm but dead hand and the body slumped to the ground.

  “Back!” he shouted as he rejoined the others. “We’ve got to go back to the intake. It’s the only place we can defend.”

  The perpendicular hallway was just around the bend. As they piled into it, they heard clicking sounds behind them. Very fast. Very close. Ryan and J.B. pushed Jubilee, Wicklaw and the other man ahead of them, through the narrow passage, then through the fissure and into the water channel.

  They all backed up against the grate.

  Ryan and J.B. stood shoulder to shoulder, facing the split in the wall. Ryan held the Galil braced against his hip; J.B. had both pistols raised in his hands. Torches were unnecessary. Even though the bodies blocked some of the light coming through the grate, they could still clearly see the fissure twenty-five feet away.

  “At least we know where it’s coming from,” J.B. said.

  The clicking got louder, and faster. Then it stopped.

  “
Are you ready for this?” Ryan said

  “Ready as I’m ever going to be.”

  “You can’t chill them,” Wicklaw sobbed as he cowered beside the grate. “No one can.”

  Something scraped in the narrow corridor. Scraped the floor, the walls, even the ceiling. Something sharp. Something heavy. Then it, too, stopped.

  The silence stretched on and on. Ryan could feel the tension building in his arms and neck until it became a burning pain. He tried not to blink as sweat ran down either side of his spine.

  When it came out of the crack, it came in a single bound, crossing twenty feet in an instant. It was big, all right. As big as a man. And no part of it was human.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  The ambushers had been laying flat on their bellies on the roof of the redoubt, waiting for the moment when all their targets stepped down into the stairwell death-trap. With concrete walls on three sides, and the steps on the fourth, there would be no escape.

  But all the targets didn’t descend. The white-haired one remained at the head of the stairs, standing watch.

  The seven field hands had to lay there and listen as the would-be looters and defilers moved the last rock from in front of the door. It was plain from the strangers’ talk that they knew how to open the tomb. And it was likely that one or more of them would enter the sacred place before the albino left his post.

  Although keeping them out of Bob and Enid’s tomb was their prime directive, something they had to prevent at all costs, in the end it was an individual decision, not a group one, to open fire.

  One of the men had a machine pistol and took it upon himself to spray the enemy into submission. He jumped up with the H&K and fired full-auto from the hip, sweeping a line of slugs across the top of the stairs, through the space where the white-haired stranger stood.

  Like a cat, the albino dived and rolled away. The bullets spanged off the concrete and the sides of the boulders.

  And the battle was joined.

  The rest of the ambushers popped up and started shooting. None of the other men had automatic weapons, but the effect of six people firing semiautomatic pistols, revolvers and pump shotguns simultaneously was much the same. Had they not been so excited, so eager to score hits, had they not jostled one another’s aim, the outcome of the fifteen-second fight would have been very different.

  The companions were caught by surprise, but not flat-footed. They had been in similar situations many times before. And each of them knew what to do. Instead of frantically returning the wild volley of fire, just closing their eyes and hoping to hit something, they aimed their shots with deliberation, if not calm.

  The exchange of blasterfire was so intense, and the range so close, it was difficult to tell who was shooting who.

  As he backed up the steps, Doc touched off the Le Mat’s shotgun barrel, which gave forth with a great orange flash and a deafening boom, sending a load of blue whistlers slapping into the two men standing in the middle of the rooftop firing squad. The pistol’s short barrel made for a wide spread of maul shot. It stitched both men from shoulder to shoulder, staggering them back on their heels. Through the dense cloud of black-powder gunsmoke, Tanner followed up with a round from the Le Mat’s pistol caliber cylinder. The head of the man on the right snapped back as he took a slug to the temple, and the other shooter grabbed at his belly and dropped to his knees, doubled over at the waist.

  Flying slugs plucked at Krysty’s sleeve and grazed her hair as she put two tightly spaced .38-caliber rounds into the man with the machine pistol. Jak’s .357 barked in time with the second shot, and hit the same target. The force of the double impact blew the man off his feet and sent him crashing to his back. His dying hand held the trigger pinned, and the H & K chattered harmlessly into the clear blue sky until it locked back empty.

  Gritting her teeth against the howling rain of lead, and the ricochets sparking and whining all around her, Mildred backed up to the top of the steps, firing two handed. Head shots were all she took. The ZKR had a butter-smooth double action, the trigger was set for combat, and the targets were stationary. Shooting gallery ducks. She emptied her weapon in short order, making sure of the kills by placing two rapidfire shots in each face. The ville men jerked backward, dropping their blasters and hitting the roof hard. One of them twisted as he fell, rolled off the edge of the roof and landed in a limp heap in front of the redoubt door.

  The last ambusher was jacking another round into the chamber of his pump gun when he was struck by half a dozen bullets. Jak, Krysty and Doc had him zeroed in. And nailed. As slugs plucked at the front of his robe, his head exploded, flying into fragments.

  Their ears ringing, the companions checked the roof and made sure all the attackers were dead. Smoke from the battle was still drifting over the park as they climbed back down into the stairwell.

  While Doc and Mildred cleared the corpse from in front of the door, Krysty tapped the entrance code into the keypad. Something whirred in the yards-thick wall. Then there was a distinct metallic clack. And the door popped open with a whoosh of trapped air. The door was two feet thick. It swung on huge, bearing mounted hinges and its inside perimeter was gasketed with heavily greased seals.

  Beyond the entry door was a vanadium steel chamber, fifteen feet long and eight feet high. There were steel benches built into the opposite walls, but no windows. The floor had a large, grated opening that looked like a drain. At the other end of the chamber was another door and keypad.

  “It’s an air lock,” Mildred said. “When the reservoir covered this place, they used it for access. They pumped the water in or out, depending on whether someone was leaving or arriving.”

  Krysty tried to open the second door, but the keypad wouldn’t accept the entrance code.

  “Close the outer door,” Mildred said.

  When Krysty did that, and retried the code, the inner door opened. It, too, was massively thick and gasketed.

  The banks of lights inside the redoubt began to flicker and come on automatically.

  “That’s a good sign,” Krysty said. “At least the nuke power is still up and running.”

  On the other side of the door was a security station with double bulletproof glass, machine-gun firing ports, and a holding cell where incoming and outgoing personnel were confined while they were processed. The only way into the redoubt was through the holding cell. Its barred entry door was ajar, as was the one at the other end.

  “One would think that five hundred feet of water would be sufficient to secure this facility,” Doc said.

  “Then one would think wrong,” Mildred stated. “These folks were worried about uninvited guests and unauthorized exits. Look at the firing ports in the glass. Half of them aim into the building.”

  The air had a musty, slightly scorched smell. No one had been inside Minotaur in a very long time.

  As they passed through the holding cell, they could see through the bars and into the adjoining security office. Loose papers were scattered all over the floor. On a gray desktop, in front of a swivel chair, stood a blackened computer monitor and drive tower.

  Left on screen saver for a century, it had given up the ghost.

  On the far side of the security checkpoint a wide, concrete staircase led to the redoubt’s first below-ground floor—a low-ceilinged, central honeycomb of work cubicles and computer stations ringed by managers’ offices, store rooms, and main frames. It was clear the place had been abandoned in haste. Spreadsheets were strewed everywhere, chairs lay where they had been overturned. Other computer terminals had burned out as well; the flare of their imploding CRTs had left black scorches on the cubicle divider walls. Personal items, family photos and oddball trinkets, were still tacked up to the work station bulletin boards.

  Krysty spoke up, giving voice to what the others were thinking. “The ville folk had to have heard the shooting,” she said. “They’ll be coming down to investigate. When they find their dead, they’ll know what happened. That we’re inside Bo
b and Enid’s tomb. At that point they’ll control the only entrance with a force of more than a hundred. How are we going to fight our way out to free Ryan and J.B.?”

  Jak grunted in agreement.

  “It’s also possible that our hosts outside are privy to the unlocking sequence,” Doc said. “Part of Bob and Enid’s legacy. And if that is true, they may be familiar with the lay of the land inside this redoubt. If they enter to do battle with us we would face the same kind of overwhelmingly bad odds as in the park last night. We could easily be trapped in here.”

  “If we aren’t already,” Krysty said.

  “We’re committed now,” Mildred told them. “There’s no turning back. We have to find the mat-trans unit, then locate the armory, then we figure a way out for all of us. We don’t have a lot of time. First of all, we need a map of this place.”

  If the floorplan of every redoubt was slightly different, the location of a complete site map was invariably the same. They found the commander’s office on the left side of the broad room. His name and title were emblazoned on the metal door in gold letters three inches high.

  Everything was as he had left it. Neat piles of documents lay in his out-box. The leather-trimmed desk blotter was cleared and shipshape. Pens in the ornamental deskset. Paper clips out of sight. Mildred rounded the desk to examine the framed photographs lined up along the wall. One of them caught her eye at once.

  “Come and have a look at this,” she said to the others.

  Mildred pointed at a picture of a man in a dark green military uniform shaking hands with another man in a very expensive suit in front of an American flag.

  “That’s our commander,” she said.

  The soldier had iron-gray hair trimmed in a tight crew cut and a jutting, lantern jaw. A fruit salad of medals decorated his breast. The taller man he was greeting, or being greeted by, wore an easy grin and had a practiced twinkle in his eyes.

  “And that was the last President of the United States,” Mildred said of the twinkler.