Labyrinth

by James Axler

Ryan pocketed the pistol, and they quickly moved on.

  In the dimness ahead, they could see the end of the hallway coming up. They had reached the far side of the dam. Scattered around on the floor up there were many more bodies and burned out torches.

  “We have to be closing in on the stairwell, if it’s here,” Ryan said. “We’re running out of room fast.”

  “Look at all those corpses,” J.B. said. “Mebbe a demon has been setting a trap, knowing they’d have to try to use the stairs to get out, picking them off as they passed.”

  “Or mebbe it just got lucky once,” Ryan said, “and decided to make this end of the hallway its home. We can’t be giving this creature any more credit than it’s due, like Wicklaw, there. It doesn’t have to be triple smart to do what it does.”

  “Just instinct, then?”

  “Instinct is plenty when you’re that fast and that mean,” Ryan said.

  With the corridor’s end in plain sight, they could no longer travel in a straight line. They had to weave around and between the litter of bodies and puddles. The odor made Jubilee moan and gag softly into her hand.

  On the right was a single, closed door. It had a small window reinforced with wire mesh. The torchlight wouldn’t penetrate to the other side.

  “Could be it,” Ryan said.

  J.B. took hold of the knob, and as he opened the door, Ryan swept in with torch in one fist and Galil in the other. The stairwell landing was clear of demons, but the stench of death was even more oppressive than in the hall. It had substance, and it had weight.

  The weight of numbers.

  “I think we’ve got ourselves a chilling ground,” J.B. said, wrinkling his nose. “There’s got to be a whole lot of bodies below us. That thing wasn’t waiting to ambush victims out in the hall. It was getting the lion’s share of them in here. The ones that made it to the corridor it probably chased down from behind.”

  “If there’s just the one,” Ryan said, “and we can get past it, or through it, we might get to the bottom.”

  “Based on that stink, the odds aren’t very good.”

  “At least it’s a tighter space than the hallway,” Ryan said. “That gives it less room to use its speed to maneuver and us a better chance to hit it and chill it.”

  “What do you say, Wicklaw?” J.B. said. “Ready to go for two?”

  It was the pilgrim’s turn not to laugh. The sight and smell of the corpses and pools of acid had turned his face pale under the beard. He covered his nose and mouth with his free hand. His eyes were watering.

  “What’s wrong, big man?” J.B. asked. “Don’t care for the perfume? You’re responsible for some of it.”

  “And now he’s on the verge of becoming perfume, himself,” Ryan said.

  “Funny how things turn out.”

  “Jubilee, take hold of my shirt,” Ryan told the girl. “Let’s do this.”

  Ryan and J.B. started down, side by side, filling the stairway from rail to wall. They held their torches as high as they could, and aimed their drawn weapons down the stairs in front of them. The lower they descended the stronger the stench became. By the time they reached the next landing they had to breathe through their mouths to keep from puking.

  On the stairs behind them, Wicklaw wasn’t so fortunate. The sounds of his wretching, and the wet splatter that followed, echoed in the passage. The gren-wounded man caught the vomit bug from Wicklaw and abruptly followed suit. Clutching the stair rail, he leaned over and hurled last night’s dinner into space.

  “Could you two triple stupes make any more noise if you tried?” J.B. snarled over his shoulder.

  “It doesn’t matter, J.B.,” Ryan said. “We’re not going to sneak up on this bastard, anyway. It already knows we’re coming. This is its prime hunting ground.”

  Evidence of what it hunted appeared below them, at the flickering verge of the torchlight. Stripped human skeletons lay stretched out along the stairs. At least a half-dozen of them. Some lay belly down, some belly up. Their clothing had been torn off and hurled aside. Some were missing one or both legs. As Ryan and J.B. stepped between the ruined bodies, the air had a heat to it, the abrasive heat of decay.

  “Wait,” the Armorer said. “Another blaster.”

  He bent, and using the muzzle of the Llama, nudged a pistol butt from the edge of the slime. From the shape of the grip, it looked like a heavy caliber semiauto. And it was. But the Beretta 92’s action was fully locked back. Looking into the breech, he could see the magazine’s floor plate. The last round had been fired. “Shit!” J.B. kicked the empty blaster aside. It wasn’t worth wiping the slime off.

  They continued down to the next landing, where the bodies were so thick it was difficult to step around them and the pools of slime. The skeletons lay one on top of the other. Most were facedown. Caught from behind as they tried to crawl away.

  Based on the weapons and capabilities he’d seen, Ryan figured the demon’s first pass was a hit and run, intended to blindside and incapacitate its victims, then it followed up at its leisure.

  “It’s still below us,” he said. “Not far, now.”

  He held his torch out as far as he could reach. He couldn’t see down to the plane of the next landing. He could see bodies on the stairs, though. Slower runners than the ones up above.

  “These things can leap, remember,” Ryan said to J.B. “It probably won’t come running up the steps at us. Chances are it’ll jump high, maybe along the ceiling, and drop down on top of us.”

  “Gotcha,” J.B. said.

  They descended more slowly, step by step in unison, pausing, listening. There were no clicks. No scraping noises. Gradually their torchlight illluminated the landing. The bodies were piled high there, too, but there was no sign of the demon. They couldn’t see around the turn in the staircase until they stepped off onto the landing. This one had a door in it.

  J.B. opened it, and Ryan stuck his head, torch and assault rifle through. Before him was a dank, dark corridor like the one they had just left. Like the hallway above, it was decorated with human remains. He listened for sounds of movement, but all he could hear was his heart pounding in his throat.

  “Just another access corridor,” he said as he drew back. “Still too high up.”

  “No sign of the damned thing?” J.B. asked.

  “Guess it’s lower,” Ryan said.

  Wicklaw and the gren-wounded man tiptoed around the bodies on the landing, keeping their backs to the stairwell wall.

  “We have to keep going,” Ryan told them.

  Jubilee took hold of his shirt. As he stepped down onto the next flight of stairs, the clicking started. Not a repeated cycle of sounds this time. This time it was a solid stream of mad chatter.

  And it was loud.

  It seemed to be right on top of them.

  “Where is it?” J.B. cried over the racket, raising his torch, scanning the stairs above and the stairs below.

  With the echo in the stairwell, it was impossible to vector in on the source of the noise. It came from everywhere at once.

  Everyone was looking around frantically, and no one was seeing the obvious.

  It was right under their noses.

  Ryan saw it first. A darker area in the landing wall, to the right of where Wicklaw and the other man were standing. Elliptical in shape, in its center was a wet spot.

  Seeping yellow.

  “Look out!” Ryan cried, swinging Jubilee around behind him. “It’s in the wall!”

  Wicklaw immediately jumped for the stairs above, but the gren-wounded man made the mistake of turning and looking at the dark spot not four feet away. He froze, eyes wide with fear.

  The clicking stopped.

  Then the center of the wet spot exploded outward, sending softened concrete and yellow slime flying.

  Ryan averted his eye and shielded his face with a forearm. He already had the Galil up, muzzle pointing in the direction of the hole. But things were happening faster than he could react. As he lowered h
is arm, he glimpsed a sleek brown shape vaulting, long legs extended, from the gash. It hit the landing and jumped to the stairs above before Ryan could fire.

  The gren-wounded man slammed against the rear wall as if sideswiped by a runaway wag, his arms flung wide and loose.

  Even though Ryan knew what was coming next, he still couldn’t track the beast. And he didn’t dare fire the Galil blind into a wall ten feet away. The full-auto ricochets would have cut him and J.B. to pieces.

  J.B. had his pistol up, too. But when the time came, he couldn’t fire, either.

  It was over too quickly.

  In a seamless, fluid move, the brown shape pivoted on the steps and bounded back to the landing. As it hit the floor, it snatched the stunned man around the waist with one of its middle legs, folding him over like a lawn chair, and leaped again, carrying him into the wall.

  No hesitation.

  Clean grab.

  Clean reentry.

  Start to finish, it took maybe three seconds.

  No one said anything for a long moment; they were too astonished by the turn of events. J.B. used his gun hand to thumb his glasses back up the bridge of his nose, and let out the breath of air he had been holding.

  Then the captured man had to have come to in the grasp of the demon. From the depths of the wall came a long terrible scream, growing fainter and fainter.

  “Bob and Enid protect us!” Wicklaw moaned. The acid spatter had burned holes in the back of his robe and in his skanky, felted mass of hair. “We are doomed!”

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Mildred, Krysty, Jak and Doc abandoned the redoubt’s elevator and ran for the stairs, back the way they had come. When they reached the aboveground floor, Jak led them through the security checkpoint to the inner air lock door, where the clanging was the loudest.

  He put his hand to the metal, then pulled it back. “Feel,” Jak said to Krysty.

  When she touched the door, she could feel the shock of the impacts through her fingertips. “Are they trying to break down the outer door?” she said. “Are they using a battering ram?”

  “That would be a waste of effort,” Mildred said. “Vanadium steel can turn back a direct hit from a cannon shell.”

  “There are too many impacts, too erratically spaced,” Doc said. “It cannot be a battering ram.”

  “Then they must be rolling the boulders down onto the door,” Krysty said. “They’re barricading us in.”

  “It appears we won’t be using that exit in the near future,” Doc said.

  “The pilgrims don’t want to have to bother guarding the entrance,” Mildred said. “This solves the problem for them.”

  “And makes our situation that much worse,” Krysty said. “Even if the redoubt’s mat-trans unit is in working order, we can’t go back to rescue Ryan and J.B., now.”

  “Not the way we came in, at any rate,” Mildred said.

  “Stick to plan,” Jak said.

  “Jak’s right,” Doc said. “We have to address and solve one problem at a time, and in the order we have already agreed upon. This regrettable turn of events has not altered our priorities. We have to know whether we are in fact trapped here. And once we have determined that to our satisfaction, we can explore our options.”

  The resonant clangs continued as the boulders piled up outside.

  “At least this means they won’t be coming in after us,” Krysty said.

  “We have all the time in the world,” Doc said. “Unfortunately the same cannot be said for our dear friends.”

  They hurriedly returned to the floor below and the service elevator. After brushing aside the dense mat of cobwebs that draped from the ceiling, they climbed in. When Krysty pushed the buttons for floor numbers ten and eighteen, the doors slid shut. Then the interior lights flickered, the car jerked, a motor above them whirred, and they began a descent so sickeningly rapid that they had to steady themselves on the walls.

  When the elevator stopped with a lurch on floor ten and the doors opened, Krysty said, “Come on, Jak, let’s find that mat-trans unit.”

  The albino nodded assent.

  “Doc and I will be down on eighteen,” Mildred told them as they stepped out of the car. “When you’re done up here, come down and find us.”

  “Good luck,” Krysty said.

  “Same back,” Mildred pushed the close button, and the doors shut. The elevator car jerked and began to drop once more.

  She looked over at the old man and said, “What do you really think about our chances, Doc?”

  “My honest opinion?”

  “That’s what I asked for.”

  “At this point, I am afraid it looks dire for all of us, my dear. Dire, indeed.”

  “What we need is a break,” she said. “Ever since we mat-transed, things have gone from bad to worse.”

  “Yes, a turn of luck would be most welcome.”

  On floor eighteen, the doors opened onto another security checkpoint. It was the mirror image of the set-up at the redoubt entrance. There was a holding cell. And the firing ports in the armored glass of the sec station faced the elevator and the hallway on the other side of the cell—designed to prevent both break-ins and breakouts.

  As they cleared the holding cell, through the open sliding window of the security installation, they could see more evidence of a sudden departure. There were paper coffee cups on the desk, the brown liquid they had contained had long since evaporated. Beside the cups were four paper plates that had once held food. Whatever the sec crew’s last meal had been, it had turned to pillowy mounds of bluish mold, which had spread as far as it could across the desktop before dying, many decades past. As Mildred and Doc walked by the window, the faint currents of air they stirred up caused the fragile mounds to collapse in on themselves, raising clouds of gray-blue dust.

  On either side of the corridor were red-and-yellow signs. Caution Biohazard. Caution Radiation Area.

  Set in the wall of the intersecting hallway directly ahead was a long, heavily gasketed window. On the other side of it, banks of fluorescent lights blinked erratically, illuminating the corridor beyond and another gasketed window. On the far side of the second window, there appeared to be another hallway, and another after that, and perhaps another still, although the glare bouncing back and forth between the windows made it difficult to be sure of the actual number.

  “What, pray tell, is all this for?”

  “It looks like a bioengineering facility,” Mildred said. “Prenuke state-of-the-art. Ultrasecure quarantine. Each of the barriers we’re looking at is a biohazard containment level. The sealed enclosures are boxes inside of boxes. From the gaskets on the windows, they’re probably reverse pressurized, which acts as a fail-safe against accidental release of dangerous material. If one box breaks, the atmosphere flows in instead of out, and there are still four more enclosures to contain the spill.”

  “A very complex quarantine regimen,” Doc said. “What was the dangerous material that required such care?”

  “Mead and Shumer’s published work was on the use of nonliving vectors to transfer specific snippets of genetic material. They would insert the new DNA sequences into viruses which when they infected the target cells, would splice in the desired instructional code.”

  “If these viruses got loose, they could accidently infect whitecoats and redoubt personnel?” Doc said.

  “That’s right,” Mildred said. “And through the process of infection, the virus would transfer the new section of DNA code to every cell in victims’ bodies. In an isolated, secure structure like this, dependent upon recycled air and a ventilation system, the escape of viral research material would mean an epidemic of unforeseen consequences. I’m guessing that’s the kind of bioengineering operation that was going on here. It’s the same application of technology that got them into trouble initially.”

  They followed the signs on the wall to the directors’ suite of offices. On the other side of a glass barrier, through automatic glass doors,
was an anteroom, Berber-carpeted, with a row of administrative assistant’s desks blocking direct access to a pair of mahogany, floor-to-ceiling doors.

  Bob’s and Enid’s spacious adjoining offices were on the other side of the massive doors, separated from each other by a wall of glass. The U. S. government had spared no expense on the lab directors’ furnishings. Mead and Shumer, international outcasts of science, had cut themselves a very sweet deal. Not just leather upholstered couches and vast executive desks. They had their own wet bars. Private bathrooms. A connecting exercise suite, complete with sauna and whirlpool.

  Mildred scanned the spines of the books that tightly packed a wall of shelves. She recognized the standard chemical and medical reference works. There were also tomes on veterinary medicine, cellular biology, cellular pathology and virology.

  She waved Doc over to the suite’s computer workstation. Thumbtacked to the bulletin board alongside the drive tower were a series of snapshots, greeting cards and little notes.

  The photos were of Mead and Shumer, together and individually, with different background scenes. One looked like a European capital. Another was somewhere in the Far East. There was a mountain-top ski resort. Holiday photographs.

  Doc opened one of the greeting cards and read the inscription. “This would be Dr. Shumer’s office, then,” he said.

  Mildred looked over his shoulder. The card’s corny, gushy, romantic sentiment was underscored by the cover’s painting of a fluffy kitten with enormous eyes.

  It was signed, To my dear one, All my love, Enid.

  The other cards’ printed sentiments were even gushier. They offered vows of love eternal. Praised a perfect match of souls. Proclaimed stolen hearts. And there were little personal notes, very affectionate, written in a tight, controlled, microminiature hand. All were from Enid Mead.

  “Here’s a different sort of greeting,” Doc said.

  It was a new baby card, addressed to Bob. Inside the word “boy” had been crossed out, and the sentence altered to read, “Congratulations, it’s an It! And it’s ours!” It was signed, Love forever, Enid.

  Mildred didn’t bother trying to start up the computer. The drive tower housing had melted into itself and the monitor screen had blown out onto the hardwood parquet floor. Brushing aside a thick coat of dust, she looked through the assembled, bound and unbound spreadsheets, then the drawers beneath the counter.