Labyrinth

by James Axler

  “It had to be an accident,” Mildred said. “Bob and Enid knew what their baby could do.”

  “I agree that the whitecoats had to understand the danger they were in, once their creature was free,” Doc said. “But why did they not just abandon the place? That would have been the simplest solution.”

  “For the same reason the ville folk are still here, today,” Krysty said. “The desert is hell to cross. Odds of making it to the other side are slim. This canyon is an oasis. If the demons are kept under control, and isolated in the dam, the chances of survival are pretty good.”

  “Bob and Enid kept their lab subjects on the bottom floor of the redoubt,” Mildred said. “We need to go down and have a look at whatever’s been left behind. With any luck, it’ll give us an idea of how to fight the trannies.”

  Had the companions not taken a different route back to the elevator, had it not been for the sound of the huge pumps kicking in, they would have missed the hydro control station. As it was, through the closed door, they could hear a steady loud churning.

  “That’s mechanical,” Mildred said.

  “Let’s have a look,” Krysty said.

  Inside, they found a fully automated system running through a hundred-year-old program. Steel boxed computers and slave units covered an entire wall. They were decorated with flow meters, and depth and pressure gauges. There was also a complicated, illuminated system schematic, with side channels, cutoffs, overflow pipes. Water flow direction was indicated by tiny, blinking blue lights. If the scale was accurate, the underground structure extended all the way to the foot of the dam.

  “I think this may have something to do with maintaining the level of the lake,” Mildred said. “The water source is obviously the river, which is running below ground, somewhere between this floor and the surface.”

  “Or perhaps the system of channels and pumps keeps the underground river diverted around this facility,” Doc suggested. “It certainly was installed at the same time.”

  As they continued on to the elevator, they double-checked their weapons, making sure chambers held live rounds and mags were full, on the offchance the lab section was still occupied by the spawn of Bob and Enid.

  Mildred pushed the button for floor nineteen. The doors slid shut, and the car jerked and dropped. After falling no more than ten feet, it stopped short, slamming to such an abrupt halt that it sent the four companions crashing to the floor.

  Even before they regained their feet, a torrent of water began to pour through the seam between the closed doors.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  J.B. poked the burning end of his torch and the muzzle of the cocked Llama pistol into the gaping new hole, careful not to get any of the yellow slime on himself. When he drew back he said, “The demon must’ve been waiting just behind the wall, ready to jump out when the next victim came past. I’ve never seen anything reverse direction like that. Pivot turn caught me flat-footed, I couldn’t get a bead on it.”

  “The stairwell isn’t any safer for us than the hallways,” Ryan said. “Not when the bastards can bust through the walls and take us by surprise. That extra split-second advantage is all they need.”

  “And all we need is enough time to get a message from brain to trigger finger.”

  “Yeah, but buying enough time for us to get shots off is going to be triple tough,” Ryan said. “This is the demons’ stronghold, not ours. The fight is by their rules, not ours. And we don’t know enough about either one to tip things in our favor.”

  “They can be chilled, though,” J.B. said, glaring at Pilgrim Wicklaw. “At least we know that.”

  Wicklaw didn’t argue the point. He was too busy squirming and scratching, his face flushed red and screwed up into a squinty-eyed grimace. The spray of demon goo had eaten lacey holes through the back of his robe, and some of it had gotten onto his skin. From the way he was acting, it had to have burned like hellfire.

  “We’ve got to move on,” Ryan said. With Jubilee in tow, he and J.B. continued down the stairs.

  Wicklaw brought up the rear, shuffling on his bad foot, scratching at himself and whimpering.

  It occurred to Ryan, and not for the first time, that every person dumped into the top of the dam would do exactly what they were doing, trying to reach an exit at the bottom of the structure. That was the only hope for a safe escape. If the demons had a grain of sense, they would have most heavily colonized the lower portions of the dam; at least in the beginning, they would have let the food come to them.

  As was the case with other predators, the oldest and strongest would control the best hunting ground. The younger, less experienced ones would be forced to prowl the edges of the prime turf, picking off strays and stragglers wherever they could.

  Which probably meant the upper corridors.

  Even the young, inexperienced demons had nothing to fear from their prey. Humans were slow to react, easy to panic and their weapons were ineffective. Ryan imagined the older ones fought the young ones to maintain their dominance. The demons could even be cannibalistic, he thought. Which would explain the absence of their corpses in the corridors.

  Ryan knew he was making assumptions on slim evidence at this point. It was just as likely that the demons weren’t concentrated on the floors below them. If the competition started taking victims higher and higher in the dam, it would force the older ones to abandon the lower floors, or starve to death. After a hundred years, with the dam walls honeycombed by their tunnels, they could be anywhere.

  Everywhere.

  He and J.B. were sorely under the blaster this time. Not faced with a learning curve, as Mildred would have described it, but a learning cliff. And they were both hanging on the same frayed rope a mile up.

  As they reached the next landing, and its crop of acid-blackened human bones, there was a shrill creaking noise on the floor above them. Then a resounding bang.

  “The door!” J.B. said, turning and pointing his weapon past Wicklaw, up the stairs. “That was the landing door slamming shut!”

  “Shhh, listen,” Ryan said over the sights of the Galil.

  From above came soft clicking sounds. A steady stream of them. Like a cat purring. Only this was no cat.

  “Nuking hell, it’s in the stairwell,” J.B. groaned.

  “Down!” Ryan snarled at the girl. “Get down behind me!”

  Wicklaw hurled himself, bad foot and all, between Ryan and J.B. Dropping his torch amid the yellow puddles and litter of bones, he lunged for the corner of the landing, and cowered there, covering the back of his head with his hands.

  The pattern of the clicking suddenly changed. Instead of a steady stream, it started coming in short, rapidfire bursts, separated by brief pauses. It almost sounded like the demon was talking to them. To its soon-to-be victims. Or perhaps it was communicating to the other demons that might be in earshot, announcing the pending kill, warning them off the spoils.

  Then the sounds stopped.

  Ryan tucked the Galil’s tubular steel buttstock hard into his shoulder. His finger tightened down on the trigger, taking up the slack, bringing it almost to break point.

  A shadow came down the stairwell, moving in great bounds, faster than the eye could follow.

  Over the years, Ryan and J.B. had proved themselves expert marksmen, at close and long range, with every conceivable type of blaster to be found in the hell-scape. Hitting what they aimed at was their stock-in-trade; their lives had depended on that skill for years. They understood the limitations of the particular weapons they held, and their own physical limitations under the conditions of low, flickering light and speeding, oncoming target. They also knew the consequences if they didn’t stop the demon in its tracks.

  Saving ammo was the least of their worries.

  Long seconds before the streaking shadow appeared, Ryan held his aim steady at the middle of the flight of stairs. Three heartbeats after the clicking stopped, an instant before the shadow appeared around the landing turn above, he opene
d fire with the assault rifle, full auto, six hundred rounds a minute, letting his target fall through the kill zone.

  It either couldn’t turn, or it didn’t try.

  The Galil roared in the enclosed space, spitting a yard of flame. The first three of its metal-jacketed .308s slammed into the step risers, cratering, shattering the concrete. The next five slugs hit something more resilient. Something that trapped and absorbed the destructive power of their mushrooming tips.

  As the assault rifle locked back empty, J.B. squeezed off his fourth semiauto shot, firing as fast as he could pull the trigger. He, too, had taken a fixed lead on the target.

  Which was still coming.

  Instinctively, the comrades dived in opposite directions, J.B. lunged for the wall to his right, Ryan for the bend in the stairwell. The black shape shot between them, crashing headlong into the landing wall.

  J.B. spun and tried to put his sights on the frenziedly thrashing and kicking demon.

  The thing was no longer clicking; instead, mouth gaping enormously, it squealed. Shrill. Piercing. Nerve-grating. Like a pig whose slaughter had been bungled.

  Trapped, crouching in the corner of the landing, his hands still protecting the back of his head, Pilgrim Wicklaw bleated, “Shoot it! For Bob’s sake, shoot it!”

  The wounded demon couldn’t get to its legs, but it was still alive, and it was berserk. Thick white blood squirted through the .308-caliber entry holes in its chest as it snapped its torso, lashing out with its back legs, the serrated blades scoring grooves in the floor and wall. The demon moved so fast, hopping and jittering, flopping from one side to the other, spinning that in the torchlight it was difficult to even get a good look at it.

  “Head!” Ryan shouted to J.B., pulling out the Astra .380. “Aim for the head.”

  J.B. leaned forward, and, timing the shots between the creature’s violent jerks, fired twice in rapid succession.

  The Parabellum rounds entered the side of its skull, just behind the huge black eye, and blew out the other side, point-blank through and through. A quart of pale beige paste splattered high and wide across the wall, and sharp fragments of whatever its skull was made of rattled around the landing, singing through the air like shrapnel.

  “Uhh! Uhh!” Wicklaw moaned from the corner, frantically using the hem of his robe to try to wipe the creature’s sticky brains and bits of its skull off his beard.

  On the landing floor, the demon trembled, head to foot, in its death throes. The armored plates along the sides of its torso quivered, all six of its legs quaked. Its jaws snapped as more of the white gunk bubbled out of the ruin of its head. Slowly its back legs extended until they were stretched out straight behind it, and then it stopped moving.

  “Radblast!” J.B. said, looking down at the locked back slide of the empty Llama. “That thing was hard to chill.”

  “It’s dead, Jubilee,” Ryan told the girl huddled behind him. “You can open your eyes.”

  She did so, clinging to the back of his shirt, peering around his arm to blink at the thing on the floor. She was goggle-eyed and speechless.

  “I thought it would be much bigger,” J.B. said, standing over the demon, and holding the torch close.

  “It’s big enough to snatch a full grown man off his feet and lug him away,” Ryan said.

  “Triple strong for its size,” J.B. commented. “It can’t weigh much more than a hundred pounds. Looks like a bug with all those legs.”

  “Yeah, but the teeth…” Ryan said. “No bug was ever born with teeth like that. They look like they could cut through sheet steel. And it’s got rows and rows of them, one behind the other.”

  “Like a shark. Always growing new sets.”

  Ryan prodded a piece of the fragmented skull plate with the toe of his boot. It had a clump of black hairs, like thick steel wires, sprouting from it. The tips were cut or broken off on the diagonal, and looked needle sharp. “Radblasted ugly sucker, any way you look at it.”

  To Wicklaw J.B. said, “That’s two down, pilgrim. Praise Bob, praise Enid.”

  “With who knows how many more to go?” Ryan asked. “We’ve got at least three floors to cross before we reach the bottom of the dam. How many more bullets have you got left? I’ve got four rounds in this predark pea shooter.”

  J.B. showed him the battered Smith Military Police .38. “Five shots is all I’ve got, assuming this blaster doesn’t blow up in my face first.”

  “Keep the Llama,” Ryan told him. “Maybe we’ll find some more ammo for it.” He slipped the Galil’s web sling over his shoulder. “I’m keeping this, too. Just in case.”

  They found no unfired ammunition on the stairs below. No loaded blasters, either. There were lots more gashes in the walls, though, gaping holes where the demons had popped out or bored in. And more bodies on the steps. Bodies galore.

  Ryan and J.B. had to boot the bones aside to clear a path.

  It was as Ryan had guessed. The bulk of the demon sacrifices seemed to be concentrated at the base of the stairwell. And not because they had tumbled down there from above. These bodies lay where they had died, stretched out, crawling to get away.

  From the fragile state of the bones, they were very old victims. maybe even from as far back as Bob and Enid’s time. The skeletons lay two and three deep on the stairs. They appeared to be climbing over one another, as if still trying to escape. Though there were dozens upon dozens of them, the stench was much less horrible than higher up in the well.

  Below, the bodies on the landing were mounded waist deep. A jumble of blackened bones that spilled up the staircase, covering the last four steps. There was a demon hole in the wall above them; its goo looked congealed or dried up. Ryan kept his weapon pointed at it, anyway.

  “Looks like the end of the line,” J.B. said as they stopped on the fifth step above the landing.

  There were no more stairs to the right, just an exit door, half-blocked by bones.

  “How are we going to get through all that?” Wicklaw said. “There’s yellow slime everywhere.”

  It was true. The collection of stripped human remains dripped with the stuff. It had spread out in a vast pool beneath them.

  “If you think we’re going to carry you, pilgrim,” J.B. said, “you’ve got another think coming.”

  “There’s worse things than a little acid,” Ryan told Wicklaw. “But you already know that.”

  Covering the hole with their handblasters, Ryan and J.B. waded into the pile of eroded corpses. Ryan’s boot heel came down on the side of a skull. Under his weight, it flattened to nothing, like he’d stepped on a pile of icy slush. It made the same wet squishing sound, too. The heaps of black bones fell away as they methodically kicked them aside, and crushed them to mush underfoot.

  Before they got halfway across the landing, yellow slime coated their boots and spattered their trousers to midthigh, saturating the fabric. There were no wisps of smoke from acid eating denim, no lancing pain from acid eating into flesh. The demon juice had lost its punch over the passing decades. It was still nasty rank and sticky, but no longer powerfully corrosive. Ryan and J.B. slogged through a bog of ancient death, and when they reached the landing door, they cleared away the barrier with their boots.

  The door opened onto a hallway like the ones they’d seen above, except the ceiling was lowered by the massive bundles of plastic pipe and galvanized electrical conduit that were strapped to it. The piles of bones that littered the floor were in similar condition to those in the stairwell—they squashed underfoot like rotten fruit.

  “What’s keeping this place up?” J.B. asked.

  He had put his finger on the most remarkable feature of the corridor, the number of gashes in the walls. On both sides of the hall there was a hole every five yards or so.

  Almost more holes than wall.

  “Maybe the demons are holding hands,” Ryan said.

  J.B. poked at the lip of a gash with the butt of his torch. “They haven’t been down here in a while. Gu
nk is all hardened.”

  They had covered seventy-five feet of corridor, searching in vain for a doorway, a chute, some kind of man-made passage that might lead to the outside, when a loud clunk shook the floor under their feet and brought down dust and grit from the pipes overhead.

  The clunk was immediately followed by a roar—the roar of tons of rushing water somewhere beneath them.

  “Sounds like someone just opened the floodgates,” J.B. said. “Maybe the lake’s draining away.”

  “What’s going on?” Ryan demanded of Wicklaw. “Is it the pilgrims? What are they trying to do?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know what it is, I swear.”

  Over the noise of the flowing water, from the floor above them, came a now-familiar clicking.

  “The demons are closing in,” J.B. announced.

  He and Ryan broke into a trot, trying to search as much ground as they could before company arrived. Jubilee kept pace, but Wicklaw fell back. If Ryan and J.B. hadn’t stopped to examine a steel hatch set in the middle of the corridor floor, they would have lost him.

  The hatch had a locking wheel, and was marked with a stenciled sign that read Turbine Channel Access #15a.

  “It’s for service access to the dam’s turbines,” Ryan said. “Water comes into the channel from the ville side, where the reservoir used to be. It runs down, drives the turbines and pours out the other side. That channel has to have an outlet downstream.”

  “But we’re on the intake side of the turbines,” J.B. reminded him. “To get to the outflow passage, we’re going to have to go through them. There may not be a way to do that. The blades could be frozen. The intake screened. Ryan, it could be a dead end. Or worse, that rushing noise we hear might be the channel full of water.”

  Then the clicking from above was joined by clicking from the dark corridor ahead.

  A second demon.

  “We can’t defend this hallway with nine bullets between us,” Ryan said. “But if we duck down the channel at least we can put that hatch between them and us.”