Labyrinth

by James Axler

  The companions pushed through the gate, and into what had once been the lab-subject containment area. Along one wall were rows of screened stainless-steel cages, stacked three high. The critters inside them were a hundred years dead. As the retreating water had drained from the cages, it had peeled away their covering of slime.

  Hairless, featherless, scaleless bags of gray skin lay on luxuriant beds of scum.

  It was impossible to identify their species.

  Or which end was up.

  A quintet of much larger enclosures stood at the far end of the room. The cells were four feet by four feet by four feet, and separated by enough floor space so the lab attendants could wheel gurneys and supply carts around them—gurneys and carts that lay overturned near the back wall. These cages had vanadium bars, horizontally reinforced, like the room’s security barriers, but inside the enclosures, covering sides and top, were sheets of clear plastisteel with neatly drilled rows of ventilation holes. The lab designers wanted no part of what was inside those cages to get out. The four of the five cells were half-filled with cloudy water, which still drained out the breathing holes. Above the water line, slime froth streaked the inside of the plastic.

  On the wall beside the cages was a tall locker marked Emergency Response.

  When Jak opened it, gallons of water rushed out of the bottom. Inside the compartment was a pair of flat, black metal tanks, joined in an aluminum backframe with webbed and padded shoulder straps. A corrugated steel hose led from the inverted tanks to the butt of a pistol grip device, complete with trigger, trigger guard, crossblock safety switch and an unmarked red plastic button. Atop the pistol grip was a pipe that ended in a fat nozzle. Directly under the nozzle was second, slightly longer length of metal tubing, bent upward at the tip. It was the diameter of a soda straw. An igniter. The weapon system’s pilot light.

  “Good grief, that’s a flamethrower,” Mildred said.

  “A devastating weapon in close confines,” Doc said. “And an excellent way to contain a disaster within these four walls. It combines lethality with sterilization.”

  “Tanks full,” Jak said, looking at the fuel pressure gauge.

  “It looks like Bob and Enid never got the chance to use it,” Krysty said. “Whatever happened down here, it happened damn quick.”

  They sloshed closer to the line of large cages. The retreating water on the floor was now shoe-top deep.

  In the closest cage, something big and white was drifting low in the water, fluttering weakly as it continued to drain away.

  The trapped liquid was dark, murky, the lighting was bad, and the object was far from the inside of the plastisteel wall. They couldn’t make out exactly what it was. Not until more of the water oozed away, revealing a much larger skin bag on the cage’s floor.

  A skin bag wearing a white labcoat.

  The bones of the man’s skull and neck were visible through the sags and rips in the loose gray skin.

  “There’s another corpse in the cage over here,” Doc said to the others. “It is also wearing a white coat. It is in rather remarkable condition, all things considered.”

  “That’s got to be due to the water temperature,” Mildred said. “It’s been nice and cool down here for a hundred years. It was a fairly sterile environment to begin with, and thanks to the flooding there was no aerobic bacteria to deal with.”

  “Were these people experimenting on each other?” Krysty asked.

  “Hardly seems likely,” Mildred said.

  “Why are they in the cages?”

  “Maybe they climbed in to get away from the trannies,” Mildred said. “Those cages could have been their only hope. It’s obvious they couldn’t reach the flamethrower in time. And the elevator was even farther away. I think they ducked in the cages and shut the doors behind them. I think that’s all the time they had.”

  “And Bob and Enid drowned them, too,” Krysty said.

  “They were cutting their losses,” Mildred said. “Under the circumstances, they couldn’t try to rescue their people down here. They had no way of knowing whether they were still alive. They wouldn’t risk letting the trannies reach the upper floors. If that happened, every person in the redoubt was going to die. So they sealed off this section and flooded it.”

  “Ghastly,” Doc said.

  “They died like rats in a trap,” Krysty said.

  There were three more of the large cages at the end of the room. Beyond them, in the light of flickering lamps the companions could see the entrance to the emergency escape tunnel. The heavy steel door stood half-open; above it was a red warning beacon-siren unit, an alarm system that alerted the redoubt when the corridor had been accessed. Water still flowed out that way, but in inches now, instead of feet.

  “Mebbe one of the whitecoats tried to get out through the tunnel,” Krysty said.

  “Or the demons somehow managed to get the door open,” Mildred said. “Or Bob and Enid sprung the door themselves to flush the demons out of the lab and force them into the tunnel.”

  “Some demons not make it,” Jak said.

  The falling water level exposed the bottoms of two of the remaining cages. Thick coatings of scum covered the lower limbs, but the heads, backs and torsos of curled-up forms were visible.

  The trannies’ hard external skeletons showed no evidence of decay, but their soft parts hadn’t fared so well. The eyesockets were huge, empty craters. Their bellies had rotted, as had the bands of tough connective tissue between their armor plates. The full force of gravity, which now bore down them, was pulling their torso plates apart, exposing the voids between.

  “Behold, the mighty minotaur brought low,” Doc said.

  “Bob and Enid’s babies, you mean,” Krysty said. “They managed to chill two of them.”

  “At least this affords us solid proof that the beasts are not immortal,” Doc commented.

  “Yeah,” Mildred said, “but it took upward of seventy-five thousand gallons of water to do the deed.”

  Krysty approached the lab’s last cage. The water had already run out. “This one is empty,” she said, “and the cage door is open. It looks like one of them got away.”

  “A single escapee set all these destructive countermeasures in motion?” Doc said.

  “One of these things is all it takes,” Mildred said. “Remember, they don’t need a mate in order to reproduce. Once just one of them gets into the walls of a large structure like this, it’d be almost impossible to eradicate. Trannies can’t be pursued into their burrows because of the powerful acids they secrete, and because of the danger presented by their other weaponry in close-quarters combat. To clear a redoubt of these invaders, you’d have to tear the place down, inch by inch.”

  “Be easier, and safe, to just walk away,” Krysty said.

  “The data I scanned indicated a rapid breeding cycle and a short time from birth to sexual maturity. Bob and Enid designed the trannies to double their population size every two weeks. If they had ever been deployed, in a few months the demons would have outnumbered the Soviets. Assuming there were any were left by then.”

  “How many could there be a hundred years after one escaped?” Krysty said.

  “Hard to guess on that. The population probably spiked early on, and then fell back and leveled off. A sustained population would depend on the number of offerings they were given. And on the room for colonization inside the dam. Trannies are extremely territorial. They’d fight each other for control of the available turf.”

  “Why did the redoubt survivors decide to feed these ungodly brutes?” Doc said. “Once they were in the dam, why not just seal them in and starve them to death?”

  “Sealing them in isn’t possible,” Mildred said. “They could come through dam walls anywhere.”

  “But you said they have an aversion to sunlight.”

  “That’s right. They hate it. And they’d avoid coming in contact with it at all costs. They don’t like open spaces above ground, either. But they’d fo
rego their instinctive preferences to hunt in the open at night if they got hungry enough. The ville folk are no match for them, and they know it. Their only option is to keep the demons content to remain where they are.”

  “Why feed them people?” Jak said.

  “After nukeday there weren’t any other large animals left in the canyon,” Mildred said. “Besides, the trannies were bred to chill people. We are their meat and potatoes. Their sensory array is tuned to locate and track down human beings. Their gut enzymes are constructed to digest us. Again, this is primary weapons control. Bob and Enid couldn’t have their demons running around chasing after Ukrainian sheep.”

  “Trannie chill-time,” Jak said as he shrugged into the flamethrower’s straps.

  “Have you ever used one of those before?” Mildred asked.

  Jak didn’t answer her question.

  “Test, first,” is what the albino mutie said. He flipped off the pistol grip’s safety switch, aimed the nozzle at one of the cages about fifteen feet away and pressed the red igniter button. With a hiss, a fine blue flame shot out of the tube beneath the nozzle. Then he pulled the trigger.

  High pressure, aerosolized fuel shot out of the nozzle and burst into flame with a continuous roar.

  Instantaneous inferno.

  Jak was standing a bit close to his target as it turned out. The two-foot-wide stream of liquid fire hit it and split in two, spraying wide to either side, hissing and steaming as it landed on the wet floor.

  Shielding their faces from the withering blast of heat, the companions shouted for him to turn the thing off.

  When he released the trigger, the torrent of fire shut off and the igniter flame winked out.

  Luckily, everything was still so waterlogged that nothing in the room caught fire. The plastisteel walls of the target cage had blackened and partially melted; the ceiling above it was badly scorched and blistered. Jak had to check out the weapon, though. It was their best hope against the trannies.

  Maybe their only hope.

  Mildred tried to push back the door to the escape tunnel. It wouldn’t open any farther because of all the debris. The lab’s lighter material had been sucked down the tunnel. Doc helped her clear the door and shove it hard against the wall.

  There were no operational lights in the escape passage. Visibility ended about twenty feet down it.

  Hurriedly, the companions scrounged through the lab for materials to make torches from. Krysty found a water-filled drawer packed with surgical supplies. She and Mildred quickly stripped the wads of sterile bandages and dressings from their sealed foil pouches. Doc broke the legs off a tall stool, and they wrapped the ends with the bandages, creating a torch for each of them. A liberal dousing with rubbing alcohol made the material catch fire at once.

  The redoubt’s escape passage was very narrow, with a low ceiling. Doc had to bend over to keep from bumping the top of his head. The tunnel’s featureless walls stretched off into the darkness at a slight down-angle, which helped with drainage. The heavier lab debris had been deposited on the floor as the water level dropped. The litter included computer diskettes, CDs, plastic labware, pipettes, hoses, test tube racks and pieces of broken glass.

  The companions advanced with weapons drawn and safeties off. With the exception of Jak, they all carried shoulder-slung canvas bags with extra ammunition, speedloaders and grens. The albino walked in front with the flamethrower’s business end in one hand and a blazing torch in the other. With a flick of the wrist, he could fill the passage from wall to wall with fire. Whether that would be enough to chill or turn back an attacking demon had yet to be proved.

  There was really no room to maneuver in the escape tunnel. It was so narrow they were forced to walk single file. Their customary procedure in a situation like this was for the point man to kneel left and fire when they met opposition. The second gun knelt right, and the third and fourth guns stood and fired over their heads. The kneeling pair didn’t rise to their feet until the shooters behind gave the clear signal.

  Jak abruptly stopped the column and held his torch near the wall to the left.

  In the dancing light, they could all see a narrow, vertical depression in the surface, about six inches deep and three feet in length, where the acid-softened concrete had been scraped away. The depression was cross hatched with talon marks.

  “Trannie work,” Jak said.

  “It tried to tunnel out,” Krysty said.

  “I wonder what made it stop?” Doc queried.

  “Maybe it realized that direction was a dead end, that it couldn’t burrow any farther,” Mildred said. “It probably has some way to sense the depth of the concrete. It could be something like sonar. Or maybe it can taste the difference.”

  “Or the water started pouring in, and it had to run,” Krysty said.

  “I don’t think it would have made it, if that was the case. Bob and Enid were trying to kill it. They would have closed the passage at the other end before they opened the floodgates. They wouldn’t want to risk it getting past the barrier and into the dam.”

  “But it did, anyway.”

  “Could have gotten spooked by something and taken off. Got by the door at the far end before it closed.”

  “Things move that fast?” Jak asked.

  “Fast isn’t the word for it,” Mildred said.

  The companions continued down the tunnel at a careful trot. They found no other evidence of demons at work on the walls. They found a lot more debris though, some of it slippery underfoot.

  The passage ended in what at first appeared to be a blank wall. As they closed in on it, they could see the mouth of a three-foot-wide drain pipe set at ground level.

  Doc got down on his knees and peered in, the torch and the cocked Le Mat thrust in front of him. “I cannot see any light,” he said. “But there has to be an opening at the other end. This is the drain line. It could also be a continuation of the escape tunnel.”

  On the wall to the left of the open pipe were a series of steel rungs leading up to a dark, circular opening in the tunnel’s ceiling. The top three rungs were bowed as if by a tremendous weight.

  “That way into dam,” Jak said.

  Holding her torch high, Mildred said, “There used to be a locking hatch up there. I can see the lip of the sealing ring.”

  Jak passed his torch to Doc and climbed the rungs first. With the flamethrower pointed above his head, he hit the igniter button and used its flame to see by.

  Mildred came after him, her Czech ZKR ready to rip.

  She scrambled out onto the horizontal passage and Doc tossed up their torches. This tunnel had been filled with water, too, because the floor was still wet. There had indeed once been a locking hatch that secured this end of the passage. Its lid was flopped back on twisted hinges. There were dents and score marks along its outside edge where it had been wrenched and pried out of its frame.

  Bob and Enid had managed to close the hatch in time. Perhaps it was even an automatic response when the lab emergency exit door was breached. Not that it had done any good.

  “The trannie used the rungs below for leverage,” Mildred said. “That’s why they’re bent like that. It battered and pushed at the inside of the hatch until it could get it open.”

  “Triple strong,” Jak said.

  “And triple desperate.”

  Krysty and Doc passed their torches up, then joined them.

  “By the Three Kennedys!” Doc exclaimed, clapping a hand over his nose. “What a putrescent pall!”

  “It smells like a bonfire of thirty-thousand unplucked turkeys,” Mildred said.

  There were gashes in the walls of the upper passage. They were spaced every few feet.

  These were big ones.

  Deep ones.

  “Are those what I think they are?” Krysty said.

  “Light ’em up, Jak,” Mildred said.

  The albino stuck the flamethrower’s nozzle into the nearest hole and touched off a blast of fire. It howled into
the ragged cleft in the wall. The congealed secretions at its base melted into spitting, smoking goo that streamed across the floor in yellow rivulets.

  “Short bursts, Jak,” Mildred said. “And whatever you do, don’t breathe in that smoke. It’ll eat your lungs to rags.”

  Jak gave each of the gashes the same treatment as they advanced, working both sides of the corridor, cooking the first five yards of burrow in two-thousand-degree heat.

  The companions listened hard after each blast of the flamethrower, but nothing moved in the dam walls, nothing scrabbled to escape the horrific onslaught, nothing died in screams of agony.

  “Apparently no one is home,” Doc said.

  “At least for the moment,” Krysty said.

  Ahead of them, the tunnel began to neck down even farther, the walls narrowing, the ceiling dropping. And at the edges of the light they could see more demon holes on either side.

  “The tighter the space, the bigger the trannies’ advantage,” Mildred warned them.

  She wasn’t suggesting that they change course. There was no other course open to them. They had to proceed.

  As the companions continued to advance into the darkness, from almost directly above their heads came a muffled shout followed by a rapid string of gunshots.

  “That’s Ryan and J.B.!” Krysty cried over the racket. “That has to be them. And they’re under attack.” The redhead shouted up at the ceiling, “Hang on, Ryan! We’re coming!”

  “Krysty, he can’t hear you,” Mildred said. “We’ve got to reach them, and fast. This tunnel has to come out somewhere.”

  They rushed forward, and as they did so, a shape appeared out of the inky blackness ahead. It slipped out of the wall to the right and dropped into the middle of the corridor, blocking their path. It crouched there, low to the ground, its shape compressed and difficult to distinguish from the floor.

  The trannie made a clicking sound.

  Like purring.

  It cocked its flat head this way and that, its huge black eyes taking them in. Unafraid.