Labyrinth

by James Axler

  Jak climbed down the bent rungs first, then Ryan followed. The others stayed in the upper corridor, watching their backs with drawn blasters.

  On the lower tunnel floor, nothing moved. It was dead quiet except for the steady hiss of the flame-thrower’s igniter, dead dark except for its blue flame. Krysty tossed them down a torch.

  Ryan picked it up and immediately pointed at the drain pipe set low in the wall. “Keep an eye on that,” he told Jak.

  Then he called up to the others, “Come on down.”

  No sooner had they all reached the floor than something started moving way back in the drain pipe. Something big. Claws scrabbled at the slippery surface, unable to get good purchase.

  Jak knelt down and fired a blast of flame into the mouth of the pipe, then he hit it again.

  “Everybody get moving,” Ryan said as Jak stood up. “Go on, run!” Priming another gren, he pitched it down the pipe, giving it a rolling spin, making it clunk and bang its way deep down the pipe.

  The hard crack of the explosion was muffled by the pipe, the concrete and the distance. Gray smoke curled up from the lip.

  Nothing came flying out in chunks.

  “At least that’ll give the bastards something to think about,” J.B. said as Ryan joined him, stride for stride.

  They didn’t think about it for long.

  Behind the companions in the darkness, over the slap of their own footfalls on the concrete, they could hear the demons coming.

  Scraping.

  Clicking.

  Snarling.

  Crashing into the walls as they fought one another to be first at the fresh meat.

  “They can follow our scent,” Mildred said as she ran. “The wind currents will have carried it all through the dam. They’ll come after us like sharks up a chum line.”

  “Sounds like there’s hundreds of them,” Krysty said.

  “Could just be the echoes,” Mildred said.

  “Could also be that’s how many there are,” Ryan said.

  He and Jak fell back, taking up a rear-guard position. And just in time to see a blur bounding out of the darkness, springing high in the air.

  Jak held down the flamethrower’s trigger, filling the corridor with a sheet of fire, angled at the ceiling. The demon was coming so fast that it blasted through the seething wall of flame. It sailed over their heads like a comet, trailing a fiery tail, its curved stingers fully extended, trying and failing to make contact.

  As it skidded down in front of them, Doc’s Le Mat bellowed and spit a yard of flame from its barrel. The impact of tightly packed metal odds and ends, screws, nuts, bits of scrap steel, made the demon’s head vanish all the way to its neck. Burning bits of skull skipped down the hall ahead of them, creating a thousand points of light in the blackness.

  The companions jumped the still kicking, still flaming corpse.

  From behind them came a rhythmic, scraping sound. Another demon had broken free of the pack. And was closing.

  As they ran, Ryan turned and bowled a gren down the corridor. It thudded into the dark, then exploded. The hard whack of detonation was followed, a split second later, by the juicy splatter of a demon flying apart.

  That didn’t end the threat. As the blast echoes faded, Ryan could hear a dull roar over his shoulder. It sounded like a tidal wave bearing down.

  And it was going to overtake them.

  Shouting “Go!” to the others, Ryan grabbed Jak’s arm and pulled him to a stop. No explanation was necessary. The albino could hear what was coming, too. They had to fight a delaying action, to give the others a chance to escape.

  Ryan pitched another gren, and, as it bounced into the dark, swung up his SIG, holding it steady with both hands. The wave’s roar got louder and louder, and then the frag blew, sending forth a hard gust of wind and a boiling cloud of cordite smoke. Segments of leg and torso rolled down the corridor toward them.

  Firing the semiauto pistol as fast as he could, Ryan swept his aimpoint back and forth between the hall-way’s walls, creating a narrow zone of death beyond the edge of the light. The 9 mm slugs ricocheted off the concrete, and made solid, meaty thwacks as they slammed into demon flesh.

  If one went down in the darkness, there were many more close behind to take its place.

  Shoulder to shoulder, jostling for position as they burst through the cloud of gren smoke, two demons bore down on the stationary targets.

  Jak cooked them both in the same withering blast, a sweep of fire that melted their eyes, burned off their spiky topknot, and cooked their soft white guts to the consistency of hard boiled egg. The twin flaming corpses screeched along the ceiling, slid down the walls and crashed to the floor in side-by-side heaps.

  Ryan heard the scrape and the pause that meant another demon was incoming and airborne. He held the SIG low and opened fire, again as fast as he could pull the trigger. Out of the darkness the demon flew, its body fully extended. Ryan’s Parabellum rounds stitched it from abdomen to throat, the bullets slapping into and coring the armored plates.

  It hit the floor and jumped one more time, right into the aerial bonfire Jak made. The lead in its belly melted along with it eyes, topknot and guts.

  Ryan dumped the empty mag on the floor and slapped a fresh one home. Acrid smoke from all the burning corpses was starting to fill the corridor, making their eyes sting and tear. Through the pall came a horrible clashing and the shrill screech of horn on concrete.

  A trio of demons appeared, leapfrogging one another. The second one in line timed its leap so it came down on the first. Using its hind leg, it slashed before the competitor could jump away. The head of the demon in the lead jumped from its torso. As the body crashed to the floor, the skull caromed off the wall, its jaws still snapping.

  The third demon landed on the back of second, and the battle was joined. They fought face-to-face in the middle of the corridor, almost faster than the eye could follow. With savage downward slashes of their rear legs, they raked open each other’s bellies, spilling white guts onto the floor. And still they fought, biting, clawing, dying in each other’s grasp, with the taste of each other’s blood in their mouths.

  In that moment, Ryan realized that it wasn’t just the companions’ scent that was luring the creatures on. It was the promise of new real estate. The dam had been fully tunneled, fully occupied, for many decades. The reopened escape tunnel offered them access to the redoubt for the first time in a century. It was the demon equivalent of the Oklahoma land rush.

  First come, first to stake a claim.

  Before the next wave could strike, Ryan and Jak turned and raced to close ground with the others.

  “There’s a heavy door at the entrance to the lab,” Mildred shouted to them as they caught up. “If we can make it there, I think it’ll keep them out.”

  Ryan could already see the light at the end of the tunnel, about seventy-five feet ahead. Behind him, the tidal wave roared. As he ran, he dipped a hand into the ammo bag and fished out another gren.

  He was last to reach the lab entrance door, but before he slipped past it, he lobbed the gren down the passage. As he threw it, he realized that he’d grabbed a stunner instead of a frag.

  Ryan slammed the door shut as the flash bang lit up the corridor in absolute white light. The shock wave slammed the far side of the door, rattling it in its frame. When he peeked out, he saw smoke and chaos. Demons blinded, deafened, disoriented, hurling themselves headfirst into the walls, the ceiling, into one another, spinning wildly on the floor. Those closest to the blast were chilled dead, their brains scrambled to mush.

  From the roar and the clatter, there were others behind, and they were coming in droves.

  Ryan slammed the exit door shut and dropped the locking bar into its latch.

  No sooner had he secured the door than the clicking started up behind them.

  Ryan spun to face the lab. The noise wasn’t coming from the section of the room they were in. The large cages on the floor and the tiers
of smaller ones along the wall hadn’t held anything alive for a century. The clicking was coming from the other side of the barrier that divided this section of the lab from the next. Something was moving beyond the half-open gate. Ryan saw the spiky tops of the demons’ heads between the steel bars.

  “Dark night!” J.B. exclaimed. He had a gren in his hand but didn’t try to toss it through the gate. The room was too small, and there was no cover. The frag shrap would have cut the companions to pieces.

  Krysty and Mildred opened fire with their .38s, popping off rounds at the dark shapes. Their slugs whined and sparked off the bars.

  “Hold it, hold it!” Ryan said. “We’ve got to get control of the gate. The gate’s the key. We can’t let them get through it. Jak, beat them back.”

  The albino laid down a smothering blanket of flame, sending it splashing between the bars, onto the desktops and floor. The demons jumped away from the heat, to the far side of the room.

  As the blast of fire dissipated, leaving behind scorched ceiling and floor tiles, the companions rushed forward to claim ground.

  J.B. pulled the barrier gate closed, but there was no key in its lock and no way to secure it.

  On the other side of the bars, spread out along the matching barrier in front of the elevator, was a trio of demons. They weren’t fighting one another; there was plenty of prey to go around.

  All three launched themselves at the bars. It was a synchronized attack, and it was met with a synchronized response.

  The companions unleashed all-out fusillade, firing point blank through the bars, into the gaping mouths, into the exposed bellies. As a demon lunged, trying to plant its stinger in Doc’s forehead, he shot straight into its face. Before it could pull back, lead balls had shattered its skull into confetti, blasting white gunk all over the floor.

  It was a slaughter, pure and simple. Joyous slaughter. They blew the demons apart and filled the lab with clouds of blaster smoke.

  When their ears stopped ringing, the companions could hear loud banging from behind them. Turning, they saw the escape passage door jumping in its frame as trannies battered it from the other side.

  “That door isn’t going to hold!” Ryan said.

  J.B. opened the gate and they all rushed through it, leaping over the shattered corpses, to the second line of floor-to-ceiling bars. Ryan was the last one through the gate in front of the elevator. He pulled it closed, but again, there was no way to turn the lock. The key was gone.

  “Get the elevator open,” Mildred said, taking aim between the bars at the jolting emergency door.

  Doc pressed the lone button beside the elevator doors. With a clunk, they slid open.

  “Our chariot awaits,” he said.

  As he spoke, there was a tremendous thud. The emergency door buckled in the middle and broke free of its hinges, slamming flat to the floor. Demons poured in through the opening, scrambling shoulder to shoulder and over one another’s backs.

  Ryan and Mildred fired their weapons, covering the companions’ rush to the elevator. The hail of bullets did little to slow the oncoming wave. The trannies crashed against the first barrier. One of them hit the gate and it swung open. A second later the rest were streaming in after it.

  As Ryan and Mildred raced into the car, she said, “We can reflood the bottom floor and chill them all. Hit eighteen, J.B.”

  The Armorer pressed the button for floor eighteen.

  “Fry them up, Jak,” Ryan said.

  The albino stepped forward, the flamethrower’s igniter hissing. As the trannies slammed the final barrier, he sent a torrent of liquid fire arching onto them.

  The elevator doors didn’t close.

  “Hit the button, J.B.,” Mildred said.

  “I am hitting it.”

  Jak fired again as fresh demons clambered over their burning kin and the open gate. Flame surged across the gap and through the bars, then the flamethrower sputtered and died. The igniter still burned blue and bright, but the tanks were out of fuel.

  The doors started to close, but in extreme slow motion.

  “Radblast!” J.B. shouted as three demons cleared the gate and launched themselves at the open car.

  The combined impact of their bodies buckled in the sheet steel. The trannie in the middle managed to get a forearm between the doors just as they slid shut.

  In front of the companions’ faces, the claw hand flexed, the long stinger uncoiled.

  “It’s going to make the doors open!” Mildred cried.

  Ryan already had his panga out and was swinging it down in a tight arc. The lopping slice cut the arm off flush with the doors, which clanked shut, and then the car started to creep upward. The severed claw lay still at their feet but the stinger squirted drops of poison.

  The car rocked as the demons threw themselves, full force, at the doors and wall.

  Jak ditched the empty set of tanks and drew his .357 Magnum Colt Python. The others checked their weapons’ ammo, and quickly reloaded.

  When they reached floor eighteen, an electronic bell dinged. The doors clunked and again slid apart in slow motion. Through the widening split they saw the hallway lights were on. And they saw the demon crouched in the corridor, preparing to jump into the elevator with them.

  The companions flattened against the car’s back wall and opened fire through the gap and into the edges of the doors, hitting the creature dozens of times as it leaped.

  Knocked sideways by the multiple impacts, the demon crashed into the wall and bounced onto its back.

  The doors opened all the way.

  The electronic bell chimed.

  Nobody got out of the car.

  “If they’ve already escaped the lab floor, they could be anywhere in the redoubt,” J.B. said. “We can’t stop them by flooding nineteen.”

  “Time to jump, while we still can,” Ryan said.

  “Punch ten,” Krysty told J.B.

  The doors closed on the demon corpse and littered hallway. The elevator moved upward. When the doors opened again, the companions were braced and ready for anything. But there was no welcoming committee waiting for them this time.

  Krysty and Jak led them on a dead run through the security gates and the heavy double doors to the redoubt’s mat-trans section. As they entered, they could feel the idling unit’s steady vibration through the floor. The banks of chattering computers indicated that the system was online and ready to process. They headed for the two portholed steel doors on the far wall.

  Ryan smiled broadly when he saw the scoped Steyr waiting for him atop the steel cart in front of the doors. As he picked it up he said, “Glad I didn’t lose this.” After shouldering its sling, he passed J.B. his Smith & Wesson scattergun.

  Then he peered into the half-open door of the nearest mat-trans unit. Surprisingly, it was furnished in steel spikes. “Doesn’t look too comfortable,” he said.

  “That’s for the trannies,” Krysty told him.

  “Advanced bioweapon deployment technology,” Mildred said. “To Russia with love, from Bob and Enid.”

  “The other one’s for us,” Krysty said.

  Jak opened the portholed door, and the companions started filing into the little room.

  Jubilee held back, looking very scared.

  “There’s nothing to worry about,” Mildred assured her. “The machinery works just fine.”

  “There’s more to worry about if you stay,” J.B. told the girl.

  The reminder didn’t help matters. Jubilee was petrified. Mildred shot J.B. a why-don’t-you-shut-up-and-let-me-handle-it look.

  “The six of us have jumped dozens of times,” Mildred said, “without any lasting ill effects. Jumping just this once won’t hurt you and it won’t hurt your baby. You’ll just fall asleep and wake up someplace else. Someplace safe.”

  At Ryan’s urging, and with a firm push from behind, Jubilee got into the chamber with the others. Ryan stepped in last. All around them, the armaglass was midnight black shot through with crims
on.

  Like sprays of blood.

  As he closed and secured the chamber door, through the porthole window, he saw demons. They burst through the swing doors, fighting one another to be first into the room, hot on the scent trail of their intended victims.

  One of them looked at the mat-trans door and saw Ryan’s face framed in the glass. From the far side of the room, it launched itself and crashed headfirst into the door.

  But it was too late. The mat-trans cycle had began and the room was starting to fill with mist. As the mist grew thicker, its tendrils lengthened, stretching down to curl around the heads and shoulders of the travelers.

  “It’s going to be all right,” Ryan told the trembling girl. “Just sit down, close your eyes and it’ll be over before you know it.”

  As they took their places on the floor, he reached out a battle-scarred fist and took hold of Jubilee’s small hand. Krysty smiled at him, her emerald eyes flashing pure love, and took hold of the girl’s other hand.

  Blackness felled them.

  RYAN AWOKE on the floor of the chamber, his head spinning. For a second, as he struggled to regain his senses, and to control the dry heaves that racked his throat and cramped his belly, he thought it all had been a dream. Little Pueblo. The dam. The pilgrims. The demons. Just another in the long chain of horrible nightmares that chased them every time they mat-transed and rematerialized.

  When he pushed up and saw the Jubilee sprawled across his leg, he knew it hadn’t been a dream.

  Mildred had already recovered and was taking Jubilee’s pulse.

  The woman noted the concern on his face and said, “She’s going to be okay, Ryan.”

  Even as she spoke, the girl began to moan and stir.

  When the effects of the jump had passed and they had all regained their strength, they exited the chamber and found their way out of the new redoubt.

  The complex’s hidden entrance opened onto a much different landscape than the one they had left. It was lush and it was high. Surrounding them were steep, densely forested slopes of evergreens. And above them, blue skies.

  “Could be Canada,” J.B. suggested.