by James Axler
“In the isolation unit with the others.”
“What others?”
“Other muties from Deathlands.”
“We need to move. You ready, Doc?”
The old man nodded, shifting the weight of the duffel higher on his back.
They took the stairs as fast as they could, but after they had descended five more levels, the ice buildup on the treads forced them to slow or risk taking a hard, face-first fall. The ice on the landing at their destination level was even thicker and more treacherous—covered with dips and humps from being walked on.
When they stepped through the bulkhead door into a gloomy hall, Mildred heard howling and screaming in the distance. The wave of relief swept over her.
“My guess is our friends are that way,” she said.
“Indeed, a sound for sore ears,” Doc said.
As they advanced down the corridor, seemingly out of nowhere, a bell chimed clear and sharp. It was only then that Mildred noticed the elevator doors on the left about thirty-five feet ahead of them. In the second of hesitation after the bell rang and before the doors opened, she shoved their hostage’s face against the wall. When the doors parted, black suits poured out of the car. They had their blasters up, and they were looking down the sights, searching for targets.
The enforcers and Mildred and Doc all started shooting in the same instant. The sudden blaze of rapidfire gunshots in the hallway was earsplitting. Slugs sparked off the walls, ceiling and floor. The opposition made no attempt to conserve their ammo; Mildred and Doc followed suit. It was go-for-broke-time, everyone firing wildly, hoping to hit fish in a concrete barrel.
In the middle of the clatter came an even louder noise, a terrible grinding roar that muffled even the gunshots. And an instant later the corridor began to shake. Muzzle-blasts flashed at Mildred through the downpour of concrete dust, but it was impossible to keep one’s feet, let alone aim a weapon.
Equilibrium lost, Mildred dropped to her knees, both hands pressed to the quaking floor. It felt as if her brain was bashing back and forth against the inside of her skull. She couldn’t move, she felt like she was going to vomit, but her mind was racing ahead, to what had to happen next. When the shaking stopped, she knew she had to strike first, and strike hard.
This temblor was much more violent than its predecessors—the movement not just side to side, but up and down. The floor buckled and cracked as if it were made of eggshell. Sections of the ceiling and walls tumbled down. The clouds of dust made it impossible to breathe without choking.
From down the hallway, on the other side of the elevator, came a tremendous crash that sounded like vast sheets of glass shattering.
The shaking has to stop, Mildred told herself.
But it didn’t. It went on and on, and on.
When the quake finally ended, she had no idea how much time had passed. Five minutes? Ten minutes? The dust was so thick she couldn’t see ten feet in front of her. She couldn’t even see the muzzle-flashes as the black suits resumed firing and bullets whined overhead. There was nothing to aim at, but she and Doc fired back anyway. Mildred carefully bracketed her side of the hallway downrange with 9 mm slugs, starting low along the join of wall and floor, and walking the bullets up. Doc was doing the same thing, working methodically to cover every square foot of space with hot lead. The noise was so loud she couldn’t tell if she’d hit anything or not. She kept firing until the Beretta’s slide locked back, then drew the second pistol she’d confiscated.
She thought about calling for a retreat under fire, back to the protection of the bulkhead, but then Doc stopped shooting as well and she realized there was no more incoming. In the swirling gloom ahead, a light on the left blinked bright, then soft. Bright, then soft.
Mildred reached over to grab the hostage by the arm and felt wet, sticky cloth under her fingers. When she let go, the woman slid limply onto her side. A quick hands-on examination told Mildred the scientist had been hit multiple times in the head and torso.
“Doc, are you okay?” she asked, wiping her fingers on her pants leg and rising to a crouch.
“Frazzled, deafened, but otherwise unharmed.”
The ringing in her ears was so loud it sounded like he was fifty feet away; she could hardly hear him. “We’ve got to move forward,” she said.
They advanced another twenty feet before Mildred could see that the strange, pulsing light was coming from the elevator doors: they were opening and closing repeatedly because a facedown body was blocking the track. In the light of the slow-throbbing strobe, she could just make out black forms sprawled all along the floor, half buried under concrete dust and rubble.
Checking for live ones playing possum was impossible. There wasn’t enough light to do a good job of it, and bending over the bodies would have put her and Doc in a vulnerable position. If there were any possums, Mildred guessed they would think twice before opening fire on people wearing black for fear of hitting their own.
“Let’s move quick. When this dust clears we’ve got no cover,” she told Doc. Then she pointed with her blaster and said, “Elevator.”
It was the only hard cover in the corridor that threatened them—although it seemed likely they would have already taken fire if someone was hiding there.
As they darted past the cycling elevator doors, they swept the sights of their blasters across the interior. The car was empty except for a broad puddle of blood on the floor. When they got beyond the corridor’s heaped bodies, they broke into a sprint, cutting around or jumping over the chunks of fallen ceiling.
Almost at once, blasterfire barked from the rear and slugs streaked past, sparking off the walls.
There had been at least one possum.
After four strides, under a wild barrage of bullets, Mildred knew they had to stop. There was no cover ahead, nothing but a long straight corridor. Before they reached the end of it, one or both of them were bound to get hit in the back. To have any chance, they had to return fire and stage a careful leapfrog retreat. Doc hit the floor at the same instant she did.
Mildred twisted into a prone position, right shoulder against the foot of the wall, and looked for targets over the sights of the Beretta. “Move, Doc! Move! I got it!” she said.
When the next gunshots barked, she squeezed off a round at the muzzle-flashes. The shooters had taken cover inside the elevator and were firing from around the open doors. Her 9 mm slug made them think twice about sticking their heads out again.
“Mildred! Your turn!” Doc shouted.
As she rose, whirled and ran past Doc, blasterfire clattered and bullets zinged by her. The old man fired three times and the shooting stopped.
The cycle was repeated over and over: retreating under fire, putting up suppressing fire, retreating. It was a nerve-racking process, but as the minutes dragged on the black suits lost their initial advantage. The shooters were stuck in the elevator while Mildred and Doc moved progressively farther away, becoming more difficult targets.
Finally the corridor made a turn to the right, giving them some hard cover. Over the ringing in her ears, Mildred strained to hear pursuit coming down the hallway, ready to pop around the corner and resume fire.
The shooting stopped. There was no sound of footfalls.
The gunmen had either run out of bullets, succumbed to their wounds or were waiting for reinforcements.
Mildred realized with a start there was no sound of anything, except the rasp of her own breathing. “Can you still hear the muties?” she asked Doc.
“Mildred, I can hardly hear you for the tinnitus in my ears. Perhaps they have been frightened into silence.”
She looked down the corridor and saw the bright glow of light on the left. “This way,” she said. “It’s got to be down this way.”
They took off running again. The light got brighter. As
they raced by rows of benches, an aftershock hit, sending them skidding sideways across a floor covered with glittering pieces of glass. Incredibly cold air howled through the long, emptied window frame. Floodlit, surrounded by scaffolding, the immense gray disk hung suspended from a sheer wall of blue ice.
Mildred only got the briefest look at it as she caught her balance and ran on, but it stuck in her mind. What the hell was that? There was no time to stop and find out.
On the right, just ahead, a corridor intersected the main hallway. They skidded to a halt before they reached it.
“The noise from the muties has not resumed,” Doc said. “You would think they would have resumed screaming by now.” He paused, then added, “Unless something truly catastrophic has happened...”
“Don’t go there, Doc,” Mildred said. “The others have got to be close, and we’re going to find them.”
When she looked down the main hallway, at the very limit of her vision given the dim light, she could see what looked like big chunks of dropped ceiling on the floor.
They moved cautiously into the intersection. Before them was a short hallway that ended in double doors.
“That looks promising,” Doc commented.
“Let’s hit it,” Mildred said.
Kicking open the pair of doors, they stepped through shoulder to shoulder with blasters at the ready.
“By the Three Kennedys, what a stench!” Doc said.
His voice echoed in the long, concrete room. When the echoes faded, there was dead silence.
Under flickering overhead lights, they faced two rows of tall steel cages. Dozens and dozens of cages, and the ones closest to them were empty. They hurried down the rubble-littered, central aisle looking for signs of life. Cage doors on either side stood ajar. There were yawning splits in the concrete floor beneath some of the cells, knee-deep gullys that transected the room from wall-to-wall.
The wretched place was deserted.
If their companions had been there, they were gone.
Chapter Thirteen
Dr. Lima scanned the wall-mounted, remote monitor screens from a chair behind a desk in the sound-and germ-proofed autopsy suite. The pint-size, mutie hairballs jumped up and down and jabbered unintelligibly. The huge, quasi-reptilians beat on the bars and wailed to be fed. In contrast, the clutch of tainted Deathlands’ humans stood sullen and silent, staring at each other across the zoo’s aisle.
It was like watching ice melt.
Occasionally Lima tapped the keyboard of the computer in front of him to shift the monitor views or call up fresh sets of vital sign readings. Baseline normal temperatures of the individual Deathlands’ species had already been logged. The cameras’ infrared sensors showed slight fevers among the humans, but there was no measureable increase among the other captives.
Lima and the two enforcers had stripped out of their hot and cumbersome biohazard gear. For the time being, there was no need for it.
Nothing of note had happened, yet.
The black suits didn’t bother to hide their boredom. They both were napping, or pretending to, laid out on autopsy tables—two of the eight spaced around the room, each with its own floor drain. Their heads rested in V-shaped, foam corpse pillows, their arms folded over their chests. The surrounding trolleys and counters were covered with trays of surgical instruments, scales, microscopes, centrifuges and racks of test tubes. One wall was made up of stainless-steel morgue drawers, floor to ceiling; the contents were preserved by the glacier’s natural refrigeration.
The enforcers had every reason to be relaxed. If the viral experiment failed, they would just move on to the next assignment—in South America. Lima was anything but relaxed. Every second that passed without a positive result increased the discomfort building in his bowels.
He zoomed in one of the cameras on the one-eyed Deathlander. Although his head hadn’t moved from the red-haired female’s lap, Lima could see he was still breathing, and his recorded heart signs were disappointingly strong. The female seemed to be speaking to him, but the directional microphone wasn’t sensitive enough to pick up what she was saying over the ambient noise in the room. It was impossible to filter out the howling of their neighbors and the banging of food buckets on the bars.
The first signs of fever had been expected to appear in the other captives within ten minutes of injection. Fifteen had already passed. That brought into question the basic procedure he had employed. Perhaps the measurements of viral concentration in the one-eyed man’s blood were incorrect and they had actually needed a much higher volume dose. A treble-or quadruple-sized injection?
It was too late to fix that.
Then he had an even more depressing thought: that during the process of replicating inside the one-eyed man’s body the viral tool might have been somehow altered, disabled or functionally weakened—something that normally only happened after many hundreds of thousands of sequential infections. Perhaps he had inherited or acquired a deactivation mechanism that caused the virus to lose its virulence. It was the kind of information that might be uncovered in an autopsy. However, if none of the other muties showed evidence of infection after direct blood to blood transmission, there was no point in performing autopsies on any of them. By order of General India the experiment would go no further.
Nor would he.
That didn’t mean he could just throw up his hands and walk away from it all. Though it was like rubbing salt in an open wound, he was responsible for cleaning up his own career dead end.
It was standard scientific protocol.
“How much ammunition do you have?” he asked the men in black. “Do you have enough to terminate all the test subjects if need be?”
The enforcers sat up on the steel tables, obviously intrigued by the possibilities. They didn’t have to check their ammo supply; they knew what it was down to the last bullet. “We are carrying forty-five rounds apiece,” one of them replied. “A full mag in the gun, two on the belt.”
“Then you may have to strangle some of the smaller ones.”
“Not a problem. We’ll shoot the armor-plated muties first. They might be harder to kill.”
Under other circumstances, Lima would have been eager to explore the innards of those massive, scythe-jawed worms, to yard them out, measure, dissect and frappé them for chemical analysis. Now that exercise seemed pointless.
Save one bullet for me, he thought dismally.
Staccato blasterfire clattered down the hallway, from the direction of the elevators. For a split second he thought he’d conjured it up. But the men in black heard it, too. Their eyes widened. In the next instant the room rocked as if hit by a powerful bomb. The shock wave was like a spear passing through Lima’s head, temple to temple. It gave him an instant, blinding headache. The accompanying roar drowned out the sounds of shooting. Everything was in motion, and seemingly in all directions at once—he couldn’t focus his eyes. The monitors began falling off their wall mounts and crashing to the floor.
Big hunks of rubble dropped from the ceiling, slamming onto the autopsy tables and the desktop in front of him. The overhead lights flickered behind a veil of dust. As the wheels on his chair rolled away from the desk, seemingly of their own accord, he let himself slide from the seat, then crawled headfirst into the knee well. He shut his eyes and covered the back of his head with his hands.
Was this the big one?
Even as his stomach turned inside out and he struggled to breathe, he thought how ironic it would be if Polestar Omega collapsed and crushed the mall before any of their grand plans could be set in motion.
Over the steady roar he heard the sound of glass cracking and shattering. He knew immediately what had broken—the big window overlooking the Ark. The panes were two inches thick and had survived any number of previous temblors. Clearly, if this was not the big quake, it
was the biggest so far.
In the middle of it all he thought he heard gunshots, but he couldn’t be sure. The popping sounds could have been from the structure shaking apart.
After what seemed like an eternity the quake just stopped. The lights flickered again and then went out, plunging him in darkness. Lima fumbled in his lab coat pocket for a small flashlight, backed out of the well and from a sitting position swept the beam around the room. It was difficult to see anything. The light from the flash was reflected back by all the dust in the air and the bright edges of the autopsy tables. Major crevasses had opened up in the floor, and some of the trolleys had tipped over into them.
“Are you men okay?” he asked.
“Yeah, we’re fine. We hid under a table.”
He shone his light on the enforcers as they stepped forward. Their black coveralls, hair and faces were coated with gray. They looked like ghosts.
The popping sounds came again, louder. This time there were tightly clustered, with irregular silences between the short bursts. Steel girders failing in the distance, toppling down like dominoes? Ceilings caving in? Because of the intervening, thick concrete walls, Lima still couldn’t be sure what the noises signified or determine their exact direction.
Then the room rocked again, dropping the black suits to floor. The strong aftershock made Lima’s flashlight beam dance wildly through the dust. The enforcers stayed down on their hands and knees until long after the shaking had completely stopped.
As they rose groggily to their feet, Lima heard a flurry of racing footsteps from the hall just outside the autopsy room door. It sounded like a stampede, like a small army charging past. His heart began to pound again.
He spotlighted the door with his flash. “Quick, find out what’s happening,” he told the enforcers.
“Sure thing, but you better stay back,” one of them said, “and shut off that light and keep it off.”
Lima had no intention of following them until he knew the situation was safe.
