Scarlet Dream (4 page)

Certain that no one was hiding in the straight corridor or the storerooms that branched from it, Kane stopped in front of the elevator doors and eyed the call button thoughtfully. The silver button glowed invitingly with a circle of faint orange around its rim. Kane knew that if anyone was in the redoubt—something that was by no means certain—using the elevator was a sure way to alert them to his team's presence.

Brigid and Grant caught up to Kane as he waited, and Grant voiced what his ex-Mag partner was thinking. “Stairs?”

Kane nodded. “I think so,” he said, leading the team toward a recess at the side of the corridor wall that ended with a heavy fire door.

“Looked like we were the first to use the mat-trans in a long time,” Brigid said quietly, “but Brewster said they couldn't be sure where the intrusion had come from.”

“Could be topside, then,” Grant muttered.

Sin Eater ready, Kane pushed his free hand against the fire door, hoping he wasn't about to trip some unseen alarm.

With Brigid right behind him, Kane pushed open the door and waited for a moment until he was reasonably certain no one was standing in the stairwell in front of him. Dim lights placed at every third popped on. It was enough to make them clear, but hardly dazzling. In the day-to-day running of this redoubt, the staircase would
have been for emergency use only, so there had been no need to keep it permanently or brightly lit. The moving of the door must have tripped the switch for the floor lights, but no noise accompanied this. Could be a silent alarm, of course, Kane realized distrustfully before tamping down the paranoia he felt.

At the rear of the group, Grant had adopted a ready crouch, scanning the corridor they had just traipsed down, just in case any sudden surprises materialized. Grant had never been comfortable leaving an operational mat-trans at his back; it meant that potentially anyone could sneak right up behind you, even from a previously empty room.

“Stairs are clear,” Kane stated shortly before he stepped through the doorway and disappeared into the empty stairwell. They appeared to be at the bottom level of the redoubt, the hard concrete steps echoing Kane's every movement. Swiftly, Kane climbed the stairs, taking them two at a time, his Sin Eater pistol nosing ahead of him.

Brigid followed, entering the stairwell immediately in Kane's wake, but holding back at the lowest step so as to keep Kane covered while he hurried up to the first landing, the midpoint between floors where the staircase abruptly turned on itself. Brigid watched as Kane whipped the Sin Eater around and surveyed the next set of stairs before making his way up to the next floor. After three seconds Brigid followed Kane up the stairs, the hollow heels of her cowboy boots clip-clopping loudly in the stillness of the vertical shaft.

Grant waited patiently at the bottom of the stairs, standing so that his back wedged the door open and he could peer out to the corridor that led to the mat-trans. The echoes of his companions' footsteps came back to him, and once he judged that they had both reached the
next floor he slipped back from the door, letting it slowly close before he hurried up the stairs.

One flight above, Kane stood in front of another fire door, peering through a vertical rectangle of reinforced glass, approximately twelve inches by two. There was nothing but darkness beyond, and he realized with irritation that, without something out there, the motion-sensitive lights of the ancient redoubt would remain off. He held his empty hand up in a halting gesture so that Brigid could see. “Stay here, keep me covered,” he said in a low voice.

Then Kane pulled the heavy door toward him and dashed out into the corridor beyond, the solid black muzzle of his Sin Eater poised and leading the way. Brigid stepped forward, wedging the door open with her foot as she watched Kane jog down the corridor, the overhead lights sparking into life. Like the one below, this corridor was painted a dull off-white. A horizontal bar of green ran in a continuous line along the bottom third of each wall.

With the overhead lights sputtering to life ahead of him, Kane swiftly and meticulously checked each door leading off from the gray-green corridor, trying the handles, peering inside those that were unlocked, and then moving on. Brigid held her TP-9 semiautomatic out and ready, tracking Kane's movements, her steadying left hand gripped just beneath the wrist of her outstretched right.

Kane felt instinctively that this whole level was empty, and he made short work of checking as much of the area as he could. It appeared to be primarily a storage level, with several offices and a quartet of bunk rooms at the far end close to the restrooms. Other than dust and a half-full box of now-perished canned food, the level was inoffensive in its emptiness. Had anyone been here, Kane concluded, the lights would have been on already—the only
real risk was when he came to the bunk rooms, whose lights worked on a manual switch. As such, they may just contain someone lurking in the darkness.

Warily, Kane entered the first of the bunk rooms, ducking low as he stepped inside, conscious of the lit doorway at his back that would illuminate him as an ideal target for anyone hiding in the shadows. Crouching in the darkness, Kane stilled his breathing, listening for any sounds of movement, any indication of another presence within the room. There was nothing, he felt sure, and he edged his left hand along the wall behind him until he found the light switch, flicking it on.

Illuminated, the room was empty. It contained three Army cots, one each to his left and right and a third over against the wall farthest from the door. There was a footlocker at the end of each bed; two of them were closed, their lids scarred and chipped. The third lay open, and Kane peered briefly at its contents—several garishly colored comic books, a dark pair of socks with a toe missing and a well-thumbed paperback with a man's booted feet on its bright red cover. The open lid to the footlocker had attracted a layer of dust, through which a two-inch yellow circle peeked like the sun. Kane leaned down, wiping his finger through the dust until he could see the circle in full; it was a sticker bearing the legend “I heart Atlanta”. Kane wondered idly if the owner would still “heart” Atlanta half as much if they saw what the nuclear devastation had wrought there shortly after this redoubt had been sealed.

Kane turned, leaving the room as he had found it and made his way farther along the corridor to check the other rooms. There were three other bunk rooms, and each contained two or three Army cots along with occasional belongings that had been left behind when the redoubt had been closed, nothing but forgotten antiques now.

Head down, Kane took long, swift strides back to the stairwell where Brigid and Grant waited. Brigid had her gun trained on the corridor as Kane approached. Behind her, Grant appeared tense as he surveyed the stairwell, up and down.

“Level's clear,” Kane explained, keeping his voice low. “Guessing no one's interfered with this junk in two centuries. Whatever Cerberus was reading, it may just be a wild mutie chase.”

“Might be,” Grant agreed, sounding less than convinced. “Want me to take the next one?”

“I've got it,” Kane assured him, taking the lead once more as he trotted up the concrete stairs.

As he turned the right-angle in the stairwell heading up, Kane saw a sliver of light eking through the rectangular glass of the fire door that faced him. Kane slowed as he climbed the stairs, checking the higher levels with a swift glance before focusing on the illuminated rectangle of light. “Could be company,” he stated, his voice little more than a whisper.

At the tail of the group, Grant peered back over his shoulder, making sure no one was following them from below, while Brigid pushed herself close to the outside wall as she slowly followed Kane.

At the penultimate stair, Kane ducked, keeping his head lower than the bottom of the glass panel, pressing his knee against the step in front of him. Kane stared, trying to make out what was going on on the other side of the tiny window as its light played against the wall. He could see the familiar off-white paint of another corridor and the edge of one of the overhead strip lights showed, glowing firmly in its ceiling mounting. Kane waited, doing a slow count to ten in his head—now was not the time to rush in where angels feared to tread. As he waited, a shadow
crossed the rectangle of glass, and Kane instinctively crouched lower, the barrel of the Sin Eater held at eye level, pointing upward to where the door would open. Nothing happened.

Warily, his breathing coming slow and steady despite the tension he felt, Kane inched forward, his eyes still on the clear glass panel. Behind him, Brigid hugged the wall, the TP-9 semiautomatic poised on the closed door.

Still in a crouch, Kane sidled up to the door until his head was just below the edge of its small windowpane. For a moment he watched the square of light that was projected on the wall to his side, waiting to see if anything else crossed the gap, all the while listening intently for the sounds of movement. There was nothing; it was quiet as the grave.

Almost a minute passed with Kane just waiting there, searching for any further indications of movement. Then he peered back, his eyes glancing past Brigid and fixing on Grant's. Grant recognized the question in the ex-Mag's face, and he nodded, indicating he was ready.

Kane turned back to the fire door, standing to his full height and reaching for its cool metal handle. As he did so, the face of a man appeared at the window. Or, at least, the remains of a face—for the man appeared to be decomposing even as the empty sockets of his eyes fixed on Kane.

With a sudden crash, the reinforced glass pane shattered inward as the eyeless thing's decomposing hand smashed through it, reaching for Kane through the window in the fire door. Kane leaped backward, staggering down two steps in his haste and yet still just barely avoiding the lancelike fingertips as they clawed the air, grasping for his face.

“The hell is that?” Grant swore from his position on the lower level.

Kane raised his Sin Eater, targeting the door. “Whatever it is, it's about to be a whole lot of dead,” he snarled.

The heavy fire door swung open as far as the safety hinge would let it, and the creature staggered into the stairwell. His tread was unsteady, more a series of lurches than a regular stride. As he approached, Kane barked an order at it, employing the authoritative voice he had used back in his Magistrate days.

“Restricted area, perpetrator—down on your knees.”

The eyeless corpse gave no indication of adhering to Kane's instruction but merely took another shaky step forward, negotiating the first stair with a rumbling groan from deep in his throat.

It was clearly a man—tall, thin and wearing a dark suit of some sort. It was hard to tell more than that, however. The suit was moth-eaten and parts of it looked burned. As for the man's flesh, that also looked moth-eaten, rotted
meat clinging to jagged bones in some perverse mockery of life.

The walking corpse took a step closer to the Cerberus team. Smelling him for the first time, Brigid Baptiste began to gag. He stank of rotting, infected meat, and as she watched she saw something dark appear between the wasting muscles of his neck; a hairy caterpillar, its black body thick as a man's thumb and longer than Brigid's hand. Poised against the wall, the former archivist reared away, watching as the ghastly thing took another staggering step past her, reaching out toward Kane.

“On your knees,” Kane repeated, gesturing with the muzzle of the Sin Eater pistol in his hand. “You take one more step and I will shoot.” He didn't have any authority here, that was true, but Kane was pretty damn sure that the dead thing that stumbled in front of him didn't, either.

Behind the creature, the fire door had eased itself closed on its slow hinges, effectively shutting off the noise of movement here from the rest of the redoubt. The rotting thing took another lurching step toward the ex-Mag.

Kane gritted his teeth. “You're about to end up a whole lot deader if you don't back off,” he snarled.

Then, with a surge of incredible speed in the dim lighting of the tight stairwell, the corpse-thing lunged for Kane. More literally he fell at Kane, arms outstretched, using weight and gravity to propel himself at the ex-Mag.

Kane depressed the trigger stud of his Sin Eater and a stream of 9 mm slugs rammed into that cadaverous body even as he fell forward. The sounds of gunfire echoed throughout the stairwell as Kane was slammed backward by the falling corpse, and he felt his feet slip off the step, throwing his balance. Then Kane found himself crashing against the metal-barlike banister that ran around the
inside turn of the stairwell, striking it with his lower back in a spasm of sharp pain.

Kane's feet kicked out as he finally lost his balance, and suddenly he was toppling backward, the corpse still flailing at him as they both began to drop over the side of the stairs.

Moving on instinct alone, Brigid reached out and grabbed for the undead thing that was pushing Kane, seizing the creature's legs as she watched Kane descend over the banister. Held in Brigid's grip, the corpse-thing found himself dragged off his victim, and he turned to face her even as his head slammed into the metal banister with a resounding clang. In that instant, Brigid produced her TP-9 and drilled a cacophony of bullets into the thing's decomposing face, reducing it to pulp. Chunks of rotted flesh sprayed the walls around her as bullets mashed into the remains of the thing's hideous features.

At the same time, one floor below, Kane dropped head-first toward the next flight of stairs. Twisting frantically in midair, he stretched his arms out in front of him in an effort to break his fall. He landed badly—it was hard to do otherwise, landing as he did on the uneven incline of the stairs—taking the impact in his strong arms and rolling over onto his back with a grunt of pain.

“You okay?” Grant asked, peeking down the stairwell at his partner as Brigid continued struggling with the corpse on the floor above.

“Help Brigid,” Kane replied without hesitation.

Grant didn't question the order—he knew that Kane only used Brigid Baptiste's first name when he was really concerned for her. He figured that being knocked over a balcony by an animated corpse will do that to you.

Brigid, however, had matters well in hand. The corpselike figure staggered in place as she peppered his decom
posing body with bullets, until he finally slouched against the banister and sunk to the floor in a heap, emaciated limbs flailing in all directions.

“I think it's dead,” Grant said as he hurried up the stairs to join Brigid.

Brigid looked at him, one ginger eyebrow cocked in amusement. “I think it was dead before it met me,” she said.

Grant leaned down, getting a closer look at the messy, foul-smelling remains of the creature. Clearly human but visibly decomposing, he reeked of death. Using the barrel of his gun, Grant prodded the corpse a few times, but the dead thing didn't react.

As Grant pushed at the unmoving corpse in the dim lighting of the stairwell, Kane trudged back up the stairs, a spatter of blood marring his forehead. “Did we get it?” he asked.

Grant nodded while Brigid checked Kane's wound. It was just a graze; the thin line of blood made it look worse than it really was. Once she wiped that away, Brigid could see the scratch, and it had already dried.

“If Stinky here has buddies,” Kane noted, “that shattered window is going to draw their attention. But if we move quick, maybe we can get the jump on them.”

With that, the Cerberus trio headed for the fire door, leaving the remains of the dead man sprawled across the stairs. They didn't notice him flinch, struggling to pull himself up from the floor after the heavy fire door had inched closed, his ruined face dripping away in gobs of muscle and dried-up skin.

 

A
N ALIEN RACE
called the Annunaki had first visited the Earth aeons ago and had been surreptitiously involved in human affairs ever since the emergence of humankind.
To man, these beings from the stars, wielding technology far in advance of anything he could comprehend, had seemed divine, and so man had served and worshipped them without question.

But the Annunaki, alarmed at the proliferation of humans, initiated a wave of destruction to purge the Earth of humankind and start afresh. Recorded by various historical documents, that purging is perhaps best known as the Great Flood of Judeo-Christian tradition, and although it decimated the local population it failed to totally destroy it.

The Annunaki had spent the subsequent millennia observing from the shadows as man had grown bold, had proliferated at an alarming rate and learned how to tame his environment for his own ends. While the Annunaki had weaponry that had seemed magical in its capability, they had been fascinated to see how man developed his own terrible weaponry, things that could hurt and maim and kill.

Ultimately, the Annunaki had played their hand once more to begin the second great purging, utilizing fire this time where water had failed before. The brief nuclear war of 2001 had utterly changed the landscape of the planet Earth, creating vast tracts of irradiated land known as the Deathlands, and all but destroying the population. This was the world's legacy that the Cerberus rebels inhabited.

But while the nuclear bombs had marked the end of civilization, they had not been the only means of destruction developed by man. In fact, in the centuries since the Annunaki had first tried to extinguish him, man had excelled in developing the means with which to kill his fellow man, and many and varied ways had been created that might be used to that terrible end.

Deep in the subterranean complex of Redoubt Mike, Ezili Coeur Noir had just uncovered one such terrible weapon. The queen of all things dead, Ezili Coeur Noir had an inherent ability, something like a homing instinct, that drew her to the things that would destroy life. She had sensed this thing down here, deep beneath the Louisiana bayou, and she found herself drawn to it. In her mind, it was like some almighty magnet drawing her down into the earth, down where the dead men lay.

 

M
OVING STEALTHILY
, Kane led the way into the corridor with Grant and Brigid just behind him. The undead thing that they had encountered had shaken them all up, and Kane felt unsettled as he trekked down the corridor.

The overhead lights flickered here, and though the motion sensors responded to the presence of the Cerberus rebels, several of the fluorescent tubes had blown. In places the lights flickered in staccato bursts, leaving the corridor in a sort of half-light of lightning flashes. Like the ones they had encountered on the lower levels of the redoubt, the corridor itself was painted off-white, with a boldly colored stripe lining the bottom third of the walls. This stripe was finished in a bright sky blue, and with the flickering illumination it gave Kane the eerie illusion of being below water.

There were no other corpse-things, but the corridor was littered with broken crates and boxes, with ancient paperwork strewed across the carpet tiles of the floor.

“Looks like they used this level as a dumping ground,” Grant muttered.

“Guess they wanted to get rid of this stuff,” Brigid pointed out, kicking at one of the stacks of paperwork with her toe. The topmost papers of the stack slid to the floor,
and Brigid saw a bold red stamp marked Top Secret across several fluttering pages. “It's just so much landfill now.”

Kane moved on, passing two open doorways to his left, both of them opening out into storerooms stacked with old furniture, chairs with broken backrests and wheels missing from their runners, computer desks stained with centuries' old coffee.

This corridor proved much shorter than the ones he had explored on the preceding levels, and it ended in a solid wall on which hung a lone fire extinguisher painted a bright bloodred. Beneath the flickering light, the extinguisher seemed to flash like some fleshy cut in the wall, vying for Kane's attention.

Off to the right, Kane saw a wide corridor set at a right angle to the one they were in. The corridor stood in darkness, and Kane peered into it trying to make out details. He could discern faint noises coming from its far end, distant shuffling sounds. With a swift hand gesture, Kane led the way silently down the corridor, his companions following at a wary distance, their guns ready.

The white-blue corridor ended in a sharp turn that opened directly into a large room the size of an aircraft hangar. The exit came so abruptly in the intermittent tube lighting that Kane very nearly stepped straight out into the open before he realized what he was doing. The sole of his boot scraped against the floor as he came up short and pulled back to the edge of the wall. He had managed just the briefest of glances ahead, but in that half second he had seen plenty, his regimented brain automatically taking in details from years of discipline.

It was a vast room, perhaps eighty feet square with scratched metal decking that glinted beneath harsh spotlights hanging on high catwalks. There were figures moving around the vast room—fleshy, shambling figures
like the corpse-thing that his team had tangled with in the stairwell.

Grant and Brigid caught up with Kane and he gave them a look, indicating that someone was on the other side of the wall. Brigid lowered herself behind Kane until she knelt in a crouch by the near wall. Grant, meanwhile, silently eased himself across the wide corridor until his back was flush against the far wall, just out of sight of the opening but with the gap firmly in the sights of his poised Sin Eater.

Kane inched forward, bringing himself in low to peer once more around the edge of the whitewashed wall. He saw now that the room beyond was lit in patches, but it was enough that he could make out even the far corners, where stacks of crates towered haphazardly against gray-licked walls. Three aging Army vehicles were parked off to the left of the room. Two were jeeps, their tires long since perished or removed, one with its engine on blocks in front of its open hood, and the third was a heavy artillery truck, its olive paintwork caked with mud that had dried there two centuries ago, its tires flat.

At the rear of the room, Kane spotted the twin metal doors of a goods elevator. They opened like jaws, and the elevator looked wide enough to hold a truck. This was doubtless how the vehicles had been brought here, Kane realized, and presumably they had been left when the redoubt had been closed down.

The central strip of the room was empty. Painted lines marked out a “road” and designated safe walkways. Corpselike figures wandered around this vast arena, some of them carrying bulky crates in what seemed to be an effortless manner despite their wasted musculature. Kane counted more than a dozen zombies, for want of a better term, before his attention was drawn to the far side of the
room. There, off to the right, a large glass-walled area took up almost one-third of the floor space, and Kane could see movement within. A towering figure strode among the other corpses, rotting like them and yet somehow demanding Kane's attention. As he watched, Kane realized it was a woman, her flesh almost entirely rotted away, what remained a dark shade of brown like licorice beneath scraps of clothing.

There was an incessant buzzing coming from the hangar, low but present all the same, from the insects that flew close to the dead things, drawn to their rotting stench. It was incessant, like the sound made by someone running a finger around the rim of a wineglass. But for the woman it was different. Nothing flew around her.

Kane stepped back from the opening, swiftly attracting the attention of his companions. “There's something going on out there,” he told them in a sharp whisper, “but I need to get closer if we're going to find out what it is.”