Scarlet Dream (5 page)

Grant nodded sternly once and, after a moment's hesitation, Brigid did the same. Briefly, Kane outlined the layout of the room and explained where everyone was to go before he led the way on swift, silent tread, into the vast, hangarlike chamber.

All the while, Kane couldn't shake the feeling that there was something very familiar about the corpselike woman he had spied in the glass-walled office. Emaciated and almost fleshless, she had a certain presence he recognized, a certain bearing he felt that he somehow knew.

Quickly, his head ducked low between his shoulders, Kane sprinted to the nearest wall of the glass-lined area, crouching where a bank of filing cabinets had been placed against the wall on the far side.

Across the hangar, Brigid and Grant made their way through the shadows at the edge of the room, posting
themselves among a pile a dismantled crates atop which a crowbar had been discarded. From here, they could see the doorway to the glass-walled area, as well as most of the vast, hangarlike room without exposing themselves.

Now poised beside the glass wall, Kane edged himself up from his crouch and peeked through the glass. This close up he could see that it was smeared with dust and grime, but he could still see through it clearly enough to observe what was going on within. The room itself seemed to be some kind of office with a laboratory attached, and files of paper had been left haphazardly over several surfaces while the lab was now in an obvious state of disrepair. The spindly corpse woman who had drawn Kane's attention continued flicking through the pages of the file she held in her clawlike hands as other undead figures wandered throughout the room.

Kane watched incredulously as a fly, its bloated black body like a blob of ink, left the gaping eye socket of its host, a dead child no taller than Kane's navel. It flew around in that strange, hard-angled-turn manner that flies will until they find somewhere to go. Then, the inkblot fly seemed to spot the woman, darting in the air to buzz toward her. But as it neared her, attracted by her reeking decrepitude, the fly's wings ceased moving and it simply dropped, plummeting to the ground where it landed with a sharp whisper, now just a dried-up husk. Kane saw another fly do the same thing a moment later, this one a fat bluebottle with body like shimmering glass. This, too, dropped in the presence of the corpse woman, falling to the floor as though in supplication.

Machinery whirred behind her within the glass-walled room, ancient lab technology that was being operated—perversely, it seemed to Kane—by another of the shambling undead figures, this one a short, stocky woman
whose skin had wrinkled into a black smear that clung like tar to her dead flesh. She was operating some kind of mixing device, Kane realized, and he moved a little to his right so that he could see what the device was doing. He watched as test tubes spun, their luminous contents bubbling and frothing with each rotation of a spinner arm. There were four test tubes at each end of the arm, eight in total, each clamped there by holding pincers, a stopper cap preventing their contents from spilling free as the arm rotated.

“What the hell are they mixing up in there?” Kane mouthed, his voice something less than a whisper.

Kane watched as the eight glass tubes were whirled around once again within the centrifuge unit, like a tiny funfair ride. The spinner arm itself was located behind reinforced armaglass, like a little glass display cabinet at the side of the room. Presumably, the cabinet was designed to both dampen the noise of the machinery and to protect the user from dangerous chemicals, for the door could be sealed to prevent any leakage. However, Kane spotted a crack in the glass and the lock appeared to have been wrenched off, a brown smear across the front panel—the woman's flesh, he acknowledged with a growing sense of nausea.

A digital timer at the top of the mixing unit glowed, proudly counting down from a little over twelve hours, its green numbers marching slowly toward an inevitable zero. Whatever it was that was being mixed there, it would be ready at sundown, Kane calculated.

His interest piqued, Kane shifted his position, turning his attention back to the taller, corpselike figure who seemed to dominate the room. The corpse woman was working through a file of papers, and Kane swallowed hard as he saw the pages begin to crumble in her hands,
tiny flecks of paper sailing away on the air, now nothing more than dust. Wrapped in its brown cardboard sleeve, the file was marked U.S. Army and several notations appeared on its foremost page.

Kane edged closer to the glass, trying to make out the designation on the front cover where the corpse woman held it with vomit-yellow talons.
RWI077-093-d.

Kane committed the number to memory as he watched the woman flick through the file, a rictus grin fixed on her hideous features. With each turn of the page, flakes of paper drifted from the file like ashes from a fire; it was literally rotting at her touch.

Kane turned at a nearby noise, ducking out of sight. Across the hangar, the animated corpse of a male was pacing toward the glass-walled room, rolling gait uncomfortable as he balanced a heavy metal cylinder in his outstretched arms. The man was wide-shouldered and must have been over six feet tall when he was alive. He still seemed formidable even with so much of his body rotted away beneath the ragged remains of his dark clothes. Despite himself, Kane smiled when he noticed that the corpse wore a leather patch over his left eye, even though the evidence of the right eye was just an empty socket now. Whatever it had worn in life, the man now wore in death, Kane realized.

Eye Patch stomped through the open doorway and into the glass-walled area, and he stopped in front of the woman, showing the cylinder for her approval like some mockery of an old-fashioned door-to-door salesman.

Kane hunkered down, watching the transaction from behind the concealing cabinets. The woman leader stared at the cylinder for a long moment, reading the coded markings there with lizardlike eyes yellow as egg yolks. There were several brightly colored haz-chem labels on
its side, Kane saw, including one showing a cross through the black silhouette of a slope-sided beaker on a burned orange background—poison.

The woman ran her hand along the metal canister, her ragged nails playing across its surface like nails on a chalkboard. Kane gasped as he saw the paint begin to peel and flake away as if it had been prematurely aged by the elements.

Then the ex-Mag heard the corpse woman speak for the first time, in a voice like dried leaves. “Yes,” she told the figure with the eye patch. “Find more. Do this for your mistress. Do this for Ezili Coeur Noir.”

The partially decomposed male figure placed the canister on the floor, leaving it at Ezili Coeur Noir's feet. Then he turned and made his way from the glass room before halting in the doorway. Kane got the impression that the broad-shouldered corpse was sniffing the air, as if he had sensed something. Kane crouched, pressing his back against the glass as the broad figure stood there, searching the room with his eyeless socket.

From his position, Kane could see only the figure's boots—holed and wasting away. He felt his stomach turn as the dead thing made some hideous sound from the back of his throat, the noise of a man choking on his own blood.

Across the room, crouching among the stacked crates, Grant and Brigid watched furtively as Kane huddled closer to the wall, trying to keep out of the eye line of the dead thing standing in the doorway. They heard him make that terrible sound deep in his throat, and they watched with concern as three figures seemed to answer, moving toward him from their work at a stack of matériel near the glass office. Ungainly but purposeful, the figures made their way over to the area where Kane was crouching, one
of them using an ebony walking cane to help balance the stride of his wasted legs.

Grant tapped on his Commtact. “Kane, you've been spotted,” he whispered. “Abort.”

Even as Kane heard Grant's words amplified through his mastoid bone over the subdermal Commtact, the eye-patched figure at the doorway turned to face him, showing the fearsome remains of its broken teeth as it snarled at him. Kane's eyes widened as three more rotting forms joined Eye Patch, standing in a semicircle at his back. As Kane began to push himself up from the wall, the figure with the eye patch raised his sickening, rotted hand and his bony index finger extended to point at the ex-Mag, like the accusing finger of judgment.

“Guess you've got me dead to rights,” Kane muttered as he stood in front of the four accusing, wasted figures.

Kane took in the figures who faced him in an instant.

The one with the eye patch pointed at Kane with a skeletal index finger as if in accusation of the living.

Behind Eye Patch, three other forms loomed, rocking on their heels as they watched him with dead eyes. The one farthest to the left was tall and scarecrow thin, wearing tattered clothing. He was so unsteady that he used a crooked walking stick.

Beside Walking Stick, Kane saw an emaciated figure with the straggly remains of long dreadlocks. The wide hips of her pelvis confirmed that she had been a woman, and a powerfully built one at that. When the woman bunched her fists, a gob of discolored and rotting flesh hung down between her ragged fingers like a teardrop. Mentally, Kane tagged the woman Dreadlocks before turning his attention to the last of the undead creatures.

This one was shorter than the others, a little over five feet tall, and had adopted a fighting stance, pitching his legs wide to lower his center of gravity. He had wispy hair, and his skull peeked through the rotted flesh of his long-dead face. Kane tagged this one Shorty, and figured him to be the least trouble if it came to a fight.

Pointing at Kane, Eye Patch curled an index finger, folding it inward, like the beckoning finger of fate. A twisting knot in his stomach, Kane recognized the movement; the corpse wasn't pointing but was pulling the trigger of
a gun, an old flinch reaction from whatever brutal life he had lived.

As the realization dawned, Kane took a quick step to his left, away from the glass wall. The tall corpse with the walking stick took a step to his right, holding the stick out to block the ex-Mag's way. Behind the clutch of corpses, the twisted form of Ezili Coeur Noir had appeared, moving like a specter from the glass-fronted office into the main hangar. Her mouth opened, black tongue writhing amid rotting gums, as she spoke.

“Life.”

Kane heard the word, and felt the nagging at the back of his mind that somehow he knew this woman. The eye-patch-wearing corpse took another step toward Kane, so close now that Kane had to step back to avoid him. The corpse's dead companions stepped forward, too, boxing Kane in. Behind them, more of the undead figures had begun amassing, acknowledging the perverted condemnation of the queen of death.

Taking another lurching step forward, the figure with the eye patch reached for Kane once more, and Kane found himself backed up against the wall.

“Back off, Eye Patch,” Kane snarled.

The corpse ignored him, reaching up with his rotting left hand and grabbing a fistful of Kane's jacket. The instant the corpse grabbed him, Kane rammed his Sin Eater into the corpse's belly and squeezed the trigger. Gobs of desiccated flesh spurted from the figure's back as 9 mm bullets blasted through rotted flesh. The corpse staggered backward several steps, wrenching a square from Kane's jacket, two brass buttons flying off into the glass wall to Kane's right.

Freed of the corpse-thing's grip, Kane kicked out with his left leg, striking the tall man in the midsection. Eye
Patch bent over himself with the impact of Kane's kick, and the ex-Magistrate pushed off, flipping over the toppling body and bringing his gun up to deal with the next of the clutch of zombies.

A short way across the hangar, Grant spoke to Brigid where they hid, watching the frantic showdown from the cover of the stacked crates. It had been less than ten seconds since Grant's Commtact warning, and it was clear Kane was in trouble.

“Come on,” Grant snapped.

Brigid trotted out from cover in Grant's wake, blasting bursts of bullets from her TP-9 at the looming pack of undead creatures that traipsed across the room toward their partner.

A fleshless woman standing close to the crates staggered over as Grant drilled her with bullets from his Sin Eater, flipping the weapon around to smash her in the face with its grip. Brigid leaped over the woman's corpse as it flopped to the floor.

And then, the one thing Brigid had most feared happened. As she leaped the fallen figure of the corpse, a skeletal hand whipped out and grabbed her ankle, pulling her to the ground.

Brigid spun, unleashing another burst of bullets right into the undead thing's withered face at near point-blank range. The corpse woman shook in place as Brigid's bullets drilled into her, ripping away the gory stump of her nose and rattling against the empty sockets of her eyes. Yet still the undead thing clung on, ignoring the effects the bullets were having on her face, and Brigid reached a sudden, awful realization—bullets weren't stopping these things.

A little way across the hangar, Kane had just come to the same conclusion. Still in motion, he had blasted
a volley of 9 mm steeljackets at the scarecrowlike figure holding the walking stick, only to see him stumble a pace back before regaining his footing, glowering at Kane with those lifeless eye sockets. Kane spun, dropping low as his leg swept the scarecrow, knocking him from his feet. The corpse's walking stick whipped out as he fell with a ghastly hiss from peeled-back lips as black as night.

Kane continued the leg sweep, catching the woman with dreadlocks just behind her ankle. She stumbled a pace forward, but despite her apparent unsteadiness, she refused to fall. She turned on Kane then, reaching down at him with long arms as he scooted across the metal plating of the floor. Kane grunted as the woman's hands snagged the torn front of his jacket, and she demonstrated incredible strength as she pulled him from the decking in one swift jerk.

The hideous figure of Ezili Coeur Noir let loose a deep, throaty laugh as Kane was yanked from the floor, nodding her approval as he was thrust up in the air by her dead servant. With clawlike, fleshless hands, Dreadlocks lifted Kane high over her head as her mistress laughed, and Kane tried desperately to bring his pistol up to shoot her.

Just then a stream of bullets slammed into the woman holding Kane and she stumbled back, her dreadlocks whipping around her face. Kane felt her grip loosen, and suddenly he was hurtling through the air before crashing an instant later into—and through—the glass wall of the office. Kane rolled across the office as glass shards shattered all around him. Then, bringing his gun up, he blasted a stream of fire across the remaining windows behind him, sending a burst of shattering glass at the five corpselike figures who were just turning to follow him. He watched in grim satisfaction as three of the figures
dropped back to protect Ezili Coeur Noir, with only the shorter individual leaping over the barrier of the filing cabinets amid the smashing glass.

Kane engaged his Commtact, instructing his companions in a hurried explanation. “They ain't living and they ain't dying. Anyone have any ideas?”

The zombie he'd named Shorty was in the office now, hurrying past a doorway through which Kane could see the closed doors of an elevator, and Kane saw that he had grabbed two long shards of broken glass, wielding them like knives as he hurried at Kane. Still on the floor, Kane pushed himself back on his shoulders before springing up into a crouch and unleashing another stream of bullets at his onrushing attacker. The short zombie was knocked backward by the impact of the bullets, and he held one hand up as if to protect his ruined face.

 

S
TRUGGLING
in the mantrap-like grip of the dead woman holding her ankle, Brigid Baptiste was a little too preoccupied to answer Kane's question. The undead thing wrestled with Brigid's foot as they lay sprawled on the floor, even as Brigid's TP-9 blasted another burst of gunfire in her face. Kane was right; bullets were having almost no effect, and they needed some other way to deal with these deathless things.

With a determined shriek, Brigid kicked the zombie girl's arm with her free leg, snapping the brittle bones with a determined boot. From somewhere deep in her rotting chest, the undead thing growled. Brigid ignored her, kicking out again.

 

G
RANT WAS PEPPERING
the area with bullets, turning this way and that as additional corpses descended on him from all around the hangarlike room. One, a child with a wilted
stump for an arm, ran straight into Grant's line of fire, his decomposing body shaking in place as he staggered closer to the ex-Mag.

They aren't stopping, Grant realized, but maybe we can drive them away somehow.

 

T
HE GLASS SHARD
in the zombie's raised hand shattered under the impact of Kane's bullets, spraying glass over the undead man's ruinous face. Instantly, Shorty lunged out with his other hand, and Kane saw the lethal shard of glass leave the creature's other hand and cut toward him through the air. In flinch reaction, Kane's right hand whipped up, bullets lashing the ceiling from the muzzle of the Sin Eater as he tracked the hurtling glass knife.

His shots missed, but Kane managed to bat the lethally sharp blade out of the air with the barrel of his pistol, turning his head as the blade shattered into a dozen smaller, onrushing blades. Then Shorty was upon him, and Kane saw the other corpses clambering over the filing cabinets as they followed the most direct route to assist their companion.

 

T
HE CORPSE CHILD
grabbed the end of Grant's Sin Eater, shuddering in place, ignoring the stream of bullets that drilled through his tiny hand. His other arm, withered to something like a twig-thin branch, jabbed at Grant, stabbing him in his side so hard he felt it through the protective weave of his shadow suit.

With a single mental command, Grant sent his pistol back to its housing in his sleeve, and the corpse child stumbled as he lost his grip. Grant was ready, however, and he drove the hard end of his bent knee straight into the undead child's face, knocking him to the floor.

An instant later Grant was turning, shoving another
walking corpse aside as he sprinted toward the far side of the room, away from the glass-walled office.

“Kane, Brigid—hang tight,” Grant ordered over the Commtact. “I just had an idea.”

“Make it quick,” Kane responded as he threw the attacking zombie over a desk, knocking a bulbless lamp and an empty filing tray flying.

Behind Kane, three more undead figures were making their way toward him in their unwieldy but determined manner, the one with the black walking stick thrusting it in front of him like some kind of sword.

 

B
RIGID LEAPED
from the floor, the undead woman's hand still clutching at her ankle. It didn't matter as Brigid's second kick had wrenched the rotten limb free of its socket, and now she dragged the hand and arm along with her as she ran back to the crates where she and Grant had hidden. Behind Brigid, the fleshless woman flapped her remaining arm as she struggled to pull herself up from the floor, moving with all the grace of a drowning man.

Brigid shoved her TP-9 back into her low-slung hip holster, reached for the crowbar resting atop the crates.

As the corpse woman staggered toward her, maggots visibly writhing in the stump now hanging in place of her arm, Brigid lashed backward with the crowbar, smashing it against the corpse's face with all her strength. The undead creature rocked on her heels, and Brigid kicked out hard into the corpse's pelvis, forcing her backward. Then Brigid swung the crowbar once more, this time from low to the floor, bringing the metal tool up in a vicious arc that rammed the claw end straight into the woman's ruined face.

The corpse-thing whined in some approximation of pain or surprise—Brigid didn't know which—and
stumbled backward, pulling at the metal bar now lodged in her face.

Bunching her fists, Brigid took a pace toward the stumbling undead woman, preparing to knock her down once more, only to hear a growling noise from far off across the hangar bay. But this time the growling wasn't coming from a recently dead thing's long-dry throat. Instead it was coming from an engine as Grant started up the artillery truck that had waited in the redoubt for over two hundred years.

Sitting in the cab, Grant pumped the accelerator and the truck rumbled to life around him. The vehicle was rusted and worn, and all four tires were flat as road kill, but at least it operated along the same basic principles as the Sandcats he had driven back in his days with the Cobaltville Magistrate Division.

The corpse figure of a man was slammed against the hood and disappeared from view beneath the body of the truck as the vehicle picked up speed.

As he urged the artillery truck across the metal decking toward the distant glass walls of the office-lab, Grant glanced out to his right and his eyes met with Brigid's. The corpse-thing with the crowbar in her face sinking to her knees in front of her.

“Want me to get the door for you?” Brigid asked, her words amplified over the medium of their linked Commtacts.

“Say again?” Grant asked.

But Brigid was already sprinting across the room, rushing behind the truck as it picked up speed. Grant glanced to his left and saw Brigid running onward deftly avoiding the shambling undead figures as she hurried toward the closed doors of the goods elevator.

“I figure we have only one exit,” Brigid explained over
the Commtact, but before she could continue Grant cut her off.

“I gotcha,” Grant assured her. “Be there in a tick. Kane,” he added, alerting his other colleague. “You might want to duck down.”

“Roger that.” Kane's voice snapped back instantly, not bothering to question his best friend's left-field advice.

Grant was at the wall to the office then and he slammed on the brakes as the truck smashed through the floor-to-ceiling panes of glass. He saw Kane leap back just in time as the glass shattered all around him, twinkling shards surging across the office like some beautiful, man-made tidal wave.

The truck slapped into the corpse wielding the walking stick like a weapon, knocking him flying in an instant, and its front tire bumped over another before it came to a halt, chairs, desks and office debris toppling in front of its hood.

Commanding his Sin Eater back into his palm, Grant snapped off a quick burst of covering fire from the truck's window as Kane vaulted over a dust-caked desk and scrambled toward the waiting vehicle. A moment later Kane had clambered up into the high rig, the figure with the dreadlocks lunging after him.