Burn

by Geoff North

  Eichberg’s voice cut off and was replaced with a high-pitched wailing noise.

  Angel cringed further into the stairs. Jenny called out over the sound. “It’s a siren—he’s thawing everyone in the facility.”

  “Armory!” The Lawman shouted running down the steps two at a time. “Now!”

  Lothair spoke again as the siren continued its ominous wail. “That brings back memories of the Blitz… I was in London during the winter of 1940, travelling under a false guise, procuring medical equipment… I would receive warnings in advance before the air raids, but the sound of those sirens haunted me for decades… It seems to be having the same effect on you. Perhaps it’s become an inherent feature in all humans—spreading from one generation to the next, until the reason is forgotten, but the fear remains.”

  Willem was ahead of the rest, swinging around the landing of level Q-R and onto the stairs below. “Doesn’t he ever shut the fuck up?”

  “I went centuries without uttering a word, Willem. Allow me these few minutes to reminisce some before you all die.”

  A door crashed open on one of the floors above. Cobe looked up and saw a twist of black shadows dancing on the red-lit walls. A dozen brain-dead, starving cryogenic pioneers from the twenty-first century spilled into the stairwell, screaming and snarling. They started running down the steps, pushing and falling, biting at shoulders and necks and ears, climbing over top of one another in a mad frenzy. More poured out from levels N, O, and P. The stairwell became too crowded to hold them; hand rails buckled outward from the crush. A body toppled over somewhere even further above and hurtled down past Cobe’s face. He saw the thing’s head crack open on a railing below—the arms and legs spun wildly until it hit the bottom level in a silent splatter of black.

  There was an awful grown of metal giving way and the low pop of bolts surrendering their hold in concrete. Lawson and Sara pushed the others up against the wall as bodies rained down in a wash of clawing and twisting grey. Cobe could hear their cries, the thuds of bodies falling on top of one another below. And through it all, the awful wail of the siren droned on.

  The door to level T was still closed as Lawson led them down, but a noticeable bulge had appeared in its metal surface. Grey fingers pressed through the crack above the lock, scratching frantically along the edge. Three more levels, Cobe thought. He remembered them from before. After T there was U-V, W, and X-Y-Z. It may as well have been three hundred levels. They started climbing over the bodies of the dying and dead. Kay screamed out as fingers wrapped around her ankle. Willem stumbled in a mound of writhing limbs and fell forward down onto the next floor.

  The seven stayed together. Sara and Jenny pulled at Kay until she was free. Lawson and Cobe caught up to Willem and dragged him back to his feet. Angel kicked at faces and stomped on fingers. The W level door was open but the supporting frame had collapsed under the press of weight trying to crash through. Those first few along the bottom had been trampled by others trying to climb over. Those still living were jammed up against the steel frame. Cobe saw a face in the middle, biting into the metal. Its teeth broke off and it continued chewing with bloody gums. More weight pressed in from behind and the thing’s face pushed up against the frame. Its lower jaw caught along the bottom edge, the top half of its face continued moving forward. Cobe looked away before its face was severed in half.

  They stayed together through it all and made it to the armory floor. Lawson picked his way over shattered corpses towards the door.

  “You have trespassed on private property, Lawman. You have murdered my clients and stolen their belongings... I won’t allow it to continue.”

  They heard something rumble. Jenny felt it under her feet and yelled at the others. “Get away from the door!”

  The explosion blew the heavy steel outward into pieces. Chunks of shredded metal slammed against the stairwell and tore into the bodies stacked around its base. Fire and smoke roared out after it.

  Cobe was lying on the floor. His ears were ringing, and when he tried to breathe, smoke filled his lungs. Something was crawling up his legs. It pulled along his shirt and dug into his throat.

  “Get up! Get up! Get up!”

  He opened his eyes and saw Willem propped up on his chest. Cobe wrapped an arm around the boy and sat up. Sara and Kay were sitting in front of them, looking equally dazed. Jenny was a few feet away, helping Angel to her feet. Cobe looked towards the armory and saw the Lawman stagger through the billowing smoke.

  Lawson paused for a moment at the gaping hole and stared through into what remained inside. “Nothin’… Not a gawdamn thing left.” He went to Sara and Kay. “You two okay?” They nodded solemnly. He looked at the others one by one. “Well it looks like my plan has gone to shit… Anyone else have an idea?”

  Bodies continued falling from above. Those still alive were rushing down the last level of stairs. The siren continued to sound.

  Lothair answered the Lawman. “Stay where you are. I’m on my way. I’ll end your lives quickly.”

  Chapter 11

  Eichberg wouldn’t have the chance to kill them on his own. Over a thousand mindless, raging ABZE customers would see to it first. Lawson was only dragging out the inevitable. He herded them into the burning shell of the armory, kicking at the melted remains of weapons strewn all about. There were pieces of charred gun handles and bent rifle barrels. Cobe and Willem grabbed a few of the bigger fragments. If they couldn’t fire bullets, they would use them as bats and throw them like rocks.

  Cobe stumbled into Jenny as he searched. The cryer was standing in a melted puddle of cabinet glass. Her grey face had a distant, serene look to it. Her eyes were closed. Cobe pushed at her. “Don’t just stand there—we have to fight them!”

  “There’s an office on the far side of the room,” she said.

  Willem was staring at her now as well. “Where we got them books the first time.”

  Jenny continued speaking. “Another door inside… Another way out.”

  Cobe realized where the girl was inside her head, and who she was in communication with. He’d been there himself. “She’s dreaming! She’s talking to her Ma!” He grabbed Jenny by the arm and dragged her through the wreckage towards the far side of the armory room. Lawson saw where they were headed and motioned the others to follow.

  The dark window Cobe and Willem had seen their reflection in was gone. Glass shards littered the desk and floor inside; most of the books in the shelf wall had been burned to a crisp. Jenny was still in her trance-like state, repeating the three words over and over. Another way out, another way out, another way out.

  The creatures were inside the armory. Some were caught up in the torn steel edges of what remained of the doorframe and wall, the flesh tore away from their trapped bodies as others tried pushing through. Some were on fire, the stench of boiling blood and cooking skin drove the entire horde into a feeding frenzy. Cobe stood in the office staring out through the broken window. He watched as they ate one another, biting at throats and faces.

  “I been in this room a half-dozen times,” Lawson said, studying the smoke-blackened walls with desperation. “There ain’t no other door out.”

  Willem had crawled behind the desk on his hand and knees. “No door in the walls, maybe.”

  Lawson and Sara pulled the desk away. There wasn’t much to see other than broken glass and smouldering ash. Angel pushed the broken chair off to one corner as Willem brushed some of the debris away. His fingers sunk into a wide recess and found a metal bar. “I knew it!” He cried. “There’s some kind of handle here.”

  Lawson was stunned. “Can’t believe I missed that.”

  Kay was standing beside Cobe now, staring mutely at the carnage taking place where the armory door once stood. The monsters were digging deeper into each other, tearing into chests and stomachs for meatier organs. A few dozen more had spread out into the room, crawling along on all fours, chewing at garbage on the floor and choking on smoke.

  But one
of them was walking on two feet. Cobe could no longer tell if it was a man or a woman. The top of its head was a melted glob of steaming hair and scalp, the rest of its body was char. It was headed straight for the office, its blank blue eyes glowing with cold, emotionless intent.

  Kay whispered. “It isn’t like the rest… It’s like Eichberg.” She held Cobe’s hand and looked at Jenny. The girl was leaning up against a wall, her green eyes staring up into the ceiling. “Like her.”

  Three more had fought their way through the tangle of feeding bodies. They were trailing after Blue Eyes towards the office.

  Lawson and Sara were straining at the handle. “Gawdamn it, Cobe—give us a hand!”

  Willem scrambled back and allowed his brother room. Cobe took hold of the bar next to Sara and pulled, adding his strength to theirs. He felt something pop beneath his fingers and a rush of cold air burst out along his feet blowing ash away from the hidden opening. Lawson lifted the door until it clicked into place at a ninety degree angle and stayed put. Cobe looked down into a seemingly endless shaft with a single steel ladder running the length of it. A string of red emergency lights flashed dully every ten or twelve feet.

  Kay screamed from the window. “They’re almost here!”

  Jenny had snapped out of her dream-like trance. “It leads down into mechanical.” She picked Willem up and the boy wrapped his arm around her neck as she started the descent. “We have to find something called the nukebatt containment area.”

  Lawson went last, slamming the door back into place above him. He called down to the cryer already thirty feet below. “What the hell’s a nukebatt?”

  “Our way out… and the only option left that’ll kill all of these things.”

  Cobe didn’t care for the sound of that. He had the feeling anything capable of killing two-thousand rampaging monsters would likely finish the seven of them off as well. The red lights pulsed around him; it felt as if they were descending through a main artery into the heart of the massive facility. He thought he heard his brother yell somewhere below. Cobe paused on the rungs, stuck his head out to the side and looked past Kay and Angel beneath him. Jenny and Willem were out of the shaft. Sara stepped on his hand and he continued down. There was a bang from above, but Cobe didn’t stop to check again. He didn’t need to look up to know the freshly revived cryers were climbing down after them.

  They dropped into a space ten times bigger than the armory. Cobe couldn’t fathom how an area so immense could exist under the earth without falling in on itself. Dozens of gigantic steel columns ten feet thick grew up out of a maze of metal storage tanks, control panels, and a hundred miles of snaking stairways.

  Jenny started down the first set of steps she found, and the others followed.

  ***

  Lothair Eichberg and Leonard Dutz had just finished descending down a ladder of their own. They had left the control room on level A and given up on the stairs altogether when the crush of ABZE clients made it impossible for them to enter the stairwell. A few of the more mindless ones had pushed into the elevator shaft with them, but they no longer had the reasoning skills to figure out how to climb rungs. They had plummeted down around Eichberg and Dutz to their deaths eighteen levels below.

  Lothair stepped over their crushed corpses and forced the elevator doors open onto the armory level. He pushed his way through the jam of flailing limbs and snapping teeth into what remained of the weapons area, and beheld utter chaos. People were feeding on their own kind in a smoking ruin of his creation.

  I did this… I took their money and assured them they would awaken to a better world… a better way of life… O mein Gott—what have I done?

  A cold realization dawned over him. There had been no need to release these men, women, and children. He could’ve pursued the Lawman to this point and killed him with his bare hands without anyone’s help. Perhaps emotion was still driving him—a bitter desire for revenge, a burning hate deep inside that an eternity of freezing couldn’t possibly extinguish.

  The Lawman made me do this. He’s responsible.

  It didn’t long to discover the Lawman and his followers weren’t among the dead.

  “Where’d they go?” Leonard asked.

  A woman with long greasy hair crawled in front of them. She lapped up a spray of blood on the floor near Lothair’s feet. He kicked her aside and started running for the office on the far side of the room. I should have killed Edna along with Strope. She’s the only person left alive besides me that knows how this place is powered—unless she shared the information with someone else. His great-great granddaughter was leading them deeper into the Dauphin facility. She was going to end everything.

  Lothair felt fear.

  Chapter 12

  Cobe knew there was no turning back. Even if every cryer suddenly dropped dead and they had the facility all to themselves, he was certain they could never find their way back up. Jenny had led them too far into the bowels of the earth. The maze of pipes and bundled wires twisting throughout the narrow, open corridors was similar to the intestines of a living creature. Cobe had seen more than his fair share of spilled guts over the last week; this mechanical level and series of sub-level innards was just as unsettling.

  Jenny stopped halfway down a see-through spiral staircase and shut her eyes.

  “Why does she keep doin’ that?” Willem asked. They were standing next to a hundred foot high cylinder with a strange image stamped on its side. He leaned up against his bother afraid the great metallic thing would burst open at any moment and spill out a thousand more hungry cryers.

  “She’s keeps losing her way,” Cobe explained. “She’s getting directions from her ma.”

  Lawson could see Blue Eyes and half a dozen like him running along one of the upper stairways. They were gaining ground. “Well can she take directions any faster? If we waste any more time we’ll have to split up and try and take them things out one at a time.”

  Jenny opened her eyes. “We’re not splitting up, we stay together…. I know the way.” She stared up at the image on the cooling tank. A corroded radiation symbol, twenty feet high and wide, stared back at her like a great bloodshot eye. Beneath it were the words:

  DANGER

  RADIOACTIVE MATERIALS

  RESTRICTED AREA

  AUTHORIZED PERSONEL ONLY

  She wasn’t sure if the warning applied to someone like her—a person frozen for centuries and thawed into something no longer human—but she did care for those with her now. There was nothing else she could do, nowhere else to lead them. Jenny continued down, calling back to the others as they went. “I’m sorry.”

  Lothair saw them heading down the spiral stairs. There were more cryers after them less than fifty feet away.

  “They’re gonna get to ‘em before us,” Leonard whined. “They’re gonna eat ‘em first!”

  “Do you remember how we hunted down those rolling creatures on the plains, Leonard? Do you remember how fast you ran?”

  Leonard nodded and smiled. He remembered especially how big and juicy the eyeballs had been.

  “We’re going to run like that now—we’re going to run faster.”

  Leonard didn’t need it explained any further. He was already flying down the next set of stairs.

  Jenny had to stop again five minutes later. They had come down a long, narrow corridor lined with heavy pipes and wrapped cables. Bundles of colorful wire drooped from the ceiling like clusters of veins forcing the Lawman to stoop over. That choking sensation took hold of Cobe once again. The walls were closing in with every passing strobe of red light. The pipes and the cables and the wires were starting to move, writhing and twisting towards him like snakes. They would wrap around his chest and squeeze the air from his lungs.

  Kay shook him. “Are you alright?”

  “I’ve been better.” The walls were back where they belonged.

  Angel pushed Kay away from him. “Keep your hands off him, he’s my boyfriend.”

  “Jenny
!” The Lawman shouted. “Which way?”

  They could go left down another set of long stairs with a dozen more radiation symbols along the walls, or they could go right towards a big steel door thirty feet away. The blue-eyed cryer was coming at them down the corridor they’d passed through.

  “My Mom—she isn’t talking to me anymore. She’s gone! I-I forget whe—”

  Lawson shoved her to the right. “Then we’ll try the door. I’m sick of gawdamn stairs.” He looked behind one last time and saw the cryer fall head-first into the corridor floor. Something was on its back, tearing through flesh with its teeth. It looked up when the creature beneath it was dead, and Lawson saw the grinning, bloody face of Leonard Dutz. A set of pink eyes appeared behind Leonard.

  “You’re next, Lawman,” Eichberg called out. He lunged past Leonard, and Lawson went left for the stairs. “Run, Lawman! Run as fast as your feeble old legs can carry you! It will make no difference. When I’m done with you, I’ll go back for the others!”

  The stairs seemed to go on forever. The emergency lights cut off suddenly and Lothair was plunging down into darkness. He slowed his descent. “Nice try, Lawman, but I’ve lived the majority of my life in pitch black. You’ll have to do better than that.”

  Lothair could hear the tap of his shoes on the concrete steps. He continued down. A dull square of dirty yellow light appeared before him. The stairs ended and he was standing in front of a door. He peered through the little glass window and twisted the handle.

  “Lawman?”

  He was standing in another corridor. The pipes and bundles of cable were gone. There were no radiation signs posted along the concrete walls.