Scarlet Dream

by James Axler

  “How much gas do we have?” Kane snapped as he wound down the passenger side window and recalled his Sin Eater back into his right palm with a slap.

  Grant looked at the fuel gauge that was set beneath the speedometer on the dashboard display as the cab shuddered in time with the idling engine. The needle stood at empty. “Not much,” Grant said.

  Kane cursed as he began blasting a stream of 9 mm slugs at the nearest shadowy form. The zombie thing to their right fell in a hail of bullets, but Kane watched with revulsion as it began to struggle back to its feet. Up ahead bright sunlight was just visible through a huge rollback door that stood open at the end of the tunnel.

  “Think we have enough to get outside?” Kane asked, peering at Grant and seeing the twisted wires beneath the ignition where his colleague had hot-wired the ancient truth.

  “We’re running on fumes,” Grant admitted, “but what the hell.” With that he slammed his foot down hard on the accelerator and the truck lurched forward, bumping over the struggling corpse and knocking another rotting figure from his feet like a bowling pin.

  The truck rocked so much that it felt as if it might shake itself apart as they picked up speed. Leaning from the passenger window, Kane snapped off swift burst of gunfire as another rotting figure loomed into view.

  The truck now snugly within the tunnel, trundling along at a steady clip as Grant wrestled to keep it on course. The vehicle’s bald tires struggled for traction, pulling the heavy machine toward the walls as Grant held the accelerator down. The cab stank of diesel, and Grant eyed the fuel gauge on the dashboard once again—the needle seemed to be stuck at empty, and Grant tapped the plastic several times to see if it was a genuine reading or whether it had simply become jammed over time. The needle didn’t move.

  “Kane,” Brigid urged, pointing up ahead.

  Kane saw what was worrying Brigid—a zombie stood close to the rollback door, his skin peeled away from his face, skull held at an odd angle atop his broad shoulders. The undead thing grasped a thick tree branch—wider than a man’s leg—and as Kane watched he hefted the branch forward like a jousting pole, swinging its sharp point at the windshield of the cab.

  Grant stomped on the accelerator, knocking another corpse flying in the air until the undead thing slapped against the low ceiling. Grant peered in the mud-caked side mirror, watching as the corpse fell from the ceiling and dropped into the back of the truck. He could not tell if it was still moving, and he turned his attention back to the doors ahead.

  Up ahead, the broad figure lunged with its jousting pole branch, driving the sharp end into the grille of the truck with a rending of metal. Beyond the windshield, the engine began to pour a cloud of steam, obscuring Grant’s view as he struggled with the wheel. Behind them, the undead corpse in the back grabbed onto the flatbed of the truck with clawlike hands, the ancient paint there flaking away with each scratch of his ragged nails.

  As they hurtled over the lip of the redoubt doors, Kane swung open his passenger side door, using it like a battering ram to knock the broad-shouldered zombie off his feet. Bald tires spun on the dirt track beyond the redoubt, and suddenly the truck was out in the open. Outside the external door they found themselves bumping along a dirt road that carved a path through the dense swamp. Although dense, the plant life in the immediate vicinity of the doorway looked brown and ragged, as if it had been touched by poison.

  As soon as they left the shadows of the underground redoubt, the heat of the Louisiana swamp struck them like a wall, the thick, heavy atmosphere of late morning like some physical blanket weighing down upon them. The breeze through the open passenger side window didn’t feel refreshing at all; it felt oppressive, hitting Kane in the face like hot liquid. Sweat beaded on his brow immediately, and his companions shifted in their seats, sweat running down their backs. Kane pushed the collar of his jacket back off his neck, wiping away the perspiration that was already forming there with an irritated hand. Threads hung from the shredded front of the jacket where the undead creature with the eye patch had grasped him.

  As they continued along the overgrown dirt track away from the redoubt entrance, they became aware of other shambling figures moving through the undergrowth, and Kane peered in his side mirror to see more corpselike forms massing at the rollback doorway of the redoubt.

  Warm air sullied the cabin, and the smell of the bayou came to them through the open window. Sitting between Grant and Kane, Brigid held her hand against the dusty vent in the center of the dash, feeling the stream of warm air there like breath against her skin.

  Suddenly the remains of Grant’s side window shattered entirely as a charcoal-black skeletal hand reached through, grabbing for the wheel. It was the undead thing who had landed on the bed of the truck as they sped out of the redoubt, Grant realized. As the wheel was pulled out of the ex-Mag’s grip, the truck lurched to the left, screeching off the dirt road and crashing through a clump of saplings, thin branches snapping as they struck the grille and windshield.

  “There’s one on the roof!” Grant shouted as the truck bumped through dense leaf cover that hung like a green curtain ahead of them, obscuring their way.

  Grasping the steering wheel with both hands, Grant fought with the wheel, struggling to right the old artillery truck’s path as the bald tires spun for traction in the marshy ground underfoot. Grant eased up on the accelerator as he felt the truck threaten to roll, pulling the vehicle back toward the dirt road, even as the undead figure batted at his face with his clawed hand.

  On the other side of the cab, Kane thrust open the passenger door and clambered out, the road rushing by just a few feet below the soles of his boots. “Come on, you ugly son of a bitch,” he snarled as he pulled himself up onto the roof.

  The undead figure on the cab hissed as he saw Kane, dark-colored spittle spraying from his black mouth. Dressed in tattered rags, the figure had stick-thin limbs and dark rubbery skin so taut that it looked as if it had been stretched over a drum. He lay on the cab roof, legs splayed out behind him for balance, reaching into the driver’s window with one bony, emaciated arm.

  With his left hand reaching back to cling solidly to the edge of the truck, Kane clambered toward the undead thing in a crouch, powering the Sin Eater back into his free hand as he did so. “Ride’s over,” he snarled. “Don’t forget to tip your driver.”

  The undead creature grabbed for the muzzle of the Sin Eater as Kane’s finger tightened on the guardless trigger, and his rotten hand was blown away in a burst of bullets. The walking corpse seemed surprised for a moment, the dead pit eyes gazing in astonishment at his ruined hand. Kane brought the pistol around and blasted off another stream of bullets as the truck bumped over the uneven road, and his shots went wild.

  Then the undead thing flipped his legs out in a such a way that they almost seemed to be dislocated, and Kane found himself tumbling off the roof and over the front of the truck. Everything seemed to whirl around him, and Kane reached out blindly until his left hand found purchase. As swiftly as it had begun, Kane’s fall stopped, and he found himself lying prone on the front of the truck above the engine housing, his hand grasping one of the wide side mirrors that stuck out like an elephant’s ears from the truck’s hood.

  Through the dirt-streaked windshield, Kane saw Brigid’s eyes widen. Then Grant was shouting something to him, indicating that he needed to get out of Grant’s field of vision, even as the truck bumped once more off the strip of bayou road, careening onward at an angle, vegetation brushing against its side.

  Low-hanging branches snapped against Kane’s back, jabbing into the protective weave of his shadow suit as the truck hurtled onward down the road. Then the undead figure that had been atop the cab crawled feet-first over the windshield. In a moment, the moving corpse was sitting with his back propped against the dusty windshield glass, and he kicked out at Kane even as the ex-Magistrate struggled to pull himself back onto the hood. The undead thing’s foot slammed into Kane’s face, the torn remain
s of his shoe falling apart as it struck him. Kane fell backward, his grip slipping fractionally on the wing mirror.

  Another good kick, Kane thought, and I’ll be—

  But there was no time to finish his thought. The moving corpse kicked out again, and Kane found himself rolling off the hood, the roar of the engine close to his ear as he toppled over the front of the truck.

  Inside the cab Brigid had produced her own blaster from its holster as the corpse kicked Kane from the hood. She thrust it against the windshield glass and began firing, fractured bullet holes appearing across the glass like heavy raindrops as she sprayed the back of the undead figure with everything she could. The mobile corpse shuddered with each shot, chunks of desiccated flesh disappearing in clouds of dusty dry skin. He turned, a disquieting movement of his emaciated body, somehow not quite the way a person should move, and then opened the black jaws of his rotten mouth, hissing out a curse at Brigid as she continued to drill him with bullets. Then the moving corpse butted his head against the ruined glass of the windshield, slamming against it like a ram as the truck hurried on through the bayou.

  “Where the hell did Kane go?” Grant shouted over the sound of Brigid’s semiautomatic, only now seeing his friend was no longer on the hood.

  The frantic answer came in an unlikely form. The undead figure that was butting itself against the windshield seemed to suddenly slip away, slumping to the right of the hood before falling from the vehicle entirely. Kane pulled himself up over the side, using the wheel rim and bumper to kick himself up from where he had been clinging just seconds earlier. Hanging on the hood, he watched the corpse-thing fall from the truck and roll across the road in a tumble of ruined limbs before he was caught up in the double wheels at the rear of the truck and was crushed beneath their tread.

  Brigid pushed open the passenger door as the truck sped on through the bayou, and Kane clambered back inside, his jacket and face smeared with dirt.

  “What happened to you?” Brigid asked.

  “Ducked out for a sec. Thought I saw someone I knew,” Kane said with a lopsided grin.

  Grant tapped at the needle of the fuel gauge once again and glanced in the side mirror, hoping that they had enough fuel to outrun anything else that intended to follow them until they could at least regroup and come up with a plan. The engine growled unhappily as Grant moved the old-fashioned gearshift, holding the clutch at the biting point as they struggled around a tight bend that ran on an incline.

  “So?” Grant finally asked, his eyes on what passed for a road amid the greenery. “You think that thing was Lilitu?”

  “When we last saw her,” Kane offered, “she was dead, remember? Blasted by an ASP gun, then caught up in Tiamat’s fireball.”

  “And yet she still walks,” Brigid muttered, her voice quiet with concern, fingers still playing against the warm stream of air from the broken air-conditioning vent.

  “You sure that’s Lilitu?” Grant persisted, as the buried entrance to Redoubt Mike disappeared around a bend in the road behind them.

  Kane nodded sullenly. “I never forget a pretty face,” he said.

  Grant sneered. “I didn’t get a real close look, but it did seem like a face you’d never forget.”

  In myth, Lilitu was renowned as a sexual predator. In reality, Kane had suffered at the hands of more than one deranged would-be goddess during their adventures, and while Grant wasn’t sure of the details, it had been a pattern so frequent it had become almost comical for a while. Even so, Grant knew better than to rib his partner about it.

  Kane turned to Brigid, seeing the look of vexation that marred her features. Brigid’s eidetic memory was such that she should have recognized the dark goddess straight away had she got as close as Kane had, even with the desiccation of her old, lizard skin.

  “I wonder what happened to her?” Brigid said, thinking out loud. “The Annunaki are almost immortal, but she looked barely alive.”

  “Their mothership, Tiamat, has regenerated the snake-faces before now,” Kane pointed out.

  “Regenerated, yes,” Brigid agreed, “but that is…well…”

  “One bastard ugly regeneration,” Grant suggested.

  “Straight to the bottom of the regeneration class,” Brigid agreed. “Besides, the Annunaki pantheon may have proved irritatingly hard to kill, but Tiamat is no longer in orbit. She’s dead. Isn’t she?”

  “She may be,” Kane mused, “but bits of her are still cropping up. We found that chair, remember?”

  Brigid nodded, remembering only too well. A little over a month ago, she and Kane had come into contact with an individual called Papa Hurbon, a voodoo priest who practiced the dark arts of the Bizango. Hurbon had a handful of seemingly undead zombies at his beck and call, but Kane and Brigid had reasoned these away as created through drug use, the Bizango practitioner’s standard way of sapping the will of the living to create what appeared to be a walking corpse. During that escapade, Hurbon had revealed himself to be in possession of something he called a vision chair, but which Brigid had identified as a working astronavigator’s chair from the deck of Tiamat. The chair had been alive, bonding with any sitter to generate a series of highly detailed star maps within the mind’s eye. In discovering this fact, Brigid had very nearly been killed by the chair as it attempted to consume her and control her will. The chair itself had subsequently disappeared when its owner had returned for it, and Papa Hurbon had found himself maimed at that owner’s hands, left alive but with both of his legs removed for her sadistic pleasure. Hurbon had, Kane recalled, referred to that sadistic owner as Ezili Coeur Noir.

  “How far away was that?” Brigid asked suddenly, gazing out the windows of the truck as if seeing their surroundings for the first time. The shrubbery here seemed lush and green, moisture glistening on its leaves like beads of sweat. They had left the strange dead zone that surrounded the redoubt, with no clear explanation yet of what it meant.

  Considering Brigid’s question, Kane did a swift calculation in his head, then stopped as the realization dawned. They were very close to Papa Hurbon’s voodoo temple and the last known location of the vision chair. “Shit,” Kane swore through gritted teeth. “A dozen miles, maybe less.”

  “And this is old Louisiana,” Brigid pointed out. “We’re not actually that far away from Beausoleil, which is where Lilitu was reborn in hybrid form.”

  Grant growled with irritation as he turned the wheel of the old artillery truck. “You guys ever get the feeling you could see something coming but you never bothered to look?”

  Brigid was about to respond, but with a sudden lurch the engine spluttered and the heavy vehicle shuddered to an abrupt halt. Cursing, Grant pumped his foot on the gas pedal several times, but there was no response. He reached beneath the steering column, untwisting and reknitting the wires he had used to engage the truck but, other than a spark from the wires and a cough from the engine, nothing happened.

  “Whatever’s going on,” Grant explained, “we’ll be meeting it on foot.”

  Kane turned to the passenger door and, Sin Eater still in hand, pushed it open and hopped out of the cab. Grant did likewise from his own side, while Brigid shuffled across the bench seat and dropped down beside Kane. The dark-haired ex-Mag was already back in point man mode, huddling in on himself as he studied the surrounding foliage, listening to the orchestra of birds and insects all around them. Off to his right, some distance from where the truck had shuddered to a halt, Kane heard heavy, dragging footsteps, and he turned that way, urging his colleagues to remain behind him. Kane trotted forward, moving with the silent surety of a sleek jungle cat, pushing aside branches as he made his way toward the noise.

  Ahead, through the low-hanging fronds of the plant cover, Kane saw another of the hideous walking corpses. This one was about five feet tall with a stocky build, and he seemed to be walking in a circle. At first, Kane thought his head was ducked low to study his steps, but as he turned Kane saw that the thing had no head, just a ragge
d stump of desiccated flesh within which the ex-Mag saw several bloated insects rummaging.

  Still disguised by the branches of the nearby tree, Kane held a hand up in silence, shooing his companions back before turning himself and scurrying quietly away from the circling corpse.

  “What is it?” Brigid asked as Kane emerged from the undergrowth.

  “Something that should have been buried a long time ago,” he advised. “Whatever’s going on here is definitely against the laws of nature.”

  “It wouldn’t be the first time those have proved malleable in the hands of the Annunaki,” Brigid reminded him.

  “No.” Kane shook his head. “This is something else. Lilitu was always a twisted bitch, but this is more like some morbid compulsion, raising the dead. If left unchecked, the dead around here could well outnumber the living.”

  “That seems unlikely,” Grant muttered.

  “There was a time,” Brigid reminded them both, “that this whole country was called the Deathlands, so many corpses had been created by the megachill. If Lilitu or Ezili Coeur Noir or whatever she’s calling herself is trying to raise an army of the dead, there are plenty of people just waiting to enlist.”

  “But dead things deteriorate over time,” Grant pointed out, glancing up at the sounds of movement nearby. “She might have an unlimited supply of names, but no one can revive dust. Can they?”

  Suddenly the thick undergrowth parted just behind Kane and the headless corpse lumbered through, arms swinging as if to keep his balance. Kane leaped away, turning to face this eerie vision.

  “There was a code,” Kane said as the headless zombie plodded toward the three rebels. “The number RWI—”

  “RWI077-093-d,” Brigid repeated, recalling the string of numbers Kane had quoted to her earlier.

  As Kane stepped away from the shuffling, headless thing, the leaves parted a little way across on the other side of the dirt track, and another walking corpse stepped into the sunlight, followed by two more.