by North, Geoff
“Hold up!” He called out, and the others stopped.
They waited for him where the tangled mess of debris started. It was here where Lawson had led Cobe, Willem, and Trot deeper into the bowels of Big Hole days earlier. It had been a difficult and dangerous process, squeezing through layers of crushed concrete and twisted rebar. Lawson knew this better than anyone; he’d been entering and exiting the ancient facility for years. The debris was still there, but it had taken on a new configuration. The lawman worked his way between the two brothers and leaned over a two-inch thick sheet of rusted iron. The metal edge was raw and curled back. Lawson cut the side of his thumb on it and pulled his hand away. Beneath it, the concrete tunnel leading into the facility was gone. In its place was a jagged, ten-foot wide and ten-foot high opening into level A.
Willem stated the obvious. “Someone blew a gawdamn hole into Big Hole.”
“Looks more like somethin’ blew a hole out,” Lawson replied.
They worked their way around the metal and rock and entered the facility. A thin layer of grey smoke clung to the ceiling. It didn’t smell like any kind of smoke Cobe was familiar with. Lawson led them down the hallway, past the doors marked janitorial, supplies, and the ones with simplified images of men and women engraved into the surface. They went into the office and saw the howler Lawson had shot over a decade earlier still slumped over its desk. Kay jumped, and Angel regarded its dusty remains with silent hate.
Lawson stepped around it and went through the door into the next hallway. Sarah was at his side. She gripped his arm and whispered. “I can’t believe you’ve come back to this place so many times over the years. Gods, Lawson…why?”
He wanted to tell her that it was his duty. He wanted to explain that the weapons he’d found in the lower levels of Big Hole had burdened him with the responsibility of looking after the citizens of Burn. But towns like Burn and Rudd had lawmen and village-leaders years before Lawson was born. They had managed without the centuries-old weapons to maintain—although not as effectively—a semblance of order. No, Lawson wouldn’t lie to her. He had returned time after time because he’d wanted to. Curiosity had driven him down into the earth, that insatiable need to know what once was.
“It was here, waitin’ to found and explored,” he finally muttered.
The walls along the corridor were streaked in frenzied scrapes of blood. Garbage littered the floor—sheets of yellowed paper, fragments of old clothes. Cobe stopped at the first door on his left—except the door was no longer there. Someone, or something, had torn it from the hinges and discarded it inside the darkened room. Lawson pulled him away and stepped in first.
The cryogenic cylinder belonging to James D. Aaron of Atlanta, GA was smashed in and dented, but still attached to the wall. Lawson peered in through the small glass window and saw Aaron’s grey, frozen face. He was still sleeping or dead—the lawman didn’t care which, so long as he was inside and sealed.
“Someone tried gettin’ him out,” Willem said.
Lawson turned and stared at Jenny leaning against the broken doorframe. “Yer group make all this mess on the way out?”
She shook her head. “Eichberg was in too big of a hurry. They didn’t even grab guns.”
Sarah’s arms were crossed over her chest. She looked cold and scared. “Isn’t that why you brought us here—guns to arm ourselves with?”
Lawson exited the room without answering. There were more smashed in doors and damaged cylinders along the way. They split into pairs and searched each room. Cobe called out from one of them further down the corridor. “This one’s open! Someone’s been letting them out.”
The lawman poked his head in and saw the cylinder-door hanging down. The layer of grey cushion inside was stained black. Cobe and Willem were standing in front of it, their feet in a pool of dried blood and fragmented window glass. “No more wanderin’ off, we stick together.”
They hurried along in silence, following Lawson down the long hallway. He stopped one last time at the door labelled Smudge. It was open a crack but undamaged. The lawman looked down and felt the hairs on the back of his neck rise. A six-inch trail of blood had dried along the outer edge, a little set of pink paw prints led down the corridor away from them.
“Gawdamn,” Lawson whispered to no one in particular. He didn’t need to open the door any further to know the three-foot wide cylinder lay open and empty. “Like I said—no one wanders away, we stay together, nice and close.”
He took them to the elevator. The doors were stuck half-open. Lawson considered climbing down the access ladder but changed his mind. Too dark, too big a risk of someone falling. He opened the stairwell door and herded the others through.
Eighteen levels, he thought. Eighteen more floors down and we’ll be able to arm ourselves.
He wasn’t all that sure they’d make it past level B.
***
Trot could see smoke rising to the northeast. Someone was burning the forests in the Dirty Hills, he thought. He stumbled away from the horses and climbed the crater wall for a better look. The hills were a long way off, but the smoke seemed even further away than that.
Rudd. Eichberg’s burning the whole town down.
Dust snorted a warning from two-hundred feet below. The other horses began to prance about nervously. What’s gotten into them? Trot wondered. He cupped his hands against the sweat of his brow to block out the sun’s brightness. He studied the stretch of barren land between the distant plume of grey smoke and the nervous animals. His breath caught in his throat when he spotted two black specks moving towards Big Hole from less than a mile away.
“No…Oh no…” He staggered back and almost fell down into the steep side of Big Hole. He caught himself and spun around. More black specks were lined along the crater’s edge around him. People. Trot blinked the light from his eyes and tried to focus on them. He counted up to six and stopped. There were too many of them to be Lawson and the others. The closest were less than a hundred yards away and closing in fast to his left and right.
One of them let out a blood-curdling scream that echoed into the hole. Trot thought the thing was screaming a single word. A second wail sounded from the other side, and Trot knew what they were yelling.
Food.
Trot stumbled back in terror again and was unable to stop himself from falling. He slid head-first and started rolling down the hill, end over end in a grunting, crying ball towards the horses. A dozen starving cryers spilled over the crater’s edge towards him.
Chapter 57
They descended at a steady, quick pace, level after level, uninterrupted. Lawson had started to believe they might make it all the way down to the armory level until their progress ended abruptly in the stairwell between levels K and L. Another explosion had ripped a substantial section of the upper floor into the one below. The stairs had vanished beneath a mass of twisted metal, concrete, and plaster.
They took turns working in pairs to clear the debris away, hoping to clear enough of a path through which they could continue down. Willem stood at the stairwell doorway, clutching a two-foot piece of bent stair-railing in his one hand. His foot was propped between door and frame, keeping a lookout down the long, dark corridor where everyone from a thousand years before with K at the beginning of their last names had been laid to rest. The boy’s eyes were wide and unblinking. “I can hear somethin’ down there… I swear I can.”
Cobe and Sarah backed out of the debris hole they had already cleared and let Jenny and Angel take over. Cobe snuck a peek through the door his brother was holding open. “I don’t hear anything…probably just all the noise we’re making.”
Lawson appeared from above, leaning over the railing leading up halfway between levels K and J. “Keep that racket down. We ain’t gonna get much further if the things being let out of their beds hear us.”
Jenny pulled a six-hundred pound block of concrete out from the rubble with considerable volume. “We ain’t gonna get no gawdamn where if
we don’t make some noise,” she replied in a decent imitation of the lawman’s voice.
Sarah met Lawson half-way up the stairs. She wiped sweat and dust away from her forehead. “She’s right, we either get through this crap fast, or we turn back and get the hell out of here.”
“Leavin’ now ain’t much of an option.”
“Why not? We’ve managed to put Rudd behind us. Let’s just keep moving south to Burn, or better yet, head off in any other direction and settle someplace safer.”
“We ain’t goin’ to Burn. You seen what them things are capable of.” He indicated down to Jenny with a nod of his head. “Look at her…barely out of childhood and pulling chunks of crap a team of horses would be hard-pressed to budge. You think her ma and pa are just going to let us go? Eichberg will track us down if they don’t. I seen firsthand the lengths a man will travel to settle things.”
Sarah whispered back, hoping Jenny wouldn’t hear. “These things aren’t men…they aren’t even human.”
“More the reason to get below for them guns. Once we’re armed, I’ll get us away from here, and that’s a promise.”
Angel called out from below. “We’ve made it, we’ve broken through!” The girl crawled back and watched as Jenny yanked a section of mangled staircase free. The rest crumbled down and crashed into the stairwell landing on level L.
Lawson ran down the stairs pulling Sarah along the way. “If that doesn’t wake the rest of ‘em up, I don’t know what will.”
Willem cried out. “Somethin’s coming!”
Cobe looked back through the door onto level K and saw the glow of white eyes bobbing up and down in the darkness. Another pair joined them, round and pink. The creatures started to scream in unison as Cobe slammed the door shut. He checked the handle and it wobbled uselessly beneath his fingers. There wasn’t time to warn the others. The door flew open knocking both boys to the floor.
A woman, naked and reeking like something dead, landed on the tiles between Willem’s feet and scrambled up his legs, snapping her teeth. Cobe swung out with the piece of railing his brother had dropped and connected with the thing’s ear. Her white eyes scrunched shut, and Cobe readjusted the steel bar in both hands, bringing it down with all of his strength into the top of her skull. Pink Eyes—a man dressed in suit of black and matching tie—lunged through the open doorway and wrestled Cobe onto his back. He jammed a thumb into the thing’s eye and it tried to bite the soft underside of his wrist. Hot saliva leaked out over its bottom lip and dripped onto Cobe’s chin and throat. It felt like the burning rain they’d been caught in on their way to Rudd.
Lawson took hold of the cryer and wrenched it away from the boy. He placed his forearm into the back of its neck and rammed its face into the concrete wall. Its arms flailed frantically and the lawman bashed its face a second time. The arms went still, but there was still some kick in its legs. Lawson gave it another hit, and another. He released the body and watched as it slid down in a trail of blood, spit, and shattered teeth.
“You can never just kill something quickly, can you?” Sarah said.
“Get me to the guns and I’ll show you what fast killin’ is all about.”
They climbed down through the wreckage between floors. Jenny went last, lifting Willem down to his brother. Cobe spoke to the lawman as he made way for the girl to jump down. “Those cryers were easier to kill than the others.”
Lawson nodded. “They weren’t anywhere near as fast or strong. Maybe Eichberg did somethin’ to them ones he woke up first.”
“He didn’t do anything,” Jenny said. “Only those closest to my family and the ones with a lot of money got those extra…perks.”
“Then gettin’ to the weapons shouldn’t be so hard,” Willem added as they descended past level L. “They’re just a bunch of mindless freaks.”
“I wouldn’t rest all that easy, son,” Sarah pointed out. “One of those mindless freaks almost tore your throat out with its teeth.”
The lights in the stairwell went out. Everything was black.
“Nobody move another inch,” the lawman warned.
They waited in silence. Cobe held Willem in front of him. He could feel one of the girls pressing up against his back—Kay, Angel, Jenny—he wasn’t sure who. Returning to Big Hole had been an unsettling idea to begin with—stuck there in complete darkness with the dead returning back to life was terrifying.
A voice called out all around them.
“Lawwww-maaaan.”
Lawson whispered into the dark. “Eichberg.”
“Where are you, Lawman? I can’t see you… Let’s try this.”
There was a momentary buzz somewhere above their heads and the stairwell lit up in red.
“Emergency lighting, Lawman… used primarily in case of an unexpected, facility-wide power failure. Or in this case, to scare the living hell out of trespassers… Aaaahh, there you are. Excellent… you all appear very uptight and apprehensive. The lights are working.”
Lawson covered his mouth with his hand and whispered. “Keep moving towards the armory. Don’t listen to him.”
Jenny looked about in the dull light for the security camera. “He can see us, but I don’t think he can hear us.”
“Oh, but I can, Jennifer. All ABZE facilities are monitored constantly for movement and sound. The tapes have been rolling for a thousand years, recording only the settlement of dust and the noise of eternal silence. If I were at all sentimental, I would say the old place was pleased to finally have some activity inside after so long.”
“Go to hell, you old Nazi,” she yelled.
There was a long pause as her words echoed above and below.
“Old Nazi…That’s what your father called me when I caught him scheming with your mother. They thought they could get rid of me… begin a new society of super-humans on the bones of a less-deserving civilization… Ironic, wouldn’t you say, dear? What did they think we were trying to accomplish in the twentieth century?”
“Where’s my mother?” Jenny called out. “What have you done with my father?”
She had stopped between levels M and N. Everyone else had continued down, leaving Jenny and the lawman alone. “Quit playin’ his games,” Lawson urged. “He’s trying to slow us down.”
“Edna’s fine… as good as a mindless vegetable can be in a town abandoned to a pack of fornicating, inbred savages. They were burning Rudd to the ground when we came after you. Leonard cut off your father’s head with a rusty axe while he was in the dream state with your mother… Not much of a military man… sleeping while on duty.”
The stair railing in her hand crumpled between her fingers. “You old bastard.”
“You aren’t fit to be an Eichberg… I’ll see you die with the rest of them.”
Lothair went silent for a time as Lawson and Jenny caught up with the others on level S. Angel was sitting on the stairs, crying into the palms of her dirty hands. “I can’t take this no more, the red lights, that voice… What is this place?”
Kay tried comforting her. “We seen it all, remember? There isn’t anything to be scared of.”
“Like hell there ain’t. I shoulda let them howler’s take me after they was done my Ma… I wish I was dead.”
Eichberg started up again. “It shouldn’t be long now, child. I’ve been looking over some recent security footage… It appears Ivan Tevalov snuck away for a short time before we left for Rudd and thawed a couple of his family members. They’ve been wandering around for days, climbing level to level in search of food. Perhaps you’ve already seen them during your descent…”
Willem shouted out. “We killed them! Smashed their gawdamn brains in!”
There was a pause. “Yes… I see what’s left of them now above you…very nasty… Most of the ABZE clients here weren’t endowed with additional abilities. They were frozen and left untouched for centuries. Those two awoke without much left functioning in their brains. Mindless. Soulless. Starving. I’m not surprised the seven of you we
re able to dispose of them so easily, but I think having to fight your way through over two-thousand more will be difficult.”
Eichberg’s voice cut off and was replaced with a high-pitched wailing noise.
Angel cringed further into the stairs, fearfully. 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 a thousand years 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 for space and the chance of feeding on something fresher than their own kind. More poured out from levels N, O, and P. The stairwell became too crowded to hold the rush; hand rails buckled outward from the crush of moving weight. A body toppled over somewhere even further above and hurtled down past Cob’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.