by North, Geoff
There was an awful grown of metal giving way and the low pop of bolts surrendering their hold in concrete. Lawson and Sarah pushed the others up against the wall as bodies rained down in a wash of clawing 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 into 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 a hand wrapped around her ankle. Willem stumbled in a mound of writhing limbs and fell forward down onto the next floor.
The seven stayed together. Sarah 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 down on fingers, shouting obscenities her parents wouldn’t have believed the girl knew. 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. The siren began to warble. 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. Sarah 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 and settling dust.
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 Sarah 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.”
Chapter 58
Eichberg wouldn’t have the chance to kill them on his own. 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… 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 for the others to follow.
The dark window Cobe and Willem had seen their reflection 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 Sarah pulled the desk away. There wasn’t much to see other than broken glass and smoldering 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.”
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 Sarah were straining away 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 Sarah 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 did
n’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. Sarah 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 take him 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. Vengefulness and hatred weren’t all Lothair was feeling. His great-great granddaughter was leading them deeper into the Dauphin facility. She was going to end everything.
Lothair felt fear.
Chapter 59
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, and that’s exactly how Cobe saw it. 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
AUTHHORIZED 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 leave 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 causing 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 the 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 said. 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!” Lothair continued yelling as he ran down the stairs. “I’ll eat their brains—as distasteful as that is to me, I’ll do it! I’ll eat their fucking brains and watch as Leonard rapes my great-great granddaughter.”
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.
There were only doors.
One of them opened and a little girl stepped out. “Hello, Dr. Penzig. I’ve missed you.”
“Nicole.” He remembered all of his patients’ names.
She took two of his fingers into her black-scabbed hand and pulled him into the room. It was one of his operating theatres beneath the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. He’d performed hundreds of surgeries here in another life. And there were hundreds of dead children in there with him now. They were packed along the walls and sitting up along cabinets. Every square inch was filled with long somber faces and accusing eyes. The only thing not covered in filthy grey clothes and blackened skin was the surgical table sitting in the center of the room.
A small boy with his fingers missing along the first set of knuckles pushed through the others. He stared up at Lothair.
“Anatoly? I saw you with your parents…in the playground. They took you away. They took all of you away.”
“I came back for you, Doctor… We all did.” He took Lothair’s other hand and they led him to the table.
A woman’s voice spoke up behind him. “Didn’t see this coming, did you?”
Eichberg turned and saw Edna standing in the open doorway. “You bitch… You lying, traitorous bitch.”
“Don’t swear in front of the children.”