Scarlet Dream. James Axler

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      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.

      Chapter 5

      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.