Scarlet Dream. James Axler

all night, watching as her people, her legion of the dead, went about their work. Her people had come from the ground, locked now in various states of decay as she had revived them. They shambled, lurching to their tasks as they dug at the marshy ground, clawing at it with withered hands that ended in broken yellow nails.

      Ezili Coeur Noir closed her eyes as her legion of dead dug at the spongy soil, listening to their groans of complaint, their grunts of interest. Most of them had no real capacity for speech anymore; their tongues had shriveled away in death, no longer able to create the shapes needed to turn sound into form. Still, they made noise, the way humans will make noise, as if—even in death—they feared this dead place where the insects made their home. There were other things here, of course—amphibians, birds, some hardy types of fish that swam in the deeper pits of water among the marshes—all of whom seemed to fill the air with creaking and cawing, the hideous shrieks of a child’s nightmare.

      Two centuries before, there had been other things living here, too—humankind. Out here in the depths of the bayou, Army men had cordoned off an area of this sweaty habitat to develop a research station located in the back of beyond, far from the nearest town, with just a single dirt road leading to it. The road endured in patchy remnants, a mud track lined with little sunken posts that stuck out of the earth like sharks’ teeth. The patches of road were uneven, and what remained survived from sheer tenacity and nothing more, for it had barely been used in two centuries and it led, categorically, to a patch of nothing amid a swamp full of the same. Or so it appeared.

      In fact, the swamp had grown to cover the single-story entrance to the redoubt that had once stood at the end of the road. Nature had buried it, either through choice or when the nukecaust of 2001 had rewritten all the maps. Either way, the entrance to the redoubt was hidden beneath layers of marsh and concrete. But far below that, far below the entrance itself, lay the thing that Ezili Coeur Noir was searching for, the toy she wished to play with. She felt it calling to her.

      Instinct had brought her here—instinct, arcane knowledge and an all-pervading sense for death in all its beautiful forms. For, to Ezili Coeur Noir, death was a thing of beauty, the perfect punctuation to conclude the statement called life.

      All around the queen of death, the corpses worked at the soil, pulling and wrenching, tossing aside sodden chunks of earth that hit the ground with wet slaps. As the ground was sifted, black-shelled, multilimbed inhabitants crawled from the soil, disturbed by the outrage. The undead men ignored the beetles and the worms and the termites as they scrabbled from the upturned sod, letting them land and feast on their decaying flesh with hungry mouths. There were other things here, too, finding their way in the early morning gloom, flying insects that buzzed incessantly as they sought out the rotten flesh of the moving living-dead things, yearning to gnaw at it and to lay their eggs in rotten muscles, in ragged ears and between the gaps of the undead men’s smiles. The undead ignored them, or perhaps chewed on those insects that landed between their lips, an old instinct from the days when they had needed to eat, just muscle memory now playing its cruel tricks. The undead care not for the needs of the flesh, are undisturbed by such things as turn the stomachs of the living.

      There came a noise then, a single, sharp thump that sounded of metal. Ezili Coeur Noir opened her eyes to slits, wide black vertical stripes crossing the yellow as she looked out at her people. They looked at her expectantly, twenty corpses that had once been men and women, and two of them just children, recently dead things now who barely stood tall enough to nose at the oyster entrance to her lifeless womb. She saw the expectation in their blank expressions where others would just see the rotting faces of the butcher’s blade. They had found it, she knew—the door to the redoubt.

      Ezili Coeur Noir stepped forward, her spindly legs flicking out uncomfortably, like the long limbs of a house spider, trotting forward with a disquieting gait. Despite her skeletal form and the hideous way her decomposing legs ground against the sockets of her hips, the queen of death still strode with an indefinably regal air, her head held high. She dominated all that she saw; there could be no question that here was the ruler of all that her reptilian eyes surveyed. Even through their dead orbs, her corpselike minions saw this and several of them genuflected in appreciation as she tottered past them, the upper half of her body swaying as though a leaf on the mildest breeze.

      The door was buried amid the sludge of the swamp, hunks of powdery concrete clinging to its surface. Reinforced steel, the door lay in front of the queen of death, nine feet by twelve, not flat but at a slight angle that made it a locked portal in the ground. A few brave rays of sunlight sneaked through the thick plant cover to glimmer on its metal surface, and pools of water began leaking over it even as Ezili Coeur Noir looked. Here was the entrance to the redoubt, the entrance that had been hidden for over two centuries.

      Without taking her eyes from the gleaming surface of the steel door, Ezili Coeur Noir issued an instruction in a voice with all the vibrancy of ashes crushed in the palm of the hand. “Open it.”

      The corpses hurried to obey, pushing past one another in their haste to serve their terrible mistress. Groaning and mumbling, Ezili Coeur Noir’s undead workers pulled at the door, struggling to make it move on its hinges. The door resisted. Not only had it been designed to withstand the impact of a nuclear blast, but also its hinges had been undisturbed for two hundred years; to move such a thing now was like trying to lift a mountain.

      Ezili Coeur Noir observed with but the mildest of interest, barely watching as her favored subjects worked at the door, throwing themselves at it, ripping at the seals with the broken nails of their decaying hands, tugging away the concrete debris that had amassed there. The corpses felt no pain and could never tire, for they were at the peak of tiredness, the tiredness that comes only with the grave. And so they simply followed the instructions of their mistress without question, working at the door with all their effort until at last something moved. There had been a magnetic seal in place here, operated by an electronic lock, but even a magnet can be conquered, given enough force, facing an opponent with relentless and tireless ambition, limitless reserves of strength.

      It took half an hour, but finally the corpses stepped aside as the door glided back on its tracks, grinding slowly to the side to reveal the shadow-filled interior of a long-forgotten military base. Two of the corpses had lost limbs in their struggles with the door, and one his head, but the others had used the broken bodies as props and levers until the door finally gave. Now the broken corpses simply waited with the others, blessedly unaware of how their incompletion might make them inferior. Ezili Coeur Noir strode forward, the sunlight playing in the jutting spikes of yellowing bone that poked upright atop her head in a crest.

      This close to the door, she could smell the stale air, which had been trapped within the redoubt since it had been sealed all those years before. Her stub of nose wrinkled for a moment in her decaying face, and her lips pulled back from sharp teeth as she was dealt the full force of that putrid air. Ezili Coeur Noir chuckled then, reveling in the stench of the absence of life. Here was a part of the Earth that had been hidden so long that it had been effectively taken from the living. Now it stood as a shrine to death, proof positive of life’s inability to truly conquer her planet.

      As the stale air dissipated, the queen of death stepped into the shadow-drenched interior of the redoubt, her long toenails clacking against the hard concrete floor. Obediently, her little army followed, their loyalty to their mistress beyond reproach. They were recently dead things, and yet they still moved, for she had granted them life, after a fashion.

      Despite being unoccupied for over two hundred years, the redoubt reacted to the movement within. The motion-sensitive strip lights flickered on along the floor and high in the ceiling, illuminating the vast, slope-walled corridor that Ezili Coeur Noir and her people now found themselves in. The light mattered little to the queen of death; she needed nothing but her inherent sense of all that kills and rots and dies to guide her way. Corpses to the left of her, corpses to the right, Ezili Coeur Noir strode down the redoubt corridor, lights flickering on with her every step, the footsteps of her posse echoing into the darkness ahead as the distant lights winked on. In such close proximity to the corpses, Ezili Coeur Noir could smell their rotting flesh as it clung to their bodies, insects burrowing among its rotten folds. The corpses reeked of death and the smell pleased her, its perfume a scent she would bathe in given