Scarlet Dream. James Axler

the tunnel sloped downward at as light incline for a long time, with no visible breaks, no doorways or recesses. From far at its dark end there came a low rumbling, as ancient generators groaned back into life and machinery began to whir. Here and there black wiring led down from the overhead lights or up from the floor, ending in a junction box set at the midpoint of the otherwise blank walls, each one cased in black plastic with a little door that worked on a simple spring-loaded hinge. Every thirty paces there was a small red box covered by a glass panel, the fire alarm system that had been installed centuries earlier.

      Here, Ezili Coeur Noir knew, buried deep in the sub-levels of the forgotten redoubt, was a thing that could do her bidding on a colossal scale. She could sense it, in the way that she could somehow sense all things that brought decay, a flaming beacon in her mind, calling to her with siren song.

      The blank-walled tunnel sloped for almost three hundred paces, and by the time the group had reached its end, the motion-sensitive lights behind them had begun switching off, leaving the area by the entry door in darkness once more. The walls were a bland gray, smoothed concrete and plaster left unpainted. Here and there, notations had been scratched on the walls, tiny markings in pencil, the initials of a soldier or a workman scrawled lightly into the plaster in a spot close to the curved ceiling beside one of the recessed strip lights.

      At the end of the tunnel the group stopped at a set of steel double doors that were set horizontally like the jaws of an immense trapped animal. The grinding, whirring noise came from behind these closed doors, and Ezili Coeur Noir halted in front of them. In silence, her undead entourage waited obediently behind her.

      Then, the horizontal double doors split, one shunting upward while the other retreated into the base of the floor, and a steel-walled box was revealed. Small halogen lights flickered on in the ceiling as the doors disappeared from view. It was an elevator, reinforced and large enough to hold a supply truck. The tunnel leading here had one purpose only, which was to take people to this elevator, and so the redoubt was designed to automatically call the elevator once the entry doors were opened.

      With all the grace that the dead can muster, Ezili Coeur Noir stepped through the doors, and her undead companions shambled behind her, walking into the large boxlike construction of the elevator cage. Behind them, the elevator doors rumbled closed on tracks that hadn’t been used in two hundred years, and then the elevator began to descend into the core of the buried redoubt.

      Standing in the shaking elevator, the sound of long-unused pulleys whining in her ears, Ezili Coeur Noir glanced around her, taking in the dead figures who had come to form her entourage. Ezili Coeur Noir had granted the dead life, but truly she wanted the reverse—to give the living the glorious gift of death.

      Ezili Coeur Noir was the queen of all things rotten, all things dead, and in that lay her power. For all things must rot, and all things must die. And so they would, and so they shall.

      Chapter 2

      In another military redoubt, high in the Bitterroot Mountains of Montana, a warning light was blinking urgently on the computer monitor screen of Brewster Philboyd. In his midforties, Philboyd was an astrophysicist by discipline. His blond hair was swept back from a receding hairline. A lanky six feet tall, he looked faintly uncomfortable as he sat in the swivel chair, hunched in front of his monitor in the central operations room of the redoubt with its twin aisles of computer terminals, its walls dedicated to the monitoring equipment that defined the hidden base’s function.

      Behind Philboyd, a vast Mercator map dominated the wall above the doors into the operations room, showing every continent of the world, each one connected by dozens of different colored lines like the old flight plan maps that had existed before the nuclear holocaust had all but destroyed civilization. The map was just one part of a monitoring system that was dedicated to the upkeep of the mat-trans project, a transportation system developed in the late twentieth century by the U.S. military. The mat-trans units scattered around the globe could be used to move goods and personnel from location to location in the blink of an eye.

      Like the map and the monitoring equipment in the control room, Brewster Philboyd was a relic from the twentieth century. He, along with a number of other military personnel, had been cryogenically frozen and placed in hiding on the Manitius Moon Base just prior to the outbreak of nuclear hostilities between the USA and the old USSR. Like many of other people who manned the redoubt now known as Cerberus, Brewster had been awoken two hundred years later into a new and dangerous world, where a once proud civilization had been replaced by the veiled manipulation of humanity by a poisonous alien race called the Annunaki. In recent years, Cerberus had set itself against this alien threat in a series of dangerous skirmishes, though the odds of actually defeating such a technologically superior enemy seemed astronomical.

      Philboyd leaned forward slightly in his seat, adjusting the black-rimmed glasses he wore above his acne-scarred cheeks as he studied the warning pop-up that had appeared on his monitor. Philboyd’s fingers played briefly across his keyboard as he brought up the details of the alert, scrolling through the data swiftly as he scanned the information it imparted. It appeared that there was life—or movement at least—in a long-abandoned redoubt out in Louisiana. According to the scrolling information on his screen, the old military base was designated as Redoubt Mike, adhering to the ancient military protocol of naming redoubts after a phonetic letter of the alphabet.

      Turning in his chair, Brewster attracted the attention of his superior, a man called Mohandas Lakesh Singh, who was busy at a terminal that sat at the back of the room, overlooking the operations center.

      “Lakesh?” Brewster began. “Do you know anything about a redoubt out near White Lake, Louisiana?”

      Lakesh’s blue eyes glazed over for a moment as he contemplated the question. He was a well-built man of medium height who appeared to be in his midfifties, with refined features and an aquiline nose. Known to his friends as Lakesh, Dr. Singh was in fact over 250 years old, and he had been with the Cerberus redoubt before the nuclear conflict that had ended the twenty-first century one cold January day. A cyberneticist and accomplished physicist, Lakesh had been involved with the mat-trans project from its earliest days, and it was with some sense of irony that he found himself in the same monitoring room several centuries later.

      “Redoubt Mike,” Lakesh mused, his eyes coming back into focus. “I have visited it several times.” When Brewster looked at him curiously, Lakesh inclined his head with self-deprecation, and added noncommittally, “In my youth. Why do you ask about it, Brewster?”

      Philboyd gestured to his flickering terminal screen. “According to this, Mike has a visitor. Maybe an intruder.”

      “That’s quite impossible,” Lakesh protested, rising from his seat. “That redoubt was sealed in the 1990s. Sealed and buried.”

      “Buried?” Brewster intoned.

      “Redoubt Mike was a staging area for one of the earliest mat-trans units,” Lakesh explained, “a prototype via which some of our initial exploration was done. Mike’s mat-trans acted primarily as a sending unit, rather than a receiver, but this was in the early days of the project when the colossal amount of power required to operate a chamber was still being investigated. Mike’s mat-trans operated using a cold-fusion generator—a nuclear system that was ultimately considered too problematic for the strains placed upon it.”

      “Problematic, how?” Philboyd queried.

      “Mike’s was a working prototype in operation while the whole process was still at its teething stage,” Lakesh explained. “Ultimately, the idea of powering the units by cold fusion was judged too dangerous to continue to use, and so other avenues were pursued. Of course, several early systems were being tested at this stage. It was a prestige military project, and as is often the way in such cases, money was in place to ensure it would work.”

      Philboyd nodded in understanding. “But you said it was buried?” he asked.

      “Redoubt Mike was abandoned once the cold-fusion system was deemed unsuitable,” Lakesh explained. “The base itself was primarily belowground, with only the entry at ground level. They concreted over those doors