Scarlet Dream. James Axler

The echoes of his companions’ footsteps came back to him, and once he judged that they had both reached the next floor he slipped back from the door, letting it slowly close before he hurried up the stairs.

      One flight above, Kane stood in front of another fire door, peering through a vertical rectangle of reinforced glass, approximately twelve inches by two. There was nothing but darkness beyond, and he realized with irritation that, without something out there, the motion-sensitive lights of the ancient redoubt would remain off. He held his empty hand up in a halting gesture so that Brigid could see. “Stay here, keep me covered,” he said in a low voice.

      Then Kane pulled the heavy door toward him and dashed out into the corridor beyond, the solid black muzzle of his Sin Eater poised and leading the way. Brigid stepped forward, wedging the door open with her foot as she watched Kane jog down the corridor, the overhead lights sparking into life. Like the one below, this corridor was painted a dull off-white. A horizontal bar of green ran in a continuous line along the bottom third of each wall.

      With the overhead lights sputtering to life ahead of him, Kane swiftly and meticulously checked each door leading off from the gray-green corridor, trying the handles, peering inside those that were unlocked, and then moving on. Brigid held her TP-9 semiautomatic out and ready, tracking Kane’s movements, her steadying left hand gripped just beneath the wrist of her outstretched right.

      Kane felt instinctively that this whole level was empty, and he made short work of checking as much of the area as he could. It appeared to be primarily a storage level, with several offices and a quartet of bunk rooms at the far end close to the restrooms. Other than dust and a half-full box of now-perished canned food, the level was inoffensive in its emptiness. Had anyone been here, Kane concluded, the lights would have been on already—the only real risk was when he came to the bunk rooms, whose lights worked on a manual switch. As such, they may just contain someone lurking in the darkness.

      Warily, Kane entered the first of the bunk rooms, ducking low as he stepped inside, conscious of the lit doorway at his back that would illuminate him as an ideal target for anyone hiding in the shadows. Crouching in the darkness, Kane stilled his breathing, listening for any sounds of movement, any indication of another presence within the room. There was nothing, he felt sure, and he edged his left hand along the wall behind him until he found the light switch, flicking it on.

      Illuminated, the room was empty. It contained three Army cots, one each to his left and right and a third over against the wall farthest from the door. There was a footlocker at the end of each bed; two of them were closed, their lids scarred and chipped. The third lay open, and Kane peered briefly at its contents—several garishly colored comic books, a dark pair of socks with a toe missing and a well-thumbed paperback with a man’s booted feet on its bright red cover. The open lid to the footlocker had attracted a layer of dust, through which a two-inch yellow circle peeked like the sun. Kane leaned down, wiping his finger through the dust until he could see the circle in full; it was a sticker bearing the legend “I heart Atlanta”. Kane wondered idly if the owner would still “heart” Atlanta half as much if they saw what the nuclear devastation had wrought there shortly after this redoubt had been sealed.

      Kane turned, leaving the room as he had found it and made his way farther along the corridor to check the other rooms. There were three other bunk rooms, and each contained two or three Army cots along with occasional belongings that had been left behind when the redoubt had been closed, nothing but forgotten antiques now.

      Head down, Kane took long, swift strides back to the stairwell where Brigid and Grant waited. Brigid had her gun trained on the corridor as Kane approached. Behind her, Grant appeared tense as he surveyed the stairwell, up and down.

      “Level’s clear,” Kane explained, keeping his voice low. “Guessing no one’s interfered with this junk in two centuries. Whatever Cerberus was reading, it may just be a wild mutie chase.”

      “Might be,” Grant agreed, sounding less than convinced. “Want me to take the next one?”

      “I’ve got it,” Kane assured him, taking the lead once more as he trotted up the concrete stairs.

      As he turned the right-angle in the stairwell heading up, Kane saw a sliver of light eking through the rectangular glass of the fire door that faced him. Kane slowed as he climbed the stairs, checking the higher levels with a swift glance before focusing on the illuminated rectangle of light. “Could be company,” he stated, his voice little more than a whisper.

      At the tail of the group, Grant peered back over his shoulder, making sure no one was following them from below, while Brigid pushed herself close to the outside wall as she slowly followed Kane.

      At the penultimate stair, Kane ducked, keeping his head lower than the bottom of the glass panel, pressing his knee against the step in front of him. Kane stared, trying to make out what was going on on the other side of the tiny window as its light played against the wall. He could see the familiar off-white paint of another corridor and the edge of one of the overhead strip lights showed, glowing firmly in its ceiling mounting. Kane waited, doing a slow count to ten in his head—now was not the time to rush in where angels feared to tread. As he waited, a shadow crossed the rectangle of glass, and Kane instinctively crouched lower, the barrel of the Sin Eater held at eye level, pointing upward to where the door would open. Nothing happened.

      Warily, his breathing coming slow and steady despite the tension he felt, Kane inched forward, his eyes still on the clear glass panel. Behind him, Brigid hugged the wall, the TP-9 semiautomatic poised on the closed door.

      Still in a crouch, Kane sidled up to the door until his head was just below the edge of its small windowpane. For a moment he watched the square of light that was projected on the wall to his side, waiting to see if anything else crossed the gap, all the while listening intently for the sounds of movement. There was nothing; it was quiet as the grave.

      Almost a minute passed with Kane just waiting there, searching for any further indications of movement. Then he peered back, his eyes glancing past Brigid and fixing on Grant’s. Grant recognized the question in the ex-Mag’s face, and he nodded, indicating he was ready.

      Kane turned back to the fire door, standing to his full height and reaching for its cool metal handle. As he did so, the face of a man appeared at the window. Or, at least, the remains of a face—for the man appeared to be decomposing even as the empty sockets of his eyes fixed on Kane.

      Chapter 4

      With a sudden crash, the reinforced glass pane shattered inward as the eyeless thing’s decomposing hand smashed through it, reaching for Kane through the window in the fire door. Kane leaped backward, staggering down two steps in his haste and yet still just barely avoiding the lancelike fingertips as they clawed the air, grasping for his face.

      “The hell is that?” Grant swore from his position on the lower level.

      Kane raised his Sin Eater, targeting the door. “Whatever it is, it’s about to be a whole lot of dead,” he snarled.

      The heavy fire door swung open as far as the safety hinge would let it, and the creature staggered into the stairwell. His tread was unsteady, more a series of lurches than a regular stride. As he approached, Kane barked an order at it, employing the authoritative voice he had used back in his Magistrate days.

      “Restricted area, perpetrator—down on your knees.”

      The eyeless corpse gave no indication of adhering to Kane’s instruction but merely took another shaky step forward, negotiating the first stair with a rumbling groan from deep in his throat.

      It was clearly a man—tall, thin and wearing a dark suit of some sort. It was hard to tell more than that, however. The suit was moth-eaten and parts of it looked burned. As for the man’s flesh, that also looked moth-eaten, rotted meat clinging to jagged bones in some perverse mockery of life.

      The walking corpse took a step closer to the Cerberus team. Smelling him for the first time, Brigid Baptiste began to gag. He stank of rotting, infected meat, and as she watched she saw something dark appear between the wasting muscles of his neck; a hairy