at him, one ginger eyebrow cocked in amusement. “I think it was dead before it met me,” she said.
Grant leaned down, getting a closer look at the messy, foul-smelling remains of the creature. Clearly human but visibly decomposing, he reeked of death. Using the barrel of his gun, Grant prodded the corpse a few times, but the dead thing didn’t react.
As Grant pushed at the unmoving corpse in the dim lighting of the stairwell, Kane trudged back up the stairs, a spatter of blood marring his forehead. “Did we get it?” he asked.
Grant nodded while Brigid checked Kane’s wound. It was just a graze; the thin line of blood made it look worse than it really was. Once she wiped that away, Brigid could see the scratch, and it had already dried.
“If Stinky here has buddies,” Kane noted, “that shattered window is going to draw their attention. But if we move quick, maybe we can get the jump on them.”
With that, the Cerberus trio headed for the fire door, leaving the remains of the dead man sprawled across the stairs. They didn’t notice him flinch, struggling to pull himself up from the floor after the heavy fire door had inched closed, his ruined face dripping away in gobs of muscle and dried-up skin.
AN ALIEN RACE called the Annunaki had first visited the Earth aeons ago and had been surreptitiously involved in human affairs ever since the emergence of humankind. To man, these beings from the stars, wielding technology far in advance of anything he could comprehend, had seemed divine, and so man had served and worshipped them without question.
But the Annunaki, alarmed at the proliferation of humans, initiated a wave of destruction to purge the Earth of humankind and start afresh. Recorded by various historical documents, that purging is perhaps best known as the Great Flood of Judeo-Christian tradition, and although it decimated the local population it failed to totally destroy it.
The Annunaki had spent the subsequent millennia observing from the shadows as man had grown bold, had proliferated at an alarming rate and learned how to tame his environment for his own ends. While the Annunaki had weaponry that had seemed magical in its capability, they had been fascinated to see how man developed his own terrible weaponry, things that could hurt and maim and kill.
Ultimately, the Annunaki had played their hand once more to begin the second great purging, utilizing fire this time where water had failed before. The brief nuclear war of 2001 had utterly changed the landscape of the planet Earth, creating vast tracts of irradiated land known as the Deathlands, and all but destroying the population. This was the world’s legacy that the Cerberus rebels inhabited.
But while the nuclear bombs had marked the end of civilization, they had not been the only means of destruction developed by man. In fact, in the centuries since the Annunaki had first tried to extinguish him, man had excelled in developing the means with which to kill his fellow man, and many and varied ways had been created that might be used to that terrible end.
Deep in the subterranean complex of Redoubt Mike, Ezili Coeur Noir had just uncovered one such terrible weapon. The queen of all things dead, Ezili Coeur Noir had an inherent ability, something like a homing instinct, that drew her to the things that would destroy life. She had sensed this thing down here, deep beneath the Louisiana bayou, and she found herself drawn to it. In her mind, it was like some almighty magnet drawing her down into the earth, down where the dead men lay.
MOVING STEALTHILY, Kane led the way into the corridor with Grant and Brigid just behind him. The undead thing that they had encountered had shaken them all up, and Kane felt unsettled as he trekked down the corridor.
The overhead lights flickered here, and though the motion sensors responded to the presence of the Cerberus rebels, several of the fluorescent tubes had blown. In places the lights flickered in staccato bursts, leaving the corridor in a sort of half-light of lightning flashes. Like the ones they had encountered on the lower levels of the redoubt, the corridor itself was painted off-white, with a boldly colored stripe lining the bottom third of the walls. This stripe was finished in a bright sky blue, and with the flickering illumination it gave Kane the eerie illusion of being below water.
There were no other corpse-things, but the corridor was littered with broken crates and boxes, with ancient paperwork strewed across the carpet tiles of the floor.
“Looks like they used this level as a dumping ground,” Grant muttered.
“Guess they wanted to get rid of this stuff,” Brigid pointed out, kicking at one of the stacks of paperwork with her toe. The topmost papers of the stack slid to the floor, and Brigid saw a bold red stamp marked Top Secret across several fluttering pages. “It’s just so much landfill now.”
Kane moved on, passing two open doorways to his left, both of them opening out into storerooms stacked with old furniture, chairs with broken backrests and wheels missing from their runners, computer desks stained with centuries’ old coffee.
This corridor proved much shorter than the ones he had explored on the preceding levels, and it ended in a solid wall on which hung a lone fire extinguisher painted a bright bloodred. Beneath the flickering light, the extinguisher seemed to flash like some fleshy cut in the wall, vying for Kane’s attention.
Off to the right, Kane saw a wide corridor set at a right angle to the one they were in. The corridor stood in darkness, and Kane peered into it trying to make out details. He could discern faint noises coming from its far end, distant shuffling sounds. With a swift hand gesture, Kane led the way silently down the corridor, his companions following at a wary distance, their guns ready.
The white-blue corridor ended in a sharp turn that opened directly into a large room the size of an aircraft hangar. The exit came so abruptly in the intermittent tube lighting that Kane very nearly stepped straight out into the open before he realized what he was doing. The sole of his boot scraped against the floor as he came up short and pulled back to the edge of the wall. He had managed just the briefest of glances ahead, but in that half second he had seen plenty, his regimented brain automatically taking in details from years of discipline.
It was a vast room, perhaps eighty feet square with scratched metal decking that glinted beneath harsh spotlights hanging on high catwalks. There were figures moving around the vast room—fleshy, shambling figures like the corpse-thing that his team had tangled with in the stairwell.
Grant and Brigid caught up with Kane and he gave them a look, indicating that someone was on the other side of the wall. Brigid lowered herself behind Kane until she knelt in a crouch by the near wall. Grant, meanwhile, silently eased himself across the wide corridor until his back was flush against the far wall, just out of sight of the opening but with the gap firmly in the sights of his poised Sin Eater.
Kane inched forward, bringing himself in low to peer once more around the edge of the whitewashed wall. He saw now that the room beyond was lit in patches, but it was enough that he could make out even the far corners, where stacks of crates towered haphazardly against gray-licked walls. Three aging Army vehicles were parked off to the left of the room. Two were jeeps, their tires long since perished or removed, one with its engine on blocks in front of its open hood, and the third was a heavy artillery truck, its olive paintwork caked with mud that had dried there two centuries ago, its tires flat.
At the rear of the room, Kane spotted the twin metal doors of a goods elevator. They opened like jaws, and the elevator looked wide enough to hold a truck. This was doubtless how the vehicles had been brought here, Kane realized, and presumably they had been left when the redoubt had been closed down.
The central strip of the room was empty. Painted lines marked out a “road” and designated safe walkways. Corpselike figures wandered
