bulky crates in what seemed to be an effortless manner despite their wasted musculature. Kane counted more than a dozen zombies, for want of a better term, before his attention was drawn to the far side of the room. There, off to the right, a large glass-walled area took up almost one-third of the floor space, and Kane could see movement within. A towering figure strode among the other corpses, rotting like them and yet somehow demanding Kane’s attention. As he watched, Kane realized it was a woman, her flesh almost entirely rotted away, what remained a dark shade of brown like licorice beneath scraps of clothing.
There was an incessant buzzing coming from the hangar, low but present all the same, from the insects that flew close to the dead things, drawn to their rotting stench. It was incessant, like the sound made by someone running a finger around the rim of a wineglass. But for the woman it was different. Nothing flew around her.
Kane stepped back from the opening, swiftly attracting the attention of his companions. “There’s something going on out there,” he told them in a sharp whisper, “but I need to get closer if we’re going to find out what it is.”
Grant nodded sternly once and, after a moment’s hesitation, Brigid did the same. Briefly, Kane outlined the layout of the room and explained where everyone was to go before he led the way on swift, silent tread, into the vast, hangarlike chamber.
All the while, Kane couldn’t shake the feeling that there was something very familiar about the corpselike woman he had spied in the glass-walled office. Emaciated and almost fleshless, she had a certain presence he recognized, a certain bearing he felt that he somehow knew.
Quickly, his head ducked low between his shoulders, Kane sprinted to the nearest wall of the glass-lined area, crouching where a bank of filing cabinets had been placed against the wall on the far side.
Across the hangar, Brigid and Grant made their way through the shadows at the edge of the room, posting themselves among a pile a dismantled crates atop which a crowbar had been discarded. From here, they could see the doorway to the glass-walled area, as well as most of the vast, hangarlike room without exposing themselves.
Now poised beside the glass wall, Kane edged himself up from his crouch and peeked through the glass. This close up he could see that it was smeared with dust and grime, but he could still see through it clearly enough to observe what was going on within. The room itself seemed to be some kind of office with a laboratory attached, and files of paper had been left haphazardly over several surfaces while the lab was now in an obvious state of disrepair. The spindly corpse woman who had drawn Kane’s attention continued flicking through the pages of the file she held in her clawlike hands as other undead figures wandered throughout the room.
Kane watched incredulously as a fly, its bloated black body like a blob of ink, left the gaping eye socket of its host, a dead child no taller than Kane’s navel. It flew around in that strange, hard-angled-turn manner that flies will until they find somewhere to go. Then, the inkblot fly seemed to spot the woman, darting in the air to buzz toward her. But as it neared her, attracted by her reeking decrepitude, the fly’s wings ceased moving and it simply dropped, plummeting to the ground where it landed with a sharp whisper, now just a dried-up husk. Kane saw another fly do the same thing a moment later, this one a fat bluebottle with body like shimmering glass. This, too, dropped in the presence of the corpse woman, falling to the floor as though in supplication.
Machinery whirred behind her within the glass-walled room, ancient lab technology that was being operated—perversely, it seemed to Kane—by another of the shambling undead figures, this one a short, stocky woman whose skin had wrinkled into a black smear that clung like tar to her dead flesh. She was operating some kind of mixing device, Kane realized, and he moved a little to his right so that he could see what the device was doing. He watched as test tubes spun, their luminous contents bubbling and frothing with each rotation of a spinner arm. There were four test tubes at each end of the arm, eight in total, each clamped there by holding pincers, a stopper cap preventing their contents from spilling free as the arm rotated.
“What the hell are they mixing up in there?” Kane mouthed, his voice something less than a whisper.
Kane watched as the eight glass tubes were whirled around once again within the centrifuge unit, like a tiny funfair ride. The spinner arm itself was located behind reinforced armaglass, like a little glass display cabinet at the side of the room. Presumably, the cabinet was designed to both dampen the noise of the machinery and to protect the user from dangerous chemicals, for the door could be sealed to prevent any leakage. However, Kane spotted a crack in the glass and the lock appeared to have been wrenched off, a brown smear across the front panel—the woman’s flesh, he acknowledged with a growing sense of nausea.
A digital timer at the top of the mixing unit glowed, proudly counting down from a little over twelve hours, its green numbers marching slowly toward an inevitable zero. Whatever it was that was being mixed there, it would be ready at sundown, Kane calculated.
His interest piqued, Kane shifted his position, turning his attention back to the taller, corpselike figure who seemed to dominate the room. The corpse woman was working through a file of papers, and Kane swallowed hard as he saw the pages begin to crumble in her hands, tiny flecks of paper sailing away on the air, now nothing more than dust. Wrapped in its brown cardboard sleeve, the file was marked U.S. Army and several notations appeared on its foremost page.
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
