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 caterpillar, its black body thick as a man’s thumb and longer than Brigid’s hand. Poised against the wall, the former archivist reared away, watching as the ghastly thing took another staggering step past her, reaching out toward Kane.
“On your knees,” Kane repeated, gesturing with the muzzle of the Sin Eater pistol in his hand. “You take one more step and I will shoot.” He didn’t have any authority here, that was true, but Kane was pretty damn sure that the dead thing that stumbled in front of him didn’t, either.
Behind the creature, the fire door had eased itself closed on its slow hinges, effectively shutting off the noise of movement here from the rest of the redoubt. The rotting thing took another lurching step toward the ex-Mag.
Kane gritted his teeth. “You’re about to end up a whole lot deader if you don’t back off,” he snarled.
Then, with a surge of incredible speed in the dim lighting of the tight stairwell, the corpse-thing lunged for Kane. More literally he fell at Kane, arms outstretched, using weight and gravity to propel himself at the ex-Mag.
Kane depressed the trigger stud of his Sin Eater and a stream of 9 mm slugs rammed into that cadaverous body even as he fell forward. The sounds of gunfire echoed throughout the stairwell as Kane was slammed backward by the falling corpse, and he felt his feet slip off the step, throwing his balance. Then Kane found himself crashing against the metal-barlike banister that ran around the inside turn of the stairwell, striking it with his lower back in a spasm of sharp pain.
Kane’s feet kicked out as he finally lost his balance, and suddenly he was toppling backward, the corpse still flailing at him as they both began to drop over the side of the stairs.
Moving on instinct alone, Brigid reached out and grabbed for the undead thing that was pushing Kane, seizing the creature’s legs as she watched Kane descend over the banister. Held in Brigid’s grip, the corpse-thing found himself dragged off his victim, and he turned to face her even as his head slammed into the metal banister with a resounding clang. In that instant, Brigid produced her TP-9 and drilled a cacophony of bullets into the thing’s decomposing face, reducing it to pulp. Chunks of rotted flesh sprayed the walls around her as bullets mashed into the remains of the thing’s hideous features.
At the same time, one floor below, Kane dropped head-first toward the next flight of stairs. Twisting frantically in midair, he stretched his arms out in front of him in an effort to break his fall. He landed badly—it was hard to do otherwise, landing as he did on the uneven incline of the stairs—taking the impact in his strong arms and rolling over onto his back with a grunt of pain.
“You okay?” Grant asked, peeking down the stairwell at his partner as Brigid continued struggling with the corpse on the floor above.
“Help Brigid,” Kane replied without hesitation.
Grant didn’t question the order—he knew that Kane only used Brigid Baptiste’s first name when he was really concerned for her. He figured that being knocked over a balcony by an animated corpse will do that to you.
Brigid, however, had matters well in hand. The corpselike figure staggered in place as she peppered his decomposing body with bullets, until he finally slouched against the banister and sunk to the floor in a heap, emaciated limbs flailing in all directions.
“I think it’s dead,” Grant said as he hurried up the stairs to join Brigid.
Brigid
