Taschen lay at his desk, blood dripping across the surface and spilling onto the antique Persian rug that lay in front, once regally spread but now rucked and torn by the fight that had taken place. Although most of the antique furniture and priceless objects d’art that he had collected in his various incarnations still cluttered the room undamaged, Louis XVI chairs were splintered and antique display cabinets were splattered with blood.
“All that conspicuous wealth,” Mildred muttered, almost to herself.
“Wealth? It doesn’t mean anything now.” J.B. shrugged. “It’s got no real value in the real world.”
“That’s the problem, John,” Mildred said sadly. “In his version of the real world, it still did. And it once had in the world I lived in. That was why people like him made shit like this happen.”
“It’s over for the Illuminated Ones now,” Krysty said firmly but quietly. “Without that fat bastard, they’re nothing more than a bunch of confused idiots spread across the land, waiting for a call that’ll never come.”
“None of which will matter a jot unless we get the little matter of the nefarious disease resolved,” Doc interjected with a note of urgency in his tone. “So I suggest that we follow our leader and begin the counterattack.”
Ryan nodded firmly, his mouth set grim and tight in anticipation of the knife edge journey they had to face, and hit the sec door release with the flat of his hand. As with the exterior locking mechanism, there was no keypad, only a single red button. Dean was about to ask Doc how it could be a counterattack if there was no initial attack to actually counter, but held his peace as the door began to rise. Taschen had obviously had the self-belief to never consider that anyone other than himself would wish to leave the room, and so had no safety devices built in.
Led by the one-eyed man, they stepped out of the room that stank of decadence, decay and death rooted in the long distant past, and moved into the bare concrete corridor of a world that was more familiar to them.
THEY KNEW that the redoubt was sparsely populated. That gave them an advantage in that it should, theoretically, be easy to avoid the Illuminated Ones and get back to the mat-trans hangar in order to free the Gate. But that could take a little time, and the ticking chron was a commodity of which they were short.
The auxiliary corridor in which they found themselves was quiet and deserted, leading onto a main corridor in which there was also very little sign of life. Although they kept close to the wall, alert for any activity, they were in a part of the redoubt where little in the way of work activity took place, and so they were able to make rapid progress down to the next level. It was as they progressed that Mildred became aware of the pains in her lungs, her breathing coming harder. She was acutely aware of the wheezing that emanated from Doc, and Jak’s normally ghostly pale skin was scored by a number of weals and sores as the pox burst out on his hands and face, becoming more visible.
“Ryan, slow for a second,” she rasped.
The texture and urgency of her voice made the one-eyed man cease moving forward, and he looked back to her. Under her plaits, which hung limply around her face, he could see that her dark skin was darker in patches, where the disease was erupting through her pores. The whites of her eyes were bloodshot. She looked ill, and her labored breathing was alarming to him.
“Listen,” she began, “I don’t know if I can make it back to the bottom and then find the lab. I have a suggestion. Doc and I go for the med lab, try to find the cure, while you free the Gate and chill these fuckers.”
“You be okay, just the two of you?”
Mildred smiled. “How the hell do I know, Ryan? But Doc and I are worst hit, so we need the antidote first, and we can move better as two than as three or four. Besides, you need all the firepower you can get if you’re going to get the Gate free.”