Genesis Echo (Deathlands 25) by James Axler

“Please?”

Ryan took careful aim and shot him neatly through the bridge of the nose. The head bounced against the wall, leaving a long smear of brains and blood, decorated with bright splinters of white bone.

The body slumped slowly down to the tiles, exhaling a long murmuring breath as the spirit left it.

“Stupe,” Trader said. “Why’d he think he could get away with something as stupe as that?”

“The door’ll muffle the noise of the shooting.” Ryan looked at the bolted door beyond. “You hear someone talking through there?” he asked.

“Yeah. More guards?”

“No.” Ryan laid a hand on the cold iron of the sec bolt. “You wouldn’t keep your sec men behind a locked door. No. Must be those experimental failures that Thea told us about, ones she sort of hinted about.”

“We going to take a look?”

“Might as well. Check the corridor first.”

Trader hesitated. “You telling me or asking me, Ryan?”

“Why? Does it make a difference?”

“Might do.”

“I’m telling you.”

“What if I don’t think that’s a good idea?”

Ryan gave him a thin, angry smile. “Then you don’t do it. I go and do it. Think we’re going to fall to blasters over who checks the fucking corridor?”

Trader favored him with his best, most wolfishly dangerous smile. “Tell you what, bro. Why don’t I go and check out the corridor?”

“Yeah. Why don’t you?”

Trader opened the outer door and peered around it. “No sight, no sound,” he reported.

“Then we’ll check out what’s behind the bolted door. Best be quick. Won’t be forever until someone finds the woman’s body. Or the dead patrol.”

“WHAT’S WRITTEN on these cards?” Trader asked, pointing to the white slips stuck in slots outside each of the cells. “Names of prisoners?”

“Codes letters and numbers. Probably refer to the experiments they’ve been part of.”

“We going to take us a look?”

“Why not?” Ryan slid back the grille on the first room on the right side of the short dead-end passage. He and Trader peeked in together.

It seemed to Ryan that a very long time passed as they stared in silence at the hideously freakish occupant of the eight-foot-square roomthe lack of any sexual equipment, the ghastly parody of a face, the armless shoulders and the rows of tiny fingers that performed their silent rhythmic dance.

The time was probably no longer than half a minute, though it seemed endless and infinite.

It was Trader who reached up and swiftly closed the slatted grille in the door.

“I don’t think I care all that much to look in on the other rooms, Ryan,” he said, unable to quite control the tremor in his voice.

“While we’re here”

Ryan was overcome with the blinding horror that one of the cells might contain his dearest loveor whatever remained of her after the sick-brained whitecoats had finished their blasphemous games with her.

The next room was empty.

The third wasn’t.

Despite his obvious shock and revulsion, Trader couldn’t hold back from joining Ryan in staring through the grille. Both of them stared back as the diminutive creature with the forked tongue hurled itself blindly at the door, its tiny claws scrabbling at the sec steel as if it would have died to reach them and rend their flesh.

“By oak and ash!” Trader exclaimed. “Come on, friend. Let’s go chill us some whitecoats and then flee from here on our burning feet of fire.”

Ryan waved a hand at him for silence. “Might as well check the others,” he insisted.

In the last cell on that side he saw a naked woman, with half of her body missing. Her eyes flicked open at the sound of the grille opening. The lips parted, but the only sound that came out was a dreadful, inarticulate gobbling noise.

The first of the small cells on the other side of the corridor was empty. Ryan checked again, tricked into thinking he had seen a sort of translucent slime, throbbing gently in the corner of the room by the toilet. But when be looked for the second time there was nothing moving.

“Hello.” The booming voice greeted him as he slid open the narrow grille in the next door along.