James Axler – Bitter Fruit

He nodded at J.B. “The door?”

“Unlocked,” the Armorer answered.

“Let’s go, then.”

J.B. pulled the door open, and Ryan fell into position along the other side. Jak used the reflector on the lamp to aim the light into the room.

Dormant computer hardware lined two walls. The third held video equipment. Besides the door, the fourth wall was totally barren. In the center of the room, a long table sat between two cryo units.

“This isn’t a regular redoubt,” J.B. ventured. “Too small. More like an emergency hidey-hole.”

“That’s how I see it, too,” Ryan replied, walking farther into the room but keeping the SIG-Sauer at the ready. He heard his footsteps against the bare floor over the rattling hiss of the burning lantern wick. “Who was the dead man back in the office in White Sands?”

“Don’t know,” J.B. said. “I saw his name on his desk for mebbe a minute before we heaved it. Walker, I think it was.”

“Doc or Krysty say anything about him?” Ryan peered into the glass plate at one end of the nearest cryo cylinder. Dust obscured the view.

“No. But they did find the room.”

“Whole setup scans like something done oh the qt,” Ryan said.

“Way I read it, too,” J.B. agreed. “Tighter than a gaudy slut’s lip seal.”

“Let me borrow that light over here, Jak,” Ryan said.

The albino passed it over. “Dead place. Nothing here.”

Ryan brushed at the accumulated dust with his forearm again. The post trauma nightmare shakes had faded some, and movement had restored his circulation to a degree, but it was still cold. One thing was for certainthe desert was a thing of the past. He shifted the lantern and peered in the cryo chamber more closely.

The light was weak, diffused by the lamp cover and the cryo chamber’s window. It took some concentration to separate the shadows from the contents inside.

A dead man peered back at Ryan. The corpse’s eyes were open, but the orbs sat like eelskin-wrapped marbles in sockets that had grown too large for them as the fluids leached away. The skin was sallow, stretched tight and looking like wax, the bones breaking through along the cheeks and chin. He’d been wearing a suit, all tidy and neat perhaps at one time. Now there were holes in it, and a powdery layer of dust covered them.

“Man died hard,” Ryan said.

J.B. walked over to have a look. “Unit must have lost power somewhere along the way. Left him trapped inside. Suffocated, I’d guess.”

The flesh on the hands was torn and ripped. Fingernails were pulled loose and lying askew in the skin on the remaining fingers.

“Mebbe,” Ryan said. He moved the lantern again and saw some of the shadows shift. Black-and-brown cockroaches nearly as long as his thumb scrambled through the dead man’s clothes and dessicated flesh, scuttling away from the light. One of them clambered out from behind one of the shrunken eyeballs and perched on it covetously. “Mebbe starvation or dehydration. There a latch?”

The Armorer felt around the cryo chamber. Ryan did the same on his side. It was slightly different than any they’d chanced across in the past.

“Got it,” J.B. said. He yanked, and there was a series of snaps. Inside the cold crypt the cockroach fled back into the dead man’s skull. A second later J.B. had the cryo chamber open.

Ryan moved the lantern’s light over the corpse. Cockroaches scattered with the fury of an Old Testament plague, their carapaces clicking against the concrete floor when they hit.

Ryan stepped closer, drawing the panga. Cockroaches popped underfoot when he moved. He raked the big knife through the dead man’s clothes, turning up a wallet inside the jacket.

“Bugs not from here,” Jak said. The albino stood out starkly in the shadows against the wall. “Crawl in somewhere.”

“You think mebbe we ought to follow them around?” J.B. asked.

Ryan lifted the lantern so the light would fill the room more properly. Dozens of cockroaches littered the floor, dashing madly to the safety of the computer hardware. More were steadily dropping from the dead man, sounding like a light pattering of rain.