James Axler – Cold Asylum

The steel slid silently across, the light above it showing that the elevator was at the top.

Since there was no visible sign of life, Ryan obeyed one of the Trader’s cardinal rules and stood still for several seconds, listening.

He could feel a draft on his stubbled cheek and half turned to face it. Apart from the vile stench it carried, he could actually detect what might be fresh air. It wasn’t by any means certain, but Ryan was beginning to think that the redoubt had probably been penetrated.

There didn’t seem to be any distinguishable noise coming from any of the corridors.

The two simple choices were to either explore as much as possible of the military complex and see if there was anything worth the taking, or to simply head for the nearest exit and get into the open.

Out and away.

Partly because of the smell, Ryan’s heart inclined toward the latter option. But his head guided him toward a recce of the redoubt first.

Since the wide passageway immediately ahead of him brought the wind, and also seemed to have been most used, he decided to try it first.

As he walked away from the elevator, Ryan’s boots scraped on the pebbles and mud, drowning the tiny pinging sound from inside the cage. If he’d turned around at that moment, he would have seen that the light had vanished from the letter T and would, in a couple of minutes, glow once more behind the letter B .

J.B. STOOD PATIENTLY at the bottom of the shaft, awaiting the arrival of the elevator. He could hear the gears turning. Years of painfully learned caution made him turn to check the corridor behind him, but there was no sight or sound of any living thing anywhere near.

MILDRED HAD MANAGED to get out of the chamber without throwing up and was now sitting in front of a comp console at one of the desks in the large room. While she sat there, Mildred started to doodle on the keys, using a one-finger hunt-and-peck technique, watching as the white letters appeared dutifully across the bright blue screen.

“My name is Mildred Winonia Wyeth, and I was born on the seventeenth day of Decembre Shit.” She backspaced and made a correction. “December, 1964. That’s more than one hundred years ago. I’m a qualified doctor of medicine, specializing in freezing techniques for human tissue. Ironic, considering that’s what happened to me eleven days after my thirty-sixth birthday. I got frozen. My father was a Baptist minister murdered by the white-sheet cowardly bastards of the invisible empire of the Klan only a year after I was born. My father’s brother, Josh, helped”

She stopped, feeling the short hairs prickling at her nape and turned in the revolving chair.

Through the anteroom, Mildred watched as the main armaglass door of the gateway chamber began silently to close.

“Holy!” She jumped to her feet and raced toward the exit doors, reaching out for the green lever, not bothering in her panic to check for safety. She plunged under the rising mass of steel as soon as it was high enough and immediately reversed the direction. She knelt the other side, panting as if she’d run a half mile across a plowed field, the revolver in her hand.

She could hear the recorded voice inside, shut off by the sec doors. “Matter transfer in progress. Any personnel with a sec rating below B-19 must leave”

The clock on the wall showed precisely 0859.

Krysty Wroth and Dean Cawdor were just completing their second jump.

Chapter Eight

Out in the corridor, Mildred was more aware of the odd smell in the redoubt.

“Formaldehyde? Can’t be. Surgical disinfectant and some kind of gangrene.”

The mix of medical scents was puzzling.

To her left the corridor ended in a totally blank wall, blocking off any thought of progress in that direction. The other way was a winding, well-lit passage, like ones that she’d seen in other redoubts. Mildred noticed that the ceiling was dotted with miniature surveillance cameras, reminding her of visits to the shopping mall in Lincoln, Nebraska.

“Here goes nothing,” she said, keeping the ZKR 551 in her right hand.