James Axler – Cold Asylum

The corridor had forked two or three times, but Ryan stuck to the main core, walking up a gentle incline, the weird cocktail of smells growing stronger with every step.

Sec doors, all locked, stood on both sides at irregular intervals.

There was an open area directly ahead of him, with what looked like seven or eight passages. And Ryan thought he could also see another map, this time relatively undefiled.

He suddenly caught what sounded like the distant murmur of voices, sending him flat against the wall of the corridor alongside yet another closed door.

Which opened.

Two figures shambled out, both turning to their left, away from him. Less than a yard from them, Ryan could hardly believe that they hadn’t spotted him.

He leveled the SIG-Sauer and considered blasting them down with a full-metal jacket through each spine. But he kept his finger still on the trigger, holding fire not from humanitarian concern, but from the probability that the explosions of the blaster would draw others to him.

The only thing that struck Ryan was that they were walking in a strange, slow way, as though they were slouching toward some distant Promised Land. Both carried something cradled in their arms, but he hadn’t been able to see what it was.

They were male, he thought, with thinning, stringy hair pasted to narrow skulls. Both dressed in an assortment of ragged clothes. The one on the left wore what might once have been a uniform of dirty gray green, missing the left leg of the pants. The other had on what looked like a hospital robe that could once have been white, but wasn’t anymore.

And smells floated around them like the miasma from a stinking swamp at midnight.

Ryan made the spot decision to follow them at a cautious distance.

As he eased past the open door he glanced inside and looked straight into the face of another of the redoubt’s occupants.

J.B. HEARD A MUFFLED YELL, echoing down the corridor from somewhere ahead of him, and then a number of staggered shots close together.

“Dark night!” He knew the sound of Ryan Cawdor’s SIG-Sauer P-226 as well as he knew his own heartbeat.

Without a moment’s hesitation the slight figure began to sprint toward the noise of the shooting, slinging the Uzi over his shoulder and grabbing at the folding butt of the Smith amp; Wesson M-4000 scatter-gun.

Mildred, just stepping out of the elevator, also caught the distant rumble of gunfire.

Not knowing what it might portend, she hesitated, licking her dry lips.

And finally began to walk up the main passage.

IT WAS 939, and Krysty threw the lever to close the double sec doors on the control room. Dean and Michael were standing close behind her, looking nervously around the blind bend of the winding corridor to their right.

“Let’s go and see what we can see,” she suggested.

Back in the heart of the deserted mat-trans unit, the cherry-red chamber door was just swinging silently shut for the sixth and last time.

THE TORRENT OF nuclear missiles that defiled the earth during the brief holocaust did more than cull most human beings on the planet. It also slaughtered a vast percentage of all living things, animal and vegetable. Food chains were destroyed or distorted, and the fragile ecostructure was tilted and changed for the rest of eternity.

Landscapes were altered. Volcanoes, long extinct, found ferocious new life and the earthquakes raged, tilting tectonic plates that raised valleys and leveled mountains. There were lagoons where there had been deserts, and forests where there had been flat plains. Much of California slid into the Pacific, and cities fell and vanished.

After four generations, the underlying effects of the nuking were still running rampant. The first mutations had been more subtle, but the deviations from what had once been the norm grew ever more gross.

Plants, fish, birds and reptiles, everything that walked or crawled or burrowed or ran or swam or flew was altered.

Muties.

Most visible as you traveled through Deathlands were the humanoid muties.

Ryan had seen most of them, fought and killed plenty of them.

But he’d never come across anything quite like the creature that stood within the room, staring blankly back at him.