James Axler – Cold Asylum

“A morgue has the connotation of a place where the bodies of the unidentified dead, or the victims of some accident, are first taken. While a mortuary is more generally the building where bodies wait before being taken to the cemetery for burial or on for cremation.”

“What’s the difference between a cemetery and a graveyard, Mildred?” Dean asked.

“One’s enough for today, young man. I’ll have to think about that and tell you some other time.”

“We going to hang around in here?” Michael asked. “The smell makes me feel like throwing up. It would be good to breathe some fresh air.”

“I will second that. It seems a most pleasant idea to be able to use this” he flourished his sword stick “as a walking aid for my frail old legs rather than to spill the unclean blood of the ungodly.”

“Show it to me, Doc,” Dean begged.

“We’ve got to move on, son,” his father said.

“Just a quick look. I never saw it properly before, and Doc chilled them so well.”

“Doc, save him from making himself a pain in the ass, would you?”

“Surely.” A twist of the lion’s-head hilt released the blade of Toledo steel. The rapier flashed in the stark overhead lamps of the redoubt.

Dean touched it delicately with the tip of a finger. “Thin, ain’t it, Doc?”

“But very resilient, springy, and powerful, my boy. Its strength lies in its very lightness.”

“What’s that lettering?” The boy lowered his head closer. “Can’t read it.”

“It is an old language from Europe, called Spanish. In the original it says ‘ No me saques sin razon; no me envaines sin honor.'” He traced the floridly engraved words along the narrow blade.

“What’s it mean, Doc?” J.B. asked.

“Do not draw me without a good reason and do not sheathe me without honour.”

“Shit or get off the seat,” Dean said.

Doc shook his head, replacing the ebony cover. “Not exactly, dear boy, not exactly.”

J.B. HAD AN EIDETIC MEMORY for maps. Once he’d looked at one it would be printed permanently in his mental files.

“Guess we might as well take a look at one of the central storage sections,” he suggested. “Then we can easily get out of the main entrance.”

“What about the cannies?” Krysty asked.

“From what we’ve seen, I don’t think they’ll be a threat.” J.B. looked at Ryan. “I never saw such poor, slow-moving bastards in all my life.”

“Long as we don’t get ourselves bottled up in a dead end, we should be fine. Don’t know how many of the tribe there are, but we’ve already dented their numbers some.”

Krysty touched him on the arm. “Still can’t properly believe that we all made it. Not after all going off on jumps to other places. Thought I’d lost you, lover.”

“Me, too. First chance we get, I’ll try to make it up for you.” And he kissed her softly on the mouth, the tip of his tongue pushing gently at her lips, parting them for a moment.

She broke away from him, her green eyes bright, cheeks slightly flushed. “Let’s go and take a look at this morgue or mortuary, shall we?”

“GETTING COLDER, DAD.”

Ryan was walking with his son at the head of their little party. It was more or less the usual triple-red skirmish line, with J.B. and his Uzi bringing up the rear and the others strung between them.

“Yeah. Only way those bodies could’ve been kept fresh was if they were chilled right down.”

“How many you reckon?”

“How long’s a piece of string, Dean?”

“Can’t answer that, can I?”

“No. Because you haven’t got enough information even to make an intelligent guess.”

“And it’s the same here?”

“Yeah.”

J.B. had told Ryan that he figured the redoubt hadn’t been broken into by the muties all that long ago. “Certainly months and not years.”

“Could be weeks and not months.” Ryan based his opinion on the fact that the main nuke gens were still running, controlling the temperature throughout the main part of the redoubt. The mat-trans gateway section normally had its own, totally self-contained power unit.

Given enough time, the sort of brutish muties that they’d encountered would have done something to wreck the whole comp-control system, then everything would have rotted. But the coolness as they drew nearer to the main blocks, and the fact that the cannies had been holding untainted meat, supported the theory about a recent invasion, possibly from some long-established mutie camp, not far from the redoubt.