Now the drop in temperature was even more marked, making everyone walk more briskly.
They’d spotted the muties only twice during the long progress through the silent corridors, moving deeper into the heart of the abandoned complex. Each time the creatures had been standing at distant corners, staring in their direction, but making no effort at all to either flee or to fight.
“There,” J.B. called from the back. “That section to the right, where the passage forks.”
“Looks like some kind of air lock,” Krysty observed. “Double doors with seals on them.”
Ryan had noticed that the floor had, for some distance, been smeared with gobbets of ripped flesh and occasional splinters of bone.
Krysty had been correct. Through the first set of doors the air was decidedly colder, making Dean shudder. And, directly in front of them, was another pair of swing doors with dark rubber sealing strips at their center.
“Everyone ready?” Ryan asked, the SIG-Sauer in his fist.
Mildred waved a hand. “I’d just like to say that this is not likely to be a pretty sight. If those things have broken into a death house as big as this one, then” She allowed their imagination to take over.
IT WAS WORSE.
Michael stared for a dozen, endless seconds, then spun on his heel and ran straight back out, hand clasped firmly over his mouth.
In their different ways, the other six were somewhat inured to the horrors of Deathlands. But, even so
The room that they’d entered was like an enormous warehouse, at least two hundred feet in length and about eighty feet wide. The ceiling, the better part of fifty feet high, was partly obscured by a faint mist, caused by the extreme air-conditioning, a freezing atmosphere so bitter cold that everyone’s breath was hazing around them.
The whole place was filled, top to bottom, end to end, side to side, with what looked, at first glance, to be like a massive filing system towering flights of drawers, mostly closed, all painted white, with handles of dark green metal.
Many of the lower ones had been opened, and their contents strewed around the place.
Their contents had been, as Ryan and the others had suspected, human bodies.
The redoubt had been an unthinkably huge, postmodernist, high-tech catafalque, designed for a single purpose, probably not long before the murderous times of skydark. With the possibility of a worldwide nuke war, the American leaders, linked to Overproject Whisper, had built the redoubt as a temporary base for stacking the expected dead.
But the expected dead had utterly overwhelmed the fragile living, a megacull that was measured not just in hundreds of thousands, millions or tens of millions.
It was damned nearly everybody.
Ryan guessed that this redoubt had been used in the first hours and days of the nuking, well before the long winter snuffed out the lives of most of the handful of survivors, back when it would still have been called the United States of America.
At first the bureaucrats would have rejoiced at their foresight and their careful planning.
Each body was stacked in its own deep-chilled capsule, having first eviscerated it and drained away all the blood. Notes were made of name, sex, age and weight, and everything was filed away ready for
Ready for what?
“All this,” Mildred said, “just so a bunch of inbred crazies can come and use it like the frozen-food section at the local market.”
The vaulted roof contained the dreadful silence.
Everywhere the eye turned, there were corpses. Bits of corpses. Hands and feet and many, many skulls, stripped of eyes and tongues and the delicious soft tissues that the cannies obviously considered delicacies.
“Looks like they never figured a way of getting to the top layers,” Dean said in a small, breathless voice, unable to hide his own shock.
“There’s a big forklift down there.” J.B. pointed with the muzzle of the shotgun. “Guess the cannies are so triple-stupe they never got round to using it.”
It was only the bottom six or seven layers of drawers that had been opened, their contents ravaged.
The shelving didn’t just line the walls. There was row upon row, all up and down the vast room, like an old-fashioned public library.