James Axler – Cold Asylum

They passed through the sealed doors into a stretch of open corridor, where the increase in heat was even more marked.

Just before they reached the final death house before the road to the entrance, J.B. spotted a few of the cannies. They stood thirty yards away, to the left, looking utterly lost. He waved the shotgun toward them and they cowered.

But one, bolder than the rest, took a few unsteady steps toward them. “Hot,” it said. “Got hot.”

“Ignore them,” Ryan ordered. “Come on.”

He led the way through the double air-lock doors, recoiling with a gasp of choking horror.

The miasma of rotting flesh was horrendous, like a fist gripping at his throat, stretching its fingers to twist in the bottom of his stomach.

Their feet splashed through a lake of condensation, a couple of inches deep, with segments of peeled skin floating on the scummy surface.

“Don’t stop!” Ryan shouted. “Try and breathe through your mouth and try not to puke. Run!”

It was almost unbelievable how fast the thousands of corpses were decomposing. The bodies that had been ravaged and then discarded on the floor were already blackening and turning into a thick gruel that seemed to be melting off the bones.

Ryan found his concentration was wonderfully focused on not falling into the hideous soup.

A child’s skull had been lying on its side, just in front of him and, even as he hurdled it, the lower jaw fell away with an audible plopping sound, revealing the rotting, blackened stump of the tongue.

Behind him, he heard Michael muttering a prayer as he ran. “now at the hour of our death.”

The farther doors were closed.

Suddenly they were thrown open, and there stood Doc, a smile of triumph on his face, his silver hair on end, waving his sword stick to encourage them.

“Faster, my brave friends. There is God’s good air not far beyond here! Have I not done wonders?”

Nobody answered him.

The fetid heat was like the throbbing heart of a tropical jungle, making Ryan realize that Doc had done more than just switch off the refrigeration. He must have turned the heating up to maximum, speeding the process.

The doors swished shut behind Mildred, the last of the seven, closing off the larger part of the vile scent of mass death.

“The entrance is only a hundred yards ahead,” Doc said. “Looks like a recent earth slip opened it up and let those foul charnel creatures in.”

“You could’ve warned us what you were planning, you revolting old pervert,” Mildred gasped.

“I am truly sorry, madam.” He offered her a deep bow, his left hand on his heart. “But seeing the name of Emily drove all thoughts from me.”

“What was that Valdemar character you talked about?” Krysty asked as they walked together toward the sunshine and bright, clean air.

“A character in a story of the neurasthenic and marvelous Edgar Allan Poe,” Doc replied. “About a man who is artificially kept alive when he should be snug and dead. In the end the process is stopped and he is allowed to pass mercifully to the release he sought.”

“I think I know that,” Mildred said. “Saw an old midnight vid of it. Vincent Price?”

“I wouldn’t know.” Doc stopped and pointed back to the bowels of the redoubts. “But it ends in a most apposite way. If I can recollect it Yes.” He struck a dramatic pose. “It ends ‘There, before the whole company, lay a nearly liquid mass of loathsomeof detestable putridity.’ Did I not do the right thing?”

Mildred touched him gently on the arm. “Yeah, Doc. The right thing.”

Chapter Fourteen

“Kansas.”

“Bullshit.”

“I tell you it’s somewhere in the middle of Old Kansas. Sextant can’t be wrong, Mildred.”

“And I tell you that Kansas wasn’t covered over with pine trees, thicker than fleas on a groundhog.”

J.B. took off his glasses and polished them. “This is now, not then.”

Mildred turned to Doc, hands wide in appeal. “Tell John Barrymore Dix that Kansas is plains, and wheat as high as an elephant’s ass. Not a sea of dark trees.”

“Waving seas ofof something or other.”