James Axler – Exile to Hell

“What’s with this red light?” Grant demanded. “You could go blind in here.”

Kane didn’t offer a reply, though one part of his mind pounced on the most likely answer. The eyes of Balam were huge and black, and therefore extremely sensitive to light levels above a certain brightness and spectrum. If this level of the Dulce complex housed Balam’s brethren or his spawn, then it would have been converted for their comfort.

Brigid stepped forward. Kane reached for her, but she was too quick. She walked only a dozen feet before halting suddenly in front of a glass wall. Kane nearly trod on her heels.

Angrily he said, “Where are you?”

His words caught in his throat. On the other side of the glass barrier, spread-eagled on a metal framework, was a flayed corpse.

It was a mass of yellow-white adipose tissue, ropy blood vessels and red-blue entrails. The body was all muscle, tendon and ligamentbut the soft organs were pulsing wetly. It was covered, held together, by a clinging sac of transparent plastic.

Kane felt his belly fill up with something. Brigid lurched away, making a strangling, gasping sound. He was only dimly aware of Grant stepping up beside him. Both of them stared in horrid fascination at the face, at the stripped head covered with a cohineal pattern of black-blue veins. Then an eye opened and stared back at them. It was a brown eye, and it held no particular expression.

Grant stumbled back a few paces, Sin Eater coming up reflexively. “It’s still alive! Chill it!” he snarled.

“No!” Brigid whirled, securing a grip on his forearm. “We’ll be discovered!”

Grant struggled for a second, then the tension went out of his arm. Brigid released him, struggling to regain a bit of her poise. The look she cast Kane was so filled with soul-wrenching horror and disgust, he could say nothing but “We’re running out of time.”

They walked along, and the sights they saw inside the glass-fronted cubicles didn’t become any less nauseating but they didn’t get worse, either. Perhaps the clinical atmosphere and the red lights contributed a sense of unreality, so even though they were on the edge of it, they didn’t panic.

Kane’s mind distanced itself from the externals, as though his eyes were vid cameras transmitting the images to the real him at some distant, safely removed location. He glanced past the glass walls, each one of them holding an artifact of horror, each one of them threatening his tenuous grip on sanity.

They passed glass cases and fluid-filled jars with floating human internal organs.

In one cubicle, they saw the naked body of a man. His complexion was ruddy, and his hair hung down his back in three thick strands. Parts of him were missing, but there was enough left of the face that they could see the snake tattoo imprinted across it.

Grant muttered, “Milt. At least he’s dead.”

“Now we know what happened to the bodies in the Cliff Palace,” Kane said matter-of-factly, and continued on his way.

He clawed frantically for a grip on the real world, but the world around him was real. Everything outside of Dulce, this nightmare spot, seemed like a dim, half-remembered fragment of a dream.

Brigid moved ahead, obviously desperate to reach the end of the corridor. She glanced to her right, then slowed to a halt. Her “Oh, God” was hushed. Grant and Kane stopped on either side of her.

Beyond the glass, hanging from a ceiling rack, was a long row of transparent sacs filled with an amber gel. Small figures, curled in fetal positions, floated within the gelid contents.

“What are we looking at?” Even to his own ears, Kane’s voice sounded creaky and old.

“An incubation chamber,” Brigid whispered. “Artificial wombs, filled with synthetic amniotic fluid. This is where the hybrids are grown.”

Kane stared hard at the creatures inside the wombs. He could see the vestigial noses and the small, thin mouths, almost reptilian in their neatness of tight lips and compressed cheeks. “That’s why the bodies of the Dregs were left behind,” he said half to himself. “They were genetically ruined. Reeth wasn’t aware of the use his merchandise was being put to here, so he tried to slip in damaged goods. Salvo chilled him for it.”