James Axler – Stoneface

With a shriek of metal clashing against metal, the slab stopped moving, jamming at a forty-five-degree angle. No amount of pulling, hauling or hanging on the chain would budge it further.

The surface of the slab was by no means smooth or featureless, so Mildred half crawled, half climbed up it Judging by the oxidized streaks, she was pretty sure it was a very old accessway, a maintenance hatch to the detritus dump. It probably hadn’t been opened in nigh on to a century, perhaps considerably longer.

She struggled to the lip of the slab, grasping the edge and carefully pulling herself to eye level to get a quick recce of her surroundings. There was very little to see. Mildred looked out into a small enclosed space, not much more than a module with convex-curved walls. It was bare, everything coated with a thin patina of dust that had seeped out of the dump over the decades. So much dust floated in the still air that the light from a ceiling fixture was only a faint yellow blob. A spiral staircase stretched up from the floor to a dark opening. The small room appeared to have been unoccupied for a long, long time.

Mildred pulled herself up, squirmed over, hung by her hands and dropped to the floor. She landed easily, dust puffing up from beneath her boots, but shivers of pain stabbed through her. But at least the room wasn’t cold. In fact, it felt close to normal air temperature. That would explain why the module appeared to be in disuse. The cryonically altered people of the Anthill would find it very uncomfortable.

She considered staying where she was long enough to repair the transceiver, but the dust irritated her eyes and dogged her nostrils. She could even taste it. Without much surprise she saw that her clothing was completely filmed by gray powder, as though she had been dipped in ashes. She assumed her face was the same color.

At the foot of the staircase, Mildred peered upward. She saw nothing but a dim light, so she went up the steps, treading quietly and cautiously. The staircase curved up and around, like a corkscrew. There was a faint luminosity above, and it grew brighter the farther up the staircase she climbed.

She was pleasantly surprised when the last step brought her to a door with an ordinary, standard-issue, commonplace doorknob. Before turning it, she drew the ZKR, emptied it of spent cartridges and plugged fresh rounds into the cylinder. Thumbing back the hammer, she crooked her finger around the trigger, turned the knob and inched the door open. After peering and listening for several seconds, she opened the door wide enough to enter a corridor.

The walls were white and dingy and not composed of the vanadium alloy. The floor looked like dirty linoleum, with a black-and-white-checked pattern. This level was obviously part of the original floor plan, constructed well before skydark. Though the air was crisp, with a hint of a chill, it wasn’t the Arctic atmosphere of the upper levels.

There was a sign on the wall, written in faded red letters, reading Know Your Emergency Exits! An arrow pointed to Mildred’s right, so she followed it. The corridor curved toward a distant set of double doors that looked like an elevator stand, so she quickened her pace. As she passed a door, she heard a sharp, hissing sound, and she whirled.

A very tall naked figure stood framed in the door. She couldn’t tell the sex of the figure, and her heart gave a great lurch. The body was gaunt and stripped of all fatty tissue. The texture of the pale skin suggested a pattern of scales, as if the figure had been spawned under conditions that were abnormal, even unhuman.

There was almost nothing human at all about the head above the tendon-wrapped neck. A coxcomb of thin blue-black hair twisted up from a low, sloping forehead. Eyes that were hugered pupilless disksblazed out of a narrow-chinned face. The nose barely qualified as a sharpened nare, and the lipless slit of the mouth gaped open, revealing spittle-wet, toothless gums.

Mildred immediately had the bore of her ZKR trained on the low forehead, when, in a high-pitched, squawky voice, the figure exclaimed, “Took you long enough, didn’t it! Where’s my goddamn brains?”