James Axler – Way of the Wolf

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AFTER AN HOUR of fruitless searching through three tunnels with doors that were frozen shut, Ryan followed the main access corridor, trailing the wind that came from somewhere outside.

The access corridor was twenty feet across, covered with a thick sheet of ice that kept them inches off the actual ground. It was thick enough that Ryan almost missed the first corpse.

Chapter Twenty-Two

It was the body of a man, a pathetic and twisted caricature of what he had to have been in life. The light from the fluorescent strips overhead barely revealed him through the ice coating.

“Mildred,” Ryan called out, squatting to rub the loose ice from the years-old accumulation.

“Son of a bitch,” Mildred said as she approached. She pressed her hands against the ice and got almost nose to nose with the corpse.

“I didn’t see a gunshot wound,” Ryan stated. “No stab wound. Not even any blood. Know what killed him?”

“Not without digging him up,” Mildred replied. “But whatever it was must have come for him bastard quick.”

Ryan nodded. “Thought so myself. Still got his military uniform on. After nukecaust, he’d have gone on.”

Krysty knelt and put a hand over the dead man’s face. Her touch had to have reached past the inches of ice, though, because Ryan saw the redhead’s face knot up with distaste and pain. “He died burning,” she said.

Mildred peered closer. “Can’t be. I don’t see any tissue damage that looks anything like burns. And there aren’t any signs of it on the wall, either.”

Krysty shook her head, clearly not understanding everything she was picking up through her mutie ability. “Not from the outside. From the inside. Something that affected his lungs. His chest got tight.”

“You can feel all that?” Dean asked.

She nodded and took her hand away. “Can’t do it with old dead every time, but sometimes, if I put my mind to it, I can get a feeling about their passing. I don’t like doing it, but this time, I thought mebbe we should know.”

“Let’s move,” Ryan said, curiosity eating at him. They were clearly in a military installation. Where they could read them, signs were in military jargon that the one-eyed man found only partially decipherable.

More dead followed, all encased in ice, and all in uniform.

“Died after nukecaust,” Jak ventured as they found a group of corpses lying on top of one another farther down the hallway. “Or wouldn’t be many so close. Wouldn’t all be uniformed.”

“Something else about the condition they’re in,” Mildred said as she studied the latest accumulation of corpses. “The cold had to have hit them soon. Otherwise we’d be finding skeletons here and there instead of whole bodies. Either the elements would have stripped them down, or predators would have.”

“The redoubt’s integrity was compromised suddenly,” Ryan said, “allowing in the cold. As thick as this ice is, as strong as it is now, there must have been a lot of water here at one time.”

“Mebbe close to the sea?” Mildred suggested.

Ryan nodded. “That’s what I’m thinking. That could account for the thickness of the ice.”

“A flood would have washed these bodies out of the corridor.”

“Could have,” Ryan agreed, “and this is where they ended up.” He got the companions up and moving again, following the tunnel. Another thing that totally confused him was the direction they were traveling in. According to the signs posted on the tunnel walls, they were in the south wing, supposedly heading south. Instead, according to the compass he had, Ryan charted them as going west.

Another quake shook the redoubt.

Ryan pressed up against the wall, holding on to Krysty as the sound of the intermittent, booming cracks filled the corridor. This time Ryan got some of the feeling Doc had talked about. It felt like the redoubt did bobble slowly a bit. After he was sure all the ices chunks that were going to drop from the ceiling had fallen, he pulled back.

When he checked his compass again during a breather, he found they were now progressing down the tunnel in a northwesterly direction instead of mostly west. The tunnel hadn’t changed direction, just continued straight.