In the passageway just outside the arched doorway, Kane kneeled to study a scattering of prints. At first glance, he wasn’t sure if they showed hands or feet. Brigid focused her light on them and murmured wordlessly in surprise.
“What do you make of this, Baptiste?”
She bent down, squinting, taking out and putting on her former badge of office, a pair of wire-framed, rec-tangular-lensed eyeglasses she wore when an archivist. “Like the hands of children…or the feet of monkeys.”
Kane swung his head toward her. “Monkeys?” he echoed incredulously.
She gazed at the prints with critical eyes. “Too big for monkeys,” she said at length. “Apes, maybe.”
“Oh, come on,” Kane said skeptically.
“See that shape like an opposable big toe?” Brigid replied briskly. “Still, it’s too narrow to have been made by an ape.”
Kane stood up. “That’s good to know. I can’t quite picture apes or monkeys teleporting themselves from wherever and digging into a self-heat-rations feast.”
“Me, either,” she replied. “Could be some unre-corded species of human or animal mutant that somehow got in here. Or” She broke off, brow furrowing.
Kane completed her sentence. “Or a hybrid.”
She didn’t respond, but she nodded grimly. More than one type of hybrid had been spawned since the unification program, although the genetic mixture of human and Archon, as typified by the barons, was by far the most numerous. England’s self-proclaimed Lord Strongbow and his Imperial Dragoons were mutagenic alterations of human biology, and Colonel C. W. Thrush was a blend of human, machine and Archon.
For that matter, Lakesh had told them that even the mutie species that had once roamed the length and breadth of the Deathlands were less the accidental byproducts of radiation and environmental changes than the deliberate practice of pantropic sciencea form of genetic engineering devoted to creating life-forms able to survive and thrive in the postnuke world.
Brigid and Kane moved farther down the corridor. The rad counter’s needle slowly crept toward the end of the yellow field, closing in on the orange. “The farther we go, the warmer the count. Not dangerous yet.”
The damage became more pronounced along the passage. The cracks and splits riven deep in the concrete walls and ceilings spilled piles of masonry and heaps of dirt. In some sections, buckled vanadium showed through the holes. Many of the light strips were completely dark.
Kane alternated making motion-detector sweeps and eyeing the disturbed dust on the floor. The echoes of their steady footfalls chased each other back and forth. Whoever the interlopers had been, he didn’t blame them for vacating the installation. Redoubt Papa was as grimly depressing a place as he had ever been, haunted by the ghosts of a hopeless, despairing past age. The walls seemed to exude the terror, the utter despondency of souls trapped here when the first mushroom cloud erupted from Washington on that chill January noon.
They climbed four sets of wide stairs, Kane noting the tracks that came and went on the risers and landings. The fourth stairway led to an open area with several corridors branching off, all but one of them blocked by sec doors. The overhead lights shone dimly, and they saw tracks extending straight ahead into the gloom, toward the single unobstructed doorway.
As they approached it, Kane saw a small form slumped in the shadows near the square frame. He slowed his pace, stiffening his wrist tendons. With a faint whir of a tiny electric motor and a click of the actuator, the Sin Eater snapped from his forearm into his waiting palm.
Brigid saw the shape, too, and at first she took it to be nothing more than a heap of discarded clothing. Still, she approached it cautiously, right hand tightening on the butt of her Mauser.
Outlined by Brigid’s microlight, and enhanced by Kane’s night-vision visor, the shape formed into that of a man, but in no way resembling any human either one of them had seen before, mutated, hybridized or otherwise.
The corpse floated in a pool of half-congealed blood that had flowed from a bullet-holed torso. He was no more than four feet in height, but he reminded Kane of a stunted giant, not a dwarf. The gnarly arms were disproportionately long in comparison to the legs. The splayed, square-tipped fingers had curved, bevel-edged nails.