Dark Days

day at the beach.

I looked up from the photograph and studied that decayed corpse again. There were no bullet wounds or visible injuries, although I could’ve missed them in my hasty examination. I was sure of one thing: That man’s last thoughts weren’t about a dark hallway. In his mind he’d been running along a beach on a bright summer day.

Clutching the photo, I could almost smell the ocean and hear the seagulls. On an impulse, I stuck it in my pocket and carefully stepped over him, trying not to disturb his dreams.

Twenty feet away, I found two more bodies sitting at a table. One guy had on a T-shirt with the same insignia and was also clutching a paper cup. The other guy was wearing a colonel’s dress uniform. On his chest gleamed three medals, like ancient jewels looted from a pharaoh’s tomb. In his right hand, he held a service pistol, the muzzle stained with the blood that had splattered when he blew his brains out.

Voices in the distance drew me out of my stupor. I backed away from that macabre scene and followed lights reflecting off the ducts in the building’s massive ventilation system. With a sigh of relief, I realized I’d only taken one wrong turn. I was walking parallel to the group, but on the opposite side of the duct. All I had to do was follow that wall and turn right where it dead-ended and I’d run into my group.

Obsessed with that thought, I started to walk faster. Wandering around alone in the dark wasn’t my idea of fun. Feeling abandoned in a building full of corpses was a thousand times worse, like walking through a haunted house.

My imagination started to play tricks on me. A couple of times I almost shot at my own shadow reflected on the walls. Then I heard whispers or shuffling footsteps following me. In my fevered mind, I saw the colonel stand up and come after me, his medals clinking softly as he stretched out his fleshless hands to grab my neck and drag me back to that room and force me to stay there forever.

Panic washed over me. I wasn’t walking anymore—I was running. Up till then, I’d controlled my fear, as a matter of pride. I didn’t want to look like a fool in front of the whole group. (What an asshole. He got lost the minute we entered the building. He’s so clueless he can’t take ten steps without screwing up. He was shaking in fear when we found him.) But by then, I didn’t care if I looked like a coward. I was calling Pritchenko, Tank, Broto, and every other name I could remember. I didn’t want to be alone in that darkness that smelled of despair, fear, and death.

If I’d been paying attention, I could’ve avoided the body, but I was in a daze and I ran right over him. My left boot sank into something soft with a faint choooofff. There are no words to describe the nauseating smell that burned my nose. I got the wind knocked out of me when I fell on my side. My flashlight flew out of my hands, slid five feet, then came to rest upside down next to some clothes piled on the floor.

For a few seconds I lay there, trying to catch my breath. Finally, I got up on all fours and dragged myself over to the flashlight, which cast a faint, ghostly glow. I grabbed it and shook it, muttering a prayer to all the gods that it wasn’t broken.

To my relief, the beam glowed bright and steady. I shined it on the body I’d stepped on. It was the corpse of a woman in civilian clothes, bloated by gasses. My left boot had punctured her abdomen allowing all the fluids to drain. The body looked like a grotesque, inflatable doll. Disgusted, I looked away. When I passed the beam of light around the rest of the room, the horrified scream I’d held in flew out of my throat.

38

TENERIFE

Lucia couldn’t see a thing. The chemicals had irritated her unprotected eyes so badly she could barely open them. What if my corneas are burned? As if I didn’t have enough to worry about.

The first thing she noticed was a faint smell of ozone and the hum of the air conditioner. She felt her way along a wall until she came to a sink where she splashed her eyes with lots of water. When the burning subsided, Lucia convinced herself she wasn’t going to go blind, but she’d have a bad case of conjunctivitis for a few days.

With water streaming down her face, she looked up. The airlock was closed again and the red light above the door was back on. Through the disinfectant steam, Lucia could make out two figures. Those bastards just wouldn’t give up.

The disinfection process only lasted a couple of minutes. Lucia had spent half that time flushing out her eyes. That left very little time to decide her next move. In desperation, she reached for the phone on the wall. It didn’t have any buttons but she got a line out the second she picked up the receiver. Wherever the terminal was, no one was at the other end, so she hung up in frustration. Her eyes fell on a tray of surgical supplies. She grabbed a small scalpel the size of a butter knife. It wasn’t much of a weapon, but it was better than nothing.

A door at the back of the room caught her eye. When she opened it, she felt a gentle stream of air. A lab technician could have told her that it was an osmotic pressure lock and that the difference in the pressure in the rooms caused the air to circulate inward to prevent leakage. But Lucia didn’t know a thing about airlocks or osmotic pressure. She mistakenly thought there was a window that opened to the outside and that she could get out that way.

Feeling confident, she strode through the door. Ultraviolet lamps lit up a corridor that led to a line of rooms with large windows. In the first room, someone who wasn’t wearing a hazmat suit was bent over a table, moving clumsily around something hidden by his body.

“Hey! You! I need help!” Lucia pounded on the glass to get the technician’s attention. “Hey! Can you hear me?”

When the man turned, the smile on Lucia’s face froze. The guy’s face was covered by the burst veins and had the vacant look Lucia knew all too well. He was an Undead.

With a groan, the Undead guy pounced on the glass with such force, he shook the entire structure. Terrified, Lucia stepped back, braced for the glass to give way, but whoever designed that cubicle had done a good job. The window withstood the barrage of punches.

A siren wailed nearby. The entry lock had just opened and her two stalkers were in the next room. Lucia fled down the corridor past more rooms. She was mesmerized by what she saw: Each cubicle held Undead in different states of decay. In one room, an Undead’s head and torso were strapped to a gurney. In another, a half dozen heads floated in formaldehyde in jars arranged on a shelf. To her horror, the heads opened their eyes and glared at her, snapping their jaws as she passed by.

The back door opened into another laboratory similar to the first. Her heart pounding wildly, Lucia realized that that last door had a lock on the inside. She pushed with all her strength, closed the door behind her, and bolted it.

She quickly backed away from the door and tripped over a chair that a technician had left in the middle of the room. She tried to keep her balance and for a second she thought she was going to stay on her feet, but she was falling too fast. She threw out her left hand in desperation to grab hold of a control panel, but her fingers slid over the buttons, pressing them randomly as she fell. The razor-sharp scalpel in her right hand cut a wide arc on her leg. The thin slit in her white nurse’s uniform was immediately stained red. That cut was thin and shallow but it was bleeding profusely.

“Awwww fuck!” she cried out in pain and cursed her clumsiness.

There was a thud on the other side of the door. Dragging her leg and cursing, Lucia braced herself on the control panel and got to her feet. Her eyes fell on the buttons she’d accidentally pressed. Horrified, she read the label on the panel: CELL OPENING SYSTEM. The muffled groan she heard outside the door told her exactly which cells she’d stupidly opened.

39

MADRID