The darkness only blunted the destruction that had been done to the area. Besides the ruin of Canary Wharf, the row houses lay in disarray.
Simon hated to see all of the destruction. There had been so much of London’shistory that had been preserved either out of sentimentality or necessity. There was no other city ever like her, and now she was torn and sundered. But London was also a city marked by disasters. For a time the largest city in the world, London had undergone many hardships and changes.
When the demons are gone, Simon told himself, she’ll stand straightand tall again. He just didn’t know if he would live to see that day.
In the distance, a few flying demons sailed silently through the sky. None were close enough to worry about. After checking the map on the HUD, Simon pressed on and led his troops toward their destination.
The wrought-iron fence around Akehurst Sanitarium remained standing and provided a gloomy introduction to the building behind it. The sanitarium stood five stories tall. The gray brick exterior exuded cold indifference. It was in a place Simon would ever have wanted to bring a family member.
Most of the windows had been broken out, and they gaped like empty eye sockets. Something had torn the ornate front gate from its hinges and cast it to one side of the entrance. A security kiosk stood on one side of the gate. No one was there now.
A simple brass plaque on an arch over the entranceway announced the name of the place in gothic script.
“I take it we’re not going in through the main gate,” Nathan said.
“No.” Simon glanced up at the fence. It stood ten feet tall and had sharptines at the top of each bar. He crouched and leaped over, easily clearing the top of the fence by inches.
On the other side, he landed with his feet spread and dropped into a low squat with the Spike Bolter braced over his right wrist while he held it with his left. The move wasn’t for accuracy, but to help provide extra coverage forHis face and shoulders in case of attack.
Nathan, Leah, Danielle, and the other Templar followed in quick succession. Simon jogged easily to the rear of the building.
Macomber hadn’t known it, but the clinic had shut down two years after he’dgone into the Parisian sanitarium. All the patients had been transferred elsewhere when the corporation finally went financially bust after several civil cases put them out of business. With the state of disrepair the building had been in, and all the problems inherent in the age, no one had purchased the property and it had sat in escrow.
Hopefully, that meant whatever had been in the building still remained there.
Someone had already broken the locks on the rear door. It stood ajar a few inches.
After he sheathed his sword, Simon pushed the door open with his free hand and followed it inside. The night-vision capability stripped away the darkness.
The doorway opened onto a storeroom that was partially sunk into the ground. Simon had to navigate a short flight of stairs to get to the bottom. Metal wire shelves lined the stone walls. Nothing cosmetic had been done to make the walls moreappealing. They were bare stone. Halfway underground as the room was, there hadn’t been a real need for insulation beyond the stone.
Bottles and jugs of industrial strength cleaner littered the floor. Clothing, bedsheets, and other things that survivors could use had been stripped and taken years ago.
Simon crossed the room and peered through the open security door there. It too had been burgled, but the scratches on the inside of the door told him whoever had broken in had done so from outside.
“So where is this concealed stairway to the lower levels?” Nathan asked.
“Other end of the building,” Simon replied. He stepped to the doorway andcrept along the hall. A transparent map of the underground section he was in tracked through his HUD. Differently colored blips on the screen marked his position as well as the other Templar and Leah.
“Why didn’t we just break into the other end of the building?”
“Because we’d have had to break in through a wall,” Leah said. “It would haveprobably been more conspicuous that way.”
“A little antsy, are we?”
“Not at all. I love poking through madhouses in the middle of the night.Especially when there might be demons here and the people I’m with insist onconducting a travelogue.”
Nathan laughed, and the chuffing sound it made coming over the comm took away some of the tension Simon was feeling. It reminded him that he was there with experienced warriors. If anything went wrong, these were the people for it to go wrong with.
*
The stairwell in the center of the hallway went upstairs. Simon took anindependently powered button cam from one of the cargo compartments built into his armor. He pressed the button cam to the wall and hit it with a charge of static electricity from the suit. The button cam adhered to the wall.
A quick check through the HUD showed that the miniature vid camera was online and available to him and the rest of the team. He went on.
Hospital roomsthough Simon thought of them or as prison cellslined thehallway on both sides. A few of them held mummified bodies and enough dust to prove that no one had been there in years. Simon took a little hope in that.
The door at the end of the hallway was locked from the outside. It was a rectangular section of ugly, dented metal that showed years of hard use. A sign in the middle of it announced:
AUTHORIZED
PERSONNEL ONLY
STRICTLY ENFORCED
“Sounds properly mysterious, doesn’t it?” Nathan asked. “What’s supposed tobe on the other side of that door?”
“Another storeroom.” Simon tried the nod and found it was locked.
“Takes a key to lock that, mate,” Nathan observed. “Makes you wonder why theybothered, doesn’t it?”
It did, and Simon thought about
