With the sights of his Desert Eagle trained on the path ahead and his finger resting lightly on the trigger, ready to unleash hell in a split-second, Sigurd stepped around the corner to where the entrance to the building was located. He paused at the doorway and smelled the air once more, but could detect nothing but a mess of dead scents, streaked alongside one another like different coloured pigments that would not blend: old mould, rotten carpeting, crumbling drywall and lead-based paint, peeling from the walls in a process of protracted decay. And then there was the sour rancidity of the derelict building’s only residents: rats, cockroaches, termites and mice, and their accumulated waste.
Sigurd growled under his breath and smashed open the rickety door with a powerful frontal kick, and then swiftly gave the darkness inside a sweep with his polar bear eyes.
Nothing.
He stepped in, cautious and alert, and only barely managing to reign in the impatience and frustration building in his core like a head of steam. He swung his pistol towards a side door as a sound cut suddenly through the veil of silence, but it was only a startled rat, scuttling away in fright. With a muttered curse he moved on, heading through the entrance foyer. An ancient elevator stood at the end of the hall, but with its door ripped from its hinges and the cage inside hanging at an angle, it was plainly evident that it had been out of use for years or possibly decades. Still, it did not matter; a flight of stairs next to the elevator led up into the heart of the ruin.
Sigurd advanced warily into the morass of cobwebs and shadows. He glanced down at the debris-thick floor, with its ripped-up carpeting and piled chunks of broken plaster, and saw a multitude of fresh footprints. They had been in here all right, his informants had been correct about that. And it had been very recent; he squatted down and touched one of the footprints, and when he drew his finger back there was not a speck of dust on it. It was almost as if it had been made merely minutes beforehand. He stood up again and waited, listening intently for any sign of life. There was none.
With the pressure of the rage inside him growing to almost unbearable levels, Sigurd gritted his teeth and moved up onto the stairs. He scanned the area carefully, first, making sure that there were no shooters waiting for him on higher levels. He then examined the stairs themselves for sign of tripwires or pressure-activated switches that could set off bombs or other booby traps, and again there was nothing.
He set off, moving swiftly up the stairs, viewing every nook and cranny of the derelict building through the sights of his Desert Eagle; if anything moved, anything whatsoever, it would instantly taste the bone-pulverising impact of three fifty-calibre bullets fired in quick succession.
Nothing moved, however; there was only the scuttling and scurrying of mice and cockroaches.
With every level Sigurd ascended he felt the wrath growing fiercer within him, this fury that had been with him since the moment of his conception. It had always been as if he and the flames had been one from a cellular level, as if he had been incubated not in the womb of a human woman but in the deepest sulphur-belching pits of an ancient volcano, with its oozing magma and liquid streaks of primordial fire. It was an omnipresent wrath, a primal blaze that could be both a powerful ally and a crippling handicap.
Finally he reached the top, and there he froze in his tracks, the volcanic heat stopping its smoke-hissing passage through his veins for a moment, for now he felt it, rippling its current through the marrow of his bones: the presence of another beastwalker.
‘You left yourselves unguarded!’ he whispered to the darkness, the words mere traces of sound waves trickling like vapour from between his lips. ‘You fools, you stupid, stupid fools,’
Now, just at the point at which it had been ready to erupt from his every pore and douse the entire building in its anarchic vengeance, the fury died down and receded, retreating back into the dark chasms from whence it had crept; perhaps, it seemed, the prize would not be denied him after all.
He stared for a while at the twin doors at the end of the corridor; they were wide and tall, but rickety and rotting. That was where they were; he could feel their presence in his bones, on every nerve ending across every square inch of his skin. A quick bristling of suspicion sent its prickly claws scurrying across his skin, though. This was too easy; why was there not a single guard posted anywhere in the building? Would his enemies really risk the loss of such a prize by leaving it unprotected?
Something was wrong with this picture, very wrong; it had to be a trap of some sorts. Sigurd kept his eyes on the door ahead and began backing slowly away. He crept back down the final flight of stairs to the penultimate level, for an idea had entered his brain, an idea that would, potentially, protect him from whatever trap his enemies may have set for him in that room.
It could not be a bomb; he could sense that his enemies were in there, and if a bomb went off in that space they would die as surely as he would. No, the most likely possibility would be a gun, triggered by a tripwire or pressure pad perhaps, aimed at the door. A sawed-off shotgun most probably; something that would inflict devastating damage at close range.
‘Well, my friends, I have the antidote
