At some point, Sieracki's soldiers would need to pump their poisoned air back out in time for the next batch of combatants to be thrown in.
Exhausted, Kendrick and McCowan found themselves at the deepest level. Robert and Ryan had died near here.
'I don't think we've got much longer to go.'
McCowan's eyes flicked upwards at the ceiling. 'You think they're still alive up there?'
'Who?' asked Kendrick, puzzled.
'Your family. Your wife and your kid.'
'I just don't know. Sometimes I convince myself they must be, other times…'
'I understand.'
McCowan nodded. 'I found something else.' He pointed down the network of corridors that he had just been investigating.
'What did you find there?'
McCowan hauled himself up again. 'I should show you first. C'mon.'
The room was round like an upended bowl, extending above their heads for about a dozen metres. In its centre stood an enormous engine of some kind, and they had entered onto a circular catwalk extending all the way around the open space in which it stood. The floor, a few metres below them, was accessible by ladders.
'Over here.' McCowan pointed with the gas mask that he still held loosely in his hand. Kendrick followed him down a ladder and over to some kind of control area. Banks of rusted machinery stood all around them.
Kendrick gazed around. 'I don't see anything.'
He didn't see the steel chair leg swinging towards his head until it was far too late. His vision blurred under a wave of agony. McCowan's fist slammed again and again into the back of his neck, smashing him to the floor. Just before all thought and awareness abandoned him, something cold and hard was pressed against his face. The last thing Kendrick heard was the sound of McCowan's laboured breathing.
He dreamed.
Fantastical creatures floated through the empty blackness of the lower levels like monsters from a Bosch nightmare. A burning figure ran screeching along the corridors, the surrounding flames golden yet cool so that they did not burn. It cried out his name, sometimes imploring, sometimes harshly angry.
He tried desperately to find a way out. He ran through doors that slithered open at his approach, ran past robot gun turrets that melted into slag as he passed. He was now nothing more than skin and bone riddled with metallic threads, more machine than human.
Kendrick woke up to find something pressed against his face. He screamed, still half-caught in a nightmare of drowning at the bottom of a deep, dark ocean. The thing was still pressed against his face, and he couldn't get it off.
Staggering to his feet in a panic, it took him a moment to realize that it was the gas mask strapped over his face. His thoughts numb, he instinctively reached around the back of his head and, with unsteady fingers, began to unstrap the mask.
Then he stopped as he remembered the rumours of gas. Refastening the straps, he sucked air into his lungs, the sound loud and claustrophobic in the confines of the mask. A canister had been carefully strapped between his shoulder blades.
There was no sign of McCowan himself.
A dull vibration rolled through the ground under his feet. But low enough so that at first Kendrick thought it was a product of his imagination.
Half an hour later, he found McCowan. The other man hadn't gone far. From a distance, he looked almost peaceful, sitting with his back against a wall. But, as Kendrick drew closer, what had appeared from a distance to be a contented half-smile resolved itself into a rictus grin, the lips drawn painfully back across the teeth, the eyes showing mostly the whites.
Safe inside his gas mask, Kendrick licked his lips nervously. It was easy to picture himself lying there instead. And, even though he hated himself for it, it was impossible for him to deny the thrill of gratitude he felt at knowing that someone else had died on his behalf.
He remembered that dream, the way every door had slid open at his merest whim. It had all felt so real, so…
Kendrick left McCowan where he lay and worked his way back up through the levels until he came to the same shield door through which he had twice entered these killing zones.
The closer he came to it, the louder the shield door buzzed with an invisible energy that made him want to reach out and twist it with his bare hands. He felt an indefinable something shift in it at the thought.
Open, damn you, he thought. Let me out of here.
This time the tannoy remained silent, the unbroken camera lenses glinting down at him. Kendrick wondered if they'd let him out.
He stepped up to the enormous steel slab and pushed it, aware how futile this gesture might be. Then he sank to his knees and pressed his head against its surface.
Something inside it gave: like a release of pressure, or a bubble bursting.
He pressed against the door again and found that he could sense the lines of electrical energy connecting the cameras in a network. The gun turret that stood nearby became perceptible as a faint skeletal shadow, a pattern of controlled lightning that flowed out of and joined with the electrical systems that controlled the entire complex of the Maze.
Kendrick pressed his fingers harder against the metal and wondered if he had only imagined feeling it tremble.
The door shuddered, then grew still, although he could hear gears and levers clicking deep inside. No wonder Sieracki and his men were so afraid of us.
A small sob escaped his throat as, finally, the door laboriously swung open.
25 October 2096 The Maze
'Who's there?'
It felt like being in a crowded room where everyone else was invisible and silent. The sensation of another presence was palpable.
Kendrick was back now in the place where Robert had died. He flicked the torch on, having so far used it only sparingly in order to conserve its batteries. But here he needed to be able to see clearly, to be sure that the figments of his imagination really were just figments.
Under the steady light of the torch, the distant walls shimmered, transforming a military storage facility into something more like a fairy grotto. To Kendrick's astonishment, Robert's corpse still lay where it had fallen all those long years ago.
I should have died down here with him and Peter. I didn't deserve to survive this nightmare.
As Kendrick played the torch's beam over Robert's remains, it struck him that the corpse had an eerily beautiful quality to it. The skeletal form was wreathed in silver threads that converged upon it from all corners of the vault-like space, their slender lines twisting together in great bales that erupted from both the walls and ceiling. Threads crawled across the floor in uncountable millions, and Robert's gaping, fleshless jaws glistened
