But it didn’t.
The road zigzagged amongst the rows of block houses, a few sheet metal pole buildings that were bleeding rust. It was a warm day and the air was thick and turgid like summer molasses, a negligible breeze blowing out hot and dry. He was struck by the silence. In that place it was not something to be ignored: it was harsh and immense with an almost physical weight that bore down on you. He felt it around him like a dark river bursting its banks, flooding the compound with a stillness that was like a tide of darkness cutting through that glaring, bone-white day. It broke up into channels and creeks and eddies, each flowing soundless and distant. Loose rain gutters creaked. Flies lit in the air. Little whirling dust-devils sought cul-de-sacs and pockets of sinister shadow between the buildings.
If there was one thing Slaughter had learned to trust in all his years of living free and riding hard, it was his instinct. It had saved his bacon more times than he could remember. And right then it was warning him away from this place, sensing despair and misery and agony beyond comprehension. An aura of seamless, black evil that crouched in every shadow, pressed up to every grimy window pane, and dripped like blood in the darkness behind bolted doors. If the compound had a voice, it was a scream in the dead of night and a whimpering of whipped dogs in the bright of day.
He moved on, his shadow following him, probing deeper into the mystery of the compound. He was wondering what he wanted with this place but knowing it was not a matter of wanting but of
Just ahead there was a long, low building. Its windows were covered in heavy steel mesh like those of a madhouse. All roads seemed to converge here so Slaughter knew this was where he had to go. The door was locked when he climbed the steps, but weathering had splintered and weakened it.
He kicked it open and a dry, awful animal stink wafted out at him.
Wrinkling his nose, he drew the Mag from its holster, his palm sweaty on the rubberized grip. The stink of age and death were apparent, but there was something more, a ghost of something haunting this place and he could not honestly put a name to it. Inside, he found what appeared to be offices with harsh metal desks and uncomfortable plastic furniture. File cabinets. There were papers scattered everywhere and a calendar on the wall five years out of date which would have put it at about the time of the Outbreak.
Next, he found himself in a high-ceilinged room that was nearly perfectly circular. It was filled with wreckage, but apparently it had been some sort of med lab judging from shattered lab glassware, culturing vats, microscopes, and drug cabinets. All of which looked like somebody had taken a sledgehammer after them and then danced a merry jig on the fragments. Like everything else, there was easily an inch of dust covering them which gave them the look of artifacts mired in silt from a sunken ship. There was a stainless steel table, a dissection table maybe, and the remains of a corpse upon it…though maybe
Slaughter had some ideas about the lab, but nothing concrete.
Not yet.
He kicked around at the debris on the floor, raising twisting clouds of dust that made him cough. Just junk. Glass, papers, rubber tubing, what might have been dirty surgical instruments and spent needles.
The most interesting thing in there was what was set into the walls: cages. They were empty, steel mesh doors thrown open. Whatever had been in them was long gone, yet a dankness still held inside them. That weird ghosting animal stink.
Slaughter went into the next room.
Another office. There was a zippered case of DVDs on the desk, a few stacked file folders, books on pathology and microbiology, loose papers. He opened the folders. Mostly scientific notations, and nothing he could understand. Beneath them was a logbook of some sort. The entries written in a precise hand read:
Stillwater 7 subjects Sept. 6
Black River Falls 23 subjects Sept. 14
Maiden Rock 3 subjects Sept. 29
Plum City 5 subjects Oct. 4
Prescott 12 subjects Oct. 13
It ran on and on like that, page after page. There was no doubt in his mind what it all meant: this was some sort of experimental station where victims of the Outbreak were brought for medical and biological study. After the worms started raining from the sky and the countryside was overrun with the living dead, the healthy ones ran east so nobody would have known about this place or objected to what they were doing here. The compound was a concentration camp of sorts.
Slaughter was going to leave the room when he noticed the circuit breaker door. It was partially open. There were dozens of breaker switches for the different rooms and buildings, outside security lights, etc. At the top were two red switches. One said
For the hell of it he flicked
When he flicked
“Still got a charge,” he said under his breath.
Which gave him an idea. There was a TV and DVD unit on a stand in the corner. Using a rag he found in the desk, he wiped the dust from them. He turned on the DVD player and got a green light. The TV came on with a field of static. He chose a DVD at random from the case and put it in the player. After more static, he watched images of worms that were being cultivated, dissected, held out for inspection wriggling in forceps, then a series of microscopic images which must have been tissue samples and sectioned worms. There was no sound, which made it all kind of eerie. The video kept pixilating randomly and it went back to static…then, for just an instant, like some kind of flashing subliminal sort of thing, he saw a face…then he saw it again.
Then nothing but static.
He stood there, feeling a worming unease in his belly. It was surely nothing, yet that unease was growing and he could not adequately understand why the face disturbed him so much. Only that it did. His belly flipped over. A bead of sweat rolled down his forehead.
He knew he hadn’t imagined it. When he closed his eyes, the image was still burned onto his retinas: a man in a black hat whose face was an almost violent shade of lunar white, a cratered/pockmarked face with brilliant pink eyes staring out.
Swallowing, Slaughter backed the DVD up to the worms and played it through the static. No face. Nothing. He tried it again and then three more times after that.
No face.
But he did not believe that.
He tried another DVD. Blank. Then another. About halfway through, things stared to heat up and get interesting.
Of course, that was purely subjective.
Because what Slaughter saw was sickening.
The video showed an Asian girl of maybe ten or eleven who was without a doubt one of the newly risen judging from her stark gray-white complexion and vacant, shining eyes like pools of gasoline. She appeared to be tied to a chair. There were several gaping holes in her face that were acrawl with maggots. She was opening and closing her mouth as if she was speaking and Slaughter was glad there was no audio. Her face and throat were bulging from some sort of motion beneath and if he wondered what that might be, he didn’t have to wonder long because what was nesting inside her started coming out in a writhing, almost liquid profusion: worms. Not maggots. Maggots would have been pretty pedestrian. No, these were the fleshy red worms that fell from the sky and reanimated the dead. They came out of her nostrils like snotty ribbons of red licorice and slithered from her
