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Brigid and Kane moved farther down the corridor. The rad counter's needle
slowly crept toward the end of the yellow field, closing in on the orange.
"The farther we go, the warmer the count. Not dangerous yet."
The damage became more pronounced along the passage. The cracks and splits
riven deep in the con-crete walls and ceilings spilled piles of masonry and
heaps of dirt. In some sections, buckled vanadium showed through the holes.
Many of the light strips were completely dark.
Kane alternated making motion-detector sweeps and eyeing the disturbed dust on
the floor. The echoes of their steady footfalls chased each other back and
forth. Whoever the interlopers had been, he didn't blame them for vacating the
installation. Redoubt
Papa was as grimly depressing a place as he had ever been, haunted by the
ghosts of a hopeless, despairing past age. The walls seemed to exude the
terror, the utter despondency of souls trapped here when the first mush-room
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cloud erupted from
Washington on that chill Jan-uary noon.
They climbed four sets of wide stairs, Kane noting the tracks that came and
went on the risers and land-ings. The fourth stairway led to an open area with
sev-eral corridors branching off, all but one of them blocked by sec doors.
The overhead lights shone dimly, and they saw tracks extending straight ahead
into the gloom, toward the single unobstructed doorway.
As they approached it, Kane saw a small form slumped in the shadows near the
square frame. He slowed his pace, stiffening his wrist tendons. With a faint
whir of a tiny electric motor and a click of the actuator, the Sin Eater
snapped from his forearm into his waiting palm.
Brigid saw the shape, too, and at first she took it to be nothing more than a
heap of discarded clothing. Still, she approached it cautiously, right hand
tighten-ing on the butt of her Mauser.
Outlined by Brigid's microlight, and enhanced by Kane's night-vision visor,
the shape formed into that of a man, but in no way resembling any human either
one of them had seen before, mutated, hybridized or otherwise.
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James Axler - Parallax Red
The corpse floated in a pool of half-congealed blood that had flowed from a
bullet-
holed torso. He was no more than four feet in height, but he reminded Kane of
a stunted giant, not a dwarf. The gnarly arms were disproportionately long in
comparison to the legs. The splayed, square-tipped fingers had curved,
bevel-edged nails.
The body was thick and powerful, the low, sloping brow topped by a tangle of
lank white blond hair. His complexion was very dark, though the features were
not negroid.
The blunt features held an expression of dull ferocity, fleshy lips peeled
back over stumpy, dis-colored teeth, black glassy eyes wide and staring. He
wore a one-piece coverall garment, a drab olive green in color where it was
not black with blood.
Brigid shifted her light down to his feet. They were bare, small, callused an
inch thick on the soles with nine long, under-curving toes on each one. The
tenth toe was exceptionally long, nearly the length of the foot itself,
projecting out at a forty-five-
degree angle near the heel. It looked like a double-jointed thumb, topped by a
yellow horny nail, caked with dirt to the cuticle.
Kane moved first, tentatively dropping to one knee beside the body, avoiding
the blood.
He gave the body a swift visual inspection. "Shot to death," he said,
un-consciously lowering his voice. "Nine millimeter, two rounds. One in the
upper right thorax, the other straight through the pump."
He dipped the tip of one gloved finger into the pool of dark scarlet. "Still
wet. He didn't die all that long ago."
Picking up the corpse's right arm by the sleeve, he waggled it, testing the
elbow joint. It moved, though stiffly. "Rigor is just now setting in."
Brigid inhaled a breath through her nostrils, then wished she hadn't. The
coppery tang of blood and the sulfur-ammonia stink of evacuated bowels and
bladder made her stomach lurch.
"What do you estimate his time of death?" she asked, imitating Kane's low
tone.
"Twelve, fourteen hours ago?"
He dropped the arm, and it landed in the blood with a splat. "A little more,
maybe sixteen."
Standing up, he performed a motion-detector circuit of the area beyond the
doorway.
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No readings regis-tered, so he stepped out in the corridor. Brigid followed
him, fanning her microlight around. Small brass objects on the floor reflected
the amber beam. Kane plucked one up, revolving it between thumb and
forefinger.
"Shell casings," he said with a note of grim surprise in his voice. "They're
248 grain.
Standard Magistrate Division issue."
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James Axler - Parallax Red
Brigid frowned. "Are you saying Magistrates chilled that... troll?"
Kane smiled crookedly. "Troll?"
She returned his smile, though wanly. "That's what he reminds me of."
Tilting his head back, Kane examined the upper walls and ceilings. He pointed
to several small, flat-tened dark blobs, adhering to the vanadium alloy. "See
the slugs? If
Mags were the blastermen, their firing pattern was pretty damn wild."
He silently counted the bullets impressed into the walls and ceiling. "At
least two blasters, maybe three."
Brigid stepped back, directing the beam of her light along and around the door
frame, seeing the scars of ricochets. "Mags aren't known for firing wild, are
they?"
"Generally speaking," admitted Kane, "no."
"Perhaps it wasn't Mags."
"Think of how those Roamers were armed, with one-shot muzzle loaders. That
kind of primitive fire-power is about the best anybody without a pipeline into
a ville armory can manage. No, whoever hosed these bullets around used
top-of-the line autoblasters."
Brigid took another backward step. "Still "
Something squashed under her left foot, as if she had stepped in mud. Blurting
wordlessly, she skipped for-ward, pulling her boot free with a slight sucking
sound.
Pointing her microlight down, she saw a viscous, two-inch layer of what
appeared to be semiliquid obsidian. "What the hell is this?"
At the startled timbre of her voice, Kane took two long steps and gazed with
mystified eyes at the gelat-inous mass extending eight feet across the floor
toward a bend in the wall. Lumps of the substance clung to the walls.
With a repellently moist, slithery sound, the black matter slowly re-formed
around the impression Brigid's boot had made.
"What is this shit?" Kane demanded, thrusting his head forward and sniffing
the air.
"Looks almost like tar, but it doesn't smell."
Brigid studied the protoplasm and felt the hair at the nape of her neck stir.
With a detached sense of horror, she recognized rough human contours,
elongated and very nearly liquefied.
Stretching out her arm full-length, she splashed the amber beam down the
corridor and her breath caught in her throat. A body lay slumped on the floor,
directly beneath a thick smear of the black substance. She whis-pered, "Look."
Kane looked, stiffened, muttered something beneath his breath and strode
quickly to
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James Axler - Parallax Red the body. She joined him as he turned it onto its
back. The red badge affixed to the molded polycarbonate pectoral caught the
light.
"A Magistrate," he said, his voice sounding hollow. "But where's his head?"
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Brigid didn't try to repress the shudder that shook her frame when she saw the
red-
rimmed cavity be-tween the corpse's shoulders. What little flesh was vis-ible
had a translucent, rubbery look to it, as of meat boiled far too long.
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