Cannibal Corpse, M/C

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 knowing. Knowing what this drab, utilitarian place was or had been. It looked like a prison farm or a ramshackle military installation. Whatever it was, it was a place that needed a chainlink fence topped with razor wire and guard towers. So it was either to keep something out or something else in.

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.

Interesting.

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 corpse wasn’t quite right because this thing was a mummy, little more than a skeleton sheathed in a leathery sort of flesh that had cracked open from the dryness, spilling a powdery film. Its skullish face and exposed rib slats were threaded with cobwebs.

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