Scarlet Dream by James Axler

flickered in staccato bursts, leaving the corridor in a sort of half-light of lightning flashes. Like the ones they had encountered on the lower levels of the redoubt, the corridor itself was painted off-white, with a boldly colored stripe lining the bottom third of the walls. This stripe was finished in a bright sky blue, and with the flickering illumination it gave Kane the eerie illusion of being below water.
    There were no other corpse-things, but the corridor was littered with broken crates and boxes, with ancient paperwork strewed across the carpet tiles of the floor.
    â€œLooks like they used this level as a dumping ground,” Grant muttered.
    â€œGuess they wanted to get rid of this stuff,” Brigid pointed out, kicking at one of the stacks of paperwork with her toe. The topmost papers of the stack slid to the floor,and Brigid saw a bold red stamp marked Top Secret across several fluttering pages. “It’s just so much landfill now.”
    Kane moved on, passing two open doorways to his left, both of them opening out into storerooms stacked with old furniture, chairs with broken backrests and wheels missing from their runners, computer desks stained with centuries’ old coffee.
    This corridor proved much shorter than the ones he had explored on the preceding levels, and it ended in a solid wall on which hung a lone fire extinguisher painted a bright bloodred. Beneath the flickering light, the extinguisher seemed to flash like some fleshy cut in the wall, vying for Kane’s attention.
    Off to the right, Kane saw a wide corridor set at a right angle to the one they were in. The corridor stood in darkness, and Kane peered into it trying to make out details. He could discern faint noises coming from its far end, distant shuffling sounds. With a swift hand gesture, Kane led the way silently down the corridor, his companions following at a wary distance, their guns ready.
    The white-blue corridor ended in a sharp turn that opened directly into a large room the size of an aircraft hangar. The exit came so abruptly in the intermittent tube lighting that Kane very nearly stepped straight out into the open before he realized what he was doing. The sole of his boot scraped against the floor as he came up short and pulled back to the edge of the wall. He had managed just the briefest of glances ahead, but in that half second he had seen plenty, his regimented brain automatically taking in details from years of discipline.
    It was a vast room, perhaps eighty feet square with scratched metal decking that glinted beneath harsh spotlights hanging on high catwalks. There were figures moving around the vast room—fleshy, shambling figureslike the corpse-thing that his team had tangled with in the stairwell.
    Grant and Brigid caught up with Kane and he gave them a look, indicating that someone was on the other side of the wall. Brigid lowered herself behind Kane until she knelt in a crouch by the near wall. Grant, meanwhile, silently eased himself across the wide corridor until his back was flush against the far wall, just out of sight of the opening but with the gap firmly in the sights of his poised Sin Eater.
    Kane inched forward, bringing himself in low to peer once more around the edge of the whitewashed wall. He saw now that the room beyond was lit in patches, but it was enough that he could make out even the far corners, where stacks of crates towered haphazardly against gray-licked walls. Three aging Army vehicles were parked off to the left of the room. Two were jeeps, their tires long since perished or removed, one with its engine on blocks in front of its open hood, and the third was a heavy artillery truck, its olive paintwork caked with mud that had dried there two centuries ago, its tires flat.
    At the rear of the room, Kane spotted the twin metal doors of a goods elevator. They opened like jaws, and the elevator looked wide enough to hold a truck. This was doubtless how the vehicles had been