The sound of their breathing echoed from the metal walls of the small, poorly lit chamber. It was barely tall enough to crouch in, but a good twelve by twelve feet square, with another metal hatch in the middle of the floor. A faint light came from a panel in the metal ceiling that had been removed to reveal several glowing cables. Hanging down from the panel was a spaghetti of wires, some stripped and spliced, others disconnected.
“What is this place?” Dana asked.
“You better—” Marty began, but then Dana stepped on Judah’s mewling face. She stumbled back from the pile of zombie parts, and Marty held her hand and guided her away. Each part was moving, twitching, throbbing with unnatural life.
“Yeah, I had to dismember that guy with a trowel,” he said. “What’ve you been up to?”
Dana stared at him in despair. Her mouth opened but nothing came out, and he saw the terrible truth in her eyes.
“Nobody else, huh?” he asked. She shook her head, and he added, “I figured.”
“You figured everything,” she said.
“Not even close,” he said. “But I do know some stuff. Check this out.” He went to the hatch in the floor and slid it open. The faint whiff of antiseptic he’d caught the first time he’d done so came again, reminding him of hospitals and endless echoing corridors and places that people only ever wanted to visit when there was something wrong.
Dana’s mouth hung open. She shook her head and looked at him, her expression saying, What?
“It’s an elevator,” he said. “Two sides metal, but two are thick glass. You can’t tell unless you… dangle your head in there. Somebody sent these dead fucks up to get us. There’re no controls inside, but there’s maintenance overrides in there.” He nodded up at the dislodged panel. “I’ve been playing around. I think I can make it go down.”
“Do we wanna go down?” she asked.
“Where else we gonna go?” He glanced at the closed ceiling hatch in the corner. “Sure as fuck don’t wanna go back up there.”
“But down there must be… ”
“Whoever’s done this to us? Yeah.” He moved to her side and they both knelt, arms around each other. What has she seen? he wondered. Curt and Holden were dead and gone, and it must have been terrible. He could ask her, but he didn’t really want to know. The terror came off her in waves, but also the defiance that he himself had been feeling ever since taking Judah’s head off. That brief triumph had given him power, and he felt the power thrumming in both of them.
He’d already destroyed one of the puppets. Perhaps it was time to find the puppeteers.
“Okay,” she said, nodding. “Okay. We got nothing else going for us, I guess.” “Only our anger,” he said.
“I thought you couldn’t get angry on dope.” “Haven’t had a smoke in over an hour.” They grinned at each other, then Dana dropped down into the small elevator.
Marty moved to the open ceiling panel and the mass of wires that hung from it.
“Get ready,” he said. “The timing on this might be pretty tight.”
He wound two wires, flicked a switch, then slid across to the elevator. The hatch was already sliding shut and he fell in just in time, the metal brushing his head as he landed next to Dana… and something else fell in with him.
Dana screamed and kicked him in the shin. The elevator started to drop. Something grabbed his leg, and he looked down to see Judah’s arm flexing as its fingers squeezed against Marty’s leather boot.
“Ah! Fuckin’ zombie arm!” He kicked and stamped, and for a moment he thought it was his movement shaking the elevator. But then he stopped, the arm trapped beneath his foot, and instead of dying away the tremors increased.
“Now what?” he shouted.
“Another earthquake,” she said.
“Yeah, and you think it’s not connected?”
From above them came the sound of wrenching metal, and then a loud crack as something broke. Yet the elevator continued down at a slow, steady rate, apparently unhindered. “Something up in the room,” Dana said.
“Yeah.”
“Almost like they’re following us, driving us toward—”
“Nah,” he said, shaking his head. “I should be dead. And so should you. Whoever’s been fucking with us, I’ve got a feeling we’ve stuck a monkey wrench into the works.” The thought made him smile grimly.
They descended for almost half a minute, then jolted to a halt. Marty turned full-circle to see which wall would open—one of the metal sides, or one of the glass—but then they started moving again. Only this time the movement felt different, and it took a moment for him to realize why
“Are we moving sideways?”
“Yeah…” Dana said, leaning against the glass wall. Marty looked around the elevator. The faint illumination came from behind an opaque screen in the ceiling, and there were similar panels spaced at regular intervals along the shaft. He looked down at Judah’s arm still flexing beneath his foot.
“You’re going home, dude.”
Then the elevator stopped. Behind Dana, Marty made out something strange. Another elevator? They were pulling alongside of it, and then—
The enraged werewolf smashed against the glass wall of its own enclosed box, mere inches from their own. The impact was loud, and Marty saw the glass flex, distorting both its appearance and the reflected image of Dana’s terrified face. She fell back into him, screaming, as the creature scrabbled and scratched at the glass. An inch of air and two glass walls was all that lay between them.
It was drooling. Its eyes were intelligent, and starving. Its teeth…
“It’s a fucking werewolf,” Marty said, but voicing the fact made it no easier to believe. “So… no.” He shook his head, and Dana turned to him and held his cheeks.
“Marty?” There was something about her voice, something calm and in control, to which he so wanted to submit.
Far too much bad dope, he thought. I’ll wake up in the Rambler in a minute with Curt driving and Jules preening in the front seat, Dana and Holden flirting and acting coy, and I’ll scream myself awake and they’ll laugh at me, laugh because…
He laughed then, high and hysterical, and the elevator started moving again. Another vaguely lit blank metal wall, and then the light from behind them changed. He and Dana turned together to see a second identical elevator revealed. This one contained a grotesque alien, straight out of the movie, all sickly suckers and flailing limbs. It leapt at the glass and stuck there, its grotesquely sexual mouth sliming and sucking as it tried to probe at them, impregnate them, and then they moved on again, descending before jerking to the side once more.
“Dana. ” he said, but she was already holding him, huddled in the center of the elevator, because they both knew what was to come. They’d seen two, and wagered that there would be many, many more.
And they were right.
On Marty’s side they saw a little girl in a ragged ballerina outfit. Her skirt was limp and torn, as if handed down from every little ballerina ever, and she had no face. In its place was a circular mouth, red-raw and ringed with vicious teeth. She stood on tiptoe and performed a surreal curtsey as they passed her by.
Next to her was a white-faced woman with smashed glass shards for hair and melting hands. She flickered at them in monochrome, flicking in and out of view as if seen on an old, old film.
On Dana’s side was revealed a tall man in a long leather coat. His skin was completely white and hairless. Across his scalp in a neat row were spinning buzz-saws, his forearms were ringed with tightly wrapped strands of barbed wire, and his teeth were spinning drill bits. He was all metal and blades, and he grinned at Dana, holding out his hand above which a strange wooden sphere flexed and warped.