“Oh Christ!” he said, as he tried to stand. The corridor twisted and contorted as he struggled to his feet, and he threw out a steadying hand to the wall, falling against it while he gathered himself, waiting for his dazed senses to stabilize.
Something wet ran down over his forehead and dripped into his left eye; he felt its warmth as it trickled down his shock-numbed cheek. Jim wiped it away with his forearm and saw that the shirt that had been crisp and white when he threw it on that morning was now torn and ripped. A brown singe mark extended up the full extent of the shirt’s right arm, turning the polyester into brittle brown strands. Bits of melted polyester crumbled under his fingers as he ran his hands over the damaged material. There was a fair amount of blood splattered down the front of his shirt too, but he knew most of it wasn’t his. He was quite sure the blood belonged to whoever had originally owned the severed arm that lay in a congealing pool of gore next to where he had fallen.
He stared at the limb. It was thin and pale, it looked almost feminine in its delicacy but the tufts of hair on the upper arm and the large metallic watch denoted it as having once been attached to a man.
Jim staggered away from the wall and took two tentative, stumbling steps toward the opposite one before edging his way to the ruined doorway.
The doorframe was broken and smashed, and long splinters of wood jutted out from the frame exposing the yellowy-white wood beneath the paint. Jim was careful to avoid impaling himself on any of them as he propped himself in the doorway and tried to see into the smoke—filled room that had, until moments earlier, contained the sole hope for the future of humanity.
It was a charnel house now. An abattoir.
A naked body lay crumpled against the wall just inside the room. Jim thought it was probably once a man but now it was just a pile of broken bones, held together by a bloodied sack of charred skin. The right arm was missing just below the shoulder and a rag of flesh hung limply against a sharp piece of fractured bone jutting out from the body’s collarbone.
“Is there anybody in here,” Jim called out. His voice was husky from the smoke he was inhaling with every breath. His throat felt like someone had taken an electric sander to it and his breathing had an odd whistle each time he inhaled. Lifting his fingers to his mouth, he felt gaps where two of his front teeth should have been.
There was no reply from the room. He took a tentative step inside, careful not to let go of the doorjamb. The room was so full of smoke he could barely make out anything.
He called out again, “Anybody in here?” His voice was quickly overcome by a succession of coughing that wracked his badly damaged body with pain, doubling Jim over as nausea washed over him.
There was a second body laying a few feet further into the room, its outline blackened by a halo of debris and torn clothing. Its size and bulk meant it could only have been one person: Horatio Mabry. The big man’s face was completely gone, now nothing more than a bloody sea of exposed muscle and gristle. His lips had been torn from his face in the explosion, exposing his remaining teeth in a lurid grin.
Everybody was dead in here. He could sense it… he could smell it; that odd burned—chicken smell cops and firefighters would sometimes talk about after a particularly bad fire. Jim backed his way out of the room until his spine hit the furthest wall of the corridor.
It was over.
Whoever had committed this atrocity had destroyed humanity’s only chance at a future. Jim’s eyes clouded over and a tear made its way over his cinder-encrusted cheek. His legs folded beneath him and he slid down the wall and into unconsciousness.
Forty-Six
A shelf of books crashed to the ground, as the three startled occupants of the receiver—room steadied themselves against the table that held the Tach-Comm equipment.
“What was that?” Simone demanded, staring wide-eyed at Rebecca. “An earthquake?”
Rebecca ignored the question. She glanced at Adrianna, her own fear reflecting back at her from the girl’s eyes. “Stay here,” she said, clasping the woman-child’s hand, “I’ll go check.”
Rebecca cautiously eased open the door of the receiver room and stepped out into the corridor. It looked normal, but up ahead, where hallway she stood in bisected the corridor leading to the transmission room, a milky cloud of dust was swirling and falling in the light of the overhead fluorescents. Alarms were clamoring and the emergency exit direction signs were glowing red as she made her way to the intersection and turned to face the source of the smoke floating toward her.
She could see the door to the transmission lab hanging from its hinges, debris lay strewn across the opening and smoke billowed out from it. The opposite wall was black and singed; the paint was covered in blisters and flaking from the wall. As Rebecca stood silent and stunned at the devastation, she saw an indistinct figure emerge wraith-like from the smoke, stagger across the corridor and collapse against the far wall.
She was running then, covering the fifty-feet separating them in seconds that felt like minutes. The man had collapsed to the floor but as she drew near, she knew who it was.
“Jim,” she cried, eating up the remaining ground, her lungs burning as she sucked in huge gulps of the smoke filled air.
He was curled into a tight ball when she reached him, his arms crossed tightly against his chest and his legs drawn almost to his wrists. His shirt was black and dirt encrusted, his trousers torn and shredded. An ugly three-inch gash ran from his forehead through singed hair towards the top of his skull and a steady sheet of blood ran down the left side of his face, gathering in a pool on the floor next to his unconscious body.
“Oh no,” she breathed, falling to her knees beside him. Grabbing Jim’s shoulders, she shook him gently, pleading with him to look at her, “Jim! Please.”
Jim turned a smoke blackened face toward her, streaks of white skin visible only from the tracks left by the tears spilling down his face. She saw his eyes were terribly bloodshot as they focused on her. He was badly injured, but at least he was alive.
“Dead,” he said through cracked, blood-caked lips. “They are all dead.”
Glancing into the room that was now completely filled with smoke, she saw the orange flicker of flames dancing like fire-imps, and she knew Jim was right. They were all dead in there.
Mitchell, Belkov, Horatio, all gone.
“Stand up, Jim,” Rebecca ordered, as she slipped his arm over her shoulder and her own arm around his back. “We need to get you out of here.” Grunting with the effort, she stood up. Holding Jim as firmly as she could, she staggered with him down the corridor.
Security would surely be here any time now but she had to get him out of reach of the choking smoke that was billowing from the burning room and filling the corridor. She half-dragged half-lifted Jim in the direction of the corridor leading to the receiver room, away from the choking smoke. Perspiration popped on her forehead and began to drip down her face, stinging her already smoke reddened eyes.
Jim lapsed back into unconsciousness and his body suddenly became dead weight. Rebecca collapsed to the ground with him, wincing as his head thudded dully against the cold floor.
Willing herself to stand, she wiped the perspiration from her eyes, grabbed Jim’s wrist with both of her hands and began pulling him the final few meters to the junction of the corridor. Once around the corner she let go of his wrist and dropped to her knees while she gathered herself, chugging in deep breaths of the cleaner air.
The gash on Jim’s head was open again and the blood was flowing freely down his face in thick rivulets. His right eye was badly swollen and a bruise the size of her hand was beginning to form down the left side of his face. Worse, his chest was rising and falling shallowly. She had to do something until the emergency crews got to them, had to stop the bleeding. She looked around frantically for something to staunch the flow.