Kenopsia (Book 1 of Pandora's Wake: The Nomad Chronicles)

“In English please Unteroffizier!” Joanas interrupted Kurt.

Kurt took three deep breaths,

“I should come with you Oberfeldwebel!” he almost pleaded, “If anything happens down there, you might need me. I don’t like being left behind!”

Joanas understood his corporal’s dismay, but his decision would have to stand.

“You are not being left behind, we will only be one level down and we need someone to watch this barricade!” The nomads had assembled a hasty barricade from spare hospital gurneys, waiting area seating, and various items from their vehicles. It wasn’t much, but in an emergency, it would offer some cover for them to defend. “Besides, we don’t know if you will suffer another attack.” Joanas was referring to the difficulty in breathing that had afflicted Kurt only a scant hour or so beforehand.

“The doctor said I should be fine, Oberfeldwebel!” Kurt protested, but with less enthusiasm. It was clear Joanas had made up his mind, and once a sergeant had made a decision, it was rare a corporal could persuade him out of it.

“We will not be long, Unteroffizier. Who do you have watching the doors at the far end?” He nodded up towards the treatment booths.

“I have stationed Ashley up there, for now, Oberfelldwebel, with Father Businger.” In truth, he’d sent Ashley up to the other end partially because he was finding her obvious timidity something of an irritation. “I would prefer Magda, she is tougher, but the doctor is taking a look at her, she has broken ribs I think.”

Joanas nodded and clapped his Unteroffizier on the shoulder. “We will not be long. You have your headset if we need you we will call! Our call sign is ‘Molnjir.’ Joanas checked his magazine once more before signalling to the others to move off.

Mathias Forrell took the lead, his shotgun levelled and ready, his pistol in the holder at his waist. He’d paired up with Esther Yadin. The feisty Israeli and Ronan had both volunteered. Ember was in the middle of the group, looking nervous but sternly determined at the same time. She’d been pressed into service in case they found the generator in less than ideal condition. Better to have a mechanic with them than to have to come back and get one. Not that she required that much pressing. As soon as the reasoning had been explained to her, she agreed that coming along was the best course of action.

Each of the 5 person team carried an empty backpack in addition to weapons, ammunition and in Ember’s case a toolkit. If they found the pharmacy, they wanted to be able to carry as many of the supplies on Doctor Allmendinger’s list as they could without having to impede their ability to fire their weapons, if the need arose.

They set off over the barricade and down the passage, ignoring the lift in favour of the stairs. They were aware that with no power the lift wouldn’t work anyway. Not to mention, no one wanted to be in a confined box with only one way out and no way of knowing what would be on the other side of the doors when they opened.

Joanas and Ronan took up positions and aimed their weapons up the stairs as Mathias and Esther lead the way down into the basement. Once they were halfway down, Joanas and Ronan followed them. Ember stayed in the approximate centre of the group.

The darkness seemed to deepen as they descended to the subterranean basement. The three men switched on the torches they had taped to their weapons. Esther and Ember turned on the lights they had on bands about their heads. Five beams of pale light cut a swathe through the gloom and illuminated the wispy clouds of breath in the chill basement.

“Creepy!” Ember murmured as they ascended to the utilitarian concrete floor of the basement, turning to their right they gazed up the long, dark, corridor. Joanas pressed a finger to his lips to indicate she should be silent.

The hallway ran north from the stairwell and lift access and was surprisingly wide, easily wide enough for 4 or more people to stand shoulder to shoulder across it. Several doors ran off the corridor on the left and right-hand side walls. The torch beams barely made it to the far end of the hallway, where it turned sharply to the left and out of sight. At the far end of the hall was a single, sturdy looking door. The walls and ceiling were painted a pale magnolia whilst the floor remained bare concrete.

Scanning the area with trained eyes, Joanas weighed up the danger the passage could present. The multiple doors meant there were several areas from which they could be surprised if they were not careful. Fortunately, the doors were offset, with only two visible on the left wall and four on the right-hand wall. They could breach most of the doors without having their backs directly to one on the other wall. There was little-to-no cover in the corridor, with only one large cage trolley about half way up the passage on the right. The trolley was half filled with white sacks, presumably laundry, and would provide minimal cover. Good for interrupting line of sight but not great for stopping rifle rounds.

Slowly and cautiously Mathias Forrell sank to the ground, lying prone and shining his torch under the cage trolley. Seeing no sign of feet beneath it, he gave the group an OK hand signal before getting back to his feet.

Joanas nodded and signalled Esther and Ronan to take up covering positions so they could watch the corridor. He and Mathias moved to the first door on the right and prepared to breach it. They had discussed the plan for breaching doors before they had descended the stairs while waiting for doctor Allmendinger’s shopping list. Since Joanas and Mathias both wore body armour, they would handle breaching the doorways and be first in, the others would provide cover and support.

The two men flanked the first door. An engraved plastic plaque on the portal read ‘Stores’ in both French and German.

As Joanas began the countdown from 5 to zero on his fingers, Mathias grasped the door handle. On the count of zero, he twisted it and threw the door open. Joanas dashed in his rifle at the ready, finger on the trigger guard.

“Clear!” he said quietly as he took the storeroom in at a glance. It was a plain room with metal shelving units lining its walls. On the shelves were a collection of tools and boxes of small electrical components, spare bulbs, fuses, and wires. There was nowhere for anyone to hide here, not unless they were the size of a domestic cat. Jonas made a mental note that the storeroom held the sort of items they may need later if they had to make any quick repairs and then returned to the hallway outside.

Joanas signalled the others to move up and make ready for the next door. He took the lead again, with Mathias following across the hall and down to the next door, this one on the opposite wall from the storeroom. The door was wider than the standard and seemed to have no handle. A glance at the hinges showed it was designed to swing both ways and the plastic sign screwed to its front read ‘Soiled Laundry Storage’ in German and French.

Mathias grinned as he read the plaque.

“After you boss” he whispered to Joanas, whose shoulders seemed to sag at the prospect.

On the count of zero Joanas dashed through the door and swept the room with the torch taped to his rifle. Mathias followed him. The store room was large, at least four times the size of the first one. In place of the shelves, the room was filled with cage trolleys, most of them containing several sacks of laundry. The smell, although unpleasant was far less overpowering than Joanas had feared it would be. The two men advanced through the room, checking behind each trolley, their hearts thumping in their chests.

Finally, convinced that they had investigated every hiding place in the store room Joanas gave the call,

“Clear!”

As if in answer a sudden, metallic “bang” sounded from somewhere nearby, startling both men.

They spun about to face the direction the sound came from, weapons at the ready, eyes wide and skin drained of colour.

Joanas signalled for Mathias to cover him as he crept forward to where the sound had seemed to originate. He grabbed a cage trolley, pulled it out of the way, behind it was nothing but a blank wall. He stared at the wall for a second, baffled.

A wide metal pipe ran around the wall at the level of the skirting board, its magnolia paint was cracked and flaking in places.

“It came from the pipes.” he whispered, “Could there be air in the pipes?”

Frowning, Joanas nodded,

“Or rats!” he answered. Still, something about it didn’t feel right to Joanas. He wished he could put his finger on what it was, but he couldn’t. Reluctantly he waved Mathias out of the room and they joined the others in the corridor.

“What the hell was that noise?” Ember asked. Her face seemed pale and bloodless, her eyes wide. She was gripping her toolbox so tightly her knuckles had turned white. She had drawn her combat knife but held it too tightly, and too close to her body.

“Just air in the pipes. Or rats maybe.” Mathias tried to sound soothing. “Nothing to worry about.” He smiled what he hoped was a reassuring smile, but which in the dim corridor, lit only by pale torch beams, seemed more of a sinister, rictus grin.

“Yeah? Great.” Ember sounded dubious. “Can we get this done and get out of here, this place is giving me the creeps. I damn near shat myself just then.”

“Does the term ‘Too much information’ mean anything to you?” Ronan asked in a flat monotone.

“Yeah. Does the term ‘fuck off’ mean anything to you?” she snapped back.

Ronan only shrugged and chuckled lightly.

“Keep it down!” Joanas said, “Let’s get going.” He indicated the next set of doors across the passage from them. Unlike the other doors in the utilitarian corridor, this one was a double. Again, the doors had no handles or locks and seemed designed to push open from either side.

The bilingual, plastic sign screwed to the lintel above the door read ‘Laundry Room’.

Joanas and Mathias burst into the Laundry room together as Ronan and Esther kept their weapons trained down the hallway. The doors swung open without resistance to reveal a large, magnolia-painted room. Several industrial washing machines and dryers ran the length of the far wall. Steam presses lined the west wall south of the door and cage trolleys were dotted about the room, most filled with crisply laundered sheets. On shelves above the washing machines were huge boxes of detergent.

The two Germans exchanged glances. They understood what they would have to do. Methodically they proceeded down the row of machines, opening each to check there was no one or nothing inside. They murmured to one another as they checked each machine

“Empty.”

“Empty.”

One after the other, they checked the large, industrial machines. Nothing but cavernous enclosures and stainless steel drums lay on the other side of the dark glass doors. Relieved, the two men turned to head back to the door and the others.

Mathias’s boot caught something on the ground, sending it skittering across the floor with a metallic ringing sound.

“What was that?” Esther asked in a stage whisper from the main door. She had taken up a crouching stance to watch the hallway outside.

“I’m not sure, but there is more of it here.” Mathias bent to pick up some of the detritus, a palm-sized section of metal grating. He turned it over in his hand, gazing curiously at it until inspiration hit. He looked up.

There above him was a large air vent. The grill that once covered it had been rent open with considerable force from the inside of the air duct.

“Well, that’s where it came from.” He pointed with the muzzle of his shotgun. The torch strapped to it shone a pallid beam into the ruined vent and the dark interior of the duct beyond.

“This seems a very new building to have so much metal fatigue.” Joanas mused.

“It’s not metal fatigue.” Mathias didn’t take his eyes from the ruined vent. With his left hand, he handed Joanas the piece of grating taken from the ground, his right never leaving the grip of his shotgun. “See, clean. No rust.”

Joanas turned the shard of metal over in his hand,

“Hmm. Then what, our phantom rats again?”

“No,” Mathias shook his head, taking a few steps back from under the air vent, “rats couldn’t do this. This is something else, something we haven’t seen yet.”

Kurt kept a sharp eye on the southern approach to their position. The stairwell and the lift seemed somehow less threatening since the call from his Oberfedwefel warning something may be in the air-ducts, but they still needed to be watched. Behind him, several of the nomads hunted for any more air vents and anything at all they could use to block them.

Ashley had already covered the one she had found in the foot-well of the nurse’s station area with the tower of one of the station’s PCs, laid on its side.

“Great!” someone was saying behind him, “Now we have monsters in the air-ducts! This is like being in a horror film!”

“Yes.” Kurt muttered to himself, “And we’ve just sent people into a dark basement in a small group.” He tried desperately to forget every horror film he had ever seen before the Event, but they seemed determined to force their way back into his memory. The more he tried to shut them out, the more of them just popped in there.

“Maybe whatever is in the air vents is what did this!” Shamus pointed at some deep, jagged scratches in the plastic of the chairs in the row behind where he had been sitting. They were attached to one another in groups of a half dozen, but were not, as he had initially feared, attached to the floor.

Ashley leant over to have a look.

“Oh, God!” she whimpered, “If they can do that to plastic and the metal air vents, what could they do to a hand or a leg?”

“Well, at least they must be small, whatever they are, to fit in those air vents. Probably more the size of that rat you saw.”

Ashley shivered involuntarily at the thought, aware now that whatever it was she had seen, it probably wasn’t a rat. It was what Shamus said next though that really chilled her blood.

“Definitely smaller than whatever it was I saw on the stairs by the fire doors.”

“What?” She almost shrieked, “You never mentioned anything about seeing anything by the fire doors!”

Shamus’s brow furrowed as he tried to think back, the fog of confusion from his pounding headache making it hard to remember,

“Didn’t I?” he seemed uncertain, “Ember must have done, she was with me... she must have seen it... I think?” now he tried to think about it, it did seem odd she hadn’t mentioned it.

“YOU THINK?” Ashley’s voice rose in volume and pitch suddenly, sounding shrill in the darkened waiting area. Around her, all activity stopped as a half dozen faces turned towards them.

“What did it look like? What was it?” she lowered her voice, trying to take control of herself.

“I don’t know!” Shamus began to panic, realising that in the fog of his oxygen starved confusion he hadn’t warned anyone about what he thought he had seen. “It was dark, there was a shadow and movement. I didn’t see it clearly, but it was big, at least as big as me!”

“For fuck’s sake Shamus!” Then, regaining her composition she called to the others, “Someone go and get Knut! Right now!”

Joanas approached the turn in the corridor cautiously. Ahead the passage turned to the left at a sharp ninety-degree angle. Facing him, at the end of the passage was a single red door. On the right wall facing the ninety-degree turn was a second door, this one painted green and with a warning sign on it in plastic, cautioning to be aware of ‘High Voltage’. With any luck, this would be the generator room. Since leaving the laundry they had checked two other rooms. One had proven to be a storeroom for fresh, clean linen. The other held the electrical breaker switches which Ember had taken a quick look at and noted that the masters were in the ‘off’ position. She had flicked them to the ‘on’ position, but nothing had changed. No sudden illumination, no sounds of electrical devices coming on, confirming their suspicions that the national grid was out and that they would need to find the backup generator.

Cautiously Joanas peered around the corner. The right angled corridor was considerably narrower than the north to south one they were in and stretched away into darkness. Doors ran off it on both the left and right walls. Several metres away a flight of stairs ascended to the upper floors and opposite those were what looked like the doors to two lifts. It occurred to Joanas that the floor here was no longer bare concrete but was covered in pale-coloured rubber tiles. The passage ran far further than his torch light could penetrate, but in it, nothing moved.

The silence was suddenly broken by the sound of Knut’s voice over the radio. The old man was wheezing as he spoke and Joanas was certain he sounded worse than before.

“Knut to Mjolnir, we have reports of an unidentified man-sized life form on the stairwell east of the fire doors here, Over.”

Joanas froze, “Copy that Knut, we have visual of the stairwell from this position, no visual on the intruder, over.”

“Intelligence is half an hour plus old Mjolnir, proceed with caution, over!”

“Half an hour?” Ester asked, “And we are just hearing this now why?”

Joanas shrugged, but there was worry etched across his face.

“Understood Knut, proceeding with caution. Mjolnir out.”

With one final faint ‘click’ Ember turned the last tumbler in the lock of the eastern door.

“There you go boys. If you want a lock picked, ask a mechanic!” she grinned triumphantly, although in truth there had been a moment when she thought she might just have to drill it.

That would have defeated the point, of course. They were trying to open it quietly. If she had needed to resort to drilling it, they might as well have fallen back on Mathias’s first plan of blowing the lock off with his shotgun.

The other door, to the north, had proven to hold nothing but the dry riser for the building’s fire suppression system.

Ember stepped back and down the passage.

“That’s my bit done boys, just grab the knob and give it a yank and then in you go!” she grinned.

The two Germans nodded, oblivious to the joke. Behind her, Ronan made a faint snorting noise. At least he got it.

Ronan and Esther had their weapons trained down the narrow corridor, watching the darkness. The various doors and in particular the stairs now seemed all the more sinister after Knut’s warning.

“We have you covered this way. Go.” Esther assured Joanas and Mathias, who prepared to go through the door.

Throwing it open, Mathias stepped back to let Joanas, clad in his heavier, military body armour, go first. The soldier swept in, scanning the room for any threat, but saw none. Joanas followed him in.

The room had bare concrete walls and floor. Several drums of fuel were stacked along the south and part of the east wall. In the northeast corner was the generator that they had hoped to find.

Scanning the ceiling Mathias saw the air vent – intact this time. Whatever had been cutting through the other vents clearly hadn’t had occasion to visit the generator room.

“Clear!” Joanas hissed, once the two men had swept the room and satisfied themselves it was safe. On cue, Ember poked her head around the door,

“Get in!” she grinned, “The generator! Let’s see if it works, shall we?”

Down the corridor, something seemed to stir in the darkness. Esther strained her eyes, trying to make it out, but couldn’t. Rather it seemed to be a squirming mass of something shrouded in the darkness. It was almost as if it was part of the darkness itself. Esther adjusted her grip on the pistol and strained to hear. She thought she caught a strange, alien, chattering noise, faint and perhaps nothing but an echo. In the room behind them, Ember and the two German men seemed to be moving something heavy. She could hear metallic scraping, the occasional grunt or groan and muted voices.

“You hear that?” Ronan asked.

“You as well? A sort of chittering sound?”

The Irishman nodded, “It’s getting louder the more noise they make back there,” he jerked his head at the doorway behind them.

“Wish I could see!”

As if on cue there came a mechanical rumble from the generator room and the lights in the passageway began to blink on. One by one the strip-lights lit up, burning away the darkness and illuminating the full length of the hallway, and the horror that had been lurking in the gloom.

“Holy Mother of God!” Ronan gasped in shock.