James Axler - Polestar Omega

Skinned out and roasted on spits the jackrabbits were a bit gamy and tough, but the companions laid into them until there was nothing left but a pile of stripped bones. After they had finished eating, they lit their torches and headed for the redoubt’s mountainside entrance. Some nameless, probably long dead joker had scratched a message into the stone above the gaping entrance: For Sale by Owner, Needs Work. It wasn’t the first time they’d seen graffiti; the same kind of message had decorated the entrances of one or two other plundered redoubts across the hellscape. Because the joke was so old, none of the companions bothered to comment.

It turned out the place was occupied by squatters—a colony of stickies had taken up residence; the corridors were crawling with the spindly pale creatures. The companions descended five floors beneath the surface and stumbled on a writhing, ten-deep, stickie clusterfuck. Something had triggered a mating frenzy. There were too many to chill, and they couldn’t reverse course because the way out was blocked by arm-waving bodies, sucker fingers and needle teeth.

A running fight to the death ensued, down the dark corridors and seemingly endless staircases. Before they were overrun, they managed to find and reach the redoubt’s mat-trans unit. If it had been out of commission, the game of survival they had played for so long would have been over.

Permanently.

But the mat-trans had powered up, and they slammed and sealed the door behind them. Faint shadows on the armaglass walls indicated that the anteroom on the other side of the chamber was packed with leaping, shrieking muties. The last thing Ryan saw before jump sleep overtook him were what he took to be the smears of sucker juice on the opaque armaglass.

From frying pan into fire, he thought.

The door opened and Lima reentered, this time with two men in black coveralls at his side. They all wore respirators.

The whitecoat kept his distance from Ryan, apparently fearing reprisal. “Each of you will be quarantined and receive separate treatment,” he told them. “The procedure is necessary to avoid accidental recontamination.”

Lima turned to his lackeys and said, “The one-eyed man will go first.”

The black suits quickly unshackled Ryan from the wall. As they led him out, he glanced back at Krysty. Her prehensile mutie hair had once again curled into tight ringlets of alarm.

They didn’t bother to hood him this time, which was something Ryan saw as another bad sign: they didn’t give a damn what he saw. One way or another, alive or dead, they figured he wasn’t going anywhere.

Lima brought up the rear as they moved down the corridor. At the end of the long hall they made a left turn onto another straightaway, at the end of which they made another left turn. To Ryan it seemed as though they were tracing the perimeter of the redoubt. There were doors on both sides, but they were unmarked. What he presumed was the exterior wall was cracked in places, and there were puddles of standing water on the floor. The air so reeked of ammonia that it made the inside of his nose and the back of his throat burn. The caustic fumes were another reason the residents wore respirators. What wasn’t clear was whether the ammonia was some naturally occurring irritant, or whether it had been introduced into the corridors as a sterilizing agent. The lights overhead flickered occasionally, but the power plant’s hum remained steady. He was looking hard for some wiggle room, a weak spot that could be exploited, and so far there wasn’t any.

He had to go with the flow.

They passed through a pair of double swing doors, the lower halves of which were covered with scuffed metal kick plates, and entered what looked like Whitecoat Heaven. The floor was carpeted in dark red; there were ceiling tiles, and chairs and couches along the white walls. In front of them, and partially blocking their path, was a curving counter behind which a half dozen men and women in lab coats sat working at comp stations. They all wore respirators.

“Do you ever take those breathing masks off?” Ryan asked Lima. “Or were you born with them?”

“The respirators are because of you and your friends. We can’t risk spreading your contamination to the redoubt core. Everyone there is unaltered.” Lima gestured for the men in black suits to enter a room on the right.

That door had a metal kick plate, too. The room beyond was divided by a full-width interior wall; a heavy glass window allowed monitoring of the isolated enclosure on the other side. A row of office chairs were set out for spectators. Ryan was bum-rushed through the door beside the window—it had a bright yellow Biohazard sign. The same yellow as his jumpsuit. Although there was a small hospital bed, what drew his attention was a massive stainless-steel bathtub filled with a slurry of ice and water.

When Ryan looked back, he saw two female whitecoats staring at him through the glass. Their expressions were hidden behind their respirators.

Lima waved for the women to enter the room. In addition to the clipboards, both carried hypodermics loaded with something pink.

“Secure him,” Lima said.

One of the black suits drew a semiautomatic blaster from its hip holster and pressed the muzzle to Ryan’s temple while the other grabbed both his wrists and lifted, bending him over, putting strain on his shoulder joints to control his movements.

Lima seemed amused by Ryan’s steely glare. “Sometimes the decontamination treatment causes an extreme violent reaction,” he said. “Everything we’re doing is for your own protection.”

“In case you haven’t noticed, I’m not fighting you,” Ryan said. “I’m going along with the whole rad-blasted program. Why not just cut the crap and tell me what this is all about? How did we end up here? Who are you? What is this place? And what is that tub of ice for?”

“Does the lab rat need to know what’s coming?” Lima asked. “Will that make its ordeal less agonizing? I think not.”

Something ugly glittered in the man’s eyes.

“Will it be more amusing to watch the rat discover the truth? Most definitely.”

He turned to the women and said, “Inject him.”

The whitecoats exchanged concerned glances; neither of them moved to obey.

“But we can’t roll up the sleeves with his hands behind his back like that,” one of them said.

“Inject him through the fabric. Don’t argue, you idiot. Just do it!”

As the women approached him on either side, Ryan stiffened. The sight of the pink liquid inside those hypos triggered something primal deep within him—whatever the hell was in those needles, he wanted no part of it. The man behind him raised his arms a foot higher, forcing him onto his tiptoes, off-balance, and the hammer of the blaster at his ear locked back with a gritty click.

“Stand still or he’ll blow out your brains!” Lima said.

Unable to lift his head because of the elevated arm hold, Ryan spoke to the floor. “You’ll regret this.”

Maybe because they thought the threat was empty, maybe because they were more afraid of Lima than a one-eyed man in handcuffs, the two women jabbed him in either deltoid. The pink gunk burned as it shot ever so slowly into his muscles. The injections took a long time because the payload was so large and so thick. When they had finished, the women jerked out the needles and stepped well back from him. It felt as if they’d just pumped a couple of boulders under his skin.

“There, that wasn’t so bad, was it?” Lima asked. “Do you want a lollipop?”

“Yeah,” Ryan said, “your head on a stick.”

“Those kinds of remarks might intimidate weak-minded rabble in the primitive shit hole we pulled you from,” Lima said, “but in a civilized society they are simply infantile and pathetic.”