James Axler - Labyrinth

“I was there on vacation once, about a hundred years ago,” Mildred said.

“A boating holiday?” Doc asked.

“No, it was before the dam was put in,” she said. “I remember there was a big stink over its getting built. The reservoir flooded a small town on the canyon floor, and Native American prehistoric sites along the cliffs were lost. For the right to build the dam, the federal government paid reparations to the Hopi tribe, and there was a land swap, too.

“Not everyone was happy with the amount of money that changed hands, or with the relocation site. Supposedly because of the number of threats, during construction the area for hundreds of square miles was turned into a top security, no-fly zone. Military ground and air units kept out protesters and potential saboteurs. A lot of questions about the Pueblo Canyon project never got answered, such as, why it was necessary in the first place. And why approval for the funding and land trade was rushed through Congress. Once the dam was completed and the reservoir filled up, the fences came down, the military left and the controversy fell off the media radar.”

“What do you make of this?” J.B. asked. He pointed at another red symbol, though smaller, in the middle of the swathe of blue, a short distance from the dam.

“Could be another redoubt,” Ryan said.

“In the middle of the reservoir?” Krysty said.

“Mebbe an island?” Dix suggested.

“Then it’d have to be man-made,” Mildred said. “The canyon is five hundred feet deep at that point.”

“Whatever it is, it’s got a name,” Dix said, leaning closer to read the scratched lettering. “It looks like ‘M-i-n-o-t-a-u-r.’”

“Does that mean anything to anybody?” Krysty asked the others.

A beaming Doc provided the answer, delighted at the opportunity to put his classical education to use. “The name refers to a mythical monster of ancient Greece,” he said. “According to legend, it was the half-human offspring of a great bull and Pasiphae, wife of Minos, the king of Crete. The bull was a gift to the king from the sea god, Poseidon, who wanted Minos to sacrifice it to him. When the king didn’t kill the animal as directed, Poseidon punished him by making his wife fall in love with it. Minos kept the monstrous product of their union, known as the minotaur, and built a maze to contain it. The king exacted tribute from conquered lands in the form of human victims, which he sacrificed to the minotaur. Ultimately, the murderous beast was defeated by the hero Theseus, with the help of Minos’s daughter, Ariadne.”

“Humans can’t make babies with other kinds of animals,” Krysty said.

“Not in the usual way,” Mildred said. “And not in ancient Crete. But in a test tube, late twentieth century, with gene-splicing techniques…”

With another loud clunk the light banks failed again, and again the companions found themselves surrounded by blackness.

Two minutes passed, then five, while they waited with weapons drawn. This time the lights didn’t come back on.

After igniting the torches they pulled from their packs, the companions followed the predark map, which turned out to be full of blind alleys. Most of the exit stairwells were blocked by floor-to-ceiling avalanches of concrete and steel. From the structural damage to the floors above, it was clear something disastrous had happened. The higher they climbed, the greater the destruction. Though they were only eight levels underground, it took them close to an hour to reach the surface. And in the end, they had to track the looters’ route through the air ducts.

Standing outside in daylight, they could see why they had been beaten to the treasure trove. The redoubt’s secret entrance had been uncovered by a massive landslide, which had tumbled house-sized blocks of sandstone onto the desert valley. There was no way of telling if the earthquake had been natural, or caused by the shock wave of a distant nuclear strike.

Ryan shielded his eye from the sun’s brutal glare, surveying a landscape of pale brown mesa and pancake-flat plain shimmering in 120-degree, midday heat. For as far as he could see in every direction, it was just rocks and sand. Sand and rocks.

“Dear friends, I fear Judgment Day is upon us at last,” Doc remarked. “Our myriad sins have finally landed us in the pit of hell.”

“Or on the moon,” Mildred added.

Krysty knelt in the shade cast by a fallen sandstone block. From a crevice at the base of the rock, she plucked a withered scrap of plant. The delicate white petals broke off in her fingers; the yellow center fell to fine dust on her palm. If Deathlands’s brave little daisy was a testament to adaptability and survival in the most hostile of environments, it was also a canary in a coal mine. “If we stay here long, we’ll die,” Krysty said.

Jak squinted into the glare. “Go that way,” he said, pointing south across the desolation.

“Can’t miss the reservoir if we walk in that direction,” J.B. agreed.

“Too hot to break trail, now,” Ryan said. “We’ll start after sunset. Check your canteens. Whatever water we’ve got, it has to last until we get there.”

Shielding his nose and mouth with his hand, Ewald Starr held the torch at arm’s length. Firelight danced over the corpse’s blackened rib stubs and caved-in breastbone, over a skull cratered from forehead to lower jaw. One leg was missing all the way to the hip. The body cavity had been plundered of its organs; the bones stripped of flesh and left mired in a sticky-looking, yellowish puddle. The fluid had splattered low across the corridor’s concrete wall.

Whatever the yellow stuff was, it stank, thermonuclear.

A combination of bearpit, toxic chemical spill and rotting meat.

In the close quarters of Pueblo Dam’s service hallway, the rank odor hung like an acid fog.

Ewald listened hard, but all he could hear was the chorus of hissing torches—the greasy black smoke they gave off billowed along the low, pipe-lined ceiling, driven by a steady, gentle breeze.

Three other men stood with their backs against the opposite wall, faces pale and pained, torches clutched in trembling hands. Paralyzed.

Ewald scowled at them.

Fear was the enemy.

The preamble to defeat.

Tall and dark-skinned, he wore his waist-long black hair woven into a thick braid and coiled on top of his head. This rat’s nest was held in place with a pin contraption made of twists of bailing wire. A spiral of decorative branding encircled his chin, creating an angry, welted goatee. The scars of healed blade slashes and bullet wounds on his massive forearms, bare chest, and neck were lost amid larger masses of discoloration, signs of his having survived prolonged torture and punishment by burning and whipping.

Ewald hunkered down next to the body, holding his breath against the caustic fumes. The victim’s clothing was a wadded mass of wet rags at the foot of the wall. Examining the jutting hip bones more carefully, he saw that when the missing right leg had been severed, a corner of the pelvis and the entire hip socket had been cut away. The clean, down-angled slice looked like a sword or ax strike. It took a hell of a sharp blade to do something like that. A hell of a powerful swordsman, too. As to what all the nasty yellow goo was, or where it had come from, he had no clue.

When he straightened, something glinted at him from the tangled rags. A single, spent, centerfire shell casing.

“Here, take this,” Ewald said, passing his torch to the closest man. The whip-lean graybeard named Tolliver accepted the burden, his rheumy gaze never shifting from the mess on the floor.

“Give me your shirt,” Ewald said to the big man standing on Tolliver’s right.