Outlanders 14 hell risin.., p.5
Outlanders 14 Hell Rising, page 5
"According to Tibetan legend, the yetis were subhuman throwbacks who haunted the Himalayas. They were known in the West as Abominable Snowmen. Though there were a lot of sightings of them, even supposedly a skeleton kept in a lamasery, their existence was usually dismissed as folklore."
"Why would the Nazis want to experiment on yetis?" Cotta asked, sounding completely at sea. Grant scowled at the mummy, then at the collection of electronic parts on the table. Comprehension suddenly shone in his eyes. "Mind-controlled warriors, bigger and stronger than humans."
Brigid nodded. "And worse than that perhaps. It's possible they bred human women with yetis to create a hybrid race, forging their own path to create a new human."
Kane repressed a shiver of loathing. "Is that possible?"
Brigid shrugged. "Who knows. If this is the corpse of a yeti, then it appears to be a bit more human than ape. Even the chromosomal makeup of a chimpanzee is less than one percent different from a human's." She gestured to the little bodies floating in the vat. "Those may be the failures of the undertaking, autopsied and tossed in there for further study."
"If that's what the Nazis were trying to accomplish here," Grant rumbled darkly, "it's no damn wonder they weren't an official part of the Totality Concept."
Cotta had managed to recover, so his steps were fairly steady when they moved on to the next room. It was even larger, a dispensary or sick bay. A row of hospital beds lay inside a curtained alcove. A glass- fronted cabinet contained a wide array of medical supplies, from wooden tongue depressors to pharmaceuticals to syringes.
Brigid gave them a cursory inspection and took out a pair of small vials. One was half-filled with a clear liquid and the other held white tablets.
"Methedrine and amphetamines," she announced, showing them to Kane. "And God only knows what else. If Skorzeny is self-medicating, it would go a long way to explain his nervous agitation and speeded-up reflexes."
"You mean he's wired up?" Kane asked.
"To the proverbial gills " She replaced the vials in the cabinet. "Maybe it's a form of hero worship, since Hitler was a drug addict himself."
At the opposite end of the dispensary, Cotta slid back an accordion-style partition on its floor and ceiling tracks. '"What's all this?"
His companions joined him and saw, angled on a raised platform, two long white capsules, reminiscent of oversized porcelain coffins. Recessed farther into the wall on metal shelving behind the tubes were twelve small silver canisters.
"Cryo units," intoned Brigid. "Just like we suspected. Rip Van Standartenfuhrer."
Chapter 5
Coils of copper tubing festooned each of the small silver canisters, and the tops bore transparent convex ports. Brigid strode over to the shelves, stood on tiptoe and peered into one. She recoiled with a wordless utterance of disgust.
The others joined her and saw for themselves what triggered her reaction. Looking down into the port, they saw a face looking back up at them. The head of a man was nestled inside the container, but there was only a semblance left of his features. The lips were peeled like old leather over discolored teeth. Part of the scalp was completely bare of hair and skin, showing naked bone. The little flesh remaining on his face was rotted, liquescent tissue.
Moving down the line, Kane saw every canister held a human head in advanced stages of decomposition. Voice heavy with disgust, he demanded, "Why the hell is Skorzeny collecting heads?"
"He wasn't collecting them," replied Brigid. "He was preserving them...or at least that was the original idea. These are cryonic storage capsules."
"Just for heads?" Cotta's tone was incredulous.
"It wasn't unknown to deep-freeze heads in liquid nitrogen at a temperature of minus 196 degrees Celsius, back in the twentieth century. The process used to be known as neuro-suspension. If these are the heads of Nazi scientists, only their brains and the knowledge within them were important enough to preserve."
"Why would they go along with that?" growled Grant.
Brigid smiled wanly. "The Third Reich wasn't known for allowing people to make their own choices. Besides, it's possible they were told their heads could be transplanted onto new bodies. It certainly looks like some form of cloning was going on here."
Gingerly, she touched the gleaming surface of a canister. "Apparently, there was a malfunction in the units."
Kane's lips pursed. "Apparently. So why wasn't just Skorzeny's head frozen?"
Brigid stepped over to the pair of long cylinders. The exterior of both bore a small label: Trans Time Technologies Inc., Los Angeles CA., Patent Pending. "He was probably the guardian, his unit programmed to revive him first so he could look after the others."
Kane and Grant eyed the capsules, mentally comparing them to the suspended-animation systems they had seen in other places. "It's not like the other units we've seen," Grant pointed out.
Brigid nodded in agreement. "The ones we've come across before utilized Archon technology, stasis fields combined with cryogenics. These are strictly cryonic based. State-of-the-art for the time, but not up to the advances later developed."
She turned to face her companions. "The Germans here didn't have access to that tech. Maybe it was withheld from them, or maybe they were already in suspension by the time it became available. My guess is that by the time the Totality Concept researches achieved a certain level, the project overseers saw no reason to keep this installation supplied. It and the people here were swept under the rug."
"With the connection between the Archons and the Nazis," Kane said thoughtfully, "you'd think this place would have favored-nation status."
According to what Kane, Brigid and Grant had been told upon their arrival at the Cerberus redoubt more than a year ago, the entirety of human history was intertwined with the activities of entities called Archons, although they had been referred to by many names over many centuries—angels, demons, visitors, ETs, saucer people, grays.
Archons traditionally allied themselves with conquerors and despots from Genghis Khan to Adolf Hitler, conspiring with willing human pawns to control mankind through political chaos, staged wars, famines, plagues and natural disasters.
But despite their superior technology and intellects, the Archons were not omniscient, as Hitler discovered. World War II was not just a defeat of the Third Reich, but a defeat of the Archons, as well. After the war, they took measures to insure that they would not be beaten again, and one of those measures was the development of the Totality Concept. A pact was formed between elements in the United States government and the Archon Directive, essentially an exchange with the Archons for high-tech knowledge. Part of the trade agreement allowed the Archons use of underground military bases. The elite who knew of the Archon Directive believed that the Archons were benevolent, that their primary interest in sharing the Totality Concept technology with humanity was to make nuclear war obsolete. That faith proved worthless with the nuclear holocaust of January 2001.
Kane had accepted all of that, the hidden history of humanity. Despite how insane it seemed to him at first, he grew comfortable with having a focus for his hatred. For months, he woke up hating Archons and he went to bed hating Archons. It was easy, it was simple and he saw no reason to change his mind, despite the fact he came across discrepancies, facts at variance with the Cerberus doctrine as put forth by Mohandas Lakesh Singh.
In the past few months, he had learned his hatred was not only pointless, but pretty much without merit. The Archon Directorate, which supplanted the Archon Directive, did not exist except as a cover story created two centuries before and expanded with each succeeding generation. It was all a ruse, a skein of outrageous fiction interwoven with threads of truth. Only a single so-called Archon existed on Earth and that was Balam, who had been the Cerberus redoubt's resident prisoner for more than three and a half years.
Balam claimed the Archon Directorate was an appellation created by the predark governments. Lakesh referred to it as the Oz Effect, wherein a single vulnerable entity created the illusion of being the representative of an all-powerful body.
Even more shocking than that revelation was Balam's assertion he and his folk were humans, not alien but alienated. Kane still didn't know how much to believe. But if nothing else, he no longer subscribed to the fatalistic belief that the human race had had its day and only extinction lay ahead. Balam had indicated that was not true, only another control mechanism
Kane in particular was still skeptical of Balam's version of the facts, but so far he had encountered nothing to prove them false. Besides, Balam was gone and with him the threat of the Archon Directorate, though the myth remained. Only the half-human hybrids spawned from Balam's DNA were left to contend with. Or so all of them fervently hoped.
Rapping one of the cryo-cylinders with her knuckles, Brigid went on. "It's possible Skorzeny was frozen as far back as the 1970s or 80s. When he revived, let's say fifteen or so years ago, he found that the other storage units had malfunctioned. He's been trapped in here ever since, wandering around alone, probably thinking he's the last human being on Earth."
Cotta winced at the notion. "That's long enough to fuse him out permanently."
"He was probably well on his way before he was frozen," Grant gruffly observed. "Why didn't Skorzeny use the gateway to jump out of here?"
Brigid frowned slightly. "A lot of reasons. Maybe it was installed after he was frozen. The fact that it's outside the facility instead of inside gives that theory some weight. He might not even know it's there. And if so, he might not know how to operate it or he's afraid to."
"I don't think that old racist is afraid of much," Grant said darkly. "Who was in the other unit?"
Brigid shrugged. "It could have been Josef Mengele himself for all we know. Both men supposedly died at roughly the same time. But whoever it was is probably long dead."
Kane released his breath in a long sigh. "There's nothing here for the barons."
"We don't know that for sure," Brigid replied.
"There may be a nuclear stockpile somewhere in here."
"Or just more memorabilia from the good old days of the Third Reich," Kane responded. "I think we should take as much of the valuable stuff as we can haul, jump back to Cerberus and come back with a larger team. This place doesn't represent a threat."
After a thoughtful moment, Brigid said, "That might have been true until we showed up...and gave Skorzeny the idea there are other people in the world."
"So?" asked Cotta.
Grant picked up on Brigid's thread. "So if there are other people, Skorzeny may figure it's past time to go out and conquer them."
Kane snorted. "One crazy old Nazi?"
"One crazy old Nazi who might be sitting on rockets with atomic warheads. That's something the barons would be interested in."
They moved out of the dispensary and through the last door. It opened onto a narrow, dimly lit passageway. Cotta's nostrils flared. "What's that smell?"
All of them sniffed the air experimentally, even though it was a wasted effort for Grant. His nose had suffered several breaks over the years and had always been poorly reset. As a result, his sense of smell was severely impaired. Kane caught a gamy whiff, redolent with the stench of excrement and a cloying odor reminiscent of a wet dog. His point man's sixth sense rang an alarm, and his finger hovered over the trigger stud of his Sin Eater.
The corridor passed beneath a stone arch and led into a chamber shaped like a perfect cube. Glowing torches were set in sconces on the high, vaulted walls and cast a flickering illumination. The four people stood in a cramped aisle between a guardrail and a triple row of theater-type seats.
The aisle overlooked a square pit, a smaller cube within the larger. The walls plunging downward were sheer. Kane guessed it was about a fifteen-foot drop to the flagstone floor below, which showed dark stains. Two heavy metal doors faced each other at opposite ends of the pit. The objectionable odor seemed to waft up from below, a miasma of stink.
"This is like a theater," Brigid observed, looking around.
"More like a stadium," suggested Cotta.
"Or an arena," said Kane grimly, leaning on the rail.
Grant grunted disinterestedly. "Let's move on."
As Kane started to turn away, a small sound at the periphery of his hearing reached him. It was a metallic scrape-click. That sound was almost immediately overwhelmed by a flat, hand-clapping bang. A spark jumped from the guardrail barely three inches from his right hand. Wiry slivers of lead struck his sleeve.
As he recoiled, he caught a blurred glimpse of a black-clad, white-bearded figure hastily drawing back behind the nearest door in the pit below. Skorzeny moved so swiftly out of sight Kane had no opportunity to return fire.
"The bastard is down there," he barked, vaulting the rail.
"Wait—" Brigid called.
Landing on the balls of his feet and instantly throwing his body forward, Kane caught himself with his left hand and went into a roll. Coming to his feet within a yard of the door, he took up position on one side of it, double-fisting his Sin Eater.
Grant, Cotta and Brigid followed him down, hanging on to the bottom cross bar of the rail before dropping to the floor. When they joined him, Kane whispered to Grant, "I'll go high, you go low."
The man nodded, crouching down. "On three." Grasping the handle, Kane mouthed, "One...
two...three!"
He yanked the door handle with all his strength. It refused to budge, and he nearly staggered backward. In angry frustration, he pulled on the handle again and heard the clink of steel on the other side.
"Drop bar," he grated, glaring at the sheet metal covering the door. "No shooting our way in."
Brigid glanced anxiously toward the door on the opposite wall. "I have a feeling that one isn't locked."
Apprehensively, Cotta asked, "Why do you say that?"
"Skorzeny is playing us," she replied. "He may be insane, but he's still cunning."
Kane threw her a dour glance. "It'll take longer to climb up out of here than to check that door."
"Yeah," Grant rumbled sarcastically. "And that's probably what Skorzeny expects us to do."
He withdrew the H&K VP-70 from the pocket of his thermal suit and handed it butt first to Cotta. "You can have this back, on the understanding you don't shoot until either I or Kane tells you to."
Cotta nodded, swallowing hard.
Kane moved toward the door. "Let's not disappoint the son of a bitch."
He took only a few steps before his pointman's sense began screaming an alert. He continued to cross the pit, but he angled slightly away from the door. He tried to ignore the icy fingers of mounting fear at the base of his spine. The closer he got to the door, the more insistent became his mental alarm. He received the distinct impression of being watched and he sensed the pressure of unseen eyes. The three people behind him didn't speak or stir.
When he was within ten feet of the door, he came to a halt. He tensed, then slowly took a long step back.
At the same time the pit filled with a clanking, ratcheting racket. The door rose upward between deep channels in the frame. A woolly, musky odor clogged Kane's nostrils, and he heard a hoarse, rasping grunt.
In the darkness behind the door, something heavy and huge moved, shifting on padded feet. Before the portal had risen completely, a great, shaggy shape emerged from the gloom as if flung from a catapult. With a throaty growl, it rocked to a clumsy halt on two bowed legs, leaning forward to support itself on knuckles the size of doorknobs.
Chapter 6
The dim light showed a giant humanoid body, but greater in girth and height than any man. The body was covered in a coat of dark gray hair, shot through with threads of white. The creature's forearms appeared to be as thick as Kane's thighs. Its large, long head, sunk between lumps of shoulder muscle, was topped by a sagittal crest for the attachment of the massive jaw muscles.
The face was a distorted imitation of a human's. The heavy supraorbital ridges above the eyes, the flat nose with flared nostrils, the protruding jaw and long yellow canines behind the writhing lips put Kane in mind of a gorilla. He had seen pies of the extinct great apes and even a stuffed exhibit on display in the ruins of the Museum of Natural History, so he immediately saw the similarities, as well as the differences.
The skin tones were a pale brownish hue. Like the mummy they had seen earlier, its broad, splayed feet didn't possess the near-opposable big toe of the ape. Kane noted that a small bare spot had been shaved in the roach of hair at the top of the creature's skull. Several splinters of metal gleamed there.
