Aftermath Read Online Free Page B

from its hinges and cast aside. Its steel bulk blocked a portion of the stairwell but there was still enough room to duck past and slip inside. There was a quick, almost ticklish wave of energy that ran over me as I crossed the threshold but it faded the instant I was through and a long hallway and a mangled body met me on the other side.
    Dressed in unadorned gray overalls, the body had been that of a good-sized man before the tragedy that befell him in that narrow corridor. He looked as if he’d taken a howitzer round to the face. There wasn’t much left of his head but mush, a vaguely shaped human skull bowl full of bloody red hamburger meat. The alcohol churned in my stomach.
    The desk beside him was drowned in his blood, everything on top floating in a pool of it. I sifted through the paperwork and sports magazines but the fluid had done a fine job of obliterating anything that might have given me a clue as to what was going on in the bunker besides boredom. Judging by the lack of TV or real entertainment, the folks that killed the guy might have done him a favor.
    I tiptoed past the corpse and started down the hall toward the rows of recessed archways that lined the walls so I could get a better look. A vague sense of mystical energy drew me on through the gloom. As I got closer I realized the archways were massive, reinforced steel doors much like those leading out of the bunker. And like the others these were just as open, though not forcibly so. I peeked inside the first of them and was reminded of what the demon had said. He’d mentioned a breakout and, without a doubt, the thing I was eyeballing was a cell; cold, clinical, and empty. The one across from the first was the same way, and it wasn’t until I peered into the third that I spied any sense of occupancy.
    Basic bathroom facilities were installed in the back corner of the 10x10’ room just a short distance from an uncomfortable looking cot with rumpled, sweat stained sheets and a threadbare pillow that had seen better days. A small wooden table, the only other piece of furniture in the room, sat across from the bed. It was covered in books and writing utensils and a lifetime of paper spread haphazardly across the face of the makeshift desk. There didn’t look to be a piece of paper that hadn’t been scribbled on by a variety of inks but the former resident hadn’t stopped there. The walls were decorated from the floor to the low ceiling in weird symbols and caveman-like drawings, heavy handed and poorly wrought, half-ass images of people—monkeys maybe?—a first grader could have drawn better. Maybe if I’d been high they’d have made some sense but there wasn’t a dick or a pair of boobs sketched anywhere I could see. What kind of prison was this?
    Hesitant to step inside the cell should the door close or someone sneak up behind me, I reached in, my fingers tingling at the threshold like the rest of me had at the main door, and grabbed a handful of papers off the desk. Flipping through the pages, and clearly unhurt but whatever it was, I was quickly distracted from the weird sensation. The papers read like a case study of the mentally deranged. The penmanship, using the term liberally, would put most doctors to shame and have them questioning the amount of effort they put into making their prescriptions illegible. They clearly needed to work harder at it.
    From that it didn’t take more than a few seconds to realize the cell probably belonged to the old coot who’d sniffed me out. It had his brand of crazy smeared all over it. The chicken scratch ran the gambit of sizes and styles and even languages, too, if I was reading it correctly. I could pick out a word or two here and there but there was no cohesiveness to it, nothing to tie any of it together in a way that stood out. It was like the manifesto of a two year-old. My eyes began to blur after a few minutes of trailing the lines of insanity, and I was ready to toss the whole batch when I