Alex opened her eyes to a world of white. Snowflakes blew against and around her in the wind. The cold was intense, painful, akin to the team’s winter training in Western Colorado. During those long days and weeks, though, a parka, thermal gloves, and goggles had protected her from the bitter temperatures. Now, she was alone and dressed only in the formal dress blue uniform she had put on that morning.

Didn’t someone take that off in the tunnel, though?

Ragged bullet holes stood out in her uniform over the left shoulder and above the left breast. Except she wasn’t bleeding. She felt her back. Her shoulders hurt but when she looked at her hands, they were free of blood. She sat and used her arm to shield her face against the wind.

“Is anyone there?”

She could barely hear her voice over the wind.

This must be a dream. But the cold felt real. Her hands and face were already numb. She tucked her hands under her armpits to warm herself. She would freeze to death if she remained in the storm. She would lie down, her eyes would close, and the freezing air would suck away her life.

“Is anyone there?!”

The only response came from the screaming wind.

She stood and tried to move forward, but the wind was too strong. She turned to it and stumbled along, driven by its force.

How did I get here?

She had been lying in the main tunnel outside the Cheyenne Mountain complex. Webb had shot her in the chest, by accident he said. But why was it an accident? she wondered, picturing his hideous face staring down at her as the wriggling worms in his eyes focused on her wound. She would have liked to rip them out with a knife.

Maybe this is hell. Maybe I really did die in the tunnel.

She let the wind push her along, stumbling at times in the snow and marveling that her feet, protected only by wool socks and her polished dress shoes, still had feeling and could propel her onward. Yet, she could feel herself wanting to lie down, to close her eyes and go to sleep. She thought about how easy it would be to sit and rest.

Steady, girl. Remember what the team taught you. Keep moving.

She pressed on through the cold, feeling miserable and alone. Then through the haze, the silhouette of an immense structure asserted itself against all the white. The multi-level facility stood on steel girders twenty feet above the ground and consisted of three buildings with short, enclosed passageways in-between. The building in the middle was the largest of the three, and a larger support column ran down from the center into the ice.

She scrambled forward beneath the central building and found a scaffold stair tower leading up to an opening in the bottom of the structure.

The winds threatened to toss her over the aluminum railings as she moved upward. The stairs and platforms creaked and swayed. At the top, she found a bulkhead door with an oversized handle, which she twisted before shoving her way through the entrance and into the facility.

She shut the door and paused to catch her breath, relishing the warm air.

The entryway resembled an airlock with wooden benches along the wall and a row of coat hooks supporting several parkas and thermal jackets. Metal trays beneath the benches held pairs of boots resembling those belonging to firemen. Once feeling and warmth returned to her limbs, she went to the second door and out into the adjoining corridor.

She listened for footsteps or voices. Nothing.

“Hello! Is anyone there?”

No reply.

Where is everyone?

She went down the corridor and looked through the open doors into empty offices and laboratories that seemed to have been recently abandoned. Computer monitors on paper-strewn desks glowed with colorful screensavers. Cups of coffee, still warm and steaming, sat beside the keyboards.

She had never in her life been completely alone. Even in her room in Cheyenne Mountain, guards or other Directorate personnel patrolled only moments away. During training missions and field exercises, she was always with the team. Privacy had been sacrificed for survival throughout the Directorate but she had never felt cramped or claustrophobic. Here, though, the absolute silence and deadness of the building inspired an empty foreboding feeling that caused the muscles in her belly to tighten.

What’s wrong? Where is everyone? What’s going on in this place? This isn’t right!

For an instant, her vision went black as if the lights had gone out. A subtle red glow silhouetted a dark sphere in the distance.

Her vision returned.

She spun around, looking up and down the hall. A feel of vertigo forced her to lean against the wall for support as she caught her balance.

What was that?

Hadn’t General Martin told her about a strange artifact that the military had excavated from beneath Antarctica? Is this Lansing Station? Is that artifact still here?

All she wanted was to be back in her room, to be able to sit down or curl up on her bed beneath the covers. This silence and emptiness were too much. If she screamed, it would banish the eerie quiet, but what if the noise drew something worse? She needed to find someone who could help her get home.

She started forward again.

The world distorted and turned red. The sphere flashed into her mind. Only now, something was different. The crystal smooth surface had changed into a swirling, oily black mass throbbing like a beating heart.

White-hot pain burrowed between her eyes. Her knees began to buckle but before she could fall, her eyesight returned to normal and the image of the Anomaly faded. She leaned against one of the walls and trembled.

I have to stay calm. I have to stay calm. I just need to find some help and then everything will be okay.

She closed her eyes and felt the side of her neck just below her jawline. Her pulse slowed. The fear and confusion lessened. And there was something else. A strange sensation, an urge to proceed deeper into the facility.

She kept going until she reached a large chamber with an open-sided cargo lift in the center. The bright lights along the ceiling illuminated the stacked wooden and metal containers against the walls. She approached the operating panel at one corner of the lift. The two buttons on the panel were marked ACTIVATE and EMERGENCY STOP. A warning sticker advised: “Use caution while operating. Cease operation and contact manufacturer if any technical difficulties are encountered.”

She reached toward the activation button and realized her hand was trembling. Are you sure you want to do this? She pushed the button. A metallic whine sounded beneath her feet. The lift plunged, and her heart skipped a beat, but the ride smoothed out a moment later.

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Shadows soon overwhelmed the platform. Despite the luminescence of the upper room, all the light faded with the descent. She could barely tell where the walls of the elevator began and the floor of the lift ended.

After a few minutes, a sliver of light appeared along the edges of the platform. Her eyes began to adjust to the brightness, and through the widening gap, she saw the walls of another chamber like the one at the top of the lift. Then all at once, her relief at reaching the bottom turned to horror.

Throughout the lower chamber, bloody handprints painted the walls while piles and congealed puddles of gore covered the ground. Bodies lay strewn about, most dressed in white lab coats or military uniforms.

She slammed the emergency stop button. The platform jerked and shook before halting above the chamber floor. She sunk to her knees and covered her face with her hands. The stench of decay made her retch. She struggled to keep the bile rising in her stomach from moving up her esophagus.

The cracks between her fingers revealed a man who had died while tearing out his own eyes. The corpse rested against a wall with his fingers jammed into an empty eye socket. A swollen purple tongue filled his wide-open mouth. Many of the bodies lay face down, but she noticed others with trails of clotted blood running from their eyes, ears, noses, and mouths. In death, their features appeared surprisingly similar: mouths and eyes wide open as if they had all died in an identical face-shattering scream.

“No!” Alex cried as she curled herself into a fetal position at the base of the control panel. “This isn’t happening! None of this is real! Just let me wake up! Somebody help me! Captain Shepherd! Dad! ANYONE! HELP ME!”

Her screams echoed through the chamber. The bloody, lifeless faces penetrated her mind even through her tightly shut eyes. She kept screaming until she heard a crunching of metal and felt herself falling through the air. Her eyes flew open. A tremendous crash reverberated throughout the room. The impact knocked the wind from her lungs. She found herself in the middle of the platform, which had collapsed the rest of the way into the chamber. The dead surrounded her on all sides.

She spotted a pistol in the hands of a man dressed in Air Force fatigues. The weapon sat lodged in his mouth, and the back of his head was a gory crater. She crawled towards the edge of the platform and stared at the man. She had a sudden urge to grab the pistol, place it on her temple, and pull the trigger.

She reached a shaking hand out toward the weapon but hesitated as a long-ago rhyme entered her memory: Pistol, pistol in my hand, send me off to fairy land. It was her own voice, childlike, sing-songing the words. She wondered if she had ever sung such a horrible rhyme, perhaps years before, not knowing what it meant.

Her hand was no longer shaking, she realized, and she withdrew it and crawled back to the center of the lift.

How did these people die? They didn’t all kill themselves. It’s like a virus or something, but…

Her eyes widened. Only one disease could have caused this: severe hemorrhagic bleeding from almost every orifice, and painful, agonizing death within minutes.

She covered her mouth and nose as she made her way to the middle of the lift. What are the first symptoms? Migraines… fatigue… nausea… dizziness… I don’t feel any of those things. Would I be feeling them yet, though? How long have I been down here? Five minutes? How long would it take before I started feeling sick?

She had no answers. She only knew she was dead if she caught the virus. The longer she remained in the chamber, the higher the chances of infection. She stood and looked toward the exit. Sill covering her nose and mouth, she stepped off the lift and dodged the scattered bodies as she hurried from the chamber.

Once clear of the room, she took in a deep gulp of air. As she exhaled, she noticed her breath was as thick as fog. The warmth of the upper facility had given way to the cold from outside. Except this was worse, somehow, a stale atmosphere as if all the oxygen had fled. Her heart beat fast in her chest. Was carbon dioxide building up in her lungs or was it fear and fatigue quickening her breathing?

As she continued through empty corridors, she noticed the sound draining from her surroundings. Earlier, she had heard the clatter of her shoes against the metal floor. Now, those footsteps sounded like a dimly remembered echo drumming deep in her head. She felt an incessant heartbeat-like reverberation first in her ears, her head, and then her entire body. She reached the end of the hallway and arrived at a double access door with a fingerprint identification module embedded next to it on the wall. She placed her left index finger on the pad, and the doors slid open without any perceivable sound.

The pulsating sound engulfed her as she stepped through the doors. It now felt like a physical presence urging her forward. She came to the edge of a circular catwalk around the perimeter of a massive cavern of ice lit by floodlights. And at the far end of the cavern, almost hidden in shadow, a perfect sphere hung suspended off the ice.

The sphere’s shadow enveloped her as she approached. The object was as smooth as a pane of glass and as black and reflective as flawless obsidian. The thrumming faded until only a pleasant vibration remained, which seemed to embrace her and pull her towards the sphere’s darkness. She leaned forward and stared into her mirror image. For a moment, the reflection of her face remained steady but then it wavered and lost focus. She stepped back.

The image resolved itself into her mother’s face, lacking distortion despite the curved surface of the sphere. Her mother’s lips moved, speaking words Alex could not hear. The only noises were the deep vibrations, like a heartbeat in her mind.

Katherine Bedford looked beautiful and young, like the photograph in Cheyenne Mountain, taken before the cancer. Her high cheekbones and steel-blue eyes were reflections of Alex mixed with the corona of dark brown hair, a long neck, and a mouth slightly parted in the smile she tried so hard to imitate.

“Mom,” Alex said softly.

She raised her hand toward the sphere and felt a warm aura. Hairline bolts of electricity arced between the jet-black surface and her fingertips. The tiny hairs on her arm stood on end.

Without warning, the sphere exploded outward.

For a split second, Alex saw smooth tendrils surrounding her hand and arm but then the world vanished into black.

She was floating in darkness. The heartbeat remained, all-encompassing. The air was warm, and she felt safe. It reminded her of coming back from a training exercise in the frozen countryside and feeling the warmth of Cheyenne Mountain wrapping around her like a blanket. She wanted to go to sleep.

Glaring white light stabbed into the darkness. The heartbeat surged in intensity and frequency. The light, as bright as the sun, focused in on her and the sound turned into an agonizing roar. She tried to scream at the light but she couldn’t speak. Her mouth refused to form the words.

The light stopped inches away. She shut her eyes and tried to turn but the brightness penetrated her eyelids. Then something was coming out of the light. A shadow perhaps but… The silhouette resolved into a spear with a hollow point and an end beveled back like a hypodermic needle.

She tried to retreat but the needle kept coming. Instead of piercing her, the point inserted itself into a thick cord that seemed to tether her in place. She felt a sharp pain and tried to scream, but the noise either refused once again to issue from her lips or was lost in the heightened and quickening heartbeat-like thumping.

She saw and felt a backwash of blood out of the cord, and then there was an intense pressure of fluid inserting into the vessel. As she watched helplessly, a glowing black coil squirted out of the needle and into the cord.

Her world became an abyss of sound, blood, and pain. She tried to reach out and grasp for anything she could use to pull herself away but the attempt was useless. The agony intensified as she heard and felt an all-encompassing scream accompanied by turbulence as she crashed up and back and side-to-side. In the background, voices yelled incomprehensible words as if they were speaking into a distorted microphone.

The light vanished into a dull yellow glow streaked with red lines. She felt she was on the verge of death. She sensed the black helix that had entered her body now tearing through her system, rearranging it, and transforming everything into itself. Part of her knew the darkness was seeking toward her brain, and if it reached that final destination, she would die. A tingling sensation came as the creeping touch of tendrils extended up her spine and into her head. It was as if worms had lodged themselves inside her and were trying to burrow into her skull. All around, the dull glow began to fade to black.

A painful jolt flung her around and battered her on all sides. However, just as the darkness reached its zenith, covering her world in a sheet of black, it stopped and began to recede. She felt the tendrils of the glowing helix throughout her body but they were no longer advancing. Her mind remained her own.

For a time, she huddled in her dark cell, waiting for the next jolt. Nothing came. The yellow glow vanished, the heaving and shaking stopped, and the heartbeat slowed and subsided. The warm darkness returned, but something remained inside her. She knew it had almost taken control and the darkness and pain would have ended her life, but it had stopped for now.

Without thinking, she tried to call out, “Mom!”

Almost in answer, her mother’s face reappeared although it was different now. It was not the face from the outside of the sphere. Her mother was old, her skin hanging loose from her cheekbones. Her hair was gone, replaced by a dark-blotched scalp and shreds of white hair like cobwebs. Her lips had lost their luster and gaped slightly open, revealing gums almost empty of teeth. Worst of all, her eyes, no longer kind and steel-blue, were dull and almost lifeless. They were sunken far back into their sockets and seemed to focus on nothing.

She recognized this image of her mother, hidden away in her memory. The feelings of helplessness, hopelessness, grief, and anger all returned. If only she could reach out and hold the shrunken body in her arms, just as her mother had held her when she was little. She wanted to rock her mother back and forth and sing the songs she had once loved to hear. Instead, she found only one rhyme repeating itself in her head: Pistol, pistol in my hand…

She looked down and saw her mother’s eyes had glazed over. The pupils dilated, looking at nothing.