The room greeted the officers with a blast of hot air.
The flashlights revealed that perhaps, at some point, someone had used that place as an operating room, an extremely spacious one with a fairly high ceiling.
It had an operating table in the middle, the only thing left standing, and Rigel managed to recognize a few IV poles down there, along with some medical monitoring equipment. Everything was destroyed or burned.
However, what drew their attention was something else. Scrap, walls, floor, ceiling; everything was smeared with black spatters, like the furious brushstrokes of a frenzied artist. Rust marks? Burn marks?
“This is where the EMP originated?” Froia wondered; his voice echoed.
“It seems to have been ground zero for an explosion rather than the origin of an electromagnetic pulse,” Snow said.
Rigel was about to touch one of those black spots on the wall, but his helmet lights gave him a better idea of what it was. They were not black, but burgundy; and dotted around these, stuck to the plates on the walls, were little bits of things. He took one off and looked at it closely.
“Don’t touch anything!” he ordered, just in time to stop Froia from doing so. “They aren’t burn marks. It’s blood.” He held up the shard for the others to see. “These are shattered bones on the walls.”
Snow and Froia were stunned. They took their lights to the ground and found torn clothes everywhere, all covered with dried blood; also, shapeless things here and there: the desiccated remains of those who had once worn them.
Froia retched; it was understandable. Luckily, he didn’t get sick; it would have been cumbersome for him to have done it with his helmet on.
A group of people had burst there—in the most literal way.
“There definitely was an explosion here,” Snow said. “And I’m definitely glad my nose isn’t exposed now.”
“Be careful,” Froia warned, pulling himself together. “I mean, just look at the state of these remains and compare it to the bodies of the students. Maybe there’s something in this place that could have triggered an electromagnetic burst of such magnitude that—Well, it’s explained itself just by looking at it.”
Rigel and Snow exchanged glances. It was true; whoever these people were had clearly ended up much worse than the youngsters up there. At least the students were recognizable as humans and not things; even so, the connection between the two ways of dying was undeniable. On the other hand, running away from there for fear of the possibility that there was something that could blow them to pieces—quite literally—was something that neither of them was going to allow, especially when there was so little left to finish inspecting that room.
And as if fate rewarded their bravery for continuing to enter there, the beams of their flashlights ran into a huge machine that was waiting for them at the end of the room. An immense ivory-colored device that rested in silence, as muted as everything in that place. It was an assemblage of computer terminals and monitors of various sizes pointing in all directions, stacked one on top of the other up to the ceiling, connected by wires and steel tubes, with a gigantic board full of switches in the center, and some long drums with pressure gauges and huge batteries on the sides.
A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.
Rigel watched it with some astonishment; he had the impression that he was not in front of a simple collection of artifacts but in the presence of an amorphous and cybernetic creature. Hell, even those monitors looked like a bunch of heads!
Up close, he noticed that there were no human remains on it except for a few spots here and there on the drums, nor were there any on the surrounding floor. Being located so far from the center of the room, where everything indicated that the explosion had originated, saved the imposing computer from being covered in waste.
“Looks like a monolith,” Snow commented. “Or a huge electronic tumor.”
Rigel nodded; the second option sounded more accurate.
“Detective, you think this could have caused the explosion?” Snow shrugged. “Maybe that’s why we didn’t find any traces of the murderer, because there never was one.”
Rigel cocked his head. “I doubt this thing was responsible for the deaths,” he said, “much less that of the students. The last young man, the one we found in the woods... His execution was identical to that of his teammates. If this thing had discharged an electromagnetic burst, beside the student, we would have found birds and other animals shattered along the way.”
“Maybe a guided attack,” Snow suggested.
“Sure, but for what purpose?” Rigel said and recalled Bill Serrano’s silly comment about someone coming down from the sky with a grenade and coming back up after killing students. “Besides…” With his hand he brushed the dust off the old control board, and against his own demurrals, he pressed a couple of buttons and switches just to check his suspicions. As expected, nothing happened. The machine did not come back to life. The displays were dead, as were their internal transistors and capacitors. “There hasn’t been power in here for a long time,” he said, tapping one of the machine’s long drums.
Snow agreed. “Well, on the other hand, no wonder,” he said, pointing his flashlight at the board, “I recognize some of these parts, and I know they were discontinued decades ago.” He turned to Froia. “What do you say? Its mother drive—could it be intact?”
Froia approached cautiously, as if afraid to wake up the machine and end up being turned into a bunch of waste on the walls. “I doubt it,” he replied.
And while his officers discussed the best way to study such a machine—whether to do it in that same place and with the complete structure, or disassemble it and take it piece by piece to one of the Army facilities—Rigel shined his flashlight on a tangle of wires in the floor, and followed their path, from the point where they left the computer to the darkest part of the room, where they disappeared into a chamber entrance.
The idea that this black doorway was a mouth that spits out shadows came to his mind as vividly as the image of the hideous undead people had done in the corridor.
He kept going, and upon getting into that dark mouth, he felt the icy kiss of a shiver on the back of his neck.
Fear? Rigel paused for a second. Was he feeling afraid? He, who had seen hundreds of violent crimes, was now afraid of the dark? Rigel shook his head. His old girlfriend told him that his will was strong and that his stubbornness was as heavy as a bull; against those two things, fear couldn’t harm him.
And when he reached the doorway, and the flashlight showed him what was inside, his guts twisted even more than they had back there with the image of that desiccated massacre. Behind the transparent cover of his helmet, his thick eyebrows rose, and his small eyes widened.
Horror had struck Colonel Rigel Beta as nothing had it done in years.
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Now, back at home, that image still remained there, in front of his eyes, like a mirage.
It took almost two hours for him to fall asleep.