Forsaken Fallout: Haunted Wastelands Series Book 3

Prologue

The skies had opened. Desert lightning isn’t like lightning everywhere else. The openness made it seem so much bigger and more intense. The smell of desert-meets-storm was an experience. Two opposing forces coming together with no care for what got caught in the middle.

Dezzy trudged across the wet sand. Rain pelted his face and soaked his clothes. He wore shorts and a T-shirt, an old pair of sneakers, and nothing more except for a backpack slung over one shoulder that steadily grew heavier in the rain. He had not expected to fight the elements. His long, dark hair was plastered to his face, and every so often, a gust of wind sent a chill up his back.

The man at his side was untouched by the weather. He had his own problems. Doc’s flesh was partially melted into an ever-dripping ooze that hung from his face, hands, and every inch of his body like it might all slough away at any moment. Some of it did. It dripped into the sand with the rainwater but quickly faded away. No part of him could exist separated from the whole.

Doc’s skull, the item that bound his spirit to the world, was in Dezzy’s backpack. Doc did not like being out in the open because he feared that the radiation saturating his bones would harm the living. Dezzy had assured him it might be a problem for others, but he would be fine. Dezzy was dead for decades once. He was not built like other people.

Dezzy did not think that Doc was dangerous. He didn’t have any tools to measure radiation, but he suspected Doc was being a little paranoid. Or perhaps it wasn’t so much that he would hurt people as it was that he was ashamed to face them.

Dezzy hadn’t pried too deeply into what Doc had done at the lab. He knew enough to know that he was responsible for hurting people. He believed that Doc was punishing himself for what he had done. Punishing himself even beyond death. He felt like he deserved to be locked away for eternity for his crimes.

It wasn’t Dezzy’s place to tell anyone what sort of penance they did or didn’t deserve. That was a very personal thing. In Dezzy’s opinion, Doc had suffered enough.

There were no lights in the desert, nor were there signposts or even roads. Dezzy was following his gut. Something had come up from under the sand and devoured the town of Benton right in front of him. Something that was not alive. And it had disappeared into the restricted areas of the Nevada desert. The place where Thomas Coulson had gone with Shane Ryan and the FBI agent whose name he forgot. Venti? Venison? It didn’t matter.

If anyone could stop what he had seen, it was Thomas Coulson. And if Coulson had elected to go to Shane Ryan and the FBI agent for help, then he’d need them, too. But he had to find them first, and they had gone in search of Doc’s old lab.

Getting through the desert had, up to that point, not been difficult. They came across an abandoned guard post at a fence. Dezzy simply opened the gate and let himself in. The most difficult part of the journey was the distance. He didn’t have a car, so he was on foot. When a torrential downpour began, that slowed him more.

Dezzy grew up in Arizona and had experienced desert life in the past. The Sonoran Desert was not the Mojave, but storms like the one he and Doc were experiencing had to be just as rare there as they were back home. He took it as a sign that something needed to be done quickly.

Walking was not the hardship for Dezzy so much as the time lost to it. His goal was so far away, and the desert was so vast. Coulson was not a man who waited around. He was a mover, and he couldn’t sit still. All Dezzy could do was follow his instincts and some basic directions from Doc.

The storm raged on. Flashes of lightning illuminated figures in the dark. Sometimes, Dezzy saw a ghost roaming the desert alone. When they neared the rocky hills, he saw many more. They watched him pass, as still and silent as statues. A palpable fear was in the air that the rain could not drown out. He had seen things that scared the dead before, and none of them were good.

It took hours before they reached a second fence, though this one was in shambles and not as large as the unguarded entry fence. Instead, it was set up as a perimeter around a small structure. Much of the fence had been knocked down, but a few posts remained upright and supported broken panels of chain link and razor wire.

“This is it, this is the lab,” Doc said as they approached. “Something has happened, though.”

Doc’s eyes were better in the dark than Dezzy’s, but it didn’t take a ghost to realize a massive hole was in the ground next to the fence line. The thing he had seen in Benton had also visited this place.

The structure was concrete, a slanted roof like a small shed that concealed a set of giant steel doors that had somehow been melted. The steel was resting in blobs in the doorframe much like the flesh eternally drooling off Doc’s face.

Dezzy approached the lab entrance carefully. Doc had worked there many years ago, doing experiments he no longer liked to talk about because of the shame he felt. He died doing the work, and so did a lot of other people. Dezzy didn’t hold it against him. He had met his share of saints and sinners, and, in the end, they all ended up in the ground.

Rainwater ran freely into the open door, and Dezzy heard it falling and splattering far below. Doc led him to the stairs that descended into the depths of the lab. With no light, there was not a lot to see, and Dezzy’s eyes were now almost useless.

They reached the first floor, and some red emergency lighting in the hall illuminated a destroyed door and a burned hallway beyond. Dezzy peered inside, watching a pair of ghosts who seemed oblivious to his presence sway gently.

“These were our failures,” Doc said. “They are less than they were. Conscious but not really thinking.”

“Who were they?” Dezzy asked.

Doc looked at him, and then back at the ghosts in the burned-out hallway.

“I never knew. I never asked. If they had names, families, or histories, knowing would have been too much on my conscience.”

“But you said they volunteered,” Dezzy whispered.

Doc nodded.

“Yes. But no one volunteered to become what these things are.”

“Why did you keep doing the experiments?”

“Because,” Doc said, “to quit would mean this was for nothing. In my mind, it was worse to not continue. If you wage war, you must kill men. And they say it is for the greater good. But if you lose that war, then did you not kill all those men for nothing? Is your loss not so much greater now? I wanted to succeed to make it mean something. To make it just.”

They stood in silence, shoulder to shoulder, watching the swaying ghosts. Their burned bodies looked like nightmares come to life. The whole lab looked like something from a horrible accident.

In his first life, Dezzy had not thought much about the balance of life and death, or if some deaths were just and others were not. That changed after he died. He had met many souls in his time, those who had passed beyond the mortal world and had become something more and something less at the same time.

Not everyone who died deserved it; he knew that now. And sometimes, people who died deserved a much worse fate than they got. But death was all that life had to offer at the end of things. Just or not, it was meted out equally to everyone.

“Was it just?” Dezzy asked.

“No, Dezzy,” Doc answered. “There was nothing just about any of my work. I was a foolish, ignorant man. That is my legacy.”

Doc was not alone in that feeling. If there was one thing death was good at, it was making a person appreciate what they had done wrong in life. Death gave life to regret. Unfortunately, most people just had to deal with that for the rest of eternity. Most people didn’t get a chance to return to fix things.

Dezzy tried not to focus on Doc and his turmoil over things done and not. He needed to focus on the present. He needed to help his friend.

There was no sign that Coulson had been in the burned lab, so Dezzy turned his back on it and headed down the stairs to the next level. It was gutted like the first. There were no ghosts there, just destruction. They gave the floor a cursory look, but there was nothing to see. The water continued to splatter on the floor below them, and Dezzy followed it down.

It was not until they reached the very bottom of the lab that Dezzy discovered some indication of what had happened recently. Water pooled there, a couple of inches deep before it ran over the doorframe and into the final lab space, where it quickly ran into an enormous hole in the floor. The thing from Benton had been here as well.

Dezzy walked carefully around the hole, avoiding where the water had made it slick. It looked like more of the broken floor could have caved into the chasm, and he didn’t want to fall in. Instead, he made his way to the far side of the lab space, illuminated by red emergency lights stuck to the walls near the ceiling. A computer was there, a control panel of some kind.

“I knew I should have taken a computer course, man,” Dezzy muttered. He had spent most of the rise of the digital age dead and far from technology. His experience with computers was very limited, but he was open to giving it a whirl if Doc would guide him through it.

“This was not my lab,” Doc said, “but I can help you.”

“This wasn’t your place? I thought that was where we were going,” Dezzy said.

“No. I worked on Phase Two. That doesn’t matter now. I think this was the Phase Three lab. Press that button there to turn the computer on.”

Dezzy did as instructed, and nothing happened. The computer screens remained blank. Nothing lit up or whirred or did whatever computers were meant to do. He pressed the button again with a frown, hoping maybe if he did it harder, he would kick something in gear.

“Perhaps it was damaged by… whatever happened.” Doc gestured to the hole in the floor.

Dezzy grunted. He knew they were supposed to go to the lab. Or he knew it as well as he knew anything in life. His feelings were generally right about things like that. Maybe a holdover from returning from the dead, but he had reliable instincts. He always ended up where he needed to be. At least, he thought he did.

He tried more buttons, but the computer was a lost cause. There was no hope of learning anything from it. Maybe his instincts were not working as well as he had hoped. He hadn’t foreseen what happened in the town of Benton. Maybe he was not up to the task anymore, or maybe something was affecting his intuition.

Dezzy turned away and paused. On the wall, under one of the red emergency lights, was a map. It showed where they were, a series of bunkers, and three additional labs.

“What’s this?” Dezzy pointed to the map.

The ghost looked over his shoulder at a fifth location on the map, adjacent to the lab they were in. The borders were drawn with a dotted line.

“That was the Project Five facility. It is entirely subterranean,” Doc answered.

“What’s Project Five?”

“I don’t know,” Doc admitted. “I learned soon enough that asking questions got one nowhere. I did my work, and that was all.”

Dezzy looked at the map again, and then at the wall near the hole in the floor. Someone had tunneled through there as well. This was smaller and more like something made by a man. And it was in the direction of the Project Five facility.

“So, do you think we’d end up here,” Dezzy pointed to where Project Five was on the map, “if we went through that hole in the wall?”

“I don’t know,” Doc answered.

“Guess we’ll find out, man.”

With Doc at his heels, Dezzy darted around the destroyed floor and entered the smaller tunnel. He was quickly consumed by darkness, leaving the red emergency lights behind and fumbling along a grossly uneven path.

Dezzy didn’t feel fear as he traveled into the dark tunnel. He remembered fear, and he supposed he still had a sense of it, but it wasn’t the way it used to be. Even when he found himself in life-threatening situations, fear wasn’t the same as it had been before he died the first time.

Doc guided him as best as he could, but uneven footing made Dezzy stumble several times. It took several minutes of tripping and stubbing his toes on rocky protrusions before the tunnel opened into a larger cavern.

A faint glow came from the center of the chamber. The cave looked natural, something the tunnel had broken into, but the glow was not. It came from a room and a metal box built inside the cave a short distance from the tunnel.

Great, jagged teeth of stone rose from the ground in the cavern, and Dezzy couldn’t remember if they were stalagmites or stalactites. Either way, they reached his waist and looked like the open jaws of a stony beast that had fallen asleep with a steel box in its mouth.

He and Doc approached the metal structure and the glow that came from within it. It reminded Dezzy of a bank vault, only something had torn it to pieces. The door and part of the front wall had been ripped apart. The marks in the metal looked like claws, and he did not have to think hard to imagine what had done it.

The cavern around the vault looked like Swiss cheese, a patchwork of tunnels at all angles. Some were as small as the one Dezzy had used to enter the chamber, but others were much larger, easily ten feet across.

“It’s lead.” Doc drew Dezzy’s attention back to the vault.

Dezzy touched the metal and nodded. The interior was all lead. No ghost should have been able to escape from it, but it had been destroyed from the inside out.

Beyond the door, in what remained of the vault, was a mass grave. Bodies lay upon bodies. Some were ancient, burned skeletons but others were fresh. Others were ones he recognized, like the waitress from the Fission Chips diner. The people of Benton were piled there, dozens of bodies, broken and battered. Many were unrecognizable, and some were barely identifiable as human.

In the center of the vault was a twisted form of merged bodies, bones fused onto bones like a tangle of weeds that glowed with an eerie, blue-green light. Dezzy had never seen anything like it in life or in death. Countless bodies were warped into a single skeleton, a structure for some unthinkable nightmare.

“What is that?” he asked quietly.

“I don’t know,” Doc answered. “I don’t want to find out.”

Some of the bodies still bore clothing on their dehydrated and burned frames. Dezzy saw lab coats, scorched and half-melted, merging with military uniforms, jumpsuits, and even a suit and tie.

Even though he did not know what it was, Dezzy knew what he was seeing. It was the body of the thing that had attacked Benton. The thing that had swallowed the town and brought the dead back to the vault. Back to its nest.

What Dezzy didn’t know was why a ghost—or whatever the thing he had seen was—wanted more bodies.

“We need to go,” he said. “We need to find Coulson and Shane Ryan. Now.”

He ran from the vault, and Doc did not protest. The desert was vast, but there was a map on the wall. There were only so many places to look.

He just hoped he had the time.