The Darkness Within: Jigsaw of Souls Series Book 4

179 pages

Chapter 3

The elevator dinged. The door opened a moment later. Vincent, Dezzy, and Mateo stared out at a nightmare. The area around the elevator looked like a scene straight out of a horror movie. Bodies were piled on top of one another. Blood that had sprayed along the walls and the floor was so thick and congealed that the tiles were submerged. The room stank of old meat and worse.

A red light flashed on the wall, spinning like the ones on top of police cars. It bathed the already morbid scene in a more noticeable and distinct red.

Many of the bodies looked to be doctors or scientists, people wearing what had once been white lab coats. Those that were still in one piece were stained with dried blood now. Mateo said it had been two days since he’d heard from Jillian. It looked as though everyone had been dead at least that long.

“Oh,” Dezzy said, staring out. The subdued music of the elevator continued in the background. Vincent could see Chaos magic flowing everywhere. It was like a pipe had burst and flooded the entire floor with it. It was layered with the blood of the dead and coated everything.

There had to be dozens of bodies. Whatever happened to them had been fast and brutal. Bodies were dismembered, literally torn apart in some instances. Some looked to have been cut to pieces with something sharp. Others were so brutalized there was no way to guess how they met their fate.

“God,” Mateo said, his voice shaky. “We should…”

He took a deep breath, holding onto the elevator door frame for a moment. Breathing in the smell caused him to choke, and he held his stomach momentarily.

“We need to check them. To see if Jillian is here. If she is, I don’t know what to do next.”

He stepped out of the elevator. The Chaos twitching across the floor reacted violently, receding from Mateo and oozing into the bodies of the dead around him.

“Mateo, get back in here,” Vincent said. The younger man turned back and looked at him.

“Why?”

“They’re reacting to you. The Chaos is everywhere.”

“What the hell does that even mean?” Mateo asked. Vincent grabbed the man’s arm and pulled him back. The bodies of the dead nearest the elevator began to twitch and move.

An older man in a lab coat, broken glasses hanging sideways from his face, lifted his head. His body had been sliced from his left shoulder to the groin. The missing half was gone, lost in the crowd of the dead. But the remaining half pushed itself up unsteadily, a tendril of Chaos serving as a new leg to keep his balance. His milky-white eyes moved in jerky, awkward twitches. Intestines slipped from the open half of his body, but he showed no sign he noticed or felt anything.

“Goddamn zombies,” Mateo said.

“I can do zombies,” Vincent said. He reached out for the familiar strands of necromancy, the power he felt most comfortable using. When possessed by the necromancer, Bogdan Dalca, he had relived some of the man’s own life and learned how to master the power of the dead. But now, it was failing him.

Necromancy, like any magic, seemed to exist within the Earth. And Vincent could feel it beyond the walls of the Abyss. But it was not in the man standing before them, trailing his guts behind him like an afterthought.

“He’s not a zombie,” Vincent said. There were flickers of necromantic energy in the body, just as there were traces of biomancy and blood and primal, as there seemed to be in all things. But more than anything, there was Chaos.

The black, oozing energy had germinated inside the body. He could see it like roots from a seedling, writhing out of a central core. He’d never seen anything like it before. Not in a living thing, anyway. Or an unliving thing.

“You’re telling me that’s not a zombie?”

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