Reggie had become frustrated.

He had been inside the ruins of Pittsburgh for what had seemed like an eternity; searching, coming up empty and then searching some more.

The cemeteries, funeral homes and City Morgue had indeed been stripped of their dead. The Tall Man had clearly made the jump to large scale pillaging with grace - now taking over big cities when, at one time, he preferred a covert means of operation, targeting small and isolated towns. All the evidence of his occupation of the city was there; the vacant graves, the bloodstained streets, the ever present stench of death.

But despite all of the calling cards left by the Tall Man and his minions, Reggie could find no evidence of a "loading dock," as he called them, in any of the "dead houses" he had searched. Not a trace of the pristine white rooms used to house a single dimensional fork. No sign of the stacks upon stacks of black canisters containing dwarves ready for their journey to enslavement on the Red Planet.

It has to be here somewhere, he reasoned. It has to be.He was wandering aimlessly, exhausted and in great danger of losing his tenuous grip upon hope for his mission. With weary legs and aching feet, he maneuvered his body to the relative comfort of a wooden bench outside the entrance to St. Anthony's Hospital. The bench's lacquered finish was scorching hot from the heat outside.

The hospital, he thought to himself, stirring with a revelation.

The hospital should have a morgue, too.

It hadn't occurred to him previously to check the hospital. He had already searched the City Morgue to no avail, taking it for granted that it was the only morgue action in town.

He rose from the bench and walked to the sliding glass doors of the hospital entrance. It was a struggle prying the heavy doors apart enough to where he could squeeze through, but he managed. The temptation to simply blast through the glass panes had been great, but it would be far too risky to cause that kind of commotion. The slightest creak of a floorboard or the closing of a door could be an open invitation for attack by a sentinel sphere, or a dwarf, or worse.

The lobby of the hospital was dark and in total disarray. At one point in time it had probably been used as a makeshift triage station, as evidenced by the overturned stretchers, bandages and dried up transfusion bags littering the floor.

Reggie used the beam of the flashlight affixed to the top of the "dwarf killer" to navigate his way through the stifling darkness. He soon came upon a doorway leading to a stairwell.

Cautiously, he opened the door and began to walk downward into the nether regions of the hospital.

Reaching the bottom of the stairs, Reggie was confronted with yet another door, only this one was boarded up and nailed shut. Whoever the handyman was that did the work had done a helluva job. There were at least ten big, sturdy boards covering the door frame. A large white cross was crudely spray painted across the lumber.

Reggie got the uneasy feeling that the handyman was not trying to keep anyone out, but to seal something in.He began prying the boards off one at a time, using the four barrels of the shotgun as a crowbar. Finishing the last board, Reggie breathed in deeply and slowly opened the door. The stench that assaulted him made his eyes burn and elevated a sizable mass of bile into his throat. He tried to cough it up quietly, but was not entirely successful. He instinctively reached for his "breather" mask, but ultimately resisted.

Now is not the time.

Reggie had, indeed, found the hospital's morgue, and much more. The doorway to the morgue was directly across from the stairwell, the hallway running in-between stacked high on both sides with decaying corpses. The floor of the hallway was slick with rot and appeared to be in perpetual motion due to a coating of writhing maggots. Swarms of mature flies buzzed around Reggie's head, frolicking in the stench. Above the buzz of the flies could be heard a distinctly familiar humming sound.

Stepping into the hallway, the gore squishing beneath his boots, Reggie could clearly see the sterile white walls and vibrating chrome poles of the dimensional fork in the morgue ahead of him. Moving stealthily, he traversed the hallway and stepped into the transport room/morgue, the "dwarf killer" trained directly before him.

The room was like all the other transport rooms he had encountered before. Though there was no apparent light source, the room was almost blindingly white, featureless and utterly alien in design. The swarms of flies in the hallway did not dare venture forth into the room. They knew better.

It was clear to Reggie that this particular "loading dock" had already served its purpose and was now obsolete, judging from the lack of dwarf canisters. A single canister lay overturned on its side near the fork, its lid ajar and leaking a viscous, clear liquid upon the otherwise pristine floor. Reggie stepped closer towards the canister and peered through the small glass window at the top. He could see a slight fluttering motion accompanied by a faint whimper/growl.

Taking no chances, Reggie took a step back and fired at the canister, splattering the wall with thick yellow blood, shreds of brown fabric and various sized fragments of the canister's casing. He quickly opened the shotgun, ejected the spent shells and reloaded, constantly checking over his shoulder to make sure he hadn't attracted anyone's attention.

He hadn't.

He walked to the front of the dimensional fork and lowered himself to his knees. Bracing himself by grabbing hold of both poles at their midpoints, he cautiously pushed his head into the rift to see what awaited him on the other side. To an outsider, the vision of Reggie kneeling at the gate, his body intact except for his displaced head, would border upon the comical. After a few moments of investigation, Reggie's head re-emerged in the transport room, safely attached to his shoulders. He was sweating profusely and gasping for air, but, in spite of his discomfort, he was pleased.

His search was over.

He slipped the "breather" mask over his flushed face and activated the dual oxygen cartridges positioned on opposite sides of the mask.

Before stepping through the fork, Reggie removed a grenade from his belt, pulled the pin and let it fall to the floor. As he stepped through the portal, he smiled with satisfaction as he heard the momentary sound of the explosion and watched as the fork behind him disappeared permanently.

No turning back now . . .

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Red Planet is Copyright 1999 by Richard Elkin and is published in feoamante.com and Feo Amante's Story Time with his permission. Richard also writes under the psuedonym, Richard Dean. Visit him at DarkeProse.com MySpace.com/DarkeProse