Sorrow Space by James Axler Page B

the twelve-by-ten room, and they appeared to be riveted in place to hold the ceiling up. The ceiling was low, and it bowed in the center, black mold stretching across it.
    Kane padded across the room, eyeing everything with disdain, breathing shallowly to relieve the threat of nausea that the room’s damp stench brought. It was abandoned, empty, dead. “We’re alone,” Kane confirmed, trusting his two partners to follow.
    Grant joined Kane in his search of the room, while Brigid spied what she was looking for—a control podium. Hesitantly, she lowered her shotgun as she made her way to the control terminal at the edge of the mat-trans chamber. The controls were set in a free-standing podium a few paces from the mat-trans door, but they were covered in debris that looked like shingle washed up by the ocean. Brigid brushed at it with her forearm. How long had it been since this thing was used? The controls were unlit and looked dead. Brigid’s heart sank when she saw that, and she searched around the unfamiliar design for an on switch of some kind. “Looks foreign,” she told Kane and Grant. “No design I’ve ever seen before.”
    “Can you work it?” Kane asked. He was walking toward the open gap in the wall, eyeing the room’s low ceiling warily where the metal struts held it in place.
    “Maybe,” Brigid said, “but it will take time.”
    Kane had reached the end of the room and he peered out through the gap that had once been a wall. They were three stories above street level in the middle of some vast, empty city. “Looks like time may be something we have a lot of,” he told Brigid grimly.
    Grant had found a door on the far side of the room. It was wide enough for two men, with a thick frame around it. Both door and frame were made of metal, reminding Grant of a bank safe door, and all of it was streaked with black grime. Grant tried the handle, confirming the door was locked. A keypad waited beside the door frame, molded into the wall. Grant flipped open its plastic cover door—cracked with a brittle hinge—revealing the pad itself. It looked something like a pocket calculator that had been mounted to the wall. Grant tapped a few combinations of buttons, but the device gave no response, not even a light.
    “Power’s down,” he muttered, resealing the dust cover. The cover snapped as he closed it, the dried-out plastic breaking at the point where the hinge met the wall.
    Brigid rested her shotgun down by her side as she stood before the control podium, tapping the raised keys there to bring up a display. Inset in the podium, the display was horizontal, like a tabletop, forcing Brigid to stoop forward to see it clearly. She ran her fingers over the keys, bringing the system to life. The display ran behind black glass, as if seen through smoke, and for a moment all she could see was a flashing number: 9. It reminded her of the rhyme she had thought of earlier, in Pellerito’s factory. “Hell-o, operator, give me number nine...”
    Brigid watched as the system reacted lethargically to her prodding, powering up with a stuttering reluctance. Finally the single digit faded and more information came across the screen, garbled and nonsensical.
    When the system failed to provide an automatic locator on boot-up, Brigid typed a query on the strangely raised keys on the podium. The keys were oval, and their shape and size reminded Brigid of fingernails. Furthermore, although the letters were recognizable, they were not laid out in the classic QWERTY keyboard style. It took a few seconds for Brigid to find her way around the unfamiliar design so that she could enter her query: “Location?”
    The screen flashed for a moment before bringing up a word Brigid didn’t recognize: “Quocruft.”
    Brigid looked at the word flashing there on the dusty screen, her eyes running over it a second time to make sure she had read it correctly. “Either of you ever hear of Quocruft?” she asked aloud.
    When neither Grant