The bluish energy gave them a stark, ashen hue. Two of them floated face-up, arms and legs dangling limply, as if they were balanced precariously upon something. Another was standing straight up, head cocked to his shoulder. The others floated with arms and legs splayed like they’d been dropped from a great height. All of them were gradually drifting and Orr realized it was probably because he had disturbed the ether that held the corpses in stasis, sent ripples running through it. He couldn’t say what that might be, only that it was some sort of energized field that apparently canceled out gravity.

Antigravity. That’s what it was. The dream of physicists and engineers everywhere. He thrust his hand into the flow and yanked it back with a gasp. It was ice-cold.

The bodies drifted about. Though they were subtly lit by that energy, Orr played his light over them. Whatever had happened, it had been a violent, ugly death for each of them. Their hands were hooked into claws, backs arched, faces contorted into screams. Ribbons of tangled blood that looked absolutely black hung from their mouths, puddling above them like pools of mist. Their eyes had been literally blown from their sockets and oozed in the air in clotted streamers of transparent tissue like squashed jellyfish. They were only connected to the hollowed orbits by threads of optic nerve. There were droplets of slime and blood floating everywhere. They looked like BBs. It was ghastly.

The antigravity stasis field intrigued him.

By all the laws of physics it was impossible, yet he was seeing it. He dug around in the pocket of his parka, found a couple coins. He chose a quarter and flipped it into the field. It arced up and started to fall as any object would and then…it just stopped, vibrating in mid-air, spinning end over end, bouncing off the foot of the nearest corpse and glancing off another and shearing through one of those suspended puddles of blood. The intrusion of a foreign body made the blood dissipate into a cloud of tiny, spreading bubbles.

That was enough.

He had to get on the radio.

He hobbled back around the shielding. He could see the red EXIT sign on the other side of the building. He started towards it. Somewhere above him, there was a noise. A Ssshush-ssshush-ssshush sort of noise. A whirring sound. The headache in his skull increased. His stomach rolled with nausea. And that was because of the sudden intrusion of a biting, pungent odor like hides treated with acidic chemicals. He only knew of one thing that smelled like that. And it was getting stronger…formaldehyde and ammonia.

They were here, now, in the darkness with him.

The bogies.