Cold. Yeah, it was cold...

The kind of cold that makes you wrinkle your eyes and your lungs feel like theyve been been hit by a frozen blowtorch when you breathe. The snow was falling thick and fast as I plodded onward. Snowshoes do not look cool. They are not cool to use. They do however work after a fashion. Snowshoe up, forward and down. Then the other leg. Forward. All that mattered was forward progress. Keep moving.

My destination was a long way from anywhere. By design. The people that built the facility knew they didnt want any of what was contained inside let loose on an unsuspecting population. The design was supposed to be insurance against anything going wrong and something bad getting out. They were wrong. All of them. Dead wrong.

Id been travelling a day and a night to get here. I knew something terrible had happened as soon as I had been put on alert. Communications had ceased with the facility and the nearest town could not be reached either. Whatever had been released had acted swiftly.

Before I boarded the Lear, I made a call to Scotland to a specialist I had worked with in the past for this type of plague. I was sure to need his services before this was over.

I had been walking for four hours now through drifted snow. The nearest town was indeed deserted. Whatever had struck here had done its damage swiftly and moved on. A Ghost Town. I had looked for survivors but found none. Not even a Kruller remained in the bake shop.

So there I was, slogging. For four hours now.

And then, there IT was.

Dark, forbidding, foreboding, slightly in need of a sand blasting.

The place I had travelled 9,000 miles to get to, and the place I least wanted to be just now.

Crunchmoor Asylum




To be continued...