Although the air inside the bunker smelled stale, a faint current of air drifted past, indicating that it was not completely sealed. At least the ventilation ducts were not entirely blocked.
Water that had seeped from somewhere in the mountain dripped from corroded pipes, the dripping echoing through the silent tunnel.
But compared with what the two had encountered earlier, the atmosphere here was actually less frightening.
The bunker interior showed clear signs of damage. Some side passages branching off the tunnel were blocked by fallen boulders, while others had simply collapsed completely.
Nick noticed some things that appeared to be human remains. He could not be sure because, before the bodies had fully decomposed, something like moss or fungus had infested them and spread wildly across the walls, leaving them almost unrecognizable.
But these parasites, or perhaps symbiotic organisms, had also been dead for a long time, and many had calcified.
"It looks as though some kind of chemical was sprayed here. Someone tried to clean this place out." Dahlia tried to identify what had killed off these strange organisms in the passage.
Unfortunately, too much time had passed. Even if anything had once remained in the surroundings, it was no longer possible to identify it.
"This way." Nick stopped in front of an iron door at the end of the passage and gave Dahlia a meaningful look.
Almost the entire iron door had rusted away, but differences in the degree of corrosion indicated that someone had pried it open before.
Although they knew monsters could not use guns, the two still followed CQB principles for indoor combat, avoiding the "fatal funnel" in the doorway.
After receiving a confirming nod from Nick, Dahlia bent down and reached out to push open the iron door. Nick immediately crouched and pivoted into the room along one side of the doorframe, raising his M4A1 toward his far corner.
Dahlia followed him inside, her tactical flashlight and muzzle aimed at the opposite far corner. The two beams quickly swept the room. Nothing moved.
"Clear!" Nick lowered his rifle, but then tightened his grip on his Bolo knife, remaining alert.
The room was larger than he had expected, roughly the size of two classrooms combined. Judging by its furnishings, it was a typical chemistry laboratory.
Rows of laboratory benches held numerous dust-covered glass containers, including beakers and petri dishes, as well as extremely old-fashioned microscopes.
Dahlia relaxed slightly. Although the laboratory benches were covered in dust, with puddles of white, waxy material of unknown origin everywhere, at least this time the place was not covered in cobwebs.
"There probably aren't any monsters here anymore," Nick said gravely. The glassware on the benches was almost all intact, showing no signs of a fight.
As a flashlight beam swept across the wall, the photograph in a frame unmistakably showed the Yalta Big Three.
"Nick, look here." Dahlia shone her light on a set of skeletal remains on the floor.
The dried corpse had slumped into a seated position, its entire body encased in waxy material, its hands hanging down to the floor. The bones of its hands extended bizarrely across the ground for nearly a meter, each finger bone longer than an ordinary person's arm, forming two enormous fans.
The corpse Nick illuminated was even more horrifying. It sat at a laboratory bench with its face tilted upward, a plant resembling a peacock's plumage growing from its mouth. Encased in a layer of waxy material, it still looked lifelike under the light.
He could not help shuddering and was about to move his light away when he noticed that the corpse seemed to be holding something.
It was a sealed metal film canister, the kind used with old-fashioned projectors.
Something stirred in Nick's mind. He stepped forward and picked up the canister, blew off the thick layer of dust, and found a label attached to the lid. Written on it in English were the words, "May God forgive us."
He turned to look at the projection screen hanging on the innermost wall of the laboratory and the covered projector in front of it. Perhaps the secret was on this reel of film.
But the question was, would a secret laboratory that had been sealed for more than half a century still have a usable power supply?
"Nick, this generator doesn't look like something from the 1940s," Dahlia said from a corner of the room.
Nick walked over with the film canister and looked. Sure enough, a small backup generator sat on the floor in the corner. It had no manufacturer's nameplate, only specifications such as its power output.
Several red gas cylinders were connected to one end of the generator. Dahlia crouched and wiped the markings on one of them. "It's propane. We might be able to start this generator," she said delightedly.
"Then let's try starting it." Nick shone his flashlight along the generator's cables and found that one ran to the room's original wiring, while another extended all the way to a room at the very back.
Propane was a fuel that could remain stable over long periods. As long as it was properly sealed, it could be stored for decades without trouble. Although the backup generator before them had accumulated plenty of dust, it was clearly a modern product.
This matched what the two had discovered earlier. Someone had been here before them, most likely not recently, but at least within the past twenty years, and had stayed for quite some time. Otherwise, there would have been no need to bring in a generator specifically.
After an inspection, Nick confirmed that at least two of the propane cylinders were still full, then started the backup generator.
With a humming sound, the generator began running smoothly, and the lights in the room came on. Only then did the two realize that the laboratory's lighting system had actually been replaced with LED tubes as well.
Nick had no idea what to do with the old film projector, but fortunately, Dahlia's father had once owned a similar model as part of his collection.
After the young woman tinkered with it and replaced the damaged light source with a powerful flashlight, the rusty old machine actually began working with a series of squeaks and creaks, projecting the film onto the screen.
Although the image was still in the black and white of the Chaplin era, and the sound and picture were somewhat out of sync, they could just about make out the images and hear the audio clearly.
As a female researcher in a white lab coat appeared on the screen and began explaining what had happened, the canyon's secret was fully revealed.
The course of events was not complicated. This had once been a secret weapons research and development base jointly established by the Soviet Union, the United States, and Britain during World War II, serving as a backup in case something went wrong with the Manhattan Project and the Allies and the Soviet Union failed to obtain nuclear weapons before Nazi Germany.
What they had been researching here, however, was not a nuclear bomb, but a secret biochemical weapon.
After World War II ended, just before the project was to be canceled, a major earthquake suddenly struck the area, damaging large amounts of critical equipment and causing a serious leak.
Afterward, the laboratory's mission shifted from developing biochemical weapons to eliminating or containing the effects of this toxic agent.
Unfortunately, they failed. In just a few weeks, every organism throughout the canyon that had come into contact with the agent-mammals, insects, plants, and even fungi-underwent a bizarre form of genetic fusion.
Plants began growing inside people, and plants merged with other organisms. Soon, everything descended into chaos.
At the research base and in the town outside, countless people died howling in agony or turned into all manner of indescribable monsters.
At this point, the female researcher lifted her clothes to reveal mutated tissue on her abdomen that had fused with a plant. Clearly, she was the very corpse that had slumped at the laboratory bench, a flower blooming from her mouth.
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