Another motion sensor.
She felt a surge of hope as she stepped into the room beyond. She was in a museum, or possibly an art gallery. The room was arrayed with pedestals and display cases, exhibiting artifacts ranging from the Paleolithic era to the Renaissance. The pieces were beautiful, as if chosen specifically for their aesthetic value. Many appeared to have religious significance. Yet, as she progressed through the room, her initial optimism waned. This was not a public exhibition but rather a private collection kept solely for the enjoyment of her captor.
Still, there had to be a way out.
An arched passageway took her to another gallery, but unlike the first, this room contained memorabilia from a more recent era in history. At first, she thought the room was devoted to medical history. The walls were lined with shelves displaying skulls and skeletal fragments, jars containing organs preserved in a liquid solution. Some were marked with a numerical code, handwritten on yellowed placards and adhesive labels. The room also contained pictures, dozens—perhaps hundreds—of black and white photographs.
Fiona now regretted having eaten before making her bid for freedom. The pictures were the stuff of nightmares. There were photographs of men and women of all ages. Children, too. In fact, a disproportionate number of the photographs were of children. They were all naked and helpless, staring bleakly at the camera. Many were emaciated; all looked defeated. Those were the easiest to look at. There were pictures of corpses, amputated limbs and bodies opened up for post-mortem examinations, but those were not the worst. The worst were the photos that showed what happened in-between.
Fiona quickly recognized the pictures for what they were, a record of ghastly medical experiments, carried out on living human victims. That was when she saw a large, freestanding trophy case at the far end of the room. In it, before a background of framed diplomas, awards and portraits of a dark-haired man with a gap-toothed smile, stood a mannequin dressed in an immaculate gray-green military uniform, replete with a peaked cap and something that looked like lightning bolts on the collar.
A Nazi uniform.
She gave the exhibit only a cursory inspection. The contents confirmed what she had already guessed. This was a very different kind of Holocaust memorial, one that celebrated the torture and murder of millions and honored those who had perpetrated such unimaginable cruelty.
There was a door just behind the display, a regular door with a handle that turned when she tested it. To her dismay, it opened into yet another large room. With stark white walls, overhead fluorescent lighting and a dull gray industrial epoxy floor, the space looked like a factory warehouse. Despite the fact that the room was far more utilitarian than the preceding galleries after the horrors she had just witnessed, it was a welcome change.
She hurried past row after row of work tables, trying to ignore the contents, lest she discover new horrors. One item, however, caught her eye.
It stood in the center of the room like a suit of medieval armor decorating the entrance to a castle keep. It was armor, in fact, but there was nothing antiquated about it. It looked more like something from a super-hero movie.
The suit was a full-body armored exoskeleton. Fiona had heard about the military’s intention to develop Iron Man-style battle suits for soldiers, though in her opinion, it looked more like the armor worn by Master Chief in the Halo games, right down to the bubble-shaped reflective visor in the helmet. As far as she knew, the project was still in the early design phase.
So how had Cerberus gotten their hands on it?
She recalled what Dourado had said about Cerberus providing anything for the right price. Had they stolen a prototype of the military exosuit? Or perhaps built this from leaked, classified plans?
The suit, which appeared to have been posed like the mannequin of the SS officer in the display case, offered no clues. She couldn’t tell if it was even functional.
But if it is…
Inspiration hit her like a lightning bolt. If the suit was operational, maybe she could use it to escape this nightmare. She took a step closer, searching for some way of opening the armored carapace.
There was a flash of movement, and something struck her in the side, knocking her backward. The blow stunned her, and the next thing she knew, she was lying in a heap on the floor, twenty feet from the exosuit. The pain arrived before she could even think about trying to rise, but in the corner of her eye, she saw the dull gray suit moving, advancing toward her.
She struggled to recover, attempted to roll over and push herself up, but her left arm refused to work, and she collapsed face down on the floor. As she lay there, trying to will herself into motion, she could feel the vibration of each mechanical footfall as the exosuit stalked relentlessly toward her.
Thump. Thump.