They came up on the next marked exit. It was different from the last one, no control room here, just clearly marked with Authorized Personnel Only signs.
Two quick strides and a hard grab was all it took to get the pistol.
“What the?”
“Sorry, dude.” Spencer pulled the trigger and the other man went down like his strings had been cut.
He used the guard’s ID to open the door and dragged the unconscious body through with him. He now stood in a room that had been carved into the side of a cliff. Extending directly from it was a wide metal catwalk that ended in what was clearly the top of an observation tower. His heart stuttered for a second until he was sure it was empty, which wasn’t easy in the moonlit darkness.
The only play he had was to get back to June. He’d taken care of the first responder, but when that guy didn’t report in, they’d send reinforcements. Suspicious reinforcements. Using the hallway to get back was, as Edmund would say, right out. He’d have to find a new route outside.
The tower itself was about thirty feet tall, giving it a good view of the area. They were on one side of a valley, with a cleared space maybe thirty yards wide in front of the tower. Beyond that was thick forest. Spencer pulled the guard around to the front of the tower and then went inside.
It was pretty standard stuff: a couple of chairs and a counter top that ran around the inside edge. The consoles and monitors would be virtual here, so there was no way for him to access them. There was a minifridge against one back wall, and a big locker against the other. The fridge had the requisite gallon of soy milk and a big bottle of…well, it didn’t have a label on it, but it was sort of green and smelled like a pasture. Behind those were regular sodas. Small ones. It was almost like they were hidden behind the healthy stuff.
On a hunch, he felt around the back of the fridge and was rewarded with a big, heavy glass bottle. Seemed not everyone doing guard duty was communing with nature sober. There was even a dusty flask sitting next to it. He’d never heard of Wyoming Whiskey, but that didn’t mean much. Small-batch distillery products were rare in southeast Arkansas. He took two big swallows and smiled. Whoever this belonged to had good taste; it was delicate and smooth. After hitting the bottle a third time, he turned his attention to the locker.
Spencer touched its lock with the guard’s ID, and it opened with a beep. He couldn’t help but whistle at the contents.
“Son of a bitch.”
Night vision glasses sat neatly stacked on a charging shelf along with boxes of ammo and fully loaded magazines. On a rack next to them were two Saiga automatic shotguns. Spencer had only used them in realms, but these matched his constructs perfectly. The magazine was a ton heavier than it was supposed to be. Taking regular swigs from the bottle, he ejected a shell.
“Holy fucking shit,” he said. “You have got to be kidding me.”
Tungsten slugs. It was cheaper than depleted uranium, but that was like saying Porsches cost less than Ferraris. When he thought about it, the load out in this locker probably cost as much as a Porsche. He bet that the guards didn’t go hunting often, but when they did, they didn’t fuck around. The rounds weren’t armor-piercing; the shape of the slug and the fact that the shotguns were smoothbore made that clear. But they were close to twice as dense as lead rounds.
It was too much for him to carry all at once. That hurt his soul. In realmspace, you never left anything this cool behind, but all together it weighed in at more than a couple hundred pounds.
That’s when he realized it wasn’t hunting gear. It was siege weaponry. Anna Treacher couldn’t count on everyone getting killed, and this stuff would probably stop anything up to and including vehicles small enough to maneuver through the forest around the plant. Helicopters would need to be careful around this stuff.
He poured the last of the whiskey bottle, which didn’t seem to have as much in it as he remembered, into the flask and loaded up what he could in a backpack that he found hanging from a hook on the wall. An insulated camouflaged poncho and boonie hat rounded out his ensemble.
He needed to make it harder for them to come after him. He looked around the space, tracing power conduit and wires. It all ended up in a box mounted inside the locker. He racked a round in, flicked off the safety, and pulled the trigger.
It fucking exploded. He’d never heard anything so loud, and the flash was blinding. The kick pushed the barrel straight up, which caused another round to fire, and that sent him crashing to the ground with what seemed like the entire tower landing on top of him.
Thank God for all that whiskey, otherwise he would’ve pissed himself. What he thought was the whole tower ended up only being some splintered wood and shingles. Once he cleared that off, he could only stop and stare at the roof joist with a two-inch chunk taken out of it, and the fist-sized hole in the roof beyond. The power box was gutted, its contents scattered across the catwalk behind the tower. Most impressive of all was a pinhole of light coming from the room at the other end of the catwalk. Over-penetration, thy name is tungsten.
Then he heard a roar.
Spencer strapped the glasses onto his head, threw the shotgun over his shoulder, and headed down the ladder. Fuck it. There was a pile of deer shit not ten yards from the tower, and he was armed with tungsten slugs. A game trail led off into the woods.
The thing about handling animal droppings was that it washed off. It didn’t matter how bad it smelled, or how awful it felt, at the end of the day it washed off. After some smearing, all a bear would think was that he was a pile of turds that moved once in a while.
A branch snapped in the distance, and now he knew roughly where it was. He tested the safety on the shotgun again. He didn’t want to blow his own head off wandering around in the woods at night, but it would also suck to alert the bear with its click.
Take your time, place your feet carefully, measure the breathing. The whiskey provided the lubrication that kept his panic at bay.
Spencer stayed well away from the main game trail in the center of the valley. All the hours spent helping Mike test Warhawk were paying dividends now. It wasn’t easy making his way through the undergrowth, but he knew how.
Noises crackled to life behind him. Spencer was past it now, so he angled back toward the trail. The wind picked up. The noise of the leaves let him move a little faster, especially since he wasn’t dodging tree limbs or brambles anymore.
He caught a glimpse of furry hide just as he stepped on a dry twig. The sound it made might as well have been a gunshot. He rolled behind a fallen tree trunk as the bear turned around with a loud snort. It rushed up to where he had been standing, but too fast. It didn’t move right. It was too confident. Spencer slowly lifted his head up to see over the trunk. Its back was to him, and it was huge. The head had to be three feet across.
It would make one hell of a trophy. Spencer lifted the shotgun to his shoulder, wiggled the safety off, and took half a breath.
It turned, and three eyes stared straight at him. The mouth was filled with rows of needle-sharp teeth. The face was scaly, and the wrongness of it pinned him to the spot. It shrieked rage and death straight in his face, and Spencer’s gun vanished.
He dropped the damned thing when he stood. Why did he stand? The gun was on the ground, two steps away. The creature blinked at the weapon, with all three eyes, and then turned back to him.
It laughed.
The only thing that kept Spencer sane was the whiskey. Bears didn’t laugh. Bears didn’t have three eyes, prehensile paws, and they most definitely didn’t laugh. It was a rumbling, rhythmic noise he felt more than heard. The thing was talking to him. He had to get away.
The flask.
Spencer yanked it out of his pocket and hurled it into the night. When the creature followed the motion, he dove for the gun. He managed to grab the base of the stock when the thing hit him full on with a paw, and he went flying. The claws tore through his coat and drug furrows across his chest, but what was worse was the shotgu
n slipping from his grip, sailing away to who knew where.
The cuts didn’t hurt for some reason. They must’ve caught his poncho and shirt. Spencer had to find that damn gun. He had to move, get away from that thing.
Its roar echoed through the forest, and it was fucking close. The gun was somewhere to his left, but the leaves had swallowed it. That was a pretty good plan. He splayed his arms open, and the leaves closed in over him.
He had to stay still. It couldn’t smell him or see him right now, and that was all that mattered. It wasn’t a bear, but it also didn’t seem to use infrared or any other low-light tech. It wouldn’t be searching for him otherwise.
Be still.
Twigs and leaves nestled into his wounds, which now had begun to hurt like a son of a bitch. A few inches of movement would cool the agony. He needed to piss like a race horse. Every bug and spider in the undergrowth crawled over his hands and up his pants legs. It would all be better if he moved, only a little bit.
NO!
Feet stomped past him, inches away.
And then kept going.
When the wind picked up, he risked raising his head. He could make out the thing’s shape as it searched the other side of the trail. Eventually it gave up and stomped away.
The damned shotgun couldn’t have gone far with that heavy ammunition inside it.
He stood up next to a tree, searching frantically. When he peered around the trunk, something smashed him right between the eyes, and he stumbled. Another blow to the back of his head sent him to the ground. But when he opened his eyes, the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen was above him.
The shotgun hung by its strap from a tree branch right over his head.
When he tugged on it, the gun didn’t fall into his hands. It was tangled up in there good, and he had to work at it quietly.
He forced himself to slow down. He didn’t need the damn strap, all he needed to do was unhook it. His hands were cold, stiff, and slick with mud and deer shit. The strap clip was strong, and it took two tries before it came free.
The thing now stood directly in front of the watchtower. It was more than ten feet tall, bigger than any Sasquatch legend he’d ever read about. To hell with it. He’d have time to figure out what it was after it was dead.
The second hook on the strap came free, and after a quick check to clear the barrel, he ran. Slugs were strictly short-range ammo. He had to get as close as he could before taking the shot. He crossed maybe half the distance when the thing hoisted itself up on the tower, reached in, and pulled the unconscious guard out with one hand.
In one smooth motion, it bit his head and a big chunk of one shoulder off.
The guy hadn’t done anything! Spencer was the one who put him there! The creature’s head snapped around at the shout Spencer couldn’t hold in, and there were those three eyes again, jolting him. It jumped high, and while it sailed through the air, he leveled the gun and clicked off the safety. It was coming straight down on him, but if Spencer dodged, he’d miss the shot.
It twisted as he pulled the trigger. A blinding fireball exploded in front of him, the kick from the recoil smashed the stock against his shoulder, and he fell. Maybe the gun had exploded, but then there was a scream that overloaded his ears. It was like Godzilla choking on sheet steel. A sudden reek of nail polish was overpowering as a hot, wet mess splattered across his face.
Another one of those horrific roars split the night. The monster ran off, smashing through the undergrowth as it went.
Spencer felt around frantically for the shotgun. He jumped away when his hands closed around a clawed finger as thick as the grip of a bat, but it didn’t move.
The slug from the shotgun had blown the monster’s arm off at the shoulder.
Another bellow echoed through the night, further away. Spencer found the shotgun, and knowing it was pointless, went and checked on the guard.
It had been quick; that was all he could say.
Spencer turned away and looked for the blood, which was where the stink came from. With the night vision glasses still firmly over his eyes—thank God for webbed straps—he couldn’t see the color, but the smell was all wrong, too chemically. Blood smelled rusty, he knew that much from hunting. He didn’t have time to consider what it meant. It turned out the creature was going his way, back toward where he’d left June.
The noises it made grew weaker as Spencer drew closer. One way or another, it would stop. There was no need to get close.
The sound of rushing water gradually increased until he broke out of the woods next to a river, the creature maybe a hundred yards ahead of him. It stumbled up a steep hill that led to a cliff side and then braced against a tree. It reached up and pulled a branch down hard. Instead of breaking, it slid smoothly down and stopped with a metallic clunk.
A door hidden in the cliff face pulled inward and then rolled up, revealing a flood of artificial light. Spencer squinted and shielded his eyes. He tore off the glasses and then blinked away the after images. In the distance the creature fell face-first into the opening.
He ran up and rolled the body over. The eyes were part of a mask, a breathing gizmo of some sort that shielded its eyes. The stench of nail polish remover was choking.
Another horrific shriek shattered the night, very close by. There were two not-bears out here. Because of course there were.
Spencer ran inside the giant room, quickly spotting a red ladder leading up to catwalks high above his head. He tucked the shotgun under his neck and climbed. He had to move. The thing was running up, he could hear it. The room was a concrete bunker of some sort, filled with huge pipes. He was halfway up the ladder when the monster’s buddy found its body. Or at least that’s what he figured, since the roars changed timbre, carrying a clear note of outrage. He kept climbing.
When he threw the shotgun onto the catwalk, the ladder wrenched violently sideways. He lost his grip. He was falling. The drop would kill him. Had to. He would not go out as a monster’s main course. The thing stared up at him with those three eyes, rows and rows of teeth in a shrieking smile. He had to die in the fall, that was—
“Spencer!”
Dark hands grabbed his shirt collar and pulled. The fabric tore as he got both hands around an arm. After some frantic scrabbling, June hauled him up onto the catwalk. She landed on her butt with him at her feet. The look of disgust as she examined her hands flashed to terror when June saw what was underneath them.
Yeah, monsters trump deer shit every single time.
The thing’s friend was a little smaller, and the catwalk was too high for it to reach them with a jump. Now that it had ruined the ladder, it searched for a different route up.
“What is that?” she asked.
It took two deep breaths before he could talk. “Fucked if I know.” It was too far away for a reliable shot, and ricochets were a real possibility around all this steel and concrete. He finally got a read on what the room really was: a hidden spillway for the reservoir June had talked about earlier. The floor of the room was split by a broad concrete channel of shallow, slow-moving water.
A control room was in front of them, a dozen paces away. The shotgun made short work of the doorknob, and then he was in.
It was here as a backstop against the failure of automatic controls. Instructions were everywhere, in cartoon clarity. The glass plate that covered the spillway release was thin but still cut his knuckles when he smashed through it. He grabbed the yoke underneath, pulled hard, and then twisted it to the left until it stopped.
The monster, who’d been jumping up trying to grab a pipe overhead, was knocked into the water by a shimmer of gold light cast by projectors that lined the mouth of the spillway, trapping it and the body inside. Emergency lights flashed red and horns honked as whatever Spencer had activated progressed. The monster climbed a short ladder out of the trough but couldn’t break through what had to be some sort of force field. It quickly waded toward the exit in front of its friend’s body.
A wall of water shot out of the mouth of the spillway, constrained by the force field. It slammed into both of the creatures as it rocketed toward the river.
When the system cycled and shut off, there was no sign of them.
He sat down on the catwalk, looking at the spillway, hanging on as the adrenaline crash took him.
June plopped down beside him. “That was no bear.”
“No shit, sister. I don’t know what the hell it was.”
She shook her head. “We have bigger problems.”
“Bigger than a fifteen-foot-tall what-the-fuck?”
“In truth, yes.” She sniffed and wrinkled her nose. “First we have to get you cleaned up. Then we have to take care of Abada.”
“Who the hell is Abada?”
Edmund’s voice came from an overhead speaker. “He might be the one holding the keys to the kingdom.”
Chapter 40
Kim
While Emily and Tonya planned their next move, Kim stayed with Mike. It had been a long time since she last translated from a language she was still learning. After three hours, her head was spinning from low blood sugar, and all she wanted to do was sleep. But every time her eyes tried to close, she’d remember it was Mike.
The story she had pieced together so far was that whoever was with him identified as male and very old. She had never heard of the place, but that wasn’t unusual nowadays. Realmspace access was supplied to the entire world from various satellite clusters and often reached places that didn’t acknowledge an authority bigger than the local headman. Drone delivery took care of getting the required equipment—up to and including generators and fuel—to places that would take weeks or even months to reach any other way.
Mike’s companion called himself Tal. He apparently hadn’t had a visitor in a long time. She was still trying to get her head around that. Kim had taken so many notes her hands ached.
“Kim,” Tonya said. “We’re ready.”
Will was still out there, and since Mike didn’t seem to be in trouble right now, they needed to get moving. Giving each other medical power of attorney had turned out to be one of the smartest decisions they made so far. Kim had access to the time-domain keys Tonya needed to use to validate the medical tools that would help them move Mike. Or rather, get him to move himself.
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