"I cannot do that."
"And that's what I don't understand."
Again, Thom stumbled with his answer, reworked it, and responded with the best defense mechanism he could muster.
"It is not our job to understand; it is our job to complete the mission, Captain. And that is what I intend to do and it is what I expect of you."
Twiste shook his head. "You can say it all you want, but I know you don't believe it."
"Then why are you here? You could have disobeyed orders, skipped out on training, and gone AWOL. Maybe even filed an objection all the way up the chain of command. No one forced you to come."
Twiste hesitated, licked his lips, and said, "You are my commanding officer, and also my friend. I suppose if you're going to be stupid, so am I. Listen, Thom, I've known you for a long time and I know you see a lot more than mission objectives and orders. But for some reason, you've put yourself into a quarantine just like this Hell hole. Do you have a death wish? What is going to get better if Thom Gant isn't around?"
"Do not push me, Doctor," Gant said. Each of his words came out separate and distinct, a sure sign he had reached a tipping point.
"I just want to hear you admit it. To admit you aren't some blind soldier; that you have your doubts, just like me. But for some reason you let yourself be controlled by your programming. Is that safer? Is that easier?"
A noise interrupted their discussion: a sharp tone and a blast of static.
For a moment, both Gant and Twiste thought their tactical headsets had sprung to life again, but this noise came from outside the door. As the static faded, Gant recognized the tone as feedback from a microphone.
"That's the public address system," he said. "For announcements to the personnel down here."
"No one is working down here these days," Twiste pointed out.
A woman broadcast through the halls of sublevel 7. She spoke in a monotone voice, which is why it took Gant a moment to recognize her.
"Thomas Gant … are you listening?"
Jean.
"Who is that?" Twiste asked. "How does she know you?"
The words coming from the address system suggested pleading, but they came out dry and flat, like a first-year drama student reading a script.
"I'm stuck down here, Thom. It's your fault. You have to come and get me."
He felt Brandon's hand on his shoulder as a sign of support and as a prod.
"That is my wife," Gant said. "My wife, Jean."
Brandon Twiste did not reply, probably because his mind was stuck on the same thing as the major's: there was no way Mrs. Gant was down inside the Red Rock Mountain Research Facility. She was, in fact, thousands of miles away.
Tending to her garden.
"Why did you leave me? You always leave me. You're never around. It would be better if you don't come home from this. It would be better for me."
Her voice bounced around the empty corridors of sublevel 7, carrying through the shadows and empty rooms. A message broadcast in a tomb.
"The garden won't grow this year. The soil is barren. It's your fault."
Brandon whispered, "That's not your wife, Thom. I've met Jean. Her voice is more, is more …"
Twiste did not finish his thought but Gant knew what his friend was trying to say: alive. But then again, Brandon had not been around Jean in a couple of years. Things change.
Thom remembered the myriad of accounts detailing mental influences taking hold of base personnel. People tricked into attempting to break quarantine, a young girl driven to self-mutilation.
"It is trying to bait us."
"Fine, okay, I get it," Twiste said. "But how does it know your name, or that you even have a wife? And why use her voice to get to you?"
"As for how, I think that is one of the answers waiting for us in the Red Lab. As to why, it is a sadistic son of a bitch."
Gant remembered Thunder's stories about those mental influences taking hold of the target's mind and controlling them. That was not the case here, however. If this thing could outright control minds, why did it fake his wife's voice? Could it not merely reach out and force Thomas Gant to march into the open?
The woman's voice went on, "You can't hide in the dark from me, Thom. I know you can hear me."
Brandon asked, "But why her? Why your wife?"
He did not reply, but the hesitation in his eyes, the slight bowing of his head gave him away. His body language spoke volumes, giving Twiste the answer he had sought all along.
"I'm sorry," he consoled his friend. "You know that's not Jean, right?"
Gant lifted his head up but did not look at Brandon. He did, however, have something to say.
"No, that is not my wife. But it is good news."
"Good news?"
"It is trying to bait me, which means that no matter how powerful this thing is, no matter if it can read thoughts or play mind games, it does not know where we are. That means we still have at least some element of surprise."
"I suppose we're not going to use that advantage to slink back up and out of here?"
If the entity had tapped his memories and used his wife's voice in an attempt to cower Major Thomas Gant, it had failed miserably. In fact, the idea of such a foul entity even knowing Jean's name only filled him with rage.
His expression grew hard, his eyes focused.
"No, Doctor. We are going to go down to where this thing lives and kill it."
19
Sergeant Ben "Biggy" Franco felt a pain that started at the base of his skull and circled around and through every part of his cranium.
He tried to move his body but his limbs ignored the command.
He opened his eyes and saw only black causing an alarm to scream “I'm blind!” but after a moment he realized that something lay atop his face, meaning the lack of vision had more to do with an obstruction than damage to his optic nerve.
His head, however, had suffered some sort of damage.
From what?
It ached. A killer headache dwarfing even the worst of the migraines he had suffered during his teen years. But he was not a kid anymore and things like headaches were not going to slow him down, no matter how goddamn painful.
He took a breath and tasted smoke, fuel, and dust.
This time, Biggy forced the impulse to go through and it worked. He managed to move his right arm and grasp something that was on his face, pulling away a broken, lightweight tile that had fallen from the hallway's dropped ceiling. Obviously the tile had been blown away by …
… by what? Oh yeah, the explosion. The explosion of what?
The pain in Ben Franco’s head was a hard, dull throb, probably caused when he hit the floor, but why, again, had he hit the floor?
… Pearson’s tanks must’ve exploded. That’s it, right?
While he struggled with his memory, his body switched back on, one nerve, one synapse at a time. He felt a tingling in his fingers, a warm ache in his shoulder and then——-and then an agony that chased away any concerns over a bump to the head. A raw, horrid, tearing pain roared up Franco’s right leg into his thigh, through his waist, and all the way up to his shoulders, where it joined the warm sting of a gunshot wound to create a hellish agony. His teeth clamped tight and a groan bellowed in the back of his throat.
Then he heard slurping sounds.
Franco raised his head as best he could. He saw smoke lingering in the air reflecting yellow flickers from small, scattered fires left over from the exploded flamethrower tanks. The unmistakable odor of burning human flesh drifted on the smoke.
He quickly located the source of the pain. It came because something knelt next to him and gnawed on his calf.
It was not one of the shadow-creatures that had attacked the unit. It was small, between four and five feet tall, although it was hard to tell since it was kneeling on the floor in a low-light environment. Still, the sergeant saw more than he cared to see.
Franco counted two arms and two legs, hands, and a head; it was
very much human in general form. Yet there was no way this thing could possibly be human, not with the myriad of welts, sores, boils, and rashes covering its unnaturally pale skin. It appeared hairless except for some wiry thatch atop a small skull.
The face was difficult to see because that face was buried in Franco's calf, pulling at a strand of flesh with spindly fingers on two gnarled hands, slurping as it ate. Biggy saw a wisp of steam rise from the gaping wound.
Franco gasped, revealing to the diner that its meal lived. When it turned to face him, it showed flesh pulled tight on cheekbones as if shrink-wrapped onto the face of a gruesome doll; eyes seemingly all black, the result of pupils expanded to the widest possible size to survive in a dungeon of dark.
An escalation of pain as the bullet in his shoulder screamed nearly caused Franco to pass out. Only through pure willpower did he remain conscious—willpower driven by disgust and survival instinct, by knowing that if he slept again he would either not wake up at all or, worse, wake up half-devoured.
He looked about for a weapon and saw none within easy reach. Then he remembered his utility belt. He grabbed the first thing he could lay his hands on: a portable ring wire saw.
Despite shaking from the volcano of pain electrocuting his body, despite a bullet in his shoulder near his collarbone, Franco grasped the wire saw's rings and pulled the cord taut. He then forced himself into a sitting position, coming eye to eye with the fiend tearing at his leg.
It seemed surprised at Franco’s ability to move. It seemed more surprised at how fast the soldier wrapped the cord around its neck.
Franco pulled the rings in opposite directions and the wire throttled the creature. In those few seconds the part of the soldier's mind that had been conditioned to observe and store information took stock of his foe, even though the incoming data was distorted by emotion, confusion, and agony.
First, the creature reacted to the wire around its throat, so it felt pain. Second, it appeared to gasp for air, so it needed to breathe and therefore was alive, and that meant it could be killed. Third, it was a small thing, almost childlike in its dimensions, but the blood caked on its cheeks, the jagged fingernails, the broken but dangerously sharp teeth, the guttural noises it screeched as Franco attacked, made this thing seem like something demonic.
Biggy Franco turned his pain into rage. He did not give the creature a chance to suffocate. He pulled the rings with all his strength, forcing his wounded shoulder to comply; the wires cut through its throat until there was no more resistance. Its head wobbled for a moment, then rolled away, teeth impulsively chattering for a second longer.
With the threat dealt with, Biggy's mind stepped back and took in the situation, except taking in this particular situation was a tall task. In fact, the incoming flood of emotion, information, and understanding tripped a sanity circuit breaker.
Franco glanced around. Bodies, gore, charred flesh, shell casings, and blood were scattered about, but no more of those things—wait, over by the stairs lurked another, this one a little larger than the first. Unlike the first, the second creature wore pants that were obviously several sizes too big. Franco noted a green camouflage pattern; a trophy, no doubt, from a past victim.
It took no notice of the sergeant or his actions; it was too busy ripping into Moss’s ribcage. Unlike Franco, Specialist Moss was definitely Not going to wake up to this unpleasant surprise. Specialist Moss was already pulling guard duty at some heavenly outpost far away.
No one … no Gant … no Campion—they left me. They left me to sit here and be eaten.
Franco turned his attention to his leg wound: a gaping hole, surrounded by teeth marks. He felt body heat rise from the gash as well as a current of blood. Then his shoulder chimed in, competing for attention by sending a burning tremor all along his arm.
Campion shot me. He wouldn't do that without Gant's orders. Fucking major wanted me DEAD.
Franco reached for and found the first aid kit on his belt using his right arm—the one that did not have a bullet hole in the shoulder—to find a trauma compress. He leaned back down and held it hard against the shoulder wound. After some more fiddling, he managed to free some adhesive tape and loosely secure the compress. It would not hold for long, but he had more important things to deal with before he could dress the bullet wound properly.
Next came his leg. He stuffed gauze into the torn flesh, bandaged it, and prepared a tourniquet.
Eating me … fucking eating me.
He pulled it tight and Sergeant Ben "Biggy" Franco screamed. He screamed from a deep spot far down in his merciless soul. It started as a scream of agony, but as the breath roared from his lungs it turned savage. It turned from agony into anger into pure rage. The sound reverberated up and down the hall and sounded as inhuman as any of the denizens therein.
The blood, the unspeakable creatures, this hellish underground complex, the smell of burnt bodies, a bullet in the shoulder and teeth marks on his leg, which had been the main course for something's dinner—all that could easily have killed a man from fear alone. But not Ben Franco. Hell, this wasn't any harder than an average day during his childhood.
He forced himself to stand. Despite the tourniquet, blood soaked through the gauze on his leg. On his shoulder, the pad slipped but, for the moment, held.
The thing that had been eating Moss—the creature—reacted to Franco’s cry and took notice, crossing the corridor with an ape-like gait.
"Come on! Come on, you fuck. You want a monster? You want a monster?"
Franco did not wait for it to strike. He reached out and grabbed its throat with his left arm, the one weakened by a bullet hole.
The creature took the general form of a person but might have been even more inhuman-looking than the alien from the Everglades. Sores and bruises, boils and cracked skin, black eyes and cauliflower ears, a skeleton covered in a skin that resembled white plastic. The only sight he had ever seen that came close to this beast were old photographs of bodies piled at Auschwitz or Buchenwald.
Franco threw it against the wall. It offered little resistance, little in the way of strength, but it did snap at him with rotting, jagged teeth, as if trying to bite off his nose.
"You want a monster, huh, bitch? You want a fucking monster?"
Franco jammed two fingers into its eyes … and pushed. They popped like sour grapes but he did not stop; he drove further into its mushy skull, easily puncturing bands of weak cartilage and snapping skinny bones that seemed no stronger than chicken wings.
It gurgled something, some kind of moan. Its teeth kept snapping, its arms flailed.
Franco pulled away his gore-covered fingers and grasped its throat with both hands. A pain shot up from his wounded leg. He nearly lost his balance and fell backwards. That would have reversed the situation. Instead, the near misstep made him angrier still.
"I’m your fucking monster!" he screamed, banging its head into the wall. "I’m the biggest fucking king-of-the-hill bad-ass sonofawhore monster in this whole Christ-forsaken shithole and DON’T YOU FUCKING FORGET IT!"
He battered the thing’s skull again … and again … and again. A thick, chunky liquid splashed out onto the wall behind. Teeth stopped chattering; arms stopped flailing. Its head deformed, taking on the shape of a rotting cantaloupe.
The sergeant stopped his assault not so much because it was dead, but because his arm grew tired. He stopped with both hands around its throat, his eyes staring straight at its gory, punctured sockets.
"What the fuck you looking at?"
He laughed, unsure if he had asked the question of the monster or it of him. Down there, in that dungeon where shapeless monsters consumed men, where brothers deserted one another, where creatures feasted on flesh—down there the mind could play tricks, making the strange and absurd seem likely and reasoned, especially for a mind burning hot from infection, a mind that had been bent and twisted by the thing living on sublevel 8.
Playtime.
Under such stress, the
hidden doors inside a man's consciousness could break open, letting free demons of a far more human nature, but no less dangerous. Demons of prejudice and envy; of frustration and anger.
Demons a weak soul might turn to if trapped in the dark.
"They left me here. They left me here to be eaten alive."
What was that saying? Oh yeah …
"Dad always said … he said, ‘Son, sooner or later you gotta pay the piper.’ What the fuck is a piper?"
Don’t know … but he gets paid … each and every time … sooner or later.
How about this, Benny. How about if you wallow around in this crazy shit long enough, sooner or later you're going to get your due. Sooner or later there’s a price to be paid.
"You say something? Did you … did you say something?" Its lips had not moved. Its arms hung loose. The stain of blood—and worse—still slopped along the wall behind its smashed skull.
The creature had said nothing, nor had anyone else. He had been discarded by everyone and everything, his purpose apparently fulfilled. Gant … Campion, they continued on, as did everything else in Red Rocks' dungeon halls. Sergeant Benjamin Franco was all alone down there; all alone with his memories, his thoughts, and his demons.
"No … you didn’t say shit. You’re dead. Just like they thought they’d leave me for dead, didn’t they? They just forgot about old Sarge and went on their happy little way. I learned in the Rangers, no one gets left behind. You don't leave people behind."
He banged its skull against the wall one more time, as if he held Gant and Campion in his grip and they needed a lesson drilled home.
"So what am I supposed to do? Huh? What am I supposed to do?"
Franco spitefully tossed the limp body aside. It thumped to the ground, as lifeless as Moss, Pearson, and the monster that had been eating his leg.
As his adrenaline cooled, the pain returned. Sharp and debilitating from two distinct injuries. Franco fell to his knees and vomited. He vomited until there was nothing left but dry heaves, one after another for several minutes. When he was done, he wiped the spit from his lips with the back of his hand, but succeeded only in smearing blood across his face.
Opposing Force: Book 01 - The God Particle Page 19
