Labyrinth

by James Axler

  Jubilee let go of her belly and sprinted, pumping her arms, driving with her legs, ignoring the pain in her lungs and her stomach. She knew what came next.

  Even though she thought she was prepared for it, the terrible force of the impact stunned her.

  The demon sideswiped her from behind, low and with such power that it knocked both of her legs out from under her, making her twist in the air and slam facefirst into the wall. She hit her forehead squarely and flashes of white light exploded inside her skull.

  Jubilee didn’t feel herself bounce off the wall. She didn’t feel herself crash to the floor. For a few merciful moments she lay unconscious on her back, aware of nothing. It was the feel of hot air rushing down onto her face and the sound of gagging that awoke her.

  That and the evil smell, so thick she could taste it.

  She opened her eyes and saw only blackness.

  All her other senses told her she was about to die.

  J.B. THOUGHT HE WAS PREPARED, too. In position. Pistol steady. Ready to fire, single action. His target only a few feet away. And well lit by the torch. But everything happened much faster than he had anticipated. The demon’s head was there, in his sights, all right, but when he fired, there was no head to hit. In the time it took for him to squeeze the trigger, the creature had jerked back, and rolled out of the way. The hammer fell, the primer ignited, and his bullet whined harmlessly off the turbine housing’s floor and skipped under the bent fan blade.

  It lunged again, almost at once, squirming its head under the fan blade and snapping its teeth.

  He fired again, double action this time. With the same result. Loud bang, way late, clean miss.

  The scale of the problem sank home to him.

  The demon could react a hundred times faster than he could.

  He had three bullets left. If the demon could taunt him into emptying his blaster into thin air, he would be trapped inside the housing, with nothing but fists and feet to fight with.

  J.B. had a choice to make, and he made it. Firing another quick shot at the gap beneath the bent blade, he grabbed his torch and started backing up on his knees.

  He fired again and again in the general direction of his attacker, spacing the blasterfire so he still had one shot left as he squirmed out of the other side of the housing. Once outside, he couldn’t see into the turbine, but he could hear the demon scrabbling around the first two fan blades. He fired his fourth shot blind, then threw his weight against the last fan. He turned the blades to block the creature’s path, then jumped back.

  Claws screeched on steel.

  Razor-sharp teeth clacked together.

  And the demon clicked its side plates so fast it sounded like a mutie rattlesnake coiled to strike. In this case, a hundred pounder.

  The fan didn’t rotate on its axle. And the edge of the blocking blade didn’t bend.

  Which was what J.B. was counting on. He figured that with the confined space in the housing, and the obstacles it held, the demon wouldn’t be able to get up enough steam to ram the barrier out of the way.

  There came a soft moan from the darkness behind him.

  J.B. turned and called out, “Jubilee? Ryan?”

  No one answered.

  Torch in hand, empty pistol tucked in his waistband, he ran down the slope. Right away, he saw a pair of dark forms on the channel floor. One lay on its back, the other crouched over it. Only one was moving, but he couldn’t see that until he got closer.

  The demon’s sides rapidly heaved in and out as it began to gag. It hadn’t vomited acid on the girl, yet. It was working itself up to it.

  Out of bullets, with no other weapons at hand, J.B. yelled curses at the creature and swung the torch around, trying to divert its attention.

  The demon ignored him. It didn’t even turn its head to look his way. Mouth gaping wide, it continued to dry heave in Jubilee’s upturned face.

  J.B. couldn’t tell if she was alive or dead. There was no pool of blood beneath her. But her chest wasn’t rising or falling. If she was alive she was holding her breath.

  In desperation, he grabbed the Smith & Wesson from his waistband. Holding the gun by its five-inch barrel, he wound up and threw it at the demon as hard as he could. Four pounds of handblaster spun through the air and hit the creature in the side of the head with a solid thwack!

  That got its attention.

  As it turned to face J.B., he began to retreat, holding the torch out in front of him to keep it back. If it had jumped, it would have had him, then and there. But it didn’t jump. Instead, it stepped lightly over Jubilee and followed him purposefully, slowly, as if it knew or sensed he had nowhere to run. It even let him turn and dash back to the turbine, which was as far as he could go.

  J.B. knew it was a dead end, but he was trying to buy a little time for the girl, hoping that she would regain consciousness and join Ryan, or that he would come to her rescue while the demon was otherwise occupied. Though he really had no plan going in, a plan occurred to him as he heard the renewed frenzy of the creature fighting and clawing to get out of the housing. And to get at him.

  It was desperation time.

  There was nothing to lose.

  If the idea didn’t work, his and Jubilee’s chillings would just come a few seconds sooner.

  Hurling his full weight against the top blade of the fan, J.B. turned it on the axle and set the trapped demon free.

  Scrambling all six legs on the metal floor, the creature shot out of the housing. It stopped at once, confronting its fellow demon by raising itself up to its full height, arching its back and snapping its side plates.

  As J.B. flattened himself against the wall, the thing looked at him, then at the competition, then back at him.

  The other demon clicked a furious warning as it honed the horns on its back legs.

  Turf war.

  J.B. didn’t actually see them jump. The movement was too fast for his eyes to follow. He saw them clearly for only an instant as they came together, colliding in midair, heads clashing, bodies thrashing, whip-sawing each other with their serrated legs. They locked limbs, sank in multiple rows of teeth and hit the floor rolling. Intertwined, they jumped, hurling themselves against ceiling and floor, all the while slashing with their horns.

  There was no give and take to the battle. Only take. Each demon frantic to dispose of the other, to chill and mark the human prey with vomit before more challengers showed up.

  The grating, screeching noise of their combat was like a dozen wag engines, all blowing their crankshafts at once. And doing it over and over again.

  Afraid the death-locked creatures might roll over him, J.B. backed away from them, along the wall. Over the din of the fighting, he heard blasterfire down the channel. Four rapid shots. Light caliber.

  No ricochets.

  It was Ryan. It had to be. And now he was out of bullets, too.

  J.B. ran to Jubilee’s side and knelt over her, relieved to see that she was breathing. He made her sit up. She was conscious but still woozy. There was no blood; she didn’t appear to be wounded. He quickly helped her to her feet, then pulled her by the hand.

  “We got to find Ryan,” he said. “We’ve got to do it fast.”

  As they hurried down the channel’s slope, the earsplitting chaos from behind got suddenly louder, then in a black blur, it overtook them. A twisting, churning, multilegged shape scraped across the ceiling and hit the floor twenty feet in front of them, blocking their path.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  As her gunshot echoed down the narrow corridor, Mildred pivoted from the hip, automatically tracking her target with the ZKR’s sights, past the crumpled and doubled over Doc. Ten feet from where the old man lay groaning, the transgenetic bioweapon had come to its final rest. A quivering heap of armored plates, its six legs splayed out beneath it, the thing threw long shadows across the floor.

  “Nice bit of shooting,” Krysty said, holding her own weapon trained on the slumping form.

 
; Mildred recovered her torch from the floor and stepped closer to the trannie. She had put the single .38 slug through both of its enormous eyes. In one and out the other. The mushrooming hollowpoint bullet’s impact had blown away not just the eyeballs, but the entire front of its face. At the edges of the massive wound, Mildred could see the skull’s armor plate in cross section; it was a sandwich, an outer layer of brown, a middle layer of white, then brown again on the inner surface. In the yawning gap where the backs of the eye sockets and the bridge of its nose had once been, a pale and wrinkled brain weeped thick white tears.

  The trannie had lost its entire upper jaw, but the lower one remained, exposing triple rows of triangular-shaped, razor teeth, and a black-edged tongue whose pointed tip moved reflexively as shocked and dying nerves continued to fire, reaching up to touch the palate that was no longer there.

  Jak nudged the creature in the side with the toe of his boot, keeping the nozzle of the flamethrower aimed at what was left of its head. “Chilled,” was his solemn verdict.

  Mildred quickly turned her attention to Doc. “Are you hurt?” she asked Tanner.

  It took a long moment for him to answer. And when he did, his voice came out in a breathless wheeze. “Only my dignity, my dear Mildred,” Doc said. He pushed up into a sitting position, still tenderly clutching his stomach. “Thank the stars that hellish creature grazed me in passing. Oof, it was like being kicked by a mule.”

  “You’re lucky it didn’t kick you,” Mildred said. “It would have laid you open, end to end.”

  As the two women helped Doc to his feet, Jak continued down the narrowing hall. He was still in sight when he turned and waved for them to join him.

  As they hurried over, he pointed at the circular installation in the ceiling and said, “Hatch.”

  It was dogged from their side.

  “Go on, open it!” Krysty said to him. She, Mildred and Doc took up covering positions, their weapons aimed at the hatch, and at whatever might decide to come through it.

  The ceiling was so low that standing on tiptoes even Jak could reach the locking wheel. It hadn’t been turned in a very long time. Throwing his weight against the wheel, he cracked it loose, and it spun easily. As he un-dogged the hatch, two things happened in rapid succession. First, a clattering, crashing, screeching din broke out above them, then came a flurry of tightly spaced gunshots.

  SEEING THE TWIN, curving stingers extended and dripping poison, seeing the wounded demon drop into a crouch, Ryan knew the thing was going to jump for him. And that when it did, wounded or not, he was way undergunned.

  Every nerve tingling, he concentrated on the timing. Its timing. His timing.

  When the demon crouched a little lower, preparing to drive with its long back legs, Ryan turned and bolted upslope. One stride was all he took. He didn’t wait to hear the scrape of the claws on concrete; if he’d waited it would have been too late. He turned a 180 and jumped.

  The predator fell for the feint.

  Unable to correct its course in midflight, the demon vaulted past him, whipping wind across his back. It skittered on the concrete, trying to stop, and ended up bouncing off the base of the wall. It never lost its balance. Standing up to its full height, it slashed at the air with its stingers, sending droplets of poison flying.

  Ryan backed away.

  Now it was mad.

  And the same trick wouldn’t work twice.

  The demon circled deliberately, making Ryan put the wall to his back. The one-eyed warrior whipped his blade back and forth as the thing closed in and crouched for the kill.

  Ryan had already picked out his target, the join of head and shoulders, when the hatch in the floor crashed back and Jak Lauren scrambled through it. Ryan couldn’t see the tanks strapped on his back, but he could see the fine blue flame coming from his hand.

  The demon turned to look at the new meat, then back at Ryan, as if trying to decide which to chill first.

  With an air-sucking whoosh, thirty feet of aerosolized fuel ignited, turning the inside of the channel as bright as day. The torrent of fire cascaded down on the suddenly immobile demon. Shielding his face from the terrible heat, Ryan retreated.

  The demon let out a piercing shriek and jumped once, headfirst into the ceiling, a ball of fire. Jak kept the flamethrower’s trigger pinned, hosing it in a steady stream. The demon’s legs shriveled to nothing and it collapsed onto its side. Crackling. Spitting. Smoking.

  Jak let the flamethrower wink out.

  The channel reeked of high test fuel and flash-cooked grasshopper.

  Krysty, Mildred and Doc climbed through the hatch. Krysty ran up to Ryan and hugged him. “Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “Where’s J.B.?” Mildred said.

  He pointed toward the awful sounds coming from the darkness upslope. “I left him up there, with Jubilee.”

  “What’s that noise?” Krysty said.

  “Don’t know,” Ryan said. “It doesn’t sound good.”

  Over the racket, and its echoes, they heard a familiar voice shout, “Ryan! Ryan! Hurry!”

  “That is John Barrymore,” Doc said.

  “He must have seen the light from the flamethrower,” Ryan said. He took the ammo bag from Krysty and opened it.

  “Your SIG’s in there,” she told him.

  Ryan pulled out his predark semiauto pistol, shouldered the bag, then led the way as they ran uphill to find J.B.

  They didn’t have far to go. By the light of their torches they could see their friend’s predicament and the source of the clattering din.

  A pair of demons locked in mortal combat thrashed in the middle of the floor. Thrashed and jumped, bouncing off the walls and ceiling, tearing at each other with teeth and claw. Every impact sent white blood flying from their wounds. There were demon legs on the floor. Severed legs.

  J.B. and Jubilee stood pinned against the right-hand wall, unable to move for fear of being crushed.

  The companions lined up and took aim at the jumping combatants.

  “Wait!” Ryan said. “Don’t shoot unless they stop fighting. Save the ammo. You can make it, J.B. Run along the wall. They’re too busy to notice. We’ve got you covered. Run J.B.!”

  Dragging the pregnant girl behind him, the Armorer did just that. When they had joined the others, Ryan waved them all back to the open hatch.

  “Leave ’em or finish ’em?” Jak said to Ryan.

  “Finish them while we can. Down the hatch, Jak.”

  Ryan took a frag gren from the satchel and primed it. Letting the grip safety flip off, he counted to three, then bowled the gren toward the fighting pair. He wasn’t looking for a ten-ring.

  It only had to be close, like horseshoes.

  A second after he hit the floor behind the hatch, the air was split by a mind-numbing thundercrack that rained concrete dust down on Ryan’s head. He felt the heat of the blast roll over him, then demon bodies and body parts, blown to bite-size fragments whistled through the channel, clattering as they skipped off the floor and ricocheted off the walls.

  They were still clattering as he ducked through the hatch and pulled it closed. Ryan spun the locking wheel, redogging it.

  “Locking the hatch was probably a wasted effort, my dear Ryan,” Doc told him. “We had some contact with Bob and Enid’s pets in this corridor, as well. They’ve extensively tunneled it.”

  “How did you get to us?” Ryan said, watching as Mildred worked on Jubilee, checking her for injuries.

  Krysty explained about the redoubt’s emergency escape tunnel, how it had been flooded in an attempt to chill the trannies, how she and the others had drained it to get access to the dam.

  “Is the redoubt’s mat-trans unit working?” he asked her.

  “We ran a jump test on it. It’s warmed up and ready to go.”

  “I don’t know about the rest of you,” Ryan said, “but I wouldn’t mind putting a few hundred miles between us and this radblasted place.”

&n
bsp; He got no argument there.

  The companions advanced down the passage, which got wider and wider as they retraced their steps. Ryan and J.B. took note of the gashes in walls and their blackened edges.

  “Jak fried them on the way in,” Krysty said. “To keep the trannies off us.”

  “Better give them another dose,” Ryan told the albino.

  Jak moved ahead of the others, quickly with the flamethrower, shooting a burst of fire into each hole. He paused before hosing down a gash on the right. His body language made the hair on the back of Ryan’s neck stand up.

  “Hold it, everybody,” he said, raising the SIG and aiming it at the hole.

  Standing well to the side of the opening, Jak pointed at a trickle of bright yellow dripping from the bottom of the gash and pooling on the floor.

  Everybody took aim.

  His back to wall, Jak angled the flamethrower’s nozzle around the edge of the gash, and unleashed a terrific blast of heat. A high-pitched scream harmonized with the roar of burning fuel. In the next instant, the scorched demon jumped from the wall and past him, a sizzling fireball. It hit the floor and leaped into the gash in the opposite wall.

  Inside the burrow, the fire light winked out, extinguished by the tight fit and by slime.

  Ryan already had the pin out of another gren. “Fire in the hole!” he yelled, pitching the fragger deep into the gash and jumping out of the way.

  Like a cannon maw, the hole bellowed and belched ten feet of flame. Debris exploded from the wall, sending a plume of white guts and shattered armor spraying over the ceiling and floor. Mildred twisted Jubilee out of the way and shielded her with her body.

  When the smoke cleared, Mildred said, “The ladder down to the emergency tunnel is just ahead. From there on we’re moving away from the dam. We should be safe.”

  Ryan saw the open hatch in the floor. “You didn’t close it?”

  “We couldn’t close it,” Krysty told him. “The trannies ripped it off its hinges.”

  “That might mean some of them got down ahead of us,” J.B. said.

  “We’ve got to act like that’s what’s happened,” Ryan told them. “And hope it didn’t.”