“Thank you,” Edward whispered to Debbie as he felt himself falling asleep for the last time. “I love you... Wish you all the best... I remembered you in my will... You’re a very rich woman.”
The day grew darker; light faded in and out, then burst into blossoms of color behind his eyelids as they closed for good.
He died as the Lumineers played the opening bars of “Ophelia”.
The creature was back, and he’d brought company.
Max turned and squeezed off a couple of pistol shots, hoping that it would somehow slow the creature, then kept running as fast as the low ceiling and dim lighting allowed. The creature’s six legs clicked on the floor as it ran, the sounds growing ever closer. As he struggled to stay ahead of the creatures, he glanced back anxiously every couple of seconds. When he looked, Max couldn’t see the nightmare chasing him, just blackness and flailing shadows. His heart pounding in his chest like a sledgehammer as he sprinted on.
Got to stop them. They’ll run me down.
The deck rumbled from an explosion in the reactor chamber. Max leaned into his stride, mindful once again that he wasn’t only racing those creatures for the exit; he had to beat the ship’s self-destruct as well. He needed to gain a tactical advantage against the pursuing creatures if he wanted to see the surface again.
I may die today, but not until I see the surface.
Max came to a corner, scanned the continuing hallway and saw no creatures ahead. He pulled one of the alien mines from a cargo pocket and depressed the magnetic sensor on the back, which fell free into his hand. He attached the sensor to the wall at the corner, pressed the arming button on the mine, and stuck it to the wall next to the sensor.
Then he ran. Only fools stick around for the fireworks. It was one of Gable’s old catchphrases, rather appropriate under the circumstances.
The clicking of insect legs grew louder when the beast turned the corner. Max kept running. As he’d hoped, the beast was so bent on taking its revenge it tossed caution and common sense down the shitter, like any typical, intelligent creature. The mine detonated; the concussion knocked Max forward onto his face and singed the hair off the back of his head. A shriek erupted like the sound of steel raking against steel. Max wasn’t sure if it was the creature screaming or the ship starting to fall apart. He didn’t have time to care. But, as he got up to run, he couldn’t help sparing a glance back. No sign of the ant creature or the one following it, just a lot of noisome smoke and black gore spatter.
A blown-off portion of ant-thing’s mandible lay on the floor near Max’s feet. The chitinous appendage swelled and then popped open. The black iridescent substance inside bubbled as it reformed. Tiny insect legs sprouted at an alarming rate. The transformation sounded like someone crinkling a newspaper. Max blasted it point-blank with his pistol, stopping the transformation and sending the dead spawn skittering across the floor.
Max took off and didn’t look back until he reached a four-way intersection. Another creature now tailed him, and it appeared to move much quicker than the ant-centaur. Two more creatures lurched down one of the other hallways, traveling away from him.
Greytech had posted a directory sign. Max took a right down the hallway toward the E-deck elevator and the exit. Neither appeared anytime soon. Max sprinted as fast as he could beneath the six-foot ceiling, legs and lungs on fire, refusing to acknowledge that the creatures were finally wearing him out. He glanced back and saw the trailing creature enter the passage from the four-way intersection, barreling after him at greyhound speed. A cross of alligator and insect, it had six legs, a shining exoskeleton, and a large armored head with an elongated snout. A long tail tipped with a stinger whipped behind it as it ran.
The ship continued to vibrate and tremble beneath his feet, and a whirring turbine sound came from the aft of the ship, growing in intensity and pitch. The lights in the passage flickered, died for an instant, then turned on again. Two doors, one on either wall, suddenly popped open and remained that way. The hallway opened on a chasm of machinery about a hundred feet ahead; the area illuminated brighter than any other he’d seen on the ship. The bridge across was extended.
You’ll never make it across at this rate.
He wanted to glance back at the creature but knew it would only slow him down. He unclipped a white phosphorus grenade from his belt, pulled the pin, and tossed it over his shoulder. The bridge still loomed a few feet ahead when the grenade detonated. Max wondered whether it had slowed the beast. A hot wind hit the back of his neck—not the grenade’s concussion but rather the creature’s breath as its jaws snapped together right behind him.
Shit. Max rummaged frantically through his bag of dirty tricks that he’d collected over the past twenty-plus years and came up empty. None of his experiences could save him now.
You’re not dead yet. One last chance...
Sweat poured down his face and soaked his body. The extended bridge beckoned, but it would do him no good if he couldn’t retract it. The orange holographic control panel sat to the right, the alien prompts a mishmash of orange scrambled eggs. Max extended the fingers on his right hand and reached for it, hoping that one of his digits would find the prompt that retracted the bridge. Something slammed into his helmet, knocking it from his head. It tumbled off into the chasm.
The bridge started to retract toward the far side, about thirty feet away.
Max jumped for the end of the bridge. Though his right hand was empty, the pistol in his left hand had to go. He tossed it out into nothingness and reached with both hands for the end of the bridge. Far beneath him two of the strange beehive-looking machines glowed white-hot, lighting the chasm to noonday brilliance. His fingers caught hold, then slipped. A brush of firmness instinctively curled the fingers, and they found one of the horizontal cylinders that locked the bridge into the wall when extended.
He twisted his body to glimpse the beast hung in midair, its six-legged form useless. It clumsily flailed at Max with its front legs before plummeting into the chasm. Max knew better than to breathe a sigh of relief. He had to vault into the hallway before the bridge retracted fully into the wall, consigning him off.
Five feet. Exhausted, the ache in his arm intensified as he white-knuckled the cylinders. He swung his legs forward for momentum, then backward as he let go of the cylinder and attempted to backflip into the hallway.
The sunlit underworld spun before his eyes. Too exhausted, he doubted he’d been able to generate the momentum necessary to flip up into the passageway. After dodging thousands of bullets over his long career, he would die the instant he hit the floor. If he were lucky. The creature down there would still be alive, and Max didn’t want to be conscious when it tore into his flesh with that savage maw.
Mercs die. You survived longer than most.
The small amount of inertia he’d gained when he flipped dissipated. No question now, he wouldn’t make the hallway.
White light blasted his face from far below as one of the beehive machines exploded with tremendous force. Max felt himself propelled forward as the shockwave hit him. Then the other glowing beehive exploded.
Max tumbled head over heels into the hallway. For a moment, he lost all sense of reality and couldn’t tell if he was conscious or unconscious. He couldn’t see, couldn’t hear, felt as if he’d baked in the Middle Eastern sun for the past few hours. He lay there helpless and hoping that his senses would return. Such an ironic coincidence, surviving the trip across the chasm only to be killed by a beast while he stumbled around deaf and blind.
Come on! He blinked his eyes, slapped himself across the face. Nothing worked but time. After a minute, he regained fuzzy vision and a negligible sense of hearing. It was enough; it had to be.
He drew his Glock and proceeded down the hallway as another explosion rocked the ship.
Within three minutes he regained his full vision and most of his hearing. Two turns in that time put him into a new hallway with an eight-foot ceiling as he departed the enginee
ring section of the ship. He came upon a four-way intersection in a small room, an upright directory kiosk at its center. The E-deck elevator and exit were down the left hallway. In that direction, the elevator beckoned from a T-intersection about thirty feet ahead, its crumpled doors opened about two feet wide.
A creature moved past the elevator yet didn’t espy Max down the hallway. The car is there. Just sneak in and go. With so little left to lose, it was the best plan he could cobble together.
A conduit sparked over Max’s head; he moved on just before it popped and started burning, filling the air with ozone and the scent of scorched plastic. The strongest explosion yet rumbled through the ship.
He sprinted to the intersection at the end of the hallway, the elevator straight ahead. The left hallway looked clear; to the right, one creature stood about twenty feet away.
It sensed him and turned around on five legs ending in elephantine feet. The alien monstrosity reminded Max of an oil-drenched sunflower, featuring eight muscular appendages tipped in black spade claws instead of petals, converging around a round mouth packed with hundreds of needle-sharp teeth. The beast came for him, not as fast as the six-legger that had chased him onto the bridge but likely fast enough to reach him before he could seal the elevator.
Max almost reached for an alien mine, then thought better of it. He unclipped his other white phosphorous grenade.
A pipe in the ceiling burst a few feet down the hallway, spewing scalding water. Steam obstructed Max’s view of the oncoming creature. He considered bolting for the elevator; perhaps he could roll the grenade down the hallway through the steam and make it inside before the creature recovered enough to give chase.
No. Get it right this time. He pulled the pin on the grenade, held down the spoon and waited, backing up to avoid being trapped in the cloud of steam.
The creature emerged from the steam five feet in front of him, four spade claws raised high, poised to eviscerate him. Round mouth opened wide, it hissed in triumph. Max tossed the grenade inside its maw and tumbled toward safety. One of the spade claws grazed his thigh, drawing blood as he escaped, but the others thudded solidly into the floor.
Max rolled to his feet in front of the elevator door, the grenade exploded with a dull pop. One of the creature’s arms was blown off, it screeched, belching fire and acrid fumes from its round maw as it began to spontaneously combust. It jumped straight up in the air, smashed into the ceiling, dropped back to the floor and took off running through the steam down the hallway, leaving a cloud of oily smoke and acrid fumes in its wake.
Max peered into the elevator, judged it clear, and squeezed inside. He hit the prompt he recognized as ‘up’. Almost there. Stay sharp and you might just get out of this.
A creature had dented the elevator door, likely to get at LT and his men. He saw several bloody boot prints in size sixteen. Sugar.
Max shook his head. Dead, all seven of them. You sure know how to fucking pick a mission, Ahlgren. The fact that he couldn’t possibly have known what awaited them in Alaska offered no consolation at all. So many red flags, starting with Banner. It sounded too easy from the start, too good to be true.
Then the most disconcerting thought hit him: You jumped at the easy money, and your team paid the price.
The elevator jerked to a halt. The lights faded dead and plunged the car into pitch-blackness. He pulled his flashlight just as the car started moving again, lights back on. Fuck, just get me to the top.
He got his wish several seconds later when the car arrived on E-deck, opening on a four-way intersection with a directory sign on the wall. He squeezed through the crumpled door and headed for the exit down the right hallway, which appeared to be clear of creatures.
BBs and brass shell casings on the floor told Max he’d nearly reached the exit. He strode toward the three-way intersection guarded by the tripod-mounted minigun and saw that the weapon had been unloaded and cleared—LT’s doing. No need to worry about that sensor down the exit hallway. Max had disabled the other minigun on the tripod near the cleansing room.
Straight ahead the hallway went black, the light blotted out by the oozing creatures.
Max jogged into the three-way intersection and turned left, wondering if he had another sprint left in him. At least he saw no creatures ahead. Adrenaline flooded his bloodstream, pushing him on as fast as his legs would carry him. He knew it wouldn’t be fast enough.
Max reached the minigun on its tripod, the big steel can of chain-linked ammo still sitting on the floor next to it. The creatures behind him emerged from the shadows and surged toward him. He had to slow them down if nothing else. No way he would be able to beat them out of the ship in his current condition.
Though the minigun had been rigged to fire electronically with a trip sensor, it also featured a manual trigger. Max acted fast, with practiced precision, loading the ammo belt and charging the weapon. The beasts came on, three or four of them, thirty feet away and gaining several feet every second. Eschewing the tripod, Max hefted the minigun, leveled it down the hallway and cut loose. The minigun burping its deadly tone of destruction. Even a full box of ammo wouldn’t last long with the gun’s high rate of fire, so every shot had to count.
The nearest creature leaped for him, and he opened up on the armored, lizard-like monstrosity with a spiked ball at the end of its tail. Max filled its extra-wide yap with bullets, shooting it down in midair, its body disintegrating under the withering fire. What remained flattened to the floor and attempted to continue the chase by staying low.
A spade-clawed creature ran over it as it recovered, wailing a screech of anticipated victory. Max lit it up, watched black chunks of flesh fly and splatter. He continued sweeping the hallway with bullets, left and right, the muzzle flash illuminating the area. Unable to regenerate at a pace equal to their destruction, the creatures reverted to liquid forms and oozed away down a duct, beaten for the moment.
Another creature in yet another fantastic form of deadly appendages rounded the corner at the three-way intersection. Max couldn’t make out specifics on the beast and didn’t care to. He emptied the minigun at the thing. The creature looking like a macabre dancer in the strobe-like muzzle flash. Most of the bullets that didn’t score direct hits still struck home via ricochets off the walls and floor. He sheared a leg off the thing and sent it retreating around the corner just as he exhausted the box of ammo, the barrel spinning empty as the remaining brass tinkled to the deck.
One pistol and two exhausted legs were all Max had left. He drew his Glock and fled from the hallway into the cleansing room. He could only pray there were no creatures in the room, and God grudgingly cooperated.
Three suits of cold-weather gear were missing.
Max grabbed his suit as he ran for the exit. An explosion somewhere in the ship shook the deck violently enough to knock him off his feet. He got back up, ran into the access tunnel and kept running until he reached the surface, never looking back.
The sun had yet to break the horizon, but Max had to slow his pace as he neared the mouth so his eyes could adjust to the brighter light. He shielded his eyes with his off hand as he walked from the ice cave into the arctic predawn.
When his eyes had adjusted, he dropped his hand.
And found himself staring directly at Banner, who stood tall in pristine, new combat gear at the center of a group of eight men surrounding the tunnel entrance. Six troops, hired by the CIA no doubt, trained rifles on Max, the red dots from their laser sights swirling over his chest. Greytech Security Chief Michael Stewart stood next to Banner, impassive. Neither man had drawn his pistol.
“Ahlgren!” Banner shouted. “Get your ass over here, son!”
He stood about ten feet away. Max dropped his cold gear before walking up to Banner. He didn’t bother raising his hands.
Banner’s weathered, cowboy face creased like an old roadmap when he smiled at Max. “Well, Max, seems you’ve left us quite a mess to clean up.”
“Seems approp
riate. You are a part of it.”
Banner laughed. “Ah, Max, you never will understand how the world really works.” The earth shook for an instant. “What the hell was that?”
“Wouldn’t you like to know,” Max retorted.
Banner drew his pistol and pointed it at Max’s face. “Get on your knees, asswipe.”
Max obeyed.
“You know, I always liked you, Max. You were a damn good egg, very useful when you wanted to be.”
“Then I wised up.”
Banner laughed as though Max had told him a ribald joke. “Not soon enough, hoss.”
One shot. They hadn’t disarmed him—why bother when they could kill him the instant he reached for a weapon? Just give me that chance.
“You remember that last mission you did for me? The one in Georgia?”
“How the fuck could I forget?” The blonde Russian agent, the electrodes, the bolt cutters, the screams, Parrish being cut down as they made their extraction—Max couldn’t escape it.
“Yeah, I underestimated you on that one, Max. I didn’t think you’d kill her and then go rogue into Russia after they captured me.”
“I didn’t do it to save you, asshole. Those hostages were your men, but they were under my command. I don’t abandon my troops, even company men like these.” He jerked his head toward Banner’s men.
“Heroic. Yet unnecessary. You fucked up when you killed her. She was my way out. I was going to hand deliver your men back to the Russians as proof of American involvement in the conflict. But you had to go and fuck everything up, you and that dipshit Vietcong you used to work with.”
“The unarmed man you cut down an hour ago?” He was half-Thai, you jackass.
Banner ignored the question. “That Georgia mission cost you a lot, didn’t it?”
“I lost a good man and my reputation with the Agency.” And a few hundred hours of sleep. “Why are we discussing this now?”
Banner laughed, a false bonhomie that bored Max. “You never could see the big picture, Max. That wasn’t all you lost. You seem to forget what was not awaiting you when you got home.”
Existential Page 29
