“God, won’t they stop?” he said, his face scrunched up as he tried to block out the sound with his hands over his ears. It did little good.
“They will when we get them out of here,” Walter said, “now this is what we’re gonna do.” The other three men gathered closer as ahead of them the cages of women – nearly all that they saw were women, all naked, though there were a few that looked like men – and Walter laid it out. “We’ve gotta stay close, so I want Bobbie walking down that main hallway there,” he pointed, and the blackness hundreds of feet ahead swallowed up wherever it went, “and Emil, I want you and Jake opening those cages on either side.”
Emil nodded. “And you, Walt?”
“I’ll take the rear, hitting anything that could come up behind.”
“Think they can make it?” Bobbie said, nodding at the caged women.
Walter shook his head. “Looks like many can move, but how far they’ll get or where they’ll go…”
“Let’s just get to it,” Jake said, and the others nodded.
Bobbie moved ahead first, his Heckler & Koch machine gun held out before him, but there were no Grays to be seen. On either side of him Emil and Jake quickly opened the many cages. The things were kennels, really, about the size you’d find in an animal shelter, though in some spots they were much smaller, and stacked, with the women crammed into them, hardly any room to move. It was they that were the most far gone. With the larger kennels the women rushed out. From behind Jake and Emil, Walter had to call to them to move down the hallway they’d come from, to not cling to the men. It was hard, as many were crying with terror, most wailing that they’d be killed at any moment.
“Run down the hall!” Walter shouted at them. “You’ll be alright – there are men there waiting for you.”
He wasn’t sure it was true, but what else was he supposed to say? General Anderholt had assured him new teams would be mobilized, and that the women just had to make it to the tube station platform where CAT-4 was. He hoped that would truly be enough, and that the suffering and anguish of these women could end.
Most were little more than college-aged women, some even teens or adolescents. All were beautiful and nearly all were blonde. Most were short as well, and Walter couldn’t help but think of his two daughters back home in Tucson, as well as what awful things the Grays would do to them if they were here in place of some of these women. At one point one of the more held-together of the many women – they were all beginning to blend together as the team progressed down the seemingly endless-hallway unmolested – came up to him and grabbed his shoulder.
“I’ve been here for two months, I’ve been raped everyday and I’ve had two…miscarriages of some sort, thought how that’d be possible in that amount of time, don’t ask me.”
Walter just nodded, hoping she’d run off like the rest. Already there’d been thousands.
“You’ve got to listen to me, I–”
Walter turned about to scold her, tell her to run along to the train platform. He was just in time to see her head explode like a melon that’d been struck with a mallet. His eyes went wide and saw a Gray standing behind them, women screaming and rushing past it as it aimed its flashgun right at his head.
“Down!” Walter yelled as the Gray fired, and dropped to the floor.
Behind him Bobbie was just turning about when the flashgun blast hit him. Jake was looking right at him and saw him wink out of existence in a flash of light, the kind that allowed you to see every bone in the person’s body. It was a fraction of a second and then there was just a pile of soot on the concrete floor. A chill came over Jake and he felt his mouth opening to scream. He turned about to do so and saw a sight almost as fearful – Emil with his eyes in a rage, teeth clenched, and Heckler & Koch MP5 submachine gun shouldered.
BAM! BAM! BAM! BAM! BAM! BAM!
It was on single-shot for some reason, but each of those shots tore into the Gray’s head and made any facial features that may have set it apart from its brethren little more than a meaty pulp.
“Bobbie!” Jake yelled.
“He’s dead,” Walter said evenly and without emotion, getting up now that no other Grays looked to be about. The tide of women was also receding, though their screams were not.
“No shit,” Emil said in reply, “and that’s what we’ll be here real quick if we don’t get another super soldier. Or were you planning on developing some kind of mind-attack blocking capability real quick here, huh?”
Walter looked at the hardheaded Lieutenant Colonel, that ever-present pipe stuck in his mouth dangling as annoyingly as usual, and then to Major Jake Zates. He frowned.
“I don’t know how to say this, boys, but I’m heading in to save as many of these women as I can.”
Emil moved the pipe from one side of his mouth to the other, shaking his head all the while, while Jake just looked like he was one more second closer to losing his mind from fear. Walter laughed.
“Shit, you men get back to that tube train platform and give Donlon and his boys on CAT-4 some support, and that’s an order.”
“Yes, sir,” Jake said, the screaming of the still-caged women plus the loss of their super soldier nearly fraying the last of his nerves. It was clear to Walter that he’d do anything to get out of there, and therefore was more of a risk to them than a benefit, at least until he got a hold of himself, and he sure the hell wasn’t going to be doing that on the edge of Nightmare Hall. Emil was a bit harder to convince.
“You know if you head any further in there you won’t be heading back out,” he said, the pipe clamped tightly.
“CAT-2 is yours, Colonel,” Walter said with a nod, then ran ahead into the darkness.
34 – The Hall of Horrors
The Hall of Horrors (Level 5)
Thursday, May 24, 1979
The men of CAT-1 fought their way across the floor of the Hall of Horrors, shooting out any vats with Grays floating inside, and quite a few that had deformed and mutated humans as well. There was one with a man sporting octopus arms and a bewildered expression; another holding a woman with four heads, not all of them on top; and several with humans that were either totally are halfway-transformed into some kind of snake or serpent creature or…sometimes it was just hard to tell exactly what they were looking at. One thing was clear, however, and that was that the defense was growing stronger.
Sammy walked steadily forward, the Mossberg Model 590 shotgun held out confidently before him. Another Gray jumped forward, seemingly out of nowhere, and once again Sammy was sure he saw fear or surprise or something in those black orbs when he kept walking forward, when he raised the gun up slightly higher on his shoulder, when he finally pulled the trigger, often with a ‘fuck you’ thrown in for good measure. This time was no different, and the 12-gauge cartridge shot out the side of the gun as the bullet shot into the Gray’s head and tore it apart, showering the walls and floor with that greenish-goo.
“Goddamn, Sammy!” Tommy shouted from behind. “That’s nine of the bastards now!”
The words barely registered for Sammy, so intent was he on what lay ahead. The men were advancing steadily through the row upon rows of glass vats spaced evenly on the floor around them, the whole multiple-acre level being taken up by them. It was a ghastly sight, with Grays floating in the tanks, most oblivious to them, like they were under the effect of some strange drug, one that made them completely useless. Of course they weren’t all useless, and as the men moved through the level, shooting nearly every vat they saw along the way – and especially those holding Grays or hopelessly mutated humans – quite a few of the aliens stirred themselves and made to attack. And oh how feeble and comical those attacks were! In most cases a Gray would be able to get itself up over the lip of the vat, perhaps thinking it could get some kind of mind attack off, but invariably they tried to fall back into the ‘safety’ of the greenish-goo when the attack somehow failed. And that’s when the men of CAT-1 and CAT-2 opened up on them.
Beside Sam
my, Major John Bingham brought up his AR-15 and sent a hail of machine gun bullets out at two more Grays that jumped out from behind some of the vats, two more of what Charlie was calling the ‘base security forces.’
“Shit!” he shouted, his heart nearly skipping a beat at the sight of the things.
“Just stay close to Tommy and me,” Sammy said as he loaded a few more shells into his shotgun, the others covering him with their guns pointed down the tunnels. “You stay close and their mind tricks won’t do a damn thing.”
“Won’t do a damn thing but fool the hell out of ‘em!” Tommy shouted back with a laugh. “Bastards can’t even read our minds – they don’t even know we’re comin’!”
Charlie heard the words and frowned. They will, he thought, God help us, they will.
He held his M240 machine gun out with one hand and fired at any Gray that moved, and with the other he reached down to the special satellite radio at his waist. If he could just get one call off…one call to Blue Lake…
You’ll never get a call off to Blue Lake, why on earth would you want to do such a thing?
Charlie looked up to see what beautiful face held the beautiful voice that just spoke to him, and he wasn’t disappointed. There, in a pool of the bluest mountain lake water he’d ever seen, was the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen. Her hair was blond and flowed about her naked body slowly, the currents in the water moving the hair just so, obscuring all the best parts, leaving it all to Charlie’s imagination.
Forget Blue Lake, Charlie – make love to me…now!
How could Charlie refuse? That was the thought going through his mind as he started forward, past the few trees blocking his path, and then as he took the last few steps to the lake shore and–
“Colonel!”
John’s shout from back on the main pathway barely registered with Charlie, but Tommy running toward him as fast as he could did. One moment Charlie was reaching out to the beautiful woman in the lake that was reaching back to him, the next he was looking some kind of…thing.
“My…God,” he managed as Tommy reached him and put his hand on his shoulder. It was some kind of human, or at least had been one, though now it’s head had nothing more than one large eye under a head of blond hair. Their was a neck going down to a pair of shoulders, but then the torso trailed off into a amphibian-like tail, the arm-like appendages little different. Charlie bent over and started to feel sick.
“Don’t get so far away from Sammy or I,” Tommy said, and even through bouts of puking Charlie could detect the serious tone in the young corporal’s voice, a rare thing indeed. After a moment he was fine. Without a word he let go of the machine gun so it dangled from his shoulder, pulled out the two Colt .45s at his waist, and unloaded each of them into the monstrosity staring back at them from behind the glass vat. Charlie liked to think the thing’s eye went a little larger at the sight, and also that it’s last thought was one of fear before his two revolvers put an end to it. He didn’t want to think that it might have once been a young woman.
“Let’s go,” Tommy said, pulling his commander back to the main pathway or roadway that led through the seemingly endless room of tanks and vats and experimental pools.
“Damn,” he shouted out between bursts from his M16 and the occasional launched grenade from the M203 mounted on top, indicating to Sammy and John that he was drawing near once again, “they just keep comin’!”
“No shit,” John yelled from a short distance ahead on the road. His machine gun had jammed a short time before and now he was firing away with his two 9mm pistols.
“Just stay close,” Sammy said.
“And keep moving,” Charlie added.
The four men kept close and kept moving, the goo-filled vats all around them, blocking their view of what lay ahead, obfuscating where the end of the level was, and ensuring that the men would always be guessing, would never be knowing.
“If we can just get up past these last few vats there looks to be a straight path forward,” Sammy said after they’d gone another few yards, and blown-out another few vats, “after that we should be–”
HISS!
It was like the sound a snake would make, one that was large and able to eat a man, by the sound of it. But it wasn’t a snake, it was a Reptilian, an especially large one, and one that’d gotten into their midst without the men even knowing.
The creature had been atop the vats, running up from the side, out of view of both Combat Assault Teams. It’d leaped and hissed and that’s when the men had looked up, just before the thing fell atop Sammy, its claws and its teeth working.
“Aaahhh!” Sammy yelled as the thing landed atop him then lunged forward with its scaled-snout, tearing into the soft flesh of the super solder’s face.
“Shoot it!” Tommy yelled, bringing up his M16.
“No!” Charlie shouted beside him, and swatted the barrel of his gun away. “It’s too close.”
And it was. The alien from the Draco Constellation was lashing and tearing and shredding with those clawed hands it had, as well as rending with those razor-sharp clawed-feet. But at the same time Sammy was whirling around, spinning in circles as he frantically tried to throw the creature off him.
“Colonel…do something!” John yelled, his two 9mm desperately trying to find an opening.
“Ah, hell!” Charlie said, then whipped out one of the Colt .45s at his belt, just like the men would expect a gunslinger of the old West to do the same, and fired a hipshot right at the struggling pair.
The shot was true, and hit the Reptilian right in the back, eliciting a howl of displeasure and pain from the beast. It was enough to get its toothy-beak off of Sammy’s face, and enough for Tommy to get a single shot to the head off with his machine gun. The Reptilian’s head was thrown back and those slit-serpentine eyes of it seemed to flutter and then roll back before the creature’s tight grip on Sammy faltered, then faded, and then dropped off altogether. The thing fell to the floor, dead.
“Aaahhh, aaahhhh, aaahhh!” Sammy screamed, his hands clasping his face, blood running out from between his fingers.
“Jesus,” Charlie said, shaking his head at the sight, “if we don’t–”
CRASH!
Charlie was thrown to the ground as something exploded in their midst, something so strong that all of the vats around them exploded and that pinkish goo went flying every which way. Charlie rolled over on the floor, broken vat glass crunching beneath him. His ears were ringing and things seemed to be moving in slow motion. His vision was blurred, but he looked out and could make out…Sammy, laying still and not moving on the floor, John…clutching his ears and…screaming, by the looks of it.
Tommy, where is Tommy? The thought came to Charlie as he realized Sammy was dead. That meant they had one super soldier, their only real line of defense against the Grays and their mental attacks. Where was…
No…God, no, Charlie thought, his vision beginning to clear, at least enough for him to see a few more feet, though he wished it hadn’t. For there on the floor ten feet away was Tommy, a large shard of vat glass sticking from his head, his eyes staring out wide in death.
God help us, Charlie thought at the sight, God help us!
35 – Pull-Out
Dulce Port (Level 1)
Thursday, May 24, 1979
“Get that fucking door open!” Captain Mark Richards shouted.
“Damn thing won’t budge, sir!” Andy shouted back.
Mark sighed, then started moving forward. “Here, move out of the way.”
He got his hands into the crack in the door and started pulling, Andy joining in from the other side.
“She’s moving!” Turn and Billy both shouted.
“Ugh!” Mark and Andy both grunted at the same time, and the door came open.
There were no aliens around them now, the port area completely burned out, especially the charred and blackened area around the HUB doors.
“Damn, sir – you really blew the hell out of the
m!” Billy laughed.
Mark looked over at the charred doors as he hopped out of the bruised and battered X-22. They were completely gone, the two Hellfire rockets having obliterated them as much as three-feet-thick steel could be obliterated. The remnants hung their like two sad window shutters after a particularly bad storm.
“Cooked their gooses, too,” Andy laughed. “There ain’t an alien in sight!”
Mark looked around and saw he was right. The whole floor of the port was now clear, with just the red flashing security lights moving. Even the desert to the rear was visible to them, the wind kicking up small swirls of sand and dust. His attention was ripped back to the entry port when a clicking sound came. He and the others looked over to see the door to the command facility opening, Jerry gingerly sticking his head out the door.
“Jerry!” Billy shouted, and he smiled further when Aaron and Johnny came out next.
“Shit, we thought you guys were toast!” he said, throwing open the door, though keeping his machine gun up.
“It’s clear…or at least that’s what it looks like,” Mark said to him as he started to walk from the X-22 and back across the floor. The others inside the command facility started to come out as well, and within moments the seven men were standing there, guns in hand, as they figured out the next move.
“Listen up, men,” Mark said, “we could stand here and cry over spilled milk and recap what’s happened so far, or we can just get our asses through those doors and blow as many more aliens to hell in the twenty-five minutes or so of this mission we’ve got left.”
There were several cocked-eyebrows and slight smiles to that, but not a man said a word. Mark frowned.
“Fuck it – I’m going in, and if any of you want to follow, so be it.”
He took off toward the HUB doors, or what was left of them. The others looked at one another, and then with an Oorah from Jerry, they fell in behind their commander.
Dulce Base (The Dulce Files Book 1) Page 14
