Fast

by Shane M Brown

  ‘They’re no animal I’ve ever seen,’ Forest said. ‘They’re killing machines. This place is making killing machines. And our friends back there with the Mark 2’s are mopping up whoever the creatures miss.’

  King disagreed. ‘Anyone smart enough to breed these creatures would make a very big cage to keep them in. This must be an accident.’

  ‘Either way,’ Marlin said. ‘We need some serious backup.’

  Coleman was only half listening. He’d missed out of reaching the intercom by only a few seconds. He still didn’t know what was happening with the evacuees, and if David and Vanessa were even among them. The last time he had anything like a plan, it had been to rendezvous with Fifth Unit. Fifth Unit hadn’t reached their rendezvous point. Coleman suspected the gunmen had ambushed Fifth Unit in a surprise attack like the one in the pool room.

  ‘We can’t stop now,’ Coleman reasoned, coming back to the conversation. ‘They’ll be circling around. They’re well organized. Did you see the way they stopped firing when –’

  ‘Here they come!’ barked Marlin, lifting his rifle. But he didn’t mean the gunmen.

  Two creatures appeared to the east, scrambling around the corner of the admin hub. They stopped less than one hundred meters down the wall from Third Unit.

  Coleman grabbed Marlin’s rifle before he could fire.

  ‘Hold your fire,’ hissed Coleman. ‘Everyone stay quiet.’

  Third Unit froze. Coleman didn’t take his hand from Marlin’s rifle. Forest also had his rifle raised. His finger twitched over his trigger. King still had his back against the wall, his rifle covering the access panel.

  The creatures stopped outside the hub. They didn’t charge at Third Unit. Instead, they spread their tentacles to cover the largest floor space possible. This was the first piece of non-aggressive behavior Coleman had witnessed, but he wasn’t about to hang around and start taking notes.

  ‘Alright,’ he whispered. ‘Very quietly, we are all going to –’

  The access hatch in the wall was suddenly kicked out by a gunman. They had taken the chance and snuck through the wall space after all. The hatch was right between King and Forest. The panel flew from the wall and clattered to the floor.

  Forest reacted instantly, turning and spraying the wall with gunfire as the gunman tried to leap out.

  The gunman took three rounds straight in the chest and fell back through the access hatch.

  King swung his CMAR-17 into the hole and blasted the passageway beyond. He held down the trigger, giving everyone in the cramped passageway a piece of the action.

  The creatures charged at Third Unit.

  That’s torn it.

  ‘Come on – let’s move,’ yelled Coleman, seeing his plan to quietly avoid the creatures had literally been shot down. ‘To the stairwell, let’s go!’

  Directly across the pedestrian loop stood the north stairwell and elevator. Beyond that lay the dormitories where Fifth Unit had last been heard retreating from the creatures. Third Unit sprinted towards the stairwell. The creatures changed directions to intercept. Coleman spotted the problem in a second. Third Unit were vulnerable to the gunmen about to emerge from the wall space.

  ‘Keep running,’ ordered Coleman as he skidded to a stop halfway to the stairwell.

  As Third Unit raced ahead, Coleman fired wildly at the creatures. Both creatures changed course, heading directly for him. When the creatures were less than fifteen feet away, he sprinted after Third Unit again. Ahead, Third Unit raced into the stairwell. A second later, Coleman saw them all charge out of the stairwell again.

  Last out, Marlin spun and slammed the stairwell door. Something in the stairwell smashed into the door with enough force to tear off hinges. The heavy door nearly split in two under the incredible force. Coleman didn’t need to ask what they had found in the stairwell.

  ‘Go for the elevator!’ he yelled ahead, seeing the huge elevator standing open just a little further on.

  Coleman looked over his shoulder to check if his plan had worked. The creatures were now right behind him, blocking the gunmen’s line of fire.

  Third Unit waited in the elevator.

  ‘Run, Captain, Run!’ yelled Marlin, his hand hovering over the elevator controls.

  The doors started closing.

  Coleman lowered his head and put on a burst of speed for the closing doors. He turned his shoulders at the last moment, just squeezing sideways through the doors before they closed. He caught his momentum on the elevator’s back wall, then doubled over from the exertion of his power-sprint.

  ‘Check…ammo….,’ he puffed out between breaths. Hands fell to ammunition supplies.

  ‘I’m low,’ Marlin said. King tossed Marlin an ammunition magazine.

  Coleman scanned the elevator. It measured at least twice as large as a conventional office-building elevator, otherwise it looked fairly standard.

  The elevator started moving.

  ‘Where the hell are we going?’ demanded Coleman. ‘Who pushed the button?’

  ‘We didn’t touch anything,’ replied Marlin. ‘I just closed the door. Someone must have called it from a level below us.’

  Coleman desperately read the elevator controls:

  Level 1 – Habitation

  Level 2 – Engineering (Restricted)

  Level 3 – Research (Restricted)

  Level 4 – Basement

  ‘We want to get out, not go deeper,’ Coleman said, searching for an override switch.

  The entire elevator shuddered.

  Marlin looked at the ceiling. ‘You must be kidding me.’

  Something heavy began tearing into the top of the lift. The screech of twisting metal sounded like a thousand fingernails down a blackboard. The elevator jerked around under their boots.

  Coleman gave up on the controls. It was just one thing after another. They blundered from one near miss to the next. They needed to gain some control of the situation, because their luck wouldn’t last forever.

  And then, with a pleasant chime, the elevator doors opened.

  Chapter 3

  Vanessa sprinted down the corridor.

  The creature pursued right behind her, a tidal-wave of thrashing spines rolling towards her heels.

  She stole another wild glance over her shoulder.

  It proved all bad news.

  But Vanessa loved life, and she’d be damned if this thing was going to tear it away from her. She continued leading the creature in a convoluted path through the sub-labs, hoping to lose or outrun it.

  Unfortunately, the core labs were programmed to close behind the evacuating staff, so soon only the three meter wide decontamination corridors would be accessible. Emergency orange navigation lights on the floor and ceiling flashed in the same direction she ran.

  If she didn’t escape the research level soon, she’d be trapped.

  Sprinting through A-lab, she searched for anything that could help. Every lab was packed with stainless steel equipment, white benches, rows of instruments and experiments…nothing helpful. Every lab had two exits. Outside A-lab she spotted a tall mobile shelving unit against the left wall. Using her body’s momentum, she toppled the shelving into the creature’s path. She was running again when the shelves crashed down behind her.

  The creature hit the shelving unit like a semitrailer busting through a balsa-wood roadblock. The unit disintegrated under the impact.

  The creature pursued just fifteen feet behind her. In the back of her mind, behind the voice screaming to run faster!, Vanessa wondered how many of these things were loose in the Complex. Might she run straight into another creature and get trapped between them? She seemed to have lost the other two back in F-lab.

  She tore through B-lab and cut left, thumping the barrier control on the way out. Now she ran up the long northern decontamination corridor, one of only two exits from the core labs. The plexiglass barrier from B-lab descended behind her.

  She glanced over her shoulder, praying she’d trapped
the creature in B-lab.

  No such luck.

  The creature rounded the corner behind her, its abdomen jackknifing across the floor like a racing dog in full sprint losing its rear footing.

  It now pursued Vanessa up a long corridor with only one exit: the massive outer containment door. Beyond the containment door, the security antechamber served the north elevator and stairwell. She had another hundred meters to run. The door would start closing any second. If she didn’t get through that door, she would run straight into a dead end.

  She stopped checking behind herself and just ran. The creature sounded like a rolling car-wreck chasing her down the corridor. She passed the emergency wall-panel display. The panel showed a snapshot schematic view of activated emergency systems. The whole panel blazed with red lights. Systems looked compromised over the entire Complex. Even on the habitation level.

  David!

  Vanessa felt her personal dilemma suddenly expand to cover the entire facility, including her son.

  The creatures are everywhere.

  Just after the wall panel came the smaller ECS panel that she was looking for. The panel was labeled: Emergency Corridor Sterilization.

  Without slowing, she bashed her fist into the glass panel.

  White sterilizing agent exploded from the walls like a hundred ruptured gas pipes. All down the corridor, plumes of white gas hissed into her path. She didn’t know if the sterilizing gas would affect the creature, but anything was worth a try. She glanced back and saw flashes of the creature coming through the gas.

  No good. It’s still coming.

  Looking forward through the gas she saw the containment door start rolling down from the ceiling. It was twenty meters away and halfway down when she spotted another major obstacle in her plan to survive the next sixty seconds.

  The door to the fire stairs was shut.

  In the time it took her to yank open the door, the creature would be on her.

  Vanessa ignored the logical part of her brain that insisted she was as good as dead. Don’t give up. Never give up. Maybe I’m faster than I think. Let’s find out….

  At that exact moment, the elevator doors opened in the antechamber ahead. Four soldiers occupied the elevator. Their eyes widened when they spotted her.

  ‘Down!’ bellowed the middle soldier. His voice sounded very familiar. ‘Get down now, Vanessa!’

  Vanessa dove down, seeing what they planned to do, but she sure as hell wasn’t going to stop moving! She crawled commando-style towards the soldiers as they opened fire down the corridor - shooting right over the top of her.

  She kept crawling as the soldiers kept firing. The entire corridor filled with the roar and light of gunfire. When the firing stopped, Vanessa had reached the elevator.

  She was looking at a pair of brown boots in the elevator’s entrance. She followed the boots up and saw the face. Now she recognized the voice and the face.

  Exhausted, she managed to ask between great sucking breaths, ‘What…the hell…are you doing here?’

  #

  Coleman helped his ex-wife to her feet, but kept his boot jammed against the bottom of the elevator door. He didn’t want any more mystery-destination elevator rides. The rest of Third Unit trained their assault rifles on the elevator ceiling.

  Thank god she’s alive. Now I just need to find David.

  The entire carriage shuddered under Coleman’s boots. The creatures were peeling away the ceiling like a sardine can lid.

  ‘Everyone out,’ he ordered. The fluorescent carriage lights started flashing. ‘Let’s go – move, move!’

  Vanessa backed from the elevator as the Marines rushed out.

  Third Unit surged into the security antechamber. Forest, King, and then Marlin rushed past, ducking away from the carriage ceiling. They spread out around the room and prepared to blast the elevator when Coleman got clear.

  ‘Hold the doors open,’ shouted Vanessa. She’d recovered her breath enough to jerk a fire extinguisher from the wall. She dashed towards the lift.

  ‘No, wait –’ Coleman said, but he never finished his sentence.

  The entire lift surged up under his boots, tossing him into the air.

  ‘Hol-ly shit,’ Coleman warbled as he landed on his heels, amazed and stunned by the incredible force that could jerk an elevator around like a yoyo.

  He thrust out a hand, but two more powerful jerks came so close together that he couldn’t recover his balance. He lost his footing and fell awkwardly on the carriage floor. The breath whumped from his body. Worse, and with a dreadful feeling of helplessness, Coleman realized his boot no longer jammed open the elevator doors. The doors started closing. He couldn’t reach the controls. He couldn’t block the doors. He couldn’t even get onto his hands and knees.

  He was literally bouncing off the elevator floor.

  Vanessa dove forward, thrusting the base of the fire extinguisher through the closing gap.

  The doors hit the extinguisher and started opening again.

  ‘Come on,’ she yelled. ‘Get out of there, Alex!’

  Coleman gave up trying to stand. He scrambled towards the doors and used the momentum of the next floor-surge to propel himself through the gap. He landed hard on his hands and knees outside the elevator.

  ‘Get ready to shoot the extinguisher!’ Vanessa yelled before Coleman could even rise. She heaved the fire extinguisher into the elevator and then, madly reaching her arm into the lift, fumbled with the control panel for the second that the elevator wasn’t jerking up and down. ‘Shoot it now! Shoot the extinguisher!’

  Coleman drew his colt and aimed.

  Blam!

  His bullet pierced the extinguisher a fraction of a second before the lift jerked again. As the carriage doors closed, the fire extinguisher flew into the air with foam spewing from its pierced cylinder.

  Now Coleman lay on the floor looking at Vanessa’s trainers. Their positions had completely reversed. She reached a hand down to help him up.

  Accepting the offered hand, Coleman stood up and checked her over for injuries. As well as being his ex-partner and mother of his child, she was the person Coleman’s platoon had been tasked to protect under any circumstances. Vanessa’s stolen genetic templates had triggered the entire operation.

  Flushed and breathing hard from her flight from the creature, she seemed to be in good physical condition. She still had the long lithe muscle tone of a regular swimmer, and she had certainly been moving at a cracking speed down the corridor ahead of the creature.

  ‘Thanks,’ Coleman said. ‘That was fast thinking. You saved my ass.’

  ‘What the hell are you even doing here?’ Vanessa repeated, throwing up her hands. ‘What the hell’s going on?’

  Coleman looked her straight in the eye. ‘I thought you might have those answers. Why don’t we start with David. Where is he?’

  ‘That’s what I’m trying to find out!’ Vanessa stalked past Coleman and picked up the receiver of a red emergency telephone mounted near the fire stairs. There were no buttons to dial numbers. ‘This should automatically call the admin hub and then redirect to the evac center.’

  Vanessa listened, frowned into the receiver and the tapped the reset button a few times. ‘It’s not working. These things are meant to be unbreakable.’

  ‘Where was David supposed to be when the evac sounded?’ insisted Coleman. ‘In school?’

  Vanessa shook her head, hanging up the receiver. ‘No, he had a class excursion to the rec reserve. He would have been there.’

  ‘The rec reserve is on the west side, right? So he had to cross the habitation level to get to the evac center.’ Coleman remembered the carnage of people moving across the pedestrian loop. Was David in that?

  ‘Yes. They would have cut across the northern section of the loop then past the cinema and the big eatery to reach the tunnel entrance. What is it like up there? Is anybody hurt?’

  The Marines all swapped glances, but they waited for Coleman to answer.<
br />
  ‘Yeah, Vanessa. Lots of people are hurt. Lots are dead. Hundreds, maybe. We walked into a full-scale massacre. I didn’t see David.’

  Vanessa’s mouth gaped open, speechless.

  ‘That’s because he made it,’ said King quietly. ‘He’s in the evac center.’

  ‘How do you figure? asked Coleman.

  ‘She just said he would have come through the north section of the loop,’ King explained. ‘We were just there, and there wasn’t a single body. Everything was still intact. The creatures were drawn to our skirmish in the south. Anyone passing through the north would have had a pretty clear run.’

  Forest was nodding his head. ‘That’s right. And Harrison and Sullivan were herding everyone through there. No way they left kids behind. Not an option.’

  They’re right,’ said Coleman, sorry he wasn’t clear-headed enough to have seen it himself. We might have saved his life without me even realizing it. Trying to help those people probably helped David reach safety.

  Vanessa still looked unsure. ‘This Harrison, would he have left anyone behind in the panic?’

  All four Marines shook their heads emphatically.

  Coleman knew Harrison well. ‘Never. Harrison wouldn’t leave anyone. He’s got David. I’m sure of it.’

  Vanessa slumped against the wall. ‘Thank God for that. David’s very competitive, like his father. He would have tried to be first to reach the evac center. So what now? Tell me what’s going on here.’

  Coleman quickly assessed their surroundings. They were in the outer security antechamber of the corridor that provided access to the research level. There were three exits: the elevator behind Coleman, the fire stairs on his right beside Vanessa, and the huge containment door across the room. The containment door had sealed shut. It looked impenetrable.

  He hadn’t forgotten about the creature that almost caught Marlin in the stairwell just two levels up. It could be heading down the stairs this very second, ready to burst into the antechamber. He made two quick hand-gestures. King turned his rifle to cover the elevator while Marlin and Forest took defensive positions covering the stairwell door.