Dropping to the floor, Coleman swept his leg around in a wide arc. His boot caught the back of Cairns’s heels.
Cairns feet shot forward. He seemed to hang in the air a second and then, smack, he landed flat on his back. His skull savagely whiplashed the floor.
Nicely done, thought Coleman.
He pinned the steel bar down with his left boot.
Now the bar was out of play and he was going to kick the living crap out of Cameron Cairns. Cairns still gripped the pinned bar. He blinked up at the ceiling, looking dazed from the skull impact.
Let’s see him swing a bar without any fingers.
Coleman lifted his right boot, spun on his left heel, and stomped down with all his strength on Cairns’s hand.
But the hand was gone. Cairns had let go of the bar.
At the last second, Coleman realized his mistake. Cairns wasn’t as messed-up as he looked.
And now it was Coleman’s turn to lose his footing.
Instead of pulverizing Cairns’s fingers, Coleman found his legs swept out from under him. He had just fallen victim to the exact attack he’d launched on Cairns.
In one smooth move, Cairns found his feet and snatched up the bar.
Oh, crap!
Now Coleman rolled for his life as Cairns brought down the steel bar like he was chopping wood balanced on Coleman’s head.
The bar smacked into the floor.
Coleman had just rolled out its path, but not fast enough to avoid a savage kick that followed through into his rib cage.
With a series of fleshy cracks, Coleman felt his ribs fracture. Cairns’s steel cap boots had done almost as much damage as the steel bar.
The kick flipped Coleman onto his back. Pain flared down his side. Cairns brought down the bar in another big chop.
There’s no avoiding this one. One way or another, he was about to take a big hit from the bar before he could regain his footing.
Struggling to stand, Coleman threw his arm up to deflect the bar. His left hand took the full force of Cairns’s blow.
The bones snapped like matchsticks. Pain tore up his arm, both from the breaking bones and the force of the impact. The hand was useless now. Pain was one thing, but every time that bar connected, pieces of his body stopped working.
Sacrificing his hand allowed Coleman back on his feet. Now he just had to use the opportunity to best affect. He needed to deliver a fast crippling blow, something Cairns wouldn’t expect.
He spun and lashed out with a low side kick. The kick was aimed at Cairns’s knee joint.
But Cairns’s knee was a moving target while his body drove the bar in a horizontal swing at Coleman.
Coleman missed.
Cairns didn’t.
The steel bar connected –
- smashing Coleman squarely across the chest with a soul-shaking thwunk.
Coleman crashed back down to the floor. It took all his will-power to just roll over. He pushed himself up on his hands.
I can’t breathe. I can hardly move!
Coleman felt Cairns standing over him, bringing up the steel bar. This is it. I can’t move!
As the bar came down, Coleman tucked down his head and hunched his shoulders. The bar hit hard, skidded off his shoulder blades and bounced off the back of his head. Coleman’s elbows gave and he collapsed down onto his stomach again.
The world jolted out of focus for at least three seconds. He lay senseless. He only knew he was lying on his stomach and had just been hit by something very hard. His mouth felt like he had been kicked in the teeth by a racehorse. His right cheek was smooshed down against a wet floor. His own left hands, bloodied and useless, swung in and out of focus.
Then, like a bad dream, his situation rushed back into his forebrain.
Cairns just clobbered me.
A sound drew Coleman back to the present. The metallic sound of Cairns dropping the steel bar.
Coleman lifted his head. Cairns stumbled towards the templates.
He thinks I’m done. He thinks that last hit finished me. It almost did.
The entire lab blurred in and out of focus for a second.
Coleman drew his colt and propped himself up on his left elbow. He sighted on Cairns’s back.
‘Stop right there,’ he slurred. ‘I’ll pull this trigger and kill us both before I let you take those.’
Cairns turned and lifted a small pistol.
No. It’s not a pistol. He’s holding a flare gun. It’s probably what he used to ignite the surfactant that killed Marlin. If he pulls the trigger, this place will go up.
The two men held their weapons trained on each other. Cairns’s face was blank, but his eyes flicked down to the flare gun.
At that second, as Cairns’s studied the flare gun, Coleman noticed something almost directly to Cairns’s left. He had only a moment to register what he saw before Cairns squeezed the trigger.
The flare gun jerked and spat the flare at Coleman. The flare was a ‘bounce and burst’ variety.
The flare had to make first impact before it activated. It would be some distance away from Cairns before it ignited. How far it would go before it ignited the gas was anyone’s guess.
Cairns sprinted in the opposite direction.
Like slow motion, the flare bounced on the floor just in front of Coleman’s eyes. The projectile then ricocheted over his head and flew off behind him.
Coleman took aim and fired in a split second.
He didn’t see what happened next, because his entire body became totally engulfed in flames.
Chapter 15
Harrison and Sullivan backed down the corridor from the antechamber.
A red fire axe hung on the wall.
Harrison lifted the axe from its safety clasp.
‘You serious?’ asked Sullivan, eyeing the axe ludicrously.
Harrison hefted the axe in one hand, his assault rifle in the other. ‘If we have to go down, I’m going down swinging. How much ammo you got?’
Now Sullivan looked like he envied Harrison his axe. ‘Just this one last clip.’
Harrison had three. He pulled one from his vest and tossed it to Sullivan. Sullivan snatched it from the air. ‘Do you think we can hold them?’
‘It doesn’t matter,’ said Harrison. ‘It’s our job to try.’
Both men knew it was far more than that. It was far more than a job. They had developed a bond with the evacuees. The strong bond that comes from sharing a terrible experience. And it didn’t get much worse than this.
Harrison knew that he would do anything to give the evacuees a shot at living through the next sixty seconds.
It’s not going to happen though. We’re going to fight, and we’re going to run out of ammunition, and I will have lied. David asked me if we had enough bullets, and I said that we had plenty.
With that thought, the plexiglass wall crashed into the antechamber.
Harrison and Sullivan retreated from the corridor and stopped just inside the main chamber. Harrison had ordered Dana into the communications room to keep calling for urgent help. Dana would broadcast the details of everything that was happening until the end. She was also advising over the radio that all the children, including David, were sealed up in the medical store room.
Harrison glanced over his shoulder, not really knowing what the rest of the evacuees would be doing. People screaming and running around? People climbing over each other for the pseudo-safety of the small side chambers?
Neither.
The crowd trusted the Marines. They hadn’t yet seen the tide of creatures. They didn’t know how many were coming. They had formed up into a rough half circle, spread around the far end of the chamber. The chamber itself was totally bare of furnishings after they had shoved it all into the passageway to block the top-deck.
The front line of the crowd was mostly people armed with whatever makeshift weapons they could improvise. They looked like a motley band of refugees making a desperately determined last stand.
&
nbsp; Harrison and Sullivan could see straight down the corridor. The creatures poured over the collapsed plexiglass like one giant fluid entity. They filled the antechamber.
Sullivan took aim. ‘Here they come.’
‘Wait,’ ordered Harrison.
Both men took up firing position, aiming through the corridor into the antechamber. It wouldn’t be hard to hit the creatures; they were everywhere. Harrison wished he had a few grenades to throw. It wouldn’t change the outcome, but god-damn it would make him feel better to plaster the walls with a few of those things.
The first creature reached the corridor.
Wait…,’ hissed Harrison. ‘We’ll catch them in the bottleneck. Make every bullet count.’
Sullivan thumbed his CMAR-17 to a fully automatic firing pattern.
A heartbeat later, when the creature was fully in the corridor, Harrison yelled, ‘Now!’
Side by side, the two Marines opened fire down the corridor. Their CMAR-17 assault rifles roared. At this range, they couldn’t miss.
The lead creature twisted and bucked under the blistering attack. As soon as it collapsed, another creature lurched forward.
The two Marines switched targets, shredding pieces off the second creature. Then another creature came over the top, then another. They kept coming, dropping under the controlled fire, but every creature pushed slightly further down the corridor than the last.
‘Back up, back up,’ hollered Harrison over the weapon fire, realizing they needed more room.
Harrison’s rifle ran dry. Smacking his last ammunition magazine in place, he heard Sullivan’s weapon run dry. Already half of their ammunition was gone. They’d only taken down five creatures. At least five times that many came through the antechamber.
For the space of three seconds, neither man was firing. It was all the opportunity the creatures needed.
As both men brought their weapons up, the first creature broke into the main chamber and lurched off to the left. Even over the roar of renewed gunfire, Harrison heard the mass outcry from the evacuees behind him.
They had just seen the beginning of the end.
The evacuees must have started moving, causing vibrations, because the creature veered away from the Marines. Harrison hadn’t expected this. He had assumed the gunfire would attract the creatures more than the panicked evacuees. Once the creatures got behind the Marines, it was all over. The two Marines couldn’t turn and fire their weapons back towards the evacuees. The friendly fire would be devastating.
‘Sullivan!’ yelled Harrison, jerking his head at the single creature breaking through their firing solution.
‘I’m on it!’ Sullivan switched his weapon left, targeting the creature and running left at the same time.
Now Harrison was holding the corridor by himself. Or rather, he wasn’t.
Shit, Shit, Shit! There’s too many!
Holding the corridor was a two man operation, and although almost every one of Harrison’s rounds found their target, the targets were too many and too fast.
Another creature broke through to the left. Then another veered off to the right. Harrison and Sullivan just couldn’t stop them all. Like a burst damn, the creatures poured from the bottleneck.
‘Come and get it, you sons of bitches!’ yelled Sullivan, shooting desperately around himself in short bursts. The creatures came at him from both sides.
Harrison had one coming straight at him. He didn’t move. He just locked his stance and poured fire into the oncoming freak of nature. Focusing on just one creature, his automatic fire tore the thing apart.
His weapon ran empty again.
That’s it. That’s the CMAR empty.
The charging creature died on the move, tumbling straight towards him, sliding on its own ejaculating bodily fluids.
Harrison dropped his now useless assault rifle and rolled from the creature’s path. When he came to his feet, he had the axe in one hand and his pistol in the other.
The first creatures had reached the evacuees.
People scattered before them.
A tall man Harrison didn’t recognize stepped up and planted himself in front of the first creature. As the hostile charged, the man swung half a chair straight down with both hands into its gaping maw. The creature’s mouth closed around the chair. Three more people cut in behind the creature, stabbing and hacking at its abdomen with sharp metal bars and broken pieces of furniture. One woman even ran forward and heaved a length of bed frame like a spear.
The three rear attackers dodged back after the first assault, looking for a new opportunity to strike.
Harrison sprinted towards the conflict, firing his pistol as he ran. His bullets punched holes through the creature’s abdomen. As he reached the hand-to-hand battle, his pistol spent, he gripped the axe in two hands. He heaved the axe through a double-handed overhead swing.
He smashed the axe right down into the creature.
The axe head disappeared into the pulpy abdomen, releasing a jet of fluid.
Harrison yanked the axe free. His senses were overloaded. He could hear screaming and fighting. He heard Sullivan’s pistol firing.
He turned and saw Sullivan go down under a hostile. Sullivan was underneath the creature, shooting up with his pistol into its head.
Another creature ploughed into a pack of scattering evacuees across the chamber.
Harrison looked back across the communal lounge. A wave of hostiles rolled towards him.
This is it. This is the end. Come and get it, you filthy vermin.
Harrison felt nothing but contempt. Contempt for the people responsible for creating these aberrations, and contempt for the people who had opened the containment door. I hope they catch the person who made these things. I hope they catch them and skin them alive. And he wished he’d had the chance to get to know Dana in different circumstances.
Black spots started swimming before his eyes, filling the chamber in every direction he looked.
Black spots? They’re not black spots. They’re butterflies. Thousands of them.
The cloud of fluttering wings swept around him. The butterflies poured from the antechamber towards the evacuees.
No, not the evacuees. They’re going after the creatures. They’re landing on the hostiles. The butterflies are stopping them!
Harrison watched in wonder. The line of charging creatures stalled ahead of the wave of butterflies that filled the chamber.
As soon as the butterflies made contact, the creatures shuddered to a complete stop. Even more butterflies were filling the room, spiraling in through the antechamber and landing all over the creatures like tiny heat-seeker missiles.
The line of creatures halted just four meters from Harrison. The half a dozen creatures that had already reached the evacuees were in the same rigid state of suspended animation. Sullivan squirmed out from under the creature that had frozen on top of him.
It felt like someone had hit the ‘pause’ button. Then the reality of the situation pressed back in on Harrison.
He had no idea how long they would stay like this. This might be a permanent situation, or they might only have seconds. All eyes in the chamber had found the tall Marine.
They were wild-eyed. Wild faces. People were breathing heavily, weapons poised. These weren’t just scientists and engineers and technicians any more. These people had been pushed into a life or death battle-frenzy.
This was an army. This was Harrison’s army.
He felt the pent-up rage of the group. He was at the center of it.
There was only one answer as far as Harrison was concerned.
‘Kill them!’ he bellowed, lifting the axe above his head, his voice echoing around the butterfly-filled chamber. ‘Kill them all!’
The human content of the room fell on the creatures with a level of pure savagery that only Mother Nature could appreciate.
#
The entire room was filled with fire.
And then it wasn’t.
It
worked!
Coleman lifted his smoking head. His wet fatigues had spared him from the worst of the heat, but his short hair was singed shorter.
When he fired his colt, he hadn’t been aiming at Cameron Cairns.
He’d shifted his aim two meters to the left.
As the flare bounced on the floor, Coleman had targeted a big red mushroom button on the wall.
It was the control to the emergency ventilation turbines, the matching floor and ceiling units that had astounded Coleman with their size when he’d first entered the lab. The oversized turbines must have made a strong first impression, because when Cairns fired the flare, Coleman attention was fixed on the turbine control.
He was seeing a new possibility. His idea had two strong things going for it. First, he had absolutely no other option. Second, it seemed far more attractive than being burned alive.
These proved all the qualifications he needed. He squeezed the trigger as the flare hissed to life behind him.
As fire engulfed him from head to toe, Coleman realized there were also two big drawbacks to his plan. First, he might miss. He had taken a big blow to the head. Second, if he hit, he might just damage the control and not manage to activate the exhaust system.
The igniting gas cloud roared around him, and then, almost immediately, was sucked away by the turbines.
Coleman’s exposed skin hardly registered the heat before the roar of flames was replaced by the higher-pitched whine of the super fans.
Then he felt the wind. A massive wind that literally started tugging his body along the wet floor.
It took a few seconds before he realized he’d overlooked the third possibility.
It’s working too well. I damaged the controls with my gunfire and the turbines aren’t stopping. In fact, they sounded like they were speeding up! The sound was like sitting on the wing of an airplane screaming in for a crash-landing.
Coleman looked backwards, gobsmacked by the view.
Mother…of…God.
A tornado of fire stretched between the turbines.
A bright red flaming helix, twenty feet tall, was twisting between the floor and ceiling fans. The fire-twister was feeding off the still venting gas.
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