by John Shirley
I feel—kind of good. Like in combat when I know I can kill the guy in front of me, even though he’s trying with all his might to kill me: I know he’s more scared than I am. Somehow I know that he’ll die…
And I’m going to live.
That humming…like a generator going full blast…that’s the sound of my blood running through my veins…But I’m still in the dark…Except…
Except for the shape of the iris of a single eye. A little light came through that distant aperture, nothing more.
He had thought he heard Sam screaming his name, from somewhere. Her voice falling away as she screamed it, as if she were falling down a deep shaft.
“Johhhhhhhnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn…!”
That’s how it had sounded. But hadn’t that been a while ago?
How long had he been out of it?
Still so dark. But then the gloom around it seemed to solidify in places, to take on shapes; light filtered in as the iris expanded, and colors began to appear…
And the room snapped into focus. He was in the infirmary…sitting up—looking down at himself.
His arm was healed. The slashes were completely gone. Not even a scar.
He stood up, looking for his sister. “Sam?” He turned, found himself looking at his own reflection in the observation window—saw there were now no cuts on his face.
The small room was trashed. Cabinets overturned, debris everywhere. A door—locked before—leading from the observation room to the corridor, was torn open, hanging crazily ajar.
Something had taken her. Had left him alone, thinking he was dead or dying. It had taken Sam and the chances were small, very small, that she was still alive.
Once more—and it was harder this time—he put the grief aside so he could deal with what he needed to do right now. He found his weapon, picked it up, slammed home a clip.
Then he stepped over the debris and headed into the dark corridor beyond, to search for Sam—or what was left of her.
Reaper was carried along on a wave of energy—that humming dynamo was pumping away, churning in his head, powering him like a thousand volts through a jackhammer.
His senses seemed impossibly acute. He could smell blood, distinguishing fresh from blood that had been spilled a few minutes earlier—he could smell sweat and the pheromones in it; he could smell cleaning agents and urine. He heard far too much—his boot steps were like a bass drum pounding, and he could hear the movement of air in the ducts and claws scrabbling in another part of the compound. That’s how he knew which way to go…
And he could see in the dark—the shrouded look of the place remained, as if black scarves were draped at the edges, but it was as if he had some version of infrared working, and he could see all the details of the corridor rushing toward him; rebar in the debris where a wall had been knocked down; serial numbers on pipes hanging from the ceiling.
The gun felt light as a feather in his hand; the floor seemed to drift away beneath him, insubstantial. He felt no effort in hurrying down the hallway. That’s what it was like: almost as if he were standing still, and the hallway was rushing past. That corner up ahead was swinging toward him of its own accord.
And then a high-pitched screech—a scream of fury, not of fear—came from around that corner. Reaper reached the branching hallway and spun to see the genetic demon running full bore toward him, a half-turned soldier, uniform in tatters: squalling, as it came on, like a bird of prey.
It was already leaping at Reaper—no time to get the gun into play, so he met it with a fist smashing into its chest and it was flung backward as if struck by a piledriver, spinning away like a broken doll into the darkness it came from.
Reaper stopped moving for a stunned instant, amazed at his own power.
Another hallway off to the right—a sound down there. Scrape…tick-tick. Scrape. An ordinary man wouldn’t have heard it. But he could see nothing down there…maybe a rat.
Reaper turned away, then heard the thump as the creature dropped from the hole in the ceiling, all the way from the floor above, howling jeeringly as it came. He spun and a female imp loomed over him—she had grotesque parodies of breasts, a gnarled sketch of a vagina: the effect was obscene.
She snarled and slashed at him—he dodged the talons with ease, again surprised at his own speed.
He seemed superior to the genetic demons—faster, smarter, more powerful.
It was the work of an instant to shove his gun up under her chin and pull the trigger—she jerked backward, the top of her head flying off.
Before the body hit the floor he was moving away—then heard a scuttling sound, turned to see the imp’s tongue, detached from her head and moving with a will of its own, on a blind mission of reproduction; it was writhing along the floor toward him like an awkward snake, rearing up to strike at him, to inject him with the genetic ejaculate that would try to make him the other kind of Carmack creation.
He sidestepped its strike—the long, absurd tongue was as fast as a cobra, but Reaper was faster—and fired, blasting it into red scraps.
Reaper heard a groan from behind, turned to see a half-turned stumbling toward him—it was moaning, clawing at itself, seeming to implore him for help. Reaper hesitated—and the thing pointed at his gun, then at its head…
It wanted him to put it out of its misery—there was a lot of humanity left in this one. Could it be someone he knew? Was it possible, somehow, to save this pathetic thing? Unlikely but he continued to hesitate—until, as if to push him into it, the demidemon charged, snapping at Reaper’s throat, and he shot it point-blank in the face.
It sank to the floor with a grateful sigh.
There was a sizeable room to one side—something moving there. Reaper switched on his gunlight and probed its shadows, moving slowly, carefully through the door, looking at the ceiling for gaps as he came, scanning the floor for unexpected holes. The room was a modest cafeteria, with pillars here and there, and large tables; a kitchen, gleaming with copper and steel, at the farther end. The smell of cooked meat was strong in the room; and the smell of blood.
Nothing moved. Had he imagined it?
There—something slipping in and out of shadow. A skulking movement—almost certainly one of them.
He was reluctant to shoot, though, without getting a clearer sight of it—it was not impossible that Sam was alive somewhere. Improbable, but he hadn’t given up hope completely, and after all—
The thought was snapped off by the demon leaping at him from the gloom—snarling at him with its dripping jaws. He jumped back behind a pillar, circled, came up behind the thing and fired, nearly cutting it in half. He fired another burst where its tongue would be coiled up, just to make sure it wasn’t going to come at him once he turned his back on the body.
Slapping another clip in his light machine gun, Reaper searched the room. Found a dead man on the tile floor behind the counter, his genitals ripped off and shoved into his mouth, one of his legs missing, his arms turned around backward; found another dead man crammed into an oven, face outward, shoved into a space far too small for a human body, as if into a trash compactor. Someone had switched it to high. He was completely cooked, eye sockets emptied, mouth charred back to expose his teeth. Here was the source of that smell of cooked meat.
Reaper searched the remainder of the kitchen and cafeteria—nothing alive remained.
He heard distant roars, coming from another room, opening off the far end of the cafeteria—they cut off abruptly, to be replaced by gibbering…
Reaper drifted across the room—still feeling strong, moving mercurially, with thistledown ease—and kicked through the double doors that led to an even darker room…
His gunlight was fading, its battery running low. The room seemed almost to resist its thin illumination.
Something chattered at him without words, in the far corner of the room. Keeping the gun leveled, Reaper felt around in his ammo pack, found the flare he’d noticed there earlier. He snapped the flare in
to ignition, tossed it hissing into the darkness.
The flare burst into a bright light, briefly illuminating ten, maybe twelve genetic demons—the living dead, imps, and the Hell Knight—crouched near the farther wall, blinking, babbling to one another, as if trying to communicate, cursing like the builders of the tower of Babel.
Then the light went out—just as he saw them tensing to spring at him, teeth bared—and he fired, spraying the room with an arc of lead, the gun jumping in his hand, the air billowing with gun smoke.
He stopped firing for a moment, unsure if he was hitting anything—and the gun spoke to him. He’d had the prompter thumbed off before, but it must’ve switched on again, because the gun said:
“Low…ammo…warning…”
Just before he ran out of bullets.
He pivoted, fired the last shots into a wall-mounted fire extinguisher, which blew up like a bomb, shrapneling the four demons in the lead as they rushed at him from the darkness.
Three half-turned went down, but the Hell Knight, standing amongst them, didn’t seem to feel the explosion. This was the biggest creature he’d seen yet—just enormous, so large it was hard for it to squeeze through the door. It loomed over Reaper, all exposed muscle and neckless head and vast jaws; gazing eyelessly down at him. It seemed to savor the moment—as if it were anticipating eating him alive.
And to Reaper’s astonishment, the Hell Knight grinned at him. An evil grin, but a human one, too.
Then it reached into the shadows—and brought out something from a set of shelves he hadn’t noticed before, in the dark room beyond the cafeteria: a chain saw. So they could use weapons—or some of them could.
Its grin widened as it started the chain saw and slashed it at him—Reaper jumped backward, smelling the motor oil and feeling the wind of the whirling blade just missing his right ear.
Reaper backed away from the Hell Knight as it raised the chain saw to strike at him again.
The Hell Knight was toying with him, he realized, stalking him. It slashed the air near his face with the chain saw and he jerked back—Reaper smelled sparking metal, hot with friction, as the whirring chain just missed his nose.
The chainsaw—a big device looking like a toy in its massive paws—was roaring itself, like a predator hungry for a kill.
Then the creature squatted—and Reaper realized it was going to jump on him. Land on him while he was flat on his back—pinion and crush him, then, if he were still alive, it would go to work on his face and neck with the chain saw…
Heart hammering, Reaper leapt to one side, sprawling. The Hell Knight thudded where he’d been a moment before, turned to lash out at him but Reaper scrambled to his feet, ducked behind a pillar. He dropped the empty weapon, his fingers closing over a familiar metallic shape in his ammo pack.
He sprinted across the room, dodging between tables, his fingers finding the controls on the device, dropping it in what he hoped was the Hell Knight’s path…
The Hell Knight paused to gleefully cut a table in half with a single swipe, then rushed after him, its bellow mingling with the roar of the chain saw.
Reaper darted around another table—but his way was suddenly blocked by the one the demon kicked at him, tossing it in his way as if it were made of cardboard. He stumbled into it, turned to see the creature looming over him with the chain saw raised to slice down into Reaper’s head…
Then the timed mine Reaper had dropped went off just behind the demon—Reaper was too close to the blast himself, had to shield his eyes with his arm. The powerful explosive blew the genetic demon into gristle and raw meat. Its body became shrapnel, its head came flying like a cannonball right at Reaper’s eyes, still grinning though it was severed from the body—
Impact. It struck Reaper in the forehead and he flew back into spinning darkness. He lay stunned, blinking, in a pile of debris.
Tearing pain jolted Reaper back to full awareness, his sight clearing to show him a genetic demon of a kind he hadn’t seen before gnawing at his right shoulder. A thing with a boarlike face, with tusks and tiny eyes and great blunt snout, was trying to eat him alive.
Reaper recoiled from it as the thing snapped at him again, trying to get its enormous jaws around his neck now. He flailed for a weapon and his hand closed over a metal pipe. He jammed the pipe vertically in the boar-demon’s mouth, so it couldn’t close its jaws. It rocked back, howling in fury, raced erratically around the room, trying to claw the pipe free from its mouth—and Reaper realized, seeing the thing’s lower half, that it had been Pinky. The boar-demon was grafted into a cyberchair. It roared and squealed, eyes wild, drooling, prying at its bloody jaws. The pipe wasn’t going to keep the Pinky-thing at bay for long.
He spotted the chainsaw on the floor, still whirring away, in the puddle of shattered flesh where the Hell Knight had been, as if the machine were hungrily trying to chew up the remains, sputtering black blood…and then it shut down.
Reaper got his feet under him, feeling strength and coordination returning to his souped-up body, and scooped up the chain saw, started it, again revving it up and delighting in the roar of power as the Pinky-thing chomped down on the pipe, sending it ripping through its upper jaw.
It charged, and Reaper jabbed the chain saw at it, missing aim and cutting only through the extruding pipe. He sidestepped like a bullfighter, and raked at the Pinky-thing as it came back around, clawing and snapping—and this time Reaper connected, catching it just above the cyberchair.
The boar-demon was stuck on the chain saw, unable to advance, slashing but missing Reaper as the blade chewed down again and again, slicing deep, until the Pinky creature went limp in the cyberchair and fell into three sagging segments of bloody flesh.
The saw sputtered to a stop, choked with bone and sinew.
Reaper—a bit horrified at how little he felt at what he had just done—dropped the chain saw in disgust and turned to hurry from the room, distantly aware that his own upper half was liberally splashed with blood from the Hell Knight and Pinky…and from his own ravaged shoulder. He glanced down at it—the wound was already healing.
He stopped at the door, turned for one last look at what remained of Pinky. I put the poor bastard out of his misery.
Right now he had to find Sam…and if he was going to get to her alive, he was going to have to arm himself.
Reaper ran back to the shelves where the Hell Knight had found the chain saw. Felt around on them, found a handheld plasma cannon—then remembered the other demons that’d been crouching in that room.
He hadn’t gotten them all with that pressure blast from the fire extinguisher. They’d been waiting in the darkness as he fought the Hell Knight and Pinky—waiting for the outcome. He heard them chattering, rushing toward him, and brought the plasma cannon into play just as they charged him from the dark corners of the storage room.
He fired three times fast, the first blindly, the second and third using the light from the plasma cannon to place his shots. The creatures were caught in the energy beams at close range, their limbs melting away, heads frying, brains boiling out their eye sockets, dancing with agony—and collapsing.
Reaper tried to fire once more to make sure—but the plasma cannon announced that it was out of power. He dropped it—and looked around till he found the light machine gun he’d dropped when the Hell Knight had charged him. He found a couple of clips in his ammo pouch, reloaded it, and returned to the corridor, looking for the elevators…
There they were. The elevator lobby. The lockdown indicator flashed red. They were still inoperable.
That’s when he heard a shout. Someone farther down the hallway, calling his name.
“John!”
It was his sister’s voice.
Twenty-One
REAPER STOPPED DEAD, staring at a scene of blistering carnage.
The hallway wall here was broken down, opening out into an impromptu charnel house, choked with bodies. The crust of the wall steamed and smoked and glowed; beyond t
he wall, what light there was came from embers and sparks raining from the broken ends of dangling electrical wires twitching against one another. Looking closer, Reaper decided that the walls had been melted down. The BFG had done this.
Corridor was blended into room and piled high in both were bodies. Human and demons, mixed up in heaps, tangled, united in blood—black blood swirling with red.
It was a prophecy of human destiny: men and monsters intermingled, fused in death. Great holes were melted in the ceiling, too—molten metal, from cooked pipes and ducts and wires, dripped down on the layered heaps of bodies, a mercuric icing on a grisly cake.
Sam’s voice had come from in here somewhere.
“John…”
There it was again. But where was she? He aimed his gunlight into the shadows—and spotted her, slumped against a wall.
“Sam!”
He ran to her, jumping over bodies as if they were rocks on a path. He reached her side, hunkered down, taking her hands in his—making her wince. She was bruised, bloodied, her hands skinned to raw flesh. She looked up at him weakly, trembling, relief, even happiness in her eyes—but also warning.
“You’re alive…” she whispered.
“Don’t talk. Please…”
Sarge’s voice came from behind. “Last man standing, Reaper…”
Reaper stood, turned to peer into the shadows. Sarge stepped forward into the fluttering, multicolored light. He’d been using Sam as bait.
Sarge chuckled, as he said, “Think she needs medical attention…” As if there was something funny in the remark.
Reaper could see the wound on Sarge’s neck; the beginning of the change in his face. “Where are those survivors the Kid found?” Reaper asked.
“I took care of them.” Sarge smiled faintly. “Just dotting the i’s.” He glanced at his watch. “Quarantine’s almost over. Power should be back on any minute.”
Reaper got it now. He knew where he stood with Sarge. “You killed the Kid…”
