Anya squeezed his hand again, but he jerked it away.
The light was nearly out of range again. She could barely see the faint red stain of Evans’s blood beside the outline of her feet.
“Come back!” Villarreal shouted. “We are up here!”
“What are you doing?” Anya whispered.
Evans grabbed him and Jade covered his mouth, but he fought free.
“Up here!”
“Juan Carlos . . .” Anya whispered.
Splashing sounds rapidly approached. The light brightened by the second until it was directly beneath them.
“Slide through to the other side,” Evans said. “I’ll hold them off.”
Jade dropped to her knees and reached through the gap on the other side. Before she could get her head through the opening, there were hands on her ankles and she was jerked backward into the water.
Anya knelt and grabbed her hand, but couldn’t slow her momentum. One of the men grabbed Anya by the upper arm and wrenched her through the hole. She barely caught her breath before she went headfirst into the water. The man jerked her back to the surface.
“Come out, Dr. Evans,” the man gripping Anya’s arm said. He wore a black tactical mask molded to look like a skull, with a series of breathing holes where the teeth should have been. A fine mesh partially concealed his eyes. She thrashed in an effort to break his grasp. “We have no desire to kill any of you. However, make no mistake, we have no qualms about doing so, either. Just do exactly as we say.”
“You promised no one would get hurt,” Villarreal said.
His words hit Anya hard enough to knock the wind out of her.
He lowered himself to his hands and knees and stuck his head through the gap.
“We will help you find it. I swear.”
His eyes met Anya’s. She couldn’t bear to look at him. Never in her life had she felt so betrayed. She’d practically thrown herself at him and he, in turn, had served her up to these men on a silver platter.
The man holding Jade had a similar tactical mask, only his had an iridescent silver cast and looked like an alien. He pressed the barrel of a semiautomatic pistol to the side of her head.
“My colleague is holding a gun to the head of Dr. Liang,” the first man said. “If you do not come out of there by the time I count—”
“I’m coming,” Evans said. He fell to his knees, reached his arm through the gap, and tumbled out behind it.
The man shoved Anya aside and grabbed Evans by the harness. He ripped off the diving mask and nuzzled the barrel of his weapon against the base of Evans’s skull.
“You are not going to give us any trouble if we let you swim on your own, are you, Dr. Fleming?”
Anya shook her head, but couldn’t seem to find the voice to respond. There was no reason for these men to keep all four of them alive. They’d be outnumbered in an environment where anything could happen, despite being armed. Her only option was to do what they asked and pray she survived.
“Very good. Now, if you please, I would like you to take the lead.”
Suddenly, Anya understood exactly why they’d let her live. They needed someone to swim ahead of them and set off whatever traps lay in their way.
BOOK III
Long is the way and hard, that out of Hell leads
up to light.
—JOHN MILTON
38
RUSSO
The Vault, FOB Atlantis,
March 27
The generator room was barely wide enough for the generators themselves, let alone the men responsible for monitoring them. Undoubtedly, whoever designed this place did everything he possibly could with the space he’d been allotted, but he obviously hadn’t spared a thought for the poor saps tasked with maintaining the equipment. Theirs was the most critical job of all. Without power, they would only last a matter of hours down here. It wasn’t just about getting electricity to the computers. If the generators failed, they wouldn’t be able to force outside air into the vault, which meant that their finite supply of oxygen would rapidly diminish. The electromagnetic lock, which took an absurd amount of energy to maintain, would fail. Everything else would fall like dominos. The lights would go first, followed by the heat, as it slowly dissipated into the cold earth. There was a reason that Paulo Russo and the other engineers had been recruited for Unit 51. It was for times just like this one, when lives hung in the balance, whether anyone knew it or not.
Each of the liquid propane generators featured an 18.3-liter CAC—charge-air cooled—engine with a power output of 300 kilowatts. They produced a considerable amount of heat and required a chiller unit to blow a constant stream of cool air across them. The temperature needed to be carefully monitored. The fuel lines needed to be checked for leaks. The vibration isolators had to be monitored for cracks, as did the exhaust lines and the mufflers. Any number of things could go wrong at any given moment. And while he didn’t believe in cutting corners, especially not with whatever the hell awaited them up there on the surface, he couldn’t get out of that suffocating little room soon enough.
“It’s already starting to stink,” Reuben Sands said.
“That’s just your imagination.”
“Is it even possible to imagine a smell?”
“Just finish taking your readings so we can get out of here.”
Russo wiped the sweat from his brow with the sleeve of his shirt. The thermostat on the chiller read 74 degrees, but it felt even warmer than that. He decreased the temperature by a single degree. He’d check it again in an hour. They couldn’t risk dialing down the thermostat on the chiller too much or the entire unit could freeze and lock up.
He caught a whiff of the smell and tried to breathe through his mouth.
“What did I tell you?” Sands said.
When Russo was a child, a rat had crawled under his mother’s clothes dryer and died. Who knows how long it had been under there, but after running some number of loads, the smell that came out from beneath there was bad enough to cause his mother to retch. It had fallen to him, as the oldest of four, to take care of the problem. The stench that had come from that little body as he carried it out to the dumpster had been enough to scar him for life. And while Harrison’s body wasn’t nearly to that point yet, he had no doubt it would get there soon, especially in this heat.
He glanced into the corner of the room, where the body lay beneath a mound of blankets. They’d wrapped it in several of those insulated silver numbers first, for all the good they did. He hadn’t really known Harrison all that well. They’d eaten together and shared the light room from time to time, but he’d never really gotten to know the guy. That wasn’t to say he wished him ill or anything. In fact, quite the opposite. He just didn’t want to spend any more time with him now that he was dead. Someone needed to figure out what they were going to do with his body before the smell forced them all to evacuate the vault. And weren’t there diseases that bred inside corpses?
“I don’t mean to sound insensitive or anything,” Sands said, “but we should really do something about it now before it gets worse. Even moving it out into the other room where it’s cooler would help slow down the process, don’t you think?”
“I’ll let you pitch that idea to Director Barnett.”
“Someone’s going to have to.”
“Be my guest.”
Russo noted the airflow and the back pressure from the exhaust line in cubic meters. Checked the digital control panel for alarms. He was about to check the fuel consumption when something moved in his peripheral vision. When he looked in that direction, there was nothing there. Only the mummy-shaped bundle of blankets.
The system coolant and engine jacket water levels were within range, the speed regulation within half a percent.
Again, movement. This time, he turned to see the blanket bulge, then settle once more.
“Did you see that?” he asked.
“See what?”
Russo shook his head. The flow of air fr
om the chiller must have caused the top blanket to billow. He’d watched Harrison die before his very eyes. He’d seen the sheer volume of blood he’d lost. There was no way he could possibly be—
The blanket rose from Harrison’s belly. Slowly, as though gentle pressure were being applied from underneath.
“Did you see it that time?” Russo turned to see Sands staring straight at the corpse, his mouth hanging open. He didn’t need to answer. “Go tell Barnett.”
“And just what do you propose I tell him? That the guy we thought was dead has somehow come back to life?”
“Give me that pipe wrench, would you?”
Sands did as he was asked. Russo turned it around and used the long, slender end to lift the edge of the top blanket and pull it back. He did the same with the blanket underneath and watched for any sign of movement as he pried back the first of the silver space blankets.
“Jesus,” he gasped, and covered his mouth and nose with his free hand. The smell was enough to make his eyes water. It couldn’t have been more than two hours. How much worse would it be after ten more?
“There’s no way he’s still alive,” Sands said.
“You think?”
Russo peeled away the final blanket, cast it aside, and stepped back.
Harrison’s face and neck were swollen and misshapen. One arm was draped across his chest, the other sprawled at his side. His bare chest was pale and marbled with bruises so dark they stood out even through the dried blood. The edges of the wound on his abdomen had retreated to expose the lacerated layers of tissue—
The muscles shifted sideways and swelled outward.
“There’s something in there,” Russo said, and pressed the bulge with the wrench. A sharp implement tented the muscles, then parted them cleanly. “What the hell?”
The creature unfurled from Harrison’s abdominal cavity in one fluid motion, reared up like a snake, and struck at Russo.
He stumbled backward. Lost his balance. Hit the ground on his back.
It was on his chest before he could even raise his arms. When he screamed, no sound came out. A heartbeat later he felt the pain and the warmth of the blood pulsing from his neck.
He grasped the wound in a desperate attempt to hold it closed and rolled over. Panicked at the sight of the crimson pool forming beneath him and the deluge sluicing from between his fingers. Watched Sands run for the door. It leaped onto his back and slashed through his jacket and the flesh underneath, driving him to his knees.
It gripped Sands’s throat in its jaws and shook its head until he dropped.
The creature rounded on Russo, who caught the reflection from its eyes before it released a shrill cry and lunged for his face.
39
TESS
Tess heard what sounded like a whistle of steam and turned toward the back of the room. The door to the generator room was closed. The people sitting closest to it were huddled beneath blankets and didn’t appear to have noticed.
“What was that?” she asked.
Moira looked up at her through blank eyes before she resumed scraping the nonexistent blood from her tattered cuticles.
Tess stood and paced the aisle between the cots for several minutes until she couldn’t take it anymore. There was no way she was going to be able to stay down here for another hour, let alone an unknown number of days. She needed something to occupy her mind. Surely Barnett had access to the camera from her workstation, and, if so, she could continue her research from the vault. If he was going to let Kelly and Roche stay in there, then there was no reason he wouldn’t allow her to do the same, especially now that she finally had Subject Z communicating with them.
She opened the door to the command center, stepped confidently inside, and instantly regretted it.
The tension in there was electric. Everyone was gathered around the wall of monitors at the far end of the room, where the images showed scenes stolen from a nightmare. It looked like a war had been fought inside the base. Tables and beds were overturned. Computers and televisions were broken. The red glare reflected from puddles on the floor that might well have been blood. Sparks spat from overhead lights shattered by the process of hanging massive nests from the ceiling.
“We can’t afford to wait any longer,” Roche said. “We don’t know anything about them, let alone their gestation period. By the time we finally make a decision, there could be twice as many of them. Maybe more.”
“That doesn’t change the fact that there are still at least eight of them up there,” Barnett said. “You think they’re just going to let us walk right out the front door?”
“We have weapons.” Roche nodded toward the rack of assault rifles on the wall. “And we have the advantage of knowing where they are.”
“And then what, hmm? The elevator is more than five hundred feet away and you saw how fast they can run.”
“We’ll need a distraction.”
“Are you volunteering?”
“How many people can the elevator hold?” Kelly asked.
“Eight,” Avila said. “We could probably push it to nine if no one’s opposed to being crammed in there like sardines.”
“It’ll take five trips to get everyone out of here,” Love said.
“And they’re not just going to let us wait around on the pad,” Barnett said.
“How much longer until the extraction team arrives?” Roche asked.
“Just over an hour.”
“And how many passengers can the Valor hold?”
“Fourteen.”
“That’s still three trips.”
“If you have a better idea, now would be a good time to share it.”
“We attack them,” Roche said. “Right now. Before they can multiply anymore.”
“I lost twelve of my best men, none of whom were able to take a single one of those things with them. You think any number of us in here will fare better?”
“The creatures had the element of surprise before. This time it’ll be ours.”
“You think so?”
Barnett abruptly stood and tapped the monitor displaying the mess hall, directly above their heads. A dark shape darted from behind an overturned table and vanished underneath one of the serving centers. Another slithered through the six-inch gap below the door propped on Young’s body and took a bite from the meat of his shoulder. The other raced across the room, snapped at it, and drove it back into the corridor.
“We can’t just wait for your men to rescue us,” Roche said. “What if they’re no more effective than the men you already lost? By then there could be ten times as many of them and we won’t stand a chance. We need to make our move now. While we still can.”
Tess found the monitor she was looking for in the bottom right corner. The thermal image of Subject Z crouched at the door of its enclosure, its legs bent and its clawed hands flat on the bare ground. It was a posture she hadn’t seen before, one that made her instinctively uneasy.
“How do you propose we do that?” Barnett asked. “The moment we open the hatch we’ll be swimming in them. And even if by some miracle we’re able to get out of the vault, how in the name of God do you propose we eliminate all of them?”
“We have to freeze them,” Moira said from directly beside Tess, who jumped at the sound of her voice. “Acute exposure to cold should trigger a state of cryobiosis, which is how the first one survived in the ice caverns. It took a flamethrower to revive it, and that’s why they need the bodies to hatch their offspring. They thrive in the heat.”
“How are we supposed to do that?” Avila said. “I left my freeze ray at home.”
It struck Tess that Subject Z was probably hungry. It had come to rely upon them to deliver its meals through the hole in the door. With no one left out there to do so, it was only a matter of time before it starved to death. Regardless of its nature or the atrocities it had perpetrated, it didn’t deserve to die like that.
“That can’t be entirely true,” Barnett said. “They got to
two of my men outside the complex in the snow.”
“Then there must be some sort of time threshold.”
“We flood the place,” Roche said. “The water from the lake is below freezing, isn’t it?”
“Even if we could,” Barnett said, “there’s no guarantee it would work.”
Tess detected movement on the screen beside the one displaying the creature’s cage. Little more than a shifting of shadows. She recognized her office and her console in the dim red light, but not the man who emerged from the dark corridor and approached the outer wall of the cage. A silhouette, his features indistinct. With the exception of his elongated cranium.
“No,” she whispered.
The man approached the control panel beside the door and started to type.
“What’s wrong?” Kelly asked.
“Override access to the door lock!” Tess screamed.
“Jesus,” Love said, and raced to the nearest terminal.
She was too late.
The man stepped back from the control panel and turned toward the door as it slid into the recess in the reinforced wall. Despite the bruising and deformities, she recognized his face. She saw it every day. Les Dutton, the chef who brought the creature its meals.
On the adjacent monitor, Subject Z’s multicolored form rose to its full height, cast one final glance at the camera, and walked right out through the open door.
There was nothing they could do to stop it.
“Don’t lose sight of it,” Barnett shouted. “I want a visual on it at all times. And isolate that image. We need to know who in God’s name released it and how we let this happen!”
A scream from the room behind her.
Tess glanced back and saw the people who’d been dozing near the back wall jump up from their cots and back away from the generator room. She walked toward them as though in a trance. The entire world felt like it was unraveling around her.
Another scream.
She recognized Anna Messerschmidt when the lexicologist turned and toppled over an unused cot. Mats Karlsson nearly tripped over her in his hurry to distance himself from the generator room. Dark fluid seeped out from beneath the door. Tess kept telling herself it was oil clear up until the point when she could no longer deny what it truly was.
Forsaken Page 22
