The BIG Horror Pack 2

by Iain Rob Wright

“You okay?” Lexi asked Hopper. The bridge of his nose was swollen and his eyes were dark.

  “I used to take worse beatings from my father so, yeah, I’m good.”

  Lexi raised her eyebrows. “Are you being serious? That’s horrible.”

  Hopper shrugged. “Made me what I am today. I joined the corps to leave my past behind. I worked my arse off and made sure I was the best, so that I never had to feel worthless ever again.”

  Lexi didn’t say that she was sorry, for she knew that Hopper did not require pity, so she just patted him on the back. She looked at her own father and thought about how much better off she had been. Boss had never been a devoted father, his passion lay with the corps, but he at least had loved her and had never hit her. She couldn’t imagine what it would be like if he ever had. She reached out to touch Hopper again, but he had moved away towards the door.

  Eventually Norman made it back to his feet, despite still looking grim. Boss got the nod from everybody and they prepared to continue the mission. The mission that started bad and had only got worse.

  “Maybe Norman should open the door this time,” Hopper said. “Seeing as how he’s Mr Invisible to the dead guests.”

  Norman didn’t argue. He made his way to the front of the group and reached for the door handle. To everybody’s surprise, it was unlocked. They all stepped through and found themselves inside an oily work area. Machine parts and benches filled the bare floor and the overhead strip lights flickered with ongoing vibrations. One of the benches held a humanoid with no arms and only one leg.”

  “This looks like some sort of repair area,” Lexi said.

  “It takes a lot to keep a satellite array running,” Hopper said. “They probably have a team of engineers stationed here. Wonder why there’s nobody here now. You’d think it would be nice and safe up here.”

  “Maybe we’ll find someone,” Lexi said. “Fingers crossed.”

  Norman went over to one of the benches and picked up a wrench. Lexi did him one better and discovered a welding torch. She gave it a quick blast to test it out and an immense blue flame shot out of the nozzle, making her flinch.

  Hopper held his axe and grinned. “Now you’re really smoking.”

  Lexi groaned. “You’re like a character out of a bad book.”

  He frowned at her. “A book? Nobody reads anymore.”

  “I’m not nobody.”

  “We must be near the top now,” Boss said. “The array should be within reach. Let’s find it.”

  “Let’s try over there.” Hopper pointed. “I think I see something.”

  It turned out that Hopper could see something. Bodies. A lot of them.

  Chapter Thirteen

  “Who are all these people?” Lexi asked. “They look like guests.”

  She knelt down beside the body of a young girl. She was wearing a hoodie with The Driller printed on it and bright pink tennis pumps. She was definitely a guest. A bullet hole dotted her chest right below her neck. Upon closer inspection, Lexi saw entry wounds on all of the bodies.

  “Somebody killed these people,” Hopper said, reaching the same conclusion that she had.

  “Looks like they were all shot in the chest,” Boss said. “Whoever shot them knew what they were doing.”

  Norman doubled over and vomited. It was a strange reaction seeing as he’d been surrounded by walking corpses for more than twenty-four hours and had dismembered several of them with his axe.

  “You okay?” Lexi asked him.

  Norman wiped his mouth. “Fine. I think everything is just getting to me.”

  Hopper nodded. “Understandable.”

  “I don’t understand,” Lexi said, turning her attention back to the several dozen dead park guests. “How did they end up here and why would somebody shoot them?”

  “Perhaps they were infected,” Hopper said.

  “No. If they were infected they would have come back, wouldn’t they? None of these people were shot in the head. I think they were healthy. They were survivors.”

  Hopper grimaced. “Why would somebody want to shoot survivors? You think it was Cog?”

  “I don’t know. Cog had a revolver when we saw him last. I don’t think he could have taken down so many people on his own.”

  “Then who?”

  Boss cleared his throat. “It doesn’t matter. We can’t save the dead.”

  A noise caught their attention.

  Hopper grabbed a tight hold on his axe and stepped towards the source. Lexi backed him up with her welding torch. Norman stayed back with his wrench.

  “Who’s there?” Boss shouted.

  “Captain Yanniger,” came the accented reply.

  “Are you armed?”

  From behind a group of fuel barrels, a handgun skittered across the floor and came to rest out in the open. “Not anymore.”

  Cautiously, they spread out and approached the group of barrels. Despite having no weapon of any kind, Boss took point. He seemed unconcerned by any threat and strode purposefully, fearlessly.

  Together they rounded the barrels and found a man sitting up against the wall. He was wearing full body armour like the dead men they had encountered inside the armoury. He was also bleeding from a ragged wound on his neck.

  Lexi knelt beside the man immediately, went to place a hand against his wound and apply pressure, but he swatted her away urgently. “No,” he said. “I’ve been bitten. Don’t get my blood on you.”

  Lexi pulled her hand away. “Do you know about the virus?”

  He nodded. “It was engineered by the League of Joa.”

  Lexi frowned. “Those fundamentalists operating out of Israel? Nobody takes them seriously, not even Israel.”

  The man swallowed and it obviously caused him pain as it took him a while to find his voice again. “European Intelligence has known Joa have been working on a biological weapon for years. They finally perfected it and sent it here.”

  Hopper crossed his arms. “Why attack an amusement park?”

  “As a threat. To show the world what the virus will do if released on Earth. This is their Hiroshima – a warning to their enemies.”

  Lexi hissed. “Show people what the virus can do without risking it getting out of control on Earth; clever. They’ll be able to demand anything now. But wait,” she looked down at the wounded captain, “how the hell do you know all this? You’re just a security guard for an amusement park.”

  He laughed and it hurt him. He winced and held his neck. “If you think this place is just an amusement park, you’re an idiot. The League of Joa targeted here for a reason. This place is a military asset. I’m not a guard. I’m United States Inteligence.”

  “What are you talking about?” Hopper said.

  “Nothing. I’m done talking about it. You’ll find out soon enough. Just do me a favour and kill me. I don’t want to become one of those things.”

  “You’re turning?” Lexi said. “Where is the person who bit you, and what happened to all of those guests back there?”

  “Orders.”

  “You killed them all.”

  “Not me. My men. One of the guards who worked on this level allowed them in for safety, but this place is not for the public. They had to be dealt with.”

  “Where are your men now?” Boss asked.

  “Dead. Like me.”

  Lexi kicked the man, suddenly enraged. “Tell me what’s going on here,” she screamed. “Was it you who jammed communications? Sabotaged our ship?”

  There was more noise ahead and Lexi stepped away from the Captain to look around.

  “Oh, hell,” Hopper muttered.

  The captain’s men had arrived, and every one of them was dead.

  The captain let out a moan, but was still alive. “My gun,” he said. “Grab my gun.”

  Lexi spotted the handgun on the floor and quickly snatched it up. She estimated five dead guards in total and fired at the closest without even blinking. The round took the dead guard between the eyes and dropp
ed him cold. She re-sighted her aim and took out the next and the next, but the final two wore riot helmets.

  Hopper took the first of the two remaining dead men. He swung his axe like a golf club and shattered the knee of his target. Once the guard tumbled down onto its belly, he kicked the helmet off of its head and brought the axe down hard.

  That left just one more guard.

  Norman stepped up. “Let me. He not hurt me.”

  They all stood back while Norman took charge. He strolled casually up to the dead man and grabbed its riot helmet with both hands. As expected, the guard simply tried to push past Norman and get to the rest of them. Norman removed the helmet and tossed it to the floor. Then he bought the wrench up over his head and smashed it down on the dead man’s skull.

  Five bodies lay on the ground, the threat dealt with.

  “We’re getting better at this,” Hopper said. “Does that worry anybody else?”

  “What do we do with him?” Lexi asked, motioning towards the fading captain.

  “Kill him,” Boss said.

  Lexi looked at her father and frowned. “What?”

  “He’s already dead. Do him a favour.”

  Lexi looked at the gun in her hand and then shook her head. “I’m not just going to shoot him.”

  “I don’t mind,” the captain said, waving an arm from where he still sat on the ground. “Shoot me, please.”

  Lexi stood firm. In fact, she strode up to her father and shoved the gun at him. “Shoot him yourself.”

  Her father snatched the gun out of her hands and shot the captain in the chest. The man wheezed for a second, then died. Boss followed up the shot with a second straight to the head. He shoved the gun back at his daughter and marched away.

  Lexi looked down at the gun and saw her hands tremble. Hopper came over to her and gently prised it away from her. “Maybe I should take this,” he said.

  They exchanged glances for a moment and then followed after Boss. Neither said it, but they were both upset by what they had just witnessed. Norman hurried from behind to keep up with them, and he didn’t look any more confident than they did.

  Chapter Fourteen

  “This is it,” Hopper said, with more than a little relief in his voice. “This is the satellite array.”

  Lexi looked around at the room they were in and was impressed. The ceiling was glass plated, allowing them to look directly up into the stars. It also allowed them to see the monolithic dish outside and the many smaller dishes mounted around it. In front of them was a massive bank of computers.

  Hopper hurried over and began accessing the systems. He used the comms unit on his forearm that they all wore. SABA had uploaded to them all the authorisations they needed, but that didn’t stop Hopper from cursing a few times as he struggled to get to grips with the firewalls.

  “Do you need help?” Lexi asked him.

  “I need Trent, but you’ll do, I suppose.”

  Lexi tutted, but didn’t take offence. She joined him at the console and leant forward. “What am I looking at?”

  “I’m trying to get into the communication hub. I should be able to send out a simple message and get a response, but it seems like some sort of override has been put in place. It was done on top of the regular operating system so it’s not much interested in my administrator rights.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean that somebody stuck a firewall of their own in place. I can’t send a message without taking it down.”

  “Maybe it was the captain.” Lexi scowled at her father. “Too bad he’s dead.”

  “He wouldn’t have been of any use,” Boss said. “Why would he lock us out of the system and then tell us how to get back in?”

  Lexi ignored him, placed a hand on Hopper’s shoulder. “Can you do anything?”

  “I’m not sure. Let me try a back door. I’ll see if any of the other systems have native control over the satellite. I may be able to…wow, wait a minute. What the…?”

  “What?” Boss asked. “What have you found, Hopper?”

  Hopper turned around to face Boss. There was a look of utter confusion on his face. “I just accessed a sub-directory called Orbital Assault Platform.”

  Lexi baulked. “What? Assault? You mean Grand Galaxy was built with weapon systems?”

  “Not just weapons systems,” Hopper explained. “Orbital weapons. As in weapons pointed at space, or even Earth.”

  Norman bent over and fell into a chair. He slumped forwards and began panting. “This supposed to be nice vacation they say. Very relaxing, very nice they tell me. Bullshits.”

  Everyone ignored him. Lexi looked at Boss to see what he thought about the situation, but he didn’t seem shocked or angry like she was.

  “Oh, God,” she said, reading her father’s expression like a book. “You knew about this, didn’t you?”

  Boss sighed and took a seat. He rubbed at his chin for a few moments and then looked at his daughter with tired, suddenly very old eyes. “Yes, I knew. That’s why we’re here. When the American and British governments built this place, they couldn’t condone such a monumental cost for a commercial project alone. It’s been ten years and this place has only just turned a profit. That’s beside the point, though, because this it was never intended to be a getaway for those rich enough to afford it. It’s a weapon, Lexi. It’s the greatest weapon ever built. From this station, our government can target a bird in its nest in any country in the world. It has a link up to every allied satellite in space and can spy on every inch of the cosmos. It has saved millions of lives, by taking out the bad men before they even know they’re on our radar.”

  “Including the League of Joa,” Hopper said.

  Boss nodded. “Their leader was assassinated several years ago. Somehow, they must have discovered the existence of this place and focused all of their attention on bringing it down.”

  “Game set and match to them,” Hopper said.

  “Why are we here?” Lexi asked. “What’s our real mission?”

  “The real mission was something only Gellar, Miller, and I, truly understood. We were to secure this place without any witnesses to what is really here, or…”

  “Or what, goddamnit?”

  “Or, if the facility is irredeemably compromised, the mission is to destroy it.”

  Lexi was so stunned that she fell back like a punch had hit her. “D-Destroy it how?”

  “By turning the orbital blasters inwards.”

  Hopper picked up a chair and threw it. Everyone stared at him in surprise, but he just shrugged his shoulders. “Felt like a throw a chair moment.”

  Norman started coughing. When he caught his breath, he made a comment on the situation. “We can’t die here. You have to get me back to Earth, remember? If this thing gets out back home then my blood might be cure. I’m immune.”

  Lexi was about to agree, but when she looked at him she found herself thinking something else. “I don’t think that you are immune.”

  Norman frowned at her. “What? I was bitten a day and a half ago and I have not turned.”

  “Not yet, but I think you’re going to. At first, I believed you were immune, but now you look like shit.”

  He sneered. “Thank you.”

  “No, she’s right,” Hopper said. “You look like a bear shit you out. You’re ill, man.”

  “I feel fine.”

  Lexi looked at Norman and raised her eyebrows. “Really?”

  “Okay, no. I feel like the death that is warmed up, but is just stress of situation. I not infected. I am immune.”

  Lexi shook her head, now completely sure. “I think you’re resistant, but not immune. You’re dying Norman. I’m sorry. The virus is in you, but for some reason your body fights it better than most. The virus is still going to win in the end, though.”

  Norman got up and waved his arms. “Immune, resistant, whatever. You still need me for tests and experiments and-”

  “You’ll never make it back to
Earth,” Boss said, his stern voice making everyone take a step back. “In fact, taking you to Earth would be a bloody awful idea. You’re infectious.”

  “No!”

  “Yes. This entire facility is now a hazard to life itself back on Earth. It has to be destroyed.”

  Norman was trembling with panic. His eyes had begun to bulge and were a fiery red at the edges. He took a step towards Boss, his arm extended threateningly.

  There was a loud bang and Norman’s head half-exploded. Hopper stood with his own arm extended, the captain’s handgun now smoking from its muzzle.

  Lexi gasped at him. “Damn it, Hopper. Not you, now? Why are we shooting people?”

  “Because he was going to become a space chomper. He wasn’t the type to quietly suffer – he would have become a hindrance – and we can’t afford anything holding us back, Lexi, because we are getting off this goddamn lump of rock.”

  Boss frowned. “Impossible. We need to destroy this place.”

  “Yeah, you do that, Boss. You can stay right here and arm the systems; just as soon as me and your daughter get back in the Hermes and fly away.”

  “The Hermes is down,” Lexi said.

  “Only because of the jamming in that sector. I’m pretty sure I can release it. If your father stays behind, he can make sure no one interferes once we head back.”

  “No way, I’m not going to leave my father here to die.”

  “Yes, you are.” Boss was speaking so they both shut up. “We can’t get a message out because of the bloody communications override, but you two can get back to Earth and warn SABA and the goddamn Pentagon of what the League of Joa is capable of. They need to be warned. Hopper, do it.”

  Hopper raced over to the console and began tapping away.

  “That madman, Cog, is still out there somewhere,” Boss warned. “So be careful. Somebody has to stay here to make sure this place is turned to dust. You can either be here when that happens, or on your way home.”

  “No, this is crazy,” but as Lexi said it, she knew there was no other way. The death and evilness in this place would devastate the Earth if it got free. There were far more lives at stake than just her father’s, and he was going to do what he intended to do with or without her.