by S. D. Perry
—and then he saw her, not behind the south door at all, but half across the room, her shotgun trained on the leech queen, her back to the central incinerator. Billy realized that she must have run out again while the monster had been busy throwing him against the wall.
He screamed for her to get back to the door, but she ignored him, firing at the queen as she charged toward Billy. With each shot, handfuls of leeches flew from the massive body, but for every one lost, a half dozen more were clambering on. On the fourth shot, the queen turned toward her, hesitating, as if unable to decide who to go after.
“Get in!” she shouted. “I’m on my way!”
Billy ran for the door, hoping to God she had a plan. She continued to fire at the creature, pump and shoot, pump, shoot—and then there was nothing but a dry click that Billy could hear across the room, the sound of inevitable defeat.
The leech queen heard it, too, and started for her, her body continuing to grow, to pick up mass as she lurched wetly forward. Billy had reached the south door and stood there, adrenaline pouring through his body, fumbling through his pack for the last two Magnum rounds.
“Run!” he shouted, but Rebecca ignored him, not moving at all. She wasn’t reloading, wasn’t even reaching for the handgun as the queen approached. Instead, she hefted the shotgun by its barrel, stepped back so that she was touching the incinerator wall—and drove the heavy stock through the sheet metal of a heat duct, popping one of the panels out with an aluminum crunch. Burning matter spilled out across the floor. Rebecca jumped into the midst of it, kicking wildly, driving lumps of flaming synthetics and rubbish into the nearest wave of leech bodies.
The queen shrieked, ceased its advance, still well away from the sudden fire. Scorched leeches scurried to their father-queen, tried to climb the towering body, to find solace there, but brought pain with them as they flocked together, attaching to the mobile hive. The queen’s shriek grew in intensity as smoking, burning leeches joined her, damaging her, making her writhe in what Billy hoped was insufferable agony.
Rebecca saw her chance and took it, running for the south wall as the queen tore at herself, screaming. Billy emptied the revolver on the floor, dropped the last two rounds into the chamber and snapped it closed, holding it on the queen as Rebecca ran past her—but the queen was beyond caring, at least for the moment, parts of her insane body turning black, melting, running like molasses to pool on the smoldering floor.
Billy kept the Magnum trained on the contorting queen until Rebecca was past him and through the door. He quickly backed in after her, and she slammed the door closed.
He took a deep breath, felt the pain in his ribs, in his arms and legs, his head, a dull agony in every pore of his body—until he turned around, and saw what Rebecca was pointing at, a smile of surprised delight on her shocked, smudged face. His pain dropped away, became nothing but a nagging background to his own sudden relief.
They’d shut themselves into a platform elevator shaft. One that went up—and from the depth of the wide tunnel that stretched away from them at a diagonal, leading toward a circle of light far, far above, the platform appeared to go all the way to the surface.
They grinned at each other like children, too dumb with happiness to speak, but only for a few seconds. Their smiles broke as the dying queen roared, her horrible voice carrying from the next room, reminding them how close they still were to dying themselves.
Without saying a word, they ran to the platform, ran to the standing console that controlled the elevator. Billy studied the switches for a beat, then, with a silent prayer for deliverance, snapped the power on.
The platform started to climb, carrying them up and away from the nightmare. Or so they believed.
SIXTEEN
The agony was magnificent in its measure, killing her with an intensity beyond any she’d ever known. The burning children clung to her, starved for release, and as they touched her, touched their siblings, they passed their pain on in a wave that would not cease. It went on and on until parts of the collective gathered and fell away, dying, melting, her children sacrificing themselves so that she might live. Slowly, slowly, the agony receded, trained away from the physical, became the suffering of loss, of infinite sorrow.
As the injured pulled away, left her enveloping arms to die alone, the rest of the children came forward, singing, crooning to her, easing her torment as best they could. They engulfed her, soothed her with their liquid kisses—and by their sheer numbers, they overtook her. It only took a moment. The queen lost her identity as Marcus had lost his, giving over to the hive, becoming more. Becoming all.
The allness of the new creature was whole and healthy, a giant, different than before. Stronger. It heard mechanical sounds nearby. It reached inside itself, accessed the mind for information, understood—the murderers were trying to flee.
They would not escape. The hive gathered itself on a thousand supple limbs and went after them.
* * *
Neither of them wanted to think about running into any further trouble, but they had to assume the worst. Rebecca checked the handguns while Billy loaded the shotgun, the two of them calling out the dismal numbers—fifteen nine-millimeter rounds left, all total. Four shotgun shells. Two Magnum rounds.
“We probably won’t need them anyway,” Rebecca said hopefully, staring up at the growing circle of light. The elevator was slow but steady; they were already halfway to the surface, would be there in just another minute or two.
Billy nodded, holding his left side with one dirty hand. “Think that bitch cracked one of my ribs,” he said, but smiled a little, also looking up at the light.
Rebecca stepped toward him, concerned, reaching out to touch his side—but before she could, an alarm started to blare down the shaft. Each door they slipped past now had a red light flashing over it, casting crimson splotches of color over the rising platform.
“What—” Billy started, but was interrupted by the calm, feminine voice of a recorded loop.
“The self-destruct system has been activated. All personnel must evacuate immediately. Repeat. The self-destruct system—”
“Activated by who?” Rebecca asked. Billy shushed her, holding up one hand, listening.
“...immediately. Sequence will commence in—ten minutes.”
The lights kept flashing, the siren blatting, but the voice stopped. Billy and Rebecca exchanged a worried look, but there wasn’t much they could do... And they’d be long gone in ten minutes, God willing.
“Maybe the queen—” Rebecca said, not finishing the thought. It seemed unlikely, but she couldn’t think of how else the system might have been triggered.
“Could be,” Billy said, though he looked doubtful. “Anyway, we’ll be out of here before it happens.”
She nodded—and they heard the crash below, the thundering, squealing rip of metal, of incredible ruin at the base of the elevator shaft.
They both looked down, found spaces in the platform’s partial grid flooring, saw what was coming. It was the queen—only not the queen. This was much, much bigger, and a hell of a lot faster, a giant dark mass pulling itself after them.
Rebecca looked up, saw how close they were. Just one more minute and we’ll be out
She looked down again, her breath catching as she saw how close it already was. She had the image of a crashing wave, black and alive, opening up as it sped toward them, revealing more blackness inside—
“Oh, shit,” Billy said—
—and the platform upended, broke through a wall, pitching both of them off.
Rebecca landed on her side, hard, immediately got to her feet, still holding on to the shotgun. Billy was getting off the floor a few meters away, concrete, painted yellow lines radiating out from beneath his feet—
Helipad. Underground helipad.
They were in a vast room, no helicopter in sight but plenty of random mechanical equipment strewn about, the small islands of metal only emphasizing the room’s spaciousness. What li
ttle light there was came from a few stray shafts of sunlight coming down from the motile ceiling—which meant they were only a single floor from the surface. It took Rebecca the space of a heartbeat to see where they were, a second beat to locate the queen. What the queen had become.
It was crawling out of the ragged hole in the wall where the elevator platform had come through, flopping masses of tentacles over the broken pieces of metal and stone. It was like some crazy optical illusion, watching as it pulled itself from the shaft, its colossal form just coming and coming. The thing that finally expelled itself onto the concrete floor was as big as a moving van, long and low and seething with twisted vines of leech matter.
Rebecca could only stare—and was nearly jerked off her feet when Billy grabbed her arm, pulling her away.
“There’s a staircase over there!” He motioned vaguely at an EXIT sign across the room, what seemed an incredible distance away—
—and as if it could hear them, could understand, the queen monster moved, heaved its great bulk across the floor with surprising speed, heading off their escape route. It half turned back toward them, tentacles whipping about its shapeless head, a thick puddle of blackish goo spilling out from beneath its hideous frame, and started to rear up—
—and then squealed, pitching back and forth, a high, hissing noise erupting from its squalid body. Smoke actually started to rise from its back, from where—
Sunlight. A shaft of sunlight, thin but bright, lay across the beast’s back. The creature sidled to one side, moving out of the light, and started for them again.
Billy grabbed her again, pulled her back. The self-destruct alarm continued to bleat, echoing through the helipad—and the female voice calmly informed them that they now had eight minutes before the sequence would commence.
“It can’t handle sunlight!” she shouted, as she and Billy both turned, started to run. They headed for the room’s northwest corner, the farthest from the monster as it humped toward them, twining between the stray beams of light. It wasn’t as fast as it had been in the elevator shaft, less to push against, but it could almost keep up with them running.
“Any idea how we open the roof?” Billy asked, shooting a look behind them, steering them more north.
“Power’s out,” she panted. “But there should be manual latches, probably hydraulic. If the roof’s on an incline, it’ll slide open when we unlock them. We can hope.”
“Do it,” Billy said, visibly winded. “I’ll try and keep her distracted.”
Rebecca nodded, looking back at the creature. It had fallen behind, but it wasn’t flagging, wasn’t struggling to catch its breath the way they were.
She headed for a likely looking panel on the nearest wall, as behind her, Billy turned and started to fire the nine-millimeter.
* * *
The hive went after them, shedding matter from its back where the light had touched. Its consciousness wasn’t entirely animal, nor human, but possessed elements of both. It understood that its home was threatened, that another force would destroy its shelter, soon. It understood that sunlight meant pain, even death. And it understood that the two humans that ran before it were the cause of it all, were the instrument of its imminent destruction.
One of the humans stopped, aimed a weapon, fired. Projectiles pierced its outer flesh, wounding, but did not penetrate to the core. As with the sun burns, the creature shed the injured matter and continued on, gaining quickly now, close enough to smell the human’s terror. It lunged forward, knocking him down.
* * *
Shit!
Billy hit the ground as the queen monster jumped at him, one of the waving tentacles lashing his feet out from under him. He tried to roll away but it had his right ankle in a firm grip. Cursing, Billy pushed himself closer to the mass of the creature, brought his other heel down on the bunched tentacle as hard as he could, and again. The appendage retracted, the monster thrashing away from him.
Billy sprang to his feet, spotted Rebecca at the west wall, messing with a control panel. He turned east and ran, looking back to make sure the thing was on his trail.
“Sequence will commence in—seven minutes.”
Lovely. It never rained but it goddamn poured. Billy ran faster, pushing himself, the monster trailing too close for comfort.
When he’d gotten far enough to risk it, he turned, saw Rebecca at another control panel across the room. The monster lunged for him but was too far away to reach, its outstretched limbs still a meter away. Billy got off a shot into what seemed to be its face, then turned and ran again, stumbling on rubbery legs. The thing came after him, seemingly inexhaustible.
Come on, Rebecca, he pleaded silently, forcing himself to go faster.
* * *
Rebecca reached the fourth and final latch as the recorded loop told them that they had six minutes left. She grabbed the small wheel that served as the manual key, twisted—
—and it was stuck. Not entirely, but it took all her strength to manage just a half turn. She strained, felt her muscles scream for leniency as she got another half turn, almost there—
“Rebecca, move!”
She shot a look back, saw that somehow, the queen monster had gotten close, too close; it would be on her in thirty seconds—but she couldn’t, wouldn’t run, knew that they couldn’t afford the time it would take to circle around, to try again.
Billy was firing, the sound of the bullets hitting liquid flesh terrifyingly immediate. She didn’t even look, knew she’d lose her nerve if she saw how close it actually was.
“Come on!” she screamed, pulling at the obstinate wheel with all she had—
—and it came unstuck, even as a thick, wet limb wrapped around her left ankle, horribly alive with slick, diseased movement—
—and with a heavy squeak of powdering rust, the heavens split wide, raining light over them all.
* * *
The light! The light!
The hive screamed as death rained down, first poaching its skin, then boiling it, thousands of individual leeches dying, falling away, the burning worse than fire because it was everywhere, all at once. It tried to escape, to find shelter from the torture, but there was nothing, there was nowhere.
The two humans ran, disappeared through a hole in the wall, but the creature didn’t notice, didn’t care. It twisted and turned, giant sheaves of flesh scraping away, layers of its body smearing across concrete, exposing the pulsing pink center of itself to the cruel, killing light, the disinfectant light of day.
By the time the building exploded a few minutes later, there was hardly anything left of it—only a handful of straggling leeches, confused, drowning in the lake of death that had once been their father, had once been James Marcus.
SEVENTEEN
They half ran, half staggered away, weaving between tree trunks in the cool morning air, the experience for Billy crazy, surreal—from shooting at giant leech monsters in the dark to a run in the woods, birds singing their morning songs overhead, a light breeze ruffling their dirty, matted hair. They kept moving, Billy silently counting down, until he got somewhere near zero.
He stopped, looked around as Rebecca also halted, breathing heavily. They’d come out of the woods to a small clearing, high on a hill that overlooked the eastern Arklay forest.
“Here looks good,” Billy said. He took a deep, cleansing breath and dropped, sprawling on the ground, his muscles cheering. Rebecca did the same, and a few seconds afterward, the countdown was over.
The explosion was massive, shaking the ground, the roar of it washing across the forest, over the valley beneath them. After a moment, Billy sat up, watched the smoke billowing up over the treetops. As tired as he was, as sore and hungry and emotionally drained, he felt at peace, somehow, watching the smoke of that terrible place drift off into the new day. Rebecca sat with him, also silent, her expression almost dreamy. There was nothing that needed to be said; they’d both been there.
He absently scratched at his wrist,
at a tickle there—and the handcuffs fell off, landing in the grass with a muffled clink. Billy smiled. At some unknown point, the second cuff must have come loose. Shaking his head, thinking of how nice it would have been to have lost them about twelve hours before, he tossed them toward a stand of trees. Rebecca stood, turned away from the smoke, shading her eyes.
“That must be the place Enrico was talking about,” she said. Billy forced himself to stand, moved to her side. There, maybe a mile or two away and well beneath their vantage point, was a huge mansion, shrouded with trees. Its windows glared against the morning light, giving it a closed and empty look.
Billy nodded, suddenly not sure what to say. She’d be wanting to get to her team. And as for him...
Rebecca reached over and grasped his dog tags, tugging them firmly. The chain gave, popped free, and she fastened the tags around her own slender throat, looking out at the mansion.
“Guess it’s time to say good-bye,” she said.
Billy watched her, but she didn’t look at him, only stared at her next destination, that silent house half hidden by trees.
“Officially, Lieutenant William Coen is dead,” she said.
Billy tried a laugh, but it didn’t take. “Yeah, I’m a zombie now,” he said, a little surprised at the sudden wistful feeling in his chest, in his gut.
She turned, met his gaze, held it with her own. He saw honesty there, and compassion, and strength—and he saw that she, too, felt the same strange longing, the same vague sorrow that had dropped over him like a soft shadow.
If things had been different... If circumstances weren’t what they are...
She nodded, ever so slightly, as if reading his mind, agreeing with what she read there. Then she straightened, her head high, her shoulders back, and snapped a salute, still looking into his eyes.
Billy mirrored her posture, returning the salute, holding it until she dropped her hand. Without another word, she turned and walked away, heading for a gently sloping decline among the trees.
He watched her until she disappeared, lost to the shadows of the woods, then turned, looking for a path of his own. He decided that south sounded pretty good, and started walking, enjoying the warm sun on his shoulders, the song of the birds in the trees.
