Another guard was right behind him. James rolled across the floor as the man fired, trying to track James as he moved faster than anyone the guard had ever seen. Until a moment later, when a blur lurched through the air and sent him sprawling into the hallway, dead before he hit the ground.
James got up and ditched the MP5. He hurried to the doorway.
Nancy was crouched on the body of the third guard, her face, arms, and chest drenched in blood and gore. She whipped her head from side to side, nostrils flaring as she surveyed the scene, and then tore off down the hall.
James followed as fast as he could. They were in a wide, antiseptic hallway with a speckled-white tile floor. An empty gurney was stationed idly against one wall.
Footsteps behind them, coming to a corner. James spun around, going down on one knee, and let loose a careful burst that caught a guard in the chest, his feet going out from under him and dropping him to the floor on his back. Behind him he heard a roar.
Spinning around as he stood up and in forward motion again, James saw Nancy at a T-intersection rip a guard’s gun arm off, blood spraying from the severed artery, before she crushed his skull with one hand and dropped his twitching body to the floor. Another guard appeared at the far end, beyond the intersection. James kicked loose a burst that skated across the man’s legs and he went down on his knees, firing wildly. James fired again, tracking up his chest and ending with a head shot that exploded his brains spectacularly across the tile.
Nancy was already gone around the corner. James raced forward, heartbeat thumping in his ears.
As he reached the intersection, shots peppered the wall opposite the hallway Nancy had gone down. James went around the corner low.
Five guards had come racing around a far corner and opened fire on Nancy after pausing for a confused, fatal moment. The little blond woman, bloody from the carnage, launched herself off the ground, her body arcing and twisting over the streams of fire, arms outstretched, before coming down on three of the guards at once. By the time they all hit the floor, her human guise was gone—in its place was a muscular, grave-pallored creature with massive jaws and feral eyes. She rolled onto her back and simultaneously hurled one fallen guard up against a standing one, then lurched off the floor at the other, driving her hands into his guts and ripping out his intestines. The man screamed and fired, bullets thudding into his two companions still getting up from the tackle. She shoved her hands in further and grabbed him by the spine, claws punching through his back, then pulled him off the ground like he was a mop and threw him into the two unhurt guards. As they tumbled back to the floor she pounced on the two who’d been shot. She ripped the head off one and drove it into the face of the other, crushing his skull and sending a spray of brains and bone fragments across the floor. The two surviving guards were fumbling beneath the gutted, flopping man, screaming in blind terror. Nancy stepped over to them and grabbed them by their faces, driving her thumbs into their nasal cavities and plunging her fingers into their eyes. They wailed as blood and pale fluid poured over Nancy’s hands, then she raised them up and flattened the back of their skulls against the wall.
James padded up. Nancy was licking her claws greedily as her human guise reasserted itself, transforming her back into a small blond woman again.
“Jesus Fucking Christ!” was the best he could manage. Eleven men were dead—so far. They’d been inside OUTLOOK for less than three minutes.
“No,” Nancy corrected him between slurps, her voice a bestial snarl. “Jean Fucking Qualls.”
“Which way?” James asked, panting.
Jean turned and ran. James followed.
They made a turn and entered a huge soundstage. In the middle of the room was some sort of enclosed set. The walls were supported with wooden braces. They heard the recorded sound of waves and the cries of birds, issuing from big speakers placed around the outside of the set.
There was a door set into one of the flimsy walls, standing open. They ran for it.
From inside the set they heard a voice cry out: “What are you waiting for! Go ahead, you fucks! Do it!”
James’ heart pounded. It was Stephanie.
The set was built to look like a Caribbean courtyard, stone walls and arches on four sides. Against one wall were three eight-foot posts, set into the floor. Vic, Abe, and Stephanie were tied to the posts, blindfolded. The wall behind them was riddled with fake bullet holes and bloodstains. No one else was in the set. Five bolt-action rifles lay on the ground opposite the trio, evidently dropped by the guards they’d just met, the scenario abandoned mid-way.
“Stephanie!” he called as he and Jean hurried over.
Stephanie turned her head towards them. She sputtered. “J—James?”
He pulled the blindfold off. She blinked, confused. “Is this real?” she whispered, her eyes hollow and desperate, wanting to believe that this was really happening, that it wasn’t another of OUTLOOK’s terrible trials.
He kissed her.
Jean ripped the blindfolds from Abe and Vic, who looked ragged and confused. She sliced through the ropes with her unseen claws, fully camouflaged once more. They staggered forward, blinking, unbelieving.
James looked into Stephanie’s eyes as he withdrew from the kiss. “It’s real,” he whispered, as he pulled out his knife and sliced through the bonds. She fell into his arms and held him tight.
“Oh fuck,” Vic was saying. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.” Jean hugged her and Abe briefly, staining their clothes with blood.
“Are you hurt?” Abe said, recovering.
Jean shook her head. “You should see the other guys.”
Vic whooped, her eyes bright.
“I can’t believe you’re here,” Stephanie said, dazed, stepping back to look at him. “I never thought I’d see you again.”
“Shit happens,” James said, smiling.
“Is Shasta here?” Jean asked.
“We haven’t seen him,” Vic said.
“He must be in the cells,” she replied. She opened her bag, slick with blood, and handed an m-4 to Abe and a Colt .45 to Vic, plus a couple magazines. “I don’t need these.” She dropped the empty bag to the floor.
A klaxon sounded.
“Let’s go,” James said. “Jean, lead the way.”
The motley procession fled the soundstage and entered a hallway on the far side. Jean ran, her thoughts racing. Somewhere in her head was a room full of boxes. One was open. From it she pulled a shuddering, weeping man covered in blood, and slapped him across the face. He began babbling, telling her where the cells were in this place. When the group reached an intersection, she skidded to a stop just before the corner.
“Company,” she hissed. They crouched and James and Abe brought their m-4s to bear.
Two guards ran into the intersection. They hit the ground, riddled with bullets. Stephanie picked up an MP5 and they took off to the left, passing more doors.
They reached an open area with twenty cells. It was familiar to everyone but James—a similar room had been at the bottom of the stairs in Maryland. Two technicians were standing behind a desk, their faces writ large with fear. Stephanie recognized them immediately: yesterday they’d played the roles of crematorium workers in another horrific scenario designed to test them, to break down their minds and see what made them tick. She squeezed the trigger, rounds tracking up the tile floor as she raised the MP5, bullets punching into the desk, exploding a computer monitor, catching first one and then the other technician, both shrieking as bloody wounds spattered their white lab coats, jerking and staggering, until Stephanie had run through the entire magazine.
“Burn,” she whispered, and tossed the spent weapon to the floor. Vic, Abe, and Jean hurried forward and began checking the cells, looking in one window after another while James stood guard and Stephanie rubbed her arms, feeling cold and jittery, but listening with hot satisfaction as the two men on the floor behind the desk panted and cried, the life draining out of them.
“He�
�s not here!” Abe yelled.
“Fuck!” said Vic. “Where is he?”
Jean thought for a moment. The man in the box was weeping. “The exam rooms. Back this way.”
They hurried back down the hall. When they reached the intersection with the two corpses, Jean passed by the way they’d come and continued down the hall. She pointed up ahead. “Check those rooms!”
In the third examination room, David Foster Nells lay in a bed, wired to medical equipment. “Shit!” Stephanie cried. “Here!”
She threw open the door and ran in, the others following.
The room was huge, as big as the room with the cells had been. David was the only occupant.
They gathered around the bed. “Is it safe to take this shit off?” Abe asked, worried.
“We don’t have any choice,” Vic replied, and began disconnecting everything. Everyone else followed suit.
When the last of the wires and tubes were removed, David opened his eyes. He looked at them, smiling tiredly.
“Hello,” he said in a quiet voice.
“David?” Stephanie asked. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine.” The expression on his face was beatific.
“We’ve got to get out of here,” Abe said. “Can you walk?”
“Sure. But that won’t be necessary.”
“What do you mean?” James said, suspicious for some reason he couldn’t place. A feeling was stealing over him, a sensation he’d first encountered eighteen years ago on the sunken wreck of the Santa Cruz.
Then they all felt it. There was an energy in the air, a weird tingle. The room shimmered slightly, waves like a heat mirage distorting their field of view. They paused, disoriented, their heads reeling from the power that was now emanating from the man in the bed.
“Well looky here,” a mocking voice said from behind them. They turned.
Adolph Lepus and six guards brandishing MP5s had entered the room while they were dazed. They were twenty yards away and had the group down cold.
“It was downright foolish of you to come here,” Lepus said coolly. “But that don’t mean I ain’t happy to see ya.” Actually, he wasn’t happy at all—he was really quite pissed off.
Then the wave of power expanded, washing over Lepus and his men. A faint atonal piping slipped into the room between the cracks of reality. Lepus went pale and his anger drained away. He remembered.
Lieutenant Adolph Lepus was humping it, forty pounds of gear on his back and an M-16 slung over one shoulder. The foliage was thick, the night moonlit. He wasn’t alone. Three hundred men enclosed him, the whole mass double-timing from the drop zone three miles back.
On the other side of the Cambodian border.
The U.S. hadn’t invaded Cambodia, though Lepus kept hearing that was in the works. This sure as hell wasn’t an invasion—at least, not from the U.S. point of view. This was a covert mission, Operation MONKEY TROUBLE. Most of the grunts here didn’t even know where the hell they were; they figured they were still somewhere in the DMZ. Only a handful knew the truth, and those handful had something in common. On each of their military personnel files was a sticker, a tiny green triangle. This little emblem marked them as possessing DELTA GREEN clearance, a very specialized form of access to a very specialized field of knowledge. That clearance was what separated Lepus from the rank-and-file U.S. Army soldiers around him. He had enough status to be briefed a little more fully than the rest—but he sure as heck wasn’t in charge.
Colonel Satchel Wade was. Wade was a Delta Green agent, though Lepus hadn’t met him until this op. Delta Green had mostly stayed out of Vietnam, as their particular talents didn’t seem to have much use in this land of guerilla fighting and violent futility.
The CIA was suspicious of Delta Green and jealous of its own status in the conflict, and agitated to keep DG’s involvement here at a minimum. DG hadn’t mounted even a single official operation in Vietnam—until now. God knows how Wade got approval. Three hundred men? Storming across the Cambodian border? It seemed like madness.
Lepus was breathing hard. They were getting close now, at least according to the briefing he’d received. Wade and his freaky “advisor,” Li, had set the scene. Lepus had disliked Wade immediately. The man was stout—if he wasn’t a superior officer, you’d say “pudgy”—and he conducted the briefing without any sign of emotion or enthusiasm. Lepus guessed that the act was supposed to make Wade seem like Mister Ice, but the result was less dramatic: he just came off like a halfwit.
The advisor was worse. She was maybe thirty years old, skinny and good-looking. Whatever emotions Wade was lacking were close to boiling out of Li. She took the time to methodically stare down everyone at that briefing as she talked, including Lepus. The feel of her eyes on him was so intense, so ferocious, that he couldn’t help but glance away even though he’d already clued in to what she was doing a few minutes before. It seemed clear that she was calling the shots here, that she had supplied Wade with the relevant intelligence, that she had him wrapped around her finger. She wanted this mission to happen—and Wade was making it so.
For all its interior drama, the briefing was not very revealing. Delta Green had identified an ancient temple on the wrong side of the Cambodian border where the locals were up to no good; tentative explanations involved some sort of nasty occult shit that would eventually be turned against U.S. troops. The CIA had given the thumbs-up to the op, Wade said, and he was sending three hundred soldiers in a frontal assault on the temple and whoever was operating out of it.
The plan immediately struck Lepus as hinky. For one thing, sending three hundred armed men into a foreign country we weren’t officially fighting seemed like a damn foolish thing to do. If the temple were such a threat, why not just let a bomber “accidentally” go off course and blow the fuck out of it? Why this man-to-man approach? For another thing, where was the military brass? An op of this magnitude—hell, from barracks conversations with the men, Lepus had doped out that Wade had pulled people out of units all over the countryside—couldn’t be cleared without a lot of Army seat-polishers stamping approvals left and right. Finally, there was Wade himself. Lepus had been brought in early thanks to his clearance, early enough to see that Wade was pulling all the strings personally. Wade was scurrying all over the place, flashing his credentials and invoking national security six ways from Sunday every time some grunt’s CO or some requisitions officer or some nosy bureaucrat asked what was going on. There was a complete denial of information to all of these people. Wade had justified it to his inner circle by pointing out that you didn’t want to advertise that you were sending three hundred soldiers into a non-enemy nation, but even so, Lepus was unsettled. Not once did he encounter anyone above Wade in the chain of command who knew what the hell was going on.
Lepus had mulled this at length, and finally decided he was just being paranoid. Wade was clearly on top of things, and was working his ass off to keep this mission a secret. But part of Lepus’s mind kept poking at the edges of the question that he wouldn’t let himself ponder: was this mission authorized, or even known of, by anyone higher than Wade?
The men broke from the foliage. Ahead of them lay the temple: an ancient plaza of jagged and broken stone, surrounded by a zone of grass half a man’s height. The temple was a ruin, and showed no signs of habitation.
Lepus got nervous. But he hauled ass with the rest.
As the men mounted the steps of the temple, weapons readied, wondering where the hell the enemy was, a strange, off-key piping sound rose around them. Lepus ducked behind a column and hazarded a quick look around.
His brow furrowed. Around him, the soldiers had stopped running and were milling around the gaping walls and carven obelisks of the obviously uninhabited temple. They were already starting to bitch about the oxymoron known as military intelligence, which had apparently led them to a fight with an enemy who wasn’t even there.
During his first tour, Lepus had consistently been point man for the platoon. He
could almost smell an ambush, a skill honed from hunting game in the backwoods of Alabama, a skill his platoon prized. He was smelling one now.
He ran across the massive courtyard, shoving his way through the throng, towards the steps on the far side that would take him back into the grass. He could have tried yelling something to his fellow men, something about it being a trap, but they wouldn’t have believed him and frankly, he didn’t really give a shit. All he thought about was running.
As he leapt down the steps on the other side and hit the grassy ground beyond, he heard the piping sound stop. Lepus spun around to look at the men in the temple, but kept backing away just the same.
The air around the temple shimmered, like waves of gasoline fumes in sunlight. There was a collective gasp from the soldiers as the wind was knocked out of every one—then, to a man, the soldiers rose to the tips of their toes as if lifted, chests buckled up to the night sky, arms and head lolling back. They were a force of rag dolls, quivering in the moonlight. They didn’t make a sound, which was perhaps the worst part of it all.
Lepus turned and ran towards the side of the temple, trying to ignore the silent death unfolding on the harsh stone nearby. When he got towards the front of the structure, he dropped and began scurrying low through the grass, staying out of sight. After a stretch he rose slowly, just far enough to see what was going on.
At the temple, there was a clattering, heavy sound as three hundred corpses fell over.
The wind had picked up. There was a rush of air over the plaza. He smelled ozone and then bolted again, heading for the foliage. Behind him, out of sight, there was a low rumble.
As he gained the cover of the overgrowth beyond the grass, he hit the ground and hoped for the best. When he was good and down, he hazarded a glance.
An obelisk fifty feet tall, smack dab in the center of the temple’s main concourse, was glowing. Electricity crackled up and down its length. The glow expanded, and began to suggest a form. The outline of the thing was twice the height of the obelisk, with shapes that suggested vast legs and a snaking, twisting appendage that hung from the top. The outline began to fill in with bone and flesh, one gruesome layer at a time.
Delta Green: Strange Authorities Page 33
