J.A. Konrath / Jack Kilborn Trilogy - Three Scary Thriller Novels (Origin, The List, Haunted House)

by J. A. Konrath

  Humans. How had these miserable hunks of carbon gotten so smart so fast? Sun had hurt him with her poison. Hurt him almost as much as those filthy Mayans did with their uranium ore. Bub could no longer alter himself to fit into the air duct—his body was busy trying to heal. Now, to add to his injury, he might actually have to comprehend his own death.

  He concentrated. Was the Yellow Arm really the only way out?

  Andy had been close to spilling his guts, but then Sun attacked him with the poison needle. That opportunity was lost, but perhaps there was another…

  The demon walked down the hallway to Yellow 4. The door was locked, and there was a keypad on the wall next to it.

  Bub didn’t bother with the keypad. Regular doors he could handle. He turned around and gave it a quick kick with his massive hoof. The door burst inward.

  General Race Murdoch was a hunk of dead meat, cooling in a pool of his own bodily fluids.

  Bub had just enough of his essence left to suit the purpose.

  • • •

  Race had been dead. He was sure he’d been dead. He could even remember the moment his heart stopped pumping. His point of vision had become smaller and smaller, darkness enveloping him, until there was nothing.

  So how could he be thinking? Race opened his eyes, amazed that his wounds were healed and his pain was gone. He soon realized why.

  “Raaaaace. How was deaaaaath?”

  “Quiet,” Race answered the demon. The words felt sour in his mouth, like he’d just eaten some bad ham. “What the hell do you want?”

  “Why is everyone in the greeeeen arm?”

  “They’re having a tea party. You weren’t invited.”

  Bub gave Race’s arm a swift tug, dislocating the shoulder.

  “Tell meeeeeee.”

  The General winced. “I can see where this is going. You torture me until I talk. If I die, you bring me back.”

  “Yessssssss.”

  Race hurt, but his level of annoyance was even greater. He’d been looking forward to death, had actually achieved it, and this smug son of a bitch had taken that from him. First Helen, now this.

  Race wasn’t going to tell him a damn thing.

  “Well, I’ll let you in on a little secret,” the General said. “Any minute now we’re going to be radioactive. I’d be tickled pink if you stayed here with me, so I could watch you bake like a cow pie on Georgia asphalt.”

  Bub tugged Race’s dislocated arm and broke it at the elbow. Race cried out.

  “Is there another way ooooooooout?” Bub asked.

  “Please…” the General winced.

  “Another waaaaaaaaay?”

  “Please…”

  “Pleeeeease what?”

  Race grinned, “Please kiss my lily white Southern ass.”

  • • •

  Then the man actually began to laugh. His pain must have been excruciating, but he was laughing right in Bub’s face.

  And Bub was afraid.

  He picked the General up and threw him against the wall as hard as he could. Race left a bloody spot there, then slumped to the floor, broken and unmoving.

  Bub hurried out of the room and went to the Octopus. With a shrill shriek, he commanded the beast to begin breaking down the gate to the Yellow Arm. There had to be another exit in the Green Arm. There had to be.

  Bub would be damned if he lost his life because of some poorly trained pets on a fourth rate planet.

  CLANG!

  He would see for himself what they were doing. And then he’d slaughter them all.

  “What the hell is it?” Andy asked.

  “It’s a linac. A medical linear accelerator. A very unique one. Get behind it, let’s push it into the hall.”

  Andy stared at the piece of medical equipment. It was white, about five feet high and four feet wide, and sort of resembled a large kitchen faucet. Attached to a rectangular base was a curved arm that could rotate. On the end of the arm was a lens kind of thing. The lens pointed down at a fancy table.

  Sun explained, “A cancer patient lies down on the table, and then their tumors can be bombarded with either electrons or photons from the collimator here.”

  She tapped the spout of the faucet.

  Andy nodded, getting it.

  “Radioactivity.”

  “Right. It kills cancer cells. Actually, it kills all cells, but it’s made to target cancer cells.”

  Andy got his shoulder behind the base and shoved. It barely moved.

  “It’s heavy as hell,” he grunted.

  “It’s actually about half the size of a normal model. They must have custom made it to fit inside the compound’s entrance.”

  Andy and Sun both put their weight into it, getting the machine to slide a foot.

  “This is what Dr. Meyer used to fight his sarcoma,” Sun groaned, pushing as hard as she could. “Skin cancer can cover a large surface area of the body, so this particular model is modified for TSEI—total skin electron irradiation. Instead of a thin beam, it showers the entire body with electrons.”

  “More powerful than an X-ray?” Andy asked.

  Sun stopped pushing and sat down, breathing heavily. “An X-ray machine gives off 200,000 electron volts. This little baby can do about 25 million.”

  “But if it’s used to cure cancer, how can it hurt Bub?”

  “Are you ready for a mini lecture?”

  Andy nodded. Sun brushed the hair out of her face.

  “Radiation is measured on the gray scale. Let’s say Meyer’s cancer required a dosage of 36 gray to complete treatment. Even though it’s an electron shower—electrons don’t penetrate deeply like photons, 36 Gray would make him sick or even kill him. So it’s broken up into ten weeks of treatments, a single 36 centigray dose a week.”

  “But if we give Bub a big dose at once…”

  “It will destroy massive amounts of tissue. But it gets better. This machine can produce electrons and photons. Photons penetrate much deeper than electrons. So if we do a wide photon penumbra—a large beam width for a full body target—at 25 million electron volts, it could really cause some grievous damage.”

  Andy said, “Nice. Let’s do it.”

  They got up and finished pushing the linac out of Green 6 and into the hallway, cables trailing behind it. Sun directed Andy to help turn the machine so it faced the Octopus.

  “Anything else?”

  “It’ll take a moment to set up. Go help Frank with the wall.”

  He gave her a quick kiss on the cheek and ran down the hall.

  Sun detached the treatment table and pushed it aside, and then used the control box to rotate the collimator on the gantry—the big counter weighted arm. She stopped it when the lower defining head was pointing straight down the hallway, aiming at the door to the Octopus.

  That was the easy part. The hard part would be figuring out the settings. Sun took a solitary class in radiotherapy over ten years ago. She didn’t remember much.

  There was a computer control console in Green 6 near the far wall. She went to it and turned it on, hoping it would all come back to her.

  • • •

  One of the reasons Dr. Belgium had chosen science as a career was his distaste for manual labor.

  “So much for that,” he muttered, swinging the pick at the concrete. For all the oomph he put into it, the potato chip sized piece that flaked off the wall was hardly satisfying.

  “How’s it going?” Andy asked, walking into Green 11.

  “How much time do we have left?”

  “About fifty minutes.”

  “In that case, not good. At this rate we won’t break through until next Tuesday.”

  CLANG!

  The noise reverberated down the Green Arm.

  “Uh-oh,” Belgium said. “It looks like that ramming beast has found a new target.”

  Andy picked up the twenty pound sledge and hefted it to his shoulder. The bandage around his wrist had become dark red.

  He gripped t
he hammer and let the wall have it.

  • • •

  The computer program that ran the linac had presets, calibrated to Dr. Meyer’s dosage. Sun found a way to manually change them, but couldn’t remember any dosage calculations. She had to deal with beam energy, field size, distance, filtration, quality, and a dozen other parameters. She decided the smartest thing to do was just shoot for the maximum on everything.

  Dr. Meyer’s beam energy was set at 6 MeV—six million electron volts. She changed it to 25, and went from there.

  • • •

  Andy and Frank developed a chain gang rhythm with their swings, one alternating with another. Slowly, gradually, they cracked through a single 8” x 16” cinder block, and were able to knock it into the wall.

  Andy bent down and used his lighter to peer through the opening. He couldn’t see a damn thing, but the flame on the lighter bent and blew inward.

  “We found it,” Andy said.

  • • •

  CURRENT SETTINGS WILL EXPOSE PATIENT TO LETHAL DOSES OF RADIATION the screen blinked at Sun.

  “Good,” she said.

  Sun saved the settings in memory and started the program to charge the beam. She hurried out of the room to see how the guys were doing.

  Not too well, it turned out. Both Frank and Andy were drenched with sweat, and they’d only knocked a single cinder block through. Blood was dripping down Andy’s right hand. He’d popped several stitches.

  “Give me a try,” Sun said.

  Andy handed over the sledgehammer, which was too heavy for her to properly wield. She tried Belgium’s miner’s pick. It weighed about ten pounds, and Sun found it much easier to handle. After a five minutes of swinging, she managed to put the eight inch pointed head through a second cinder block. Andy and Frank helped her pry the rock away.

  “One more, and we may be able to squeeze through,” Belgium said.

  There was a sudden CRASH! and the ground shook.

  The trio ran into the hallway, and watched as the giant ramming creature burst into the Green Arm.

  It slowly backed out, and in crawled Bub, triumphant, his eyes burning with malevolent glee.

  “Stay here,” Sun told the others, and headed for the linac by Green 6. She immediately knew she wasn’t going to make it in time. Bub was going to reach the machine before she had a chance to turn on the photon beam.

  So she changed tactics and forced herself to stay calm.

  “Well,” she said. “It looks like you’ve won.”

  Bub grinned.

  “I alwaaaaaaaays win.”

  Sun considered her slim options. If she couldn’t find a way to switch on the beam she was dead, Andy was dead, and possibly the entire human race was dead.

  “I have one question to ask before you kill me,” she said, getting closer. The linac was ten steps away.

  “Yessssssssss.”

  Six steps. Five. Four.

  “Do you know what a hertz donut is?” Sun asked.

  The demon cocked its head to the side. “A heeeertz doooooonut?”

  Sun walked calmly up to the linac and put her hand on the control box.

  “Watch,” Sun said.

  She hit the activate button.

  The linac hummed like a stock car and Bub immediately thrust his hands out in front of his eyes. He fell backward, his exposed skin mottling and turning brown.

  “Hurts, don’t it?” Sun said.

  The demon opened his wings and attempted to shield himself, but only something with the density of lead could shield 25 million volts of X-rays. Every inch of his body seemed to bruise and mush like overripe fruit, weeping clear fluid.

  He rolled backwards, but his retreat did little good. There was no beam stopper, and photons traveled in a straight line at the speed of light. They tore millions of sub atomic holes in his body, ripping through membranes, ionizing atoms and bursting cell walls, breaking down his DNA into base pairs.

  As Bub rolled away, large sections of dead tissue were sloughing off his body in strips. Sun watched as he spewed blood along the walls and ceiling. He was screaming, a sound not dissimilar to the cries of the many sheep he’d gutted and eaten.

  “Beg for death, my ass,” Sun said.

  Momentum took Bub through the Green door and into the Octopus, but from what Sun could tell he was no longer moving. The hallway was empty. The giant demon cowered off to the side, out of the beam’s invisible perimeter.

  Belgium came up and said, “Good good good. Leave it on and we’ll get back to work.”

  “Won’t that beam run out of power?” Andy asked.

  “It doesn’t use any radioactive isotopes,” Belgium explained. “A linac uses high frequency electromagnetic waves to accelerate charged particles, such as photons, to high energies through a linear tube.”

  Sun said, “I thought you were a biologist.”

  “Minor in nuclear physics. Fun fun fun stuff.”

  “How much time do we have?” Sun asked.

  Andy looked at his watch. “Forty-four minutes.”

  “Okay, Mr. Physics, assuming we can break down that wall, how far away do we have to be from here when the nuke is dropped?”

  Belgium rubbed his chin. “I’d assume they’d use a simple fission mechanism in the lower kiloton range, maybe 10-30 kTs. A Uranium-235 or a Plutonium-239 bomb would vaporize metals for a kilometer in all directions. We’d need to be 2 to 4 miles away to escape the thermal effects. The blast effects would send hundred mile an hour winds up to the two mile mark.”

  “How about radiation?” Andy asked.

  “If we’re two miles away, we’d only absorb a minimal dose, maybe 12 centigray, but if they used a fusion weapon rather than a fission one, say a lithium deuteride core with an Uranium jacket, then it would be a thermonuclear neutron bomb with the same explosive power, but 30 times the radiation. I’d guess that—”

  The lights went out, plunging the entire complex into total darkness.

  “This isn’t a good development,” Dr. Belgium said.

  “The bastard cut the breaker.”

  “The linac is off!” Sun yelled. “Bub can get in!”

  Andy’s lighter cut through the darkness, and the trio shuffled back to Green 11. Sun knocked over a metal shelving unit, and she and Belgium pushed it in front of the door.

  “SUUUUUUUUUUUUN!”

  Bub’s voice was hoarse and sickly, but it still carried with tremendous force down the hallway and caused Sun’s knees to knock with fear.

  “Look what you did to meeeeee!” he roared. “To MEEEEEEEEEE!”

  “Give me your shirt,” Andy said to Sun. “Mine’s too wet.”

  She complied, stripping to her sports bra. Andy wound the shirt around an ax handle and lit it like a torch.

  “Frank, where’s the pick?”

  “I think I dropped it in the hall. Want me to get it?”

  “Here I coooooooome!”

  “Perhaps not,” Belgium said.

  The doorknob turned. Sun held tight to the metal frame of the shelves and braced herself.

  “Help me!” she said. Frank and Andy put their weight on it. The door exploded inward, sending the shelf skittering across the room.

  Bub filled the doorway. His skin was blistered and peeling, brown and black rather than the normal red. A horn had fallen out, exposing a raw sore. His teeth had shredded his lips, and when he breathed bits of flesh fluttered out like streamers. He was missing his left eye; in its place was a gooey, dripping blob. His animal smell was now a roadkill smell, a stench of decay and death.

  Before, Bub had been taunting and clever. His evil was sadistic and calculating.

  Now he was simply a mad dog.

  This scared Sun even more.

  “Hey, Bub.”

  The voice came from behind the demon, in the hallway.

  Bub spun around. “Yooooooooooooou,” he hissed.

  Andy held up the torch and they watched as the vent grating fell from the ceiling and
a figure crawled through.

  “Race,” Sun whispered.

  • • •

  General Race Murdoch landed hard, but without pain. Before crawling up into the air conditioning vent he’d stopped at the Med Supply room. Besides shooting himself up with various painkillers and stimulants, Race had also made a weapon. He taped the largest scalpel he could find to a broomstick, and then wrapped the tape in a quick-setting fiberglass cast.

  He stood up and gripped the makeshift spear in his good hand, pointing it at Bub’s head. Race felt like he’d lost a fist fight with a lawn mower. But Bub looked even worse.

  “Block off the door,” Race told the trio. “Escape.”

  “What about you?” Sun asked.

  “A little while ago I died with my tail between my legs. Bub injected me with that same stuff he used on Helen. God only knows what I’ll turn into. I’m not going quietly this time. This time I’m going down swinging.”

  “Good luck, Race,” Andy said.

  Race winked. “I’ll take training over luck any day. Now get going.”

  Sun nodded her good-bye and slammed the door to Green 11.

  The hallway was enveloped in absolute darkness, save for a single thing.

  Bub’s glowing red eye.

  “I can seeeeee you in the daaaaaark,” Bub whispered.

  “Not for long,” Race said.

  He put everything into the lunge; his rage over Helen, his frustration at wasting forty years being Bub’s caretaker, his pure hatred for being forced back to life. The spear went into Bub’s eye, through his brain, and stuck in the back of his unholy skull.

  The demon fell, screeching.

  Race sensed movement behind him. He turned, and saw the huge glowing eyes of the giant gate-breaking demon draw nearer.

  “Well, ain’t you a big sonuvabitch,” Race said.

  He felt along the floor and found his spear, yanking it out of Bub.

  “You hungry, big boy? I got something for you to chew on.”

  Race smiled, and when the monster opened its mouth and bit down on him, Race jammed in the spear as far as it could go, his very last thought of dancing cheek to cheek with his beloved Helen.

  • • •

  Andy and Sun threw everything they could find in front of the door while Belgium banged away at the wall.