Hefting the shotgun, he moved into the room, ready to blast anything that came through the opening. The floor shifted under his feet, wobbling strangely, and he had to catch himself and regain his balance, as if he were standing on ice.
A low growl drifted from the toilet stall. Rogers tensed, finger on the trigger, waiting for the head to pop up so he could blow it to bloody hash. As he lifted the shotgun anxiously and moved forward, the tile floor behind him erupted. Clawed arms seized him and long fingers wrapped around his legs and dragged him down. Another snapping figure fell on him from behind and he was gone, swallowed by the gaping hole in the floor, his shotgun clattering on the loose tiles near the ragged edge.
Griffith arrived in time to see him disappear. He grabbed up the shotgun and then turned and ran.
Buena Vista
3:22 A.M.
Rudy bolted for his life through darkness filled with atonal shrieks and the worst stink he’d ever smelled, rotten and fishy, like he’d fallen into a mass grave. It was everywhere, wafting on the breeze like some awful swamp gas.
He cleared a clump of yucca like a hurdler and sprinted across an empty lot. He didn’t know if anything was chasing him but he wasn’t going to slow down to check.
He vaulted a chain link fence and raced through a field of tall weeds. Something rose up in front of him and belted him in the solar plexus. He came to a sudden halt, as if he’d slammed into a wall. The wind rushed out of him, and a sharp, burning pain filled his chest. He fell to his knees and looked up into the face of Rattlesnake Torres, and then looked down at the crude blade sunk deep in his own torso. Rudy coughed feebly as his heart pumped blood through his severed aorta, quickly filling his body cavity. He muttered, “Shit,” in a strangled voice and then keeled over and proceeded to bleed to death.
Torres scooped up the MAC-10, checked it, and then searched the dead man for extra magazines. He found one, stuffed it in the pocket of his filthy pumpkin suit, then racked the bolt and headed for the station.
Station Nineteen
3:25 A.M.
In the holding cell Love, Juanita, and the kid were pressed up to the bars, trying to see down the hallway. The noise from outside was deafening, a hodgepodge of inhuman screeching and men yelling in Spanish. The sounds of chaos were punctuated by the intermittent crackle of submachine gun fire. It sounded like a war had broken out in the parking lot.
“What’s going on?” Love demanded.
“Shut up!” Minaberry snapped, anxiously watching the foyer. He had the shotgun clutched to his chest like a security blanket.
Griffith came through the vestibule fast. He had the shotgun that Rogers had been carrying. “Rogers is gone!” he said wildly. “They’re coming through the floor!”
Minaberry drew back, eyes wide like a horse in a barn fire. “We need to get the hell out of here!”
“And go where?” asked the soldier desperately. The sound of the creatures smashing away at the barricade of junk on the stairs reached them. Griffith pointed to the prisoners. “Unlock the door. Let them out.”
“What?” shouted Minaberry. “No way!”
“We need their help!” Griffith shouted. “We need every gun we can get!”
“I am not letting them—” the doctor never finished the sentence.
Griffith cold-cocked him with a hard fist to the jaw, and Minaberry’s head wobbled on his scrawny neck like a bobble-head doll. He bounced back and hit the doorjamb, pole axed into senselessness. The soldier unburdened the doctor of his shotgun and grabbed the key ring from his lab coat.
Love was at the door, hands out, and Griffith slapped the keys into his palm. Love unlocked the door and the soldier handed him the shotgun. The kid stepped up and Griffith didn’t hesitate to give him his Colt Commander .45 automatic. Juanita was next, her hand out, and her face expectant like a kid on Halloween. Griffith let her have Love’s .357 magnum. No one thought to give Vega a weapon. He remained silent, in any case.
“You’re all locked and loaded,” Griffith said, spinning and marching away, moving roughly past Minaberry, who sat rubbing his face and coming to his senses.
“Stay here,” Love said to the kid. “Guard the window.” He pointed to Minaberry. “If the scarecrow here gives you any trouble, kick his ass—but don’t waste a bullet on him.”
“You got it,” the kid promised and gave the scientist an evil smile.
Love heard Griffith working his shotgun at the staircase. “Come on, Juanita,” he huffed as he took off to join the soldier. She was right on his heels, with Vega trailing behind her.
From the vestibule they saw Griffith at the foot of the stairs, blasting away. A creature’s head popped out of the restroom in the hallway behind the soldier. Griffith was too busy keeping the stairs clear to notice the danger to his back. The creature coiled, ready to spring on the unwary man.
Love rushed down the hall with the shotgun and killed it with one blast to the head. Pausing and turning in the door, he looked into the bathroom and saw a creature slithering over the windowsill, and one coming up through a hole which had been punched in the tiled floor under the sink. The entire bathroom floor sagged and looked about to collapse, as if the foundation had been undermined by tunneling, an old siege tactic. He worked the action of the slide and fired.
Juanita shot a reptilian figure coming through the window in the captain’s office and waited to see if another would try to make an attempt. The empty window was a black square, ominous and threatening. It looked huge to her eyes. Seconds ticked by—
And then another pair of evil bug eyes popped into view and she blasted the creature before it could reach for a handhold to begin hauling itself over. Another sprang up to take its place, and Juanita began to worry about running out of bullets. She shot it through the head, and then anxiously tried to remember how many shots she had left. Still they kept coming. She fired again.
At the foot of the stairs, Griffith pumped up empty and tossed the shotgun aside. He pulled the flamethrower into his hands with one deft movement. Light and heat filled the hall as he thumbed the weapon to life, searing the flailing creatures smashing their way relentlessly through the makeshift barrier on the stairs. Thick smoke billowed upward, reducing visibility in the hall. An ear-splitting screech echoed in his ears as he worked the fire over the staircase. He was burning the walls and the wooden stairs as well as the desks that formed part of the blockade, creating a roaring bonfire, but he was past caring. This was it: Griffith’s Last Stand.
In the back, the kid nervously divided his time between the window and keeping an eye on Minaberry, who hadn’t moved since the soldier had decked him. The sounds from the rest of the building were eating at the kid’s nerves like acid. He began to get very worried when the first tendrils of smoke started creeping down the hall from the foyer.
He pointed at the scientist with the barrel of his .45 and said, “Yo, pale and skinny, get your narrow ass in that cell.” He motioned to the holding cell. “I am tired of having to watch you and this window too. I got enough to worry about.”
“But—” the man protested.
“I don’t wanna hear no shit from you. Now move!”
The kid raised the gun and strode toward Minaberry threateningly. The doctor held up his hands. The kid grabbed him by the arm, his wrists were like two pieces of chalk, and dragged him to the cell and shoved him inside.
“You’re lucky I don’t kneecap you and send you outside as bait,” the kid said, remembering how the man had behaved when the tables had been turned and the kid was the one in the cage.
Minaberry stared morosely in front of him at the bloodstains on the wall, and then turned to face the kid. His eyes grew large and round and he jerked back convulsively.
The creature had hit the floor behind the kid as quietly as it had slipped through the window, landing in a crouch, and then slowly rising to its full height. Minaberry noted it was larger than any chimera he had ever seen. It towered over the kid, teeth glinting, do
rsal spines brushing the ceiling.
The kid saw the expression of ineffable horror come upon the thin man’s face. “Hey man, what—”
The creature tore his head off and flung it aside. The kid’s body shuddered and slid to the floor. Then the creature was reaching madly through the bars for Minaberry. The doctor whimpered and retreated, hugging the wall, trying to make himself even flatter and thinner than he already was. He thought briefly of the pheromone in his pocket and wondered if that is what drew the creature to him so insistently.
Could there be a leak in the containment vessel? Could they smell it through the glass bottle?
The snarling monster strained, but even with its long arms and their extended fingers, it couldn’t reach him. Minaberry allowed a strangled chuckle of giddy astonishment to burble from his lips. It couldn’t reach him! Ha! The damned thing couldn’t reach him!
Then, with a sinking feeling, he watched the beast spin around. That tail was long enough to reach him—and it did, skewering him right through his skinny abdomen and embedding itself in the wall behind him, a perfect bulls-eye in the circle of red from Mootz’s blood. But the creature didn’t pump the scientist with neurotoxin. Instead it slowly pulled him from the wall.
Minaberry struggled. White hot agony flooded his body as he dangled on the barbed tail like a worm wiggling on a hook.
The creature used its powerful appendage and dragged Minaberry over like a fisherman reeling in a trout and lifted him up to the bars. The beast twisted around, yanked out its tail like a man withdrawing a sword, and reached its hands and grasped Minaberry by his ears, one hand on either side of his face. It pulled his head almost through the bars, making him scream in wild terror as the pressure on his head increased. The beast put its face close. Leathery green lips drew back and the jaws snapped open, drooling saliva. The hungry mouth jutted forward and pointed fangs pierced Minaberry’s eyeballs, sinking into them, and then sucking them from his skull with a grisly pop, trailing veins like strands of wire.
Minaberry dropped to the floor shrieking in anguish, gore pouring from his savaged eye sockets. His screams became gurgles as blood bubbled out of his mouth from his stomach wound. He choked wetly, dying words drowning in his throat. The creature chewed his eyeballs slowly, savoring the taste. Then its head exploded as Love appeared in the doorway and gave it a taste of twelve-gauge buckshot.
The lieutenant quickly took in the scene, noted the carnage, and lamented that the kid had bought it. But he had no time to mourn. Another hissing figure came slithering through the window. Love blasted it to stillness and then turned and raced into the vestibule.
He ran into a thick cloud. He couldn’t see a thing. He choked on the acrid smoke, his eyes watering. He heard Juanita coughing. “Juanita!” he called out. In the confusion, he didn’t notice Vega slip out the front door.
“Juanita!” Loved called again. A figure with spikes on its back popped up next to him like an evil jack-in-the-box. Startled by the close proximity of the beast, Love pivoted and fired from the hip. The blast caught the creature in the side and threw it back into the smoke.
“Juanita!” he called again.
“I am here.” She appeared from the whiteness like a ghost, wreathed in curling tentacles of smoke. She held up the .357. “I am out of bullets!”
He was getting low on ammo himself but he didn’t tell her that. Instead he barked, “Get behind me!”
They heard more of the creatures knocking over the desk in the captain’s office as they clambered through the window. The hallway filled with snarling shapes. Figures darted wraithlike through puffs of smoke—ethereal, always in motion, impossible to discern.
“Where is Griffith?” asked Love.
A hoarse scream from the boiling clouds of smoke at the end of the hallway was all the answer he needed. If they killed Griffith, then it was all over except the crying. There were too many of them, coming too fast now. The whole place was going up in flames, which didn’t exactly help the situation. Once again, he thought fleetingly of the Alamo. Too damned appropriate. Everyone at the Alamo had been killed too.
A monster jumped up through the smoke, bounding at Love. The lieutenant moved to meet it, bringing the shotgun butt down on its head, crushing one of its eyes. The thing flopped to the floor, its body jumping like a grounded fish.
Love was down to two shells left in the Remington. Decision time: use the last two shots on Juanita and him? He dismissed the thought as quickly as it occurred. He was going to go out fighting. But what about Juanita?
“Come on,” he retreated to the holding area.
Juanita gasped when she saw the mutilated corpses of Minaberry and the kid. Love trampled past the holding cells and turned into the evidence room. He pulled up short when he saw the dead creature on the floor. He’d forgotten that he and the sergeant had placed it there when the attacks had first begun. It felt like a million years ago, in another age, in a different time, rather than a matter of a few hours.
He stepped over the carcass and helped Juanita into the room with him. The evidence locker was a standard-sized room, eight feet by eleven feet, with a twelve-foot ceiling. One wall still contained the shelves with their locked metal fronts, looking like bus station coin lockers. The room had no windows. And the door was solid metal. Only one problem: it locked on the outside.
But that didn’t trouble Love. As soon as Juanita was inside with him, he jumped over the dead creature and scooted out the doorway. Before she had time to ask him what he was doing, he closed the door and locked her in. At least she would be safe.
A shadow fell across the hall.
Love looked up.
Torres smiled at him and hefted the submachine gun in his hand. “Who ordered the large pepperoni?” He had two other weapons slung over his shoulder and he wasted no time in giving one to Love.
Love felt the reassuring weight of the gun. “Torres, I like your style.” He puffed out his cheeks in a huge sigh of relief.
The killer nodded his head. “Let’s get moving. The smoke will help hide us, but only till we get to the car.”
“You’ve got a car?”
“Outside,” Torres said tersely, eyes on the vestibule. “It’s parked as close to the front door as I could get it, with the engine running and the doors open.” He winked at the lieutenant. “This ain’t my first rodeo.”
“I really like your style. Let me get Juanita.”
“Where is she?”
When Love explained, pointing to the evidence room, Torres’s smile grew wide. “Very heroic,” he commented.
A figure appeared at the end of the hall, tail whipping back and forth, eyes blazing. Torres raised the submachine gun and pulled the trigger, muzzle flash lighting the hallway to crackling white. The bullets found their mark and the creature spun away.
“Time to go,” was all Torres said.
Noise from the vestibule. He turned. Another creature had rushed up through the smoke to come at him. He gave it a short blast and it pitched over backward. “It’s really time to go.”
They collected Juanita and had no more trouble until they opened the front door to make the last mad dash to the waiting car—the waiting car that was sitting at the bottom of the walkway absolutely covered with the creatures.
They perched on the front of the Caddy like demented hood ornaments, while others flew back and forth above them, circling and dipping in the hot wind from the burning building. A group fed on Vega’s body at the top of the stairs, no more than five steps from the front door. He hadn’t made it very far.
Torres stopped with the door cracked half-open. “Shit,” he rasped. “We are gonna have to shoot our way to the car.”
Without giving them time to hesitate, knowing that at any minute a creature could come charging at them from anywhere in the building, which was coming down around their heads anyway, he kicked open the door and charged out.
The creatures on the hood toppled over backward in a misty spray of blood as
his first shots ripped out and struck home. Behind him, Love and Juanita blasted away as they emerged from the burning building at a run. The three submachine guns chattered, dropping the monsters like funhouse targets. Torres worked his weapon expertly, squeezing off small bursts, making each shot count. Love and Juanita fired in wide, spraying sweeps. The MAC-10 had an extremely high rate of fire, one of the highest ever for a modern automatic weapon. Before she knew it, Juanita had blown through a full magazine.
It didn’t matter. They’d cleared a path and now the trio charged down the steps to the car. Juanita dropped her weapon and leapt inside. She crawled over and plopped down into the backseat. The first thing she noticed was another submachine gun on the floor, along with a number of bloody, mangled fingers. Her mind took it in clinically. She noted every detail: the hair on the knuckles, the residue of gunpowder on the end of the sound suppressor, the shine of moonlight glinting off the smooth metal.
Torres piled in behind the wheel and slammed the door shut. Love was climbing in when a long arm caught him and spun him around. He was face to face with a drooling, bug-eyed horror. He stuffed his gun in the creature’s gut and squeezed the trigger. The ripping blast punched the creature into a heap. Another took its place, snapping teeth darting for Love’s face. He raised the submachine gun.
Click!
It was empty.
He thought fleetingly of his wife and daughters, achingly aware that he’d never get to see them again—
—the dripping fangs plunged toward him, descending in a whistling arc—
Siege of Station 19 Page 12
