“The brief is the same,” King said. “Plant your bomb-spikes. We get out and blow the place sky high. No matter what they’re cooking up here, the remote location will prevent it from spreading and the sands will cover this place up.”
“Damn, remember those guard dogs you wanted, Knight?” Rook’s voice came over the net. “We’ve got a roving patrol here. I don’t think they’ve spotted us. Looks like six men. They’re all bundled up like hairy brown pillow turds.”
“Still nothing on this side,” Bishop added. “I can’t see anything.”
Welcome to my world, Knight thought, still rueful over the loss of his eye.
Then he saw a dozen men, armed with AK-47 rifles, come rushing out onto the floor of the lab below. He crept backward across the metal suspended floor, toward the door to the stairwell. Pawn was already there in the shadows. She raised a finger, pointing at the far side of the catwalk that surrounded the entire lab space. Over eighty yards away, on the opposite wall, was another doorway, most likely to another guard tower.
Eight men rushed out of the doorway, their boots clanging on the metal catwalk. They were bundled up in what looked like rags and furs, and they were each armed with a rifle. The men circled the catwalk, heading right for Knight and Pawn’s doorway.
4
Queen slipped through the snow like a wraith. While Rook attempted to cover her position from where they had been keeping an eye on the south and eastern sides of the building, she followed close behind the roving patrol of men as they moved along the south wall. She briefly switched on the audio for the outside of her helmet, listening for any noises over the howl of the storm, but all she heard was the constant, roaring whine of the wind.
Feeling confident in her approach, because the storm would cover any noise she made, Queen rushed toward where she’d last seen the men, before they disappeared into the blowing ice crystals. The whiteout was thick, but she pressed on blindly, hoping to catch the men and dispatch the entire patrol before anyone was the wiser.
Instead, she ran right into a wall.
Of fur.
In the split second it took her to realize that the men on patrol had performed a ‘Crazy Ivan’ technique, suddenly turning to ensure no one was following them, the man she had run into, covered in rags and furs, and carrying a fur-wrapped AK-47 rifle, began to raise his weapon. Queen’s wasn’t in position. Her rifle was angled off to her left after the unexpected impact. So she lunged upward with it, the side of the SCAR smashing into the man’s gauze-covered head. She figured he could barely see through the layers of cloth anyway. After the weapon impacted his head with a dull thud, the coverings were displaced upward, blinding him.
She didn’t know if a gunshot would be audible over the screaming wind, but she didn’t want to chance it. She dropped her SCAR, and it swung down to her side on its sling. Her hand came up with a SOG SEAL knife instead. The blade was seven inches long, making it a monster of a weapon. She normally preferred a shorter 4-inch blade, but in this environment, where she expected any opponents to be wearing thick layers of clothing, she had thought it best to go with a longer knife. As the blade rammed home into the man’s throat, and continued straight back to sever his spinal cord just above his second thoracic vertebrae, she congratulated herself on the choice. The wide man, looking like an overstuffed brown pillow in his thick clothing, tumbled backward. She held tight to the handle of the knife, and it sluiced out of the guard as he went down.
She was just starting to turn, to keep her own system of Crazy Ivans in the blinding white, when she saw the barrel of an AK-47 emerge from the white fog to her right. With no time to fully turn, she lunged her whole body in that direction, mashing the barrel of the weapon away from her, even as it lit up, spewing 7.62mm death in an uncontrolled burst. She only hoped the man, whose finger had clenched in surprise, managed to mow down some of his fellow guards. Then she and the man were tumbling down toward the ground.
Moving the fight to the rocky soil was a bad enough turn of events, but just as she and the second man hit the hard, frozen ground, something worse happened.
The wind abruptly stopped.
And the blowing snow and sand that had been obscuring her from view, vanished with it.
* * *
“Fight or flight?” Pawn asked, sheltered in the shadow of the doorway.
Knight waited a beat before replying to her. “Option 3. Rook style.” He dove forward, rolling out onto the catwalk. As he went low, Pawn came out behind him, aiming high and firing at the oncoming team of guards. Her three-round burst hit the first man, spinning him, and her second burst hit the next man in line. As the two victims fell sideways, the third man on the narrow catwalk was revealed, and a second later, he was impaled.
Knight had fired one of Rook’s tailor-made spear gun-like bomb-spikes. The compressed-air weapon was strong enough to send the metal spike across the catwalk to drive itself deeply into the man’s chest. Pawn could see the small red LEDs on the ring of explosives around the shaft were lit already, indicating that the bomb was armed. As the man fell backward into the others still standing, Knight and Pawn took off running the other direction along the catwalk.
The remaining three men opened fire on them, bullets pinging off the metal catwalk near their feet as they ran. Suddenly the wall to their left began sparking from additional bullet impacts, and Pawn swept her SCAR over the railing to her right, firing several blind shots down at the floor of the lab, where she assumed the other guards were standing. She knew there was a risk of hitting the vats of fluid down there, and she had no way of knowing what they contained. But since the mission was essentially to break everything, she figured it would all work out okay.
As Knight reached the corner of the catwalk, and another doorway to their left – most likely to another watchtower, he darted inside, holding his arm up to show her that he held the transmitter for the bomb-spike. He was going to flick the switch.
Pawn darted into the doorway, just before the pressure wave ripped along the metal floor, nipping at her heels. As soon as it was done spewing shredded fabric and shattered, blood-stained chunks of rock their way, she darted back out onto the catwalk, which was now mangled and on fire at the end. She leaned over the railing and fired a bomb-spike from her own spear gun down into the lab. The spike implanted in the ground right next to the largest vat of lime green fluid. Pawn then pulled back and swept her SCAR up to cover Knight. He had reloaded his own spear gun and leaned over the rail, as she had done, firing his spike to a far corner of the lab’s floor. They took turns, laying suppressive gunfire and launching their deadly cargo, until Knight had loosed four of his seven remaining spikes and Pawn had fired all eight of hers.
Wordlessly they turned to ascend the darkened stairs of the new tower, hoping there would be an exit, because the space behind them was about to erupt in a fireball of chemicals, pulverized stone and slivers of metal and bone.
* * *
“What in the name of Michigan J. Frog happened to the friggin’ storm?” Rook asked, scrambling to his feet and racing toward the distant brawl between Queen and one of the patrolling guards.
With the air suddenly clear of ice and grit, he could see she had already taken one of the men down, but while she grappled with another, there were four more men. Two had turned already and were rushing toward their fallen comrades.
Rook loosed a controlled burst of fire from his FN SCAR, dropping one of the men, and winging the other. He kept running toward them, firing again as he got closer. He dropped the second alarmed guard, just as Queen plunged her huge knife in the chest of the man she had on the ground. Rook kept advancing and was pleased to see the last two guards hadn’t even turned yet.
Queen climbed to her feet. Rook was still half-a-dozen yards from her position and heading for her at a run. He was about to fire on the last two guards, when one of them turned and the other simply dropped. Rook raised his weapon to fire on the turning man, but he dropped as well.
Queen felt the ground trembling again and then saw Rook heading her way, aiming past her. She turned back and saw the last of the guards fall down. Then she and Rook both understood what had happened to the men.
King, approaching from the back of the building, he had taken both men down with single shots from his rifle, as he’d come around the corner.
But something was wrong. He was running toward them, and moving full out.
“King, what’s—” Rook started to ask.
Then Rook noticed the vibration beneath his feet. At first he’d written it off as another of the tremors Aleman had mentioned. But it was stronger now, and the ground was bucking and jumping, as if this earthquake was going to be a huge one.
Then the source of the quake became clear, as a monstrous thing followed King around the corner, hissing and frothing.
5
King ran faster than ever before, but it still wasn’t enough.
Once he’d heard there was a bioweapons lab concealed underground, he’d planted four bomb-spikes – one in each corner of the ground-floor courtyard inside the outer wall, then he’d headed out a rear gate. That was when the trembling had begun. He’d sensed that it was closer than the rumble they had experienced the last time, and that its force was increasing at an exponential pace.
He had wondered if it was something Knight and Pawn had set off underground, but then the wind died. He could see. A hundred yards behind the building, the soil had erupted, as if a mole twelve feet in diameter was burrowing up from underground. He had thought of the giant 250-foot-diameter sinkholes that had opened in Siberia months earlier.
But the thing that fired out of this hole like a breaching whale was no mole, and the hole had not been a sinkhole, but a tunnel. The creature was ten feet in diameter, and rose up out of the hole straight into the air, at least twenty feet high. It had shiny, wet skin, blood red and covered with cascading rains of dirt. Its long, tapering body was ribbed into segments, and the front end of its tubular shape opened into a huge gaping maw.
It’s a worm, he had thought. It’s huge!
And then the mouth had opened wider, and a plume of purple vapor shot out, making the rocks and soil that it hit steam with wavering fumes.
And... King had thought, Time to go.
As soon as he’d started running for the southwest corner, the massive thing had begun to chase him. He reached the corner and took down two guards, but he didn’t slow.
“King, what’s—” Rook was starting to say.
King had no time to answer him, and the man would get an eyeful in just a second. “Bishop! Going to need that 240, southwest corner. Coming in hot!”
Rook and Queen were already turning to run as he approached them.
“Why am I not surprised it is you who started the big rumbling?” Bishop replied from the other side of the building. She hadn’t said so, but he knew she would be hauling the machine gun to the location he had specified.
“Yeah, count on him to find the one thing out here bigger than a damn rabbit. Knight, Pawn. We’re leaving in a hurry,” Rook said, running side by side with King.
“We’re already on the roof. What the hell is that?” Knight said.
Then King, who had opened his exterior microphone, heard the small man take three shots at the pursuing worm with his sniper rifle. “Didn’t even slow it,” Knight said.
“Slow what?” came Aleman’s disembodied voice. “What are you dealing with?” He was used to being able to see everything the team saw through high tech lenses and video feeds, and he was clearly at a loss with no visuals.
“Seen Tremors or Dune?” Rook asked.
“A giant worm?” Aleman said, disbelief coloring his words.
“Yep, but redder than a Doberman’s wanger.”
Queen had taken the lead in the sprint and was veering toward the corner of the building, just as Bishop rolled on the ground from the opposite direction, coming to rest prone and planting the 240B on its bipod legs.
Queen nimbly leapt over the long weapon and Bishop, and she rounded the corner of the structure. Rook was right behind her, and hopped over Bishop, too. King dove to the ground, next to his sister, just as she opened up with the chugging big gun. He added his FN SCAR to the process, unloading a full magazine at the giant slithering thing heading their way. The ground trembled slightly as the monster approached. King assumed the full-on earthquakes were from it tunneling under the soil and rock.
“Kakova hera,” Bishop swore in Russian – What the fuck? – while pounding the approaching worm with a withering torrent of 7.62 rounds, highlighted with the occasional tracer shot of brilliant orange, so she could adjust her vector of fire. The concentrated fusillade chewed a ragged hole through its side, just to the right of its black, gaping maw, but the beast’s approach wasn’t halted or even slowed.
“Pick up,” King said, buttoning out his magazine and quickly inserting another before blazing away at the worm again.
Bishop scooped up the machine gun and ran. King turned to follow her around the corner of the building, just as the rumbling thing spit at him again. This time a burst of the purple liquid arced forward out of the cloud of vapor, dashing against the side of his environment suit. He saw his left arm start to smoke, but he didn’t slow down his pace.
Bishop, Rook and Queen had all set up at the northeast corner of the building, past the big, wooden front doors. While Bishop inserted a new drum into the machine gun, the others were firing above King’s head at the pursuing creature. The worm had continued well past the corner. It clearly couldn’t turn effectively, and King was grateful for the brief reprieve.
“Boss, your suit’s smoking, like it’s gonna melt,” Rook said.
Bishop opened fire on the creature, this time able to strafe the worm’s full forty-foot-long side, as it slowly arced around the open desert floor.
“It sounds like a Mongolian Death Worm,” Aleman said over their comms.
“Oh that’s helpful,” Rook said. “It couldn’t be the Mongolian Fluffy Rainbow-Pooping Worm?” He dropped a magazine and slotted a fresh one into his SCAR, but then let the weapon hang. It wasn’t doing any damage to the giant ribbed creature. He’d wait until it closed the distance, and then he’d try his ‘Girls’ – a pair of IMI Desert Eagle Mark XIX Magnum .50 caliber semi-automatic pistols. He’d had several pairs over the years, some getting lost in different skirmishes. He hadn’t yet come across anything, no matter how big, that wouldn’t feel a few slugs from the handguns at close range.
“He has a point,” King said, perturbed. “How to kill it would be better than a name.”
“It’s a mythical cryptid. Supposed to be about four feet long,” Aleman said.
“Bigger,” Queen said. “Much bigger. Twelve-foot diameter. Forty feet long.”
King pulled free his KA-BAR knife, a 7-inch blade like Queen’s, and slid it into the boiling, formerly fur-covered sleeve of his environment suit’s fabric, slicing it open, then he dropped the smoking knife on the ground. He’d tried to cut away the burning part of the suit, but had failed. “Rook.”
It was all he had to say. As he flipped off the helmet and hood of the suit, breathing in the freezing air, Rook moved forward to grab the outer fabric of the suit in places where it hadn’t been coated in the creature’s deadly venom. He pulled the fabric taut as King disentangled himself from the outer garment, being sure to lean as far from the smoking side as possible.
Rook instantly saw King’s breath add a cloud of vapor to the already rising ribbon of steam from the cooking fur on the ruined suit.
“It’s supposed to be able to spit venom,” Aleman continued.
“Think we can confirm that one,” Rook said.
Queen fired a sustained burst with her SCAR as Bishop reloaded the machine gun. The creature had finished its wide loop and was homing in on the team, at their new location.
“We need a plan,” Queen urged.
“There’s nothing about how to kill them. No
one has ever even had a confirmed sighting of one...” Aleman sounded frantic.
“Then give me some other intel,” King said, his teeth beginning to chatter. “How long do I have in just the wetsuit in temps like these?” He had shed the outer garment, now smoking on the ground like a dead animal on a charnel heap. He wore just the under-suit, which was a special gel-heated neoprene, and he had been able to salvage his boots and the furry gloves from the outer suit.
Rook thought he looked strange in white, fur-clad boots and gloves, but a black body suit and hood. Like some kind of snow bunny at the Winter games, but this one had an automatic rifle and was collecting the bomb-spikes for his spear gun from the pile of quickly discarded equipment.
“Your suit? Oh crap. Um...if you keep active, any part or your skin that’s exposed might be able to withstand frostbite for...around ten minutes. Maybe less.”
King turned to see the approaching worm was just a few yards away, and it was beginning to rise up in the air, like a cobra poised to strike.
6
“There!” King pointed the barrel of his SCAR and fired an unrestrained, fully automatic burst, holding down the trigger. “Under its neck.”
The others instantly saw what he was targeting. Just under the rim of the creature’s black mouth, which lacked teeth but had short one-foot-long wriggling tentacles, like insect feelers or kelp waving in an undersea current, was a small metal box affixed to the creature’s crimson skin. It looked to be the size of an old metal lunchbox, and King’s bullets pounded the can, pinging off of it. Then Bishop opened with a sustained burst from the 240, and the box, as well as the slick, wet-looking skin below it, disintegrated.
The giant worm dropped down from its attack position, its heft slamming into the ground and sending a shockwave underfoot. Then it turned and headed away from the building, and the surprised team.
“Control mechanism?” Queen asked.
“Possibly,” King said. “Blue, we need a pickup, ASAP.”
SNAFU: Survival of the Fittest Page 31
