Across the arena, a manhole cover fell back into place, pulled down from within, with a dull ringing noise. Sitting near the wall, near the dead and blackened park, it was the same manhole Thao and Layla had emerged from earlier after escaping the library. Although the tunnel it had been barred it had led outside the walls to freedom. Beyond that it would only be a matter of getting the information they’d taken into the right hands.
xXx
One of the four-person teams of mercs moved around the shoreline. They walked toward the corpse of the Abomination. In the low light, it looked like an exploded whale but the multitude of tentacles and limbs attached to the corpse betrayed its true nature. Even dead, the men kept their distance.
“Were you watching when they took this thing out? Pretty clever.” One of the men said.
“Hell yeah I was, but I still can’t believe Slayerz got permission to transport one of these motherfuckers stateside.” Another said, “Crazy dangerous, can you imagine if it had gotten loose?”
“Probably would’ve nuked the whole site from orbit, only way to be sure and all that shit.” The first man said.
“What’s a nuke going to do?” A third member of the team said, “These things were born in nuclear explosions, probably would just make it stronger.”
“That ain’t the way it works.” The fourth man said.
“No one knows how they work, they don’t even know how these things breed or nothing. That’s what I’m saying, why it was so dangerous to try and capture one of these things and bring it here.” The second merc said, “But I guess they smoked it.”
“I know one thing about them, they fucking stink, now come on and keep your eyes on the prize.” The fourth man said, “We got a job to do and I know they said shoot on sight but I want to get that cyborg chick’s autograph before we take them out if I can.”
The four-man team went to circle around the massive corpse when something scuttled in the darkness. One of the men whipped his assault rifle to his shoulder and tried to track the sound.
“What was that?”
“What are you talking about?” The fourth man said.
“I heard something! Over there!” The jumpy merc said.
Something came scurrying out of the shadows, running in a straight line toward the four men. It was the size of a Golden Retriever but looked like some unholy cross between a giant spider and a squid. A human face was stretched across its back, mouth open and still filled with teeth. The men fired on instinct, the creature darting from side to side as bullets sparked off the ground around it.
“What the fuck is that?”
Another small creature, snakelike, threw itself at the man who had yelled. Its body was coiled and serpentine but its head ended in an extension like a human hand. A lamprey-like mouth took the place of the hand’s palm and it tore a chunk out of the man’s leg through his pants.
There was more movement and more noises from all around them. The blasted body of the Abomination was squirming as if infected with maggots the size of dogs. Weirdly proportioned, in every conceivable shape, scores of the baby Abominations swarmed out of the original’s corpse and converged on the four mercenaries as they sprayed their weapons wildly and screamed.
Beaten and covered in battle scars, a short distance down the shoreline a lone mech came staggering up the slope and out of the lake. Saltwater ran in rivulets down its dented armour.
Puppy’s leg and hip joints were grinding together even worse since being forced to walk across the bottom of the lake to dry land, having sunk like a stone to almost its deepest section after being tossed in by the Abomination. Audio sensors picking up the screams and gunfire, Puppy tilted its bulbous head to one side. Rocking back and forth for a moment, the mech seemed to decide it had better places to be and stomped off in the opposite direction, into the dark and abandoned arena.
Table of Contents
Prologue.
Chapter One.
Chapter Two.
Chapter Three.
Chapter Four.
Chapter Five.
Chapter Six.
Chapter Seven.
Chapter Eight.
Chapter Nine.
Chapter Ten.
Chapter Eleven.
Chapter Twelve.
Chapter Thirteen.
Chapter Fourteen.
Chapter Fifteen.
Chapter Sixteen.
Chapter Seventeen.
Chapter Eighteen.
Chapter Nineteen.
Chapter Twenty.
Chapter Twenty-One.
Chapter Twenty-Two.
Chapter Twenty-Three.
Chapter Twenty-Four.
Chapter Twenty-Five.
Epilogue.
Serial Escalation Page 29
