“Jesus!” he screamed. That was all he had time for, because before he could even scuttle backwards or raise his pistol in feeble self-defense, the creature—a screamer, one of the deformed, mutated members of Alpha squadron—seized him roughly by the throat, hauling him abruptly off his feet, hoisting him into the air.
It was hideous, its face and form a twisted, gnarled mess of varicose veins, bulging nodules and pus-filled cysts. Tumors had covered one of its eyes with stark red lumps and growths, while the other bulged from its socket as if shoved out from behind. Its lips wrinkled back and the bulbous globe of its protruding eye locked on Andrew’s face.
“Andrew!” Dani cried as the screamer threw him the length of the room, sending him smashing into the far wall, leaving a crumpled depression in the plaster. The force of the impact knocked the wind from him and he collapsed in a heap on the floor, his ears ringing, his mind swimming.
Dani screamed again as with an overlapping series of crashes and thuds, more screamers pounced from hidden alcoves in the ceiling. They had all been hiding in the claustrophobically small channel between the drop tiles and original ceiling, clinging to conduits, I-beams and whatever else had been on hand to support them.
“Oh, my God,” Dani shrieked, then she fired the M16, sending a rapid-fire series of rounds scattering into the clustered screamers. The report was deafening, and with each brutal impact, the screamers danced wildly, jerking and writhing, staggering backwards, falling over.
“Shoot them in the hearts,” Andrew tried to tell her, but even if he hadn’t still been gasping vainly to catch his breath, he doubted she’d have heard him over the furious ratta-tat-TAT of automatic gunfire. Now he understood why Moore had told him this when they’d encountered the first creature inside the lab. The regenerative capabilities caused by his synthetic virus meant anything less than an instantaneously lethal wound would only slow them down. And probably piss them off.
The gunshots ceased, the room fading to silence, a lingering haze of smoke and drywall dust hanging in the air. The screamers all lay sprawled on the floor, tangled together, a mass of mostly indiscernible appendages that had once been arms and legs, feet and hands.
“What are they?” Dani whispered. “What the hell are those things?”
That was right about the time one of the screamers began to move, recovering from this initial attack. A pair of spindly, jointed limbs rose from the heap of bodies, each as big around as Andrew’s forearm and longer than one of Andrew’s legs, grotesquely oversized and insectile.
When the screamer lifted the remains of its torso up between these two hideously peculiar limbs, Andrew realized they were some of its ribs, that somehow several of the lower bones in its ribcage had fused together, then grown out from its torso in crude protuberances. Between these and its arms—which had likewise split along fault lines from the vertexes of its thumbs clear to its elbows, separating the hands and the parallel bones of its forearms into separate limbs—the screamer balanced itself, spider-like.
Unlike O’Malley or any of the others Andrew had seen to date, this screamer’s head remained relatively untouched by the tumor-like growths. Its mouth looks swollen, its eyes bulging out as the brain matter behind and beneath grew out of control, swelling inside its skull cavity, but its features still looked human, a contrast to its monstrously deformed body that made it somehow even more grotesque.
“Oh, my, God,” Dani whispered with a breathless, stunned sort of horror, the barrel of the M16 drooping toward the floor. “Langley?”
PFC Grant Langley—or what was left of him, anyway—scrabbled around, crab-like and swift, at the sound of his name. His distended eyes swung to lock on Dani’s face and the thin seam of his mouth cut wide, his lips pulling back as he grinned at her, gleeful and deranged.
“Santoro,” he said, although his voice no longer sounded even remotely human, more a lisping, scraping sound, like fingernails against a chalkboard or a knife blade against a whetting stone.
The places where Dani’s bullets had struck Langley were healing, new tumors bubbling out like heated air bubbles from a lava bed, regenerated flesh forming to fill in the crater-like points of impact where he’d been shot.
The other screamers began to stir and rise all around Langley. The one that had attacked Andrew rose clumsily to its feet, propped on the oversized, gnarled twists of its hands like a silverback gorilla. One of Dani’s rounds had caught it in the head and glistening, spongy tissue burbled out like the innards of a rotten melon spewing from a fissure.
Dani moaned. “Duvall?” she whispered to this one, shrinking back. Her stricken, horrified gaze panned from screamer to screamer, staring past the tumors and disfigurements, finding enough familiarity in each to recognize them all. “Parker?”
Another had been shot in the neck, unleashing a gory rush of blood from its punctured carotid artery. If that wound hadn’t spontaneously healed, then the blood flow had at least been rerouted by the same regenerative abilities, as new blood vessels, each as thick as Andrew’s forefinger, began to grow, vine-like, to encircle its throat, to reach up toward its head in rapidly spreading tendrils and capillaries.
“Madison?” Dani moaned. “Oh, God, what’s happened to you?”
“Shoot them,” Andrew screamed.
“What?” she stared at him, stricken, shaking her head. She looked back at what was left of Alpha squadron as they shambled toward her, backing her further and further across the room. “No, no, I can’t do that, I can’t.”
“Dani, shoot them,” Andrew screamed again, stumbling to his feet, grimacing at a sharp, grinding pain that lanced through his lower back at the movement.
“I can’t!” she screamed back, her voice strained and hoarse. She’d retreated into a wall and pressed herself there. To Andrew’s horrified dismay, the M16 tumbled from her hands, clattering to the floor by her feet. “I know them.”
“Santoro,” Langley hissed again, scuttling forward, swallowing the distance between them in less than a second.
“What happened to you?” Dani whispered. “They told us you got sick. All of you…you were sick.” Her voice cut short in a frightened cry as one of his forked, deformed hands shot forward, its long, spindly fingers splayed wide to frame her face.
“Santoro.” He continued to smile at her, his grin stretching wider and wider until the skin of his cheeks began to split with the strain, ripping open with a sickening sound, like old parchment tearing along moldering seams.
“Oh, God,” Dani moaned.
The flesh under Langley’s chin also split as his neck began to elongate, stretching like molten taffy being pulled to unnatural, elastic proportions. Further and further, his neck stretched, the muscles and ligaments beneath pulling taut, new blood vessels growing in a bizarre, interlocking latticework, until Langley’s head bobbed at least three feet above his shoulders.
“Santoro,” he said again, his cheeks rived wide enough so that when he opened his mouth, his bottom jaw seemed to come completely unhinged, dropping unnaturally, grotesquely wide. She screamed at this, then screamed again as what looked like a pair of chelicerae, the massive fang structures of a spider or crab, suddenly protruded from beneath his upper lip, extending from where he’d carried them retracted and tucked against his upper palate. This was apparently what had happened to his front teeth and gums, how Moore’s retrovirus had transformed them into something horrific, hideous and new.