Maddock saw others moving in the shadows behind him.
Bones ran toward the fallen man, trying to pull the coat off him but it was too late. And, truthfully, it was for the best.
“Leave him,” a voice from the doorway called. It was the leader of the Spetsnaz team. He had his submachine gun in front of him, ready to cut down Bones if the big man turned on him. He seemed fascinated by his enemy’s concern for his fallen comrade, as if it was an alien concept. “This is not my fight and it wasn’t his either. The man you want is inside. He is insane, believe me, there is no reasoning with him.”
“What do you propose?” Maddock called across the distance, not willing to believe it could be this easy.
“I would rather take my chances with Mother Russia than be part of his madness. But if you go in there, know that you enter at your peril.” The man had a curiously formal, old-fashioned way of talking.
“What about the rest of your men?”
“The rest? That was the only one left to take home.” He looked down at the body beside Bones. Maddock weighed up their options. There was a chance that the Russian was stalling them, that he’d sent word for more men to finish what he had started, but he sounded like a man who was broken, all of the fight beaten out of him.
It was impossible to believe that a couple of bottles of gasoline achieved that.
The man emerged from the darkness, crouched to put his weapon on the ground, then walked slowly toward Professor and the skidoos.
“Where’s the egg?” Maddock asked.
The Russian grimaced. “He has it in there.”
Their new captive held up his arms while Bones frisked him.
“He’s clean. What do you want to do with him, chief?”
“What are you going to do if I let you walk out of here?” Maddock asked.
“Go.” The look in his eyes told Maddock it was an honest answer.
“Okay. Get the hell out of here. Don’t turn around or I’ll put a bullet in your skull. Do we understand each other?”
The Russian nodded. “May God go with you,” he said, looking back toward the black hole that was the open door, and whatever lay across that blazing threshold. He crossed himself, then clambered onto one of the skidoos. Professor stepped back to let the man twist the ignition and power away from the camp, churning snow in his wake.
They watched as the skidoo receded in the distance.
None of them spoke.
Bones bent down to retrieve the fallen man’s weapon. “That was weird,” he said, breaking the silence. “Something happened in there. It doesn’t smell right.”
“Which is why we’re going in,” Maddock agreed. He turned to Leopov. “I’m not asking this time, Leopov. I don’t want you getting hurt when we go in there. Stay back with Professor. We’ll call you when the building’s secure. Ok?” She nodded. No argument.
Maddock and Bones headed back inside the building, no idea what was waiting for them inside.
On the threshold, Maddock stopped and turned to Professor. “Was our gear still on the skidoos?” Professor nodded. “Fire up the radio, get word back to the ship. We’re not hanging around here.” With that, he motioned for Bones to go in with him. They stepped into the smoky darkness as the cocktail’s fire burned out.
TWENTY EIGHT
They came across a few bodies as they made their way inside but these were not soldiers; they were thin to the point of emaciation, skin stretched tight across cheek bones and shoulders. They were brittle and broken.
“Prisoners,” Bones said.
Maddock wasn’t so sure. “That, or victims of the same thing that’s inside that egg.”
“Guinea pigs?”
Maddock nodded. “And if I’m right, there’s no way of knowing if we’ve been contaminated simply by coming in here, or if it’s got some kind of half-life and is already burned out.”
“Pleasant thought, dude. Maybe Professor’s got a theory; he’s usually got an answer for everything.”
“Personally, I’d rather not know. We’re going to have to do this regardless.”
From somewhere further along the corridor came a deep bass thrum that resonated through the walls all around them. It could have been a generator firing into life, or a drill. A huge drill. Sound echoed through the concrete, becoming increasingly distorted as it did so.”
“This way,” Maddock said, taking them toward the noise. They turned right to face concrete walls splattered red. The first thing they saw was the smear of blood along the floor like a trail of breadcrumbs for them to follow. Maddock cursed under his breath but took one cautious step after another until they reached a body which had been dragged along the ground.
“Spetsnaz.” Maddock recognized the emblem tattooed onto the man’s neck. He checked for a pulse. Nothing. As he turned the corpse over he saw that the Russian’s chest had been torn open to expose splintered ribs. Internal organs shifted and started to spill as he lowered him back down again.
The noise came again.
This time Maddock knew that the sound had come from whatever had done this to the dead Russian. It wasn’t a drill or a generator. It was the deep-throated growl of the monsters they’d faced out on the ice.
He gave the nod for Bones to move on. As they took the next corner it became abundantly clear why the Spetsnaz leader had been so eager to leave.
Three more of his men had been torn apart, limbs severed from their bodies, chewed and torn, ripped and covered in so much blood there could have been forty instead of four dead men in the room. The fourth lay in the doorway, wedging the door open. His head had been crushed by vice-like jaws.
They looked at each other, at the corpses, and then back at each other. The place was quiet now. Too quiet. The door ahead led to wherever the creatures had made their lair. They had a choice. Move the body and allow the door to close — and hopefully trap the animal in there — or go inside and face the thing.
The problem was the egg. They had no way of knowing where it was, but the crappiest laws of the universe guaranteed the creatures were between them and it. That was just the way the world worked.
“I’m going in. You secure the rest of the building after the door closes behind me.”
There was no argument from Bones, despite the fact that separating didn’t feel like the smartest move. He gave the briefest of nods and dragged the dead man out of the way. A sticky trail of blood smeared along the floor. Maddock tried not to step in it, but it was impossible. The man had spilled his guts across the floor and the staircase on the other side. There was nowhere that wasn’t stained dark with the stuff.
Maddock went through the door.
He stopped and listened on the other side after the door closed behind him.
The path ahead was lit by dull lights.
He had to tread carefully, and softly.
As he listened, he realized that there were two distinct sounds, one animalistic, the great cat’s growl, the other the voice of a man, speaking soft and low in Russian. Neither man nor beast was aware of his presence.
Maddock held his gun at the ready, descending into the darker levels of the basement. The stone steps had been hewn into the rock. At the bottom, he paused again to listen. The sounds traveled eerily around the rock, carrying a strange echo that made him realize that this was more than a simple cellar dug into the ground. The walls and the ceiling above him were, in the main, roughly hewn. Myriad cables ran along them, connecting machine after machine. Numbers flashed on screens that meant nothing to Maddock. Some of them could just as easily be some fancy washing machine as they could be the control center for a guided missile system. It wasn’t his job to work out what they were. He just had to get the egg and get out of there with the rest of his team. Or at least the ones who were left.