“It’s inside…” Carmack whispered. Barely audible.
And then his eyes glazed over.
“Looks like we missed the party,” Reaper remarked.
“What happened to all the animals?” Goat asked.
He and Reaper were in the animal experimentation lab, staring at the broken cages. The cages were all opened — the test subjects gone. Some of the cage doors had been bent back, ripped away.
Gurgling and giggling came from near one bank of cages.
Goat and Reaper nodded to each other. Weapons ready, they eased around the pens, poised to shoot — and found a scientist in a white coat, hunkered down, half-turned away over a fallen, open cage.
“Sir?” Reaper asked. “RRTS, we’re here to help. You all right?” No telling if this was an enemy or someone he should save, yet. They didn’t know who or what the enemy was. He went with friendly until he knew differently. “We’re here to help you.”
The scientist turned toward them — his eyes were wide, his skin the color and consistency of dough. Blood rimmed his mouth and ran from a wound on his neck. “Sir, are you injured?” Reaper persisted.
Still gaping at them, registering nothing, the scientist thrust both his hands into the cage, pulled something white and squirming out. And shoved two white rats into his mouth at once. Bit down…they squealed and writhed, tails lashing.
Goat and Reaper took a step back, shocked. Goat touching the cross at his neck, murmuring a prayer.
“Sir,” Reaper said, thinking he should just blow the guy’s head off instead, “whatever’s happened to you we can get you hel —”
Spitting bits of dead rodents, the man seized a cruel-looking knife from the table and charged them, howling as he came — a rat’s head spinning out of his mouth with the last long ululation. He was nearly against the muzzles of their guns before they opened fire, the bullets slamming him backward to crash into the cages, knocking them into a clattering wreckage.
The scientist twitched, moaned, and went limp. His lab coat was on fire from the close proximity of the gun muzzles; smoke wisped from him like his escaping soul.
“Contact report!” came Sarge’s voice, on comm.
Reaper cleared his throat. Went to look at the name tag he’d glimpsed on the scientist’s coat. “Found one of our missing scientists. Olsen, I guess. He rushed us. Crazy. Just like Carmack.”
Reaper wondered if it was just like Carmack — who was with his sister now. Suppose he should go off the deep end, like Olsen had? He had shown incredible bursts of speed. Unnatural agility, preternatural energy. He might get at Sam before Duke could stop him…
In a corridor on the other side of the lab division, Sarge was talking on the comm to Reaper, with Destroyer just behind him, watching his six.
“He dead?” Sarge asked.
“Yeah, very…” Reaper said, his voice almost lost in the comm’s hiss.
Destroyer was feeling extra nervous. This place made him nervous anyway: it wasn’t like the jungle or the desert or some urban-warfare scenario — he knew what to do in those locales. This place seemed to be operating according to rules he didn’t quite understand.
But now he felt like something was watching him. He didn’t know where it was. He didn’t know what it was. But he could feel it watching him.
And then he heard it. Creaking noises from that big ventilator duct that ran along flush with the wall, overhead…something deforming the metal with its weight.
“Sarge?” Destroyer pointed his gun at the duct.
Sarge looked, saw the duct was shaking, just slightly, as something moved through it. He nodded and swung his weapon toward the grating high in the wall.
Destroyer went to the grate, reached up, quietly removed the grate, pulled himself up…gun in one hand, pulling himself along by his elbows, into the duct. Turning up ahead. He got to the turning, peered around in time to see something rush at him, teeth bared, squealing with hatred as it came — big eyes, muzzle, fangs, fur —
He scrambled backward — firing the gun spasmodically, the muzzle flashes making a strobe light that chopped up his visuals so he didn’t know if he hit the thing. He fell backward, out of the duct into the hall, firing the gun as he fell, puncturing the metal of the vent, the chaingun doing a demolition job on the duct, the ceiling.
Found himself sitting on his ass with the chaingun smoking in his hand.
“What the hell was it?” Sarge asked.
“A…monkey. Some kind of monkey.” Realizing it was probably just an escaped lab animal. Gone a little nuts in here.
But then maybe the animals could’ve been affected by whatever had affected Carmack…presumably the experiments had started with them.
Blood was dripping from the bullet holes in the duct. Sarge went to it — put out his hand. Blood dripped on it. Not ordinary blood. Not the right color.
It was the same as the blood Dr. Willits was just then drawing from Carmack, in the infirmary.
Jet-black.
In the animal experimentation lab, Reaper and Goat were still puzzling over the dead scientist. And the rats on the floor he’d bitten in half.
Reaper shook his head. He wanted to move on. Get to the bottom of this — and get the hell out of the room. He called Sarge on the comm, wondering what they should do, if anything, with Olsen’s body. “Sarge — should we bag him and tag him?”
Goat was looking at something different on the floor now. A shadow, lengthening, twisting. Cast by something behind…
“Negative,” Sarge was saying. “Continue your search.”
But Reaper wasn’t listening anymore. The low, wet rasping sound from behind him had his full attention. He caught Goat’s eye, who nodded; their fingers tensed on the triggers of their weapons —
And they spun, firing at something just glimpsed in the dim farther reaches of the cluttered room. It roared in fury, wounded, and retreated, around a row of cages.
Reaper just made out something bigger than a man, rippling with muscles. Dark scaly skin — and a leg iron, its chain broken, locked around its ankle — and then it was gone from their line of sight.
They advanced on the row of cages it’d vanished behind.
“Shoot-pause-enter,” Reaper said. A standard tactic. Goat nodded.
They jumped around the corner, firing — nothing. It’d moved on, through the open door into the corridor. They shoved fresh clips into their guns, and Reaper led the way into the hallway — empty. Nothing. Except black blood on the floor.
“Reaper,” said Sarge on the comm, “what’ve you got?”
“We’re chasing something,” Reaper replied. It seemed as if every second light was out in this corridor. The long hall was paced by pools of shadow that were darker than they should naturally be.
“What do you mean, ‘something’?” Sarge asked, on the comm.
“Something big! Not human!”
“Godammit, give me a confirmation on what you see!” Sarge hollered over the comm. “Reaper!…Pinky, you get a look at it?”
“Roger that. Enhancing now.”
At the comm center, Pinky was rewinding Reaper’s guncam, from the digital record. Mac was watching over his shoulder, a hulking presence that made Pinky nervous. But he didn’t know how volatile the Japanese Privine might be, so he didn’t tell him to back off.
There — something in that dim image. Pinky froze the frame, rewound a little, put the cursor on a silhouette seen down the corridor. He pressed the keyboard combination for enhance and render. The computer hummed and something began to appear, almost seeming to materialize out of the digital murk. Whatever it was had its back to the camera.