Sarge shot him a cold look. “The Ark is sealed. Nothing crosses back here until everything on this planet is dead.” He examined his own weapon, adding, “Weapons check. We’re going in hot.” As if to say that settled the issue.
Portman just stood there, his weapon on the floor beside him, staring at Sarge in disbelief. “You’re serious?”
Reaper looked at him. Was this guy really ignoring an order? “Pick up your weapon, Portman.”
Destroyer slapped a belt of ammo into his chaingun. “Come on, Portman — move out.”
Portman didn’t move anywhere. “Didn’t you see the way that thing greased Goat?” His voice was getting shrill. “We don’t know what we’re dealing with!”
Sarge chambered a round, slammed the breach.
“It’s SOP,” Portman continued, insistently, almost whining, “to call in reinforcements when a situation —”
“We are the reinforcements!” Sarge interrupted, his voice like an ax chopping. “Now shoulder your fucking weapon, soldier!”
Portman swallowed — and looked at Reaper for support.
Reaper only slammed a fresh clip into his light machine gun. He looked at Sarge, and said, “Pray for war.”
“Pray for war!” the others chimed in.
Most of them. This time it was Portman who didn’t say it. Sarge’s look bored a hole right through him. Finally, Portman picked up his weapon, and said, “Pray for fucking war.”
They broke up into two teams, and started out, Destroyer half dragging Portman with him and the Kid.
Sarge, Reaper, and Mac headed toward a tunnel marked D4.
Reaper thought about trying to brief Mac on what they’d seen in tunnel — but you couldn’t brief someone about something you didn’t understand yourself.
Sam pried open the “imp’s” jaws and shined a light in past razored teeth.
Duke stood back — looking at the monster, then at Sam, his eyes lingering on Sam. Nice view of her from behind. Much preferable to looking at that horror on the examining table.
Sam’s hand twitched as a particularly noxious smell wafted out of the thing’s gullet, and she dropped her penlight down its throat. The light shone from down there like a flashlight from a scarlet, slimy cave.
“Shit,” she said. She turned to Duke, “Hold this open.”
He hesitated. Didn’t want to get near that thing — even dead.
“Don’t be a wuss, Duke.”
That tore it. A girl calling him a wuss. He had to do it.
He stepped in, gripped the thing’s jaws, careful to keep his hands away from the sharpest teeth — a scratch from those, and who knew what unspeakable interworld infections you’d get. He held them open as she reached into the creature’s mouth, pushing in half her arm.
“Little tension between you and the Reaper?” Duke asked. Get a girl to confide in you about her problems. Sometimes it worked.
“Why does a talented student throw it all away and join RRTS? Turn himself into a killing machine?” she asked, fishing around. Her arm made squelching sounds in its throat.
“I guess most of us are running from something.” Try to sound sensitive with the ladies. That works sometimes, too.
“What about you, Duke?” she asked, still fishing around, grimacing. Making fun of him, probably, as she went on, “What are you running away from?”
“Today,” Duke said earnestly, “it’s mostly been big ugly-ass demons…”
She couldn’t help but smile at that. She drew her hand out, clutching the penlight and, relieved, he let go of the monster’s jaws.
“What was he like before?” Duke asked.
“As a boy?” What had her brother been like? She thought about it a moment. “Empathetic. Sensitive.”
Duke looked at her in surprise. “Hard to think of Reaper as sensitive.”
“Well, I knew him before all the drop-down-gimme-fifty woo-ha stuff.” She resumed her examination of the imp, peering at its chest now.
Duke laughed. “It’s hoo-ah.”
She tapped its chest. “You have a family?”
“I have Destroyer — grew up together.”
“He seems like a good guy.”
Duke nodded — a little embarrassed.
She stared at the horror on the table, decided she needed to cut it wide open to see how it ticked.
“You know…” She tapped the other side of the imp’s broad chest, over its heart. “I bet secretly you’ve got a big heart, Duke.”
Yeah, she was definitely making fun of him. “It ain’t the only big secret thing I got,” he said. What the hell, a shot in the dark.
She looked at him, raising her eyebrows. “Little rusty, huh?”
Duke sighed. “Lady, you got no idea. I been bunked up with a buncha Marines, none of whom I find remotely attractive, for like, ever. Right now, having sex with me is practically your civic duty.”
She was careful not to smile at that. Though she wanted to.
She picked up a scalpel, began a Y-incision on the exoskeleton over the chest. And the scalpel snapped in half.
She tapped the broken handle against the imp’s thick skin. “I need a power bone saw. There’s one in the procedure room.”
“Power bone saw? Lady I been waitin’ for you my whole life…”
Who are you?
I’m you. I always have been. The animal in you. The hungry animal.
No. I’m not you. I…I am Carmack. I’m a scientist. An award-winning researcher. I’m not an animal.
You amuse me, giving yourself airs. All embodied beings are animals.
We become more than animals when we become rational.
Your rationality is like the thin coat a man wears when he’s expecting a light rain. And then comes a blizzard and he freezes to death.
No! Reason built our civilization. Reason is power. It builds weapons to destroy such as you. I know who you are — you’re a part of my mind altered by the infection!
What of it? Can you destroy me, Carmack, without destroying yourself? We are becoming indistinguishable.
Oh it’s dark here, it’s so dark. You — you’re just a nasty little voice in the dark. At least tell me — where am I?
In a safe place. As for the darkness — you are blinded with the rigors of transformation. Hiding from them while your body completes its revolution. That which has so long been hidden away in you will now come to light. The façade of civilization will tear away — underneath is the face of the beast. That is who you really are: me. The hidden part of you released by the genetic infection.
So dark…so dark here…I hurt, my limbs burn…what is happening to me? I feel as if I am pregnant with a child, bursting with new life, but I am male — I feel like that insect that is injected with offspring by its mate, so that when they hatch out they eat their own father from within. I feel like my legs are wriggling with a life of their own, breaking free of the body; I feel like my heart and liver and guts are writhing inside me, fighting one another for space, tearing their way from my skin…Oh God the pain…
We are growing, changing…
Liar! We are not one thing! You’re just some psychological fracture of my own mind. You’re the result of the pressure, the horror of what I’ve gone through…
What you’ve gone through? You mean when you locked the door on your friends and colleagues? When you shut the door on that poor woman’s arm, cut it off so you could be safe? When you let them all die so the important Dr. Carmack could live? What is your ordeal to theirs?
I had to do it — so that I could survive, and warn the others! I had to warn the world!