Sarge felt nothing much, as he contemplated Reaper’s probable death. Maybe Destroyer’s dying had used up the last of his caring. It’d been a long time since he’d been able to feel much. Except satisfaction in destroying the enemy.
“System on line,” said the soothing mechanical voice.
“Get ready,” Sarge said, looking at the mercurial droplet, defying gravity in the midst of the Ark chamber. He charged up the BFG with the flick of a switch. It throbbed inwardly, as if eager to discharge its bioenergy…as if it were eager to begin killing.
He looked at Duke and the Kid. “Here are your orders. Uphold the quarantine. Nothing leaves the compound. If it breathes, kill it. Pray for war!”
Trained to the marrow, Duke and the Kid cocked their weapons. And as one they intoned in turn: “Pray for war!”
Sarge shouldered the BFG, took a deep breath, and stepped into the Ark…
On the other side, the steel door into the compound was wide-open.
That’s the first thing Duke noticed when they came through the Ark — that and the waves of nausea he was experiencing.
After the door and the sickness, the next thing he, Sarge, and the Kid noticed were the bloodied bodies of UAC employees, sprawled randomly across the floor. Some familiar faces were among them.
And at just that moment, Portman’s message came through from Olduvai, Mars. Since it came over an emergency channel the central computer piped it over the public address system:
“…Portman with RRTS 6 Special Ops on Olduvai 0310 hours…”
Jumping over the dead, Sarge jogged to the wall comm. Its small screen blinked with:
RRTS ENCRYPTED
On its monitor was Portman’s grainy videocam image from the bathroom of Carmack’s lab on Olduvai. The message Portman had sent some hours ago, only just arriving:
“…we have encountered hostile activity, require immediate RRTS reinforcements…”
“No shit,” the Kid muttered.
Duke went to the control panel of the compound, at a computer terminal near the wall comm. The monitor there read out:
Quarantine Lockdown Time Remaining…59 min…58 min…
“We’ve got 58 minutes,” Duke said, shrugging resignedly, “before the auto lockdown is lifted…”
Sarge grunted. Thought about it a moment, then said, “Reset it for another six hours.”
Portman’s transmission was repeating again, on an emergency band loop: “…Portman with RRTS 6 Special Ops on Olduvai 0310 hours…”
Visibly annoyed — here was a recording of Portman disobeying his orders — Sarge hit the control for the PA and turned Portman’s voice off.
“I can’t reset it,” Duke said, after tinkering with the computer. “It’s been disabled. Same with the topside comm link.”
Meaning, Duke thought, there was no way to get a message out for reinforcements. The reinforcements they needed after all — Portman had been right.
“They’re disabling the computers now?” the Kid said, sounding confused.
“They’re rocket scientists,” Duke said, “remember?”
“They may be rocket scientists…” Sarge said, cocking his sidearm. “…but they’re still dumb enough to try to fuck with me.”
He slung the BFG over his shoulder, and walked over to the nearest corpse. He shot it in the head.
He went to another corpse. He shot that one in the head.
Duke and the Kid grimaced — but followed suit. Over and over again, black blood fountained and bits of bone sprayed.
Sarge had broken into a weapon’s locker, armed himself with a light machine gun. Gave the Kid an assault rifle. Dangerous in close quarters, the BFG was slung over his shoulder on a strap, like a sinister scuba tank.
Then they split up into the two corridors forking off from the main Ark chamber in the compound.
Sarge took the Kid with him, gestured for Duke to head down the right-hand corridor. Duke gave Sarge a haunted look, just before he went — he didn’t want to set off on his own, but he wasn’t about to say anything about it, and Sarge never rescinded an order.
Guns at ready, Sarge and the Kid moved carefully into the hallway. It got darker as they went, as if the lights were getting scared to stay lit the closer they got to whatever was waiting for them in the depths of the compound.
There was a peculiar sound, coming from around the corner, at the end of the hall. Hard to make out exactly what it was. A sloppy, wet sound, with cracking, gulping noises mixed in, and low snorts.
Instinctively crouching, they turned the corner, turning their gunlights toward the source of the noise.
Demonic semihuman things crouched over human bodies. Feeding.
Interrupted, the creatures looked up, snarling, blood and tissue dripping from their fanged jaws, glaring at the source of the irritating lights. As if they resented being exposed in their feasting.
There were bits of clothing still clinging to these things. Looked to Sarge like they weren’t through transforming yet: You could see they’d once been people, UAC employees from Olduvai or the compound. Their foreheads were swollen in angry red folds, like some aquatic being’s, and their eyes were sunken, barely visible, receding into the mutated opticals of the new, murderous configuration; bone ends had thrust out through the tips of their fingers, burst raw from the flesh, dripping mucus and blood; their heads were sunken into broadened shoulders, their feet had become something quite inhuman…as they growled, their tongues flickered like separate creatures with a sentience of their own.
At their stubby, disfigured feet were what were barely recognizable as human bodies, like sides of beef gone over by amphetamine-crazed butchers. Only, one of those flayed human beings was still alive. Impossible to tell, in what was left of it, if it was a man or a woman. But a set of human eyes, missing the eyelids, looked back at them in quivering, agonized madness from the wreckage of flesh.
The Kid made a soft sound of terror in his throat. But he didn’t run. That was good. Sarge was almost proud of him.
There was that stretched-out instant, when they and the creatures, blinking in the gunlights and ruminating on human flesh, regarded one another.
And then as one the demonic things emitted high-pitched screams of pure fury and rushed at Sarge and the Kid. One of them swinging an emergency ax…
Two steps back — but the Kid wasn’t going to run, not with Sarge standing there. He and Sarge opened up at the same time, assault rifle and light machine gun blazing, filling the corridor with a hail of metal-jacketed death. The Kid didn’t neglect to put a couple of rounds between those staring eyes on the floor. That light had to be shut off.
The half-humans kept coming at them, the snarling mutant in the lead raising the ax over his head, despite being ripped by the bullets, seeming to push upstream against the automatic-weapons fire, as bits of flesh and bone and droplets of blood flew from him.
The Kid was glad Sarge couldn’t hear him whimpering when he ran through his clip, the gun out of ammo.
The creatures were almost within reach…and then all but one of them fell facedown with a sickening squelch.
That one obstinate horror was still reaching for them — it was on its knees, one of its arms hanging by a shred, pouring black blood, its right arm reaching out twitchily to rake at them with its claws — Sarge had run through his clip, too, so he drew a knife and simply stuck it to the hilt in the thing’s right eye, then twisted to slash its brain up from within.
Sarge had been clear enough.
Here are your orders. Uphold the quarantine. Nothing leaves the compound. If it breathes, kill it. Pray for war!