She felt the rumble before she heard the horrible, grinding noise of falling rock. She tried to stop, but lost her footing on the loose gravel and fell hard. Her knee took most of the fall, sending hot pain shooting up her leg. She looked up to see Achmed clumsily hit the ground, then spring back up. Cook helped her to her feet and they started forward again.
Strange noises shot down the narrow adit toward them. The sound of hammering on rock and metal filled the air. Other sounds filtered through as well, sounds she couldn't quite place, sounds that chilled her soul. If she hadn't already been sprinting forward with the others, she would have turned and run the other way.
That would have been the wisest choice she ever made, but for Katerina Hayes, it was already too late.
The din of the lowering elevator drowned out all sound from the top of the shaft. Connell heard nothing except the grinding of gears and squeaks of metal. Nothing out of the ordinary.
Nothing that is, until the snap.
The group had been nervously talking among themselves, waiting for the elevator to arrive. The “snap” was a sudden, painfully sharp screech of metal that echoed incessantly through the long shaft. Conversation ended instantly. A brief second passed where all seemed to wait, turning to look up the elevator shaft, to see the cause of the noise.
Connell saw the danger first. The elevator was on its way, all right, but quite a bit faster than normal and tilting to one side, lightly scraping against the smooth shaft wall with a blazing orange stream of sparks.
"Run!” Connell screamed, turning and sprinting away from the shaft. For once nobody said anything; they just turned and bolted down the tunnel in a mad scramble for safety.
O'Doyle and Lashon waited until Connell, Veronica, Mack, and Sanji passed their position. Just as they turned to follow them, O'Doyle looked back and realized they were one head short.
"Fritz!” O'Doyle screamed. Fritz was still asleep, oblivious of the noise and the danger. His eyes fluttered open and he weakly lifted his head. O'Doyle started forward, but the younger Lashon was much faster, sprinting the twenty feet to the elevator with long, powerful strides.
The elevator, cut free from its supporting cable, twisted on the way down. One side caught the wall; the elevator flipped and tumbled down the shaft, filling the tunnels with the horrid, deafening screech of metal on rock. Amplified by the narrow space and rock walls, the painful noises sounded like a demon erupting from hell.
"Lashon, no!” O'Doyle shouted, but it was too late. Just as the tall man reached Fritz and threw an arm around his waist, the elevator slammed into the bottom of the shaft. Five tons of metal hit the ground at terminal velocity, smashing like a bomb blast. The ground shuddered. Bits of rock crumbled from the ceiling. Everyone hit the deck — some voluntarily, while some simply fell from the impact tremors. Thick clouds of dust and dirt billowed forth from the bottom of the elevator shaft, filling the tunnel with choking darkness.
Kayla trained her binoculars on the adit mouth. No sign of the guard and the two scientists. She panned back down to the camp, seeing nothing out of the ordinary. The exhausted-looking miners were filtering back into their Quonset. Almost everyone remained asleep, except for four guards who patrolled diligently, fully-automatic HK416 rifle with 30-round magazines at the ready.
Apparently playtime was over. She'd be extra careful if she had to go into the camp again. It had all been fun and games, but now if she made one mistake and someone opened up with one of the H&Ks, she'd be dead in a second. That had made the game much more challenging. She panned back to the adit. Something interesting was going on in there. Something interesting indeed.
Katerina hadn't quite reached the end of the adit when it happened. The blow to her knee slowed her. She felt a jagged chip of limestone grinding away under her skin, and she couldn't keep up with Achmed and the guard.
Up ahead the guard saw something, yelled in fear, then let loose with the H&K. The roar of automatic weapon fire tore through the air. The deafening sound filled the small tunnel, so loud that she put her hands to her ears and screamed, her eyes closed and her face scrunched in fear and confusion. The firing stopped suddenly — a splatter of something hot and wet hit her face. She wiped it away, then opened her eyes.
It was blood.
She stared at her red-smeared hands. She didn't know if it was the guard's blood or Achmed's blood and she never got the chance to find out. A noise up ahead drew her attention back down the adit. A noise like dead leaves rattling across concrete.
The way it moved. It was something that would take her mind several seconds to comprehend, to accept.
She didn't even have that long.
A crescent-shaped platinum knife flashed out, slashing her abdomen and nearly cutting her in half. She gasped in fear, at least tried to, but it was impossible with her diaphragm separated from her lungs. She hit the ground, eyes still fixed on the horrible, flashing, waving thing that was killing her.
Through her binoculars, Kayla watched a small, metallic shape crawl from the adit mouth. It looked like a spider, but with only four legs. She adjusted the focus, trying to identify the strange creature. As she gazed in confusion, multicolored lights seemed to flash from inside the adit.
The spider moved aside, and Kayla's jaw dropped in astonishment, confusion, and fear. Bizarre creatures, each slightly bigger than a man, rushed out of the adit, past the spider, and spilled down the mountain, soft bodies and boneless limbs giving them a graceful, fluid movement. She couldn't say they ran, because the word running wasn't exactly right. Perhaps flowing was a more fitting description. Hundreds of them poured down the incline with speed and purpose, racing towards the camp. Their colors flashed brilliantly in the night, lighting up the ground before them with an angry, multicolored intensity, oranges and reds and yellows playing off the rocky limestone slope and dirt path.
They looked like a thick, glowing medicine ball with tentacles, three on the bottom that acted as legs, three on the top — juxtaposed above the spaces between the lower tentacles — that looked like arms. The top tentacles, the arms, held long, strangely curved metal objects, obviously some kind of knife.
She was speechless. Thoughtless, in fact, as she watched them hit the camp like a tidal wave. The first guard barely saw them coming, he managed a single burst from his H&K, and then they were on him, hacking and cutting and tearing.
His shots alerted the other guards, one of whom hit the general alarm. Every light in the camp instantly burst on to the accompaniment of a blaring Klaxon. The remaining guards on duty ran toward the shots, weapons at the ready.
The guard who'd hit the alarm turned the corner of the lab just as four of the flowing, flashing creatures reached the building. The guard stared, frozen. They moved so quickly he never even got a shot off. They swarmed on him like piranha, obscuring him from her view. Body parts and great gouts of blood flew through the air, splattering an alarming red against the building's white walls.
From his vantage point at the main gate, Cho watched in horror as the sickening, glowing creatures hacked Frank Hutchins into a dozen pieces, his blood splattering in long streaks against the white lab building walls.
Jessup's demons, he thought with clarity he found odd, considering the insane situation that danced before his eyes. He wasn't crazy after all — they're real.