The main gate was the camp's farthest point away from the mine adit. Cho hid behind a boulder, cringing at the way the creatures lit up the night, glowing and pulsing like some twisted, squishy string of Christmas lights. The way they moved, so fluid, so boneless, like no living thing he'd ever seen, except maybe for a jellyfish or a sea slug.
The Klaxon blared. Cho waited, hoping some miracle might allow Frank to emerge alive from the horrific pile of demons. Blood flew. Cho watched in dumbstruck awe as one of Frank's feet tumbled across the sand.
Jesus, Frank.
Cho opened up on full automatic. The demons shuddered under the attack, quivering in instant death throes, and fell to the ground in lifeless heaps.
Hundreds of the things raged through the camp. The bizarre conflict was already over. Cho's brief battle with his fight-or-flight response ended quickly. He turned and sprinted out the main gate and down the sloping road.
It was only a few flashes of red, yellow, and orange that let him know something was behind him. Still running, he threw a glance over his shoulder but couldn't get a good look at it.
Cho turned and ran backward, firing on full automatic. Screaming, he emptied the magazine into the glowing thing, but it kept coming. It whip-snapped a glowing tentacle — something metallic flew through the air. He ducked, but felt a slicing pain in his shoulder.
His H&K was empty, the trigger making useless clicking noises. The thing was still coming, now only ten feet away. Cho pulled his pearl-handled .45 and squeezed off three rounds — all hits. Whatever the hell it was, it dropped in a lifeless heap on the sandy ground, its mysterious light instantly fading away, leaving a boneless gray corpse behind. He turned and ran before the thing even stopped twitching.
He only made it about two hundred yards when his vision grew spotty. He slowed and looked at his shoulder — blood covered his entire arm, glistening in the moonlight. He stumbled, tried to catch himself, but fell to the ground. His head smacked loudly into a rock.
He lay still.
They swarmed over the camp, pouring in, around, and over buildings. Screams, male and female, filled the night air along with the creatures’ odd sounds. Odd, angry, aggressive sounds. It reminded Kayla vaguely of screeching car tires on hot summer asphalt, but with many different pitches and tones.
The guard barracks burst open. The off-duty guards, dragged from sleep by the blaring Klaxons, came out firing. They ran toward the oncoming mob, firing on full automatic all the way. Somewhere in her mind, it surprised Kayla that the things could be hit, could bleed, could fall in a lifeless heap on the desert floor. Something flew through the air and smashed the forward guard's head like a rotten melon. He dropped instantly, body jittering in the throes of death, a fist-sized rock buried in his skull.
The guards stayed together in a loose line for as long as they could, but within seconds the creatures swarmed over them like army ants. The hacking began.
Kayla lost count, both of dead EarthCore people and of the things that had poured from the mountain. Isolated gunfire continued for several minutes, as did the creatures’ screeches. Human screams, so prevalent in the first few minutes of the conflict, quickly died out.
Someone made it into the equipment shed. A Land Rover ripped through the garage door in a splintering cloud of wood and metal, camp lights flashing off the green paint and the blue EarthCore logo. One of the creatures stood defiantly in the vehicle's path, tentacles waving in psychotic scarlets and murderous yellows. The Land Rover plowed into the creature, which splattered on the grille like a water balloon dropped from twenty stories up. Impressions of gooey orange blood registered in Kayla's brain, but she couldn't be sure of the color under the garish camp lights. The Land Rover turned hard to the right, heading for the downslope gate, trying to escape the camp. The creatures hurled rocks at the vehicle. A dozen or more bounced off every side like wind-driven hail. One finally hit the front windshield, shattering it.
The Rover swerved violently toward the diesel fuel tank. Kayla watched in awe as the Rover smashed through the tank's walls, sending ten thousand gallons of diesel splashing through the camp.
She didn't know how long the battle went on. Gunfire echoed through the camp as someone fought desperately for life. A last human scream punctuated the chaos — the gunfire ceased.
The creatures’ clicks and screeches dominated the night's roaring sounds. They freely moved through the camp, setting fire to everything that would burn — including the spilled gas. Flames shot into the night sky as the creatures tore down the light poles and knocked down walls. As they attacked every structure, the Klaxons dropped off one by one until the alarm vanished, leaving only the crackling fire and the creatures’ strange noises. Flickering orange lit the camp. Kayla watched, barely able to believe what she saw, as the creatures screamed their victory to the night. They crowded near to the flames; so close they had to be blistering from the raging heat. They continued to scream, the sounds of hundreds of tires skidding across open pavement. Kayla sat in her camouflaged warren, paralyzed, unmoving. But the show was far from over.
Explosions ripped from the equipment shed as vehicles succumbed to fire. The diesel fuel continued to burn, still the brightest light in the camp. There were more of the creatures now, hundreds of them, their soft bodies moving to and fro in the demolished camp. The creatures butchered the human corpses, cutting them up into smaller and smaller pieces, then burying the diced remains.
After what could have been minutes or several hours — Kayla had lost all concept of time — the fires began to die down. The creatures seemed sluggish, tired perhaps, but they continued to work. They tore down the blackened Quonset huts, burying the pieces deep in the desert sand.
The first rays of sun illuminated the morning sky with a light the color of a glowing coal. As a unit, the creatures headed for the slope, dragging their dead along with them. Most moved very slowly, some so weak they had to be dragged up by others. They tackled the incline and entered the adit. Kayla watched in rapt attention, unable to look away as they slowly moved out of sight. When the last one disappeared into the adit, she turned her attention back to the camp.
But there was no camp. Kayla lowered her binoculars; with normal sight she could barely tell there had ever been a camp at all. With the binocs, she could see the lumpy remains of a few buildings, the diesel tank's sand-covered concrete footing, here and there a small piece of torn metal reflecting the morning sun. But for the most part the camp had simply ceased to exist.
She wondered if she should move farther away from the camp, but she knew the monsters hadn't seen her. That much was obvious — they destroyed everything and everyone in sight, but they'd never come for her. She decided to keep her location — they'd missed her once, if they came out a second time, they'd likely miss her again.
Her mind finally clicked back into gear. Opportunity? She'd come to the desert looking for it, and now here it was. Much more opportunity than she'd ever dreamed. Screw the South Africans, screw the Russians, and screw the platinum. They offered only money, and money couldn't buy her what she wanted most in the world.
She didn't know what, exactly, she had just witnessed, but she knew damn well no one had witnessed it before. What were those things, some kind of monster? An experiment? Aliens? They couldn't be aliens — what race intelligent enough to use space travel would use knives to attack automatic weapons? Whatever the creatures were, they were primitive. And, in truth, it didn't matter what they were, not for her purposes, anyway.