Thirty yards away-at the far end of the hall-loomed a closed sliding door. Nina guessed the larger warehouses waited ahead and the Bishop somewhere further beyond.
The sound of another Chariot flying low over the building drew her attention for a moment. Nina wished she had not sent Odin with the human survivors. She forgot how much they depending on his sensitive canine nose.
“Cap?”
Nina answered Vince with a wave of her arm ordering them to spread out and move forward. The rain increased. The Chariot’s engines sounded directly overhead. Nina glanced toward the ceiling again and saw only black.
What was that?
Did something move up there?
She heard-they all heard-a soft clang. Like a chain tapping against metal.
Nina gripped her rifle tight and took mental stock of her armaments: the Mac-11 in a shoulder harness; the desert eagle on a thigh rig; four grenades on her belt and-as a last resort-a short sword strapped to her left leg. She also carried a detpack in her kit.
They reached the halfway point of the hall. The closed door loomed ahead.
Oliver Maddock walked a step behind and to Nina’s right. The other two stayed close to the far wall.
The sound came again. A rattle. A squeak. Louder.
Nina’s eyes darted from wall to ceiling. Vince and Bly hurried toward the sliding door. Maddock checked their rear, turning around in time to see the thing drop from the shadows and swing toward his gut.
He raised his rifle and pulled the trigger. His silenced rounds went askew as the thing shaped like a scorpion’s tail cut into his chest and hauled him up into the darkness above.
More of that clanging noise.
Nina saw him go. She raised her rifle, but suddenly the darkness turned to bright as a hundred orbs of light sprung to life along the hall. She shielded her eyes with an arm and instinctively dove for a spot low against the wall. Maddock-screaming his last breaths-went higher and higher into the rafters carried by the half-shell, half-iron scorpion tail hanging from a series of chains and pulleys.
As it neared the crisscross of rafters above, the tail uncurled and let the man fall from 50 feet to the concrete. Nina-her eyes barely adjusted to the newfound illumination-could do nothing to save him. He and his gear hit the ground with a sickening crunch.
The metal door slid open of its own accord. Two Spider Sentries stood in the entry on their spindly legs. Their high-powered rapid-fire pellet guns fired. Vince Caesar barely avoided a burst as he rolled toward the wall and returned fire with his carbine.
Bly dropped into a prone position and rested his M-249 on its small tripods. As the alien rounds skipped across the concrete around him, Carl Bly fired a fierce volley. The loud rat-tat-tat of the machine gun joined with the falling rain, the complex’s constant rumble, and the hiss of Spider Sentry guns to fill the hall with an eclectic mix of sound that bounced off the high ceiling and echoed to ear-splitting levels.
Bly’s first rounds went wide but his steady hand guided the hose-like stream of bullets into one of the Spiders. Its round head disintegrated into goo.
Nina felt a shot hit her high in the shoulder, catching uniform and padding but not flesh. She concentrated her M4 at the head. The silenced rounds fired from her carbine in a series of pops. Those bullets annoyed the Sentry-knocked its round head side to side-but could not only chipped at its flesh.
Just behind the rat-tat-tat of the machine gun, the pop of her silenced weapon, and the sharp hiss of the Spider Sentry guns came the whir and clang of the scorpion tail descending from the heights somewhere-not far-behind her.
Vince, from one knee, launched an M203 grenade hitting the second sentry in the side. A nice chunk of its centerpiece fell away but it kept on shooting at Nina. She found cover along a metal bin-a kind of dumpster-but a new threat garnered her attention.
Her instincts felt the thrust of the scorpion tail’s razor-sharp stinger and she dropped and rolled at the last instant. The strange device hit the metal bin where its stinger lodged. The tail-thing immediately wiggled to try and free itself.
Despite incoming fire from the sentry, Nina wedged an anti-personnel grenade in the last joint by the tail’s sharp point. A moment later it freed itself from the metal bin and retreated toward the ceiling.
Nina threw herself to the ground alongside the bin and covered her head.
The grenade exploded. Pieces of metal and a kind of hairy skin fell to the floor but the sound of machine guns and air guns and rain drown out any noise the impact may have made.
Nina sat up and re-focused on the remaining Spider Sentry just in time to see Bly’s M-249 finish it off. The thing wobbled side to side and then collapsed.
“Move! Move! Move!” She commanded and led them into the next room-where they stopped dead in their tracks.
The three soldiers entered a massive rectangular chamber filled with pallets full of cereal boxes, canned fruit, powdered milk, shortening tubs, chemical jugs, pasta crates, and much more. All stacked in piles seven to eight feet tall, shrink wrapped into tight bundles, and aligned in rows to create a maze of boxes. Most of the goods inside certainly spoiled a long time ago; an acidic sour smell emanated from the collection joining with the already pungent aroma of the facility.
The room stretched as long and as wide as a football field. A catwalk ran the length of the chamber halfway up the four-story western wall. Bright fluorescent lights hanging from a flat metal ceiling lit the whole place up like a stage on which a play would soon begin and Nina knew exactly who the players would be.
“We have to keep moving,” she said, but she did not get a chance to finish the sentence.
Nina felt hot shot fly passed her face, inches from her nose. She instinctively dove toward the first line of packed pallets.
Carl never stood a chance. A round hit him in the forehead. The weight of his M-249 machine gun pulled his lifeless body over like a toppling statue.
Vince tried to dodge but another blast of alien bullets hit him in the leg. He crumpled over, barely finding cover behind another pallet of goods.
The shots came from the catwalk overlooking the maze of crates from the west wall. One of Voggoth’s mechanical commandos served as assassin.
Nina raised her rifle and tried to return fire, but more shots came in from the advantage of an elevated position. She retreated, pulling Vince along with her by his utility belt.
Behind cover, Nina took stock of her mates.
Bly lay in the open in a growing puddle of crimson. The impact tore away the top half of his head. Despite knowing battlefield gore all her life, Nina felt a sharp pang in her heart at the sight of her friend so badly mangled.
She turned to Vince. Blood streamed out and over his black BDUs from a wound to his knee. His face twisted in agony, but he refused to cry out.
Captain Forest removed her pack and retrieved a heavy bandage. She struggled to wrap it around the wound. His leg shook violently from the pain.
“Listen, we have to stop the bleeding; or at least slow it down,” she spoke the obvious. “Then I can get you out of here.”
“I can’t walk, Nina.”
“Not yet you can’t. But look, I’ve got strong shoulders. We’ll get you out of here.”
“Strong shoulders? Yeah-yeah…” he mumbled as she wrapped the bandage tight. Blood spouted but with each trip around the leg the dressing grew firmer and pressed against the hole in his leg.
A grating metallic sound interrupted the first aid treatment. The two soldiers faced south and saw the bulkhead from which they had come slam shut with a very permanent clang.
Nina returned to her work, pulling the bandage tight on its final trip around his knee.
Another grating metallic sound. This one farther away. This one from the north end of the warehouse. Nina did not need to see the bulkhead opening; she could picture it in her mind. She wondered how the Christians had felt when the Romans opened the tigers gate on the far side of the coliseum…