As the moving wall connected with the opposite side of the corridor, it locked in with a thump — the same sound that we’d heard earlier. One mystery solved.
“Yep,” Sanders said, “the walls move. I don’t know if there really are an endless number of configurations, but to the prisoners it probably feels that way.” He looked around hopelessly. “And to us, too, now, I guess.”
I studied the walls and noticed there were barely visible seams every fifty yards. “Okay,” I said, “stay close and keep alert for moving walls.”
We walked on for several minutes with nothing happening and my mind wandered to what Halverson said about selling research files to Goldman’s evil twin. I was thankful that we wouldn’t have to deal with soldiers mutated with cockroach genes again, but I had a bad feeling this would be something worse.
I mean, we were in a labyrinth after all.…
As if to confirm my fears, I heard a loud exhale of breath, like a horse would make… or a bull.
Gale looked back over her shoulder. “Don’t worry,” she said, “that’s just a recording the doc uses to freak out the prisoners.”
The animal sound came again, louder. Closer.
“Well, it’s working,” I said, feeling pretty damned freaked out.
Gale smiled reassuringly. “Just wait until he switches to the—” Her expression instantly changed to abject terror as she saw something behind me.
“Bunny!” I shouted as I turned. “Watch your back!”
Bunny instinctively sidestepped before turning to look behind him. “You’ve got to be shitting me,” he grumbled.
The bastard had actually done it. Dr. Goldman had created a human-bull hybrid.
A freaking Minotaur. In a maze. Barreling at me, head down, horns first.
Bunny didn’t shoot. I didn’t shoot. Mostly because the last time we encountered mutants like this, they were our brothers in arms, misled into believing they’d be turned into supersoldiers, not monsters.
I also didn’t shoot because the thing was damn fast.
I was faster. Gale wasn’t.
A split second after I pivoted out of the way, Gale screamed as the Minotaur’s horns impaled her. The creature was tall, so even hunched over with his head down, his horns hit her chest, puncturing her heart and lungs in unison.
The Minotaur shook his head and flung her away. She was already dead. For a brief moment, the Minotaur stared at her with a look of sadness. Grief. He had horns sticking out of his forehead and his nose looked all bull, but his eyes were still human.
He hadn’t wanted to kill her. He hadn’t even glanced at Bunny. He’d been aiming for me.
Confirming my suspicion, the man-bull turned toward me, his nostrils flaring as his breaths came quickly. He looked agitated, confused. It seemed clear I was his target, yet his heart wasn’t in it.
A red dot appeared over his heart, on the thick brown hair that covered his shirtless chest.
“Should I take the shot, Cap’n?” Top asked.
“Wait,” I said, once again getting a feeling of déjà vu. I looked into the mutant’s human eyes and said, “U.S. Army. We’re the good guys. And I think you’re a good guy, too.” I glanced down at the tattered remains of medical scrub pants on his powerful, hairy legs. He hadn’t been a prisoner, he wasn’t a terrorist. “I don’t think you meant to kill Gale, or the other two, either.” He nodded emphatically; I was on the right track. “And you don’t want to kill me, either.”
He shook his head slowly, with a level of indecision that I didn’t like. Then his eyes narrowed, as though he’d made a difficult decision and he was about to do something risky.
Something dangerous.
He charged.
Top would’ve taken him out before he reached me. Well, assuming his bull hide wasn’t thick enough to stop a bullet. Hell, I would’ve put at least two bullets in him myself. Bunny, too, if he’d had the right angle. But there was something I’d forgotten and two things I hadn’t counted on: the Minotaur was damn fast; it wasn’t actually charging at me; and Sanders rushed toward it, causing me to yell for Top and Bunny to hold their fire.
Sanders evidently thought I was shouting at him, because he replied, “Screw you and screw that thing! It killed Gale and Johnson and I’m taking it down.”
He fired his Glock, but he got only one shot off before the fleeing Minotaur rounded a corner.
I thought I heard a grunt of pain, but I couldn’t be sure because the wall engine fired up at the same time. I rounded the corner to see Sanders’s second shot ricochet off a closing wall.
The Minotaur was gone.
No doubt Goldman didn’t want Sanders killing the Minotaur before it killed me.
Something was nagging at me, as though I weren’t getting the full picture. Then Top put his finger on it for me. “Something I don’t get, Cap,” he said. “Goldman knows we’re an elite black ops team, yet he traps us with just one monster?”
“Budget cuts?” Bunny offered.
“You think he’s got a whole herd in here?” I asked.
“We got a big influx of prisoners a couple weeks ago,” Sanders said.
“How many we talking about?”
“A dozen.” He no longer looked hell-bent on vengeance; he looked suddenly petrified. To put it bluntly, he looked ready to piss his pants.
To lighten the mood, I said, “I’ve always wondered what it’d be like to do that running of the bulls thing. Now I don’t have to go to Spain to find out.”
“I’d rather do the one in New Orleans,” Bunny said. I raised a quizzical eyebrow, so he explained. “Instead of bulls, you run with Roller Derby girls wearing bull-horn hats. They won’t gore you, but they’ll whack you with plastic baseball bats.”
“Dewey Beach, Delaware, has the best one,” Top said. “No bats, just some dude in a bull costume and a lot of girls running in bikinis.”
The mood suitably lightened, I suggested we move on. I should’ve known better than to relax, even a little — I was just taunting Murphy’s Law.
So, obviously, it was right at that moment that a strange wheezing sound started up. It could’ve just been that one of the Minotaurs had asthma, but something about it seemed wrong. As the sound grew closer, my mouth went dry and my ass cheeks clenched.
I blamed Goldman. And since I couldn’t shoot him, I chose the closest camera. I got a childish pleasure out of watching my bullet smash through it.
I also distracted the others at the exact wrong moment, just as that bastard Murphy would’ve wanted.
Sanders shrieked, dropping his Glock as he was yanked off his feet by something that most definitely was not a mutant man-bull.
More like—
“The Fly!” Top shouted.
“Fruit fly,” I said distractedly as I tried to get a clear shot, which was near impossible with the way the man-fly was jerking around, apparently having difficulty staying aloft with the added weight.
“How can you tell?” Bunny asked, agitated.
He had a point.
While the shape and translucence of the mutant’s wings could have been from a housefly or a fruit fly, the chitinous scales that blotted out most of his skin were a yellow brown rather than black. And his eyes were a bright red. “Isn’t it obvious?” I said. “Actually, I remember the original Goldman mentioning something about fruit flies.”
“I dunno,” Top said. “This guy kinda looks like Jeff Goldblum if you ask me.”
Sanders struggled to get free, but the attacker held on to his prey tenaciously. As I jogged along after them, I tried to recall what I knew about fruit flies. Did they just eat rotting fruit or would they eat meat?
The security guard flailed around and managed to grab hold of the creature’s left wing. He threw his whole body into a strong tug and yanked the wing right off the man-fly’s body.