“Richard, we need to leave now!” shouted Sullivan.
Richard, who excelled in retreat, was in full concurrence. He turned away from the oncoming mass of evil intentions and sprinted for the elevator as Dalton slipped inside. When he was few steps away, Sullivan removed his hand from the frame that had prevented the doors from closing. Fretting that he wouldn’t make it before the doors shut him out, consigning him to a painful and imminent death from the ravenous hoard, Richard focused on the narrowing gap. Sucking in his chest, he sidled through with barely enough room to accommodate him. As soon as the doors met, Sullivan punched the up button a few times. The old elevator lurched into movement and began to rise. Loud thumps from the frustrated creatures slamming against the door echoed up the shaft.
They had done it.
“Did you plant the charges?” asked Colbert, leaning against the wall for support.
A little breathless, Dalton glanced at the blood seeping from his hand and the commander’s wounds; both needed medical attention. “Richard threw the bag into the room where the alien egg layer was, but as you know, some have hatched and are no longer in the room.”
Richard sighed. He had risked his life for nothing. He could have left the explosives in the hall.
“No matter, they’ll still destroy the level and hopefully everything on it,” added Sullivan, sticking an explosive charge to the elevator ceiling. “At the very least those creatures will be trapped down there.”
Colbert glanced at his watch. “Forty-three minutes before the big bang. Plenty of time for us to move to a safe distance and watch the fireworks.”
Sullivan nodded at Dalton’s hand. “What’s the damage?”
“Serious, but I’ll live. Though I don’t think I’ll be firing a weapon any time soon.”
“Hopefully you won’t need to,” reassured Colbert. “As soon as we’re patched up good enough to prevent blood loss, we’re leaving.”
Sullivan leaned closer to the side of Dalton’s head. “You’ve also lost part of your ear.”
“I have?”
Keen to draw the attention away from Dalton’s ear and who might be responsible, Richard turned to Colbert. “Now I’ve completed your mission for you, can we please get out of this damn Russian hellhole?”
“That’s the plan,” replied Colbert. “We’ll head to the helicopter, move to a safe distance and wait for the charges to go off to make certain the facility’s destroyed.”
“Good, then what happens to me?”
Colbert shrugged. “You can come with us, or we’ll return you to the dig site we picked you up from.”
“Abducted,” corrected Richard.
Colbert grinned.
“Take me back to the crater. I have work to do, and I’m sure my brother’s worried about what’s happened to me.”
“Probably the only one that is,” uttered Dalton, looking at his damaged ear in the reflective wall of the elevator.
When the elevator arrived on Level 3, Sullivan and Colbert stepped out and covered the corridor with their weapons. Uncertain how intelligent the creatures were, and if they could operate an elevator, Dalton kicked the short length of timber between the doors to prevent them from closing and sending the elevator down for the aliens to ride up. Sullivan led them along the corridor that would take them to the secondary elevator, which they would ride to Level 1 and the first aid station.
They paused when a loud crash of tortured metal rose up the elevator shaft and travelled along the corridor.
“That didn’t sound good,” Dalton said, as he and the others gazed worriedly back the way they had come.
Sensing her hatchlings were in danger, EV1L dropped from the ceiling, sucked in her bulbous reproductive mass and formed a creature selected from its extensive repertoire. Four-legged, armored and vicious, Ev1L turned her large head to the men fleeing along the corridor with her offspring in pursuit. A glance around the birthing chamber revealed most of her eggs had hatched. When gunfire rang out, she observed her younglings dodging the bullets; they had inherited her experiences with the human weapons and were quick to react. Those that were hit suffered, but they would survive. She sent out her senses to search for her first produced. Failing to detect its presence, she assumed the humans had killed it.
Ev1L growled menacingly as she padded lazily to the cracked wall, lowered her head and pushed through. Ignoring the glass showering to the floor around and over her, she headed along the corridor and watched the fleeing humans escape into the chamber that could move up and down. She headed for the doors her offspring sprung frustratingly against. Some turned to liquid and tried to seep through the joints but protective seals that could hold back gases and contaminants foiled them.
EV1L growled an order, stilling her younglings. They looked at their parent and subserviently backed away when she approached. EV1L pressed her head against the doors and felt them give a little. She moved away, turned until she faced the doors and rushed at them.
The impact of beast against metal echoed up the shaft. The doors screeched in protest as they buckled under the force. EV1L enlarged the hole when she poked her head through, turned it 180 degrees and gazed up the dark shaft. It was vital for her minions to feed to become stronger, and the only food source available was the fleeing humans. She growled a series of drawn out deep growls before stretching her body through the doors. As her elongated mass touched the concrete side of the shaft, it formed into a large archaic alien centipede and climbed the wall. Her hatchlings poured through the gap and formed smaller facsimiles of their mother. The clicks of a thousand claws filled the shaft as the wriggling mass of Black horrors continued the hunt for human prey.
Armed with Colbert’s rifle and on guard outside the first aid station while Sullivan was inside patching up Colbert’s and Dalton’s wounds, Richard cocked an ear nervously along the corridor and raised the weapon at the sound of approaching footsteps. He turned his head to the doorway and whispered, “Someone or something’s coming.”
Sullivan thrust the roll of bandage he was binding around Dalton’s hand into his commander’s hands. “Can you finish this off.”
Already patched up, Colbert nodded.
Sullivan grabbed his weapon and joined Richard in the corridor.”
“It might be the Russians,” offered Richard anxiously, thoughts of interrogation and gulags flitting through his head.
The possibility of a firefight creased Sullivan’s brow. Though all of them were battle-hardened veterans, except for Richard who he doubted would be of much use, he was the only one not wounded. A small force could easily pin them down and block their only escape route. In addition to that, if the Russians had grenades they might be forced to retreat nearer to the creatures that seemed to be making their way up through the levels. They would be caught between two evils. The lack of any warning from Ramirez was also worrying. If it was the Russians approaching, he must have been overpowered or worse, killed.
As Sullivan’s hand moved to his radio mic to contact Ramirez to hopefully shed some light on the situation, the man appeared around the corner. Sullivan’s gaze flicked to the woman accompanying him. Ramirez’s relaxed manner inspired confidence there was no imminent threat from the Russians or the woman he assumed was one of the surviving scientists who worked here.