A tall man with sores on his throat stumbled through the doorway. As if he’d suddenly decided to relax there for a while, he leaned against the wall. He looked down at his chest with a puzzled expression. A dark stain spread through the material of the torn-to-crap shirt he wore. He pulled it open to see a bullet hole above his breastbone that pumped big fat drops of crimson down his chest. Still puzzled, he fingered the wound. I found myself unable to tear my eyes away as he touched the bullet hole with his fingertip, then pressed harder. His finger slipped into the gory hole, his fingernail dis-appearing. With a look of astonishment, he watched his finger smoothly slip inside his chest as far as his knuckle. He began to rock his hand, and I realized what he was doing: He was trying to locate the bullet with his finger. Even as I watched he worked the finger inside the hole, rotating his hand from side to side, as if he’d found an object there that he couldn’t quite- suddenly he coughed.
A stream of blood spurted from his mouth. His knees gave way, dropping him dead to the floor.
Tony shook me. “Snap out of it, Valdiva. Come on!”
I touched the flame to the fuse. The moment it caught I lobbed the dynamite into the middle of tunnel. Hornets packed the place so tightly, they walked with their hands on the shoulders of the ones in front of them, grunting with bloodlust, their eyes locked on ours. A hungry kind of look that fairly hollered their craving to get hold of us and tear the skin from our bones. The dynamite bounced on the head of a bald man, then slapped into the face of a woman with boils clustering ’round her eyes… Hell, these people were goddam monsters… you couldn’t describe them any other way. Ugly creatures driven by an overwhelming urge to kill.
I waved Tony and Zak away from the entrance. I followed, ducking into the open doorway of the sick bay as my homemade bomb erupted with a roar.
We didn’t waste any time. After the tunnel entrance sneezed out a huge ball of black smoke we ran back to the shattered doors. Through the smoke I could see that the explosion had toppled the hornets like a crowd of mannequins. They lay flat, covering every inch of the floor.
I didn’t wait; I ran into the corridor. With no floor showing through the fallen bodies, some lying on top of the others, I ran across that mat of once human flesh. Most were dead, with hideous facial wounds where the blast had ripped at them. Some held up bloody stumps to stop me passing, but they weren’t going to slow me down. No way!
As I ran, my boots crunched down on faces, chests, stomachs, throats. And as we raced across the torn bodies some of them began to recover consciousness. Immediately the air filled with a deep groaning. A great fat bass sound like a choir of madmen singing. The sound grew louder. Moans, groans… a deep, DEEP sound that made the teeth in your head vibrate.
A guy with a beard that reached his chest sat up, his hands outstretched to grab me. I snapped the muzzle of the rifle down and fired, exploding the top of his head. I ran over his still-twitching body and felt his hot blood spray against my bare arms. Tony and Zak, too, fired as they ran. Now the deep bass moan bore a mixture of rising shrieks as bullets ripped into bodies.
Then, ten seconds later, we were out of that gloom filled tunnel. Ahead lay the main bunker. A huge door attempted to slide shut to seal us into the tunnel. But men and women had been hurled back by the blast to fall in the doorway. The heavy door made a mess of their bodies, but still it couldn’t close fully. I slipped through the gap, screening out a sound like cracking eggshells as the steel door crushed hard against torsos, cracking bones, rupturing lungs and bursting stomachs.
I stood for a moment, blinking beneath the bright lights of the bunker. So this was it-Phoenix’s den. My stomach muscles spasmed. This was where he nurtured the hive, feeding it with human captives.
The corridor ran away in front of me. Doors led off on either side. Where now, Valdiva? Where now?
Fifty-two
The main bunker looked far bigger than the little brother annex where Michaela and I had stayed. Room after room lined the corridor. Storerooms. Pump rooms. Bedrooms. Mess rooms. Rooms with air-conditioning plants. Rooms full of computer terminals. The place was the size of a battleship. Corridors ran off at tangents. Stairwells led to higher levels. Elevators plunged to unknown depths.
“Where’d we go?” Tony called as he snapped a fresh magazine into the machine gun.
“I don’t know… We’ll have to go through all the rooms one by one.” I kicked open a door to reveal a sick bay. Spent hypos covered the floor. This must be one of Phoenix’s little joy cabins, where he sent himself on cosmic journeys at the point of a needle. With narc habits like that it’s a wonder the guy survived.
A hornet ran screeching from a corridor, waving an iron bar with such ferocity it flashed with blue sparks every time it struck the wall. I dropped him with a single rifle shot to the gut.
More hornets spilled from a side corridor. Tony’s gun clattered. Men and women went tumbling to the ground.
“Greg, there are hundreds of rooms here. I don’t think we’re gonna have time to search them all.” Zak blasted a pair of hornets with a single shotgun shell.
Tony pumped a tracer into the swarming bodies. “Hey, the bad guys are coming thick and fast.”
No sooner had he said that than Phoenix’s voice boomed in the confined space. “Move into the corridor to your right.”
“Yeah,” I yelled. “As if we should trust you!”
The voice echoed. “You can’t shoot them all, Valdiva. There are hundreds down here!”
“And who’s to say you’re not inviting us to run into their open arms?”
“Trust me, Valdiva.”
“Yeah, like hell I will.”
From a doorway a heavyset man flung himself on Tony. He fell with the man straddling him. The monster put a pair of huge hands around Tony’s throat and began to squeeze. I used the rifle butt to crush the guy’s skull. He crumpled like an empty sack.
“Come on,” I said. “We’ve got to get out of here. There are too many.”
No understatement. Around fifty hornets surged along the corridor we’d just run through. Ahead, three corridors ran away into the distance.
“Come on, Tony. Get up.” Zak pointed the twelve gauge in the direction of the surging mob. “You can’t lay there all day.”
Tony grimaced. “Looks as if I will. The big ape’s gone and busted my leg.”
I glanced down to see Tony gripping his shin. His face was tight with pain.
“Come on, buddy. You’ve got to stand up.”
Tony shook his head. “It’s broken…” He pulled the machine gun toward him. “I’ll stay here and cover you.”
“No fucking way… Zak, grab him by the collar and drag him.”
“Which way?”
“I don’t think it matters; just move as fast as you can. Go!”
The mob started to run. There were so many hornets, the sound of their feet came like pounding drums. I fired the rifle until the magazine was empty, dropping the leading bad guys. Some behind tripped over the fallen bodies. But I wasn’t stopping them all. I glanced back to see that Zak had grabbed Tony by the collar and dragged him into a sitting position farther along the corridor. I followed. “Not that way. That’s where Phoenix told us to go. If I know him it’ll be a trap.”
“Where, then?” A desperate note sounded in Zak’s voice. “Where the hell do we go?”
The pounding grew louder as the hornets ran at us. Now they were maybe thirty yards away. I drew a handgun. In a strangely dislocated way I aimed and fired. I felt calm. I knew I’d simply aim and fire one round after another until the hornets overran us.
I aimed at a guy with a red beard. Bang. He went down with a hole through his cheekbone. Then I focused on a wiry-haired man with a hooked nose. Bang. Clutching his stomach as the bullet tore his liver, he did a kind of forward somersault roll. Immediately the mob charged over him. If the bullet doesn’t kill him those crushing feet will, I told myself in a cool way that seemed as remote from this as if I was watching TV. Bang. A woman with black jagged teeth was next. The bullet popped her eye like a soap bubble. Bang. Another guy went down with blood pouring from his mouth.