Now, Peter thought there was something wrong with him. The big guy was huddled up, hunched over like he might hurl. At first, Peter thought he was just coming down off of the battle high, but this was something else. “You don't look so good. You all right? Sure you don't want a little pick-me-up?”
Christian shook his head. Then, he stood up with a sudden force. “You hear that?”
At first Peter could only hear the wind, then he realized his buddy was right. There was something like… like a sucking sound.
And then below them, a bellowing yell. No, not a yell, he thought. A scream.
“Jin!”
They rushed over to the railing, looking down to the level below. Peter's first thought was one of sheer delirium, and his mind jumped to his dealer. He gave me the wrong batch. He gave me the wrong batch. Good God, he gave me the wrong fucking batch!
They were coming from the tentacles. Hideous, blackened shapes were dropping and slithering from the tentacles like roaches. They crawled over the supports, naked and deformed, dropping onto the catwalks in droves. Peter's eyes darted to the left and right hoping — praying — that he taken something that had melted his mind. But that was stupid; nothing worked that fast. Below him, Jin was being pulled into a tentacle and… devoured, Peter thought crazily. He was being sucked inside and eaten by whatever lay within, the ropes hanging off his body like strands of cheese.
The blackened shapes moved across the platform, scurrying and stumbling like animals. But they weren't animals. Those shapes, no matter how twisted and blackened, had once been people.
Peter had a sudden memory then, as clear as anything he had seen in his conscious mind. He was six again, standing with his parents outside of church. “Is there really such as thing as the devil?” he'd asked his mother. She had told him that there was, and that he should always be a good boy, because the devil was watching. But he hadn't been a good boy, had he? Jesus Christ, he killed people for a living. And now, the devil was here.
Christian fired. It snapped him back to reality, the rifle blazing fire beside his head. Vy hit one of the shapes, sending a spray of black blood through the air. They were fast; within moments, he had abandoned the fast-moving targets and was spraying the tentacles, sending streams of black and green fluid raining through the lower levels.
Peter grabbed his grenade launcher and clicked the safety off. By the time he had his head straight, there was no need to look down over the rails. The things were crawling up the stairs. They were crawling up the drill shaft and over the catwalks, and they were running straight for them.
3
Hal's body exploded in a red spray as the bullets tore through the cockpit. The front of the chopper was mangled in an instant, the glass shattered and the metal perforated with holes.
Mason hit the deck before he knew what was happening. The other chopper—his chopper — was hovering thirty feet from the platform. A shape stood at the open bay door, turning the mounted fifty caliber in a deadly arc. Mason stared at it from his back. Up until this morning, he would have believed nothing could surprise him any more, but he was wrong.
Across the pad, Nicholas was yelling something, and he read the kid's lips: “Markus!” he was shouting. “It's Markus!”
At first, it didn't register. The shape in the chopper doorway looked like Reiner, but it was too gaunt, too discolored. And it was wearing a grin, a cutting, eerie rictus unlike anything Mason had seen on the man. That grin bore a hole straight through him. I'm going to cut you in half with this thing, old buddy, that grin seemed to say, and I'm going to enjoy it. I'm going to enjoy it. I'm going to enjoy it!
Mason jumped to his feet and tore ass across the helipad, throwing one arm around Nick. A spray of gunfire cut the ground behind them, missing the kid's legs by inches. Mason lugged him into the stairwell and threw him into the corner like a garbage bag. Melvin was already there, staring like a dog in headlights.
“Can you get a shot off?”
Melvin stuck his head up to helipad level and was greeted by another barrage of gunfire. “No!”
Mason slung the AR-15 around his shoulder. He could hear the chopper circling. The Aeschylus was big, but the hostiles could move around the derrick and get a better vantage. Hostiles was the only way he could think of them. Anything else, and he'd have to stop moving and sort the shit in his head out.
Calle looked at him. “What do you want to do, boss?”
“Draw their fire.”
“Say what?”
“Draw their fire!” he barked.
The kid looked at him from the floor, his eyes wet with pain. “Where are you going?”
“To find the other fifty cal. Now get moving and make yourself useful, goddammit!”
Mason jumped down the stairwell, then bounded out the second level and onto the deck. He could see the heavy gun on the crate where they had left it, near the bridge. In the wake of finding Doctor Grey, nobody had bothered to dismantle it.
Then a sound from below: someone else was shooting. He stopped. The Aeschylus suddenly felt too big, a thousand miles separating him and his men. He put his hand to ear and felt his earpiece, forgetting it was inutile until his fingers touched the transceiver. A second later, he ripped it out and threw it to the ground, screaming to the sky.
The fifty cal was waiting for him just across the deck, and he hurled himself at it, sprinting full force until he reached the crate. It was then, in that moment, that he he saw them.
Human shapes were slithering from The Carrion tentacles and crawling up onto the deck. One of them found footing on the barracks bridge not fifteen feet away. It stared at him as it gained its feet, its eyes nothing but milky pits.
Mason stared back. The thing in front of him was… it was a woman. He tried to reconcile her figure with the alien look of her skin and couldn't. It was too freakish, like something at a circus sideshow after dark. She hissed, an awful, animal sound from the back of her throat, and that broke the trance. He squeezed the trigger on the fifty cal, and the top of her head exploded.
Not twenty feet away, St. Croix came hustling up the stairwell with Vy in tow. The man fired a grenade round into the space behind them, shaking the foundations of the platform with fire and dust.
“To me!” Mason yelled. “To me! To me!”
Vy sent two more targets to the ground, then followed Peter to Mason's side. Mason didn't know how many were left, but if he had to guess… well, he'd guess about two hundred. Crazy, he thought, and suddenly realized just how well Doctor Grey had been holding it together.
Mason unscrewed the bolts holding the mounted machine gun and removed the ammo belt. He was about to let it drop into his arms when a human head rose from the railing in front of him. This one was a man, his bald head and mustache covered by black lesions and spider veins. Mason could see a small tentacle growing out of one ear.
His right hand flew to his knife, and he jammed it through the thing's skull, shoving it straight through. It hissed, the blade showing through the back of its mouth. When Mason yanked the knife away, it dropped backwards into empty space.