Franco did not wait for it to strike. He reached out and grabbed its throat with his left arm, the one weakened by a bullet hole.
The creature took the general form of a person but might have been even more inhuman-looking than the alien from the Everglades. Sores and bruises, boils and cracked skin, black eyes and cauliflower ears, a skeleton covered in a skin that resembled white plastic. The only sight he had ever seen that came close to this beast were old photographs of bodies piled at Auschwitz or Buchenwald.
Franco threw it against the wall. It offered little resistance, little in the way of strength, but it did snap at him with rotting, jagged teeth, as if trying to bite off his nose.
"You want a monster, huh, bitch? You want a fucking monster?"
Franco jammed two fingers into its eyes … and pushed. They popped like sour grapes but he did not stop; he drove further into its mushy skull, easily puncturing bands of weak cartilage and snapping skinny bones that seemed no stronger than chicken wings.
It gurgled something, some kind of moan. Its teeth kept snapping, its arms flailed.
Franco pulled away his gore-covered fingers and grasped its throat with both hands. A pain shot up from his wounded leg. He nearly lost his balance and fell backwards. That would have reversed the situation. Instead, the near misstep made him angrier still.
"I’m your fucking monster!" he screamed, banging its head into the wall. "I’m the biggest fucking king-of-the-hill bad-ass sonofawhore monster in this whole Christ-forsaken shithole and DON’T YOU FUCKING FORGET IT!"
He battered the thing’s skull again … and again … and again. A thick, chunky liquid splashed out onto the wall behind. Teeth stopped chattering; arms stopped flailing. Its head deformed, taking on the shape of a rotting cantaloupe.
The sergeant stopped his assault not so much because it was dead, but because his arm grew tired. He stopped with both hands around its throat, his eyes staring straight at its gory, punctured sockets.
"What the fuck you looking at?"
He laughed, unsure if he had asked the question of the monster or it of him. Down there, in that dungeon where shapeless monsters consumed men, where brothers deserted one another, where creatures feasted on flesh — down there the mind could play tricks, making the strange and absurd seem likely and reasoned, especially for a mind burning hot from infection, a mind that had been bent and twisted by the thing living on sublevel 8.
Playtime.
Under such stress, the hidden doors inside a man's consciousness could break open, letting free demons of a far more human nature, but no less dangerous. Demons of prejudice and envy; of frustration and anger.
Demons a weak soul might turn to if trapped in the dark.
"They left me here. They left me here to be eaten alive."
What was that saying? Oh yeah …
"Dad always said … he said, ‘Son, sooner or later you gotta pay the piper.’ What the fuck is a piper?"
Don’t know … but he gets paid … each and every time … sooner or later.
How about this, Benny. How about if you wallow around in this crazy shit long enough, sooner or later you're going to get your due. Sooner or later there’s a price to be paid.
"You say something? Did you … did you say something?" Its lips had not moved. Its arms hung loose. The stain of blood — and worse — still slopped along the wall behind its smashed skull.
The creature had said nothing, nor had anyone else. He had been discarded by everyone and everything, his purpose apparently fulfilled. Gant … Campion, they continued on, as did everything else in Red Rocks' dungeon halls. Sergeant Benjamin Franco was all alone down there; all alone with his memories, his thoughts, and his demons.
"No … you didn’t say shit. You’re dead. Just like they thought they’d leave me for dead, didn’t they? They just forgot about old Sarge and went on their happy little way. I learned in the Rangers, no one gets left behind. You don't leave people behind."
He banged its skull against the wall one more time, as if he held Gant and Campion in his grip and they needed a lesson drilled home.
"So what am I supposed to do? Huh? What am I supposed to do?"
Franco spitefully tossed the limp body aside. It thumped to the ground, as lifeless as Moss, Pearson, and the monster that had been eating his leg.
As his adrenaline cooled, the pain returned. Sharp and debilitating from two distinct injuries. Franco fell to his knees and vomited. He vomited until there was nothing left but dry heaves, one after another for several minutes. When he was done, he wiped the spit from his lips with the back of his hand, but succeeded only in smearing blood across his face.
He paid that blood no attention. But he did pay attention to something else. Not far from Moss’s body lay that soldier’s M4 carbine with its infrared scope.
Franco looked at the weapon, then looked at the stairs ascending to sublevel 5.
Those fuckers left me here to die.
Franco tried to stand again but he managed it for only a long second; the pain was too much. He could do no better than hunch over and limp as he made his way to the carbine.
Biggy grabbed it. The grip and trigger were painted in Moss's blood but Franco barely noticed the mess, just as he failed to recognize that it had been his shotgun that had blown away half that man's body. No, Franco was more interested in the magazine, which he ejected and examined, finding it full.
Idiot didn't even fire a shot. Died without a shot. Fuck that. I'm going down with both barrels blazing.
Franco slung the M4 over his shoulder, wobbled to the stairwell, and grabbed the rail for balance.
They owed him a debt and he planned to collect.
20
Captain Campion stood in one corner of a big room full of bookshelves, tables, microfilm readers, and mammoth monitors hooked to equally large computer towers complete with floppy drives. He realized the place was, in fact, a library, but it could also pass as a museum.
Jupiter Wells and Sal Galati stood to either side, trying to catch their breath after a double-time evacuation from the combat zone.
Still, they had escaped the initial danger, giving Campion an opportunity to get his bearings and plan their next move. To that end, he examined the display on his wrist computer yet again. He knew better than to completely trust that map. After all, the facility's layout had changed during its construction in the early 70s, not to mention some levels undergoing remodeling and retasking in the years before the incident. Add in the fact that the images on his screen were actually poor-quality scans from forty-year-old blueprints and the result was more of a general overview than an accurate representation of sublevel 6.
Wells tapped Campion's shoulder.
"Hey, Cap, just so you know, you almost forgot this."
Wells held the duffel bag containing the V.A.A.D. unit. Somehow, for some reason, Campion had completely forgotten about his half of the equipment. In fact, right before the battle broke out he had focused entirely on keeping Twiste and the bag that man carried safe, yet that bag contained only batteries.
For the first time in his career, Campion worried he might be losing focus. How could he possibly have concentrated so much on Twiste and disregarded the fact that Twiste was useless without the main unit? Worse, how could he leave the battle scene and not even remember the one piece of gear that was critical to completing the mission?
As he recounted the confrontation outside the elevator, Campion came to realize that his mind had not seemed quite right during that entire episode. While forcing Twiste to go first turned out — ironically — to be the best move, it made no sense and did go against Major Gant's wishes.