“But won’t the explosion—”
“No,” Roy shook his head. “Shrapnel can’t turn corners, so if you stay in here, you’re safe. And the concussion doesn’t have this far of a radius. But there’s no guarantee that the explosion will kill that thing, either, so as soon as we blow the vault, we’ll have to close on it fast and make sure it’s finished.” He paused. “We’ll see.”
Standing, Roy lifted the rifle and glanced out the window of the Observation Room where Margaret and Isaiah stood on the platform of the ATLAS.
“Oh, hell,” he muttered. “Now what?”
***
Roy sprang onto the ATLAS platform with energy that would have seemed impossible fifteen minutes ago and asked, “What are you doing out here without some guards, man?” He pointed toward the Observation Window. “We don’t know for certain that that thing is in the corridor. It could be in this tunnel.”
“Just taking a look,” said Isaiah. “Can your men squeeze that hydrogen bomb into this cylinder without damaging these magnets?”
Roy glanced into the ATLAS. “Yeah. There’s enough room. But I don’t know whether that nuke isn’t gonna go active the second those particles start colliding in here. It could go nuclear as soon as Margaret hits the switch.”
“Doesn’t it have fail safes?”
“It’s got seven fail safes. But who knows what’s gonna happen when a bunch of protons start hitting it at the speed of light?”
“Understood. I just wanted to know if this chamber is big enough to hold that nuke without damaging any of these magnets,” Isaiah continued. “This ATLAS is calibrated with a laser micrometer. If it’s off one thousandth of an inch, it won’t work.”
Roy was glaring nervously at both ends of corridor.
“I think it’s good but hurry it up,” he said shortly. “This ain’t a good defensive position.”
“I’ve seen enough,” Isaiah stepped back. “Now I know why I couldn’t open this door when Amanda and I were trapped in the corridor. It can only be opened from the control room. Like a bank vault. And Janet didn’t know we were down here.” He nodded. “Let’s get back and prepare a last chance suicide run.”
***
Roy carefully stuffed the satchel in the crevice carved into the titanium vault by the plasma arc welder and slowly, silently stepped back. All of them stared down as if it would explode at any second.
“Well,” said Roy, “that’s the best we can do.”
“How big will it be?” asked Isaiah.
“Equal to about five hundred pounds of TNT,” Roy answered. “And if that thing has torn its way halfway through this vault when I blow it, he should get the full force. This alloy isn’t made to resist that kind of pressure and the walls will amplify the concussion.” His gaze flowed across the walls. “The concussion alone might kill it.”
“And if it doesn’t?” asked Janet.
Roy shrugged, “Then we close on it and try to finish it with regular ordinance. Bullets and grenades. If that thing’s made of flesh and blood, it bleeds.”
There was a pause.
“Some things can bleed an awful long time,” Isaiah observed.
Roy’s grunted, “Yeah. I know. I saw a saltwater crocodile bleed for three weeks after it lost a leg. It killed six more villagers before we put it down.” He sniffed. “If it bleeds, sure, we can kill it. But some things can bleed long enough to kill you and your whole hometown before it goes down.”
“Have you ordered Janet to close the last two vaults once you and the guys lock horns with it?” asked Isaiah.
“Yeah.”
“To keep it from reaching the Observation Room in case it kills all of you?”
“Uh huh.” Roy placed the stock of the rifle on his hip. “If Delta doesn’t kill it in this free-for-all, then there’s no more Delta. No more guards. Simple as that. You guys will be on your own. And I hate to say it, but at that point you might as well launch your suicide run. You won’t have anything to lose, that’s for sure.”
For a moment Roy gazed at the ceiling. “But if it does kill me, and you guys somehow manage to finish it, don’t be too fast to rush into the light of day. You’re gonna have to use a lot of caution if you don’t want to get shot dead.”
“Why is that?”
“Because I guarantee you that the Swiss army has already set up a perimeter around this mountain. So if this demon, or that collider, doesn’t kill you, I can promise you that they will. They’ll think you’re infected or not even human or some damn thing. To be honest, they’re not gonna be looking for a good reason. They’ll be scared and there will be a quarantine in place. Standard procedure.”
Isaiah nodded, “In the unlikely event any of us survive, I’ll remember.”
Standing beside Tony, General Jackman stated, “Well, I gotta be honest. This ain’t the first suicide mission I’ve been volunteered for but this is the proverbial end of days mission for sure. Still, if we’re gonna die, let’s make sure we take those things with us.”
Unexpectedly Tony mumbled, “If we’re doomed to cash it in, I’d appreciate a chance to pay up some of my debts, if that’s even possible.” He slowly shook his head. “Christ, I done seen so much war I gave up believing in good and evil a long time ago. But there ain’t no contest here, boy. Hell, no. This is evil like I ain’t never seen evil in thirty years of looking evil dead in the face. And that’s saying something.”
Margaret’s voice emerged from a radio.
“It’s one vault away.”
Roy pressed the mic.
“We’re on our way.”
***
As they gathered in the Observation Room Isaiah stood alone in the corridor staring at the vault a half-mile away but he didn’t plan to be standing here when that satchel exploded. It didn’t take much calculating to know the chances of anything standing within a half-mile of the oncoming detonation, especially when that shrapnel would be channeled down this corridor like machinegun fire.
Roy stuck his head out the door. “C’mon, man! It’s on the other side of the vault!”
Isaiah entered the portal and shut it, swiveling the handle.
“Don’t do that,” said Roy “I need a line of sight.”
“What? You have to be standing in the corridor?”
Roy shook his head, “I don’t like it, either. That blast is gonna fill that corridor with enough debris to demolish a tank. And as soon as the satchel detonates, we all have to charge down on that thing whether the corridor is on fire or not. We’ll just have to take our chances on whether it’s wounded.”
“How could it not be wounded?”
“Hell if I know. They don’t train us to fight demons.”
Isaiah picked up a spare rifle.
“Forget that,” Roy stated. “If we can’t stop that thing, we’ll only have two chances left to finish this. That’s when you initiate your plan and, if you don’t succeed, the general blows the satchels on the collider and kills everybody. I only have one question.”
“What’s that?”
“If you’re bound and determined to do this astral travel thing, why don’t you go ahead and go? Let us finish these things by ourselves.”
Isaiah shook his head. “I can’t leave until I know that we’ve put these two down.”
“Why?”
“Because it’ll be one less factor I have to calculate on the other side. And the less I have to consider, the better.”
“If you go, I want some kind of signal to know whether you’ve even made it to the other side. Because if you don’t make it, we blow the collider. But I am not sending you into Hell’s Gate and then kill myself and everyone else in this place when there’s a slim chance you might actually pull this off.”
Everyone stared at Isaiah.
Amanda stepped forward. “I have an idea.”
“It’s the only way!”
“If you go with me, you’ll die.”
Amanda scanned the room. “What are you talking about? We’re probably gonna die, anyway! At least if I go with you, I can bounce back through the gateway and tell Roy that you made it and we still have a chance.”
Roy asked tiredly, “Did you just say, ‘bounce back through the gateway?’”
“It’s a portal!” Amanda raised her hand at the ATLAS. “It’s the same thing as a door! And a door swings both ways! If we can go into that dimension through that portal then I can come back through it as long as the collider is still alive! But if you blow up the collider, then Isaiah won’t have any way to escape the bomb!”
No one spoke until Margaret stated, “Amanda is right. She can return through the ATLAS as long as the collider is up and running. But she’ll only know if Isaiah has made it to the final conflict. She won’t know the outcome.”
On the wall, a monitor flickered and a fragment was torn from the third vault, the only vault separating them from the creature.
Roy snatched up his rifle. “Lock and load!” He focused on Isaiah. “If we can’t put this one down, you try your suicide run. And as soon as Amanda comes back through the portal you got exactly one hour to finish it on the other side.” He held up a finger. “You’ll have exactly one hour, Ronin, to finish the fight and escape the biggest nuclear blast any dimension has ever seen. Got that?”
Isaiah nodded.
Amanda closed her eyes.
“Talk about a chance in hell,” she whispered.
“Whoa!” Janet spun with the word. “It’s almost through the vault!”
Roy slammed both hands down on the console before he snatched up the detonator and ran to the door. “Everybody get behind something solid!”
He stuck his arm out the door and pressed the button.
***
Strangely, Amanda heard nothing and within a moment found herself staring at the open door where Roy had disappeared and there was nothing but white light. The air surrounding her was almost solid with a weight that prevented her from even moving her head. But she could also not look away from the door. Then she saw Roy’s body fall limply to the floor; he had been pressed against the wall as if by an invisible hand.
Then a roar filled the tunnel and the Observation Room was a liquid thing—as solid as a flood—completely condensing inside the chamber with an invisible mass thundering over her body and inside her head. Then Amanda was screaming as she suddenly found the ability to slam both hands over her ears. And she kept screaming, realizing somehow that it was helping her equalize the pressure inside her body as the last of the explosive effect was gone and there was nothing but silence.
Roy’s voice boomed from the door.
“On me!”
He charged into the corridor.
Every man with a weapon scrambled out the door and Amanda raised her gaze to a screen to see a titanic humanoid shape rising from ragged rubble completely sheathed in white debris and dust.
Whether it was wounded or not was impossible to determine but it moved slowly before it staggered and fell. Heavily coated in ash, it was horrifyingly visible and Amanda confirmed what she’d suspected earlier: It seemed to be wearing armor. She didn’t know how long she stared before Isaiah snatched up a rifle and ran toward the door.
“No!” Margaret screamed. “If you get killed we won’t have a chance to close the portal from the other side!”
Isaiah shouted over his shoulder.
“They need all the guns they can get!”
Shots erupted in the corridor as Amanda and Margaret leaped back. And, after a moment, Amanda heard someone say in her voice …
“I thought you didn’t like guns …”
***
By the time Isaiah reached the conflict, a holocaust of firepower was focused on a black-and-white shape shattering walls and he knew in a heartbeat that it was the same beast that had attacked them earlier. This time, however, it seemed far greater in scope and Isaiah was certain that it was wearing armor.
It was more than half again the size of the largest grizzly and seemed to be made of stone instead of flesh. Already half a dozen guards lay dead at its feet and it was only beginning to recover from the blast.
It lashed out with a single arm that no one could have anticipated and took a guard’s head off at the neck before swiping the half-closed hand back through empty air. Roy bellowed at the wholesale carnage and fired a grenade.
The grenade must have hit the creature dead center but Isaiah didn’t know for certain because he was in the air—air thick and blinding with smoke—before he painfully crashed into debris that he didn’t take time to identify. He chambered his weapon and struggled to his feet, instantly aiming at the beast.
He held down on the trigger for a long, concentrated blast at what seemed like center-mass of the creature and even in the swirling white dust saw where the bullets were defeated by whatever armor it wore over its torso and head. Isaiah raised aim at its face and kept the trigger pressed and the beast took a series of steps backward, flinging up a single arm as if to ward off the fusillade.
Rifle fire was converging on it from every direction and from every survivor, but the beast would clearly survive the carnage to kill all of them unless they could somehow defeat its armor.
“Get down!” roared Roy, lifting something to his shoulder.
Isaiah knew what it was and dove behind a barely visible bulk of wall large enough to shield him from the detonation of the Javelin—a Light Anti-tank Weapon—and was deafened at the resulting explosion. Isaiah had no idea if anyone else had survived the blast, but he leaped to his feet staggering.
The beast slowly rose.
The blast had knocked it backward and to the floor but didn’t kill it. Still, the armored chest revealed a slash of black and green that Isaiah quickly calculated as flesh and blood and it had lost its helmet. Now it’s face and head were exposed.
In the speed of the moment Isaiah couldn’t be sure, but he saw other rifles erupt with fire and vaguely realized he was not the only survivor.
The beast roared with what could be described as human rage as it charged into a trio of guards, and even though they never ceased firing they didn’t live long enough to do any damage. But in the rush of the conflict Isaiah was certain that its armor was not any more impervious to ordinance than steel. Yeah, it could repel bullets and grenades for a time but not forever; they had to pour down on it until they reduced its armor to shreds.
“Son of a bitch!” shouted Roy as he scrambled across the debris and snatched up a fallen rifle. He didn’t even rise as he rolled and centered his fire at the gap in its armor that should have been visible to all by now.
The beast protectively closed a hand flat over its chest and raised its other arm across its face as it angrily staggered backward. Then it flung out both arms and bent forward to roar and Isaiah got the first clear glimpse of its face.
Above gaping jaws its eyes were liquid black. But somehow Isaiah saw, or sensed, an end to it—a place where intelligence and strength glassed out like a glade reduced to charcoaled nothingness by a consuming blaze.
They were wearing it down.
“Aim high!” Roy bellowed above the din of gunfire and scrambled across a space, snatching up another Javelin.
Isaiah took a solid stance, pulling the stock of the rifle tight into his shoulder, and aimed for its right eye. He fired a single shot and the beast wrenched back and screamed, grabbing its face with its right hand as Isaiah fired a bullet into its left eye, causing the same reaction. It staggered almost to the point of the demolished vault clearly wounded but still a long way from going down if its rage was any indication of its endurance.
The image of a retreat, however slight, encouraged the
surviving guard to instantly close on it unleashing full clips and changing clips without report.
It stepped beyond the ragged remnants of the vault.
Roy fired the second Javelin.
This time Isaiah didn’t have time to dive behind cover and instinctively lifted a single arm over his head as he half-turned to evade the furnace of fire that engulfed the monstrosity. Isaiah was not aware of how much time passed before he staggered, deafened and stunned, to his feet, and to his vague astonishment he heard a bestial howl.
With difficulty Isaiah managed to focus and saw that the creature did appear to be gravely wounded this time; its chest was clearly visible with gaps of bright green almost as glowing as the distant emergency light still working in the corridor. Indeed, most of the walls and ceiling were torn and demolished by the explosions and gunfire, but enough light remained for Isaiah to see Tony hurl his rifle aside and leap forward, snatching up one of the two remaining Javelins.
With what would have been considered a suicidal rush, Tony advanced in front of the raging gunfire. Then charged over rubble with broken steps to where he was actually on a level equal to the beast’s chest and head. And it was clear that Tony knew the simple process for readying and firing the Javelin.
He raised it to his shoulder, took two seconds to poise, then leaped outward and down, landing solidly on the beast’s chest as he shoved the Javelin into its chest.
“Eat this!” was all Isaiah heard before the encompassing explosion—an explosion amplified in strength by the enclosing walls—fully lifted Isaiah and hurled him down the corridor. But this time Isaiah was slower reaching his feet, stunned again by the detonation, and realized that anyone who had stood close to the perimeter of the blast was dead.
Quickly Isaiah glimpsed a black shape rising and recognized Roy.
For a moment the Delta operator stared at the red and green carnage on the far side of the broken wall and then dropped a clip before angrily slamming in another, walking forward. He ruthlessly shoved Tony’s dead body aside and pointed the rifle straight down into what remained of the creature’s head.
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