“Anna Beck. Gen-Y Security. I just met with King. Gave him a map. I imagine he’s on his way.” She smiled slightly, laughing at his scrutiny. “I’m on your side.” She turned her weapon around, holding it by the barrel, and handed it to Knight. “You’re going to need this.”
Knight took the weapon and tucked it into his pants. “Why’s that, exactly?”
“The facility is sealed down tight. There’s no way out. Not until Ridley or Reinhart shuts down the system.”
“In that case,” he said. “Where can I get lost?”
Beck stepped into the elevator. “Science level. Lots of nooks, crannies, and equipment to hide a little guy like you.”
Knight looked at her wryly. She stood a good three inches taller than him and probably weighed more, too. At that moment, he realized he liked the size difference and decided to not take offense. He returned to the elevator and stood next to her. Looking over, and up, he saw she was closer to five inches taller than him. A lot of woman, Rook would say, was not necessarily a bad thing. Knight agreed. Still, her uniform bore a Gen-Y logo. He might fancy her, but he couldn’t trust her. Not yet.
The elevator opened a moment later. An empty hallway yawed before them. “The science level. Go in deep, pick a room, and hold your position. I’ll see if I can’t put a wrench in things here.”
Knight stepped off and turned around. “Thanks for helping.”
The doors closed.
Fighting hard to not cover his ears against the ear-splitting alarms, Knight ran into the science level, not worrying about tripping motion sensors or appearing on cameras. He needed to find a place to make a stand, and fast. He found what he was looking for at what he surmised was dead center of the level. The lab was large, perhaps fifty feet wide and three times as long. The room had only one set of double doors. Nowhere to retreat, but only one direction to shoot. Not knowing the layout of the facility, this would improve his odds of survival more than running pell-mell through the hallways.
He worked his way through the room, rounding computer terminals, refrigeration units, and large, granite-topped lab tables with built-in sinks. The place looked like a combo computer lab and college science lab. But there was a lot of equipment he didn’t recognize. All that mattered to him was that it was made of metal and could take a bullet...or fifty, in his stead. At the center of the room was a long work table. It had metal sides and a granite top. He took up position behind it and leveled his Sig Sauer at the doors, ready to shoot anything or anyone foolish enough to enter.
As a long minute passed he noticed the large carrying case on the tabletop. It was gun metal gray and cold to the touch. Something important must be held inside. Something recently transported, possibly from Tristan da Cunha. Knight kept one hand aimed at the doors, while he unlatched the carrying case. He flipped open the lid. Steam rolled up and over the top. The object inside the case looked like some kind of statue head, snakelike and monstrous. The Hydra head.
Knight realized the head might be his ticket out of Manifold. If they still needed it intact, he could hold off an army for however long it took King and Bishop to track him down and raise holy hell. As he closed the lid, three rounds, fired in so rapid a succession they could barely be distinguished from one another, ripped through the air and smashed into the case. The case toppled, spilling the Hydra head onto the floor. It slid across the smooth tiles and slammed into a table leg, chipping chunks from its nose.
Some bargaining chip, Knight thought as he ducked down. He realized that Manifold would have never left the head unguarded and placed casually on a desktop if it wasn’t completely irrelevant. In fact, they’d probably want it destroyed to keep anyone else from accessing its DNA.
He rolled to the side of the desk, poked his head around the side, and fired off two shots. The guard who’d fired at him dropped to the floor. Knight ducked behind the desk again and as he heard the doors open, popped up, and took aim. His eyes widened as six men poured into the room. He fired off two more shots, dropping another man, but the other five took up positions behind equipment and support beams. They returned fire with a devastating amount of raw power. With each pull of the trigger, each man fired three rounds without recoil. Holes punched through the desk on either side of Knight as debris and shrapnel from bullet impacts all around sprayed into the air.
What a pitiful last stand, Knight thought. He was a sitting duck in a shooting gallery. Then he remembered the Metal Storm weapon given to him by Beck. He drew it, stayed low, and listened to the gun reports. Two men on the right, three on the left.
The gunfire stopped for a moment as the guards stopped and listened. They were, no doubt, trying to figure out if they’d hit him. He rose from his hiding place, ready to fire. But a barrage of bullets tore up the granite tabletop, spraying his face with shards of granite. He fell back down. His face stung from where the stone had buried itself in his skin. Quickly reaching into his pocket, he produced a small eye dropper bottle. He sprayed both eyes, blinked rapidly to clear the debris and discarded the bottle. A man rounded the desk, weapon aimed.
Luckily for Knight, his knee-jerk reactions were faster than the guard’s planned actions. He squeezed the Metal Storm weapon’s trigger only once, but three rounds smashed into the man. He cried out and spilled backward, flipping over a computer terminal, taking the monitor with him. Knight noticed the man’s earpiece. He searched the back half of the room and found four security cameras.
Four cameras. Too many to waste ammunition on, but at least now he knew the guards were coordinating their attack with whoever was watching. Knight fired a warning shot in the air, causing the guards to flinch, then dove over a desk and worked his way around a second lab table. He then dove to the right, sliding behind a refrigeration unit, leaned out, and fired. The men, still catching the audio description of his fast movements, were caught off guard. Knight fired and dropped one of the remaining three. The fridge exploded as a massive amount of rounds struck. Bottles and beakers within burst as the rounds ripped through. Liquid spilled from the unit like blood from a wound.
Knight leaned out to fire again, but both men were hidden from sight. They’d learned that Knight didn’t miss. Knight went into motion again, diving and rolling. Rounds filled the room as he popped up and ducked down again and again like a special ops whack-a-mole. He slid to a stop, found a clear shot along the floor and squeezed off a three-round burst. A man on the receiving end screamed as his ankle shattered. He hit the floor just as Knight fired again, silencing the screams. Knight went to stand, intending on dropping the last man with an Old West draw. But his foot slipped and squeaked across the floor. He fell back in a pool of multicolored liquid.
Fluids rushed around his body. He looked to the back of the room. More refrigeration units had been destroyed. This was bad. Not only was his footing ruined, but he had no idea if the liquids were poisons, chemicals, or somebody’s rancid milk. At any moment he might succumb to a toxic gas created by mixing chemicals, or be blasted apart by an explosive reaction. But not knowing for sure meant the true danger still lurked at the other end of the room. Knight braced himself and prepared to stand and fire. When he came up his target was nowhere to be seen. A shadow moved. No, the man was hiding. But why? He must know about the liquid, about his unsure footing. Why not take aim and fire when he emerged? Knight knew a moment later when the doors burst open and ten more guards charged into the room: reinforcements.
Knight drew his handgun and along with the Metal Storm weapon, unleashed a barrage. Two men fell. The rest returned fire. Chaos reigned around Knight. Equipment exploded. Glass shattered. More liquid spilled. The Metal Storm weapon was empty. Having no ammo to reload and no idea how to do so if he came across some, he tossed the weapon to the side.
The pounded metal desk he hid behind relented to the bullets. A round struck his shoulder. He winced at the pain, but never slowed, angling his weapon up over the top and firing a spray of rounds across the room. As a man shouted out in pain
, Knight launched toward the back of the room. Bullets ate up the floor behind him and obliterated the equipment around him. He dove behind the last lab table and slapped a fresh magazine into his gun.
He could hear the men sliding through the room. Whispering commands to each other, holding their fire as they closed in from both sides. Knight didn’t stand a chance. He lay flat on his stomach. Placing his face half in the liquid rushing by his position, he looked under the two-inch space beneath the desk, hoping to see the locations of at least a few of the approaching men. He didn’t see any boots, but what he did see stripped away what little hope of escape he had left. The Hydra head sat beneath a desk, deep in a puddle. Knight watched as the liquid was absorbed by the head. The fluids were pulled so quickly that they began flowing toward it. Turning fleshy and green, the head swelled near to bursting. But it didn’t burst.
It grew.
54
New Hampshire
David Lawson leaned in close, staring at the screen where he’d watched Knight dive behind a lab table. “Be advised. Target is partially obscured.”
“Copy that,” came Reinhart’s voice. He stood by the doors in the lab overseeing the battle, but not taking part. He wanted to see how the men he trained fared without him. The grim expression on his face and the number of motionless bodies on the floor revealed things were not going as they should have.
But as three groups of three moved in on the target from different directions, Lawson knew the man would soon be a stain on the floor. At the same time he couldn’t help but respect the Delta operator. He fought with spirit and his aim was uncanny. His partner, Simon Norfolk, with whom he’d been posted since the destruction of Manifold Gamma, failed to see why killing the man was a shame.
“They’re going to get the prick now,” Norfolk said. He rubbed a hand quickly over his crew cut head, then rubbed both hands together with nearly spastic excitement.
“Focus on your job,” Lawson said.
Norfolk rolled his eyes, then noticed Knight laying on the floor, looking beneath the lab table, handgun at the ready. “Middle team, watch your feet.” The three-man team climbed onto chairs and desktops. All Knight would see was floor. As long as the cameras functioned, the team would coordinate based on every move their enemy made. The man was already outnumbered ten to one, bad odds to begin with, but with the cameras providing a kind of battlefield ESP, he didn’t stand a chance, no matter how good his aim.
Motion behind the center team caught Lawson’s eye. He looked at all four cameras. Not one of them provided a good angle. It could be nothing. Or it could be some kind of trap...but it didn’t look that way. More like a fish flopping on the floor. A green fish. He tried to remember if the labs had any animal testing scheduled. He didn’t think so, and they tended to use pigs and rats. Not lizards.
Lawson toggled the microphone, “Center team. Check your six. You’ve got—”
The jolt came fast, so fast that Lawson never shouted in pain or flailed. He simply stopped talking. Norfolk, now staring at the green writhing object on the lab floor, didn’t notice his partner’s silence until he turned around. “Dave, what the hell is that—gah!”
The electric shock baton caught him in the shoulder, sending eighteen amperes in ten microsecond pulses into his body. He seized and slumped into his chair. “Sorry guys,” Anna Beck said as she stood above them, holding the shock baton by her side. “I was never keen on this peeping Tom stuff.”
She could see the men on the four screens, nearly on top of Knight, holding their earpieces. They’re intel had gone silent, throwing them into confusion. What had been a very organized approach fell apart as men began moving on their own. Reinhart was speaking into his headset, shouting actually. She couldn’t hear him, but the four-letter expletives spilling from his mouth were easy to read. Heads would roll. Luckily neither Norfolk nor Lawson had seen her face. And after their screw-up letting Seth escape with classified information, these two would pulling duty in the arctic, or worse. Motion on the screen caught her eye. Knight had sensed the confusion and was attacking. The Gen-Y guards scattered, firing back as they did. But there was something else at the center of the room. Whatever Norfolk and Lawson were looking at was still there...and still moving. The thing writhed into view for just a moment before disappearing back beneath the desk. Beck gasped and stepped back. “Oh my God.”
She had to warn Knight. If that thing kept growing no one would get out of that room alive.
Beck stepped past Lawson and jabbed the surveillance system with the shock baton. The system quickly overloaded, shutdown, and spewed smoke as the circuits fried. Gen-Y was officially blind.
She rushed out of the surveillance room, hurrying toward the barracks. She had to make a quick stop before she could help Knight.
Knight heard the sudden stop of feet sloshing through liquid and crunching on glass. Something had stopped the security force in their tracks, but it wasn’t the thing growing behind them. They were too quiet for that. A voice by the door revealed the true nature of the problem. “Lawson. Lawson, get back on this com or so help me God I will make your life a misery!”
Knight sat up, using the lull and confusion to his advantage. He put several rounds in the closest man, then glanced toward the front of the room and dropped a second man without looking. He lay back down as return fire once again filled the room. He’d killed the two nearest attackers and got a glimpse of the man running the show—Reinhart. One of the Chess Team’s Manifold most wanted. Knight risked sitting up again and squeezed off a round toward Reinhart, but a single shot was all he got before bullets began zinging past, and the shot was wide. He did manage to get Reinhart’s attention. The man quickly gave up on reaching whoever had been directing the action.
Despite pain from the several shards of plastic, metal, and glass embedded in his face, and the sharp sting of the bullet wound in his shoulder, Knight couldn’t help but smile. He lay on his back, looking beneath the desk. The thing on the floor had grown a body and legs were beginning to sprout. It looked about the size of a St. Bernard, but would provide a massive “holy shit” factor once spotted. These boys were about to experience their first true chaos, the kind that comes with urban warfare, and which Knight would cleave through like a katana blade through watermelon.
“Give yourself up,” Reinhart shouted, still at the front of the room. The man was either a coward or smart. “Live to fight another day” was a motto that could win wars if abided by. “You won’t be killed.”
Knight remained silent. Confusion and stealth were his friends. Speaking gave away his position, physical condition, and mental state.
“You’re outnumbered and the facility is locked down.” Reinhart sighed. “You can’t kill us all.”
Knight knew Reinhart had experience. As head of Gen-Y he’d be their best-trained man. Ex-military. That he hadn’t simply lobbed a grenade over the desk to flush him out meant he was either under orders not to do so or there was something in this room that made explosions a high risk. As a waft of something chemical hit his nose, Knight decided it was the latter. A chemical explosion at the heart of the facility could end up killing more people than just the men in this room. Motion on the floor caught his attention.
He lay back on the wet floor as the liquid continued rushing toward the growing creature. The Gen-Y boys would approach much more slowly now, if at all, so he was content to lay in wait. If someone was stupid enough to round the desk, he’d shoot them down. Otherwise he’d wait.
The screams would start soon enough.
55
New Hampshire
It started with a startled “What the?” then descended into horrified screams of “Oh my God” and “What the hell is that!” The Gen-Y security team engaging Knight had seen the scaly green creature writhing at the center of the room. The loudest screams came from those, who, like Knight, were on the far side of the lab. Getting back meant getting past the creature. And as it reared up not one, but three heads
, everyone realized how difficult that might be.
Each head held serpentine yellow eyes, split down the middle by black diamond-shaped pupils. Sheets of flesh, like thick insect wings, extended from slits on the sides of its heads, where the skull met the neck—like gills...or possibly ears. Rows of small horns rose up from its snout and tailed back across its face, splitting into two rows that rose up over the perpetually furrowed eyes. Its greenish brown body was covered in reflective scales except on the underside of its neck and belly, where large, hard plates overlapped all the way up and under its many chins. Muscles rippled on its legs as they hefted the now horse-sized body off the floor. A stubby tail grew down to the floor and twitched like an agitated cat’s. Last but not least, its four feet held four toes, all connected by thick, webbed flesh and bearing sharply curved talons. Once caught in the creature’s grip, nothing would escape.
Knight stood, knowing that everyone was too distracted to fire a round in his direction. They stood in awe of the mythological monster. Reinhart realized what it was just as Knight did. “The Hydra,” he said.
The creature stood on four legs and stretched its still lengthening necks toward the ceiling. It gurgled—fleshy—as though its vocal cords were still forming. As the wet sound escaped all three sharp-toothed mouths, the sound came together, loud and clear. It was like a combination of an ocean-liner horn blast and a peacock’s blare. Both high-and low-pitched, with each head producing a unique sound. The vocalization was accentuated by a sharp rattling sound that came from its winglike ears as they vibrated madly, slapping against the thick necks. The shriek made Knight’s hair stand on end. It also sprung Reinhart into action.
The head of Gen-Y security drew his Metal Storm weapon, shouted “Kill it!,” and began pulling the trigger. Knight ducked down, content to wait and watch while his enemies fought it out. If Gen-Y got the upper hand, he’d start dropping bodies. If the Hydra took control, he’d make a stealthy, and fast, exit.
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