The general—his uniform perfectly pressed, his medals shining, his shoes blemish-free—repeated, "I gave a direct order to keep you out."
"Yes, to your robots. They decided not to play along anymore."
His face contorted but there was confusion there.
She added, "They decided to think for themselves this time. They weren’t quite ready to listen with blind obedience. Not when it’s obvious that their general is not in control."
—
Wake up, fat ass.
Huh?
Are you sleeping out there, Biggy? Looks like they're running right around you again. They must figure you can't make the stop.
Sergeant Ben Franco opened his eyes.
He was still behind the overturned desk. At some point he had found a lab coat within crawling distance and pulled it over his body for added warmth. He needed warmth; everything below his neck felt very cold, very drained. Yet his head burned like it might be on fire. What a strange sensation, shivering from a chill at the same time as he was sweating with fever.
Of course everything—from his black BDUs to the dirty old lab coat—was wet with his blood, although he had managed to slow down the streams from his shoulder and his leg enough so as to not to bleed to death. At least not yet.
The room was not as dark as before. No amount of power could make the busted bulbs in the old vestibule glow, but light from the hall drifted in and formed a beam stretching across the middle of the room.
He heard voices and movement. People walked toward the exit, passing him to the left, never noticing him, paying him no mind, no thought. Just like Gant never gave Franco his due. No, that black bastard was too busy keeping the sergeant down and spoon-feeding praise to that lapdog captain of his.
He's going to slip around you again, Biggy, unless you get your ass in gear.
Franco heard Major Thom Gant’s voice. It played like fingers on a chalkboard to his ears, touching the exposed nerves of hate, anger, frustration, and fear all heightened by that lonely dark pit of a place, sharpened by a mind pushed beyond the breaking point, and let loose by an infection that scrambled the soldier's senses, blotting out any thoughts of right or wrong.
In the bowels of Red Rock, the nastiest demons were free to dance in the dark, and the piper played Franco's tune.
Fucker is NOT getting past me this time.
Sgt. Franco peered over the desk and saw that—yes—Major Gant walked across the room, accompanied by two strangers: a short, balding guy wearing—wearing a suit? Seriously?—and a big fellow who might have been a soldier but clearly not one of the team.
More secrets they kept from me. Gant planned this shit all along. Him and Campion led us to an ambush and met up with some buddies down here.
Other than as new fuel for his anger and paranoia, Franco gave the other two little attention. His fever and delusions allowed only tunnel vision.
Biggy ignored the pain in his shoulder and the pain in his leg and slid out from behind the desk, aligning himself in the center of the room. From there, he had a clear view of the three men moving toward the closed vault door, but only Major Gant held his interest.
Time to pay the piper, you fuck.
Franco concentrated so completely on Gant that he took no notice of the ghastly white creature lumbering up the hall from behind.
—
"So what is all this?" Gant asked as they walked through the ruins of the old security station and approached the sealed vault door.
"This?" the entity wearing Briggs’s body answered. "Games to amuse me."
"Amuse you?"
The old vestibule lacked the bright lights of the rest of the complex. Apparently no one had replaced the bulbs in this section.
"If you have been in control since the experiment, why did you try to make people break quarantine? Why did you want to see colonels shot and soldiers gassed? Why bother breaking through this first door?"
Briggs remained silent.
"So it was all to amuse you. Like Ruthie amused you. You were playing with insects."
Still, the entity did not respond.
Gant remembered seeing the face of Dr. Briggs go blank when Twiste killed himself. He remembered a voice trapped inside that body pleading for someone to "help me." He remembered the hippie chick and the Twinkies his men brought into the bowels of the facility.
He remembered the words of Dr. McCaul: "Ronald was always telling me and Ruthie that we were putting on weight or something. Yet he was the one with the cupcakes and girlie magazines in his desk drawer."
They reached the vault door and while that bulkhead remained closed, a door leading to the truth opened to Thomas Gant.
"I am such an idiot," he chuckled, sardonically. "It was all right there, in front of me, the whole damn time."
"What? Stop laughing, you fool."
"All this time the truth was staring me in the face."
—
General Borman stood in front of the vault door, his face shining beet red.
"Not in control? I am in COMPLETE CONTROL!"
"No, no you’re not. You never have been."
Borman’s fingers drummed on his sidearm.
"Everything down here is mine to command! You are nothing more than a half-assed babysitter. I put together the security protocols down here. They are a model for all the military. Me. General Harold Borman!"
"Whatever is down there—" she maneuvered to the side and pointed at the intimidating portal. "—has been in charge all these years!"
"Nonsense!"
"You have been sending supply runs! Feeding it, keeping it alive. Replenishing its oxygen. All these guards …" she waved her arm around. "All to keep it safe! All to keep the outside out! You have been nothing more than a pawn. Can’t you see? Can’t you fight it?"
"I am in complete control! My word goes down here, Colonel. No one else’s. Mine! I can do as I want. This is my place. I OWN IT!"
"It wanted disciplined military minds. You had me and all the other shrinks over the years throw out anyone who could be distracted! Anyone who wasn’t completely focused! It wanted focused minds, General. Focused minds don’t question what they see!"
"I sent down the V.A.A.D. to end this stalemate!"
"It called for the V.A.A.D.! It’s been biding its time all these years, waiting for what it needs to be free. And now here you stand, ready to open the door for it! To let it out!"
"I … AM … IN … CONTROL …"
Borman pulled his pistol and leveled it at Thunder.
"… and I have had enough of you …"
—
Sgt. Franco placed the sight to his eye and peered downrange at his target, seeing three globs of identical yellow and red heat signatures. He knew Gant stood to the right.
Franco heard a noise from behind, but gave it no heed.
Don't let him slip by again, Biggy.
36
"I am such an idiot," Gant said, bringing his laughter under enough control to form words.
"Stop it! Stop laughing, you insect! Stop it!"
"I assumed the Briggs experiment cut a hole into another … what? Dimension?" the major explained with a smile that held little humor but a lot of scorn. "And some life force came pouring out right into the body of poor old Ronald Briggs and got stuck. Maybe the hole was not big enough."
"Why are you laughing? Stop it!"
"A life force made up of thought! It was the ‘help me’ that threw me for a loop. I figured that was Briggs trying to get out."
"Stop … laughing … AT … ME!"
"All this time I thought Briggs got absorbed by an alien, but that’s not what happened, is it … Ronald?"
"I AM A GOD!"
Gant’s humor left and he growled, "It came through all right: pure intellect. Pure thought. And you grabbed it with your black heart and hate and trapped it in that frail little body! It’s all been an illusion. There was no monster in the mist; that was a trick. You wanted us to believe there was
a creature behind the curtain. But it has been you all along, Doctor. It was the entity that pleaded for help! It wanted to escape from the hell of your sick mind!"
Briggs shook and shuddered and repeated in a red face, "I AM GOD!"
Jolly stumbled around, the gun hanging loose in his grip as the directives and impulses inside his controlled mind became crossed and confused.
"Twiste was right! You found the devil, Briggs! You found it in your own soul!"
—
Sgt. Franco held his target in the scope. He paid no attention to the shouting among the men, paid no attention to the big guy with the gun starting to wobble and turn as if he were a malfunctioning robot.
He was focused … completely … on his target.
At that instant a weight fell on him. He heard a bark-like shout and snapping teeth. He felt sharp stings and raking claws and jagged bites.
His finger yanked the trigger. The M4's muzzle flashed licks of fire and spat bullets across the old vestibule toward the trio gathered at the vault door.
Then Franco rolled over, confronting his attacker, holding it at bay and fighting for what remained of his life.
—
Major Gant’s moment of triumph—at least on some personal level—over the entity that was in reality Dr. Briggs himself was short-lived. Gant felt a bullet whiz past his nose before he heard the fire, before he saw the flash of an explosion.
He instinctively sought cover but his leg gave way and his entire body fell to the floor like a helpless sack. He heard more shots and saw more flashes. He saw Jolly whirl in the grips of some mental malfunction.
Most important of all, Gant saw one of those rounds slam into the chest of the enraged Dr. Briggs. The man who dared dream of godhood staggered, his rage replaced by shock.
Briggs had convinced others—even himself—of his power. He had drained the brains of people and turned them into mindless drones. He had tricked men into murder and suicide. He had controlled a general and crafted his own private hell deep beneath the surface of the Earth.
Yet in the end, he was merely a man. A perverted man of weak emotions and petty hatred. A man with a black heart full of sadistic desires. But a man of flesh and bone.
One bullet was all it took.
The human who was indeed a monster staggered and gaped as a massive stain of crimson grew on his chest, ruining his suit. His mouth worked as if to speak but there was nothing left for Dr. Ronald Briggs to say.
Jolly dropped the submachine gun and the giant fell to his knees, clutching his head with both hands and screaming, his howls whistling through exposed teeth until another wild bullet exploded the monster's skull.
As for Briggs, the death of his body was the unlocking of a prison door …
—
Sal Galati and Jupiter Wells retreated no more; not when they saw what bullets could do to these creatures. These were not ethereal nightmares but animals of flesh and blood. They could be killed.
After withdrawing around the corner, the two soldiers stood and fought. Sal's G36 tore away two skulls, Wells's SCAR-H handled the third.
"Finally, something that dies," Wells said as he eyed the pale-skinned, child-sized spawn of the Red Rock monster.
"They weren't so tough," Sal said, inhaling deeply as he caught his breath. "I remember these things we ran into on an oil rig—"
"Shut the fuck up."
Their task done, the two soldiers hurried back to the Red Lab to support Campion. Before they could get there, energy exploded through the corridors like a hurricane of light, knocking them over as it gushed toward the surface.
—
Campion completed his mission.
He calibrated, charged, and activated the contraption a few feet ahead of Briggs's equipment. His task done, he stood and walked toward the exit and then absently remembered, oh yes, I'm supposed to shoot myself now.
He reached for his sidearm, pulled the slide, and … the impulse faded.
Why exactly should I shoot myself?
Electrical energy charged around the device and the V.A.A.D. generated a hum that started low but seemed to double in volume every second, like a bomb about to explode, encouraging him to walk fast and then run, knocking open the double doors and sprinting down the hall.
The variable accelerator antimatter delivery device exploded. Not with shrapnel or concussion, but with light. Streams of plasma surged at the box-like centerpiece that was the epicenter of a dimensional rift. A rift Dr. Ronald Briggs had wedged open more than two decades before.
That dimensional rift was not repaired. That had never been the intent. Briggs had always been in control. He had arranged everything, using Vsalov and Borman as pawns.
The V.A.A.D. blasted that rift wide open, breaking the tether holding the entity close to ground zero a moment after a bullet freed it from a sick man's mind.
It came from the infinitely small and burst from imprisonment into the world as a growing flow of blue-white plasma. It drove out from the laboratory, exploding open the double doors, passing Campion as he dove for cover, all the while growing more powerful and more immense as it rushed for freedom.
—
A tremor went through the entire complex. Every level—above and underground—shook.
In the vault room, Liz staggered and fell. Borman nearly fell, too, but he reached out and placed a hand on the vault door and steadied himself.
She shouted, "It's coming!"
—
Gant lay on the floor. Had he not already been there, the quake would have toppled him.
Briggs did not fall, however. Or, rather, Briggs’s body did not fall. It stood straight and still, as if immune to the tremble of the earth.
That’s when Gant realized … Briggs was dead and gone. The body that remained was merely the holding cell for whatever entity had been held hostage by the man. An entity comprised of pure thought. An entity that knew not of rage and hatred and perversion or any of the rest of man’s emotional excesses. An entity that could have expanded the boundaries of man’s mental capacity. Instead, its arrival to humanity’s plane of existence had been hijacked by an evil soul that had then twisted that power to indulge its own sick fantasies and warped delusions.
Red Rock had been more than a subterranean dungeon; it had been a dark hole in the human soul. Belowground, people changed, their heart of darkness set free.
Thom realized that Captain Campion had completed his mission. The V.A.A.D. had truly been the solution to the stalemate at Red Rock: Dr. Briggs’s solution.
With its vessel dead and the portal blasted open, the entity that had been captive in that monster’s mind was free. The balance of its essence rose up from the bowels of the complex. Gant knew—he knew—the big metal door that had kept the evil doctor safe and secure belowground for two decades would not be enough to stop the creature.
A great light blared into the abandoned vestibule room. The first strands of that light illuminated a writhing pile of bodies and Gant saw Benjamin Franco wrestling with one of Briggs's feral children and he understood: it had been Franco who had come to the rescue. Franco's bullets had killed Jolly and Briggs; otherwise all that power rising from below would be in the control of a madman.
The light became a tidal wave of energy surging toward the vault door. Gant rolled away, his leg and shoulder screaming.
The energy being smashed part Ronald Briggs, but it did not stop there
—
General Borman dropped the pistol. It rolled across the floor.
The man who had been little more than a puppet for over twenty years saw it all with crystal-clear clarity. His hand rose to his temples and pushed.
Then the vault door blasted off its hinges, smashed into Harold Borman, turning his body into a jumble of broken bones, and fell to the floor on top of him.
The blue-white mass of energy shot through the vault room, through the vestibule, and along the hall, forcing Sanchez and the other soldiers to dive aside or be smash
ed to pieces.
Liz lay on the floor to the side of the exposed entryway and watched it soar past like a comet, leaving behind a glowing tendon of smoking plasma.
—
The countryside around the Red Rock facility shook. The exterior windows and several chunks of the facility's exterior walls and ceiling exploded like a collapsing dam as the energy erupted from within and enveloped the entire complex.
37
Major Thom Gant felt the glow all around him as the alien flowed out the door and beyond. As he did, his eyes glazed over and he was no longer lying on the floor …
… he was surrounded by a storm, standing in a forest … a surreal woodland placed on a stage. So phony that when lightning flashed he saw the shadows of the branches reflect against a gray canvass.
The wind ripped across the façade, casting leaves from the trees. Those leaves warped and dried as they fell, as if the decay of autumn could happen in an instant.
He held his hand aloft to block the wind and to shield himself from the tornado of dried leaves as they swept across. Thom felt no pain in his leg or shoulder, yet he was dreadfully cold. The whole place was cold. Cold and empty and sad.
He staggered forward, looking for something. What was it? Who was it?
Ahead, there, the forest rose and cleared. There was a peak there … a precipice reaching toward a vast nothingness.
Gant moved forward, fighting the wind. A whirling cloud of leaves and sticks followed. There was a person on that ledge ahead. He could not see who it was … not at first … then he saw.
"Jean! Jean!"
His wife stood at the edge of that cliff, looking off toward more nothingness in the distance. A fake void built at the end of the stage.
He shouted and cried but she did not turn.
"Jean! I’m here!"
He approached. She was almost within reach.
Then the swirl of blowing leaves engulfed her.
"No! Jean!"
Her image began to collapse, like those leaves falling from the trees. He heard her say one thing, except he knew it was not Jean Gant speaking but the entity composed of thought that, at that very moment, could probably sense every thought across the planet.
Opposing Force: Book 01 - The God Particle Page 30