by SD Tanner
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE: Trapped in the city (Leon)
The emergency hatch Bill had shown them was supposed to be positioned next to the main doors, and it should take them directly onto the floor of NORAD. Ark had rustled up some pictures of the interior and layout, but he wasn’t sure if they were genuine or not. Even Lexie’s advanced vision wasn’t able to penetrate the blast doors and walls of the complex, so he had no idea what they were walking into. In the interests of taking in as much firepower as possible, Bill had agreed to keep everyone secured in the trucks until they returned.
They were standing on the sparsely covered side of the mountain, peering down at a square door lying flat against the ground. In the middle was a thick, roughly molded, wide metal handle. All they had to do was lift it, and they should find a ladder to the floor. The hatch needed a code, but he was confident Tank and Tuck could tear it open.
“Tank. Tuck. Open the hatch. Everyone else stand ready.”
Both men bent on one knee and pulled the handle on the hatch. It tried to resist their combined efforts, and when it finally opened, it revealed a gaping, dark hole. Lexie stepped forward to peer inside and let out a startled scream.
“Hit the deck!” Ark shouted
Dropping awkwardly to his knees, he asked, “Why?”
Ark never bothered to answer and everything around him went green. Falling onto his front, he instinctively tried to put his hands over his helmet. His armor rumbled in a way he’d never heard before, and the impact of an endless stream of clawed feet could be felt all over his body.
“Reality viewing,” he croaked to his computer.
Lifting his head slightly, all he could see was a blur of black limbs. Critters were streaming out of the hatch and running over them, appearing so desperate to leave they were oblivious to their presence. Looking at the hill around him, they were dispersing and running in different directions.
“What the hell…?” Tuck complained.
While their clawed feet continued to pound against his armor and helmet, he could only agree with Tuck. It was hell and they were in the middle of it.
As the numbers of critters began to dwindle, Ark remarked dourly, “Well, at least we know NORAD has been compromised.”
“Oh, yeah, that’s a great help,” Lexie replied sarcastically.
“Tank, you go first,” he ordered. “Shoot the crap out of anything that gets in your way.”
“Roger that.”
Tank lifted one heavily armored leg into the hole and then allowed himself to drop. Ordering his computer to give him advanced viewing, he watched through the hatch as Tank moved deeper inside the bunker.
“Lexie, you’re next.”
Copying Tank, she dropped gracefully to the floor. He, Tuck and Trigger followed her and stood staring at the dimly lit corridor. The small walkway opened into the main entrance behind the two blast doors, and they were standing inside the steel complex. The interior was four and a half acres of excavated chambers and tunnels, surrounded by two thousand feet of granite. Inside the main complex were three chambers that were forty-five feet wide and six hundred feet long. These were intersected by four more chambers that were thirty feet wide and over three hundred feet long.
There were fifteen buildings within the structure, joined together with flexible connections. Twelve of the buildings were three-stories tall, and the others were one and two-story. The walls of each building were made of thick continuously welded low carbon steel plates to reduce the effect of an electromagnetic pulse. All of the buildings were mounted on steel springs to absorb blast and earthquake impact, and it meant they could move twelve inches in any one direction.
Behind them were the blast doors and there was only one direction they could walk in. Ordering his computer to switch to reality viewing again, there were motionless critters slumped against the walls of the arched concrete corridor. In death, critters would dry up and their stiffened limbs would sprawl around their flattened torsos. He moved to the one closest to him and kicked it with his thick-soled boot. Similar to a spider, the dead critter had a deflated appearance, and his boot merely made its stiff corpse skitter along the concrete. If he hadn’t known better, he would have thought someone had flattened the dead critter with a big boot.
“What the hell has gone on here?” He asked.
Ark couldn’t hear them through the thick granite and metal walls that now surrounded them, so they didn’t have the benefit of his access to information.
“They looked like squashed little fuckers to me,” Tuck declared cheerfully.
“Yeah, I get that, but why are they dead? What killed them?”
“Who cares?” Lexie asked impatiently. “Let’s go. I wanna see what’s inside.”
“It’s important, Lex,” Tank replied amiably. “Whatever killed them could kill us too.”
Tank had just articulated his immediate concern. Anything that could kill a critter would make short work of them, even with their hydraulics, weapons and armor.
“They seemed pretty keen to leave,” Trigger observed. “Maybe they’ve been trapped in here.”
“Do you think they starved to death?” He asked.
“Maybe.”
Ignoring the dozens of flattened critters, they began to walk down the wide corridor with Tank on point. They knew there was nothing on their six and he wanted full firepower forward. Lexie was in the middle and he was following her. The corridor opened into an enormous chamber, clearly built into the granite mountain. Just as Ark had said, there were a series of buildings and straight roads between them. None of the buildings touched a wall, and they looked like they were made of the same materials used to build shipping containers and construction site huts. The entire dimly lit facility had a metallic and military feel to it.
Without warning, Tank opened fire down the corridor with his freestanding gun, and he ordered his computer to give him advanced viewing. Unlike the corridor that led them to the chamber, there were green blobs in some of the buildings, on the roads, and others were clinging to the ceiling. A critter dropped from above his head where his visor camera hadn’t seen it, landing squarely on his helmet. Grabbing at it, he got hold of what he assumed was a leg, and swung it forcefully into the concrete floor. The critter didn’t put up much of a fight and deflated on impact.
Lexie was chasing a critter down the corridor at the top of the buildings. “Lexie, stay in position!”
She came to immediate stop and turned towards him, dragging the critter she’d caught by one of its legs. Tuck, Trigger and Tank were still firing at targets in the corridors facing them, but he wasn’t sure how many they were dealing with. When Lexie returned with her pet, he switched to reality viewing and studied the critter. It was moving feebly as if it didn’t have the strength to attack her.
“Hold it up, Lexie.”
She lifted her arm so that the critter hung by one leg, and the rest of its limbs dragged uselessly on the concrete floor. While it hung limply from her raised hand, it didn’t seem to be paying any attention to them.
“I think it’s tired,” she quipped.
It was more than tired. It was half-dead. Grabbing the critter by the head, he twisted it so he could see its molded features. It offered no resistance and he let go of it again.
“Kill it.” While Lexie did as ordered, he batted Tuck’s armor. “Ceasefire.”
“Say what?” Tuck asked incredulously.
“You’re wasting ammo. Only kill them if they attack and even then do it by hand.”
Tank walked into the corridor closest to them. On either side were the white metal walls that formed the building’s Ark had described. Slumped bodies of critters littered the walkway, and more of them were tumbling from the ceiling, landing gracelessly on the ground in front of them. Just as he’d ordered, Tuck, Trigger, Tank and Lexie were killing them by crushing their heads and bodies under their boots. The walls of the buildings were pitted with bullet holes, and he assumed there’d been a firefight for
survival inside of NORAD.
“Weird,” Trigger observed.
“I’m guessing they got stuck in here and haven’t been able to feed.” Looking at the walls around him, he said, “We need to check the place for goo. Let’s get on top of the buildings.”
“Why are we worried about the jello?” Tuck asked.
The bullet holes in the walls were evidence of a fierce fight, and he hoped some people might still be alive. The entire site was built to be blast proof, which meant there was a chance some people had managed to find somewhere safe from the critters. If they wanted to bring anyone out, then they’d need to make sure there was nothing outside of the buildings that could kill them.
Lexie was the first to leap onto a one-story building, but she was the least useful person to get there. They were waiting for a software update from the techs, and the goo still wasn’t visible through her visor. Tuck followed her and then Trigger, while Tank continued to stomp along the corridor, only stopping to kill any critter that got in his way.
“Floor plan for NORAD,” he ordered, and his visor screen was overlaid with the map Ark had provided.
It was a big site with about thirty corridors between the buildings. It would take time to check every pathway, kill the critters, and locate any goo.
Calling to the squad, he said, “Okay, let’s take this at a steady pace. Only use your firepower if you have to.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO: Hidden lives (Tod)
“Did you hear that?”
“Yeah, it was gunfire.”
“What kind of weapon was that?”
“Oh my God, we’re saved.”
“That’s not possible. The military are gone.”
“But who else knows how to get in here?”
They’d been hiding in Building Eleven for over four weeks now and tempers had frayed badly. Twenty-eight people crammed into a storage room with no bathroom hadn’t been fun, plus they had to be deathly quiet to avoid attracting the attention of the creatures. He was only a junior Information Technology specialist, but was considered something of a genius. Even as a kid he’d been fascinated by technology, and after pulling apart his father’s laptop at the age of eleven, he’d rebuilt it to be faster. His father had been so impressed he’d given him a free hand to buy whatever electronics gear he’d wanted. The generous offer had launched his career, which was how he now found himself stuck inside one of the most secure facilities in the world.
Boris was the unelected leader of their group, and he whispered urgently, “Quiet. Someone needs to go out there and make sure they find us, otherwise they might leave.”
When the muffled sound of gunfire stopped a woman asked, “What if they’ve left?”
Shaking his head, Boris replied, “That’s why we need to get out there now.”
All eyes turned to the soldiers in the room. Of the twenty-eight people present, eighteen of them worked for the military, but only three of them were soldiers in the traditional sense. The others specialized in managing the weapons and satellites. They might wear a uniform, but they’d never been expected to fight. Only six heavily armed soldiers had fought against the creatures. They’d lost three of them in the fierce firefight, but they’d successfully managed to secure the rest of them inside the storage room.
The three men stood up and began to check their weapons and ammo. They were carrying M4A1s, but they already knew they wouldn’t stop the spiders.
“We can’t send them out there,” another of the women said worriedly.
The soldiers continued to snap ammo magazines into place and adjust their vests, but said nothing. The bunker had been fine for about a week or so. With over seven hundred people spread across the buildings, everyone had quickly gone about their jobs. He shouldn’t have been there, but the software company he’d worked for had asked him to assess a system error they hadn’t been able to replicate. They assumed it was probably something to do with the other software it was integrated with, and he was supposed to sit with the users, observing their actions until the error occurred again.
Working for the specialist software developer was a dream come true for him. Once they’d organized his security clearance, he’d been sent to sites as a hotshot problem solver. Software wasn’t simply lines of code to him; it was a logic that followed a predictable sequence providing you knew all of the roads on the map. Whenever he saw an error, he could trace all the possible routes it had followed, ultimately isolating the source of the problem.
When everyone began to kill one another, he’d stood dumbstruck at what he was seeing. With his quick mind, he saw it as an error and quickly identified the source as anyone that was left alive. Realizing he had to escape the others, he’d headed for the building he knew they used for storage, figuring it would be the place with the least people. Running down the road, he’d met the soldiers fighting with the creatures. In a chaotic battle, they’d retreated to Building Eleven, and twenty-eight of them made it into the storage room alive. After securing the metal door to the room, they’d settled in and prayed for help to arrive.
Being stuck inside the room for over four weeks, he’d gradually unraveled what had happened. When the creatures turned up in every city in the country, they’d gone to DEFCON level two. They’d begun to monitor the country and world using the satellites, but command structures had collapsed and no one was giving them consistent orders. Boris was a Colonel in the Marines, and it he who ordered them to bomb their own cities. They’d briefly argued, but Boris was the head of Combat Operations and, in the absence of a higher command, it was his call to make.
They’d bombed Seattle, Minneapolis, Nashville and Philadelphia before one of the men at the desks in the control room had attacked the person next to him. After that there were no more bombs, and while he’d run to the storage room, others were making their way out of the bunker. After being stuck inside the storage room for four weeks, he still wondered if he should have followed them. At first, he’d been too frightened to care, but now he was bored and desperately wanted to see the sky again.
“We can’t send them outside. We know the creatures are out there.”
The woman was right. All the walls were made of metal, so there was no way out other than through the door. The creatures had been hanging around outside their room for weeks now. Whenever they’d thought it might be safe, they would hear the now familiar screeching and rustling of their legs as they ran up and down the corridor.
“But if they leave without checking all of the buildings then we’ll never get out,” a man objected.
The woman glared at the man who’d spoken. “So, you’re willing to send these men out to certain death just to save your sorry ass?”
He didn’t really know any of the people in the room. Being a software genius didn’t give him the best social skills and he’d kept to himself. There was plenty of food and bottled water, so supplies weren’t a problem. For the past four weeks or so, he’d sat quietly on the edges of the group, taking what he needed and trying not to get involved. He was worried about his Mom and Dad. If what they said was true then they were already dead, or had turned into creatures just as the people inside the bunker had. Accepting they were gone left him feeling abandoned, making him withdraw even further into himself.
“They’re willing to go,” the man replied. Turning to face the soldiers, he asked, “Right?”
The soldiers were all in their late twenties, and had the hard look of men who’d seen more than their fair share of war. They’d spoken little to the group, preferring to keep to themselves in their own small corner of the room. He didn’t even know if they were part of a squad, or had simply teamed up once they’d gotten into the room.
Appearing oblivious to the argument about their well-being, one of them spoke to the other two men. “We’ll need to clear and secure the door fast.”
The man next to him nodded. “If we make it outside the building they should hear our gunfire.”
He noticed the man hadn�
��t said they would escape, merely that they would alert whoever was in the bunker to their location. Obviously, they didn’t expect to survive their mission and he felt ashamed. They were going to die for him, and they didn’t even expect him to ask for their help or to say thank you.
“You don’t have to do this,” the woman said, addressing one of the soldiers.
“Yes, they do,” Boris interrupted. Turning to the three men, he simply nodded. “We need to keep the satellites operational otherwise we lose the missiles.”
The three men each gave Boris a sloppy salute, and turned to trudge down the corridor between the storage shelves. Wanting to watch what they did next, he scooted down the matching corridor on the other side. The door was on his left, and he peered through the gaps in the racking. While one man stood against the wall next to the door, another stood in front of it, and the other stretched his arm across to pull it open. In complete silence, and only giving one another meaningful looks, the soldier opened the door.
The screeching static sound tore at his ears, making him want to cover them, but he resisted. Gunfire erupted, and all three men left the room, slamming the door behind them. Ducking around the end of the rack, he ran to the door and jammed his ear against it. The screeching and gunfire was muted, but as long as he could hear it then at least one of them was still alive.
Gradually, as it drew further away, the gunfire began to diminish, until all he could hear was a single shot handgun firing one bullet after another. When there was no more gunfire, he knew the three soldiers had died trying to save them.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE: Brass balls (Leon)
“Where did that come from?”
“Back wall, on our right.”
“Lexie, get in the middle. Tank, take point.”
“Go! Go! Go!”
“Dammit, the caliber is too low.”
He’d recognized it as the short burst fire of an M4, and the bullets wouldn’t penetrate the critter’s hard rubbery exterior. Through his visor, he could see green blobs bursting from a building at the far end of the corridor, and a pinkish blob running towards them.