Joe Ledger

by Jonathan Maberry

  In the air vents I could hear a faint scuttling sound. Like fingernails on paper. I stepped closer to the vent, straining to hear it in the gaps between the bleats of the warning bells. It was there. Faint, and growing fainter.

  They were moving away from us. Toward the other end of the complex.

  Damn.

  Chap. 4

  The Vault

  Twenty-two Minutes Ago

  We left the others behind in a locked room. The emergency lights were smashed out along most of the hallway, so we flipped down our night vision. We had M4s from our equipment bags, and each of us wore light body armor. The stuff would stop most bullets, but I didn’t think that was the kind of fight we were likely to have. Would it stop Collins?

  Only one way to find out, and I didn’t want to. Not one damn bit.

  As he ran, Top whispered, “That door back at the staff room.”

  “Yeah.”

  “You saw the way those things tore at that vent grille. No way that chicken-ass door would keep them out.”

  “Yeah.”

  “You don’t seem too broken up about the thought of those things getting in there.”

  “Are you?”

  We ran for a dozen yards. Bunny said, “They’re still civilians, Boss.”

  “Farm boy’s right,” agreed Top.

  “Yep. So, if you want to go back and babysit them, you have my permission, First Sergeant.”

  Bunny cursed under his breath. We kept running down the hall.

  We ran low and fast along the wall, guns out, moving heads and gun barrels in unison, the red eyes of the laser sights peering into every shadow. The Vault was enormous. It was one level, built into a series of interlocking limestone caves, but it spread out like an anemone, with side corridors and disused rooms and staff quarters and labs. There were three of us, and thirty wouldn’t have been enough. Not without lights. Not with an enemy that could move as fast as these things could.

  We looked for an ambush everywhere we went, and even then the monsters caught us off guard.

  We were looking forward, we were looking side to side, we were covering our asses. Anything came at us in any normal direction, we’d have sent it home to Jesus in a heartbeat.

  They tore open the damn ceiling and dropped on us.

  There was a puff of dust, and then a screeching tear as the whole belly of the air duct tore open and they dropped out.

  Like bugs.

  The first one slammed down on Bunny. Two hundred pounds of it struck him between the shoulder blades, and the big man went down hard, knees cracking against the concrete, the air leaving his body in a surprised and terrified whuf!

  Top screamed and spun, sweeping his gun up, firing as the second one fell, and the third. The rounds tore into them, punching through the dark, mottled skin, splattering the walls and ceiling with black blood. The creatures twisted in midair, trying to dodge the spray of lead, but instead soaking up the bullets.

  The air was filled with a high-pitched keening and screeching as the things climbed through the torn duct and dropped into the hall.

  Bunny was screaming as the creature on his back tore at him with fingers strangely thick and dark, the fingernails and the flesh beneath fused into chitinous hooks. Its back was to me, and I fired as I backpedaled, angling to shoot it and not Bunny. The creature threw back its head and screamed. Not like an insect, but like a man.

  Bunny twisted under it, and slammed an elbow into the monster’s side, and squirmed out from under. He was drenched with blood. I didn’t know how much of it was his own.

  “Cap!”

  I turned at the yell and saw Top being driven backward against the wall. He had his M4 jammed sideways and pressed against the chest of a creature whose face was something out of nightmare. The eyes were human, but that was all. Its face was covered with thick scab-like plates, some of them overlaid like dragon scales, others standing alone on human skin. The nose was nearly gone, flattened against the armored face, and the mouth was a lipless slash surrounded by wriggling antennae. The creature was naked to the waist, the rags of fatigue pants hanging from its spindly legs.

  Before I could close on him and offer help, Top pivoted and chopped out with a low, short side-thrust kick that shattered the creature’s knee. As it reeled back, he came off the wall and swung the M4 in a tight upward arc, crushing its chin with the stock of the rifle. The blow was so powerful that the telescoping stock cracked and bent, but the thing that had once been a soldier flipped over backward and crashed down on the ground. Top stamped a foot onto its chest, and put two rounds into the misshapen skull.

  I had my own troubles. Three of them swarmed at me in a three-point close. They tried to run me back against the wall, and if they had, I’d have been trapped and torn apart. They were so close that I only had enough room to bring my M4 up and hit the closest one with a burst to the chest. The impact flung him back, but the creature to his right lashed out and swatted the rifle out of my hands. It was a hugely powerful blow, way too strong for a man of his size. Whatever the doctors had done had amped up his strength. Or maybe he was mad with horror and rage and was pumping adrenaline. The rifle sling kept the weapon from flying away, but I lost my hold on it, and the creature reached for my throat with gnarled black fingers.

  I parried and ducked and came up on the far side of his arms, then shoved him hard into the other attacker. They crashed into the wall, which gave me a short second of breathing space, so I grabbed at the rapid release folding knife clipped to the edge of my pocket. It was positioned to release into my hand, and I gave it a flick and felt the blade lock into place even while my hand was moving. There was a flash of green fire, and then the second of the monsters was spinning away, trying to staunch the flow of black blood from his throat.

  The third one growled at me, his voice filled with clicks and hisses, and he slashed at my face. I ducked, and felt his ironhard nails tear through the fabric cover over my helmet. I didn’t wait. I drove in low and hard and put my shoulder into his chest, driving him back against the wall. He hit with a crunch that tore a howl from his throat. I used a flat palm to knock his head against the wall, and then moved in to let the knife do its work.

  He fell, and I pivoted, switching the knife to my left hand, drawing my pistol with my right.

  And froze.

  There was James Collins right in front of me. I knew immediately that it was him. Three fingers were missing from his left hand. He crouched ten feet away, legs wide to straddle the body on the ground.

  Bunny.

  Collins bent low so that he could touch Bunny’s throat with the fingers of his right hand. The fingers were long, the nails thickened into talons, and from where each tip dented Bunny’s throat, thin lines of blood leaked down the side of the big Marine’s neck. Around us, the alarms rang and the lights flashed, but nothing and no one moved. Collins raised his horror-show face and I could tell, even with those dark and alien eyes, that he knew as well as I did that we were all sliding down a steep slope into hell.

  I raised my pistol and put the laser sight on Collins, right over the heart. He looked down at it for a moment, and his fingers pressed more deeply into Bunny’s flesh.

  “Cap’n,” murmured Top from a few yards away, but I ignored him.

  Even though Goldman and Halverson had told us what to expect, I could feel a scream bubbling in my gut. This was wrong, and it was ugly, and it was scaring the living shit out of me. Sweat ran down inside my clothes and my mouth was as dry as mummy dust. If I could have run, I would have.

  I said, “Collins.”

  The creature’s head jerked up, and his slit of a mouth worked for a moment. All I could hear were clicks. His face was covered with the same platelike scabs as the others. It wasn’t precisely an insect face, but it was too far away from human. There were tiny fibers or antennae around his mouth, and they twitched like stubby fingers. God only knows what sensory information those appendages fed that tortured mind.

  �
��Listen to me,” I said, and my voice cracked a little. I cleared my throat, and tried it again. “Collins…listen.”

  In the shadows, the other creatures clicked and hissed at the sound of my voice.

  “I know you’re in there. I know Corporal James Collins is still in there.”

  His mouth and throat muscles worked. Rasps and clicks, a stilted flow that was so alien and unnatural that it was painful to hear.

  “J-J-J—”

  I kept the red dot steady, my finger inside the trigger guard. I had my trigger adjusted to a five-and-a-half-pound pull, and I had about four pounds on it. Bunny was trying not to breathe, trying to sink into the floor, and he looked every bit as terrified as I felt.

  “J-J-J-Jimm…J-J-Jimmy,” said Collins.

  My breath caught in my throat.

  “Holy mother of God,” Top whispered behind me.

  “Jimmy?” I asked.

  The misshapen head bobbed.

  “You’re Jimmy Collins, is that right? Jimmy, not James?”

  Another nod. There was a light in his eyes. Fear. Anger. Maybe—relief?

  “The docs,” I said. “Jimmy—the docs said that you signed up for this.”

  His eyes hardened. The others hissed.

  “They said that you knew the risks.”

  “Risks,” he snarled and I knew that just framing the word had to hurt his throat. He used his maimed hand to touch his face. “Not…this.”

  “No,” I said emphatically. Almost a shout. “Not this. There’s no way they told you that this would happen. But did they tell you what might happen?”

  He tried to answer, but emotion—or whatever was left for him to feel—stole what little voice he had. Eventually he managed to get it out. Two words.

  “They…lied.”

  “Yeah, brother, I pretty much figured that. That sucks more than I can describe, but listen to me, Jimmy….I can’t let you hurt my man there. He’s a good man. A friend.”

  “A—Army?” Collins said.

  “No. He’s Gyrene like you are. End of the day, though, he’s another pair of boots on the ground in someone else’s war.” I eased off of the trigger and slipped my finger outside the guard. He watched me do it. I didn’t lower the gun, though; and he saw that, too. “I know you never signed up for this, Jimmy. Who would? They think that because you enlisted and because you signed a piece of paper that they own you, that you’re just a lab rat to them. If that’s the case, if that’s what we’ve all been fighting for, then God help the United States. Or maybe God help us all, because someone’s missing the whole damn point. You with me on this, Jimmy?”

  He paused, then nodded. It was impossible to read his face, hard to know if he was agreeing with me or giving me permission to keep talking.

  “You want to know why I’m here? Why me and my team are here? The docs who did this to you called Homeland and said that this facility was being overrun by terrorists.”

  “T-T-T-T—” He couldn’t even get the word out. The stubby antennae around his mouth twitched with wild agitation.

  “Yes, sir, Jimmy. Terrorists. How’s that for a thank-you from Uncle Sam? They rang the alarm, and we were sent in to drop the hammer on the bad guys. But…here’s my problem, Jimmy, and maybe you can help me out with it.”

  His black eyes glittered like jewels.

  “I’m not sure who the bad guys are. I mean…you’re killing folks, and you know that I can’t let that happen. I can’t let it continue. But at the same time, I don’t think you’re doing these kills because you’re a terrorist.”

  He said nothing. They all waited.

  “I think you’re doing it because you’re scared. More scared than I am now, and that’s saying something. But you know I can’t let you go on killing these people. Even if I agree with why you’re doing it, I got a job to do, and I know you understand that.”

  His antennae twitched.

  “Now…terror is a funny word,” I said. “We use it all the time, but we don’t think about what it really means. Right now…I think my man on the floor there is feeling some genuine terror.”

  Collins looked down at Bunny and then up at me.

  “And you’ve got to be feeling it. All of you.”

  The others clicked and hissed.

  “And everyone else down here is feeling it because of you. There may not be any terrorists down here, Jimmy, but I have to stop the terror. That’s my job. That’s what I’m really here to do.”

  Jimmy Collins’s eyes were wide, and dark, and wet.

  “Can you help me with that, Marine? Can you give me an out here?”

  Collins looked at me, and raised his eyes slowly toward my helmet. Not at the night-vision unit, but at the small cylinder mounted on the left side of my tin pot. He nodded at me. At it.

  “That’s right, Jimmy,” I said with a smile. “That’s a video camera. We’re on mission time here, everything’s being recorded. Everything we’ve seen, and everything we’ve heard since we came down here is saved to memory in our helmet cams. Now how about that?”

  Collins bent low until his deformed face was inches from Bunny’s. He whispered something that I couldn’t hear over the alarms.

  And then he straightened and pulled his hand away from Bunny. The five little pinpricks still leaked blood, but there was no real damage. Collins took a step back, and another. Bunny scrabbled sideways and scuttled back toward me. He made a grab for his fallen M4.

  “No,” I said.

  Bunny looked at me in surprise, then at Top, who nodded, and then at Collins.

  The hulking figure stepped farther back. His companions clustered around him. They made chittering noises, and God only knows if it was some kind of speech or the screams of the damned. Behind them was the door to the secondary generator. Collins turned, looked at the door and then back at me. His eyes were intense, pleading.

  I swallowed a lump the size of a fist.

  “Boss,” said Bunny, “if we get them out…maybe something can be done. Maybe there’s some way of reversing this….”

  His voice trailed off as the huddled monsters chittered and clicked. It wasn’t words, but it was eloquent enough.

  I shook my head.

  “But…you know what they want to do,” he pleaded.

  Top put his hand on Bunny’s shoulder. “If it was you, farm boy, what would you do?”

  I raised my pistol. “Stand aside,” I said to Collins.

  After a moment, he and the others moved away.

  It took six rounds to blow the lock open.

  Smoke hung thick in the air. The klaxons continued to bleat.

  “Give us ten minutes,” I said.

  Collins stared at me, his eyes unreadable in the green gloom of my night vision. Did he nod? Or was it simply the way his body trembled as he turned and slipped into the generator room? The others followed.

  I holstered my gun and looked at Bunny and Top.

  We ran like sons of bitches.

  Chap. 5

  The Vault

  Now

  The voice said: “Fail-safe is active. Hard lockdown commencing.”

  It was a female voice, very calm. She began counting down from one hundred.

  “Top, Bunny…get everyone into the elevators.”

  “The generator—” Top said.

  “…Eighty-nine, eighty-eight, eighty-seven….”

  Halverson said, “The elevator has a separate power source. It’s topside. As long as we get above the three thousand foot line we’ll be fine. Below that charges in the wall will collapse the elevator into the shaft.”

  “…eighty, seventy-nine….”

  “Get moving!” I ordered, and my men began herding the remaining scientists, support staff, and security personnel into the elevator.

  “…sixty-three, sixty-two….”

  I lingered in the staff room, watching as Doctor Goldman finished downloading his research files onto a one-terabyte portable drive.

  “Is that everything?�
�� I said as he pulled it out of the socket.

  “…forty-four, forty-three….”

  “Yes, thank God. Everything was in packets for quick hard-dump. We have everything we need to start over.” He moved to the door, but I shifted to block his way.

  “Give me the drive,” I said.

  “…thirty-six, thirty-five….”

  “What the hell are you doing? This is no time for—”

  I kicked him in the nuts and snatched the drive out of his hand. Yeah, it was a sneak shot, but who cares? He uttered a thin whistling shriek and grabbed his groin, sinking to his knees in shock and agony.

  I set the drive on a counter top.

  “…twenty-eight, twenty-seven….”

  I drew my sidearm and used the butt to smash the drive to silicon junk. Goldman screamed louder than when I’d kicked him. He made a grab for it, but I batted his hand away.

  “What are you doing?” he croaked.

  I moved to the doorway. The elevator was a hundred yards down the hall. I could make it at a dead run.

  I said, “I’m doing what I believe is in the best interests of the American people.”

  He stared at me and opened his mouth to say something, but a sound cut him off. Not the relentless female voice counting down. This was a thin, chittering noise that echoed out of the darkness at the far end of the corridor.

  I holstered my gun, turned and ran like hell.

  “…thirteen, twelve, eleven….”

  “Where’s the doc?” Halverson demanded as I skidded into the elevator car.

  “They ambushed us,” I lied. “Came out of nowhere. Now come on, get this damn thing moving!”

  Halverson met my eyes for the briefest of moments, and I could see the realization in his eyes. He flicked a look out into the darkness. Maybe he could hear the skittering sounds. Probably not. The alarms were so loud that they even drowned out the sound of the screams.

  He slammed the door shut and the car began to rise.

  Three seconds later, we heard the bang-bang-bang as the steel doors dropped down and the thermite charges blew, fusing them shut. A moment later, the explosives in the elevator shaft blasted half a million tons of rock into the well of darkness below us. Dust clouds chased us all the way up into the light.