by Jacob Rayne
He decided against poking his head above the surface and taking a look. Instead he crawled deeper into the dark tunnel.
He felt a few small animals crawling past him, heard noises from further down the tunnel. Whatever they were, he reasoned they couldn’t be worse than the reptile creatures and decided to take his chances in the tunnels.
The blazing agony in Andy’s lungs and legs forced him to stop. Even the thought of the two heinous creatures chasing him couldn’t spur him on. He stopped running and turned to see where the creatures were.
He didn’t even get all of the way turned around before the creature hit him. He fell sideways under its bulk.
Before he even hit the ground, the creature’s teeth tore out his cheek. He felt his own blood squirting out onto his chest. Heard his own scream like it was coming from someone else.
Somehow, his shaking hands managed to jam his gun into the creature’s open mouth. He grinned and pulled the trigger.
The creature’s blood rained down upon him. He let out a victory cry as he saw the hole through the back of its throat. Then his cry died. The creature was still moving. It seemed pained, but furious.
Oh shit, the biker was right, he thought. I’ve just made it madder.
Then it was on him and he felt his arm wrenched from its socket. Felt a mouth at the warm, spurting wound, literally sucking the life out of him.
The pain dwindled, the creature’s snarls began to fade. The last thing he felt was a strong hand around his neck, squeezing and tearing the head from his body.
Andy’s soul-rending scream was incentive enough to push Billy on to fresh exertions. He knew nothing he could do would save his friend. Hell, he was probably already dead by now. He sprinted away, hoping that the creatures stopped to dine on Andy’s corpse.
Jarvis found himself in a wide underground cavern. There was little or no light to speak of, but, as his eyes adjusted to the darkness, he saw dim shapes in the gloom. They looked like bones.
His foot fell into a crack and he let out a cry of surprise. The sound echoed, making him feel that he was not alone in the dark.
He realised that he wasn’t plummeting to his death, just that his foot was caught in a crevice in the rock. That he could deal with.
It seemed he was alone in there with the bones.
He still shook with the memories of what he had seen, but he felt safe. Nothing would find him, he felt certain of that. With that reassuring thought in mind, he went to sleep.
Billy found that the creatures seemed to have stopped chasing him. Maybe they had decided to feast on Andy like he had hoped. Whatever the reason, he was glad. He could run no longer. His legs burnt with lactic acid.
He walked now, all around him seeing pairs of the glowing orange eyes. They seemed to notice him, but it was like they weren’t interested.
Still, he didn’t want to assume they weren’t interested in him, so he moved cautiously. Every step he took, he was convinced that the creature’s eyes were going to snap onto him and it would come racing out of the gloom, to tear him apart like they had done Andy.
But, for now, they didn’t.
Marcus looked back and saw that the thing was still following him. Jesus, don’t these fuckers ever get tired? He kept on, legs and lungs burning. His pace was slower than normal, due to his adrenaline overload.
He struggled on, taking panicked looks over his shoulder every few seconds. The creature was gaining on him, no denying it.
Fuck it, he thought, it’s gonna catch me sooner or later. I’m more of a fighter than a runner anyway. Who knows, maybe I’ll land a lucky haymaker.
He turned to see the creature bearing down on him. He rushed at it, tackling its legs. The creature seemed surprised by his crazy manoeuvre and let out a stunned yelp.
They hit the floor and rolled over and over and over. Marcus was lost and disoriented. In the dark, he couldn’t tell whether he was on the top or the bottom.
By the time he figured it out they were moving again.
He slammed a fist into the creature’s face. It roared and swung back at him. Its long claws raked four bleeding furrows in his face. The wounds stung like hell and made him cry out. Without meaning to, he swung another punch. It landed hard on the creature’s chin, making it go limp.
Gotta be a trick, he thought. But the creature remained still.
‘You’re gonna make one badass trophy,’ he muttered. He pulled out his machete and slammed it into the creature’s neck. Blood sprayed out, adding to that already on him. The creature’s neck was thick and hard, but he kept at it until the head came loose.
Caked with blood, he stood and picked up the head. He carried it under his arm as he walked further into the woods.
Something was wrong, Billy decided.
He’d been walking for what seemed like forever, crossing through the many sets of watching eyes.
Not one of the creatures went for him, or even made a move towards him. On one hand, he was relieved they weren’t tearing him to shreds, but he was mostly unsettled. It just didn’t make sense.
He carried on past them, felt their eyes run over him, but none of them made a move towards him.
After a long, uneasy walk, he came out in a small clearing. More of the orange eyes were there, two lines of them, parted by a distance of roughly ten feet. It seemed almost like they were shepherding him towards something.
Without querying why they were acting in such a way, he grinned like a madman when he saw the gleaming white paintwork of the van they’d stolen from outside the village hall.
He aimed his gun at the nearest creature as he fumbled the driver’s door open. He needn’t have bothered; it just watched him, a fascinated look on its face.
Laughing a laugh that made him sound insane, he pulled the keys out from the sun visor and started the van. Then he pulled away in a cloud of exhaust fumes and burnt rubber.
‘They think I’m one of them because of the eyes,’ Marcus said aloud.
That must be why they haven’t ran up and murdered me in the most horrible way imaginable, because I have the head with their eyes. Good job I took this little souvenir, he thought.
There were at least five sets of eyes watching him. Ha, I’ve got them fooled, he thought.
He was still grinning at his own cleverness when his next step sent him plummeting down into a deep, dark pit.
He saw hundreds of daggers set into the concrete floor of the pit. Among the blades were bones and body parts.
He recognised a face as one of the town’s missing woman, but her face was cracked, dried blood encrusted around the sections of skin. She looked like a poorly formed version of the reptile creatures.
Midway through this thought, the blades tore through his body, sending his blood cascading down to the floor of the pit.
His eyes focused on the creature’s head he had taken. Its eyes still blazed orange and he was certain that its lips twitched into a leering smile.
Then he saw nothing at all.
Billy piloted the van with his foot clamped to the gas pedal. The van skidded a little on the mud and leaf mulch in the wood, but the roads were pretty clear. He just had to get onto the road that led over the reservoir, then he’d be in the clear.
He cried out in alarm as one of the creatures stepped out in front of the van.
Then his alarm turned to glee as he pressed the gas down further still. The creature didn’t move, just stood there, seeming to grin at him.
The entire van shook as the heavy carcass hit the bonnet and left a bloody smear across the windscreen. There was a deafening thud as it bounced off the roof and a pained howl as it hit the ground behind the car.
‘Fucking take that, you piece of shit,’ Billy bellowed, punching the air with his free hand.
His joy was short-lived; he heard a rustling in the back of the van and turned to see a leering face with glowing orange eyes staring at him from behind the workman’s welding tools that were in there.
A
s he tried desperately to concentrate on steering the van, his bulging eyes instead fell upon the oxyacetylene tanks propped up against the back doors and he understood why he’d been allowed to survive.
‘Holy fucking shit,’ he muttered, upon realising that the creatures were much smarter than he’d given them credit for.
As the creature landed on him, its razor sharp teeth already sinking into the right side of his face, he screamed as he realised that the van was headed straight for the middle of the concrete dam that protected the town.
His screams were obliterated in a huge fireball as the van hit the dam, the impact igniting the welder’s tanks and tearing the dam in half.
Water rained down from the broken dam, running down in thick streams until it hit the electric fences and blew the generators.
With the town’s defences duly disabled, the creatures moved en masse towards the helpless prey that awaited them there.
‘What the fucking hell was that?’ Duggan shouted as the thunderclap of sound from the broken dam shook the police station to its very foundations.
‘Ah shit, they took the van, didn’t they?’ Chuck said.
‘What van?’
‘Marcus and co took the van with the welding gear in it. There were oxyacetylene tanks in there.’
‘Ah for fuck’s— What the hell were you thinking just leaving that lying around?’
‘Hennessee was watching it. I figured he could handle it on his own.’
He was spared further interrogation when his phone blared into life.
He listened, all the colour slowly draining out of his face.
Duggan didn’t see as he was already on his way out to see what had happened to cause such a monumental explosion.
‘That was one of the guards from the fences,’ Chuck said. ‘The van with the tanks in crashed into the dam.’
‘So?’ Duggan failed to see the significance.
‘The water in the reservoir has ran down into the generators and blown the electric fences. Those fucking things will have the run of the town.’
Ryan Willis’s ears were still ringing hard enough to disorient him.
The force of the blast had hurled him from his station on the wall, which was lucky as he was thrown clear of the tons of water and concrete that had overwhelmed the town’s defences.
He still had his rifle, but his ammo had fallen out of his pocket somewhere along the way.
His disbelieving eyes scanned the scene, seeing the surging water still hitting the fences, which were now fizzing and crackling and smoking. Through the billowing clouds of smoke from the explosion which had decimated the dam, he saw twisted shapes moving.
Countless orange eyes glowed in the darkness. He could make out figures but not features. There were fucking loads of them.
He heard a gunshot from one of his colleagues off to his left. Saw a muzzle flash, heard an inhuman cry then a human scream and the sounds of flesh being eagerly torn apart.
The sounds did little to fill him with hope.
He heard the sounds of his other comrades opening fire, saw that it was doing nothing to stop the surge of marauding obscenities and turned and ran.
Screams came from all around, along with awful wet, slurping sounds.
He saw the many pairs of glowing orange eyes and he knew that death had found its way into town.
V: Annihilation
Duggan almost popped Chuck for the second time in disbelief at him leaving Hennessee to guard the tanks alone, but he realised they had much bigger problems on their hands.
‘He thinks he’s the only survivor left. The explosion took out some of the other guards and those left were picked off by the creatures,’ Hennessee said.
Duggan was already halfway into a police car. ‘Get as many people as possible down there. Arm everyone. Remind them of what I said, but we’re a bit chucked in at the deep end here, Randall.’
Hennessee nodded and watched Duggan squeal away in a cloud of tyre smoke.
When Duggan got to the fences there were already more than a dozen of the creatures forcing their way through the wire. He saw a terrified guard, his face slick with blood, racing towards the town.
‘Hey, throw me your rifle,’ Duggan said.
The frightened guard looked relieved to see Duggan, an ally against this carnage.
Duggan aimed carefully and took off the head of the closest creature. Blood sprayed out of the fist-sized hole in its head, but it was still walking towards him with all the grace of drunken sailor.
Flashing lights illuminated the scene around Duggan and the terrified guard.
The majority of the town’s cops were here, but Duggan had a feeling that it wasn’t going to be enough. Bullets weren’t putting the creatures down and there looked far too many of them to do anything so suicidal as engage them in hand-to-hand combat.
The mutants in Taunton had been bad, but these things seemed far more dangerous and more numerous too.
‘We might be a bit fucked here, mind,’ he grimaced.
A few miles out of town, Kyle pulled in and swapped seats with his wife. He wanted to assemble the weapon he’d gotten from the boot.
If he’d had the foresight to leave it in the house he may have saved his brother and his wife with it.
He pulled the matt black metal bars out and began screwing them together. A fist-sized cartridge clicked neatly into place beneath the weapon’s trigger guard.
‘What’s that?’ Simone said, her young eyes full of wonder.
‘It’s a crossbow, sweetie,’ he said, beaming with pride. ‘It should kill those monsters with one shot.’
‘It doesn’t look much,’ Marla said.
‘Trust me, it’s more than enough,’ he said, snacking one of the tiny darts into place.
‘Where are we headed?’ Vanessa said.
‘The facility. We need to get more of this serum. As much as we can damn well get.’
‘Won’t everyone else need it too, daddy?’ Simone said.
‘Screw everybody else,’ he said. ‘You guys are my priority. As long as you’re safe everyone else can drop dead as far as I’m concerned.’
Vanessa gasped a little at her husband’s bloody-mindedness.
‘We knew this was coming, honey,’ he said. ‘We talked about it when I first started working for Jeffries.’
‘I know. It’s just so harsh hearing it said like that.’
‘We’ve gotta look after each other. There’s also a serum that will cure their bites.’
‘Is this serious?’ Vanessa said, pointing to her bitten leg.
‘Not really,’ he said, but his face betrayed the lie.
‘The truth, please,’ she said.
‘We need to get the antidote for you in the next few hours.’
‘What will happen if we don’t?’
‘You don’t want to know.’
The majority of Rook’s Foot Canyon were sleeping when the creatures came but it wasn’t long before they were dragged, kicking and screaming, from sleep’s warm embrace by the cacophony of explosions and screams outside their windows.
Jack Craggs was first to realise what was going on and his instinct was to arm himself and his wife. He told her to lock herself and the kids in the bathroom until he came back.
He ran down the street, knocking on all the doors, to rouse any neighbours who’d somehow not been woken by the horrendous screams.
A few minutes later, the residents of his street were awake and armed. Craggs rallied them, reminded everyone of Duggan’s advice, but stressed to try and kill the invaders with bullets and blades first. Then they set off to reclaim their town.
Kyle cursed as their car turned the corner to face roadblocks and a heavy police presence.
The halogen lights carved a path through the night, illuminating the rain which fell like tears for the impending demise of humanity.
The cops on the roadblock held submachine guns and Tasers. Word had spread; the escaped mutants had already begun
to cause havoc.
If they’d reached his house – almost fifty miles from the nearest test facility – then the neighbouring towns were bound to be overrun already.
It was a shame that they needed to cut through those towns to reach the labs.
‘Pull over in the alley,’ Kyle said, his voice on the verge of cracking.
Vanessa did.
The lead cop’s loudspeaker blared into life, something that was incomprehensible due to the distance.
‘You guys get into the sewer,’ he said. ‘I’ll lead them away.’ He pressed his smartphone into Vanessa’s hand. ‘The map you need is saved in my emails. If I don’t make it, follow that map through the sewers to laboratory C121. The instructions to get the serum are in the document next to the map.’
Vanessa opened her mouth to protest but Kyle darted a glance over her shoulder and saw two of the cops making their way over to him.
‘Get in there, there isn’t time. I love you.’
Kyle gave her a kiss, drew his handgun and fired a few wild shots in the general direction of the cops.
As predicted, they ducked back for a second, giving him a short time to build up a head start on them.
His heart thudding in his chest, he left his family and ran into the alleys.
A number of Rook’s Foot Canyon’s residents were not lucky enough to have a neighbour like Jack Craggs. The first Marsha Hughes knew of the invasion was when a distorted ruin of a man landed on her bed amid a shower of broken glass.
The creature began to tear her throat out with its glistening fangs. When her husband interrupted its feeding frenzy, it went for him, only for him to slam the door in its face and run, screaming, to his gun cabinet.
With shaking hands, he loaded rounds into his shotgun and went back for the creature. When he returned to the room, the creature was now accompanied by three more. He fired at the closest one, spraying its head over its friends and the wall behind it.