by Jack Hamlyn
Lots of things could have happened, the way he was figuring it.
Marauders could have gotten in and wasted everyone for the food, weapons, and other supplies stockpiled there. A slim possibility but conceivable. There could have been an armed overthrow from a group within the bunker. Again, a slim possibility but maybe. Slugheads could have overwhelmed everyone. Unlikely with the safeguards in place and the fact that the gates were all still locked. Lastly, there could have been some kind of freak slug outbreak. Things like that had happened at other bunkers. In a matter of hours, everyone could have been slugified.
When Kurta reached the entrance, he keyed in at the pad. All the exterminators had an emergency pin to be used only in the most dire circumstances.
Like this, he thought.
The door opened and he went in. It hissed shut behind him and locked. Silent alarms should have been tripped in three separate locations. Security people should have been bearing down on him by now.
But he heard nothing.
The silence remained unbroken.
He was more certain of it now than ever: everyone in the bunker was dead.
42
He moved quickly down the dark corridor, heading for the central hub. Someone was always there monitoring the outside security cameras. It was one of the locations where the silent alarm would have been triggered. As he approached it, his light bobbing up and down and casting threatening shadows over the walls, he could see the flashing red light on the console.
He disarmed it, then clicked on the lights in the hub.
“Shit,” he said.
He saw two bodies, then a third and a fourth. A teenage boy, two women and a toddler sprawled in pools of drying blood. Without his helmet filtering the stink of blood and death, the smell made him feel more than a little green in the guts. They all died from the same sort of wound—the crowns of their skulls were split open from the hairline to the backs of their heads.
As grisly as it was, he had to get in closer and see.
It was important and he knew it.
Putting the tactical light of his M4 on each cleaved head, it looked as if they had been split open by something like an axe.
He thought: An axe murderer? A hatchet killer?
No, it was just too farfetched.
It couldn’t be anything that simple.
Not now.
Not with the madhouse the world had become.
“What then?” he whispered.
He crouched down, putting his light right in the wounds. He examined them carefully and what he found made him even more sick than he already was.
Their brains were missing.
There was gore and strands of tissue in the skulls, but nothing else. Someone or something had licked them clean as soup bowls.
Kurta stood up slowly.
His mouth was dry and his heart was pounding. He went over to the console. His hand was shaking so badly he could barely thumb the intercom.
“This is Kurta from Ex-Three. I’m in the hub,” he said, his voice echoing up and down the corridors, cutting the heavy, deadly silence. “If anyone’s alive, answer me now or get to the hub. You’ve got ten minutes. After that, I’ll kill anyone I find.”
He sat down on the console desk and lit a cigarette, listening—and hoping—for the sound of footsteps. He was hearing things out there now, but they were not the sound of human feet.
Smoking, he waited.
And waited.
43
He gave it ten minutes, chain-smoking and feeling something loose shift inside him. The tension was nearly unbearable. Then it was time.
He began systematically searching the first floor, turning on lights as he went. He found more bodies. In fact, he founds lots of bodies and all of them had died the same way with their skulls ripped open. He counted twenty-three corpses. Most of the main living space was on the first floor—the kitchen and dining room, the infirmary, the rec rooms, the gym, as well as the greenhouses where they grew fresh vegetables and fruits.
He found bodies everywhere.
All of them missing their brains.
What troubled him was that despite the horrific head wounds, they all had the same peaceful, soporific look on their faces as if they hadn’t felt a thing. That more than anything else made him suspect the slugs with their abundant pharmacies.
But slugs didn’t have the equipment to split heads nor did they feed on brains. Their flukes did, but slowly, very slowly.
He walked from room to room, finding more bodies.
Place is a fucking morgue.
He saw too many faces he recognized and it pained him. He knew that eventually he was going to find Lisa Hilsson and it was going to hurt because he still had feelings for her.
You had a hell of way of showing it.
Now and again, he found some blood trails over the floors, smears that went out doorways and sometimes right up the walls.
Standing outside the greenhouse door (where he found five bodies), he lit a cigarette and tried to get his nerves in order. He was shaking. This was a new terror and he did not know what form it would take. That was the worst part. It was what kept him shivering and trembling.
What the fuck is this about? What the hell happened here?
Questions without answers.
Once he had been through the first floor twice and was no closer to any answers, it was time to go below. There were two more levels. One held the sleeping quarters, machine shops, and generator room. The one beneath that was where the lab was and where Major Trucks’ digs were. Dr. Dewarvis and his people were down there. It was also where the supply rooms were.
As he made for the stairway which was down near the kitchen, he heard a scratching noise from the corridor he had just left. Wiping cold sweat from his face, Kurta went over there and saw…nothing.
But he knew he had heard it.
A scratching like fingernails on a door.
He waited for a time, but he never heard it again. Finally, he went through the door and down the stairs to see what he could find. All the way, something inside him—cold fear and instinct—told him to turn back, to leave this alone. To get back out to the APC and get out of there.
But he knew he couldn’t.
That’s not who and what he was.
He had to find out even if it killed him.
When he came through the door, he found more bodies right away. There were so many that he had to step over them. He found them in bed, on the floor, sitting in chairs, and sprawled in doorways. And they all had that serene, passive look on their faces. Something which was in great contrast to the gore that had dripped down their faces.
He found Lisa in her room. Both she and her daughter were dead like the others. There was nothing to do or say. He closed the door quietly, something breaking inside him. A few doors down, he found Daniella Creed in bed. Amazingly, she was alone. Naked, her charms on full display, she was smiling, her head split like a gourd.
Out in the corridor, he heard the scratching again.
In fact, he heard quite a bit of it.
He was about to find out what this was about and he knew it.
44
The scratching became a flurry of noise that came from every quarter.
The M4 held high, Kurta followed the corridor to the end, turning left past the stairs that led below and walking over towards the library and its adjoining rooms where the kids were schooled.
As he reached for the library door, the scratching stopped.
Just like that.
He hesitated, unsure, the sudden silence probably the loudest thing he had ever heard.
Fuck this.
He opened the door and stepped inside, fumbling about for the light switch. In those three or four seconds of darkness before he found the switches, nothing lighting up all the grim stacks but the light on his rifle, he had never been so completely afraid.
It was a special sort of fear.
The oldest and most debilitati
ng fear man had ever known: the fear of the unknown. Nothing could hold a candle to it.
The lights chased away most of the shadows, but not those in his own head that lurked at the very edge of reason.
The library was no different than any other—there were reading tables and nooks, aisles and aisles of books, a children’s area at the back. The only thing truly unique about it were the corpses slumped in chairs or sprawled on the floor where they had fallen, their heads laid open, blood and gray matter dribbled down their faces.
As he passed by a group of them, a woman fell over on the sofa, her face landing squarely in the lap of the man next to her. Under any other circumstances, it might have been funny how she face-planted so perfectly in his crotch. The moony grin on the man’s face only accentuated the situation.
But it wasn’t funny.
In fact, when it happened, Kurta jumped. It forced a strangled cry from his throat. And it didn’t help that at her current angle, the fluorescent light overhead revealed the void of her emptied skull.
Then something fell.
Several things fell.
They thudded loudly to the floor. He tracked them to their source: the aisles of books. In the second row, three books were on the floor, having fallen from the highest shelf. One of them landed with its cover facing up: In a Lonely Place by Dorothy B. Hughes.
“Who’s there?” Kurta called out, knowing someone was. He could feel their presence. It was heavy in the air.
Something moved behind him.
A few more books fell.
This time, however, he saw something move and fired in its general direction. Several books were ripped apart by the rounds, but nothing else. As fragmented pages drifted down around him like snowflakes, he turned and ran down the aisle and into the next.
It was here. I know it was here.
He stood there, breathing hard.
Something wet struck his face. It was cold, yet it burned. He wiped it away with a moan of disgust. It wasn’t blood. It was brownish, nearly black, and it was slushy.
Another droplet fell and struck his shoulder.
It was coming from the clean air vent above.
Something was up there.
45
Kurta stepped away.
The vent was about three feet wide by maybe a foot in height. What the hell could possibly be up there? Not a man surely. Slug? Creeper?
Feeling hemmed in, he moved quickly back into the open where he’d have more maneuvering room if it came down to it.
He almost stepped on one of them.
A creeper.
It was wide in front and slender and wormy in the rear like the others. A bright glossy red, it was segmented and horribly centipede-like. It had the same tentacle-like appendages and slithering mouthparts.
That much was the same.
But what was different was that it was much larger, easily three feet in length. It seemed broader, thicker, more powerful looking. Like others he had seen, when it breathed it expanded like a bag of gas, mouth opening wide with each breath. But unlike them, its hollow tongue jutted out, wiggling in the air like that of a python. Not only that, but he could see a hook protruding from the upper jaw. It looked sharp and deadly like an ice pick.
As he made to open up on the thing, something moved behind him.
Another big creeper.
A megacreeper, for lack of a better word.
As it sucked in air, it inflated to twice its normal size, the mouth dilating and revealing the ribbed expanse of its throat. Its tongue tasted the air, that hook sliding from the gums.
And something more.
A fluttering diaphanous membrane that was frilly and pink extended from its sides and it flew through the air, gliding like a flying squirrel.
Kurta ducked and it missed his head by less than a foot. It looked like it would crash right into one of the bookcases, but it didn’t. At the last moment, it veered off, spreading out and sticking to the wall like a thrown spitball. It clung there, vibrating. Its segments rasped together. Its hook scratched the paint, leaving furrows.
The other one on the floor launched itself and he drilled it with a three-round burst, knocking it against one of the tables. Torn and squeaking, it crawled a few feet, leaking a shiny purple-brown blood, then went still.
Another one launched itself from atop a shelf of books. Two more crawled from behind the sofa. Kurta darted away, bumping into a chair and overturning its corpse to the floor.
He shot another in midair, ripping it in half, splashing its blood over the serene faces of several cadavers.
They were everywhere now.
They crept up the walls and flew through the air and wriggled over the floor. And he saw why. As he’d suspected, they were coming out of the clean air vent in numbers.
The vents would have given them access to the entire bunker. That’s what must have happened to everyone.
He ran, jumping and ducking, firing wherever he saw motion, killing creepers and ripping holes in the walls and perforating seated corpses.
He reached the door as another flew out at him.
He slammed it shut, and the creeper attached itself to the glass panel of the door like a snail to the side of an aquarium. Its underbelly was a shocking white, legs squirming. It held on by a vertical row of sucker-like knobs that he was willing to bet were designed to cling to prey and never let go. The knobs looked like flabby white lips, pulsating as if they were kissing the glass.
Out in the corridor, there were more of them.
He burned through the rest of his magazine and then another as they converged on him. They were thick on the floors, the walls, even the ceiling. He blasted them to worming fragments and painted the walls with their fluids.
Still more came.
There was just no way he could hold out alone.
He cut down another corridor, wasted two more creepers, and then another came seemingly out of nowhere, flying right at his face and he put up an arm to block it. It hit with incredible force, knocking him to the floor and making him drop the M4. Up close like that, it was a real horror. It clung to his arm by its suckers, its tentacle legs wrapping around his arm. He saw the mouth open and the hook come sliding out.
He pulled his .357 and drilled it with two shots, killing it. He tore it off his arm and the suckers broke free with a pop-pop-pop sound. He tossed its loathsome weight to the floor, and just as he had, another creeper tried to drop on him from the ceiling. He got out of its way, blew it apart, and another came sailing towards him. He caught it with a glancing shot that tore its side open, sending it careening into the wall. It hit the floor, bubbling out gouts of that weird blood that spattered in all directions.
Enough of this shit.
He grabbed up his M4 as more creepers showed. Retracing his steps, he took the first egress he could find which was the stairway to the lower level, the biocontainment level.
You sure you want to go down there?
But he was.
If he wanted answers to this nightmare, then that’s where they would be.
46
Guiding himself by the light on his rifle, Kurta went down the first flight of stairs, banked to the right and went down another set.
As he keyed himself through the door and stepped into the corridor, another megacreeper shot out at him. He gave it a three-round burst dead on and it dropped flopping to the floor. He found the light switches and lit up the place.
He saw no more creepers.
He knew if he went to the left, it would take him to Major Trucks’ office and quarters. Down there is also where Dr. Dewarvis and his crew had their digs. He saw very little of them. They spent most of their time in the bio lab, working on ways to eradicate the slugs. At least, that’s what the official line was coming down from Trucks. What they were really doing was anyone’s guess because no one was really allowed in there.
And maybe, just maybe, Kurta thought, there was a very good reason for that.
He
didn’t bother going to check out any of the offices or Trucks’ hangout; he had no doubt whatsoever that everyone was dead. He went right to the bio lab. He’d been wondering how he would get in there because you needed key cards to access the doors, but he saw that wasn’t a problem. The outer hatch was held open because there was a dead guy caught between it and the jam. One of Dewarvis’ flunkies in a lab coat.
He stepped over the corpse, scanning about quickly, looking for creepers and seeing none.
The labs consisted of five interconnected rooms, all of which were quite large. He’d never actually been in there before. If he was looking for a clue, some evidence to explain what was going on, he wasn’t going to find it. That much was obvious.
The place was trashed.
Desks and workstations were overturned, equipment shattered on the floor amongst human remains. The stench in there was ungodly. He stepped carefully over the mess, everything from IV bags and plastic tubing to laptop computers and surgical instruments. Drug cabinets were overturned. Digital microscopes dashed against the walls. He saw stainless steel tables with drains in them that were dark with old, crusty stains. Incineration units. Scattered bones. One of the few things still standing were a series of glass laboratory vats that held pickled specimens—wigglers, slugs, creepers, even several of the megacreepers.
He passed into another of the rooms, and this one held what looked like Plexiglas-enclosed containment cells. There was nothing in there but stains and bits of carrion.
He thought: If you had to use your imagination, you could say that what was in those cells escaped or was allowed to escape.
But that seemed too simple, way too simple. He was almost certain there was more to it than that.
He walked into another of the labs. He recognized what he thought was an electron microscope. Other than that, more of the same—computers and papers, instruments and odd-looking machinery smashed on the floor. There was also a very large containment cell. Its walls and ceiling and floor were covered with a putrefying black rot.