Vanessa’s eyes went distant. ‘No. Wait, maybe.’ Her gaze dropped to the floor. ‘There’s a security subsection under the labs that can be accessed from the stairwell. We call it the ‘underlab’. It’s just a system of corridors under the peripheral labs, but it gets more complex under the core labs. The underlab mirrors the layout of the rooms and passages in the core labs above it. It’s designed to let people move under the core labs without interrupting critical experiments. It uses access codes and large round hatches in its ceiling to access the core labs above.’
‘Right, let’s go,’ said Coleman, already heading for the stairwell.
‘Wait,’ blurted Vanessa. ‘What about David?’
Coleman met her gaze. ‘I’ve thought it through. If David’s in the Evac Center, then he’s safe for the time being. If he’s not, then we have more chance of finding him by moving around, right?’
Coleman didn’t mention that his plan would also serve to distract the terrorists from the evacuees and David. If Coleman’s team could cause enough trouble in the main Complex, hopefully the evacuees would seem insignificant to both the terrorists and the creatures.
Vanessa nodded, perhaps understanding his plan after all. ‘OK. But you don’t understand about the underlab. It’s not what you think it –’
‘Vanessa, we don’t have time,’ insisted Coleman. ‘Cairns might already be in your labs. I don’t care about the risks. Can you access the underlab or not?’
She nodded, her earlier hesitation gone. ‘Yes.’
‘That’s good enough,’ said Coleman. ‘We’re just lucky you called the lift and we ran into each other.’
Vanessa shook her head at the elevator. ‘I didn’t summon the elevator. I was running for my life when the elevator doors opened and I saw you.’
Coleman realized she was right. She had been running towards the elevator. And Forest definitely hadn’t touched the elevator controls. There was no one else around who could have summoned the elevator to the third floor. Coleman filed the information away in his mind as another mystery to analyze later.
He joined Marlin at the fire stairs door. ‘Any activity in the stairwell?’
‘Nothing yet.’ Marlin glanced upwards. ‘But that spiky bastard two levels up nearly had me before I slammed the door in its face. I bet it’s still in there, pissed off and waiting.’
Coleman knew the confined space of the stairwell could be a death trap. ‘We don’t have a choice. We have to go in. Two by two formation, Vanessa in the middle.’
‘Shooting will attract them,’ added Vanessa as the five took position with Coleman and Marlin in front, King and Forest behind. ‘Any noise or movement will trigger an attack.’
Marlin prepared to yank open the stairwell door. ‘So when we shoot we attract them, but if we don’t shoot, they’re going to swarm all over us.’
‘We only fire when we need to,’ advised Coleman. ‘But we keep moving. If we have to, we’ll make a defensive withdrawal two by two down every level.’
‘What the hell does that mean?’ blurted Vanessa, looking around urgently. ‘This is all new to me!’
Coleman placed his hand on her shoulder. ‘Two men move while two men shoot, then we swap, like leapfrog. So we’re always moving and shooting. You stick with the two that are moving. I won’t let anything happen to you.’
‘Tunnel of love,’ rumbled King from the back.
‘Okay,’ Vanessa said nervously, then added quickly, ‘And spread your shots. Hitting them in one place will only disable part of them. They don’t feel pain. Put enough hits on them and they will be drained of the fluid that lets them move.’
Coleman raised his rifle and nodded to Marlin. ‘Do it, Corporal.’
Marlin yanked opened the door. Coleman steamed in the stairwell. He trained the rifle up and down the stairs as the others came through behind.
Coleman was right. The confined space of the stairwell proved a death trap for the evacuees.
Human remains lay everywhere, like a hundred serial killers shared the stairwell to hide their victims. It was just layers of carnage. In places, people were draped two or three deep over the stairs in rolling humps of bodies.
Thank god David was on the habitation level and didn’t use the stairwell.
King scanned the grilled landings, screwing up his face. ‘It’s a killing field.’
Coleman started down the steps, wincing at the sound his boots made on the steel grill. He chose his footing carefully. It was a slow process picking their way past the bodies.
‘They look like they’ve been in a shredder,’ whispered Forest tactlessly, avoiding the corpse of a woman who was twisted backwards with her right arm caught through the handrail. ‘This is too much.’
‘Why were so many caught in the stairwell?’ asked Marlin. ‘There are too many dead in one place.’
Vanessa didn’t answer. Her expression was ashen. She knew these people. If not by name, then certainly by face.
Coleman led the way. Averting his eyes from the victims, he focused on the task at hand. The stairwell was a dangerous place to be. They needed to access the sublevel, this ‘underlab’, as quickly as possible. Coleman sensed the rising tension in his Marines’ voices as they navigated the stairwell carnage behind him. He needed to get them out of here and focused on their task of retrieving the templates.
Forest hissed angrily, ‘I’d like to know how all these creatures just appeared? Everyone is following their normal daily routine and then – bam – there are monsters everywhere, all over the Complex. How can that happen?’
‘I don’t know yet,’ answered Vanessa thoughtfully. ‘But I have a suspicion we’re going to find out very soon.’
Coleman reached a door resembling a submarine hatch with an access code panel.
‘This is the security sublevel,’ confirmed Vanessa.
Coleman motioned for her to hurry with her access codes, but she was gone.
‘Vanessa!’ hissed Coleman, keeping his voice low. He spotted her disappearing down the stairwell.
‘After her,’ he hissed.
Third Unit reached the bottom and found Vanessa peering into the dark triangle of space under the last flight of stairs.
‘What the hell are you doing?’ demanded Coleman.
She pointed up at the zigzag pattern of stairs above them. ‘Your mission involved accessing the Complex via the stairwells, right? Rather than using the freight lift or just a single stairwell?’
Coleman was surprised by her accurate observation. Their insertion points had been spread right around the Complex to take advantage of the stairwells. Coleman had helped plan the mission, as was the case with many Special Forces operations where ground operatives had more input than regular forces into mission planning. The stairwells provided fast access to key points, but this had led every unit straight into the path of the evacuating staff and the creatures.
‘Why?’ asked Coleman. ‘How are the stairwells important?’
‘Shine your flashlight in there.’ She pointed towards the dark wall under the stairs.
Coleman directed his flashlight under the stairwell, expecting to see a flat slab of wall, but instead found himself looking into a large cavity recess. He panned his flashlight around inside the unexpected void.
It looked dark and messy, like a tooth cavity, but big enough to park a small truck.
‘Holy tap dancing Jesus, what the hell is this?’ breathed King, moving his own flashlight slowly around the edges of the hole.
Vanessa squatted to examine the cavity’s edge.
‘This is where the creatures were born,’ she answered quietly. ‘These walls are part of the basement. They’re part of the experiment that….’ She caught herself mid sentence. She looked back into the cavity. ‘I can’t believe he did this.’
‘Part of what experiment?’ prompted Coleman. ‘Tell me.’
Vanessa waved her hands to indicate the entire Complex. ‘This place, the Complex itself, is one of the bi
o-survive experiments I’ve been explaining. How much do you know about the history of this site before it became the Biological Solutions Research Complex?’
Coleman chose his answer extremely carefully. This topic skirted territory that led to their break-up in the first place.
‘I know it used to be an open cut mine until they hit an underground lake, an aquifer. The aquifer flooded the site and made it impossible to keep working. The site was abandoned.’
Coleman knew a lot more about the history of the site than he admitted. He knew that a special kind of work had proceeded at the site before the research Complex began construction. The abandoned mine site – at the time just a big hole in the ground – had been temporarily in military hands and the location of some very classified activities. If Vanessa knew the truth, her opinion that the U.S. military was built on deceit, hypocrisy and unjustified violence would only be reinforced.
‘The aquifer is the reason we chose this site for the Complex,’ she continued. ‘You would have seen the ‘lawn’ as you flew in, the big ring of bright green vegetation around the Complex?’
Coleman nodded.
‘Well, the lawn draws water up from the aquifer. We built this place right into the aquifer, so the basement level is riddled with half-flooded passages. Those passages are also full of roots that carry water to the lawn and the rest of the Complex.
‘We call the whole system the ‘big sucker’.’ Vanessa sounded proud. ‘We purify and transfer enough water to supply the entire Complex, just using the natural capillary action of the lawn lifting water from the aquifer. We’ve integrated some of the walls into the system.’
King looked closer at the wall. ‘These walls are alive?’
She nodded. ‘Partially. They’re fed using direct nutrient streaming. Gould knew this and planted the corrupted templates in the walls. The growing creatures consumed the organic walls and tapped into the nutrients. That’s how they grew undetected so fast.’
Coleman imagined the walls rupturing and the creatures spilling over each other into the stairwells. ‘So Gould placed them in the emergency stairwells, knowing that when the evacuation alarm sounded, all the evacuees would rush straight into the creatures. Gould drew the entire Complex into a giant trap.’
Clearly disgusted, Vanessa nodded at Coleman’s assessment.
‘If we catch this bastard, we’re going to nail him,’ spat Marlin without taking his eyes off the stairs. ‘No international bullshit while countries argue about extradition. We just give him a bullet to the brain. Job well done.’
‘Amen,’ murmured King.
An alarming thought struck Coleman. ‘Could Gould have planted any of these in the Evacuation Center?’ He imagined the evacuees, including David, streaming into the Evacuation Center, the massive containment door sealing shut, then dozens of creatures spilling from the walls among the people.
‘No,’ answered Vanessa. ‘The Evacuation Center is constructed from steel and concrete. The creatures couldn’t grow in there. They could only grow in places with nutrients, like here or the hydroponics bays.’
Thank heaven for that, thought Coleman, judging the depth and height of the cavity. ‘About fifteen creatures would fit in this hole. Gould stole six templates. That makes roughly ninety creatures loose in the Complex.’
‘That sounds about right,’ agreed Vanessa.
‘Ninety?’ asked Marlin. ‘So where are they all?’
Coleman remembered the creatures disappearing from the revolving door. ‘Let’s not wait to find out. Quick, back up to the sublevel before –’
Coleman caught himself mid-sentence as a stairwell door above was suddenly kicked open. He slapped his hand over Vanessa’s mouth, pushing her into the wall cavity. In less than a second, Marlin, King and Forest crowded in behind them.
#
Bora kicked open the stairwell door. The Marines felt close.
Eight gunmen spread out over the landing. Bora raised one finger sharply for silence. He settled his fingertips on the handrail.
He slowly closed his eyes.
It always felt the same.
Bora was four years old when he’d lost his hearing. Deathly ill, he’d fallen asleep normal and woken completely deaf. The last sound he remembered was his mother crying beside his rickety Czechoslovakian state hospital bed.
‘He’s strong. He’ll make it.’ This was his father, consoling his mother over and over again.
And four year old Krisko Borivoj had made it. His little body fought the illness, wracked with spasms and fevers and rashes. When he woke, the world was silent. Profound deafness was a lonely place.
But Bora had his father. Like many others in his small village, poaching was necessary for survival. Like all valuable skills, the lessons were passed from father to son. By the time Bora was seven, he was learning the ways of the woods as he glided silently behind his father carrying their heavy steel traps. Week in, week out, the overgrown game trails were their bread and butter. Bora’s eyes never strayed far from his father. It was only by watching his father’s body language that Bora learned how to move silently on the hunt.
But still, it was his father’s hearing that was essential. Bora was still just reading his father’s senses.
He couldn’t hear a twig breaking under his boot, but he learned how the sensation felt through his sole. In time, he learned how it felt when his father stepped on a dry twig a few meters away. Then one day Bora felt the vibration of one of his father’s traps snapping shut behind them. The metal ground-stakes had telegraphed the event through the lush soil.
His father hadn’t heard the trap, but Bora felt it. He tugged his father’s sleeve. They backtracked and found the sprung trap. Bora’s father smiled and squeezed his shoulder. That’s when things had changed in Bora’s mind. He could do something that others couldn’t.
He learned to listen with his entire body.
Bora’s father made every stick of furniture in their house, and Bora pushed the simple bunk his father had made for him into the corner where he could sleep with his hand resting on the wooden architrave. From there, he could feel everything that was going on. The patterns of tiny tremors that came through the wood were like rolling brail. What was happening in his home, in the houses next door, outside; every act had a characteristic affect on the world around it, and Bora was learning how to intercept and interpret these signals. If he felt something new, he jumped up and rushed outside, searching for the new source of vibrations with the wonder of a child learning a new word. He developed the habit of touching surfaces that he innately sensed would amplify vibrations. Likewise, he avoided areas that dampened vibrations. This was the way he came to categorize his surrounding, a tapestry of mediums through which he could sense life around him to varying degrees.
By the age of twelve, Bora was taller than his father.
His body grew strong, and before long it was Bora carrying their game across his shoulders while his father followed with the traps. Perhaps Bora was compensating, but all he knew was that it felt good to be taking the lead and receiving his father’s rare nod of approval.
Bora’s father also started using a rifle for larger game.
Then everything changed.
When they arrested his father, they confiscated his rifle and all his traps. It was his rifle that alerted the police, Bora’s mother later explained. The gunshots had carried through the woods.
Bora never saw his father again.
It was now Bora’s responsibility to provide for himself and his mother. All Bora had was his father’s hunting knife.
He took the knife back into the woods. For three days he hunted through the woods, returning home each night hungry, empty-handed, and mentally exhausted.
On the fourth day, while stalking a buck and feeling feint from hunger, he sensed the coal train. He’d sensed it before, often before his father heard it, but they had always remained concealed until it passed. Bora could feel its passage coming through every part of
the woods. Through every stone, through every tree he laid his hand on, he could feel its approach. He didn’t need to see it – couldn’t even see it through the thick forest – but he knew exactly where it was.
Suddenly it happened. He was crouched among a pile of brown leaves with one hand steepled on a boulder and his other dug into the dark soil.
He felt the train coming, he watched the buck, and then suddenly he sprung forward. The buck saw his movement and bounded away, straight into the side of the train that suddenly loomed out of the woods in its path.
When the train passed, Bora approached the buck. He deftly slit the suffering animal’s throat and then squatted with his hands on the train tracks. He stayed there until the vibration through the tracks was like a mosquito landing on his fingertips.
Right now, in the stairwell, the hand rail under Bora’s fingertips felt just like those train track. The rail was still vibrating from movement further down the stairwell. Today it was his job to flush the Marines under the train tracks.
‘They’re close,’ he said confidently. ‘We’ve got them. Spread out and search the stairwell.’
#
Coleman slowly released his hand from Vanessa’s mouth.
‘Nobody move a muscle,’ he whispered.
He heard Bora’s gunmen coming down the stairwell.
Third Unit were in deep trouble.
Bora only needed to drop a grenade down the stairwell and Third Unit would be wet wall-paper.
A terrorist’s boot appeared on the steps above Coleman’s head. The man descended side on, alertly panning his weapon left and right.
It was too late for Third Unit to make a dash for the basement door. Bora had the tactical high ground and a clear line of fire between the cavity and the door.
Third Unit’s only chance was to remain undetected in the dark cavity. Coleman had overlooked the cavity when standing right before it. The shadow from the stairs covered the cavity entrance in a sheet of darkness, but if the approaching terrorist angled a flashlight through the last flight of stairs, or came all the way to the bottom, Third Unit would be spotted.
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