‘How badly was he injured?’ hissed King. His voice sounded like it was falling apart in his chest. ‘More than just his leg?’
Coleman nodded. He didn’t want to explain how Marlin had looked just before the end. ‘It looked like he tangled with the creatures in the shafts again, after he got caught the first time.’
King made a monumental effort to stay calm. His breath shook as he exhaled. He asked, ‘So Marlin took on the creatures head-to-head, twice, and then got burnt just before he reached the riser?’
‘That’s what it looked like,’ Coleman answered quietly. ‘He was pretty messed up.’
‘But he was alive when the fire reached him?’
‘Yeah. He was almost at the riser.’ Coleman reached out and steadied himself against a cabinet. He felt dizzy after the intense heat.
‘You’re blistering,’ said Vanessa, spotting Coleman’s hand. ‘We’ll have something for that in here.’
In here? thought Coleman.
He realized they occupied a small medical center. He was leaning against a cabinet full of syringes and vials. The smell was instantly recognizable. It smelled like his home town’s doctors surgery. It even had a similar feel, right down to the dog-eared magazines and saltwater fish tank. Beside the fish tank a handwritten notice read: Health assessments in the gymnasium every Tuesday afternoon, 3pm.
Coleman realized the medical center was designed to feel familiar, no doubt one of the techniques used to reduce the anxiety of staff living and working in the isolated, underground Complex.
The medical center had been spared from the creatures’ rampage. The sliding doors seemed intact. Coleman recalled that the medical center was located roughly in the center of the hub, not far from the pool room. Judging from the equipment, the center’s primary goal was to stabilize patients before relocation to better-equipped facilities. It would never have coped with today’s casualties.
But by the look of it, someone had tried. Medical supplies lay scattered all over the floor
Staring down at the supplies, Coleman felt a surreal sense of shock about losing Marlin. It wasn’t just that. Last time he’d been on the habitation level, the entire scene resembled pure anarchy as people ran screaming for the safety of somewhere other-than-here.
Now it was deadly quiet. Same place, different feel. But the feeling was almost as bad.
Vanessa gave up rummaging inside the cabinet and got down on her hands and knees. She picked through the supplies scattered over the floor.
‘Gotcha,’ she said, plucking an aerosol spray from the mess.
Coleman’s fatigues, boots and body armor had shielded most of his skin from the few seconds of intense heat, but the backs of his hands were blistered.
‘This is an anesthetic burn treatment.’ Vanessa shook the can. ‘It should stop any infection.’
Coleman felt the cold spray hit his hand as she applied the treatment.
‘What now?’ asked Forest emptily, keeping watch through the glass doors.
Coleman had just been asking himself that same question. ‘Now we’re back on the habitation level, I’m making it our first priority to contact the Evac Center. I need to make sure David’s OK.’
Everyone nodded, and Vanessa searched around herself.
‘I think I know a way to reach David,’ she said. ‘It’s close too.’
Coleman hoped she was right. He added, ‘And we need to broadcast a distress signal to the Coronado. I’m open to suggestions of how we do that.’
Coleman directed his question at King.
King hadn’t noticed. He was staring up at the vent. The vent where his best friend had just been torn apart by creatures and then burned alive.
Coleman knew that King had no family left. When able, King had spent his Sunday lunches for the last four years at Marlin’s family table, with Marlin’s three sisters and mother. Coleman had joined them a few times, and was surprised to see the massive man smiling so much, washing plates, his hulking figure bending over the sink while Marlin dried the dishes. His deep laugh boomed through the house as Marlin quietly cracked jokes.
Maybe King was thinking about that right now.
‘King,’ said Coleman. ‘I know how you feel. I feel exactly the same way, but we need to keep our heads in the game. We need to send out a distress signal. Any suggestions?’
King lowered his gaze from the vent.
He stared at Coleman, his dark features unreadable. A very intelligent man dwelled within that hulking exterior. He was a loyal Marine, but at the end of the day, friendship meant everything to King.
Coleman wondered if he had a problem. The time to grieve for Marlin would come later, otherwise they would all end up like Marlin.
Dead-pan, King replied, ‘Fifth Unit carried an executive communications pack. If we can find their equipment, we can contact the Coronado.’
Hearing the logical suggestion, Coleman dismissed his concerns. King was still thinking like a professional. And he was right. If they could find Fifth Unit’s radio equipment, they could hump the radio outside the Complex beyond the blackout zone.
‘But where’s the equipment?’ asked Forest.
The last time Coleman had heard from Fifth Unit, they had been on this level, heading towards the pool room. They never showed up. Coleman knew that a team fighting a running battle left signs of their passing. It shouldn’t be too hard for him to track them.
A different problem worried him now.
‘Something else is worrying me,’ he admitted. ‘There could only have been a dozen creatures up in those vents chasing us. If there had been more, we would never have outmaneuvered them.’
‘So where the hell are all the other creatures?’ asked Vanessa, picking up on Coleman’s train of thought.
She unconsciously reached down to her tablet. ‘And what are they doing?’
‘Exactly,’ said Coleman. ‘How much ammunition do we have left?’
Forest knew without checking. ‘Three and a half magazines between all of us.’
Coleman had only half a magazine left in his assault rifle. After that he was down to his colt.
‘We can’t sustain any more face-to-face confrontation. We need to use stealth. Fifth Unit initially deployed through the north stairwell. I think I know a way we can cross to the north stairwell without being noticed.’
Coleman nodded to Vanessa. ‘Show me how we can contact David.’
Vanessa moved to the small rear door in the medical center. She opened the door slightly to peer through the crack. Beyond lay the school classroom. A common wall joined the two facilities.
She quietly opened the door and scanned the classroom. Coleman hardly heard the others following them, which was exactly what he wanted.
Clearly there had been an attempt to keep the classroom as normal-looking as possible. On the walls hung children’s paintings and multiplication tables. Lunch-bags and pullovers hung from hooks near the door. A whiteboard displayed an interrupted lesson in long-division. Coleman saw where pencils had been abandoned when the alarm sounded.
‘This is his desk here,’ said Vanessa, touching a desktop as she crossed the room.
‘It was lucky the children were so close to the evacuation tunnel,’ Coleman observed.
‘It wasn’t luck,’ Vanessa corrected. ‘We designed it that way.’
Coleman reached the other side of the classroom. He looked out the partly open door.
Christ.
He’d been expecting this, or some variation of what he was seeing, but it was still terrible. A person lay torn apart in the doorway. Coleman hardly recognized the mess in as anything but chunks of flesh held roughly together by strips of fabric. It looked like the person - a man or woman Coleman couldn’t tell - had distracted the creatures while the children escaped. They had used a fire extinguisher as a weapon.
‘This is Peter Crane,’ said Vanessa, picking up a plastic identity swipe card. ‘He was the schoolteacher on rotation this month.’
Forest passed Coleman the remains of Peter’s jacket lying in the classroom. A lot of good people had gone down fighting today. Peter Crane was one of them.
‘The children reached the Evacuation Center because of you,’ said Coleman, covering Peter’s remains with the jacket. ‘You saved them.’
‘Alex -’
Coleman looked up and saw Vanessa standing across the room, her hand on the type of intercom he had already found inactive. She looked pale. She had stopped speaking mid-sentence and was looking around herself.
‘What is it?’ Coleman asked, alarmed by her sudden change of manner.
Dry-mouthed, she said, ‘I know why there weren’t more creatures in the vents. I think I know where most of the creatures have gone….’
Coleman looked around the classroom, at all the artwork on the walls, at the small tables and chairs and bags. ‘You’re not serious. Tell me you’re not serious!’
‘The Evacuation Center,’ confirmed Vanessa quietly, looking nauseous. It was the first time in all this mess that she had seemed completely shaken. ‘They can’t know about the vibrations yet. They have all kinds of systems operating in there. David’s in there.’
‘Can the creatures access the Evacuation Center?’
Vanessa didn’t answer immediately. When she did, her answer changed everything.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘And very soon.’
#
Harrison stood in the heart of a siege.
The creatures were literally tearing the Evacuation Center apart from the top down.
Alone in the antechamber, looking upwards, he tracked the path of destruction across the ceiling as the wave of creatures thundered overhead. His first hint of the attack came barely thirty seconds ago.
Three system integrity alarms had sounded simultaneously.
For a brief moment, despite the alarms, he prayed the sound announced a helicopter landing to evacuate the civilians.
Then he heard the first screeeeech-twang-clatter of a surface maintenance hatch being violently torn from its hinges.
Then another hatch was torn away, a short distance further along the roof. At the same time, the upright fuse box for the helicopter landing-pad was ripped off. Orange warning light appeared on the digital wall display as he heard the first alarmed cries from the evacuees. Ceiling lights flickered for five seconds throughout the Center. The evacuees stood and turned their faces upwards. They guessed what was coming.
It was quiet for a moment.
And then the full storm hit.
It felt like a tornado dragging wrecked car bodies across the roof. The sound above the evacuees was a devastating orchestra of tearing fixtures and straining metal as the creatures demolished their way into every conduit, maintenance point and access tunnel.
There could be no mistaking their intentions: they were trying to find a way inside, testing every nook and cranny to find an opening. Fortunately, most of those points on the surface ran into dead-ends or became narrow apertures through solid concrete.
Most, but not all.
‘Everyone stay calm,’ Dana urged over the intercom. ‘They can’t get in here. We’ve barricaded every entrance. Just stay calm.’
Harrison prayed she was right.
Non-essential surface instruments taking a battering wasn’t going to kill any of the evacuees, but as he projected the creatures’ path across the roof, Harrison predicted a much bigger problem. On the digital wall-display, groups of warning lights blossomed ever larger as the system traced the creatures’ destructive path eastward.
Towards the top-deck.
The worst possible direction.
The Evac Center had two entrances: the evacuation tunnel, sealed by the heavy containment door, and the top-deck. A single concrete stairwell led from the communal area to the top-deck. At the top of the stairwell, a short landing served a set of gas-operated doors. The metal sliding doors provided an airtight seal for the sterile Center. Sullivan’s engineering teams had done their best to barricade the top-deck, welding and bolting cross-struts across the door and inside the landing, but their defensive resources were limited.
Harrison pinched the bridge of his nose. If the creatures could pry open the top-deck, then they could get past any of their hastily-constructed reinforcements.
Warning lights started flashing around the top-deck.
For a moment the lights flickered in the antechamber as the creatures severed some power relays from the main Complex. After a moment of darkness where the noises seemed even louder, the emergency power came online. Harrison hoped that one of the creatures had just been electrocuted.
On cue, Sullivan’s frantic voice came over his headset. ‘Harrison, I got hostiles up here. They’re tearing apart the top-deck. I can see the sunlight through our reinforcements. There’s a fucking nest of them up here!’
Harrison pressed his index finger to his earpiece to hear over the continuous roar of buckling metal. ‘Will the reinforcement hold?’
‘No way. They’re going to compromise the top-deck in the next minute and then reach our barricade. The doors weren’t designed to resist this kind of force.’
Harrison faced the reality that the creatures were going to break into the Evacuation Center. It was no longer a matter of if they could, but when they would.
It was only a matter of minutes.
Two Marines and a mass of unarmed and terrified civilians against countless biological killing machines? The creatures would tear apart every living person in the Center - women, children, everyone.
Don’t stop. Don’t give up.
Harrison snatched up his hand radio. ‘I want the second and third engineering teams to meet me at the top-deck immediately. Start cramming the stairwell with equipment - tear out the bed-frames if we have to. If the creatures get through the top-deck I want them to work for every inch of stairwell.’
Suddenly Harrison heard Sullivan’s assault rifle firing.
Sullivan came over the radio a second later.
‘I got visual. I got targets! They’re breaking through the top-deck.’
Harrison stared hard at the blueprint.
What the hell drew the creatures? Had they slaughtered everything in the main Complex and were now looking for fresh prey? There must be some way to distract them; some way to stall their progress and buy precious time for the evacuees.
Sullivan came again over the radio.
‘They’ve breached the top-deck doors, Harrison! They’re at the barricade! I got hostiles three meters away!’
Harrison turned from the blueprint in disgust and snatched up his assault rifle. This was it - they were breaking in. They’d be through the barricade in minutes. There was nothing more he could achieve from the antechamber.
‘I’m on my way, Sullivan. Let’s give these freaks a fight they won’t forget.’
Harrison sprinted down the short corridor.
The evacuees in the communal area, more than one hundred and fifty people, raced to block the stairwell. It presented an incredible scene as people did whatever it took to get as much material moving towards the stairwell as humanly possible. Survival instinct mobilized everyone. Chairs, cabinets, couches, bed frames, shelving units, monitors - everything not screwed-down passed hand over hand through the crowd towards the top-deck stairwell. Anything screwed down was being quickly unscrewed or torn up.
A sea of people passed, pushed, carried, and dragged every possible obstacle towards the stairwell. They must have started the process before Harrison even gave the order to the engineering teams. He spotted young David struggling with a chair over his head, a determined look locked on his face. At the edge of the crowd, a man grabbed the chair from David and threw it up and into the stairwell. David turned and ran to fetch another. Every hand made a difference.
These people weren’t giving up.
Harrison absorbed the scene on the run. He dodged left and right through the working crowds, ducking under a couch and cutting in front of two
women straining to carry a small fridge.
Dana’s voice came breathlessly over his radio. ‘Harrison? Are you there? Harrison!’
He snatched the hand radio from his hip. ‘Dana? What is it?’
He couldn’t hear Dana’s answer over the chaos of evacuees.
He skidded to a halt in the middle of the surging crowd, the only still person in a sea of motion. ‘What’s that? Say again!’
Dana’s voice sounded clearer this time. ‘Harrison, come to the communications station right away! Hurry!’
‘What is it? Are the C-Guards down?’
‘No, the blackout’s intact. Just hurry, will you! The signal might not last.’
A signal? Who could send a signal through the blackout?
Harrison took off running towards the communication room.
‘How can we be getting a signal?’ he demanded as he slid into the comms room.
Then Harrison saw Dana standing at the intercom system, a simple microphone and speaker box on the wall with a single ‘talk’ button.
Dana gripped the intercom with two hands, watching over her shoulder for his approach. As soon as she saw him, she thumbed the talk button and spoke into the recessed microphone. ‘He’s here. Harrison’s here.’
She quickly stepped away from the intercom. ‘He’s asking for you.’
Harrison slid into the room and ignored the intercom. He turned his back on Dana, angry he’d been distracted from where he was needed over something trivial.
He yelled over his shoulder back to Dana, ‘If you’ve got someone holed up in the Complex, they’re on their own. I don’t have time for this.’
‘Then you better make some time,’ blurted a familiar voice from the intercom.
Harrison didn’t take one step more. He didn’t speak for three valuable seconds of what was perhaps going to be the last few minutes of his life.
‘Captain!’ Harrison flew to the intercom. ‘Captain Coleman! Is that you?’
‘It’s me, Harrison. Listen, this is important. Have you got my son? Is David there?’
‘Yeah. He’s here. I’ve got him. What the hell’s going on?’
‘Are you sure it’s him? Is he hurt?’
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