It is our duty to die if it means keeping the facility secure. The creatures inside this hole simply cannot be allowed to surface.
It is the only way.
I have no choice.
Still, the deaths of the men and women still inside the Spiral was enough to burden any man’s heart. Many of them had devoted years of their life to the Order. To die now, so hopelessly, so terribly, was an affront to their loyalty.
And Gornman has locked me in this hole to die with everybody else.
Perhaps I deserve it.
I’m going to die a failure. After so much distinction, this is how things are going to end.
Unable to help himself, Kane looked at his computer monitor. He hovered randomly over each thumbnail to bring up the individual feeds. He watched a small group of survivors on subbasement 4 holding each other and crying. He saw Rimmer and Jerry inside the spider cell, shooting at those horrible nosferatu things. He saw ten people in the mess hall, the doors barricaded with tables and chairs, one woman on her knees with her hands clasped in prayer.
The inmates were loose in the asylum and the masters had become the slaves.
At the top of Kane’s computer screen was the Omega Protocol countdown.
8:52… 8:51… 8:50… 8:49…
Less than nine minutes to live. A life Kane had been truly honored to have lived. Being a guardian, a keeper of secrets, was the pride of Kane’s life. He would leave this world knowing he had performed his duties admirably, and that when things had gone wrong, he had done what was right—even if his last assignment had ended in disaster.
He hoped that his colleagues would see that.
He would see the countdown through. Nothing inside the Spiral could be allowed to live. All must die.
It was for the greater good. Kane made peace with himself.
I’m a hero. A hero in the truest sense because almost nobody will ever know of my sacrifice.
God will greet me with open arms.
Kane picked up his phone from its cradle and dialled in the number for his counterpart in Texas. It would be good to say goodbye to an old friend. Nobody should die without having said a few last words.
The phone rang.
And rang.
Odd, Robson always picks up. Kane’s calls normally get routed straight through to him wherever he is.
It was some time before the call was answered.
“General Robson?”
“No, no, this is Hilary.” It was Robson’s secretary, and it sounded like she was sobbing. “Who is this? You have to help us!”
“This is General Kane. Where is Robson?”
“General Robson is dead. Most everyone is dead.”
“What the hell is happening over there? What’s going—”
“It’s the faustling. Somehow it escaped. It let all of the other prisoners free. They slaughtered most of us before we even knew what was hap—”
The line went dead.
Kane replaced the handset carefully and stared into space.
7:37 left on the countdown.
General Kane closed his eyes and asked God for forgiveness.
Then, outside in the hallway, the screaming started.
Chapter Forty-Three
Bub saw all.
He saw through the eyes of every copy of himself in the many Deus Manus facilities throughout the world. Through the eyes of those copies still roaming free. Through the eyes of his slaves, of every creature he’d injected with his essence.
The copies weren’t nearly as powerful as his combined being. When he had divided, Bub’s power had weakened considerably. The minions he had created were also considerably weaker.
He’d spent years in his divided form. Growing. Regaining strength. Some had been injured. Or killed. But enough remained to once again take his place as the ruler of this world.
The time of man was at an end.
First, however, he needed an army.
Mankind, in its infinite, foolish hubris, had practically gifted him that army. And they’d kept it safe, for millennia, in the many Deus Manus facilities around the earth.
Bub had originally split into multiple copies of himself as a means to survive. But that had turned out to be the perfect way to infiltrate each iteration of Deus Manus. Each of his copies would lead a rebellion, an escape. Then his armies would converge, and he would once again recombine his smaller parts and become whole.
Each version of Bub was autonomous, though they worked as a hive mind. The creatures he possessed were part of this mind as well, to a lesser degree. He could control his copies through intense concentration, via thought waves that transmitted and detected muon neutrinos. Humans, and other creatures of their pitiful intelligence, would call it telepathy, even though there was nothing supernatural about it. Unfortunately, it took a great deal of energy to communicate with his other selves, and even more energy to control those he’d mutated into demons. Which meant he was functioning at a diminished capacity.
Once all of his selves recombined, his range and power would increase.
But there was a matter of some urgency to deal with first. The batling sensed the sudden doom in the hearts of those yet living. They all feared certain death, but not at the hands of claws and teeth. Something even more certain was the cause of their worry. Something that was quickly approaching.
As was the case with Samhain, the men of the facility would seek self-destruction in order to stop him. In Baja, Mexico, there was a single man who could potentially end the batling’s glorious slaughter before it even got started.
General Kane.
Kane had activated a safeguard, intending to bury everyone alive. Not as dramatic as a nuclear explosion, but effective just the same. The version of Bub at the Baja facility might be able to survive, but buried hundreds of meters in cement would prove difficult to escape from.
Kane had to be persuaded to shut off his suicide switch.
The batling reached the elevator at the end of the corridor and immediately wedged its bloody claws into the gap between the metal doors. It forced them apart and slipped through.
The elevator was not present in the shaft. The batling swooped upwards into the dark, empty space, night vision guiding it. The demon spiralled higher and higher, eventually reaching the elevator. It tore at the bottom, breaking its claws, its fingers, as it fought the steel. But as fast as its bones broke, the batling’s unique metabolism healed them, and slowly, inexorably, it punched through the floor of the lift and made a hole large enough to squeeze through.
The doors inside were already open, allowing Bub to shoot straight out into the Nucleus and pounce upon the nearest human.
The woman screamed as she was injected with the stinger in Bub’s claw. A nearby guard fired, threading shots through the demon’s flesh. Bub switched off his pain receptors and leapt upon the man, knocking away his rifle, pinning him to the floor.
“Where is Kaaaaaaaaane?”
Two more soldiers attacked, shredding Bub’s wings with machinegun rounds. He tore out the prone man’s stomach with his foot talons while leaping at the newcomers, ripping the first one’s throat out, and biting the second in the thigh, chomping through the femoral artery. Blood gushed like sprinklers, and Bub luxuriated in the sprays for a moment, a fond memory returning him to Sumeria over five millennia ago. His worshippers had filled pools with sacrificial human blood for Bub to bathe in as ten thousand grovelled on their knees, chanting one of the many names he’d had throughout the ages.
“Ušumgallu! Ušumgallu! Ušumgallu!”
He’d been away for too long. But the day would come again when he ruled humanity. Soon. Very soon.
Bub hadn’t sat on a throne of rotting corpses since his Mayan days. He wasn’t one to lament time lost, but the thought of it made him almost wistful.
The other humans in the room scattered in terror as the batling swooped into the air, soaring above them all. Even the men with guns dove into hiding.
Screeeeee
eeam, vermin!
The demon glided in a circle, reconnoitring. At the far side of the room was a glass partition, the wall to an office.
Kaaaaaaaaane.
Bub dive-bombed a nearby guard, hooking his talons into the man’s shoulders and tearing his arms from his sockets. Then he accelerated toward Kane’s office.
The general ducked away just as the batling smashed through the window. Kane had drawn a bulky, silver revolver and opened fire.
“One,” Bub said as the bullet punched into his chest.
The second shot shattered Bub’s femur, which immediately began to heal. “Twooooooo.”
Another bullet buried itself into Bub’s gut. “Threeeeeeeee.”
Another through a wing. “Fooooooour.”
Bub continued to creep forward. A bullet took a chunk of flesh out of the demon’s throat. “Fiiiiiiiiiiive.”
When the batling was only a meter away, General Kane drilled a round straight through his skull, blowing bits of brain matter from the back of Bub’s head.
Bub immediately fell, eyes wide and blank, blood pouring from the wound.
Kane appeared terrified, hair matted with sweat, his whole body shaking. He let the revolver drop to his side and blew out a stiff breath.
“Thaaaaaat’s siiiiiiiiiiix,” Bub said, sitting up and grinning. “You’re ooooooout.”
As Kane scrambled to reload, Bub gracefully hopped to his feet and dug a talon into the general’s soft belly.
“Turn it offfffffffff,” Bub ordered.
Kane grimaced as Bub’s finger penetrated him to the second knuckle.
“No. My job is to bury you alive. And that’s just what I am going to do, you… you abomination.”
Human anatomy was relatively simple, so Bub easily hooked his claw around Kane’s small intestine. He tugged until it came out the hole in the general’s abdomen.
“ Turn it offfffffffff. Noooooow.”
The general dropped onto his ass, pulling out more of his digestive tract as he did. He blinked when he saw his own innards.
“It’s…. over. You’re going… to… die… in… two… minutes.”
The batling barked a laugh. “Twoooo minutes is an eterniiiiiiiiiity.” He began to disembowel Kane, careful not to pierce anything vital.
The pain on the general’s face was exquisite.
“Turn it offffffffff.”
“N-no.”
Bub dug a second claw inside the general, and found his descending colon. He pulled that out to show the man.
“Dooo it. Noooooooooooow!”
Chapter Forty-Four
It couldn’t be.
It just couldn’t.
Dr. Gornman refused to believe that General Kane had the guts, the balls, to doom this entire facility.
He was old school military. A die hard patriot. But during her many sessions with Kane, Gornman would have bet her life he would have valued the safety of his personnel over the threat of monsters escaping.
And she had bet her life. And been wrong.
Gornman’s face contorted in rage and frustration, and she hit her fists on her desk in frustration as she watched the countdown to cement-filled death.
Ten seconds.
Nine…
Eight…
Seven…
Six…
Five…
Four…
Three…
…
…
…
Gornman looked around, expecting to hear the rush of concrete pouring in from the overhead ducts.
But there was nothing.
A minute passed. Then two.
No annihilation.
A half-hysterical laugh burst from her lips.
Kane chickened out! He stopped the Omega Protocol!
Gornman flipped through various security cameras on her monitor, looking for Kane. She wanted to see the defeated expression on his face. First she tried his office, but he wasn’t sitting as his desk, as Gornman expected. Right before she switched screens, she noticed the blood trail on the floor. Gornman punched in her code to take control of the camera, and made it pan right, where the smear of red ended in…
“Holy shit.”
General Kane was face down. His legs had been broken and twisted into a knot. And winding around his torso several times were his intestines—
—tied into a big bow on his back. Like a red ribbon on a Christmas present.
It was the most horrifying thing Gornman had ever witnessed, so she was surprised that she snorted a laugh at the sight.
Bub certainly wrapped up that problem.
It had to have been Bub. He was the only entity in the Spiral smart enough and powerful enough to have done that to Kane, obviously forcing him to stop the protocol. But as she continued to scan the room, Bub wasn’t there.
Gornman checked other security cameras, saw escaped creatures committing more carnage, including several on her level. If she didn’t find Bub quickly and get him to fulfil his promises to her, Gornman could end up as a monster snack.
But how could she contact him without revealing herself as a traitor? Rimmer and several guards were still alive. And Kane no doubt had notified Deus Manus, who would be sending evacuation teams and reinforcements. They couldn’t find out she had betrayed them all.
Gornman’s brows scrunched, thinking of how she could contact Bub without alerting anyone else of her crimes.
And then she had an idea.
Chapter Forty-Five
The draculas didn’t die easily.
The first was shredded when it stepped into the cell; Rimmer’s Kriss Vector carbine cutting it down like a scythe through a wheat field.
“Mag!” he yelled when he was empty, and Jerry was ready with one to hand him as the second dracula climbed over its dead comrade to get at them. Rimmer erased the monster’s head, and Jerry gave him another magazine while a third creature scurried into the room and flanked them.
Jerry aimed and fired too, the Glock kicking and stinging his hand like he was trying to catch a speeding cricket ball. The recoil was so surprising that Jerry flubbed his next four shots, the tip of the pistol jerking upward and making him miss the creature as it rushed at him, mouth wide and so crammed full of teeth they tore bloody holes through its cheeks.
Just as the dracula grabbed Jerry’s arm, Rimmer swung around and rammed his rifle between the beast’s jaws, blowing off the top of its skull.
“Jesus, Rimmer. That was hardcore.”
“You’re not the only one who plays Call of Duty.”
Another dracula darted into the room, running like a cheetah on all fours, pouncing on Rimmer and pinning him to the floor of the cell. Rimmer held his rifle in both hands, one on the butt and one on the barrel, trying to keep the monster’s chomping jaws away from him.
“Shoot it!”
Jerry realized he couldn’t aim for shit, so he pressed the Glock to the dracula’s nose and pulled the trigger as fast as he could, showering him and Rimmer in gibs of tissue. He continued to pull the trigger after the magazine had emptied and the vampire flopped over on its side, dead.
Rimmer reached out a hand, and Jerry helped him sit up.
“Nice shooting, Tex,” Rimmer said, coughing. He ejected the mag from the rifle and opened his palm for another.
“We’re out of clips,” Jerry said.
Another dracula appeared at the cell door.
“They’re magazines, not clips,” Rimmer said. The correction seemed pointless considering their dire situation. “Check the bodies.”
Jerry quickly patted down the corpses of the guards. “They’re out too.”
Rimmer nodded. “Makes sense. They went down when they ran out of bullets to return fire. Still got that round in your pocket?”
Jerry slapped his pants leg and found the bullet he’d picked up in the elevator, when Rimmer was giving him the impromptu shooting lesson. He fished it out and held it up.
The dracula stood there, watching.
“Put it in the chamber of the Glock and close the slide.”
“One bullet?” Jerry whispered, his eyes flitting to the dracula. “You can’t kill these monsters with just one bullet.”
“It’s not for the monster,” Rimmer said, his face solemn. He drew his knife and asp. “I’m going down fighting, and I’m going to be ripped to pieces. If you don’t want that to happen to you…” his voice trailed off.
“Suicide? I’m supposed to kill myself?”
“Do you want to be eaten alive? Or worse, turned into one of those things? Put the cartridge in the weapon.”
With shaking hands, Jerry followed orders.
The dracula took a step toward them, sniffing the air.
“Been nice knowing you, kid.”
Jerry didn’t know where to point the gun. Aiming at the creature would be a waste of a bullet—it took at least ten shots to drop one of those things, and he’d no doubt miss. Shooting himself was an option, but that was a last resort kind of thing. And shooting Rimmer—well, that would be brave, and an act of mercy considering Rimmer was probably dying from the spider bites, but Jerry felt if he pointed the gun at Rimmer the soldier would kick his ass, even in his weakened condition.
So that left suicide.
“What’s the best way?” Jerry asked.
“Put it in your mouth, aim at the top of your head. But I can’t guarantee that for sure.”
“You can’t? Why not?”
Rimmer grunted. “Never tried it.”
The dracula took another step toward them, legs bending, ready to spring.
“I’ll try to hold him,” Rimmer said. “Maybe you can get around him and get out of here.”
“Shit, Rimmer. That sucks.”
“Okay,” Rimmer said. “You grab him, I’ll run for it.”
Jerry’s nerves were fried, fear and adrenaline making his whole body twitch, and he was in that hyperemotional place somewhere between laughing and crying.
He chose to laugh. A full, hearty laugh that shook him to his core. Then he held up his middle finger toward the dracula and said, “Bring it, ugly. I got something for you to chew on.”
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