Mac stepped through the newly formed hole to make sure no surprises waited for them. "Coast looks clear," he said after a few seconds and stepped back to Emily, "Let's get everyone over here and we can—"
His words were abruptly cut off by a man's frantic warning cry. The words were quickly drowned out by yells of fear. "They're here," another voice shouted. "Run! Run!"
Several men who stood nearby stared up at the ceiling, eyes wide, mouths agape. One pointed at something Emily could not see from the doorway, her view blocked by an outcropping of rock that jutted from the wall above her and Mac. A small group of survivors, their faces contorted with fear, stumbled toward where Bishop and Cleaver waited, arms spread wide to try and stop the rush of men toward the exit. Bishop managed to grab two, Cleaver another, but the rest slipped by, stumbling past Mac and Emily before either could react, then disappearing through the space in the blown door.
"God damn it," Mac said, as he watched the men stumble their way along the tunnel in the direction of the cavern. Then he yelled, "Everyone stay where you are."
"Please, let me go. Please. Don't let them get me, please," the man Cleaver held begged, struggling to free himself from the soldier's grip. The two men Bishop held were both yelling something similar.
Emily stepped away from the door and swung her flashlight up to the ceiling...and the gears of her mind ground to a shuddering halt. Through the holes Victor had pointed out earlier, three creatures Emily was sure had once been human but who now resembled nothing less than nightmares, climbed out onto the cold rock ceiling to join two already staring down at the humans below. It was difficult for Emily to get a clear view of the five creatures that were now scuttling over the rock toward the side walls because each time she pinned one in her flashlight's beam, it would scurry away into the nearest shadow. But the glimpses she did catch were of humans, people. Pale and naked, the five wretches now had extra limbs attached to their backs; hands that held elongated fingers equipped with claws; heads with multiple sets of eyes; bodies that seemed twisted as though they had been cut in half and replaced facing the opposite direction.
A cacophony of screams, yells, and expletives echoed through the cave as the rest of the human captives now recognized the threat scrambling down the wall toward them. As if they were a single entity, the hundreds of survivors who were still capable of walking rushed toward the door. Some lost their footing, fell and were instantly trampled beneath pounding feet, others ran blindly into outcroppings, crumpling to the ground. But the main throng of panicked humans rushed onward. Cleaver and Bishop stood their ground for a second, then dived out of the way before they could be swept up in the onrushing mob and crushed underfoot.
"Look out!" Mac yelled. He grabbed Emily around the waist and lifted her off her feet as the mob surged toward them. He sprinted, then dived to the floor. Mac let out a grunt of pain as he hit the ground, and a second one as Emily toppled onto him. Together, they scrambled hand over hand away from the periphery of the panicked survivors. The door Mac had blown open was wide enough to allow people to step through two-abreast, but only if they did so in an orderly fashion. Orderly was the last word Emily would have used to describe the frenzied stampede of dirty bodies pushing and jostling and fighting to get through the confined space. Fists were thrown. Bones were broken. Bodies were crushed beneath feet. The sudden bottleneck of humans collected around the exit began to spill in Emily's and Mac's direction, as more and more people reached the exit and tried to force their way through the narrow opening.
Emily got to her feet and pushed a panicked man away as he stumbled over Mac's still-prone form. She reached down, grabbed her husband's arm just above his right elbow and dragged him with all her remaining strength another two meters from the crowd. Panting hard, Emily asked, "Are you okay?" Even though she was only a few centimeters away from Mac's ear, her words had to be yelled to be heard over the screams of pain and terror that echoed throughout the cavern.
"Might have broken a rib or two," Mac ground out through clenched teeth. He groaned as he pushed himself to his knees, then allowed Emily to help him to his feet. He leaned against her for a moment as they limped another couple of meters farther away.
"Do you see Bishop and Cleaver?" Mac asked.
Emily scanned the cave looking for the two soldiers. The pressure of the panicked mob against the exit had broken away pieces of the explosion-weakened door, enough now that four or five people were able to get through at a time. Even so, the press of human bodies seemed to only be growing larger as the slower survivors made up the distance. The crowd acted as a plug in the doorway, blocking any chance that Emily and Mac had of getting out into the tunnel beyond.
"There," she said, spotting Cleaver pushing through the sea of bodies in their direction. Bishop was a few steps behind him. Both men held their weapons above their heads as though they were wading through a river. "Over here," Emily yelled at the men, waving her hands.
"You okay, boss?" Cleaver asked when he and Bishop reached Mac.
"I'm fine," Mac lied. "What the hell spooked these people so badly?"
Emily moved her light up the walls trying to locate the transformed humans she had seen come out of the holes in the cavern's ceiling. They were nowhere to be seen on the walls or the ceiling, and for a moment Emily thought that maybe they had turned tail and headed back into those same tunnels they had emerged from. Then her light caught the pale, naked flesh of one of them crouched on a nearby outcropping of rock. It was a man, or, she corrected herself, had once been a man. Now it was a mutated horror.
"That did," said Emily, drawing her three companions' attention to the thing spotlighted on the rock. "There are more of them in here somewhere."
The thing on the rock still retained its original human legs, but the man's arms had been replaced with a second pair of legs; these looked slim enough that they could have belonged to a woman. From the man's side extended two gray tentacles, at the end of each was a curved claw, that reminded Emily of the beak of an octopus. The man's head was bald, the skull dimpled with round pits that made his head resemble the surface of a golf ball. His mouth was a slit, the lips removed to reveal a toothless mouth with black gums. His eyes, still perfectly human, watched the panicked throng of bodies struggling to push through the exit. The abomination's head tilted left and right as it tracked the humans rushing past it, then it let out a curiously high trill, almost like a bird call. The four other creatures Emily had seen climbing from the ceiling ran from the darkness in loping bounds to join the first, gathering around the base of the rock. These mutant-humans all closely resembled the one sitting atop the rock, who, judging by the way it used its whistle to direct the others, Emily assumed was the leader of the group. Two of the mutants had multiple sets of eyes spaced across their skull, which, Emily suspected, would give them almost perfect 360-degree vision.
The pack of mutant-humans regarded the panicked mob but did not move to intercept any of them. Then, from somewhere high above, echoing from the mouth of one of the multiple openings in the roof of the cavern, a shrill screech blasted across the space of the cave. As one, the mutant-humans leaped from their perch and ran headlong at the rear ranks of the escaping humans.
•••
The mutant-humans sprang, claws first, into the throng of survivors; jaws snapping, talons slashing at any human unlucky enough to be within their reach. The screams of the injured could be heard even over the yells and curses of the rest of the mob as they tried to force their way through the opening, unaware that the horrors were now amongst them. A new wave of panic moved through the survivors, as those at the rear tried to fight their way deeper into the mass of heaving bodies to escape the attacking mutant-humans. Others simply ran off blindly into the darkness of the cavern. A man reeled away from the crowd, his hands clasped to his throat trying to stem the gushing blood oozing from between his fingers where a claw had cut deep into his flesh. Another man staggered backward then collapsed into a heap on th
e ground, the right side of his head staved in. More bodies fell as the mutant-humans cut down human after human.
"We've got to do something," Emily yelled, jumping to her feet. She unslung her shotgun and headed toward the mob. A look back over her shoulder confirmed Mac was following a few paces behind her, his pistol clasped firmly in his right hand, Bishop and Cleaver, right behind him.
Shadowy figures ran or hobbled past Emily, their panic blinding them to anything but their own survival, forcing Emily to sidestep them or risk being knocked to the ground and trampled beneath the stampede of people who were now moving away from the entrance. This at least meant the crowd toward the rear was thinning out sufficiently that Emily could see all five of the creatures as they went about their killing spree.
One of the creatures, the one Emily assumed to be the leader, was clamped onto the back of a screaming woman, its talons sunk deep into her back, causing her to stumble forward as the creature rode her to the ground like a lion on an antelope. It used its claws to cut two long gashes down the woman's back, slicing through her dirty clothing. The woman screeched in agony then fell silent. The mutant-human, knowing it had delivered what was undoubtedly a fatal wound, perched on the woman's back while it searched for its next victim, its head rotating around on the stalk of its neck like an owl.
Emily raised her shotgun and took aim. "Get out of my way," she yelled at the people running blindly in front of her. She couldn't fire without risking hitting some of the survivors, still her finger caressed the trigger in anticipation. "Hey, asshole!" she shouted at the monster. "Come and try me."
The mutant's head rotated in Emily's direction, its eyes locking with hers, then the rest of its body swiveled toward her and the thing began to move across the space separating it from Emily, its two sets of legs working like those of a panther, giving it surprising speed.
"Oh shit!" said Emily, staggering backward, the mutant's agility knocking her off balance. She spat another expletive as the creature leaped at her.
Two loud cracks reverberated nearby. People screamed.
Emily ducked, and the monster sailed past on her left, a spray of blood from the two bullets Mac had put into it splattering across her arms. The mutant hit the ground and lay there, one leg twitching spasmodically.
"Come on," said Mac, taking Emily by the elbow. He guided her toward the next creature which was intent on disemboweling a man it had pinned against the rock wall. The man was dead already, Emily was sure, so she stood about five meters away, took aim with the shotgun and fired. The double-ought buckshot turned the monster's head into pulp. Its headless body and the dead man crumpled together into a tangled heap on the floor.
The concussive boom of Emily's shotgun drew the attention of the remaining three mutant-humans. Simultaneously, they dropped their victims and turned their attention to the humans hunting them. They trilled back and forth in some weird language that a human mouth should never have been able to produce, then sprinted at Emily and Mac, knocking people aside like they were bowling pins.
Bishop killed one before it had taken more than two bounding steps toward them. Cleaver managed to hit another with one shot, wounding it sufficiently that one of its four legs was useless. Still, it did not seem bothered by the wound, as though it felt no pain. It dragged its useless limb behind it while its eyes continued to focus on Mac with murderous intent.
Emily aimed her shotgun at the creature.
A man ran in front of her just as she was about to fire. Then another, and another, blocking her shot, separating her from Mac. She glanced at the doorway; in the confusion of the past few minutes, as more people had run back into the cave, those that had stayed at the doorway had made it out into the tunnel beyond the blown door, relieving the press of humans on this side of the opening. Seeing this, the survivors who had run back into the cavern were now making a dash for the exit again, dodging in front of Mac and Emily. One survivor made the mistake of getting too close to the creature Cleaver had wounded and paid with his life; it lashed out with its claws, sending the man reeling away into the rock wall, a trail of blood marking his way.
Bishop approached the mutant-human from the right, leveled his automatic rifle at it and sent it back to hell.
Emily spun around trying to locate the fifth and final mutant, but she had lost track of it in the confusion.
"Anyone see it?" Mac yelled, pushing through the crowd to Emily's side.
Cleaver and Bishop both yelled that they did not.
"No sign of it," Emily yelled. Mac reached her position, placed a reassuring hand on her arm, then turned and faced the opposite direction, so they were standing back to back. Cleaver and Bishop took a similar stance. Slowly, they rotated around, eyes scanning the cavern for the final adversary.
A scream from near the exit caught Emily's attention. "There!" she yelled. The last of the mutant-humans had broken out of the mass of bodies again collecting around the exit, cutting down a fleeing man as it rushed toward Emily and Mac. They both fired simultaneously, killing the creature while it was still three meters from them.
A few human stragglers limped toward the breached exit, moving past broken and bloodied bodies littering the ground. Apart from the moans of the injured and dying, the cavern had become eerily quiet. Then, from far above them, the same sibilant voice that Emily was sure had ordered the mutant-humans to begin their murderous rampage sounded again. This time the voice had taken on a different tone; one of anger, maybe even hatred, Emily thought. She looked up into the blackness of the ceiling, tracking the beam of her flashlight as she ran it over the uneven rock from hole to hole.
"Oh, you have got to be shitting me," Emily gasped, her voice rising several octaves in disbelief.
A swarm of the same ugly-ass mutants they had just dispatched streamed from the holes in the ceiling, leaping across the ceiling to the walls and then down toward her and the team. Emily did a quick count; there were at least thirty of them, and they were moving with speed and obvious intent toward Emily and the men. Leading the attack was a creature that dwarfed the others. It was three or four times bigger than the rest. As Emily's light momentarily illuminated it, the huge creature stopped and turned its head toward her, hatred gleaming in its multiple sets of eyes. It let out a weird alien call from lips that had once been ruby-red but were now black and alien.
And even though the body had been so terrifyingly altered, the monster's features were still unmistakably those of Dr. Sylvia Valentine.
CHAPTER 19
"Is that...?" Mac's words froze in his mouth.
"Yes," Emily whispered, already backing away in the direction of the exit, her eyes never straying from the horror that was Valentine, far above their heads. "We need to get out of here, right now." She felt a rush of fear fill her as she stared back into the inhuman face of the woman who had so desperately wanted her dead. To Emily, Valentine’s naked torso looked as though it carried the scars of having been badly burned, but as her flashlight lingered on the monstrous creature, she saw that below Valentine’s original arms, two extra pairs of arms had been biologically fused to her body. Around the area where the new arms were attached to her torso, where Emily thought Valentine had been burned, the skin was lumpy and bubbled with scar tissue, like rough welds. The rest of her torso was covered in thin, white, spines, like the quills of a feather, each about thirty centimeters long. The spines vibrated making a sound like a rattlesnake’s warning as Valentine glared down at the humans.
The fingers on the blotchy-skinned hands at the end of each arm were elongated, the nails on the fingers black and sharpened to a point. On either side of Valentine's spine, just below her shoulder-blades, two gray tentacles waved, undulating over her shoulders like charmed snakes. At the end of both tentacles were hooks similar to the octopus-like beaks of the mutant-humans that milled around her, except Valentine's were articulated, opening wide enough to fit around a human head, then snapping closed with a cracking sound like a sprung mousetrap. Valentin
e's head looked almost human, at least if you ignored the row of multiple eyes stretching across her forehead and back around her hairless skull like a crown, giving her, Emily was sure, total 360-degree vision. When she opened her mouth to snarl at the humans below her, Emily saw nothing but black gums within.
Where the woman’s hips should have been was only a tightly-wound coil of flesh that connected Valentine’s torso to a larger ant-like abdomen with six legs... no, Emily corrected herself as she moved her flashlight over Valentine's transfigured body, they were more arms, muscular arms. The arms were bent backward against their natural articulation. The hands on each looked normal until Emily realized the fingers were twice as long as they should be, with a thick patch of skin between each of them, like webbing, and each finger ended in a slightly curved claw that allowed her to securely grasp the uneven rock of the cave.
She is an abomination, Emily thought. It was almost as though the Locusts had somehow been able to reach inside this woman's soul and use the darkness they found there as a template to create this version of her, giving form to the ugliness within. Emily had no idea whether there was any remnant of the woman she had once been left within this monster, anything that might be appealed to or pleaded with. But then, she told herself, there had been very little humanity there to begin with.
Emily needed to reload. She had been using double-ought buckshot in her shotgun, which was good enough to take down the mutant-humans, but she wasn't sure it was going to be very effective against the thing Valentine had become. She reached into her pocket and started loading heavy-duty slug rounds. They were basically the equivalent of very large caliber bullets and packed the kind of punch she suspected she was going to need against Valentine.
"Out, now," Mac yelled. He tugged Emily toward the exit. They slipped through hole he had blasted open, closely followed by Cleaver and Bishop, keeping their weapons pointed back through the opening into the cavern as they backtracked down the tunnel. In the tunnel ahead of the team, two men struggled to keep moving forward, each holding the other up as they hobbled slowly along together. They were moving so sluggishly that there was no way they were going to be able to outrun the mutant-humans who were surely just seconds from flooding into the tunnel, Emily judged. The men's emaciated bodies were so weak they were almost dragging each other along the smooth surface of the tunnel. That meant either she and Mac were going to have to abandon them to certain death or help them and risk being caught in the rush of creatures she knew was just moments away.
Extinction Point: Kings (Extinction Point Series (5 book series)) Page 18