The front rank perished in an instant, their bodies tumbling down the steps like unstrung puppets, exposing the creatures just behind them, who met a similar fate. For a few seconds, the tide of battle was against the humanzees. A third of their force was dead or injured, piled up on the steps like a deadly obstacle course between them and their objective. In the face of such carnage, even the bravest human soldier might have hesitated before charging into certain death. But the humanzees appeared oblivious to their losses. They kept coming, bounding nimbly over the corpses strewn in their path.
In the midst of the chaos, Queen did not hear King’s warning or the subsequent explosion of the containment building. The shockwave that shook the stairs was barely a blip on her radar. A cloud of smoke hung in the air around them, mixed with the smell of blood and death. Spent brass was piling up atop twitching bodies that had slid all the way down the steps and come to rest at their feet.
The magazine in her rifle lasted longer than she expected it to. In the fog of war, she must have made a counting error in her favor. She had a spare in hand, and changing it out took less than a second, but it was a second in which the front line advanced almost within reach. They were pushed forward by the mass of creatures behind them. Beside her, Bishop changed her magazine with similar haste, and Queen did her best to cover the brief slackening of their defensive fire, but as she swept the muzzle of her rifle back and forth, raking the advancing line of humanzees at point blank range, she realized the creatures weren’t going down. Although their bestial semi-human faces were contorted with death throes, sightless eyes clouding over as they stared into oblivion, they were still upright, still advancing.
They’re using their own dead as shields, Queen realized.
And then her rifle went empty again.
She reversed the spent weapon and jammed the wooden stock forward, connecting solidly with the skull of a humanzee that was probably already dead. The blow knocked the creature aside to reveal the head of the living enemy right behind it, and Queen put a round from her pistol through its eye.
Then the crush was upon them.
Queen was knocked back, as a wall of dead humanzees pushed by the dozen or so living ones that remained, slammed into her. She managed to stay on her feet and leaned into the advancing horde. Gripping a blood-slick corpse, she pushed back, but it was like trying to stop a bulldozer.
With a cry of pain, Lynn lost her footing and went tumbling down the steps. Bishop made an instinctive grab for her, and suddenly the humanzees were everywhere.
45
“Fire in the hole.”
On the far side of the concrete slab, and with Volos’s arm and body plugging the only opening through it, Rook barely felt the subsequent detonation. But the giant ape snatched its arm out and recoiled like it had been hit by an electric charge. Rook caught just a glimpse of the thing’s hand before it was clutched protectively against Volos’s body. The explosion had smashed it into an unrecognizable pulp.
“Go!” Knight shouted, bursting from their hiding place like a racehorse out of the gate.
Rook wasn’t quite as fast as Knight over long distances, but less than twenty-five yards separated them from the opening. Over that short interval, the difference was negligible. Rook stayed on Knight’s heels the whole way.
The passage was strewn with rubble and gore. All down its length, chunks of concrete had broken away, exposing inch-thick steel rods. At the midpoint, the explosion had opened a four foot wide gap in the floor.
“Hole!” Knight shouted, leaping over it without breaking stride.
The warning was almost drowned out by a thunderous roar, and the sound of something rushing down the passage behind them. As Rook made the jump, he felt a concussion wave buffet his back. It was followed immediately by a sound like boulders smashing together. Beneath him, the hole suddenly doubled in size, the floor crumbling away to reveal protruding spikes of broken rebar right where he was about to touch down. There was nothing he could do to extend his leap, but he twisted sideways as he came down, trying to avoid the protrusions.
It almost worked.
A blossom of fiery pain erupted on his left side as the fractured steel tore through his coat and gouged a bloody weal across his ribs. His breath was stolen by the impact. For a fateful second, he saw only stars. He flailed and clawed for a handhold, anything to keep him from plunging through the hole, but his fingers glanced off the rebar. Then something slammed into his left armpit. He could feel his arm rip at his shoulder…
As the initial haze of pain subsided, he realized it wasn’t quite that bad. Without actually intending to, he had caught the piece of steel under his left arm. The impact had strained the ligaments and probably torn some muscles, but his bunched up coat had provided a little cushioning, and more importantly, he hadn’t plunged to his death.
Not yet, at least.
The floor shook with another impact, as Volos drove his arm deeper into the passage, and more concrete crumbled away.
Knight wheeled around and then threw himself flat on the rubble strewn floor like a baseball player making a headfirst slide into home plate. He caught hold of Rook’s coat and with a single seemingly superhuman heave, he dragged Rook out of the hole.
Rook could feel the floor collapsing beneath him and the steel tearing at his flesh, but a moment later he was back on more or less solid ground, half-entangled with Knight and rolling away from the breach. His side, where the steel had gouged him, was hot and cold and sticky and wet, all at the same time. But pure adrenaline was a potent anesthetic. He felt only a mild sting, like a bad sunburn where the steel had gouged him. His shoulder wasn’t hurting either, at least not until he tried to get up and his left arm folded underneath him.
Knight scrambled to his feet, and before Rook could protest, dragged him the length of the passage. As they reached the base of a metal staircase, the floor lurched from another impact. Suddenly half of the passage behind them vanished. A chunk of the ten-foot thick slab had broken away, collapsing down into the cylindrical chasm, around which the ancient city had been built. The falling debris obliterated huge sections of the spiral ramp as it fell, which in turn triggered still more tremors.
The giant ape, emboldened by this success, thrust both hands—the limb damaged by the blast already fully recovered—up through the hole in the slab. He began tearing away more of the damaged concrete.
Rook found his breath. “I’m good,” he gasped, trying to shake loose of Knight’s grip.
He wasn’t good by any means, but he knew if he didn’t stand on his own, they would both get pulverized. He grabbed on to the stair rail and heaved himself up. As he did, he caught a glimpse of what was happening a few flights up. He couldn’t make out any details. It was just a mass of bodies writhing on the stairwell, punctuated by a few pistol shots. But he knew one of those bodies was Queen and that she needed him.
As he charged up the steps, with Knight at his side, Rook drew his Desert Eagles from their shoulder holsters—or rather he tried to. His attempt to cross-draw was doubly foiled when his groping right hand found only an empty sheath on the left side. The pistol had been torn away during his close encounter with the exposed rebar.
Well…shit, he thought. Another one bites the dust.
It wasn’t the first time he’d lost one of The Girls in the line of duty. The other half of the set was still in its holster on the right, but his left arm didn’t respond to his attempts to reach the holster on the right. He somehow managed to contort his right arm around and got the pistol out before he and Knight reached the melee.
Lynn and Bishop had taken a tumble down half a flight, and four of the hairless humanzees were monkey-crawling along the stair rail in an attempt to reach them. Rook blasted two of them with an equivalent number of shots. The heavy caliber rounds not only punched fist-sized holes in their torsos, but blasted them off the rails. Knight concentrated his fire on the creatures closest to the beleaguered women, making up for any deficit
in stopping power with quantity, which gave Bishop an opening to empty her pistol into the remaining attacker.
Rook leaped over the two women and charged up the remaining distance to where Queen was all but buried under a mass of humanzees. He couldn’t risk a shot into the group, so instead he swung his fist, and the pistol in it, at the nearest monkey-head. Then at another and another, hammering skulls with berserker fury until he at last caught a glimpse of Queen’s blonde hair. The creatures had driven her to her knees, but she was still fighting, slashing her bayonet back and forth, streaked with the blood of her foes like some ancient Norse war maiden.
Now that he could see where she was, and more importantly, where she wasn’t, Rook stopped using his pistol as a bludgeon. Instead he used it as a pistol, dispatching the four remaining attackers with four rapid headshots.
It was only as the last headless corpse pitched backward that Rook realized the humanzees were the least of their worries. Below them, the gates of hell were opening, and the devil was coming through.
46
Volos exploded through the slab, sending car-sized chunks of concrete flying in every direction. The eruption shook the staircase. If Bishop had not already been in a semi-supine position on the steps, one hand clutching her injured mother, she would probably have been flung out along with the rest of the debris.
Below them, the ape creature wormed its way out of the hole it had created and immediately turned its attention to the miniscule figures that had invaded its realm and attacked it. The creature grasped the base of the stairs and gave it an experimental shake, as if curious to see whether the stairs would bear his weight.
The metal skeleton supporting the stairs creaked and flexed. Anchor bolts broke loose from their moorings and shot out like bullets. Miraculously, the stairs remained upright and intact. Bishop knew they would not continue to do so much longer.
Knight knelt beside her and slipped an arm under Lynn’s back. He was shouting something, urging her to flee.
Why? What was the point? They would never be able to reach the top of the stairs before the monster brought it all down.
Nevertheless, she struggled to her feet. As Knight lifted her mother, she threaded her own arm under his so that Lynn was suspended between them. The stairs groaned and swayed like the deck of a ship on a stormy sea. She gripped the rail with her free hand and lurched up one step at a time.
She saw Rook and Queen, shoving humanzee bodies out of the way, trying to clear a path for them, but before they got there, Volos let out another roar and shook the stairs more forcefully. Bishop clutched the rail, kneeling and she somehow managed to avoid tumbling back down. More bolts and rivets exploded from the staircase. Over the bestial roar, she could hear the distinctive report of a Kalashnikov.
Shooting? Now someone is shooting at us?
The shaking stopped but the shooting and the roaring did not.
No, not shooting at us. Shooting at him.
On the floor below, a hundred yards from the staircase and kneeling at the base of the concrete wall, King was unloading a rifle at Volos.
Idiot, she thought. What was King thinking? Bullets couldn’t hurt the beast. They would just piss it off.
Which was, she realized, exactly what King was trying to do.
As if to confirm that, a shout sounded in her ear. “Queen. Get them the hell out of here!”
Rook answered first. “Not leaving you, boss.” As if to punctuate the statement, a shot thundered from the steps just above Bishop, the bullet disappearing into the fur on Volos’s broad back like a pebble thrown into an ocean.
“Damn it, Rook! Ceasefire.” King shouted. He fired another long burst into the beast’s face, then switched out the magazine without lowering it. “If you don’t get out now, none of us will. Queen. You’ve got your orders. Follow them for once.”
“You heard him,” Queen called out. “Move.”
Bishop knew her brother was right. If they stayed one second longer, they would all die. Her. Their mother. The team. And King, too.
“Trust me,” King said between bursts.
Bishop looked over at her mother. Lynn couldn’t hear King’s side of the exchange, but she knew what was going on. She nodded slowly.
Trust him.
The staircase shook again, but only a little, as Volos charged into the storm of bullets from King’s rifle. The entire slab shook with each footfall, fractures radiating across the concrete like cracks in thin ice. King stood his ground, firing until the magazine was empty again. Then he simply stood there, waiting as Volos raised his massive fists and brought them down.
Bishop knew her brother would dodge, knew that he was simply waiting for the last instant, for the beast to commit fully. He wasn’t suicidal, and he knew that staying alive and keeping Volos occupied was the only chance the rest of them had at escaping.
She was not wrong. As the monster brought his fists down, King darted forward, sprinting between the beast’s legs. Volos’s fists came down through the emptiness where King had been standing only a moment before, and then the floor heaved as the fists went right through the concrete like a pair of wrecking balls.
A long fissure—not merely a fracture but a crack several inches wide—shot out from the point of impact. It was like a black lightning bolt racing between Volos’s legs, across the floor toward the crater from which the monster had emerged. The halves of the floor lurched. King stumbled, fell and slid toward the widening crevasse. He threw his arms out wide, arrested his slide, and then he rolled away from the fissure, toward the wall.
Toward the creaking staircase.
Volos whirled around, spied his elusive prey, and lurched forward. As his foot slammed down, the broken slab collapsed completely and fell away into the yawning chasm below. Volos scrambled for a handhold, but everything he touched crumbled beneath his weight. With one last howl of fury, he plunged into the darkness along with everything else.
A long section of the wall behind the stairs broke loose and joined the rain of debris, exposing the unlit bowels of the research facility where the humanzees had lived in their pens. The staircase remained intact, hanging out over the abyss, anchored to what was left of the wall.
Queen found her voice first. “King! Come in. What’s your status?”
There was no answer.
“Knight, do you see him?”
Knight leaned over the rail and scanned the darkness. “Shit,” he muttered. “I don’t see King, but Kong is coming back for more.”
Queen’s eyes went dark with helpless rage, but aside from that, her expression was as cold as ice. “Then it’s time for us to go.”
47
The room shook so violently that the table Peter was strapped to rose several inches off the floor before slamming back down. There had been several smaller tremors in the minutes since Julie’s departure, but nothing of that magnitude. Peter wondered if the entire underground facility was about to cave-in.
The Russian President seemed to be thinking the same thing. He turned to his bodyguard. “Gather up your men and take the helicopter up.”
The man, clearly conflicted between safeguarding his charge and doing as he was told, frowned. “Come with us, sir.”
The President clapped him on the arm. “Go. I am in no danger here, but if the helicopter is damaged, we will all have a long walk.” He laughed and the bodyguard laughed, too. It was a nervous, insincere sound, though. Then the man grudgingly left to carry out his orders.
“Is this how you imagined your long game would play out?” Peter asked, when the two of them were alone.
The President was unflappable. He circled around the table, positioning himself on the side opposite the door, and leaned over Peter. “The advantage of the long game is that you always win in the end, no matter what happens, if only you stay the course.”
“You’ve bet everything on the Firebird. What if you can’t make it work?”
“It will work. If not today, then tomorrow, or next
year. I can wait.”
“I don’t think you can. My son forced your hand, didn’t he? You have to do this now, or it all falls apart. And if you don’t have the Firebird, you can’t risk war with the West. Your empire dies before it can be born.”
The other man smiled. “Yes. Exhilarating, isn’t it? A game without stakes is not worth playing. But I will tell you a secret. The Firebird does not matter.”
Peter shook his arms against the restraints. “Then let me loose.”
The President went on as if he had not spoken. “Oh, it will give us an advantage to be sure, but it is like a…” He waved his hand in the air, as if grasping for the appropriate simile. “A crash helmet. The days when the Americans would have been willing to use nuclear weapons have long since passed. They are weak, too concerned with how history will judge them. But I tell you, history will remember only that a once great nation went into decline, as all nations do. It will remember that a great Russian empire rose up to take its place as the world’s only superpower.”
“But if you’re wrong,” Peter pressed, “you would risk everything.”
“Not everything.” He seemed about to expound on the cryptic statement, but at that moment the door opened. Julie entered, followed by a young man Peter surmised must be Alexei, the mad scientist tasked with creating the Firebird.
Peter had noticed Alexei in the hangar, speaking to Julie and the President. He was a haughty sycophant, lording over his little domain, while slavishly worshipping the President. Now, he looked positively terrified. His face was pale, almost ghostly, and he carried himself with his hands against his chest, clutched in protective fists. He looked like a person trying to shrink himself into nothingness.
If the President noticed Alexei’s discomfort, he gave no indication. “Ah, the moment of truth has arrived. Now you will see what comes of playing the long game.”
Alexei’s eyes were darting about nervously, as if he feared the ceiling might come down at any moment. “Perhaps it would be safer to conduct the test in Moscow,” he said. His tone was tentative, as if he feared to give offense.
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