by Jason Parent
It didn’t stop him from accepting. And after all his training was done, they – the Pointy Hats – still asked nothing from him. Instead, they offered him a job, and a high-paying one at that, never seeking reimbursement for services rendered.
That had been a lot of jobs before, and Dante had amassed quite a fortune. Still, he kept taking the jobs offered, getting himself into all sorts of needless trouble. Yeah, getting into it was his forte. Getting back out…not so much.
He’d drawn the conclusion that getting out of the research center was going to be a steep, uphill battle. Obtaining that second briefcase seemed about as likely as the Pearly Gates spreading wide for him when the infected claimed his body.
He hoped the devil needed someone with his skills. Better to rule in hell, yadda yadda yadda…. But Dante couldn’t shake the feeling that he’d already met the devil that day, hiding behind the still, dead eyes of Sergei Kobozev.
“We’re here.” Belgrade threw out an arm to block Dante, who was coming in hot.
Monty punched a code into a keypad adjacent to a heavy-looking bomb-shelter blast shield of a door. In its center was a placard that read in small white letters on a black background, ‘Control Room’.
No hiding the ball there. Dante didn’t expect a hidden war room filled with men in uniform pushing pawns over maps, but he did expect a bit more…. Pizzazz? No…. Je ne sais quoi.
Monty cursed. He slid his badge through the ID reader and punched in a code once more. Again, nothing happened. He looked at Belgrade. “Have they changed the codes since this morning?”
Belgrade frowned. “Step aside,” he said, already muscling his way past Monty and grabbing his own badge. “Let’s try mine.” He repeated the process Monty had just gone through, but when he swiped his card, the door unlocked and swung open.
Monty grunted. He stood beside Belgrade, who held the door open as Dr. Werniewski pushed his way into the dimly lit entrance. Anju, Monty, and finally Dante made their way inside.
“Wait! Please! Wait!” a man’s voice shouted up the hall. “Hold the door! Please!”
Only a few steps past the entrance, Dante’s curiosity got the better of him. He slunk back to the door. Anju followed, clinging to him like a newborn possum. Her breath was hot on his neck, her fingers gently tugging on his vest.
Her proximity might have made him nervous had he not been so intent on the incoming traffic. The man begging for help wasn’t much to look at: one of those lean, compact guys who appeared strong until you stood him next to a soldier or a weightlifter. Strength was absent from his gaunt face. His complexion had taken on a more sickly hue than his ugly, preppy green sweater.
Dante instantly hated that sweater. By extension, he didn’t care for the man, another lab coat-wearing scientist. But compared to the swelling formation of human body parts following the scientist closely – too damn big and with far too many appendages to be made up of just one human – Dante liked the man just fine.
He scrambled into the control room. His dossier had spent a great number of paragraphs on that room – what exactly it could control and what goodies hid within. With two swift kicks to a wooden door marked ‘Armory’, he entered a treasure trove of weapons, enough to make any arms dealer proud.
He didn’t waste time picking and choosing but went for the weapon he’d already seen work best.
“That is Jordan Phillips,” Anju said from the entranceway.
The sound of loafers pounding against floor tiles mixed with a more unsettling sound, like rusted-over pruners forced open and closed. Those last sounds grew louder.
“Do not shoot,” Anju said.
“How can you be sure?” Belgrade asked.
“Because he is being chased by that…that…giant purple people eater!” Anju answered.
Banging and crashing came from outside the control-room door as Dante hoisted the tank onto his back. Armed like Prometheus, ready to share fire with the whole damn world if he had to, he stormed out the armory door. From inside the control room, a five-foot-nothing ASAP lackey sprinted past him as he hurried toward the entrance.
The guard never looked Dante’s way. He bounded toward Anju and Belgrade, clearing the distance in a second, yelling at the top of his lungs for them to close the door.
Dante doubted Belgrade had heard the man, for he had opened fire, aiming high. Though Dante couldn’t see Belgrade’s target, he could tell from the guard’s shifting feet and blazing-wide glare that he was hardly managing to keep it back, whatever it was. Anju and the newly arriving guard do-si-doed, each going opposite directions. She passed Dante on her way deeper into the control room, her face whiter than bleached sheets.
She was followed by another, on hands and knees, the man with the puke-green sweater. The scientist met his stare and even gave Dante a polite nod before continuing his frantic crawl away from the chaos outside.
“It’s not stopping!” Belgrade shouted from the entrance. His shoulder was propping the door open as he fired into the hall.
“Close the door!” The short guard kept shouting. He maneuvered skillfully past Anju and the crawling scientist, but his momentum carried him forward as he reached past a gun-blazing Belgrade to yank the door shut.
Belgrade had enough presence of mind to pull up his gun as his coworker lunged over him, but he didn’t have time to pull back his leg.
The guard crashed face-first into the door, pushing it open. He spilled into the hall, falling onto a long spear-like tail constructed from two or more spinal columns and a sharpened pelvis. It pierced through the guard’s back and emerged from his stomach. The spearhead caught on his large intestines. What it didn’t pull out began to spill out of the exit wound like cooked spaghetti drenched in sauce, what non-motherland Italians tried to pass off as Sicilian gravy.
At that moment, Dante didn’t miss home cooking. He reached Belgrade, who’d resumed firing, either too panicked to close the door and shut the thing out or too rational to know there was no shutting the tail’s owner out.
When Dante moved into position, he guessed the latter. He hesitated, too stunned to speak or move. He gaped up at the tail’s tip as it carved divots into the ceiling, then followed its length down to a giant, multilegged, purple-hided scorpion of sorts. Its massive pincers were made from the cracked femurs of two no-longer-recognizable humans whose bodies had melted into the creature’s sides. Instead of having anything resembling an arachnid’s head, the abomination wore a human torso, nearly complete, as if it were some wicked horror version of a centaur.
Half man, half…. He chuckled despite his terror, familiar with the song inspiring Anju’s choice of words. ‘Giant purple people eater’ sufficed.
The shish-kebabbed guard had died instantly, yet he was seizing on the creature’s tail. His fervent shaking jostled the vertebral blades up through his chest then out the base of his neck. He was like turkey breast pushed through a meat slicer. After sliding down the tail and onto the creature’s back, he acid-melted into the purple hide.
Fucking red shirt, Dante thought, recalling a joke someone had made about an American show that constantly went in and out of syndication back in Naples. The show was only slightly less ridiculous than its follow-ups, which as far as he could tell, starred a different individual playing the same character each time he’d seen it. He whistled the show’s catchy tune, his mind unusually off his game, no longer afraid unless fear made him retreat inward.
“Light him up already!” Belgrade yelled.
Dante jumped, but he hit the trigger, sending out a gush of fire that engulfed the flesh scorpion as if it were a match head. Bubbles boiled and popped on its skin before oozing fluids formed larger blisters. When those too popped, fist-sized miniatures of the creature tried to extend their short lives by jumping and fleeing, but all were caught in flame, popping like corn kernels. The human mouths stretching from the centaur head a
nd those stretching from shallow graves in the beast’s sides opened in silent screams.
Dante kept the fire burning strong and hot as the purple people eater skittered left and right, slicing and scissoring the air with vicious but blind attacks. Whatever smarts the organism had, no one had ever taught it to stop, drop, and roll. Instead, it collapsed onto its folding-chair legs and burned as brightly and as pungently as a compost heap.
The monster’s movements slowed then stopped. Dante turned to say something about campfires to Belgrade, but the guard had abandoned him sometime during his firefight. He shrugged, closed the door, and stepped inside, where the Russian waited for him in the dark.
“They must know where we are now,” Dante said. “That door will only stall them. Is there another way out of here?”
“One,” Belgrade said. “Follow me.”
A man of action, not indecision. Dante thought he’d found a wartime ally, one who seemed to understand priorities. He followed Belgrade down a short hallway that led past the armory and into the main room, a circular central point with wall-to-wall screens and more buttons and consoles than twelve commercial airplane cockpits.
Belgrade stopped. He and the rest of the crowd fixed their gazes on a massive monitor with multiple split screens, the biggest of the displays showing the giant purple people eater still twitching but burning nicely outside the control room’s door. Sprinklers were showering everything everywhere but had no noticeable effect on the burning mass. Other screens showed people running, some toward other people and some away from others. A greater portion of monitors showed people convulsing, people dying, people changing, and people becoming part of the horde.
Everywhere.
“Cazzo!” Dante hung his head.
“The facility is lost,” Dr. Werniewski whispered.
“Is there any way to reach the outside?” Jordan asked. “You know, call for help?”
“No,” Monty said. “Not during lockdown.” Standing over Jordan, he rested a hand on the scientist’s shoulder. “I’m sorry, mate. There’s not much we can do. Even if we could get hold of them, you wouldn’t like what they’d have to say. The whackers probably already have us surrounded, making sure none of us get out alive.”
“So that’s it?” Dr. Werniewski asked. “We’re doomed?”
The room went quiet. No one broke the silence for what seemed like an eternity, until Anju muttered, “All those people…Are we able to help any of them?”
No one answered that question either. Not until—
“Most will be dead way before we could get to them,” a woman said. Everyone turned to face an ASAP guard Dante hadn’t noticed before, and by the startled looks on the others faces, they hadn’t either. She sat at the consoles, rising from a slouch in a chair below the big screen. Her long blond hair was ponytailed and tucked through the back of her ASAP ball cap. Given her dark-as-night complexion, Dante doubted the hair came naturally. Or that it matched the—
“Well, there’s that guy,” she said, pointing at a screen. “He might be heading our way.”
“What guy?” Belgrade asked.
The faux blonde’s knee bounced, and she kept clenching and unclenching her fingers. She stared everyone down as if she were sizing them up. She seemed hesitant to look back at the screen. “Does it matter? It’s too late for them. Shouldn’t we gather our things and leave?”
Belgrade frowned and stared at her expectantly.
She slowly turned to the monitors. “Well, he was here, but now he’s…here!” she shouted, pointing at another screen as something flashed across it then was gone. “I’ll get you.” She tapped on her keyboard. One by one, the monitors mapped out the facility like a puzzle pieced together.
But Dante’s intrigue remained with the guard. They’d been too focused on the on-screen horror show to get caught up in their own fleeting circumstances, a mistake Dante wouldn’t make twice. Since the woman had announced her presence, her smooth skin, muscular gymnast figure, and confident beauty could no longer be missed. Dante took in the sight, staring at her breasts long enough to pick up the name on her nametag in passing. Dikembu.
“Whew, that boy can run,” she said, snapping him from his trance. She pointed at a young man, no more than twenty, running down a whitewashed hall.
He was wearing a blue jumpsuit and looked like any one of the maintenance and janitorial staff who faded into the background of the facility, just a regular guy trying to make a few euros doing regular work at a not-so-regular place. Dante hoped the boy received hazard pay. He certainly wasn’t paid enough for the hell that was chasing him, close on his heels.
The freakish absurdities chasing the young man were big, clumsy looking, odd-duck monstrosities that had no business moving with the ease and speed at which they were. They kept pace with the center employee almost stride for stride. They reminded Dante of an image he’d seen many times, though the only particular place that he could then recall having seen it was his grammar-school biology textbook. He saw that image clearly in his mind: a fish emerging from water, its fins having evolved into front legs, while its tailfin remained unsuited to life ashore. Lungs on the outside of its body stood in for the gills they covered. The image was supposed to represent evolution, but Dante found it anything but natural, the hateful mutant looking like the inbred child of newt siblings that had spent their lives drinking and swimming in toxic waste.
But if the toxic newt thing was disgusting, those grizzly-bear-sized mudskippers were downright grotesque, aberrations of nature and biology that, if truly representative of evolution, were at the same time God’s cruel joke. Their fat, wide heads seemed too big for their bodies, their toothless mouths too big for their heads. Their lack of pointed incisors made them no less terrifying, and their worm-purple lips secreted a mayonnaise-like substance. They half crawled on human arms and elbows – the only parts of them that appeared human – and half glided sidewinder-like toward their fleeing prey: a single man, terrified out of his mind, running for his life.
As he left one camera view, and thus one monitor, Dikembu pounced on him with the camera tied to the next screen. She targeted him down one hall then the next, amazingly so far avoiding a dead end. Dante couldn’t help but feel that, though the young man shouldn’t have made his list of priorities, much less rule it, if they could save the maintenance guy, maybe there was hope. Maybe they could even save themselves.
Belgrade had the same idea. “Kill the alarm,” he said to Dikembu. “And the sprinklers.” He picked up a rather anachronistic microphone connected to an intercom system that all the other equipment made look ancient. The lights everywhere finally stopped flashing red. The blare of the alarm died.
“You, in the maintenance uniform,” Belgrade said. “We have you on video. Keep running.”
If the young man heard him, he made no effort to acknowledge Belgrade. Not that Belgrade had given him sagely advice.
Keep running? Dante shook his head and frowned. You think?
Belgrade placed a hand over the microphone, an unnecessary precaution since the speaker was button-activated. “On my mark, seal off Corridor 492,” he said softly to Dikembu.
Dante raised an eyebrow. Sealing off corridors? Now this is something.
“Take a right at the next intersection,” Belgrade said. “Your other right! Good.”
The young man was listening. That meant he had a chance. On a close pass by one camera, the man’s features came in with crystal clarity. Dante could see he’d been generous in the years he’d afforded the youngster. He was just a boy!
Run, kid, he barely had time to think before toothless, crescent-moon smiles trampled his spark of hope.
“We’re going to seal off your next hallway,” Belgrade said. “If we time it right, a barrier will separate you from…them.” Belgrade wiped his brow. “Timing is everything, son. You may have to slide.”
The boy nodded, his expression weary and strained. Dante released a breath, happy to see the boy’s head move up and down. Had it moved left and right….
“Close the shutter,” Belgrade said.
Dikembu hit a series of buttons, each keystroke clacking in a language all its own. Immediately following the end of her typing, Dante heard the shutter’s closing mechanism roar to life, not through one of the monitors as he’d initially thought – they had no audio component, at least none that was functioning or turned on – but somewhere in the hallways nearby. The boy was close, which meant so were the things chasing him.
Dante made the sign of the cross. “Come on, kid,” he said quietly. He watched as a metal gate on rollers descended from a slid-back panel in the corridor ceiling. “You can make it.”
Cameras had been placed on each side of the metal shutter. On the one side, the maintenance-team member ran from toxic newt mutants with spindly human arms, but no one in the control room could see it. The camera had been angled to face the shutter. Dikembu entered in another command or two, and the camera swiveled just in time to catch the boy as he emerged from around a far corner. One of the creatures behind him hit the corner with a heavy crack and enough force to send a small tremble through the wall, shaking the camera. It missed the boy by mere inches, but it stumbled and tripped up the others following it, giving the boy a little more breathing room.
But not much.
The boy’s arms swung back and forth like reaping scythes. His legs stretched into elongated, almost exaggerated strides. The shutter was closing. He was six meters away.
The massive steel gate descended like a garage door at a rate Dante estimated to be close to half a meter per second. It was still two meters above the floor. The boy’s feet left the ground, and he threw his arms out in front of him. And as his eyes widened in shock, he must have figured out what everyone watching in the control room must have known: he’d started the dive too early.