Piotrowicz looked at the woman for a long time. Finally he nodded.
“So let’s get the hell out of here.”
* * *
It wasn’t long before they’d gathered Lutz and started along the way.
Lower gravity helped. They rigged a stretcher from two posts and a blanket from the van. It looked a little comical, watching someone smaller lifting the heavyset mercenary as they placed it under him.
While they worked, the trio of lookouts kept watch, seldom speaking.
Cho tried to get hold of Manning without success.
There was nothing else to it. They had to move.
They had to go.
So they grabbed everything they could carry, and began to make their way toward the door where Perkins had seen Willis emerge. The three sentries took strategic positions around the group of ten unarmed people. Perkins gave her night vision goggles to Rosemont, so she could guide her people while carrying the injured man.
Vogel called out.
“Here they come!” She pointed with the barrel of her pounder.
The black silicon tunnel, which had allegedly been sealed, vomited out several black shapes. No one saw them but Vogel. Then the other guards caught on and lined up with her.
Still carrying Lutz, Rosemont and her crew ran as best they could, and Perkins and Cho went with them. Piotrowicz, Vogel, Dwadji, and Anderson took their time and aimed for the vile things that skittered down the wall, moving in leaps and bounds, never staying in one place for more than an instant. Perkins slowed for a moment to see what was going on. She didn’t want to. What she wanted was just to run. Fear clenched her stomach in a vice.
In the semidarkness, all she could make out was the forms of the aliens—no details. Two of the things got blown away as they descended, and fell to the cavern floor without any sign of life left to them. The others were faster, and got to the ground without being touched. They found cover in the stacks of supplies without anyone tagging them.
The group made it to the door.
Please let it open, Perkins thought. If Willis had—for whatever reason—locked it behind him, they were up shit creek without a paddle. But despite her fears, the thing opened. Cho stepped in first, lit his flashlight, and glanced around quickly. Then he gestured for the rest of the group to join him while he took point. There was no way of knowing what was above them, and it was best to be safe.
“Move it, folks!” Perkins said. “We’ve got company, and they’ll be headed our way.” Most likely they didn’t need the reminder. She gave it to them anyway.
And then she was through the door and looking back, wishing she had her goggles, watching the others doing their best to fight off the damned things. She couldn’t see the bugs. She could only see her four comrades where they stood on their perches and fired.
She spotted one, just as it came for Piotrowicz. He was standing several feet off the ground and the black shape charged, moving between two of the stacks. She only saw it because that barbed tail whipped fast enough to catch her attention.
She saw it.
Petey did not.
“Piotrowicz!” her voice called out and he turned to look at her.
The thing jumped, clearing the stack with ease. It hit him hard enough to lift him into the air. The monster’s front claws landed on his shoulders and pushed him back. She saw the pistol in his hand as it sailed up and away, and even from a distance she thought she heard the sound of his skull cracking as he hit the packed dirt floor.
It seemed to her that she was looking right into his eyes when the beast came down, and bit him in the face. Then she couldn’t take it any longer.
Perkins took aim and fired at the thing. She missed, but her charge blew a hole in Petey that was big enough to put her arm through.
“Oh, fuck, no!” Her voice cracked as she watched his entire body kick from the impact. She was still staring at him when the monster looked her way and charged. Adrenaline and instinct took over.
She still took the time to aim at the monster and fire.
The damned thing ducked under the blast. That was enough to make her focus. She aimed again, and realized she was too late.
The demon was on her, hissing and clawing, and then her head was slamming against the wall of the access tunnel and there was nothing.
Darkness ate her entire world.
Perkins hated the dark.
43
NESTS
There was a loud grinding noise, and then the entire affair jerked and stuttered and quit. The lift stopped working. They’d been rising at a nice, steady pace.
In that instant, Decker thought they were going to be stuck in the elevator forever. He caught himself breathing too hard and too fast. He needed to get away!
“You’re freaking again.” Adams was staring at him. “Are they closer?”
He swallowed as best he could, and tried to focus.
“I can’t think,” he said. “But I don’t think it’s them.” He forced the words out. They didn’t want to come. They wanted to stay locked in his throat.
Manning noticed the exchange and hissed out an order, telling Adams to give him a shot. She did so, and in the space of a dozen heartbeats he felt himself calming down. The bands around his chest relaxed, he gasped in a proper breath, and then another, a third.
“They’re very close,” he said. “They’re serious, too. All I get is the sense that I’m the target.”
“You mean they weren’t serious before?”
“Shut the fuck up, Leibowitz,” Manning growled.
“Yeah, they were serious before,” Decker said, his resolve hardening. “But I think there are more of them, and this group seems, I don’t know, focused. This isn’t a science, you know? It’s a gut feeling. There just doesn’t seem to be as much white noise coming from them.”
Adams sighed loudly next to him. She was exasperated.
Tell me about it, he thought.
Manning called on the comm, but got no answer. No word from Cho. No one answered from any of the levels.
Grunting his own frustration, he turned his attention to the list. Bracing himself, he caught his boot on the railing and reached up until he could open the maintenance hatch above them. Less than a minute of looking around, and he dropped back down.
“It’s maybe twelve feet up to the door to the next level. I say we take it.” He looked around for a moment. “Any objections?”
There were none.
Manning was the first up, followed by Adams, and then Decker himself. One by one they climbed to the top of the car, and the two mercs pulled a pair of utility gloves from a pocket on their slacks. Like the gloves Decker often used on a work site, they were surprisingly thin, and equally effective, enabling the wearer to retain his sense of touch.
The merc leader used them to hold the cable, occasionally wiping some of the grease from the metal fibers to get a better purchase. In a matter of minutes he was up to the doors and wrestling with the locking mechanism. Adams watched him climb, and Decker watched Adams.
He forced his attention back to the bugs. The medication enabled him to deal with their increasing presence without pissing himself. They were close. They were so damn close he could almost smell them.
Decker glanced around the shaft just to make sure that last part was his imagination, because the bugs seemed adept at hiding in the strangest places. They might even have been the reason for the malfunction.
Seeing what he was doing, Adams pulled her flashlight and started scanning the area, frowning all the way.
Nothing. Then Manning dropped a line down.
“Make sure you use gloves,” he warned. “The line is thin enough to cut flesh.”
Decker shook his head. “I don’t have any.” A moment after that, two grease-coated gloves dropped on his face.
Adams stifled a laugh—though she didn’t seem to be trying very hard—and started climbing. He was following a moment later, pulling his body up the line, straining
with it. He was very glad of the lower gravity.
He pulled himself through onto the tunnel floor. They waited as the rest climbed, and Decker did his best to sort out the emotional tides swirling around him. Away from the claustrophobic lift, he could pinpoint details better, and there was another sensation—one he couldn’t easily define. He tried concentrating on it, separating it out, but without success. It was more like interference than emotions.
“There’s something down to the left,” he said. “It doesn’t feel like the bugs, but it’s strong enough to get my attention. And in the midst of all this, that says a lot.”
As with the previous level, this corridor was lit well enough, though the lights were less frequent here. Some of them had been broken and others dangled down from the ceiling where the anchors had given out and let go of their prizes.
“You think you can find whatever it is?” Manning asked, retrieving his gloves and shoving them into a pocket of his backpack. His expression had gone back to neutral.
“Yeah, I can.” Decker nodded. “Like I said, it’s strong. There’s something familiar about it, too, but I can’t put my finger on why.”
“Then don’t waste time trying. Lead on.” Manning let him take point, but stayed close.
The differences between levels quickly became more evident. Where the fifth level had seemed empty, as if it had been deserted for a very long time, there were far more signs of activity here. Markings on the walls indicated they were on the second level, and some of the signs and notices looked to have been posted recently, over the course of the new activity.
The corridor was as well paved as the previous one, but there were far more chambers off to each side, and they had to check each one before continuing on. Several loaders and trucks were parked haphazardly in designated areas. Manning looked at them with interest, but said nothing.
A very large opening on the right hand side revealed a dark chamber. There were lights, but most of them were damaged or burnt out. The few that remained were dim, and flickered fitfully.
A quick look told them that this was an active mining site. The trimonite vein was very apparent, dark and glistening in the rough-hewn walls. The ceiling was close to twenty feet high in some places, and looked as if it climbed a good deal higher in spots. That must have been where the miners found a particularly rich vein of raw ore.
Decker peered up into the dark recesses, and shrugged.
“Of course,” he said. “That’s where the feeling is strongest.”
“You just never stop being fun, do you?” Manning shook his head and held his rifle a little closer to his chest. “Bridges! I want you up here.”
“What the hell did I do?” He was trying to be funny. Manning wasn’t in the mood.
“Just think of yourself as the canary in the coal mine,” Manning said. When Bridges looked at him without comprehension, he added, “I need someone to use as bait, and you’re elected.”
Bridges nodded and tapped the shocker against his leg. Decker winced reflexively, expecting the man to howl with pain. A moment later he lifted the weapon, and its light hum could be heard.
Adams stepped up next to him.
“Same routine.” She handed Decker a metal baton. “Use the reaper first. You run out of ammo, use this. Hit ’em if they get too close. Otherwise, leave it to me.” He wasn’t quite foolish enough to ask for the rifle back, but part of him was tempted. Slowly but inexorably, he could tell that the bugs were closing in.
They moved carefully, and Decker advised where to look as the team ran light over the darkened surface of the walls. It wasn’t long until they started seeing the same substance used in the construction of the black tunnels. Before long they were sprouting from every available surface.
The weird sensation grew. And then he saw the source.
Along the walls, sprawled in an uneven confusion, shapes stood out against the blackness. None of the forms made much sense until he understood that they weren’t just against the blackness, but had been consumed by it.
No, not consumed—enclosed within it, woven into the black silicon. Here and there a limb jutted forth, a hand or a fist, a bone or a portion of flesh. Mostly what showed were the faces, some frozen in scowls of pain, others slack and lifeless. There were people here, a lot of them. They had been wrapped into the black silicon like flies in a spider’s web.
“What the fuck?” He didn’t know who spoke, but the emotions spiked for everyone in the group. Horror, anger, fear… all in equal measure.
Most of the trapped forms were unconscious, though some could be seen to be breathing. As the lights flickered over the shapes, Decker had to think that was a blessing. Several of them were dead. They hung slack in their glossy bindings, and universally the dead ones had holes in their stomachs or chests, complete with a thick drool of gore that ran down from the openings. He tried counting them, but the numbers didn’t want to stick in his mind. He lost count after fifteen.
There were far too many for all of them to have been mercenaries. There had to be miners and other civilian personnel—he didn’t want to know how many.
“Holy cow.” Manning looked them up and down. His expression was no longer calm. His teeth were clenched. His gaze stopped on one of the dead ones, and he turned. “Adams? Didn’t Cho say something about this?”
“Yeah, it was one of the civilians,” she replied. “The scientist with a hole in her chest. Yeah.” Adams shone her light over the deep wound and studied it carefully. Decker didn’t want to look, but found he couldn’t quite look away.
Then he realized something.
The dead weren’t the source of the weird feeling, but they were close to it. The unconscious humans weren’t the source either. They were unconscious, and anything they gave off was muted by that fact.
“Fuck.” He shook his head and stepped back. “It’s coming from inside of them.” His voice rasped. His whole body went numb. The presence of the things flared inside of his head, until his ears were ringing.
“What?” Adams asked.
“The feeling I’m getting,” he said. “It’s inside the people. Whatever it is, it’s inside of their bodies.”
Bridges glanced briefly over his shoulder.
“Trust me, there’s nothing inside those people.” He nodded toward one of the wounds as he said it. Decker couldn’t decide if the man was trying to be funny, only that he failed.
“No, not them,” he hissed. “I mean the ones that are alive. There’s something else going on here. There’s something inside of them.” As he said it, the rest murmured oaths, until a gesture from Manning shut them up.
“That’s sick!” Adams shook her head. “But it fits with what Cho said. I couldn’t picture it before, but now it makes sense.”
Manning started to say something, but instead he turned, aimed, and fired in one sure, fast move.
44
BREEDING GROUNDS
The result was a squeal of pain from one of the bugs as it got blown in half.
What they’d suspected became fact. The damned things were there. They’d been hiding in the black cascade of silicon, some of them near the trapped victims, and others further away. As Decker watched, the things unfolded themselves from their resting places and very quickly shifted into crouching positions, hissing at the human invasion of their territory.
One looked at him, and its rage increased exponentially. Immediately the sensation spread throughout the room, as all of the creatures recognized him. But unlike before, they did not attack. Instead they hesitated, and… taking positions.
“They’re protecting the people.” Bridges spoke with a genuine confusion in his voice. “Why would they do that?”
“No.” Manning’s voice was unsettlingly calm. “They’re protecting their young. That’s what Cho was saying earlier. They’ve planted babies inside the people.”
Several of the mercenaries behind him let out noises of disbelief. But there it was for all to see. The corpses didn�
�t add their voices to the argument, and neither did the living hosts to the unholy eggs. They could not. They were spared the agony of consciousness.
Through the noise, Decker recognized something. The things inside the bodies were keeping their hosts sedate. That’s why there was no fear coming from them. They didn’t deaden their pain so much as they numbed their emotions. Sedation for the spirit, not for the flesh. The very idea horrified him.
Manning gestured again, and with practiced ease the freelancers stepped into a closer formation. Each one that carried a ranged weapon paired up with another who stood with a bludgeon or some other close-combat device. They took up positions around Decker.
Without warning, the aliens attacked. There was no tensing to act as a forewarning, and they moved with the sudden speed and brutal efficiency of natural predators. And once again, they moved straight for Decker.
“Do this!” Manning opened fire and blew one of the creatures apart as it dropped down to attack. Others did the same, including Adams, who fired on one that was scaling the nearest wall and nearly hanging upside down as it came for them from above. The stench of the alien blood mingled with the rot of the dead and the industrial odors from the mine itself.
Decker tried to look everywhere at once. Despite their focus on him, the creatures seemed to be more careful this time, moving with greater purpose. Some of them seemed to be sacrificing themselves, but even in that there seemed to be a pattern—
Then it hit him.
“They’re trying to get us away from their young!”
Manning paused for a moment, and then fired at one of the humans stuck to the web of black. The shot was either very lucky or amazingly accurate because he hit his target in the meat of the shoulder without managing to kill the poor bastard.
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