Meanwhile the soldiers finish loading the excavator onto the truck. One of them closes the tailgate, fixing it with its hooks.
«Quite right, lieutenant», Ironside agrees, turning a tired smile to the soldier. «Anyway, if you notice anything unusual, let me know immediately. When we go back to the base we all must take medical tests. We must be sure that no one is contaminated.»
«Yes, sir, I understand.»
Then Redmond turns to Ironside, looking him straight in the eye. «Sir, the men who came here from the helicopter crash site reported something strange. Major Macready isn't here, and we can't communicate with the base. What's going on?»
Ironside seems to think for a moment, then he decides that that good guy doesn't deserve a lie. «We're dealing with something terribly dangerous, lieutenant. As for the base... I don't know much more than you. At what point are the soldiers with the remaining preparations? The sooner we go back, the sooner we will have some answers.»
«The boys have almost finished with their job. We'll be ready soon.»
USA base CNT222
The world comes slowly back to life, from the lethargy and darkness in which it faded out.
Where am I?
The woman struggles to retrieve some piece of lucidity and she begins slowly to remember the most recent events. She's on the ground, curled up in a fetal position in a corner of the big elevator. Twinges of pain afflict her head, intermittently lightening up like a tribal drum with each beat of her heart.
Fleeting images flash in front of her mind's eyes.
The laboratory tests...
Ivanov...
Vasquez!
The elevator stops, with an almost imperceptible shake. Moore gets up, while staying squatting. She's still keeping tightly one of the bombs in her right hand and holds her breath, as the doors slide laterally at a rate that seems incredibly slow.
How long have I been unconscious?
She's confused, like recovering from anesthesia. One of the two halves of the door is blocked at a third of the opening, with a crackling noise. The exterior of the cabin is dim, barely lit by the flickering light of a fluorescent tube that dangles from the ceiling. The feeling that something isn't as it should be permeates the environment, infusing an unhealthy aura. A faint ticking is barely perceptible in the reigning silence.
Moore takes a step into the hall where the elevator opens, which was originally a replica of the one on the upper floor.
The signs of the devastation are clear. One of the walls is completely smashed, letting a glimpse of the adjoining room. On the walls are traces of blood and organic indistinct material. The scientist leans slowly close to the hole in the wall to look at what remains of the entertainment room beyond it. An old pinball lies sprawled on its side and on its broken glass the remains of a Flash Gordon sticker are still visible. One of its lights is still flashing intermittently, causing the ticking heard by the woman. A cyclone seems to have been unleashed in the room. Everything lies sprawled on the ground. The outer coating of one of the walls has been partially torn, as if something exploded inside. Large white pipes are visible, rudely exposed and split. Drops of water drip down into a small puddle that widens slowly on the floor.
No sign of life, no bodies.
The woman tries to recall Macready's words.
What was on the middle floor, in addition to the entertainment room?
With a now sadly familiar hiss, the doors of the elevator close again, locking her on the floor.
A multitude of thoughts stir in the mind of the scientist. She must make a considerable effort to stay focused and keep a cool head.
She leans forward, moving slowly down the hall, being very careful not to make any noise and not to step on the glass fragments scattered on the ground.
The atmosphere is oppressive.
Shades, unnatural silence, dark corners in which she imagines all sorts of lurking monstrosities. And, most of all, the awareness that only a few minutes earlier, something terrifying was unleashed in that place.
Something that may still be there, seeking its preys, waiting for her somewhere in the dark.
With her senses alert, Moore moves down the hall, bent and careful not to lift her head too much, avoiding to show herself over the edge of the windows, fearing that something can notice her presence from the adjoining rooms.
Focused on the arduous task of moving slowly and bowing silently, she inadvertently leans her left hand on a wall. A throbbing dense pain draws her attention, and she bites her tongue not to scream.
The woman leans against the wall with her shoulder while watching her hand. It's swollen, dirty, scratched and stained with dried blood. Three fingers look really bad. Two are obviously broken, and the first phalanx of the middle finger seems out of the articulation, bending the finger in an unnatural angle. The thumb-nail is torn up to half, sticking outside of the nail groove. She grits her teeth while with her right hand she presses on the finger, to flatten the nail on the translucent underlying skin, rich in nerve endings. After several painful attempts, the woman gives up, merely trying to keep the thumb folded in her palm.
Struggling to ignore the pain and forcing herself to forget the sense of disgust, Moore approaches a door that faces the corridor, just after the first corner. It's in correspondence with the room where Ahmed was held upstairs. Moore reads the label next to the door, which shows the "Infirmary" words However, the window in the sliding door is mottled on the inside with splashes of blood. Gritting her teeth, the woman moves along the corridor to the next door. She remembers she has already been there. It's the room in which, along with Ironside and Macready, she has met Ivanov. Only a few hours have gone by, but it seems almost another life. The scientist is about to get up to swipe her badge into the slot of the door lock when a gurgling sound comes from within, like a liquid suction, followed by the noise of a chair moving and something heavy falling on the floor.
There's something in here...
The scientist freezes instantly, instinctively crouching. With an exasperated slowness she moves away again, crawling along the corridor. A little further the path turns right, as its upstairs twin.
She leans slowly over the corner, to make sure that the way is clear. Unlike other areas, this one is still intact.
Large windows run along the wall to her left. The inside of the walls are tarnished with condensation, and the room is barely lit by lines of red and blue LED lamps, whose light filters through a thick foliage.
The greenhouse...
Moore moves on, wondering if the creature may also assimilate and clone vegetable life forms.
A quick flicker of a shadow catches her attention. Moore looks up at the window along the long greenhouse room. There seems to be something that shakes on the ceiling. The misted glass doesn't let her distinguish the details, but whatever it is, it gives the impression of having a large number of legs.
Get away from here...
Eager to get far away from the disaster area, from the room in which she felt the presence of something just moments earlier, and now also from the greenhouse, the scientist moves along the corridor heading to the section of the staff's private rooms.
Maybe I'll find some communication device...
She reaches the door at the end, eavesdropping and holding her breath as she listens. She can't hear anything but the accelerated beating of her heart. No sound seems to come from within.
Holding in her right hand the explosive tube and the badge, Moore stretches her arm, sliding the key card in the reader. Nothing happens, while somewhere beyond the bend of the corridor she just walked through she hears a dull sound, like something banging against one of the doors from the inside.
God, no!
With a quick gesture, the scientist wipes the magnetic badge to a cleaner part of her lab coat, then she tries again to unlock the door.
More powerful thuds, more violent, come from somewhere in the elevator area.
On the third try, the doo
r slides sideways, revealing a new section of corridor. Many doors are on its sides at regular intervals. Each of them is flanked by plates showing the name of the occupants and other card readers.
Moore enters quickly, then she immediately pushes the lock button to close the door behind her. This one however doesn't close completely, leaving a slender ray of a few centimeters.
Damn!
Walking in the corridor, with a heavier apprehension at each step, Moore approaches the first door, hoping for a miracle.
Nothing, as expected, her badge doesn't work.
She goes on down the corridor, reading the names of soldiers staying at the base in a permanent service. Bishop Samuel, Brody Simon... Her stomach shrinks, when reading the name of Juan Vasquez.
After a bend to the right, the corridor proceeds with other rooms, to finally end with a big and massive door on the far wall.
Going on, Moore approaches the second-to-last door, bearing a single name: Philip Redmond. A look at the wall beside the door freezes her.
* * *
Macready curses through clenched teeth to the entire series of events. He walks at a brisk pace along the main hangar of the base, followed by two marines. All of them wear bio-hazard suits. The worsening situation, and the radio silence of the base – his base – has deeply shaken the Major, turning his initial bewilderment into a lucid fury.
On board of a jeep, the three soldiers have traveled at breakneck speed the few kilometers between the helicopter crash site and the base, and they almost rolled over on the dunes a couple of times.
After reaching the destination, they found the guard post empty. A number of attempts to call the elevator to the floor didn't have any success.
Using the video surveillance system, Macready has accessed some of the internal cameras of the base, those still in operation, and has seen the state of things in the underground levels. The devastation is almost complete, and the absence of traces of soldiers still alive is a reality that is hard to assimilate.
Giving up the idea of forcing somehow the elevator to operate, the commander guides the two soldiers to a seemingly small service room used as storage. This is located on another side of the huge hangar. Before entering it, Macready takes off his protective suit remaining in tactical pants and a khaki t-shirt.
«That Russian brainiac was right. We're not dealing with a virus. And these suits just slow us down. I have made my choice guys, you are free to decide for yourself.»
After about a minute, three protective overalls are lying on the thin layer of sand that covers the ground.
Going into the tiny room, they find an environment barely lit by a dusty spotlight. Macready moves towards the opposite wall, on which some old wooden boards, yellowed plastic panels and other junk are piled up. «Quick, help me move this stuff.»
The three quickly free up the wall, revealing an aluminum box also covered with dust. With a quick gesture Macready removes it, revealing a white plastic plate with a hole and a red LED. The Major removes a crumpled plastic tarp on the floor, just to the right of the safety device.
The torches mounted on the assault rifles of the two soldiers illuminate a square metal plate, about a meter in size.
«Stand back and be ready for anything», commands the Major. After rummaging with one hand inside his t-shirt, he pulls out a chain with a kind of a pendant looking like a tiny box. He inserts it into the hole on the plate in the wall, then takes a step back pointing his weapon to the metal panel. After a moment this one seems to sink a few centimeters and then it slides sideways revealing a staircase that goes down deep. Macready peeks slowly, staring at the inside for a few seconds and smelling the stale air coming from below. Then, apparently satisfied, he begins to descend, ordering the two men to follow him.
The three descend through a short section, proceeding on the rungs of a metal ladder. Then they reach a rough concrete floor. The place is narrow, lit by the cold light of LED spotlights mounted at regular intervals along the walls. The shape of the room is essentially cubical, about ten meters per side. A little further on, an opening in the floor reveals a stair, also in concrete, going down to the lower levels. Pointing their guns and their torches in front of them, the men go quickly down a few flights of stairs, coming soon to a different level. On one of the walls they can see a heavy armored door. It carries the number 1 painted in a bright color. Lit by spotlights, it seems to shine with its own light. A retinal scanner is beside it, with the case for the emergency button.
«You two stay back. Howe, get ready with incendiary grenades.» Macready approaches the eye to the scanner, then takes a few steps back.
The three men wait nervously for a few long moments, until the door slides sideways.
A damp breeze invests them, bringing to their nostrils a mixture of nauseating odors.
The door opens onto a small hall, a little wider than the door itself. The room is empty, except for a smaller door on the other side, whose glass has been broken through. It's flanked by an unlocking button lit by a red LED. The soldiers approach and Macready pushes the release button, turning the led green. The door slides aside quickly. Macready starts to hate those automatic sliding doors, which don't allow half measures and make it impossible to sneak inside in a stealthier way.
The opening faces a long corridor. There are clear signs that something terrible must have happened, not long ago. The floor is wet, the air smells of burning mixed with a rotten stench and chemical effluvia. Down the corridor, a flickering glow reveals a fire not yet extinguished by the sprinkler system. Many doors face the hallway. Some of them are smashed, one is torn from its hinges. The walls are stained with dark blood splashes and organic material that looks mucilaginous.
The soldiers move on cautiously, fearing an ambush at any moment. Through the gashes in the doors and in the walls, they can see inside the rooms.
They find nothing but occasional dark puddles and stains on the walls. This side of the base holds generic rooms, possibly used during the external staff's visits. Macready moves on. The soldiers come down the hall beyond the first bend. About twenty meters down the path, it turns left again. The men reach the corridor section that runs along the laboratory perimeter. The windows are completely destroyed, the interior is dark, barely lit by a small fire, still burning. The cones of light projected by the soldiers illuminate the devastated environment, and stop on a deformed and dark mass, motionless on the floor. The soldiers look at the remains of a charred creature, briefly dwelling on the monstrous forms visible in the mist generated by the fire sprinklers. Deformed limbs, wide open jaws, traces of human faces grotesquely distorted that scream pain and anguish.
«Jesus help us! It's like that shit on the helicopter...», one of the soldiers whispers.
A little further on, the path ends up on a barrier of debris of a collapsed wall and ceiling and a laboratory workbench flipped sideways and partially burned. There is no way to go further.
Macready steps back without a word, the two soldiers with him move along with him. With the senses alert and careful not to make a sound, the three walk back to a corner in the hallway, near the section facing the laboratory.
«Howe», the Major whispers. «Set here a C4 charge. Half an hour.»
«Range of the explosion, sir?», the soldier asks.
Macready's gaze is more than eloquent. Howe takes quickly the material from his backpack.
Leoni, the other soldier – a dark and short boy, boxy skull and with a heavy Latin accent – seems uncertain. His eyes bounce from his colleague who prepares the charges, to the Major. «Sir, what about the men and women inside the base? We can't blow them up too!»
«Look around. There are no survivors, and right now our main goal is to contain the infection and prevent the creature from reaching the outside. I'll take my responsibilities. Howe, regulate the amount of explosives taking into account that we will place two other charges on the lower floors, one for each floor. If we find someone we will take him out, tha
t's all. We can't risk that tomorrow this hell will break free in a town.»
Howe acts quickly, setting the C4 bomb. Finally he synchronizes its clock, setting the timer for the delay ordered by Macready. Leoni doesn't seem entirely convinced and he is about to object something, but his sentence is interrupted in the bud by a noise that catches their attention.
The three men turn around in unison. Howe finishes placing the explosive, then gets up quickly and takes an incendiary grenade. The sound has come from their back, from a room facing the corridor they just walked through. Just next to the door, on the wall, there is a fissure about half a meter high and half as large.
«I could swear that it was empty until a minute ago», Leoni whispers.
Macready signals to stay quiet, then with a nod of the head he points to one of the doors. The two soldiers move silently to the sides, while holding their weapons ready. The Major waits a moment, then he swipes his badge in the reader slot. The door slides to one side, revealing the inside of the room.
It's empty, except for a desk flipped on one side, as to hide a corner. Something white is visible behind it for a few moments, then it drops with a quick movement, hiding behind the flipped desk.
Macready points the beam of the flashlight in that direction, signaling to Howe to be ready with the firebomb. «Okay, let's keep it simple: I don't know who or what you are, but believe me, better for you to come out and show yourself. Do it now, or I'm going to blow up your ass right now!»
The Major is about to order the soldier to throw the grenade into the room, when a voice, with a deep Russian accent, comes from behind the desk.
«Please, don't shoot!»
After a few moments of tense silence Macready speaks: «Get up, slowly, and keep your hands in plain sight.»
Two bony and trembling hands sprout from the shady area behind the desk, while the lights of the spotlights under the military weapons illuminate a white silhouette that gets up slowly.
It's Ivanov, pale as the gown he wears. His eyes are terrified and somewhat haunted.
Cellular Activity- The Djinn Page 20