Doom

Destroyer found himself on his back, the wind knocked out of him, staring up at a gaping, salivating mouth big enough to swallow his whole head in one easy snap. Big the thing was, bipedal, every muscle outlined in unhealthy pink-and-blue tissue; bulky, without eyes — but with plenty of teeth and claws. A manacle on the thing’s leg with a broken chain trailing from it…

All these impressions came to Destroyer in the fraction of a second it took him to see his enemy and roll aside, trying to get his chaingun.

He tried for his knife, but the hulking mutant swatted it away — the blade skittered across the floor, fell with a clink into the holding pit.

The creature’s slashing claws just missed him as he rolled, leaving a row of gouge troughs in the floor, torn-up tiles flying like tossed playing cards as Destroyer slammed a kick into the creature’s inside right thigh, toppling the beast — even as it batted his chaingun from his hand, the heavy-duty machine gun crashing against the wall.

The monster scrambled to its feet as Destroyer sucked air into his tortured lungs.

…and kept the roll going, got his feet under him and at the same time grabbed the chain attached to its leg, putting his weight, his motion, and his muscle into it as he jerked the monster off its clawed feet. The chain wrapped around Destroyer’s wrist.

The chaingun was almost in reach — Destroyer grabbed for it, missed — then yelped as the beast leapt up and wrenched the chain on its leg with tremendous force. He felt himself being flung, pitched through the air, tumbling, skidding, rolling, feeling the beast bounding over him, the two of them falling…

Into the holding pit. Falling, he grabbed at the gurney hoist — it snapped in his hands as he fell but broke his fall so he was able to land on his feet. Winded, half-stunned, he straightened up, confirming he was in the pit with the steel sides that Goat and Portman had found. Dark in here, just a little light coming from above.

Something was in the pit with him.

He could hear it breathing liquidly, growling deep within itself. It shuffled forward, and he saw that the hulking creature had fallen in with him.

Destroyer looked at the walls. Twenty feet or more up to the rim. No way he was getting out of here anytime soon. Not alive.

So this was it. He was going to finish his life fighting in a steel pit with a thing that was pure aggression…

Kind of fitting, really. He was just sorry that Canner, that cold-blooded son of a bitch, wasn’t here to see how well one of his men could die, when the time came.

Anytime you want advice — you come to me. And that’s a guarantee, son.

He knew what advice Canner would give him now. Sell your life dearly, son. If you can, take the miserable bastard down with you…and the gods of war will be waiting to give you the gang handshake in the next world…

The beast came closer, an enormous, fever-colored scabrous presence in the gloom; almost magnificent, monstrously Herculean, snarling, raising its claws as it prepared to meet its enemy head-on. It growled again — and, intuitively, Destroyer understood that growl:

One of us will die now.

“I see we speak the same language,” Destroyer said.

Pinky, at the secondary comm. console in the wormhole chamber, was staring at the screen trying to work out where Destroyer was. But Destroyer had evidently dropped his gun — the guncam was sending only a nondescript wall. Was that a little blood on the wall? That could be anywhere in the facility.

“Destroyer?” came Sarge’s voice, filtered, over the comm from the corridor near the special weapons lab. “Portman? Come in…”

Pinky wanted to be able to give Sarge some sense of where his men were — but Destroyer’s tracking blip was going in and out. Maybe…Carmack’s lab?

But maybe not. Hard to say for sure. The transmitter had been damaged. Chances were, Destroyer was dead. And Portman, too.

“Lost Portman,” Pinky said, into the comm, “and all I’ve got from Destroyer is some kind of wall…”

In a steel-lined pit…

The big mutant charged and whipped out with a clawed fist, hammered Destroyer’s uplifted left arm hard — faster than he’d have thought so big a creature could be — and Destroyer staggered and fell, rolled, got his feet under him again, and lunged at his enemy, all his strength going into that assault, slamming his shoulder into the thing’s lower torso, making it stagger back into the wall.

Crack! High-voltage electricity making the thing howl, the pit strobing with the fat sparks, the monster lit up for a moment, roaring, quivering with the voltage, smoke rising from where its flesh fried on the metal wall. It shook, its jaws spastically opening and shutting, clacking — then it tore itself free, whimpered just once, lowered its head like a bull and came at him like a locomotive —

Destroyer laughed and ran at his enemy, screaming, “Pray for war, motherfucker!”

They met in the middle, the creature with more sheer bulk coming harder, lifting Destroyer off his feet, even as he dug his fingers deeply into the wet places where its eyes should be, sank his teeth into the place that should’ve been its neck so that he tasted its tarry blood, and head-butted it so hard his scalp split open like that orange Mac had pitched to him…

Until the two of them crashed into the wall, the electricity searing through both of them now, as they tore flesh from each other’s bones in the death throes of shared electrocution.

Crashing white light, all consuming darkness, infinite journey to nowhere…and then…

Good job, son. Welcome to Valhalla.

Duke was sitting on a chair as Sam sewed up his wound. He was pretending it didn’t hurt as much as it did.

He was staring at the “imp” trapped in the nanowall. It’d gotten some of its strength back, was thrashing around, jet blood streaming between its teeth, foam dripping from the corners of its jaws, blood leaking from the edges of its eyes…

The creature thrashed and moaned.

“That’s why I don’t do nanowalls,” Duke said. He looked at the wound. Good, neat sewing. “Now that I’m dying,” he said gravely, “I want you to know I will accept mercy sex.”

“Sorry,” she said, bending to bite through a suture thread. “I’m afraid it missed the brachial artery. You’ll live.”

“Just my fuckin’ luck.”

Half a smile from her, then. Almost.

The lights flickered — off. On. Off and on. Duke and Sam looked up at the ceiling lights as they fluttered another time…and finally, almost reluctantly, decided to stay on for a while.

“Good,” Duke said dryly. “Because it’s not as if it wasn’t scary enough in here already.”

Sam grunted in agreement, and went over to the exam table, looked at the incisions she’d sawed into the dead imp’s chest.

Duke looked at the other imp trapped in the door. Almost felt sorry for it. Almost.

“Give me a hand here,” Sam said.

Duke turned to see Sam bent over the monster’s corpse on the gurney. She had a crowbar in her hand, was working on the thing’s chest. He sighed and went to help her pry it open. She used the crowbar, he used muscle, grabbing the two halves of the thing’s chest-exoskeleton, pulling them apart. Repugnant smells and fluid gushed and sputtered out, runneling over his hands, down his forearms.

This was not Duke’s ideal of a good first date.

They got the chest wide open — and Sam stared into it, mystified.

Duke didn’t look too close, himself. Sure he was tough — but he was a little squeamish about some things. “Jesus…you ever seen anything like it before?”

Sam nodded numbly. “Yes.”

Eleven

IN THE INFIRMARY’S observation room, a zipped-up body bag on a gurney was stirring. Whatever was inside was getting restless. The bag was squirming like a chrysalis just before the moth breaks out.

The body bag settled into stillness…

Then it suddenly lurched, the motion carrying it off the gurney, onto the floor with an ugly thump.

It lay still for another few moments — until an arm punched through the vinyl, at a place where the seams met in a corner; another arm ripped free.

And Goat, who’d been dead for some time, thrust his head out through the break. The whites of his eyes had gone red; the pupils were the color of dead flesh. His skin was like the imp’s — as if outer layers had been stripped away.

But it was Goat. Wriggling, ripping, climbing out of the body bag — insect from cocoon — getting to his feet, swaying, staggering to the glass wall between him and the two human beings who had no notion that he was there, that he was staring at them, that he wanted to shred their throats with his teeth…

Sam and Duke were staring into the imp’s pried-open chest.

“Look,” Sam was saying, her voice hoarse, “there’s a heart, lungs, liver, kidneys…”

“But…” Duke was trying to think his way out from under the conclusion that was threatening to settle on them both. “But like, dogs got kidneys, right? Pigs…pigs got kidneys…”

Sam shook her head. “See this scar? On the lower right side abdomen here…and this ligature, and stitching…” She swallowed, and looked at him. “It’s…had its appendix removed.”

He stared. “What are you saying? Are you saying…”

She nodded. Looked back at the imp, having difficulty accepting it herself. “It’s human.”

When she looked back at Duke again she saw him staring, suddenly pale, at the observation room behind her.

She turned to see Goat glowering balefully at them from the other side of the glass wall. Goat tilted his head and bared his teeth. His eyes were two embers glowing from the hollows of his skull.

Then he raised a hand to his forehead and made the sign of the cross.

“Oh my God,” she breathed.

Goat turned away…walked a few steps…Then turned and sprinted toward the window and rammed it with his head — the audible crunch of bone reached them and black blood ran down the glass.

Duke saw it then — a look in Goat’s eyes. Horror. Recognition. Despair. A mute entreaty…

And again Goat slammed his head on the glass. And again. Duke and Sam watching helplessly as Goat pounded his head on the glass, over and over until bone fragments flew and gray matter clumped on the transparent wall beside the blood, to ooze slowly down the glass. And at last — Goat collapsed. He shuddered and twitched, then lay still.

A second death. A final death.

It was a long moment before either Duke or Sam could speak. “He knew,” she said at last, softly. “He knew he was turning…”

Sam looked at the imp on the gurney as the realization struck her. “That thing didn’t butcher Willits — it is Willits.”

She turned to the imp in the nanowall. Walked toward it, suddenly on a mission. “We’ve got to keep it alive…”

Duke looked at her. Keep it alive? As far as Duke was concerned, that sentiment was totally baffling.

Once, in a faraway desert place, they’d been driving half the night in a big, six-wheeled armored vehicle, Sarge and Destroyer, Duke and Reaper and three other men. Sarge was driving — all three of those other guys were now dead. Red Morrison, Rolf Gestetburg, Lee Zhang. They had the bad luck to be in the rear of the ATV when the RPG hit just above the right rear fender.

One moment they were ribbing each other about flatulence and snoring, the next they were screaming as shrapnel cut them to pieces. Blown clear, Zhang lived about ten minutes and then blew out his own brains with his sidearm when he realized he was missing most of his lower half.

Upfront, Duke had been wounded, but got out in one piece. Sarge had been stunned by a spinning chunk of steel fender, was slumped over the steering wheel of the burning vehicle, vaguely aware of what was going on but unable to move. Reaper was out on the road, firing at the enemy — the insurgents cresting the dune on the east side of the road. They were skidding down the dune to kill any RRTS who’d survived the blast. Maybe torture them a while before they killed them, knowing these desert guerillas.

Destroyer grabbed Sarge under the arms, pulled him from the ATV just before it went up in a fireball.

All of them — even the enemy — were knocked flat by the secondary explosion. Reaper’s jacket caught fire; Duke had been stunned; Destroyer’s eyebrows had been burned off. He must have been a terrifying sight as he got to his feet, smoke rising from his brows as he stood over Sarge, firing his chaingun, mowing down the surprised insurgents. The guerillas had expected to find these outlander ’Privines’ without any fight left in them. Duke and Reaper opened up on the enemy on one side, Destroyer on the other.

Sarge had gotten movement back, some of the mist cleared — and looked up to see Destroyer towering over him like a giant statue, an ancient wonder of the world. Sarge was flat on his back and Destroyer was standing over him, boots planted to either side of his chest, ready to go down protecting his NCO.

When he’d run through the last bullet on that chaingun, he’d run through all the guerillas, too. Twelve of them were lying sprawled on the face of the dune, blood seeping into the yellow sand. Dead or dying.

Then Destroyer had tossed the gun aside, stepped back, and hunkered down, helped Sarge up. Sarge had tried to walk — and had collapsed. He’d sustained a pretty serious concussion.

Destroyer shrugged and picked Sarge up, only grunting once with effort, slung him over his shoulder, and carried him — a man who weighed as much as Destroyer himself — off down the road, toward the Marine outpost, seven miles away.

Now that, Sarge thought, was a real set of balls. Destroyer was a helluva damn soldier.

He remembered all this, thought all this, as he stared down into the holding pit, his gunlight picking out the two bodies on the floor, wrecked cadavers still smoking and bloody, barely recognizable: Destroyer and the monster he’d killed, locked in lethal, terminal embrace.

Sarge let out one long low rumble, deep in his chest, which is as close as he ever got to expressing grief, and went to find a ladder.

In the wormhole chamber, Pinky was thinking about Sam. He’d always liked and respected her. He hoped she was going to get through this. He suspected few would.

A sudden motion from the monitor drew his attention back to the crisis at hand. He checked the squadron thumbnails. Sarge was now jogging down a corridor where the lights flickered on and off. Duke was looking at Sam —

Pinky scowled. Duke’s cam was squarely pointed toward Sam’s rear, as she worked over a table. Though the cam was on Duke’s chest, you could tell by the centeredness of the image that he was staring at her ass.

“What a dog,” Pinky muttered.

He looked at the other thumbnails — Portman’s guncam was pointing under the door of the bathroom stall…

And something was moving toward Portman’s stall. Moving toward that camera angle…something big. Moving slowly, in a careful way. The way an animal does — when it’s stalking prey.

Pinky stared — then found his voice, hitting the comm button. “Portman!” Pinky was yelling. “Holy shit, Portman, get out of the bathroom. Sarge! Portman! Can you hear me!”

No response. Portman had cut off all input from the others. Pinky could see what was going to happen to Portman and had no way to tell him about it.

In the lab bathroom, adjusting the equipment, Portman was feeling nervous about Destroyer. He’d heard him shouting to come out. Easy enough to ignore that. Then there was another noise from out there — something crashing around maybe. But he’d been listening to his headset, not really paying attention.

But finally it occurred to him that maybe Destroyer had been jumped by one of those things…

Fuck it. He was going to finish what he’d started, then he’d check on Destroyer. What he was trying to do here might well save Destroyer’s life.

Another moment’s adjustment, and he got the quantum-send connection he was looking for. He let out a relieved breath and hit SEND, transmitting his digitally recorded message home. He hoped.

The comm screen announced:

Transmission sent. Time until reception

2:56:18…17…6…

Fucking hell. Almost three hours before the message arrived through the Ark transfer.

Okay, so he’d get in trouble later, when the reinforcements showed up. Sarge might haul him up on charges for disobeying orders — but most likely he’d take care of it himself: beat the crap out of him. Maybe kick him out of the unit. So fucking what. He’d never belonged there anyway. They’d never really accepted him. Especially Sarge — who’d had to let him into the unit only because Portman’s uncle, in Marines Op, had pulled some strings. Fuck ’em. Let ’em punish him.

It was better than being dead.

Anyway, he had to get out of here and find Destroyer — even that stone-cold killer might need some backup…

Portman plugged his guncam cable back in, re-tuned his comm, immediately hearing Sarge calling to him:

“Portman — what’s your position…get out of the bathroom, repeat, get out of the bathroom!”

Portman swallowed. He dropped the earpiece from his ear.

“Portman, we’re tracking something —!” came Reaper’s voice, distant and staticky from the fallen earpiece.

He reached down and switched the comm off, not wanting whatever was hunting him to hear it jabbering.

Silence. And then a snuffling sound. A scrape, from outside the cubicle…

He opened his mouth to call out, to ask if it was Destroyer — and then thought better of it.

He knew damned well it wasn’t Destroyer.

Slowly, feeling the sweat start popping out on his forehead, holding his breath, Portman bent down and laid hold of his rifle, very slowly picked it up, trying to make no noise at all…but the strap scraped on the concrete floor.

Portman winced and looked into the breech — the weapon was unloaded. He fumbled in his pocket for a clip.

Something was definitely breathing out there. There was a sharp smell, and the sound of claws on the floor…

Portman tried to load the gun — and the clip fell from his shaking hands. It skidded with a rattle under the cubicle to his right.

Immediately, something large snorted in reaction, on the other side of the cubicle wall.

Trembling, Portman knelt and looked under the divider — there’s the clip. He couldn’t see anything else over there. Just the toilet and his ammo. He reached for the clip…couldn’t quite get it. He got down lower, the floor cold under his fingers, and squeezed partway under the divider, swiping at the clip…almost had it…But…he was stuck under the divider. Christ!

Grimacing with discomfort he forced himself a little farther — almost laughing at the ludicrousness of his position.

Don’t you fucking laugh, he told himself. You’re on the edge of hysteria. Stay fucking frosty. Almost got the damn thing.

Then he heard the creature again. Snort. The click-click of claws…

Where was that clip? There! Got it. He writhed back into his stall, sat up, pressed the clip in place as quietly as possible, and stood. He took a breath, dizzy from holding it, and slowly pressed the door open with the muzzle of his gun, inching out to look into the bathroom, finger on the trigger, ready to blow the thing’s head off.

Only, it wasn’t there. What the fuck?

Dust sprinkled down, into Portman’s hair. He didn’t think much of it for a second — then realized…

The ceiling overhead was shaking. He looked up…

A kind of fatalistic paralysis gripped him. He knew. He just knew, somehow — it was too late. He could run — he stood and prepared to run — but even as he did it, he knew.

And that’s when a huge-taloned rawboned hand smashed down through the ceiling from above, making ceiling tiles and insulation tumble down — as it reached for him.

“Aw shit…” Portman muttered. His last coherent words in this life.

After that, there was only screaming — as the massive arm encircled him, plucked him up into midair. The comm unit fell, his gun with it — he grabbed at his knife, as the thing hauled him upward, into the shadows of the crawl space, Portman jerking the blade from its scabbard, slashing at the brawny, scabrous arm.

His knife had no effect — and then that big arm pulled him up into the ceiling.

Still at the comm console in the wormhole center, Pinky slammed a fist against his wheelchair in frustration as he watched on the guncam — Portman’s weapon was leaning against the toilet, pointing upward — as Portman was yanked into that crawl space, vanishing for a few seconds only to be lowered by the ankles, smashed back and forth in the stall, battered from wall to wall like the clapper in a frantically tolling bell — blood splashing, his screaming was the bell’s ringing.

Pinky swore under his breath. It was bad enough being trapped in this cyborgian wheelchair the rest of his life — but watching as other people were torn to pieces, one after the other…

Portman’s screaming came over the comm in filtered distortion, muffled but somehow all the more awful for it.

Then Portman was jerked bodily upward one more time, vanishing entirely into the darkness of the hole in the ceiling.

The image shuddered with a vibration — then went dark as Portman’s blood rained down on the guncamera’s lens.

Reaper and the Kid rushed into the lab’s bathroom, firing as they went, the Kid letting go with both autopistols, Reaper chewing the ceiling up with his machine gun. Knowing damn well that Portman was dead — and all they could do was avenge a fellow Marine.

They paused — not sure if they’d had any effect.

And then Sarge pushed in between them, shouldering them aside.

“Step back,” he said.

And he let go with the new gun he’d brought from the weapon’s lab: the BFG.

They stepped hastily back as Sarge’s weapon emitted a multicolored fireball that engulfed the stalls, the ceiling, the bloody remains of Portman, and the creature that’d killed him, all of it merged into a puddle of molten metal and smoking flesh.

Sarge lowered the gun. When the smoke cleared, there was nothing but a crater that encompassed floor, wall, and a big section of the ceiling.

“Did we get him?” the Kid asked, somewhat ridiculously. No one bothered to answer him. “We must have, huh?”

Reaper looked at the barrel-shaped gun in Sarge’s hands. “What the hell is that?”

“BFG,” Sarge responded, calmly, patting the gun affectionately.

“What’s a BFG?”

Sarge smiled thinly. “Big Fucking Gun.”

Reaper could only nod.

Duke was watching Sam work on the imp trapped in the nanowall, amazed to see her start an IV on the thing. A section of the nanowall opened, to one side of the creature, not disturbing its immuration, and Sarge came in, walking backward, dragging Destroyer’s body. Reaper came after him, dragging another of those unsettling lumpy ponchos, this one containing pieces of Portman, mingled with the monster that’d killed him, like ingredients mixed in a casserole.

“Destroyer!” Duke blurted, running to Destroyer’s body.

Sarge noticed Duke’s emotional reaction. He’d known Duke and Destroyer had grown up together. But he didn’t like sentiment getting in the way of focus — Duke had better get frosty, and fast.

“Portman, too,” Reaper said.

“What the fuck’s that?” Sarge asked, looking at the gore on the observation window.

“Goat,” Sam said. “He killed himself.”

Sarge gave her a chill, skeptical look. “What do you mean he killed himself? He was already dead.”

Duke was standing over Destroyer, wracked with sobs but not shedding any tears — the sobs were silent. He wouldn’t let them out. But his body shook with wave after wave of them.

Sam went to Duke, pushed him out of the way, hunkered to check Destroyer’s neck — she was looking for the telltale neck wound that seemed to presage infection. But Destroyer’s neck was one of the few parts of his body that wasn’t lacerated, burned, or broken.

Reaper pointed to the poncho where bits of Portman were mixed up with the thing that had killed him. “That’s all that’s left of the thing we were chasing. And we found two more dead scientists in the dig. Clay and a balding guy with glasses.”

“An imp…” Sam said, glancing at the poncho.

“A what?”

“Imps. Just a scientist’s urge for classifying — what isn’t classifiable.” She looked over at the imp on the gurney, muttered, “Dr. Thurman…”

Suddenly feeling exhausted, she sat on the floor, knees drawn up, rubbing her eyes. Trying to think. “Did you check their necks?”

Reaper’s look said it for him: Their necks? Why their necks?

“Were there wounds on their necks?” she persisted, sounding like a weary teacher with a dense student.

“They were dead, all right?” Reaper replied, irritated with her supercilious tone. It was back to the condescending Sister Scientist again. “We were in a firefight; we weren’t conducting a goddamn field study.”

Sarge ran a hand over his head, struggling, like Sam, to collect his thoughts. There were just too many X factors here to organize into one clear picture. “We came here to find six scientists — anyway, the six big shots in the facility. We got four known dead and Willits is probably KIA down in that sewer. So all we’re missing is Carmack.”

They all thought about that a moment. Remembering that Carmack had vanished from his gurney — after he’d seemed dead. Then Goat had gone living-dead. Was Carmack where Goat had just managed to keep from going?

Sarge turned to Duke. “Carmack shown up yet?”

Duke pointed at the imp trapped in the door. Drooling, barely alive. “Oh he’s shown up all right.”

The others stared, not getting it. Maybe not wanting to.

“Look at the left ear,” Sam said.

Sarge went over to the trapped creature — close enough for a good look, but not too close.

He stared at its head. It was missing an ear — like it had been crudely carved off. Just the way Carmack had ripped away his own ear in his madness, when they’d caught him in that dead-end corridor…

“Son of a bitch,” Sarge murmured.

Sam pointed at the imp cadaver she’d been dissecting. “I think that one is Dr. Willits. I’m going to run the DNA, check it against his med records.”

Sarge turned to her and voiced what all the men in the room were thinking:

“What the fuck were you people working on up here?”

Twelve

SAMANTHA DIDN’T ANSWER immediately. She only had suspicions, after all. She couldn’t be sure…

They waited.

Finally, she said, “In my part of the facility, we analyzed bones — and artifacts.” She nodded toward the imp. “We weren’t doing anything like this.”

They weren’t going to let her off the hook. Sarge gestured toward the thing that had been Carmack. “What the hell is that?”

Sam sighed. “It must be a genetic mutation. Maybe caused by something environmental or viral. I just need time to figure it out, see if there’s a way to stop it, reverse the condition…”

Sarge shook his head, looking at the other imp struggling in the nanowall. “Carmack’s condition is irreversible.”

Reaper looked at him. There was a particular flatness in Sarge’s eyes. Reaper had seen it in him before. Sarge had made up his mind. When Sarge got like that, the shit came down hard.

Sarge stepped closer to the imp.

“It’s not necessarily irreversible,” Sam said, watching Sarge closely, “he’s still alive. Perhaps we could replicate hyperplasia, create antioncogenes…”

“It’s irreversible,” Sarge repeated, with icy conviction. And he drew a pistol, shoved it under the imp’s chin…

“No!” Sam said.

The imp’s eyes opened, one after the other, three and four and five and six eyes looking at him — then Sarge pulled the trigger.

Blew its brains out. Black blood and gray matter fountained, slopping onto the nanowall, instantly running off — none of it clinging — to puddle on the floor.

Sarge hadn’t only killed an “it” Reaper knew — he’d killed Dr. Carmack, too. Whatever was left of Carmack had been trapped in that thing’s skull. But Sarge was doing the man a favor, Reaper decided. There just wasn’t going to be time to “reverse the process.”

“…Because,” Sarge continued, his voice even and casual, “Carmack’s condition is that he’s dead.”

Sam stared, stunned by the summary execution.

“Kid,” Sarge said, methodically checking the load on his pistol and turning to what remained of the squadron, “go back to the dig and make sure those other dead scientists are really dead.”

The Kid looked at Sarge, at the dead imp, swallowed, then went in a hurry to follow orders.

“I’ve lost four soldiers,” Sarge said, turning to Sam, advancing on her. “What are you people experimenting with up here?”

Sam merely stood there in stunned silence.

“I’m not going to ask you again,” Sarge threatened.

“I told you, this is an archaeological research center.”

Reaper watched them closely. Was Sarge going to harm his sister? Wasn’t that implied, somehow? If that’s what Sarge had in mind, he had figured John Grimm’s loyalties all wrong.

“You think I’m lying to you?” she said, looking at Sarge, her face white with shock, her eyes hot with anger, her voice sharp. “You think I’m hiding something. I’m telling the truth.” She turned to Reaper. “I’m telling the truth, John.”

Reaper was pretty sure she hadn’t lied — not exactly. But had she held something back? He looked at her uneasily. “What’s on the hard drives?” he asked, at last.

She blinked. “What?”

“What’s on the MICDIs, Sam? What were you downloading? What were you sent in to protect?”

She chewed her lower lip. “It’s just research data.”

Reaper glanced at the imp. What remained of it was slumped like a question mark in the nanowall. “Research into what?” he asked.

Exploitation of Mineral Wealth, Water,

Oil, Oxygen, Plant Life, Coal —

The words appeared on the computer screen in Carmack’s lab as Reaper and Sam — with Sarge and Duke watching — fast-forwarded through MICDIs.

— Agriculture, Livestock, and other animal assets…

Reaper looked at the door to the bathroom — the room Sarge had cratered with the BFG. He had hard-core misgivings about being back in Carmack’s lab, especially with Sam along. They shouldn’t be here. A few steps away, Portman had been smashed to pieces. And a few yards more was the pit where Destroyer had been killed. The imps, whatever else was scuttling around the facility — the things might be anywhere. But right close to here seemed a good bet…

Duke kept an eye on the main door to the corridor; Reaper and Sarge tried to keep a watch on the rest of the room, between checking the computer — but how did you stand sentry against things that could pop out of the ceilings and floors?

He looked at the console as he heard Carmack’s voice: “— test rats have evidenced increased musculature, endurance, ability to —”

Sam shook her head and Reaper reached over, hit EJECT, scanned for something more recent. There was an image of Carmack, looking a bit older — or more worn-out. Like a guy who hadn’t been sleeping for days.

“— skeletal development, stimulation of the rhesus’s metabolic systems…”

Nope. Reaper ejected the MICDI, they popped in another.

” — subject was injected with study agent at 00.03. DS solution used with 10 micrograms IV bolus —”

“Here we go,” Reaper muttered.

The digital video cut to a new image, poorly framed from a fixed camera mount above, maybe on a ceiling. Some poor sap on a gurney. Most prominent in the image was a naked arm, bar code tattooed on the forearm, and part of the man’s torso. The video — about as clinically cheap as you could get — was stamped:

SUBJECT: STAHL, CURTIS. 003 HRS

“Vitals normal,” came Carmack’s voice, over the image. “Elevated heart rate, attributable to subject anxiety…”

Reaper shook his head. How did researchers working on human beings stay so detached? How could they talk about a man like they were talking about a lab rat? Maybe that was really what had gone wrong here — treating people as something less than human made it easier to turn them into something…less than human. But it seemed to Reaper that the inhumanity started within the scientist.

On the screen, Carmack’s hand came into the video shot, carrying a syringe. He drew something from a bottle marked C-24, coolly injected it into the clearly terrified man’s IV tube.

“C-24 successfully grafted to subject’s marker cells at 00:09…”

“What’s C-24?” Sarge asked.

Sam tilted her head, as if she wondered herself. She looked at the bottle on the video, then turned to the equipment on the bench next to the VDU. On a solute spinner was an identical bottle — marked C-24.

She picked it up, looking at it with something resembling awe. “Carmack must have managed to synthesize a stable solution of the synthetic chromosome…”

When she thought the others weren’t looking, she slipped the bottle into her pocket. But Reaper saw her do it.

On the grainy video, the experimental subject, Stahl, was lifted on a winch, gurney and all, across the room…and then lowered into the pit. Down into the very holding pit Destroyer had died in.

Reaper was just guessing when he murmured: “He reconstructed chromosome mutation in human subjects…”

“Subject moved to protected observation area,” Carmack was saying, on the video, “at 00:17…”

“What the hell are we looking at?” Sarge demanded.

“Genesis, chapter one,” Reaper muttered. And he thought: Mary Shelley would’ve liked this — Carmack playing God.

Various angles on that grainy video — finally showing Stahl looking from side to side, in a kind of sublime panic, trying to think of some way out of this. He was trapped on a gurney, in unbreakable restraints, in a pit twenty feet deep, in a locked-down research facility, surrounded by coldhearted men who thought no more of him than of a gerbil, men who would not hear him — who would mentally edit it out — if he begged them to let him go. They’d already injected him with some nightmarish agent; he could feel it taking hold inside him.

Still, driven by instinct, Stahl looked this way and that, straining against the restraints, hoping for a way out.

“Who was he?” Reaper asked.

Sam went back to the console, typed in a search: experimental subject Stahl background. Text flickered by. The scrolling stopped on the experiment’s biographical records.

Stahl, Curtis

She pursed her lips, scanned the data, encapsulated it for them. “Curtis Stahl. He was condemned to be executed. He’s a paranoid schizophrenic with convictions for multiple murders and pedophilia.”

A hard guy to feel sorry for, Reaper reflected. But watching him lowered into that pit, seeing the terror in his eyes, his mouth quivering like a two-year-old’s, like a child lost in a big city crowd at night, you felt sorry for him anyway.

Sam pointed at the computer screen — as the video jumped to 004 hrs.

The arm and torso began to swell — was that swelling…or growing? Their horror grew, too, as they watched. “Oh my God…” Sam muttered.

The video record jumped ahead, from stage to stage, like an animation without enough frames per second, showing Stahl’s transformation. At 005 hrs Stahl was writhing — and metamorphosing. His skin was growing lumpy, red, his flesh thickening, then forming the exoskeleton, a scaly hardness. His eyes were sinking away, his nose seeming to melt, lips peeling back, melding with the growing skull, teeth baring, extending; his fingers were merging one into the next, bone projecting out — he screamed in agony at this, as bone burst from the flesh to become claws…like the talons that had scythed Mac’s head from his shoulders. Maybe the very same ones. And Stahl’s noseless face, once the transformation was done, seemed strangely familiar to Reaper. Then it hit him…

It was the same monstrous face he’d seen staring at him from the shadows, when he was a kid, that day in Dig Twenty-three.

Ghost? Maybe. Precognition? Could well have been. It didn’t matter.

Sam was muttering something about laws of conservation of matter, probable quantum induction…And genetic demons…A “Hell Knight,” according to a subtitle on the video.

But all Reaper could think about was how it must’ve felt, at that moment, to be Curtis Stahl. Getting bigger and bigger — a true Hell Knight, all right. He reached out and switched off the video. They could see where it was going.

Reaper felt the fury rising in him. What they’d seen on the computer — that was Olduvai. The soul of Olduvai was in that steel-walled holding pit. Just as he’d sensed it as a boy.

He looked hard at his sister. Did she finally understand? “They sent you in here” — he gestured at the lab around them — “to save this? They wanted to protect this?”

“It doesn’t make any sense…”

“You trusted them, and they used you. They lied to you, Doctor.”

Sam’s eyes were narrowing as she worked out a scientific problem in her mind. “If he perfected xenogenesis, he would have also had to —”

“Jesus Christ!” Reaper interrupted. “Don’t you see what this place is? It’s hell. It always was. This shit ends here. Gimme those drives.”

He snatched them up.

“What are you doing?” Sarge asked, his voice and eyes modulated to a deadly chill.

He closed his fist over the disks. “We have to destroy them.”

He shook his head. “That’s UAC property.”

“The fuck are you talking about, Sarge?” Reaper felt mad enough to take Sarge on right this second if he had to. Where had Sarge’s leadership got them so far? Mac. Portman. Destroyer. Goat. All dead. “We got the chance to end this…”

“We take the data back.”

Reaper waved the disks at him. “You want this to survive? Jesus Christ, did you even see what I just saw?”

Sarge locked eyes with Reaper. You could feel it like a physical shock when Sarge fixed you with both beams. “I didn’t see shit. I ain’t paid to see shit. I got my orders. And so do you.”

He walked over to Reaper and stood eyeball to eyeball with him. Reaper could feel the heat of Sarge’s body, up that close.

He felt Sarge take the disks from his hand. Without breaking eye contact, Sarge said, “Is this everything?” Talking to Sam — but looking at Reaper.

“I…”

“I said is this everything?” Sarge bellowed, still facing off with Reaper.

All the time Reaper wondering how to take Sarge out if he had to. And if Duke would back him up. Probably not. Duke was all Marines all the time…and that meant complete loyalty to his NCO.

“I have one more to download.”

“Then do it,” Sarge said flatly.

Reaper decided to wait. If he decided to challenge Sarge head-on, there’d be a better time than this.

He nodded, just slightly, and turned away.

Sam went to the computer.

The Kid had never been this scared.

Not that anything was jumping at him right now, as he walked through the mudroom to the surface air lock. Nothing moved here. There was nothing at all but pottery, and crusty old artifacts, and tools. And somewhere in the room were a couple of dead guys — he was supposed to shoot their bodies in the head, when he found them.

He hoped to God they were still dead.

No, nothing moved, nothing threatened him, not out front. But you could feel them watching you. He knew those things were here somewhere, just out of his line of sight.

And every time one of the squadron had gone off alone — Mac, Portman, Destroyer — they’d ended up KIA.

Guess what, the Kid thought. You’re on your own right now just like Destroyer. You more likely to survive than those vets? I don’t think so…

This was seriously fucked up. What was Sarge doing, sending him out alone? Trying to get rid of him? Let the predators get the weak one out of the way?

You’re getting paranoid. Just remember who the enemy is…

But he was still buzzing on the shit that Portman had given him — though dope fatigue was starting to set in, that feeling of dirt in the gears of your nervous system — and the stuff, instead of helping him, had just made his nerves vibrate till he was teetering on the top of the greased slide of paranoia.

So it was hard to be sure who the enemy was — maybe it was everyone here.

Cut it out. Think back to when you decided to join the Privines…Think about the corps spirit you saw that day…

He’d been stationed on a ship anchored just off a bombed-out raggedy-ass town on the edges of a sun-washed sea, two thousand miles from his hometown. That day he was on the docks, supervising a bunch of seamen carrying supplies from the boats to the trucks pulled up to where the pier met the breakwater of jagged rocks — the engineers had tumbled broken boulders along the interior shoreline of the harbor, an attempt to protect it against the rising seas of global warming. He’d been warned, before the last three supply runs, that there might be a raid of the local religious fanatics on the supplies. The rebels wanting to keep the provisions from getting to the base on the other side of what remained of the town. But it hadn’t happened yet, and there were rumors like that all the time. Still, the Privatized Marines had been assigned by the civilian supply company to protect the materiel. The Kid hadn’t taken the “Privines” squadron seriously. He was just thinking about getting this materiel mission over with, getting back to the ship, watching the comedy DVD that was up that night in the rec center: Hotties in Orbit. It was supposed to have some good shots of big-titted chicks in free fall. All that sweetly floating flesh…

He’d noticed the Privines lolling about on the crates in the shade — guys he would someday come to know as Duke, Reaper, Goat, and Destroyer — watching as he and his Navy boys muscled supplies up from the boats to the half-broken robot freight mover on the dock. Stupid robot couldn’t pick up anything itself anymore, you had to load it and tell it where to carry the shit.

Remembered thinking, What a bunch of lazy Privine pricks. They could help us and they just sit in the shade, weapons on their laps, chewing gum and spitting tobacco and grinning as we sweat this bullshit in the hot sun.

That’s when the attack came. Starting with an explosion.

No, that was wrong, he decided, as he revisited the memory. It really started with a noise, a shuh-shuh-shuh-shuh, and Reaper had popped up like a jack-in-the-box, the lolling Privine vanished, all fighting Marine now, on hearing that noise — shouting, “Get down, incoming!”

And that’d saved the Kid’s crew. They dived for cover, and the surface-to-surface missile struck the robot freight mover, the machine turning to screaming flak and hissing shrapnel, flames licking up, the massive device half-falling through the hole the explosion busted through the dock.

The Kid’s mouth had gone all cottony, and he had trouble being loud enough yelling at his men to move back to the boat, get under the dock, as the insurgents’ stolen truck came roaring toward them from the shore, a dark face at the wheel, a man with shades and white teeth bared, barreling it at them. That was the real attack, the missile was just a preliminary to shake them up, disorient them, kill a few. That’s the way the rebels liked to hit you.

The truck could be a suicide machine itself, totally wired — but Destroyer and Reaper were running toward it, when anybody in their right mind would be running away; their weapons blazed, tearing the truck’s engine apart, and the radiator was the only thing on it that exploded. Then it veered, out of control, smashed into a piling and overturned with a thump that shook the whole dock. The rebels got out of the back anyway, yelling their war-cry gabble, something about calling their God to give them strength to smite evil, charging with those cheap rebuilt assault rifles spitting rounds, bullets chewing up the pier, sending splinters and ricochets off metal bolts whipping past Reaper and Destroyer.

Duke and Goat had moved off to the other side of the dock and were doing what they could to flank the rebels in the narrow space, firing their weapons.

The Kid had finally managed to get the safety turned off on his own assault rifle, clicked a round into the chamber, fired at the rebels — running after the Privines as he fired past them at the enemy.

It’d been just thirty, maybe forty-five seconds of firefight, but it’d seemed a lot longer. The Kid watched in wonder as Duke ran at two rebels, screaming his own war cry. One of them was firing back — Duke staggering, but not falling, running through his clip, blowing the head off one of the guerillas and slamming into the other, knocking him flat, smashing down with his boot, crushing the guy’s throat. Another one was coming at him from the side and the Kid was trying to get a bead on that rebel — but there was Goat, jumping over a crate, coming down firing, hitting the guy between the eyes.

The Kid was awestruck by the squadron’s tautness in action, their unity, their sheer nerve: Duke turning to cover Goat’s six, shooting a rebel who was coming at him from behind; Destroyer getting Reaper’s back, Reaper turning to cover Destroyer, giving a hand signal the Kid didn’t know and suddenly they were running in a phalanx, all four of them, into the remaining six rebels, who were trying to aim but were too panicked to hit anything. Another second and the squadron was among them, cutting them to pieces. The squadron fired astonishingly fast, moving from target to target with split-second exactitude, as fast as a rock drummer pounding unerringly through his drum set.

The Kid was firing, too, when he could get a shot, but he didn’t think he had hit any of the enemy, and by the time he got close enough to do it for sure, the rebels were already dead. Shot to pieces.

Reaper had taken a couple of rounds in the chest, but he was still standing — his Kevlar had stopped them. Goat had lost a chunk of his hip, and Duke had taken a round in his right shoulder…

But the bodies of dead guerillas were lying about like a crashed load of mannequins strewn over the dock. The Privines had made every round count — and most of the enemy had died from head shots. Instead of panicking, the squadron had worked like a well-oiled machine.

That’s what the Privines were about. Readiness. Readiness in unity.

Afterward, the Kid had walked up to them. Watched as they patched one another up. Cleared his throat.

“What?” Destroyer had asked.

“Just wanted to say…”

“You’re welcome. Now fuck off.” He looked down at Duke’s wound.

Reaper glanced up at the Kid. “You call a med-chopper?” Reaper had asked.

“On their way.”

Destroyer had gone back to bandaging Duke, Reaper to taking care of Goat. Then Destroyer looked up, feeling the Kid watching.

“What?”

“You guys…did a great job.”

“So? We’re supposed to.”

“I guess — we were sort of bad-mouthing you…”

“You wanted to say sorry?” Duke had said. “We don’t need it. We only take sorry from people we respect.”

“Actually,” Destroyer pointed out, as he squeezed some pain-stopper into Duke, “I turned around, the Kid was coming up with us, firing at the enemy. The only one of that bunch that did. Shows…I don’t know. Shows something I guess.”

The Kid fairly glowed inside at that.

“So, Kid —” Duke said. “You want a medal? Go get us something to drink, if you want to be useful.”

“Sure,” the Kid said. “I mean — something to drink. Some water. I’ll get it…the water I mean.” The Kid turned away. Then turned back. “Uh…how do I…?”

Destroyer looked balefully at him. “How do you get water? You get a canteen and you shake it. If it goes gurgle, gurgle, there’s water in it. Then you bring it here to me first — not to these other jar-heads.”

“Hey fuck you, Destroyer,” Duke said, “who you calling a jarhead, jarhead? Kid, don’t listen to him. Bring me the water first.”

“But — how do I…”

“What?”

He finally just blurted it: “I want in.” He licked his lips. “Be…you know…one of you.”

Duke snorted. Destroyer shook his head. “Hard to jump from your service to ours. Special deals got to be made. Besides — the training alone’d kill you. Now, Big Balls, how about that water?”

“I’ll get you water. But…I want in.”

“What, we don’t get water unless we say you can join?”

“No, I’m not saying that…”

“Then fuck off.”

“Huh? Look — I want in.”

“Heard you before.”

Confused, the Kid opted for simplicity and ran for the canteen, ran puffing back, handed it over. But as they passed the water around, he said, insistently, “I want in. Or…uh…I don’t get you in to see Hotties in Orbit tonight.”

“Hotties in Orbit?” Duke had said, sitting up, suddenly interested. “You can get us in to that?”

“Come on, Duke…” Reaper muttered.

“Hey, I wanta see that thing. Yeah…and the kid was good. Boy howdy he was good. You see how good he was, backing us up like that, Reaper? I heard they got that blond with the tattoos on her ladyplaces in that thing, man…that genius actress with the humongous…”

“Oh Christ,” Reaper said, laughing, “are you going to saddle us with a…”

He had almost changed his mind about joining, though, when he’d seen Goat using that big knife to take “trophies” from the dead rebels.

The Kid laughed softly to himself now, thinking about it.

He had gotten them in to see the weightless hotties, but that wasn’t really why they’d helped him get in their squadron. They’d done it partly because he’d done his best to back them up in the firefight, firing at the enemy, charging the rebels when the other sailors had gone to ground…

And partly because Destroyer had said he’d take the responsibility. Destroyer had stepped up and taken the Kid under his wing. A minor politician, the Kid’s own father had been absentee most of the time — one day a pushy reporter had burst into his office to find him boffing an intern, the two of them standing up at his desk, her underwear down around her ankles. It made a nice photo in the tabloids. Mom divorced Pops faster than an MP chucks a shit-faced soldier in the tank, and that’s fast, and after that the Kid saw his father once a year — the old man was just a distracted, irritable presence when he was around, nothing more. No big brothers; teachers all hated the Kid’s smart mouth, same with the officers on the ship. He’d barely made bosun. Giving the authority types crap and all the time looking for someone to tell him what the hell to do with his life. Then along comes Destroyer…

Now, looking around in this ghostly archaeological workroom on a faraway world, he thought: Along comes Destroyer — then there goes Destroyer. He’s dead…

Tears welled in the Kid’s eyes. He was glad he was alone, now. If they saw him crying — even for a combat brother — he’d never hear the end of it.

But Destroyer had been the closest thing to a big brother he’d ever had…best combat teacher anyone could want.

He let out one last shuddering sob, wiped his eyes, and decided that Destroyer wouldn’t want him bawling like this. So he cussed himself out for a minute, squared his shoulders, and went to check out the dead guys.

Wondering, as he went, if he’d ever see his woman again. Millie — a nurse back home. Nice girl. What would she think of all this?

Crossing the room he walked past a neat row of heavy-duty chain saws, numbered sequentially, “9, 8, 7…5…4…3…”

What’d they needed chain saws here for? Weren’t chain saws for wood?

He went to where Sarge had told him, on the comm, he’d find the bodies of Clay and Thurman. He found the blood, all right, and plenty of it. But there was a problem about the bodies.

He touched the headset transfer. “Sarge? We got a problem…”

It was a simple little problem. He’d been sent there to find some bodies.

The bodies were gone. Some other place, you’d think: They’re dead bodies, they couldn’t just get up and walk away.

But here — they could do exactly that.

In the wormhole chamber, Pinky was fumbling with the med-remote on his wristband, trying to adjust the antidepressant and analgesic feed on his cyberchair. He was running short of the pharms — should’ve checked the implant panel that morning. He needed a little something extra to get through this.

If he could just see Samantha, see her walk through the door and into the Ark. See her get safely home. She was like an adopted sister to him.

He’d never let himself fall for her, of course. He didn’t have a lower half. You proved your love, for the most part, with your lower half. Intimacy started in your lower half and traveled upward — he remembered it, from other women, before the accident. Now he’d never feel it again.

Still, it tormented him thinking that Samantha was probably going to die in this interplanetary limbo. Some nightmare from Carmack’s lab was likely to get to her. Tear her to pieces. Or worse — from what he’d been gleaning, over the comm — it could make her into a monster.

He almost threw up, at that thought, and tapped the remote again, squeezing another few drops of trank into his system.

The meds weren’t working today.

He ached to get out of here, detach from his cyberchair, hook up into his life-support recliner, go to sleep for a day or two. But he was needed. And anyway, he was afraid of the nightmares that would come if he slept. He knew the nightmares were there, stored up in his head, waiting to spring at him the way the imps were waiting to kill the others.

It bothered him that he was safe here while they were all at risk. He went to the computer console, thinking that it was bad enough being handicapped, trapped the way he was in this machine, without facing the same dangers the others faced…

That’s when he heard the sound outside the big, locked metal door. Sounded like an engine starting up. Then another sound, a squealing of metal on metal: something grinding against the thick steel of the door.

Okay. So maybe he wasn’t safe here after all.

“Sarge?” Pinky said into the comm. “Something’s outside the Ark door — is that you guys?”

“Negative,” Sarge responded immediately. “We’re still in the lab.”

If it wasn’t them…and everyone else was dead…

“I was afraid you’d say that,” Pinky said, as something on the other side of the door began to cut its way into the wormhole chamber.

Thirteen

IN CARMACK’S LAB, nothing was really resolved between Sarge and Reaper — but the new crisis, a possible assault on the Ark itself, superseded everything else.

“Reaper, let’s go,” Sarge said, slapping a fresh clip into his rifle.

Reaper read him to mean they were going to check out whatever was trying to get at Pinky. Which meant only the squadron was going.

“She’s coming with us,” Reaper said, nodding toward his sister.

Sarge shook his head, just once. “Negative.”

“We’re gonna leave her here alone?”

“She’s got a job to do, Reaper. Just like you have.”

Reaper could tell that Duke clearly didn’t like the idea of leaving Sam either. But he only shrugged at Reaper. He wasn’t going to argue with Sarge.

Sam was engrossed in a computer file, trying to reach some deeper understanding of the phenomena of the imps and the Hell Knight. “Carmack’s happy little elves,” Duke had called them.

“Sam…” Reaper began. Not sure what he wanted to say.

“I’ll be okay, John,” she said distractedly. “Go.” She was leaning close to the monitor, fascinated by some DNA signature, some nuance of the chromosomes that was all cryptic code to Reaper and an open book to her. Sam had come a long way as a scientist, he thought. And once more he felt a rush of admiration for his sister…

Sarge looked at him. Almost expressionless — but it was a warning. Reaper couldn’t shake his bad feeling about leaving Sam. But it was hard for him to let his squadron go into a probable firefight situation without him.

He tossed his sister his comm headset. “Keep the door locked,” he told her. “Don’t open it to anyone. Use this if you need help…”

She glanced up, nodding. For a moment their eyes locked. She looked as if she wanted to say something…something that bridged the gulf of years, reached back to their childhood together. To the times when they’d made their own action figures out of bits of old cleaning robots; when they’d watched old movies on the digital feed; when they’d toyed with being musicians together, him playing his crude guitar, she banging on a cheap little electric piano, laughing when she hit a sour chord…

That laughing little girl. And he was leaving her alone in here.

Sarge was heading for the door. Duke hesitating — looking between Reaper and his sister. Reaper sighed and nodded to Duke.

They followed Sarge into the corridor. Sarge signaled them to double-time it, and they began to run.

Pinky stared in fascination at the rock-saw blade pushing its whirring snout into the wormhole chamber, roaring and squealing as it cut through the door. Sparks rooster-tailed into the room, metal grit accumulated on the floor under the diamond-tipped chain saw as it cut out a good-sized, jagged-edged circle. It was obviously cutting an entry into the room — a doorway, big enough for something large to climb through.

“Pinky?” came Sarge’s voice, over the comm almost lost in the screech of the chain saw gnawing at the metal. “Do you have a visual?”

“Oh, I got a visual all right,” Pinky said, in chilling understatement.

He had a pistol already on the computer table beside him. Doubted it would be of much use.

Staring at the growing, smoking breach in the door, Pinky reached down to the bag of ST grenades Mac had given him, having to strain to reach it from the cyberchair. Picturing himself popping from the chair like a cork from a bottle if he went too far…just caught the edge of the bag with two fingers, worked it up to a better grip, pulled the sack of grenades onto his synthetic lap.

He pulled one out, and got it ready in his right hand, held the pistol in his left…

Heard Sarge shouting in the comm as he and Reaper and Duke ran down the corridors to the atrium:

“Don’t let it get into the Ark!”

Amen to that, Pinky thought. But it’s just about too late for that, too…probably too late for all of us…

The saw finished its circular cut. The metal from the hole vibrated like a dull gong, then fell into the chamber, clattering. The rough edges of the hole smoked.

Pinky waited, staring at the hole, sweat making the grip of the gun slippery in his hands.

Then the thing showed itself.

Pinky screamed — and fired.

“Use the grenade!” Sarge shouted into the comm as he and Reaper and Duke ran into the atrium. The Kid came running from the dig tunnel as Sarge again urged Pinky, “Use the goddamn grenade!”

Ahead was the door into the Ark chamber. There was a hole cut in the enormous metal door — from the look of it, Reaper figured they’d used a diamond-frosted chain saw. The chain saws were used by archaeological engineers to saw through the metal walls of some of the ancient Olduvaian structures, and to free things trapped in stone, Reaper remembered. He’d noticed them in the mudroom. Hadn’t thought for a moment they’d ever be applied here.

If those things had gotten to the Ark — to the wormhole that leapt through space, to Earth — then they’d gotten to the UAC compound at Papoose Lake.

And there was a whole planetful of people to infect, to transform, waiting there. Most of them without a clue that they were about to be invaded by a kind of vicious genetic aberration, a thinking infection from a distant world.

Only — the horror didn’t come from an alien world, not entirely. It had been created by a fusion of human science and the lore of the long-dead savants of Olduvai.

Pistol fire cracked from beyond the hole cut in the metal door. Then two flashes of color-challenged light…the weird light, all colors and none, that they remembered from the Ark.

Sarge got there first, fairly diving through the hole. The other three followed — and found the wormhole chamber deserted.

No Pinky, no chain saw, no crazed scientists, no imps, no Hell Knight. Just a grenade, twirling slowly on the floor, where it’d been dropped — unused.

They stared…Duke was the one who said it for all of them. “Jesus. It’s home. It got through.”

Sarge took a deep breath. His voice was almost a monotone. “We gotta stop it before it gets out of the home-side compound.” He looked at Duke and Reaper and the Kid, one after the other. “Are we ready?”

But Reaper was thinking about his sister. “Sam?” he called into the headset comm. “Sam — do you read me? Over.” Nothing. Just static in his ears. He felt a wave of desperation. A sinking feeling of defeat. First this planet had gotten his parents…now maybe his sister. “Sam? Do you read me? Over!”

Sarge was reloading his gun. Acting like he didn’t hear Reaper, like it was not his concern.

Reaper licked his lips, watching Sarge as he waited for a reply on the comm. Was he going to have to choose between protecting his world — and his sister? “She’s not answering…Sam? Do you read me? Sam!”

Sarge started for the Ark. “Lock and load.”

Reaper knew what that meant. It was Sarge’s succinct way of saying that Sam was a lost cause. They had a bigger mission to think about, responsibilities that went way beyond the personal.

Reaper knew he should go along with that decision. But he wasn’t sure he was capable of it. Maybe she was dead — but maybe not. He just couldn’t leave her behind, no matter what the stakes. It just wasn’t in him to do that.

That’s when the lights around the wormhole went dim. Flickered. Came back on…

And then switched off. They were left in near-complete darkness.

“What the fuck is that?” Duke demanded. As if anyone there had the answer.

A soothing female voice issued from the PA system:

“System reboot…”

And the lights came back on.

“Quarantine is breached,” Sarge declared. “This mission is no longer containment. Double in, gather up all the weapons and ammo you can find.”

“Sam!” Reaper yelled into the comm. “Do you read me? Over!”

Only static replied.

The soothing digital lady intoned, “…Time required to begin renewed operation. Five minutes…”

Reaper looked at Sarge, waiting.

Sarge said, “You got three.”

Reaper thought about arguing, but there would be none with Sarge. He had three minutes to find Sam and get her back to the Ark.

He ran to the door, climbed through, and sprinted across the empty atrium — half-expecting, in this wide open, shadowy space, that something was going to rush him, rip at him with claws of razor-sharp hardened bone, pierce his throat with a lancing barbed tongue.

But he made it to the air lock, sprinted through it, found himself in the corridor leading to Carmack’s lab.

Seemed to take a lot longer to get there than he remembered — and he was running full tilt, his weapon heavy in his hands, breath burning in his lungs, heart pounding in his ears. Long time since he ran track as a kid.

He remembered when he was a boy, before they’d gone to Mars, he and Samantha had been back home, without their parents, staying with an older cousin. He’d won a ribbon in track. He’d hoped his dad would hear of it, say something. Transmit his pride to his son. Nothing. He’d been pretty bummed out — hadn’t heard from Mom or Dad in a while. Hadn’t said anything about it to anyone, but his sister had watched him, and saw how he felt.

Then he’d gotten an interworld e-mail from Dad. “Heard about your triumph in track. Doesn’t surprise me when you do well at anything — always been proud of you. Congratulations. Love, Dad…”

He felt better. It was several years before he realized that his sister — clever with computers — had faked it up, managed to send it to him as if from Dad.

Christ. Sam…

And the worst thing was what had happened to their relationship when their parents had died. He had retreated into himself, going morose and silent. He hadn’t been much comfort to her. She’d buried herself in science — as if to reclaim her parents that way — and he’d run from science into the military. First the Army, then the Privatized Marines…

“Sam!” he shouted, running into Carmack’s genetics laboratory, gasping for breath. He skidded to a stop, again expecting an attack as he swept the room with his gunlight, ready to fire — aware that he was on edge and hair-trigger right now, and if he wasn’t careful, he’d shoot his sister, thinking it was one of them, in the dimness. No attack came — and no Sam, either.

He searched the room, sweat stinging his eyes, even looking in the wrecked bathroom.

She was nowhere to be found. Not her and not her body.

They might have gotten her — dragged her up into the crawl spaces, chewing on her as they went. Tearing her to pieces.

No. He had a strong feeling Sam was still alive. But where?

The seconds were passing. Think…

If she’d finished here in the lab, where would she have gone?

Of course! The infirmary. Finish the research there. Should have gone there first, he was wasting precious time…

“I’m an idiot,” he muttered, turning to run back the way he’d come.

He ran back through the corridor, into the air lock, racing across the atrium…down the hall, pressed through the nanowall…there were several corpses and pieces of corpses on tables and gurneys. And Sam…

She was there, bending over a cadaver. Sam’s face was rapt with concentration, her hands operating a scanner as she ran it slowly over the battered chest.

That was Destroyer’s body, some part of his mind noted, and veered immediately away — he didn’t want to deal with Destroyer’s death yet. He had to put all grieving off till the mission was over. His pain over losing his buddies was like a child weeping in a detention cell — it wasn’t time for that child to be let out yet.

“What the fuck are you doing, Sam?” he rasped, between gasps for air, as he stalked up to her. “Didn’t you hear me over the radio?”

The question didn’t register. She kept frowning into that scanner — and asked a question of her own. “Why did they take Goat but not Destroyer? Why Carmack but not Dr. Thurman?”

He slapped the butt of his machine gun with impatience. “Sam — you’ve got to come with me. Now! We got, like, a minute to evacuate —”

She was still caught up in her stream of thought — seemed about to be swept over some inward verge. “Lucy had the twenty-fourth chromosome…but she wasn’t a monster — she died protecting her child, not devouring it. Why did the same chromosome that made her superhuman turn Stahl into a monster? Just give me one minute to show —”

He glanced at the door. Were the others already going through the Ark? He had to be with them when they went through. They could be facing the enemy instantly, on getting home. He couldn’t let the squadron down — they’d need all the help they could get. The whole world would need it.

She bit at the tip of her tongue, looking again at Destroyer, that detached scientist’s state of mind, narrowing her eyes again. “John — give me just one minute to show you…”

“We don’t have one minute!”

“Then give me ten seconds!”

He looked at her. There was something in her expression.

It was as if she were saying, You didn’t trust me when our parents died. You wouldn’t talk to me. To anyone. And you sealed yourself off, inside, from people. This time…trust me.

He looked away — a kind of acquiescence.

But he turned back to watch as she snatched up a biopsy needle, sank it into the base of Destroyer’s skull — sucked out the gray matter with a practiced motion of her thumb.

Reaper grimaced and looked away again.

She moved to a table where — he hadn’t noticed it before — Portman’s head, still in its helmet, lay in a grisly lump.

He found himself watching her again — and regretted watching her when she found a swab, collected matter from the head by the simple expedient of sticking the swab through a hole in the skull, dipping it into the brain like a candymaker stirring caramel in a pot.

She leaned over the remains of Carmack’s torso, separated the lungs, revealing another strange organ where none should be.

“This is its tongue…”

A tongue inside a chest? But that long, long tongue had to start somewhere.

She held the swab up and looked at it critically — it was lathered with brain matter from Portman, looking like moldy cottage cheese. Then she held it over the tongue hidden in the Carmack imp’s chest.

The tongue suddenly churned and wriggled, spattering them both with black blood.

“Brain matter from Portman…” she said, as if thinking aloud.

Then she took the biopsy needle, squeezed some of the red-gray sludge onto a swab.

“This is from Destroyer…”

She held the sample from Destroyer’s brain over the tongue — and the tongue just lay there. It didn’t react.

She passed Portman’s brain matter over it again — and the tongue jerked in instant reaction.

Reaper stared. Worried about the Ark but fascinated despite himself.

Sam ran through her impromptu theory as she worked. “There are genetic markers for aggression, violent behavior. The marker could be a specific neurotransmitter it’s picking up on, a ganglion. It’s choosing, John. It’s choosing who it infects.”

He shrugged helplessly. “Choosing? Choosing how?”

She considered. “Latching on to numbers in the DNA code linked to…”

“Sam…”

He looked at her skeptically. She was getting fanciful. “Linked to what, Sam? To ’evil’?”

It’d been well over the ten seconds she’d asked. But he intuitively felt this could matter — if the creatures had gotten to the other side, knowing how the things decided to do what they did could help stop them.

She spoke rapid-fire. “Ten percent of the human genome is still unmapped. Some think it’s the genetic blueprint for the soul. Maybe C-24 is what destroyed the Olduvaians. It would be why some of them had to build the Ark — to escape to a new beginning. It made some superhuman. Others — monsters.”

It felt right to Reaper. He looked at the imp. “Goat was right. Said we are all angels or devils…we become one or the other.”

They looked at each other. Which are you?

Then an implication hit him. “Oh my God…”

“What?”

He started toward the door. “The people quarantined on the other side of the Ark —”

“What about them?”

Reaper hadn’t heard what’d happened to the people who’d been evacuated — but it made sense there’d be a quarantine, for a time, back home; they’d be contained in the compound where they couldn’t spread any of this genetic infection…contained where they’d also be sitting ducks.

“He’s going to kill them!” Reaper went on. “But they won’t all be infected!”

Fourteen

THREE MINUTES HAD been used up seven minutes ago.

Sarge was done waiting for Reaper and Sam. As far as Sarge was concerned, Corporal John Grimm was AWOL.

The Marines were stripping off everything they didn’t need and loading up with all the extra ammo they could carry from the crates of munitions that’d been stacked in the wormhole chamber during evacuation.

As he took off his extraneous equipment, Sarge decided he’d made a mistake: he shouldn’t have let Reaper go after his sister. Only reason he’d done it at all was he figured the girl might’ve found out something handy — something they could use against the enemy. She could’ve been a resource.

But, of course, she was either dead, by now — or she was one of the enemy. Same probably went for Reaper. Too bad. Reaper was a good soldier.

Sarge felt nothing much, as he contemplated Reaper’s probable death. Maybe Destroyer’s dying had used up the last of his caring. It’d been a long time since he’d been able to feel much. Except satisfaction in destroying the enemy.

“System on line,” said the soothing mechanical voice.

“Get ready,” Sarge said, looking at the mercurial droplet, defying gravity in the midst of the Ark chamber. He charged up the BFG with the flick of a switch. It throbbed inwardly, as if eager to discharge its bioenergy…as if it were eager to begin killing.

He looked at Duke and the Kid. “Here are your orders. Uphold the quarantine. Nothing leaves the compound. If it breathes, kill it. Pray for war!”

Trained to the marrow, Duke and the Kid cocked their weapons. And as one they intoned in turn: “Pray for war!”

Sarge shouldered the BFG, took a deep breath, and stepped into the Ark…

On the other side, the steel door into the compound was wide-open.

That’s the first thing Duke noticed when they came through the Ark — that and the waves of nausea he was experiencing.

After the door and the sickness, the next thing he, Sarge, and the Kid noticed were the bloodied bodies of UAC employees, sprawled randomly across the floor. Some familiar faces were among them.

And at just that moment, Portman’s message came through from Olduvai, Mars. Since it came over an emergency channel the central computer piped it over the public address system:

“…Portman with RRTS 6 Special Ops on Olduvai 0310 hours…”

Jumping over the dead, Sarge jogged to the wall comm. Its small screen blinked with:

RRTS ENCRYPTED

On its monitor was Portman’s grainy videocam image from the bathroom of Carmack’s lab on Olduvai. The message Portman had sent some hours ago, only just arriving:

“…we have encountered hostile activity, require immediate RRTS reinforcements…”

“No shit,” the Kid muttered.

Duke went to the control panel of the compound, at a computer terminal near the wall comm. The monitor there read out:

Quarantine Lockdown Time Remaining…59 min…58 min…

“We’ve got 58 minutes,” Duke said, shrugging resignedly, “before the auto lockdown is lifted…”

Sarge grunted. Thought about it a moment, then said, “Reset it for another six hours.”

Portman’s transmission was repeating again, on an emergency band loop: “…Portman with RRTS 6 Special Ops on Olduvai 0310 hours…”

Visibly annoyed — here was a recording of Portman disobeying his orders — Sarge hit the control for the PA and turned Portman’s voice off.

“I can’t reset it,” Duke said, after tinkering with the computer. “It’s been disabled. Same with the topside comm link.”

Meaning, Duke thought, there was no way to get a message out for reinforcements. The reinforcements they needed after all — Portman had been right.

“They’re disabling the computers now?” the Kid said, sounding confused.

“They’re rocket scientists,” Duke said, “remember?”

“They may be rocket scientists…” Sarge said, cocking his sidearm. “…but they’re still dumb enough to try to fuck with me.”

He slung the BFG over his shoulder, and walked over to the nearest corpse. He shot it in the head.

He went to another corpse. He shot that one in the head.

Duke and the Kid grimaced — but followed suit. Over and over again, black blood fountained and bits of bone sprayed.

Sarge had broken into a weapon’s locker, armed himself with a light machine gun. Gave the Kid an assault rifle. Dangerous in close quarters, the BFG was slung over his shoulder on a strap, like a sinister scuba tank.

Then they split up into the two corridors forking off from the main Ark chamber in the compound.

Sarge took the Kid with him, gestured for Duke to head down the right-hand corridor. Duke gave Sarge a haunted look, just before he went — he didn’t want to set off on his own, but he wasn’t about to say anything about it, and Sarge never rescinded an order.

Guns at ready, Sarge and the Kid moved carefully into the hallway. It got darker as they went, as if the lights were getting scared to stay lit the closer they got to whatever was waiting for them in the depths of the compound.

There was a peculiar sound, coming from around the corner, at the end of the hall. Hard to make out exactly what it was. A sloppy, wet sound, with cracking, gulping noises mixed in, and low snorts.

Instinctively crouching, they turned the corner, turning their gunlights toward the source of the noise.

Demonic semihuman things crouched over human bodies. Feeding.

Interrupted, the creatures looked up, snarling, blood and tissue dripping from their fanged jaws, glaring at the source of the irritating lights. As if they resented being exposed in their feasting.

There were bits of clothing still clinging to these things. Looked to Sarge like they weren’t through transforming yet: You could see they’d once been people, UAC employees from Olduvai or the compound. Their foreheads were swollen in angry red folds, like some aquatic being’s, and their eyes were sunken, barely visible, receding into the mutated opticals of the new, murderous configuration; bone ends had thrust out through the tips of their fingers, burst raw from the flesh, dripping mucus and blood; their heads were sunken into broadened shoulders, their feet had become something quite inhuman…as they growled, their tongues flickered like separate creatures with a sentience of their own.

At their stubby, disfigured feet were what were barely recognizable as human bodies, like sides of beef gone over by amphetamine-crazed butchers. Only, one of those flayed human beings was still alive. Impossible to tell, in what was left of it, if it was a man or a woman. But a set of human eyes, missing the eyelids, looked back at them in quivering, agonized madness from the wreckage of flesh.

The Kid made a soft sound of terror in his throat. But he didn’t run. That was good. Sarge was almost proud of him.

There was that stretched-out instant, when they and the creatures, blinking in the gunlights and ruminating on human flesh, regarded one another.

And then as one the demonic things emitted high-pitched screams of pure fury and rushed at Sarge and the Kid. One of them swinging an emergency ax…

Two steps back — but the Kid wasn’t going to run, not with Sarge standing there. He and Sarge opened up at the same time, assault rifle and light machine gun blazing, filling the corridor with a hail of metal-jacketed death. The Kid didn’t neglect to put a couple of rounds between those staring eyes on the floor. That light had to be shut off.

The half-humans kept coming at them, the snarling mutant in the lead raising the ax over his head, despite being ripped by the bullets, seeming to push upstream against the automatic-weapons fire, as bits of flesh and bone and droplets of blood flew from him.

The Kid was glad Sarge couldn’t hear him whimpering when he ran through his clip, the gun out of ammo.

The creatures were almost within reach…and then all but one of them fell facedown with a sickening squelch.

That one obstinate horror was still reaching for them — it was on its knees, one of its arms hanging by a shred, pouring black blood, its right arm reaching out twitchily to rake at them with its claws — Sarge had run through his clip, too, so he drew a knife and simply stuck it to the hilt in the thing’s right eye, then twisted to slash its brain up from within.

Sarge had been clear enough.

Here are your orders. Uphold the quarantine. Nothing leaves the compound. If it breathes, kill it. Pray for war!

“Pray for war,” Duke muttered now. Wishing it were war.

But this wasn’t war. War was with people. This was some other category of butchery.

The corridor Duke had taken went straight, zigged to the right, went straight again — and then dead-ended. The door at the end was open: a rectangle of night. Duke wasn’t eager to go through it.

But he made himself push ahead, probing the room with his gunlight.

The room was piled with corpses — they were literally piled up, as if someone had tried to use them as a sort of impromptu barrier, a fortress of dead human flesh.

“Christ…” Duke murmured.

Some of the bodies were trembling a little — weren’t they? Or was that an illusion caused by his hands shaking the gunlight?

He wasn’t taking any chances. They could be transforming…

He moved into the room, and started firing, putting a round into the head of each corpse. The bodies flinched as he fired into them — just flesh reacting to impact, but in the dimness his imagination made it seem they were trying to crawl away from his gun muzzle. His stomach lurched, and he almost threw up — probably would have except it had been so long since he’d eaten. He had a nutrition bar in his pocket — but the thought of eating made his stomach contort again. He kept firing, firing…blood runneled around his feet — red blood, not black…

He paused to put in a fresh clip, coughing from his own gun smoke.

There was another sound, besides his coughing. Something moving, and maybe a moan, coming from the far side of the room.

He swung his weapon around, fired in that direction, toward another heap of bodies — which was twitching ever so slightly.

“Jesus Christ, stop shooting!”

Duke knew that voice, didn’t he? “Who the hell’s in there?”

Two arms popped up from the pile of human corpses. Duke almost fired at them, out of sheer tension, but he managed to hold back. A face came after the arms. Bloodied but human. It was Pinky.

Pinky glared at him. “Don’t just stand there, you dumb son of a bitch, get me outta here!”

Fifteen

“YOU WILL NOT hesitate, and you sure as hell won’t turn back,” Reaper was telling his sister. “Research here is over.”

They were standing in the wormhole chamber, close to the tank where the silvery droplet spun and pulsed.

“When I go through the Ark,” he went on, “you count to three and come after me. I’d send you through first, but I don’t know what’s waiting over there…”

“I’m afraid we do know,” she said softly. “I just don’t know if those things are the only enemy —”

“You understand what I’m telling you, Sam? You don’t get a sudden inspiration and go back to the goddamn lab. You don’t go looking for souvenirs or clean underwear. You follow me through. One…”

“…two, three. And I go through. I think I kinda get it, John.” But Sam was smiling sadly at him — he was just trying to protect her. She looked at the Ark. “You hate going through that thing…Maybe you’re the one who’s stalling here.”

“How do you know I hate…well yeah. Everyone does. Okay, I’m going. Remember —”

“I know, I know, one-two-three.”

He turned, took a breath, and stepped into the Ark’s field of sensitivity — as always getting the eerie feeling he was stepping into the embrace of something alive and sentient.

He shuddered, feeling again that he was diving into cold water that was instantly warm water, then icy again…

The mercurial droplet leapt at his eyes, and he was falling into infinity. Living seas swirled around him in impossible colors, improbable smells.

But suddenly he was somewhere familiar…familiar tropical colors, familiar tropical smells…

He was no longer falling — there was solid ground under his feet. He was back in that rain forest where Jumper had died. Back in the steaming jungle, with all his men. Even the ones who had died there. They were alive now…or anyway they were standing up and looking at him.

Mac was there, too. Destroyer. Goat in the background. And Portman. All standing around him, staring at him — Mac had to gaze at him from waist height, because Mac’s body was carrying his own head in his hands, holding it at the level of his navel.

“Good to see you, Corporal,” said Portman. Sneering it. He was pretty mashed up, but his body seemed to be more or less hanging together, in a raw-meat kind of way, as if the butcher had sliced him up, then strung him back together with whatever was at hand.

“Good to see you…” Reaper said vaguely. Though it wasn’t good to see Portman or the other dead men — not like this. Walking, talking ruins.

Reaper shook his head. Where am I? Wasn’t I going through the Ark? Where’s Sam?

“We got some memories, huh?” said Mac’s detached head, chuckling. How was it talking without a voice box? “Remember that time we all went on furlough together — the whole bunch of us drunk in the same whorehouse, shouting at each other through the wall. ‘How’s yours?’ ‘She’s great — but small!’ ‘Hey yo, mine’s big enough to kick my ass!’”

Reaper dutifully chuckled at that. “Yeah. We had some times…” His lips felt rubbery.

“We did,” Duke said.

Duke was quite intact. Wasn’t dead yet. So why was he here with the dead guys? For that matter, Reaper wondered, why am I here?

“Don’t know,” Duke went on, “if we’ll have any more good times, way things have been going, Corporal…”

“Yeah well…talk to…to Sarge…”

It was hard to think, hard to talk here. This was all wrong.

“Talk to Sarge?” the Kid shook his head. “I don’t know about that. I just hope I live to see twenty-one, man. That’s all. Just get to twenty-one…”

“Remember…remember,” Portman said, “you guys were going to a ball game. Didn’t want to take me along…But then you said, Hey, come on, Portman. I remember that. You’re not so bad, Corporal…”

“Thanks, I uh…why…why are we…”

“But then again, pretty soon Duke and the Kid here are going to be looking for their head like Mac or their arms like me…And that’s all about you fucking up, isn’t it…Corporal?”

“I’m doing the best I can. Trying to get somewhere now…I’m trying to get to the compound…to get Sarge’s six…”

“Are you? Then you’re fucking up again,” Portman said. “’Cause here you are. Loafing in the jungle with us…You remember this jungle. Where your ol’ pal Jumper bought it…thanks to you.”

“You were our corporal,” Mac said. “You should’ve done a better job. We’d be alive now. You should’ve kept me in line of sight. Sarge was busy — you were responsible. You let that thing whack my head off. You let me die, Reaper. You should’ve covered my six…”

Reaper felt wet on the outside, with the humidity and his sweat, and bone dry inside. His lips stuck together, and it was painful to pull them apart and talk. His voice came out in a desiccated rattle, “Look, Mac — I just didn’t know what we were dealing with.”

“What about me?” Jumper asked, pushing to the front of the group, grinning at Reaper with this wrecked, bloody mouth. The top of Jumper’s head was missing, just the way it’d been when he’d been shot in the rain forest, but it didn’t seem to bother him. He had one eye left, hanging down on his cheek, and it swiveled to look at Reaper as he chuckled. “Did you know what you were dealing with when you let ’em kill me, Reaper? Jungle fighting? Like you never had done that before…” He plucked his eyeball, rubbed it against his flak jacket as if he were polishing a marble. “Can’t see for shit through this thing…” He put the eye back in place. “That’s better.”

“I…I was stuck with those bunk guns, Jumper — Listen, bro, I’d have given my life —”

“Bullshit. And you’re making excuses — you could have refused that ordnance,” Goat said, stepping into view. “Even if it meant pissing off the major. But you chose sinfully — your sin was not putting your men ahead of your career. You are the accursed of God…”

“The major was hot on those guns —”

“Sarge would have stuck by you,” Jumper said. “You knew it was a mistake. Then you let them decoy you with that dumb teenager you blew to pieces…”

“Nobody can help any of us,” Portman said, “except Corporal John Grimm here. He can help us by blowing out his brains. That’d make us feel better anyway. Maybe we’d rest then. Because we counted on him, and he blew it…even the stupid guerilla kid, you coulda figured he didn’t know what he was doing, maybe captured him…but you had to end his miserable little life…”

Reaper could bear it no more and burst into roaring, sobbing rage, and he wrenched himself out of the Ark-induced vision, closed his eyes and felt himself falling, falling through the essence of corruption, into oily blackness, to emerge in a spinning tube of liquid colored with colors that weren’t colors and suddenly he was staggering out into the Ark chamber in the compound…back home. But in another way, they were still a long way from home.

Twenty seconds later the room stopped shifting, and Reaper’s gut quieted enough so that he was fairly confident he wouldn’t throw up. At almost the same instant, Sam materialized in the Ark chamber, stepped out of the cylinder into the main room.

She took two steps and stumbled, groaning — he caught her as she fell. Held her in his arms. Her eyes were rolled up in her head and she shuddered, went limp — and again shuddered, went limp, over and over…as she muttered, “Dad…he’s…John’s all…”

“Sam!”

She squeezed her eyes shut, then opened them, looked at him. She swallowed. “I hate that thing…Seeing things in there…”

He nodded, helping Sam steady on her feet. “Me too…” But then he thought: Maybe what I saw was just the truth. Sometimes dreams show you the truth…

He looked around; the UAC promo screens had gone quiet, with all but the barest auxiliary power cut off, and it was nearly dark here, only a few of the lights working. It was like a big catacomb to him then, just waiting for the skulls to stack up.

“So what now?” she asked, running a shaking hand over her hair.

He was checking his gun, adjusting the strap — anything to occupy his mind so he didn’t have to think about what he’d just seen, in the Ark…his conversation with the dead.

“Nobody can help any of us,” Portman had said, “except Corporal John Grimm here. He can help us blowing out his brains. That’d make us feel better anyway…”

Reaper closed his eyes. Oh God. Jumper. Let his only friend down…he’d let him die…

Maybe he should just end it now. Kill Sam — do her a favor, keep those things from getting at her. Then he’d kill himself. So that Jumper and the others would have some rest.

It would be the work of a moment. Turn and shoot his sister, then stick the muzzle of the weapon in his mouth, suck metal, pull the trigger…

“John? You okay?”

His fingers tightened on the weapon. “…That’d make us feel better anyway…”

“John?”

He had a lot of combat experience behind him. He knew, on some level, that he was as posttraumatic as they came, right now. Partly because of what’d happened in the rain forest. Not being there for Jumper. Letting him die.

Then — Olduvai. The pressure of worrying about his sister there. Losing Mac, Portman, Goat, Destroyer.

Theoretically it was all on Sarge’s account sheet, it was his responsibility. But Reaper kept thinking maybe he could’ve saved them…After all, what he’d seen in the Ark had been contrived by his mind. He’d superimposed his own nightmares, his own guilt on the quantum field shifting within the Ark…

The feeling of remorse and hopelessness was so strong — hopelessness like the weight of ten miles of ocean over his head…tons of dark cold sea about to crush him. He’d failed, and failure was death in his profession. He was surrounded by horrors. The world was doomed. Doom was like a dark icy cloak settling over his shoulders…it was all so hopeless, they couldn’t possibly…

“John!”

Sam shook him now. Because he was just standing there, fingering his gun, staring.

“I need you, John!”

He’d just let her down. Better if they both died here and now, a flash of pain and it’d be over…

“John — please! Hey — brother, yo!”

Brother. That seemed to call him back. He looked into her eyes — and saw life there, and determination. Intelligence, a range of possibilities…and hope.

He took a deep breath and shook himself.

“Fuck you, Portman,” he muttered. Seeing them in his mind’s eye.

“What?” she said.

“You too, Mac. Yeah — even you, Jumper. The whole fucking bunch of you. I did all I could. Some days, things just go sour…”

She waited, sensing he was working through something.

He wasn’t through with it. But he’d put it back into the dark corners of his skull — he was ready to move into some other dark corners now.

“I’m sorry,” he said huskily, squeezing his sister’s shoulder. “I guess I lost it for a minute…Let’s do this thing.”

Sixteen

“SARGE,” REAPER SAID into his comm, “what’s your position?” No answer. He tried again. “Sarge — do you read?”

A burst of static in his headset. And maybe, from far off in the compound, the distant sound of gunfire, abruptly cutting off.

Then: “I copy, Reaper…”

But Sarge was a little occupied, right now. He and the Kid had just finished killing a full-blown imp. And now he saw someone crawling toward him, from a heap of wreckage — the wreckage of fallen rafters and fallen human beings.

The individual crawling toward him was not obviously turned as yet. He wore the tatters of a uniform; one of his legs was twisted the wrong way.

“Sarge,” Reaper’s voice said, over the comm, “we don’t have to kill everyone. Transmission of the condition is self-selecting.”

Sarge watched the man crawling toward him across the bloody floor of the corridor.

“Help me,” the man begged. His tears made the dried blood on his face run once more. “Help me please…”

The Kid lowered his gun, obviously intent on lending aid. Sarge pulled the Kid back, shook his head.

Sarge leveled his weapon…

“Please…”

…and fired, at close range, so that the man who’d pleaded with him was hurled back into the shadows, his head shattered.

The Kid gaped at that, put up a hand to cover his mouth.

“Roger that, Reaper,” Sarge said calmly. “I’m on my way toward you…” He turned to the Kid — who took a nervous step back from him. Sarge pretended not to notice that. “Clear the rest of this sector,” he ordered the Kid. “Meet me back at the Ark chamber.”

Sarge dropped the exhausted chaingun and went off in his own direction.

The Kid watched for a moment, then turned and hurried off on his mission — only looking back over his shoulder at Sarge once.

At first, the Kid had felt glad to get away from Sarge. But a short ten minutes later, in the echoing gloom — in a corridor that was all too much like the ones on Olduvai — the Kid was wishing Sarge was still with him.

Because this corridor was mostly blacked out…and because it seemed so empty and quiet. And that just made it fairly creak with imminence, as if the silence were an arranged prelude to an attack.

I’m going from paranoid to having crazy thoughts. The amphetamines turning to crap in my bloodstream.

There was a noise from a door, to his left. He turned the gunlight on the door. STORAGE, it said. A cough from in there. A noise that might’ve been a sob. Something or someone was definitely in there.

He could go and get Sarge…but Sarge was on the other side of the compound — and judging by the bursts of gunfire coming from that way, the Kid figured Sarge’s hunt was yielding up some game. He was busy.

And if he went back for Sarge, he’d look like a pussy. Was Sarge calling for backup every time he ran into the enemy?

As if replying in the negative, another burst of gunfire echoed down the hallways to him…

Okay. So he was going to check out this storage room on his own. The door was narrow. If they came through it, they’d come one at a time. The Kid would be ready.

Aim for the head, he reminded himself.

The Kid held his weapon at ready, held his breath, too — and kicked the door in.

There was a squeal and a gasp from inside — but nothing else. No imp, no half human launched itself out at him. It was dark in there.

He took a step closer and shined his light into the small, dark storage area — but the center of the room was crowded with people, scared but otherwise ordinary-looking people, all staring back at him, blinking in the light.

Startled, the Kid raised his gun to fire — and the humans in the room cried out in fear, some of them covering their eyes.

He lowered his weapon and found the light switch on the wall. It lit up about twenty people in various stages of damage and desperation, crammed in with shelves packed with food and supplies. Some of them clutched chair legs, pieces of metal, as makeshift weapons.

“Holy shit,” the Kid said.

Jenna Willits came out from the crowd — the Kid recognized her. She’d been working with Samantha Grimm in the infirmary.

Her eyes were haunted, as if she were staring in disbelief at something she’d seen, something that stayed before her eyes no matter what she looked at.

“My baby…” She licked her lips. “They took my baby…” She said it as if she still couldn’t believe it was true. “They took the baby…please help us.”

She’d lost her husband, the Kid remembered — now it seemed like she’d lost a child, too. This thing was tough — but in the Navy he’d seen refugees, running from war and revolution, carrying dead children in their arms so they could find a proper place for a burial; he’d seen old people left lying in ditches to die, to save on food supplies, so the younger ones could have a chance to live. That was life for a lot of the world. But for the upscale people at the facility and the compound, this kind of desperation was a new experience.

One of the older men in the crowd looked at the Kid with a mixture of expectation and mistrust. “Are you here to help us?”

The Kid licked his lips. “Uhhh…”

“Please,” another woman sobbed, breaking down. She’d held herself together for a long time now, huddled in the darkness, running from hellthings who’d once been friends and colleagues, and she just couldn’t cope anymore. “…Please…” The words almost indistinguishable from moans. “…save us…”

The others took up the chorus. “Help us!”

“For God’s sake…”

The Kid was backing out the door.

“Somebody’s got to do something —”

“— we have no weapons —”

“— you have to protect us!”

The Kid slammed the door on their pleading. And ran to find Sarge.

“Sarge?” Reaper called, on the headset comm.

“Yeah…” Sarge’s voice crackled.

“We’re in the compound infirmary, looking over the medical supplies — thought we could all meet up here.”

“I’m not far away…Hold on…I’ll get back to you…”

“Sarge?”

No reply. But distantly, they heard gunshots. A lot of them.

Sam looked up from the wound-spray kits she was sorting. They figured there’d be a lot of patching up to do here. “He is shooting who he’s supposed to be shooting…Isn’t he, John?”

“Yeah well — he got the message. I told him that not everyone gets infected. He said roger that.”

“But suppose…” She looked back at the kits, but her mind was clearly elsewhere. “Suppose he isn’t discriminating?”

Reaper shrugged wearily, suddenly sitting heavily in a chair. “I’ll try to convince him.”

“But suppose —”

“I said I’ll try to convince him!”

Instead of reacting to his anger with anger, she looked at him with concern. “You look tired…”

“So I’m tired…”

“Here…just sit still…”

She went to a cabinet, got out an inst-infuse nutrition kit, brought it over to him. She sponged his arm with alcohol, then pressed the cylindrical inst-infuser against his bare shoulder. There was a flash of pain, then the processed nutrients rushed into him — bringing strength, and a little clarity.

But he still didn’t know what to do about Sarge.

She opened another medikit, found a nutrition bar, and tossed it to him. He tore it open and began to eat, not tasting it much. “Sarge’ll do exactly what he thinks he’s supposed to, as he interprets his orders, and not one iota different.”

“You said you were willing to convince him…” She hesitated. Maybe amazed at herself, at what she was about to suggest.

He looked at her. Then made sure his comm was turned off, before he said, “You suggesting I might have to ‘convince’ him — by killing him?”

“I don’t know. But — it’s not unthinkable, to save a lot of other lives. If he’s killing innocent people. But maybe there’s another way. A tranquilizer shot, or…”

Reaper shook his head. “He’s wary. He knows you’re not on his side. He’s not going to turn his back on you for a second, Sam. Anyway, you’re jumping the…jumping to conclusions. He might be all right with it…”

“Who might be all right with what?” Sarge asked, abruptly coming in.

How much of the exchange had he heard? Reaper wondered. “I heard gunshots, just a minute ago, Sarge…”

“Yeah,” Sarge said, picking up a nutrition bar, tearing its wrapper open with a practiced motion of the same hand. He bit off half of it, and, chewing, went on, “Ran into some of our little genetically fucked-up buddies.”

“You’re sure they were…” Sam began.

Sarge glanced at her — his expression conveyed his supreme indifference to her opinion. “Close enough for rock ’n’ roll.”

She shook her head slowly. “Close enough — isn’t close enough. We need to know. If they’re obviously changed or changing…fine. But if they’re not…we have to wait. Find a way to make sure. Work up a test.”

He finished the nutrition bar with his second bite. He swallowed, and said, “We don’t have time for that. I don’t have time to eat this, and I don’t have time to talk to you. While the compound is sealed, we’ve got to make sure nothing that could’ve been infected can get out.”

“I’m the only doctor here,” Sam said flintily. “That puts me in charge of the quarantine. And I’m not going to allow —”

“You’re not in charge of anything. Neither is your brother. This is now a military lockdown. It’s martial law, Doctor. And for that matter — how do I know for sure you two didn’t get infected somehow?”

Sam and Reaper looked at him. Sarge just waited.

Reaper decided, for now, to put his outrage away and answer the question rationally. “We don’t have the marks. You can see for yourself. And we’re not behaving that way.”

“I only have your word for it that the thing infects its victims through the neck and nowhere else. Maybe — maybe not. And there might be stages of behavior in people who’re infected, Corporal Grimm…”

So now Sarge was calling him Corporal Grimm instead of Reaper — as if creating a little personal distance between them, for what had to come.

Reaper had just about had enough. “Sarge — you make a threat against my sister, or me, even a theoretical one, I’m going to do have to take it seriously. And act accordingly.”

Sarge looked narrowly at him, head tilted. At last he said, “I guess you’re the same guy — so far. But I can’t have you questioning my orders. Not the ones I’ve gotten and not the ones I give.”

“You got any new orders from anyone lately?”

“No.”

“Maybe we should call out and get some, Sarge.”

Sarge shook his head. “I got mine for this kind of situation. I just didn’t tell you every last part of it. They didn’t specify what might go wrong. But before we went to Olduvai I was told that if things go sour…” He shrugged. “We have orders to contain this facility by any means necessary.”

“But I don’t think everyone is infected!” Sam insisted. “Or even capable of being infected!”

“We have orders to contain the threat,” Sarge said, “by any means necessary.”

“We evac the uninfected survivors,” Reaper suggested, “and we blow this place back to hell.”

“…And orders to protect this facility,” Sarge said.

“We don’t have orders to kill innocent people,” Reaper persisted.

Sarge smiled thinly. “‘By any means necessary.’”

Reaper’s hand tightened on his weapon. Maybe, he thought, this was the moment, if Sarge was going to start deciding that anyone but him was infected…

He almost jumped when the door banged open. Duke came in, smiling ironically. “Look who I found under a pile of dead bodies…”

Pinky rolled in, behind him. He looked haggard, pale, scared. But also looking relieved to see Sam. “Boy, am I glad to see you guys. That thing cut through the door. I tried to use the ST grenade, but it malfunctioned. It followed right behind me through the Ark. Started killing everybody…” He swallowed. His voice became husky as he said, “It was horrible…”

Sam walked over and examined him, frowning over his neck. Nodded to herself. “He doesn’t have the wound on his neck. He’s clean.”

Sarge took ammo from his belt, began to reload his pistol. “I say who’s clean and who’s not clean.”

Pinky stared at the gun in Sarge’s hand. Those bullets going in. Did he really intend one of those — for him? “What are you doing? You shouldn’t have left me there. It wasn’t my fault…”

Sarge cocked the pistol.

Reaper looked at Pinky, then at Sarge. Was Sarge really going to shoot him? Right here and now?

“I’m not a soldier,” Pinky was saying, a hysterical edge to his voice, his hands scrabbling at his cyberchair, “you shouldn’t have left me…”

The Kid burst in then, breathing hard.

Sarge, Duke, and Reaper — all three of them nearly shot the Kid in reaction.

“There’s a storeroom to the south!” the Kid blurted. “Got like twenty people holed up in it!”

“Weren’t your orders to clear that sector?” Sarge asked him. That flatness in his voice; in his eyes…“Is it cleared?”

“I told them to stay put. They’re okay; they’re just scared shitless —”

Sarge shook his head. “We kill ’em all — let God sort ’em out.”

Seventeen

THE KID LOOKED desperately from face to face.

“Okay —” he said at last. “— I think this is wrong.” Having a hard time saying it. Wanting badly to please Sarge. But there were limits.

“Son,” Sarge said, “you don’t have to think — because you’ve been given a fucking order.”

The Kid seemed frozen with indecision.

“We are in the field, soldier,” Sarge reminded him.

Reaper said, “Sarge, if nothing’s found them yet —”

“We are in the field!” Sarge interrupted, speaking only to the Kid. “You will obey the direct order of your commanding officer!”

The Kid licked his lips. “No.”

“Now, soldier!” Sarge said. It was more than just insistence. In those two words was a warning and a guarantee:

Obey the order or you’re going to pay the ultimate price for defying a superior in combat.

The Kid was being offered a choice. He could still say Yes sir, and lead Sarge to that storage room and stand side by side with him as they cut all those people down together. All those scared, perfectly ordinary people…

He thought about those desperate faces in that room. Jenna Willits losing her husband, her baby. He seemed to see the face of his girlfriend Millie, who was a nurse — it seemed like a million years since the Kid had seen Millie, and now he imagined what she’d think if she could see him as he mowed down all those scared people. He imagined Millie looking at him — at him! — with disgust. And, worse yet, with fear.

The Kid shook his head at Sarge. He looked him in the eye. And he said it as clearly as he knew how.

“Go to hell,” the Kid said.

In one swift motion, Sarge swung his arm around toward the Kid, leveled the pistol, and fired. He shot the Kid through the neck.

The Kid spun, hit the wall, and slumped to the floor.

There was a moment of sickened silence. The Kid choked, fumbled at his ruined neck…then his whole body began to spasm.

Duke said it for all of them: “Holy shit.”

Sarge’s tone was all reason. Just…reason. “Mutinous insurrection in the field is punishable by death.”

Sam broke from her shocked paralysis and rushed to the Kid. “Oh God — someone get me a medikit!”

“It’s his first mission!” Reaper burst out.

Sarge turned toward Reaper — who realized he’d let his surprise rob him of a chance to take the initiative.

“And it’s not gonna be my last. I need soldiers, I don’t need anybody else.”

“Fuck!” Reaper swore. He and Sarge stared at each other.

The Kid’s eyes were glazing; blood was bubbling from his mouth. Duke grimaced, looked away.

Sarge swung the gun toward Reaper —

Reaper was about to fire in response —

“Drop the weapons,” Pinky said, suddenly.

They turned to see him pointing a pistol at them.

Pinky was wondering if he was a fool to give in to survival instinct this way. He didn’t like his life much, and no one seemed to really care if Sarge killed him — though maybe they hadn’t much chance to react to the threat — and they were probably all going to be killed or converted into subhumans by Carmack’s little playthings within minutes, anyway.

Maybe he should’ve let Sarge execute him. Get it over with.

But he was a survivor. “Do it,” Pinky went on. “I didn’t come all this way to be killed…drop ’em now!”

They stared…and Pinky realized it wasn’t at him. They were looking past him now. At something looming behind him…he could feel it back there, breathing, the heat of its body. Hear its knuckles cracking, claws clicking in its talons…

“Oh no,” he said, in a small voice. “Is…something behind me?”

No need to answer — the creature standing behind Pinky closed its taloned paws around his neck and jerked him, wheelchair and all, into the air. The gun went flying as the genetic demon slammed Pinky from side to side, up and down, on walls and ceiling, Pinky screaming as he went — the thing was using the wheelchair as a bludgeoning tool, so that Sarge and the others had to hit the floor, but not before Reaper was struck glancingly in the face, sending him spinning backward.

Sarge and Duke fired at the imp, and Reaper — though stunned, firing through a blur — fired, too, trying not to hit Pinky. The hulking genetic demon retreated…

As Reaper’s eyes cleared, it appeared to him that rather than retreating, exactly, the imp was carrying off its prize…Pinky.

“On me!” Sarge yelled. “Let’s move!”

Despite having come close to a gunfight with Sarge a minute or two earlier, Reaper only hesitated an instant when Sarge gave the order. Training and situational urgency took over and he obeyed, running after Duke and Sarge, into the corridor, around a corner.

They got there in time to see the genetic demon drag the bleeding, moaning Pinky through an open nanowall — and into darkness beyond.

Sarge raised his hand for a halt as he assessed the situation…It was darker, around this corner. Dim here — with only the auxiliary lighting, faint and getting fainter. Up ahead, through the nanowall, it was dark as a cavern.

Pinky and his abductor were nowhere to be seen.

There was a smell coming toward him from that impenetrable darkness: rank, vinegary.

“Listen,” Duke said.

Many mouths breathing. Many hundreds of claws clicking on the floor, faster and faster…

And then another sound: a kind of chattering; a furious discussion but without a language. An angry discourse in grunts and clicks and sounds you might hear from a monkey in the last stages of rabies.

And then the throng came sprinting out of the darkness. A throng of genetic demons, half-formed and misbegotten. All of them coming right at the squadron, with their jaws salivating in anticipation.

“What the…” Reaper muttered.

Sarge cocked his weapon. “You with me here, Reaper?”

Reaper cocked his light machine gun and fixed Sarge with a look. “I don’t know who’s more dangerous — you or them.”

Sarge gave out one of his rare smiles. “Sure you do, Reaper. It’s me.”

The sounds were louder now; they could make out a great moving mass in the shadows up ahead…coming toward them.

“Withdraw,” Sarge said calmly.

They moved back to the wider corridor they’d come through…and moved to the corridor the enemy was going to come from.

“On my command,” Sarge said softly, raising his weapon.

An instant later, the demonic undead were upon them — as if the imps had sent the half-turned as the first wave of attack.

“Okay motherfuckers,” Sarge yelled. “Let’s play!”

Sarge and Reaper and Duke were rushed by at least a dozen walking dead men, their eyes uniformly red, their mouths streaming black blood, their clothes tattered, their faces contorted with the hunger to kill — there was not the faintest remnant of their former humanity in their expressions — some of them with overgrown foreheads, the beginnings of talons.

Hoping to disorient the enemy, Sarge sent a burst of fire into the ceiling lights, plunging the room into semidarkness illuminated by bursts of automatic weapons fire: a deadly strobe-light show.

The living-dead seemed to dance in the “strobe lights” as the thudding gunfire rocked them, making them spin and jump. But they kept coming, forcing the men to step back and back and back, hurling furniture about as they came.

An imp came hulking in the doorway, then, an unusually big one having to bend to get its head through, slashing the air with its talons, knocking some of the undead out of the way — the blows splashing the creatures bloodily against the wall — as if they were minor irritants between it and its prey.

Reaper could spare only a glance for his sister — saw her huddled against the wall behind them, her fist crammed into her mouth.

Should have armed her, he thought. We’ll need every last weapon we can get working.

Another imp rushed at Reaper, slashing at him, raking his right arm — Reaper shoved his gun into the imp’s mouth and pulled the trigger. The top of its head joined the ceiling and its body met the floor.

“Field of fire!” Sarge bellowed.

The men emptied their clips with a deafening barrage of concerted automatic-weapons fire, chewing the living-dead up, spraying the walls and floor behind the creatures with blood and bone fragments — but only opening the way for the big imp.

Sarge had led the attempt to drive off the enemy, and now he led the retreat, turning and bolting to find another, more defensible position. Reaper’s gun emptied and he went to follow Sarge, both of them slapping fresh clips into their weapons as they ran, Reaper shouting for Sam to go on ahead of them — his warning unheard over the roaring of their pursuers.

Duke ran out of bullets a half second after the other two, and was last to run — trying to cover their retreat — turning, taking one step, only to be caught by a great shadowy paw, the dark bulk of the big imp grabbing him the way a grizzly would, pulling him close —

“Duke!” Sam shouted, seeing him caught up and hurled at the wall like a toy hurled by an agitated child — he struck an overturned table and screamed as the splintered table leg went through him, back to front.

Reaper turned in time to see his sister running to Duke.

Damn her — she should be getting out of here!

Reaper turned and fired almost point-blank at the imp — it raked its forepaws in front of its face as if warding off a swarm of bees. Reaper used its momentary distraction to get to Sam, skidding as he went in a pool of black blood, having to leap over a feebly clutching, dying half-turned.

“Go,” Duke was telling her, his voice barely audible. Blood running from the corners of his mouth. “Get out of here…”

Sam grabbed Duke’s gun — Reaper thought she was going to put Duke out of his misery and Duke thought so, too, closing his eyes —

Just then, Reaper had to turn away and fire at an imp and one of the undead, keeping them back — the bigger imp stalking back and forth, roaring and slashing frenziedly at the undead who’d gotten in its way — and turned back to see his sister pulling Duke to his feet, as he wailed in pain. She helped him stagger toward the door.

“John — help!” she shouted, as the creatures came at her and Duke.

Sarge had turned, and he and Reaper laid down a withering cover fire — as all four of them retreated through the infirmary’s nanowall. Sam helped Duke into the room.

On the other side, Sarge smacked the nanowall control panel, just as the first of the half-turned started through it — three of the living-dead screamed as the wall solidified around them. An arm and leg jutted out of the metallic gray nanowall, writhing and kicking.

A dead end — the demons had raged through here and the way out was blocked by fallen debris.

Reaper and Sam had escaped — into a trap.

Reaper turned to see that Sam had gotten the big splinter out of Duke, stopped his bleeding with a medikit spray. Duke might live — the wound was low on his chest, looked like maybe below the lungs, above the liver.

A massive thud from the nanowall — the creatures were hurling themselves against it — made them all step back, reflexively pointing their weapons at the thumping gray rectangle.

Sparks and arcs of electricity spurted from the nanowall. It undulated, as if struggling to keep itself defined as a rectangle, and the arm that was reaching through was able to push a little farther in, clutching at the air.

The wall began to disfigure, then, showing the outlines of other demons trying to force their way through, like impressions coming through a sheet of clay, howling and roaring and chattering as they struggled with the nano material.

“There’s too many,” Reaper said.

Sarge nodded in grim acknowledgment. Too many of the half-men, the transfigured, forcing through at once would break the nanowall’s interior organization down, interfere with intercommunication between the microscopic machines that composed it. The wall would reach a certain level of entropy and collapse. The creatures roared in triumph as they sensed they were breaking through…

Sarge laid the machine gun aside, and swung the BFG around, got a good hold on its grips, aiming it at the wall. This was the place for the Big Fucking Gun — where he could see where to focus it, and the others were safely behind him.

The nanowall was bulging in toward them now, rippling, more and more of the demonic forms pushing through, clawed hands, taloned paws…half a snarling face, a fierce rolling eye.

“It’s not holding!” Sam blurted, seeing more nightmare faces pressing through. It was seconds from breaking down.

“Here they come,” Sarge said, matter-of-factly.

“Oh man,” Duke said, disgusted — Reaper could tell he was reacting to something besides the wall’s breaking down.

They turned to see that Duke was standing on a grate in the floor — and raw, skinless, ropy arms had bent the grate’s bars and reached through to grasp Duke firmly by the ankles.

There was a moment of shock as the implications came home to them.

“Duke,” Sam said, trying to aim her gun at the arms gripping his ankles. “Hold still!”

Duke smiled sadly — all resignation, and then the creature jerked one of his feet through the grate, something down there chattering with wordless glee. Duke quivered with pain — trying to pull free but too weak from his wound to do so.

In two seconds, before they could try to help him, the rest of Duke was pulled sickeningly down, his mouth working soundlessly to express a pain that was beyond screaming as his body was forced through the grate with a repellent sound of flesh bursting wetly, sliced into segments as it went. Stopping briefly at his chest — Duke giving everyone a last, long, imploring look…

Until with a final vicious tug he was pulled the rest of the way through the grate — he exploded into bloody fragments and Sam, watching in horror, bit down so hard on her fist that her own blood flowed.

Sam was wracked with silent sobs. Reaper went to her, pulled her away from the grate — which was mucky with torn flesh, bone splinters, and part of a face, still trembling — and pushed her into a corner, hugging her as he brought her there, giving her shoulder a commiserating squeeze as he forced her back into the closest thing he could find to safety in the room. It was all he could do for her, just then.

Sarge’s expression was inscrutable except for a bitter determination in his eyes as he turned to the weakening nanowall, raising the BFG.

“Bring it on,” he growled, stepping close to the nanowall to give the powerful weapon full play. Electrical arcs crackled the air around him, as if expressing his checked fury, and more limbs flailed through the barrier.

Then he looked down to see a monstrous arm sweeping from the nanowall, its taloned paw getting a vise grip on Sarge’s leg — and yanking him violently back into the weakening wall.

“No!” Sarge yelled, dropping the BFG as he was jerked off his feet, twisting his whole body so he was spun about as he fell, slamming him onto his face.

Instinctively — despite the fact that he’d been thinking he might have to kill Sarge — Reaper ran to him, hunkering to grab his body armor. He pulled with all his strength, trying to drag Sarge back from the wall. But the genetic demon, pulling from the other side, was far stronger than Reaper. Sarge slipped farther into the wall.

They needed Sarge to fight these things — even if it was only putting the conflict with him off — and now they were losing him.

Sam ran up and joined Reaper, helping him pull. They strained, groaning with the effort, feeling like their joints were going to pull apart. Sarge helped with his elbows, but they only managed to slow him a bit — he was still being inexorably pulled through the wall, into a room filled with demonic creatures who lived only to kill him — or make him one of their own.

Sarge grabbed at the BFG, managed to get hold of its strap — as he was pulled another fourteen inches into the wall.

“Ahhhhh! Motherfucker!” he roared, as he felt himself losing ground — his voice mingling almost indistinguishably from the roars of the man-beasts on the other side of the wall.

Another violent tug and Sarge was in the wall up to his waist. Sarge got a better grip on the BFG as Reaper and Sam strained to pull him back, sweat running down his face, down his neck, sticking his clothing to his skin…

Reaper could feel it then — he was losing his grip on Sarge, and the thing on the other side was giving one last mighty heave. Sarge was about to go.

“I’m not supposed to die yet…” Sarge said, between gritted teeth.

And then he vanished, pulled entirely through the nanowall.

Reaper and Sam backpedaled, falling in reaction, panting for air.

Sarge was…just gone. So were the shapes of the genetic demons, for the moment — the wall had quieted, a mysterious silence reigned, and the penetrating limbs had withdrawn.

Maybe they were all busy tearing pieces off of Sarge. Reaper was sorry he’d let Sarge hold on to the BFG once the genetic demons had grabbed him.

“Are you okay?” Sam asked, hoarsely.

Reaper looked at his sister, propped on an elbow beside him — she looked lost, haggard. But her eyes focused as she noticed his raked arm.

“We have to go now…” Reaper said.

“You’re hurt,” she said.

“…we have to go now…” he repeated, helping her up, guiding her away from the wall. He bent to scoop up a satchel Sarge had brought in — it clanked with various kinds of ammo — and headed toward the accidental barricade blocking the way out.

It seemed to him that they could get through the debris if they just pulled some stuff out of the way. And if they could do it without making the ceiling collapse in on them, then…

Reaper got wearily up, began dismantling the barricade, working alone, letting Sam rest. Now and then glancing at the nanowall, half-expecting it to be breached again.

Sam glanced at the place where Duke had been dragged down to his death — then looked away. But it was still there: she was staring into space, eyes wide, as if seeing his death over and over in her mind…

Reaper kept working on the barricade.

After a while, seeing him work on the debris, she started to help him. The effort, however short-term its value, seemed to give her hope and she worked with concentration.

In a few minutes they were through — only to find themselves trapped, yet again, in a farther room.

Eighteen

REAPER AND SAM were hiding out in another infirmary room. Sitting on the floor, knees drawn up, resting. They could hear the genetic demons moving about in the air ducts, roaring and chattering in the corridors beyond this temporary refuge.

How long before they were up to their asses in monsters? Reaper wondered. It sounded like they were getting closer and closer.

Reflexively brushing her hair back into some semblance of order with a shaking hand, Sam asked it out loud. “How long?”

Reaper shrugged. “Minutes.”

They didn’t have many options. But he knew he couldn’t let these monsters get out of the compound. They’d spread their sickness to the whole world…

The infection happened so fast. What had Carmack been thinking? How much of the experiment had UAC known about? Had they been working on a bioweapon — in the form of a transformed human being?

Reaper’s country was in many ways effectively indistinguishable from the multinationals headed by the United Aerospace Corporation — and the UAC had a great many enemies. Religious fanatics formed into well-armed, secretly trained militias — some of them big enough to be called armies — and factions in hostile nations furious over the UAC’s exploitation of their resources; over its willingness to prop up brutal hegemonies just to keep the goods flowing from the oil fields, the uranium mines, the methane fields — like the one where Jumper had died…

But how could the UAC use these genetic demons as part of an armed force? The damned things were completely out of control. Could UAC’s military branch have been planning to drop an infected creature in amongst an enemy force — to get them all changed and killing one another? They must’ve had some means to control them…or they’d intended to develop controls. But then things had gotten out of hand.

Another possibility was that the whole project had gone sour almost from the start: the imps and the Hell Knight had been an unintended side effect of another effort entirely, hinted at by some of the computer files Samantha had unearthed, to create a kind of superman who remained in control of himself, who retained his former loyalties.

Maybe a repeat of the exact same mistake the scientists of Olduvai had made. Some vast, quickmoving catastrophe had destroyed that civilization.

Pretty obvious now what that cataclysm had been — it was replaying itself, growling and snarling, right now, beyond the door. It had killed Destroyer and Mac and Duke and dozens of others. Instinctively, the genetic demons wanted to spread their fury out into the world, wanted all humanity to share in it.

Whatever had happened on Olduvai was about to happen right here on their own world, culminating with some gigantic act of self-destruction, rendering the surface of the world a desert, the air poisonous.

Still…some people injected with C-24 didn’t sink to a bestial level — whatever dark thing there was in others that distorted their transformation was lacking in certain individuals. There were other possibilities, for someone like that. There was a chance for real power, simmering in the serum.

Reaper wondered…just suppose…

He shook his head. No — too risky. There was another way to stop these things…the only way to be sure of stopping them.

But he didn’t know if he had the strength to do anything more. He’d had longer missions than this, under worse physical conditions — firefights that lasted hours in temperatures ranging up to one hundred-and-ten, unspeakable humidity. But he was feeling so weak now…like the bottom was dropping out of the world.

Sam picked up on his distress, looked at him inquiringly — then stared at the blood running from under his body armor down his hip and leg. “You’ve been hit.” She unsnapped his armor, like pulling the shell from a tortoise, peeled it wetly away. More blood gushed, then, and they saw it was coming from a small hole in Reaper’s abdomen.

A bullet hole, from friendly fire? Or something else?

Still simmering with adrenaline, Reaper hardly felt the pain from it — just a kind of pinching throb. But he could feel the strength seeping out of him through that wound. He felt cold…colder by the second…

“You’re losing too much blood,” she murmured, bringing her medikit over. She examined the wound gravely, then glanced up at him. He saw it in her eyes — he was in bad shape. Not likely to get very far from here.

He nodded his understanding.

She sprayed the wound on his side and the raked places on his arm with skin sealant to stop the oozing.

What they’d gone through already would have pushed most people over the edge into helpless hysteria. His sister had been deeply shaken, had come close to losing it — and then pulled herself back. And now she was right back to taking charge.

My sister, he thought, smiling. Scientist, doctor, take-charge broad. She really is something.

He felt colder yet. Dizzy. A redoubled roaring echoed from the blocked doorway. The door shuddered as something big tried it. They heard the sound of claws on metal — a long, drawn-out screeching…then mindless chattering — and a squeal as one of the genetic demons attacked another; their competing roars as they fought. The tendency the things had to fight one another was one of the few advantages he and Sam had left.

The door started shaking again.

It would hold for a while. But not long. Those things would be in here, in minutes — ripping into them, or shooting those hideous tongue-spears into their throats…

Reaper had to act. There were just too many of them now — and he didn’t have the BFG to even the odds. He’d soon run out of ammo if he took them on, tried to kill them all one by one.

Somehow he had to stop them from getting up to the surface, spreading out into the world. There was just one way.

Blow the Ark. Blow the compound. Meaning he and Sam would probably have to die, too. But it was that or…

He made up his mind.

“You have to listen to me,” Reaper said. “This is important…”

“You’re cold,” she observed. “You’re shivering…”

He bent over the satchel of ammo, started taking out grenades, taping and strapping them together with anything he could find. “These are ST grenades,” he told her. He had to work hard to get his fingers to move; they were going numb, feeling rubbery from blood loss. “When they get through…Are you listening? You pop the top, hit this button, okay?”

He finished the improvised bomb…and sank back, swaying in place. Feeling like he might keel over. The room was spinning, ever so slowly.

“John,” she said, urgently, “stay awake, please. Stay with me!”

The room was getting dark. The wound in his side was deep, and patching it on the outside hadn’t been enough. Internal bleeding. He could feel it — like his insides were gradually disintegrating. He might be able to med himself up enough to stop another wave of the genetic demons. But he doubted he could take care of them all. And every one of them had to be stopped cold.

He put his hand on her arm. “Listen, Sam — if I can’t make it to the elevator to keep them from getting topside, you’re going to have to nuke the whole place from here.”

She didn’t get back to him on that one right away.

He looked at her. “Sam, are you listening?”

She chewed a fingernail. Went determinedly back to the computer, monitoring the upload. But she said, “Yes.”

“If the quarantine clock gets to one minute, and you haven’t heard from me, or if one of those things gets in here — pop the top, hit the button…”

She was just going to have to deal with it the best she could. But at the back of his mind he did wonder if he were becoming a little too much like Sarge. She looked at him. Waiting.

“…and throw it in the Ark,” he said.

She nodded numbly. They both knew what that would mean — the Ark was unspeakably volatile. The explosion would set off a chain reaction, a blast that would multiply itself exponentially. The compound and a great deal more would be destroyed and both of them with it.

With any luck, though — the planet would be saved.

He stood up — and nearly fell over. Did they have a vitamin shot of some kind? Drugs? He didn’t see anything like that in here.

Sam nodded to herself. Coming to her own hard decision. She took something out of her medical bag. A syringe.

“What’s that?” he asked.

“C-24,” she said. Looking at him meaningfully.

His mouth went dry. “No.”

“I took it from Carmack’s lab…”

“No, forget it.”

“You’re bleeding to death,” she said flatly. “It might save you.”

He looked at her. How could he tell her? He had to be as evil inside as anyone here. She just didn’t know what he’d been forced to do, in the RRTS. He flashed to that teenager he’d blown in half, the day they’d lost Jumper…

“I’ve done things,” he told her. “You don’t know. Places I’ve been — dark places…”

“I know you,” she said.

“No you don’t. You don’t know me.”

“You’re my brother. I know you,” she insisted. And there were two big tears rolling down her cheeks.

Another wave of weakness shivered through him. He almost fell right then. A black gulf was opening up in front of him.

She was right. He was dying. This was his only chance.

Increasing clamor from the blocked entrance to the room. The door gave out a jarring thud and shivered. They were trying to break through — and in a concerted way, now.

Let us in! the monsters roared — in the language that preceded language.

Breathing hard, Sam turned to look at the door. Now it was bending inward, shaking; she heard the redoubled roaring. There was no more time for theories or arguments.

Reaper unholstered his sidearm, cocked it, and handed it to her. “One in my heart,” he said crisply. “And one in my head, the second…”

“I won’t need to!”

“Don’t hesitate! If I start to turn into one of those things…don’t wait. Do you hear me?”

She bit her lip. Then nodded.

He rolled up his sleeve, and Sam prepped his arm with alcohol. She intertwined the fingers of her free hand with his, clasping hard as if she could keep him alive, keep him here in the world with the strength of her grip.

“I’ve missed you,” she said. And she gave him the shot, injecting him with the stuff that made men supermen — or into monsters.

The serum was coursing through him and…he felt nothing.

It wasn’t going to work. Maybe the label had been wrong, or the serum not yet complete…

And then — he felt everything, all at once: every nerve, every cell of his body howling in outrage as it was invaded.

He was no longer cold. A wave of inconceivable heat rolled through him, and another, more and more. His back arched, his fingers fisted, his eyes started, his mouth went into a kind of rictus and his throat seized up and he couldn’t even scream as the C-24 roared through him, setting up a chain of cause and effect that reached beyond the biological, somehow resonating in the quantum realm: sucking energy from the world around him, forming it into matter, infusing it into him.

His body slowly began to swell, his bones creaking; his clothing tearing at the seams. He wasn’t growing like an imp — just firming, thickening, rippling with an energy that the physics of his own world didn’t even have a name for, as yet…

But it was too much — the sudden complete change of it all. The pain was unimaginable, a cosmos filled with nothing but agony. His body and brain couldn’t take it.

He wasn’t going to live through this. Nothing could. It was unbearable. He didn’t even want to live any longer. Feelings like this — of every last cell of his body interpenetrated and redesigned, made into something alien, in just a few seconds — were beyond comprehension.

And then the pain stopped — and so did his heart. He was falling —

And bang, he hit the floor. The world dissolved into a murky blur. Darker, darker yet.

He blew out a long slow breath — and was unable to draw another in. That breath — had been his last one.

Nineteen

SAMANTHA GRIMM MADE up her mind to shoot her brother in the head.

John had begun convulsing, his face a rigid mask of pain, and she could see the change taking place in him, the C-24 transmuting him before her eyes: his muscles, already firm, were bulking; there was a certain trace of heaviness in the bones of his face, indicating they were becoming more dense…

And the eyes. They seemed animalistic — two fires in his skull.

She was almost exhausted. And she was seeing everything through a glass, darkly: she’d liked Duke, despite his clumsy moves on her — maybe because of them — and she’d seen him sliced and diced. She’d seen Pinky, whom she’d worked with for so long, backed into a corner, then abducted by a monster. She’d seen Carmack become a monster. She’d seen heaps of bodies. She’d seen Sarge murder that nice Kid for having a conscience. She’d been told it was her responsibility to blow herself and her brother to kingdom come.

She was seeing doom everywhere she looked. Everything seemed hopeless. How could she believe, in this moment, that C-24 wouldn’t do to her brother what it had done to Curtis Stahl?

And as John fell onto his back, shaking, going into the last stages of the transformation, Sam raised the pistol, to shoot him in the head.

Then the door behind her burst open, and she turned to see an imp rushing at her, drooling mouth agape, squealing with hatred. She fired the pistol at it almost point-blank — wounding it in the right shoulder but not stopping it, not even slowing it. It struck the gun aside, then backhanded her, knocking her sprawling.

“John!” She managed, as she fell.

Head spinning, she felt something grab her by the right wrist and drag her across the floor, toward the shattered door. She struggled feebly, but the blow to her head had left her badly stunned, almost paralyzed.

She shouted her brother’s name one last time as she was dragged through the door, into the hallway, into reeking gloom, then it was all too much, and she lost consciousness.

Sam woke to a warped ringing sound — it was in her own ears, as if her head were a cracked bell, still ringing from the blow to the face the imp had given her. And there was a choking smell of rot and vinegar and blood.

Her eyes slowly cleared, and she saw she was in the bottom of a large air shaft, forty feet across: the central station for pumping and purifying oxygen throughout the compound. She’d seen down into it one time, on her first and only tour of the place: a vertical shaft with three gigantic fan blades whirling in it.

A little rusty light filtered down from a skylight, at the top of the shaft about four stories up, flickering with the slow turning of the fan blades. On the other side of the shaft, its back to her, the imp crouched over the body of a woman…using its talons to rip pieces of thigh meat from the woman’s leg, stuff them in its maw.

Watching it feed, Sam controlled the impulse to vomit — and to scream.

If you want to live, control yourself. This is your chance — when it’s not watching…

She wondered vaguely why she was still alive at all. Obviously it wanted to infect her, or it would’ve killed her already. She touched her neck, wondering if the thing had already pierced her with its tongue-barb. She could feel no wound there.

Maybe they needed to do the deed while you were conscious. Maybe it was saving her for later — if it was, it wouldn’t be for long.

Slowly, Sam sat up and looked around for an egress. There was a tunnel, the way they’d probably come in — but it was on the other side of the imp. She couldn’t get to it without being noticed.

She spotted a metal maintenance ladder, rungs built into the wall, running all the way up the air shaft, passing through narrow crawl apertures beside the fan blades. Better than nothing.

Moving slowly, trying not to make a sound, she got her feet under her and stood. Wincing at the pain in her head, the bruises in her limbs, she edged carefully toward the ladder.

Sam reached the ladder and began to climb. She was several steps up when her foot slipped, the toe of her boot clanking on a lower rung. She froze — but the imp lifted its head as if listening. It turned with a roar and saw its prey trying to get away.

She started up the ladder again, forgetting her throbbing head and aching muscles, clambering as fast as she could. She reached the opening, and just managed to squeeze through the narrow aperture beside the fan blades’ framework when the imp closed its talons around her ankle and nearly jerked her back down.

No. She wasn’t going to let it end like this.

Sam kicked downward, going with the motion of the imp’s tugging, and slammed the genetic demon hard in the face with her bootheel, grinding into its optical membranes. It squealed in pain and its grip loosened. She wrenched free and pulled herself up onto the little platform, next to the slowly whirling fan blades. The imp was reaching through the aperture, raking its claws at her, but she was well out of reach. It couldn’t fit its wide shoulders through the opening to this level — it’d grown past human proportions.

“That’s right, you bastard, I’m getting away from you!” she yelled. Releasing pent-up fear and fury. “Fuck you!”

She continued up the ladder, then paused about halfway to the next set of blades when she heard the imp chattering, making a sound close to laughter. She looked down to see it had taken hold of the fan blade, was being spun around, not particularly rapidly, like a child on a playground toy. It slung its legs up over the blade, and began to climb onto it, still spinning around as it climbed. The blades were going so slowly that they weren’t much obstacle.

“Shit,” she muttered, and resumed climbing, trying to urge her aching limbs into greater speed.

But moments later Sam heard the imp chittering in triumph and looked down to see it leaping from the top of the big fan blade to the lower rungs of the ladder she was on. It leered up at her and began to climb, moving much more rapidly than she could.

“Oh fuck…” Riding a surge of terror-charged adrenaline, she redoubled her speed, and reached the next aperture, pulled herself through just ahead of the imp. It raked at her leg, slashing a bit of her left calf away, but she managed to slip through ahead of it.

She turned to see it leap at the fan blade, catching the slowly spinning metal with the agility of a giant chimp, chattering to itself as it spun around and around, doubling up to wrap its feet around the blade.

Despite the pain, she started climbing again. Trying to see what was above that last whirling blade…air ducts, going off in three directions. Big enough to move through, hunkered down. But the imp could fit into them, too. It would follow her and catch her before she got fifty paces.

She spotted something else, next to the platform beside the air ducts, above the topmost fan blade…

She was panting for air in her effort to keep ahead of the imp, sweat running down her back and pasting her hair to her forehead, blood flowing from her injured leg. Sweat on her hands threatened to make her lose her purchase on the rungs — she almost fell into the imp’s arms, and it roared in anticipation, snapping at her heels with its jaws.

“No!” she shouted, reaching the final aperture. She reached up and did a pull-up — something normally she hadn’t strength to do — and wormed her way through, banging elbows and knees in her haste.

The imp was already poised to leap at the fan blades.

Sam stood up and opened the metal box on the wall, the controller for the fans she’d spotted from below. There it was — the setting she had hoped for.

FULL POWER

She looked to see the imp just about six feet away, clambering up onto a blade, halfway up, legs dangling down below the fan. In another second it would be up — and upon her.

She turned the control knob and the fan blades responded immediately — although the lights dimmed a bit as it drained more of the emergency power — turning faster, faster, becoming a blur like helicopter blades, humming…

And slicing the imp in two.

It shrieked, and its upper half tumbled atop the blades, dancing about like a chunk of meat when first popped into a blender, before being chopped to pieces. Black blood splashed the walls, pieces of talon and teeth and bone flew everywhere…The increased turbulence from the fan made her stagger, bouncing her back against the wall so that she nearly rebounded to fall into the blades. Blood from the imp became a horrific rain caught in hurricane winds, bitter as it struck her mouth…

She caught a stanchion and held on, caught in an artificial windstorm, her hair streaming, eyes drying in the roaring wind. She reached out and fumbled at the knob, switched it back to normal speed. The fan blades slowed, the gale abated, and she got her balance again.

Sam sat on the platform for a few moments, back against the wall and knees drawn up, resting, cleaning demon’s blood from her face and hair as best she could. Then she caught a distant chattering, clicking sound — coming from the tunnel opposite her. She stood up, listening breathlessly. Yeah, there it was again. And it was getting louder.

A genetic demon was coming down the tunnel toward her — she couldn’t see it but she knew it was coming, hunting her.

She turned and darted into the round air duct to her right — maybe it wouldn’t take this one when it got to the air shaft.

But less than a minute later, as she made her way hunkered over in the narrow, dark metal tunnel of the duct, she heard a low chattering growl echoing from behind her. She could smell the imp; she heard its urgent, clicking footsteps…

She turned and looked down the circular tunnel, saw the silhouette of an imp, against the light, its quivering shadow stretching ahead of it, as if reaching out for her in anticipation. It was closing in on her.

Sam turned, hurrying on — then heard a hissing sound and instinctively threw herself flat. The imp’s tongue flashed over her, susurrating as it passed close over the back of her head, unrolling out of its mouth — just missing her before reeling back into its toothy maw.

She was up and scrambling down the tunnel, then — and came to a grating, for a vent down into a room under the duct. She could see through the slats, into the room below — a bit. There was a desk and a chair down there; she couldn’t make out anything else. The rest of the room might be filled with monsters. But the imp in the duct was almost upon her again, and there was no time to worry about what was below.

She slammed her elbow into the grating, hard enough to make blood flow, and the grating popped out, clattering down. She felt the demon’s breath on the back of her neck…

It was too big to get through the vent opening. It was her only chance.

Sam dropped through headfirst, trying to break her fall on the desk with her hands — but she never struck it, though it was directly below.

The imp had gripped her lower legs, just above the ankles. She was dangling there, head down. It was running its long, long tongue down her right leg, spiraling it around her ankle, down her calf, wet and raspy, probing toward her crotch. She could feel the barb on it, dragging across her skin, looking for the right spot to strike, like a cobra aiming its fangs.

Sam’s hands were dangling over the desk…and on the desk — a nice big pair of scissors. She couldn’t quite reach them.

She strained for the makeshift weapon. The tongue was slinking along her, stretching…leaving a trail of drool on her skin.

She caught the edge of the scissors with the tip of her index fingers, managed to tease them toward her, scooped them up, bent at the waist, reached up and — working her fingers with all the strength she could get into them — severed the tongue where it issued from the thing’s mouth.

It screeched as she dropped heavily onto the desk, striking it painfully with her left shoulder, rolling, clawing at herself to get the tongue off — it slithered away, like a frantic snake, thrashing.

She kicked at it, backing away, stumbled over a wastepaper basket, got to her feet, threw the metal can at the rippling, bleeding tongue.

Sam still had the scissors in her other hand, but she was afraid to get close to the severed tongue — it seemed to have a life of its own.

Overhead, the imp was really pissed off . It was shaking the duct, ripping at it, tearing it free from its supports, bits of ceiling coming down.

Sam looked around, saw she was in an unoccupied, dimly lit administrative room, with cubicles and desks. She started off between the cubicles — stiff, in pain and bone-tired but urging herself on. The imp would break out of the duct in seconds.

She got to the corridor, stepped out, turned — and saw another big imp standing just forty feet from her, a massive burly figure barely fitting into the hall, seeming to suck the light into itself.

The big imp had its back to Sam, was looking down an intersecting passage, sniffing the air, growling low in its chest. She could feel the growl resonating in the walls, the floors, in her bones…

She backed away down the hall — and the imp was staring off in another direction, leaving her. But she could hear the other imp breaking loose in the room she’d left, the thump when it dropped down on the desk.

Sam realized she still had the scissors in her hands.

She had reached another doorway, open into a storage room that connected two hallways. The big imp was going — and she threw the scissors at its back.

Then she ducked into the storage room.

Sam heard a roar — the shears had struck the big imp, not hurting it but getting its attention. It turned —

Which was exactly when the smaller imp came out of the other door, looking for Sam.

The big imp knew that someone had struck it and, as Sam had hoped, it decided it was the smaller imp, the only other individual it could see.

Sam peeked around the corner of the door and saw the imp she’d provoked rush the smaller one, roaring — the smaller imp turned to defend itself, leaping on its assailant’s chest, like a panther onto a wild bull, sinking its jaws into the bigger demon’s chest.

That ought to keep them busy for a while.

Sam turned, slipped through the storage room to the next hallway. Where was she now? How was she going to find John?

Sam had to get downstairs. She had a vague memory of where the elevators were. They were frozen but the stairway was nearby. She hurried down the corridors, wishing she had a weapon of some kind.

She heard more chattering, something rumbling, not far ahead — the direction of the elevators. She slowed, heart pounding, when she got to the cross hall and looked cautiously around the left-hand corner, trying not to show any more of herself than she had to.

Three half-turned genetic demons were crouched, about fifty feet down the hall, over a heap of torn meat. Feeding.

Sam stared, thinking they’d torn some poor bastard to pieces, until she realized that an overturned cafeteria refrigerator lay beyond them. They’d dragged it out here and pulled the deli meats out — she could see all the wrappers now. Almost reassuring to know they ate something besides human flesh. But it wouldn’t stop them from killing her.

One of the half-turned was wearing a uniform. It could almost be identical to her brother’s. Only it wasn’t — was it? She tried to remember what his uniform had been like.

Could that be John? Could he be one of them?

She stared…and though the light was dim, she could see that this man had red hair. Not John.

Still…John could be one of them right now, somewhere. Her brother hunting through the corridors like an animal…hunting Sam.

She wouldn’t believe it. She would believe, until she saw him, that he was all right. He wasn’t one of them. He was alive. He was trying to find her…

But he’d never look up here. She had to find her way back to him.

She looked to the right, saw the elevator about a hundred fifty feet down the hall. It was open — there was a naked, bloody man’s body lying in the way of the door, which kept trying to close on it. The door would close against the body’s shoulder, then triggered by the blockage, would open, then pause, closing again — breaking the body more, and more, and more with each closing. Beyond was an empty elevator shaft. Where was the elevator? Stuck somewhere below? Then how had the door gotten open? Probably the man had pried it open, trying to find a way to escape — and then the half-turned had caught him. She could see that most of his right leg was torn away…

“Hold the door for me,” Sam muttered.

She was going to have to go that way — the stairs were down there. But then, she’d never make it down before the half-turned caught up with her. They could be fast.

A rumbling snort from the half-turned — she turned to see one of them looking right at her. The others looked up one by one — and they all stood and bounded toward her.

“Oh fuck…”

She had no choice now. It was the stairs or…

There was another possibility. Only, it was crazy and she’d probably die in the attempt.

But Sam was already running toward the elevators, going full tilt, hearing the howling half-turned harrying after her. She glanced over her shoulder, saw that two of them were down on all fours, like unfinished werewolves, loping toward her — all of them had their mouths open, ululating with blood-lust as they came.

Up ahead was the elevator, and on the left, the door to the stairs. The door was closed. It might even be locked, or blocked from the other side.

The elevator shaft, though, she knew was open.

The half-turned pursuing her were close, close, very close behind. She could hear them panting almost on her heels, catching up: a second or two more and they’d bear her down. One of them reached to grab the hair streaming behind her and yanked, tore some of it out by the roots, trying to stop her. But she kept going, a few strides more, just a little more —

The elevator shaft was looming…the body…the doors closing, opening, closing…opening!

Sam leapt over the body and out into the elevator shaft.

The cables she’d glimpsed were there — and seemed a bit farther than she’d anticipated. But her hands closed over them, lower than she’d planned, her breastbone smacked into them, she closed her legs around them…and began to slide down —

Even as the three half-turned, unable to stop in time kept going, floundering over the body in the doorway, falling headlong, tumbling past her, down the shaft, shrieking in fury and fear as they plummeted — to smack messily into the top of the frozen elevator four stories below.

Their howling abruptly stopped.

Sam was sliding down the cables, her hands burning, skin ripping away from her palms, gritting her teeth in pain. She was pressing as hard as she could with her feet and knees to slow her descent…and after a few more seconds of hand-scouring agony her slide eased almost to a stop.

Not quite within reach, beyond the cable, was a ladder, built into the farther wall of the elevator shaft. She worked her way around to the other side of the cable, grimacing with the agony in her hands, clamped herself in place as well as she could, and leaned back, grabbing for a rung.

She caught one — and then thought: I’m an idiot. I can’t let go of the cables, my weight will pull me off the rung. I can’t go back, I’m leaning too far, I’ll fall…

She was stuck, spavined over the void.

She decided on the ladder. She’d just have to hold on. And she was losing her hold on the cable…sliding down…

Sam let go of the cable and — feeling absurdly like a primate in a tree — she swung over to the ladder, kicking a foot toward a lower rung, trying to get a hold.

She missed, and fell to the end of her right arm, and shouted in blinding pain — almost losing her grip, nearly dislocating her arm from her shoulder. Sam whimpered, and felt with her toe, looking for a rung, found one, got a foothold and what a blessed relief it was to take the weight off her arm…

She clung to the ladder, gasping, for ten long seconds, feeling sweat dry on the back of her neck, her forearms. Then she made herself start down. Her right arm ached at the shoulder, but it seemed intact.

She was almost to the bottom of the ladder when she heard the genetic demon snarling, and she turned to see it crouching beside its dead fellows, preparing to leap at her. Its left arm was broken, turned crazily wrong in the socket, bone ends sticking out. Blood coursed from the corners of its mouth…

She moaned in frustration and started back up the ladder — and then the thing leapt and grabbed her by the neck, jerked her off the rungs. She fell shouting wordlessly, falling on her back at its feet. She looked up — seeing it upside down, dripping blood and saliva on her face as it ducked toward her, opening its mouth to tear into her throat…

A thud and it staggered — and fell across her, the back of its head shot away.

With a yelp of revulsion she pushed it off her, rolled and got her feet under her — looked up to see Sarge standing there, gun in hand.

“Hello, Sam,” he said.

Twenty

REAPER WAS IN darkness — but behind its cloak was a powerful humming sound…like a great dynamo thrumming somewhere…What was it? The sound of the universe going on without him?

So this is dying, Reaper thought. I don’t think I like it much. But I always thought it’d be worse than this…But then again, my dying ain’t over…Maybe it gets worse — maybe Hell’s coming next…

No, wait a minute. I just came from there.

Hold on: if I’m still thinking, can I really be dead? So maybe…Maybe I’m not going to die yet. Maybe I’ll survive this thing. The pain is gone. Strength coming back…but almost too much. Like I might explode with it…

I feel — kind of good. Like in combat when I know I can kill the guy in front of me, even though he’s trying with all his might to kill me: I know he’s more scared than I am. Somehow I know that he’ll die…

And I’m going to live.

That humming…like a generator going full blast…that’s the sound of my blood running through my veins…But I’m still in the dark…Except…

Except for the shape of the iris of a single eye. A little light came through that distant aperture, nothing more.

He had thought he heard Sam screaming his name, from somewhere. Her voice falling away as she screamed it, as if she were falling down a deep shaft.

“Johhhhhhhnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn…!”

That’s how it had sounded. But hadn’t that been a while ago?

How long had he been out of it?

Still so dark. But then the gloom around it seemed to solidify in places, to take on shapes; light filtered in as the iris expanded, and colors began to appear…

And the room snapped into focus. He was in the infirmary…sitting up — looking down at himself.

His arm was healed. The slashes were completely gone. Not even a scar.

He stood up, looking for his sister. “Sam?” He turned, found himself looking at his own reflection in the observation window — saw there were now no cuts on his face.

The small room was trashed. Cabinets overturned, debris everywhere. A door — locked before — leading from the observation room to the corridor, was torn open, hanging crazily ajar.

Something had taken her. Had left him alone, thinking he was dead or dying. It had taken Sam and the chances were small, very small, that she was still alive.

Once more — and it was harder this time — he put the grief aside so he could deal with what he needed to do right now. He found his weapon, picked it up, slammed home a clip.

Then he stepped over the debris and headed into the dark corridor beyond, to search for Sam — or what was left of her.

Reaper was carried along on a wave of energy — that humming dynamo was pumping away, churning in his head, powering him like a thousand volts through a jackhammer.

His senses seemed impossibly acute. He could smell blood, distinguishing fresh from blood that had been spilled a few minutes earlier — he could smell sweat and the pheromones in it; he could smell cleaning agents and urine. He heard far too much — his boot steps were like a bass drum pounding, and he could hear the movement of air in the ducts and claws scrabbling in another part of the compound. That’s how he knew which way to go…

And he could see in the dark — the shrouded look of the place remained, as if black scarves were draped at the edges, but it was as if he had some version of infrared working, and he could see all the details of the corridor rushing toward him; rebar in the debris where a wall had been knocked down; serial numbers on pipes hanging from the ceiling.

The gun felt light as a feather in his hand; the floor seemed to drift away beneath him, insubstantial. He felt no effort in hurrying down the hallway. That’s what it was like: almost as if he were standing still, and the hallway was rushing past. That corner up ahead was swinging toward him of its own accord.

And then a high-pitched screech — a scream of fury, not of fear — came from around that corner. Reaper reached the branching hallway and spun to see the genetic demon running full bore toward him, a half-turned soldier, uniform in tatters: squalling, as it came on, like a bird of prey.

It was already leaping at Reaper — no time to get the gun into play, so he met it with a fist smashing into its chest and it was flung backward as if struck by a piledriver, spinning away like a broken doll into the darkness it came from.

Reaper stopped moving for a stunned instant, amazed at his own power.

Another hallway off to the right — a sound down there. Scrape…tick-tick. Scrape. An ordinary man wouldn’t have heard it. But he could see nothing down there…maybe a rat.

Reaper turned away, then heard the thump as the creature dropped from the hole in the ceiling, all the way from the floor above, howling jeeringly as it came. He spun and a female imp loomed over him — she had grotesque parodies of breasts, a gnarled sketch of a vagina: the effect was obscene.

She snarled and slashed at him — he dodged the talons with ease, again surprised at his own speed.

He seemed superior to the genetic demons — faster, smarter, more powerful.

It was the work of an instant to shove his gun up under her chin and pull the trigger — she jerked backward, the top of her head flying off.

Before the body hit the floor he was moving away — then heard a scuttling sound, turned to see the imp’s tongue, detached from her head and moving with a will of its own, on a blind mission of reproduction; it was writhing along the floor toward him like an awkward snake, rearing up to strike at him, to inject him with the genetic ejaculate that would try to make him the other kind of Carmack creation.

He sidestepped its strike — the long, absurd tongue was as fast as a cobra, but Reaper was faster — and fired, blasting it into red scraps.

Reaper heard a groan from behind, turned to see a half-turned stumbling toward him — it was moaning, clawing at itself, seeming to implore him for help. Reaper hesitated — and the thing pointed at his gun, then at its head…

It wanted him to put it out of its misery — there was a lot of humanity left in this one. Could it be someone he knew? Was it possible, somehow, to save this pathetic thing? Unlikely but he continued to hesitate — until, as if to push him into it, the demidemon charged, snapping at Reaper’s throat, and he shot it point-blank in the face.

It sank to the floor with a grateful sigh.

There was a sizeable room to one side — something moving there. Reaper switched on his gunlight and probed its shadows, moving slowly, carefully through the door, looking at the ceiling for gaps as he came, scanning the floor for unexpected holes. The room was a modest cafeteria, with pillars here and there, and large tables; a kitchen, gleaming with copper and steel, at the farther end. The smell of cooked meat was strong in the room; and the smell of blood.

Nothing moved. Had he imagined it?

There — something slipping in and out of shadow. A skulking movement — almost certainly one of them.

He was reluctant to shoot, though, without getting a clearer sight of it — it was not impossible that Sam was alive somewhere. Improbable, but he hadn’t given up hope completely, and after all —

The thought was snapped off by the demon leaping at him from the gloom — snarling at him with its dripping jaws. He jumped back behind a pillar, circled, came up behind the thing and fired, nearly cutting it in half. He fired another burst where its tongue would be coiled up, just to make sure it wasn’t going to come at him once he turned his back on the body.

Slapping another clip in his light machine gun, Reaper searched the room. Found a dead man on the tile floor behind the counter, his genitals ripped off and shoved into his mouth, one of his legs missing, his arms turned around backward; found another dead man crammed into an oven, face outward, shoved into a space far too small for a human body, as if into a trash compactor. Someone had switched it to high. He was completely cooked, eye sockets emptied, mouth charred back to expose his teeth. Here was the source of that smell of cooked meat.

Reaper searched the remainder of the kitchen and cafeteria — nothing alive remained.

He heard distant roars, coming from another room, opening off the far end of the cafeteria — they cut off abruptly, to be replaced by gibbering…

Reaper drifted across the room — still feeling strong, moving mercurially, with thistledown ease — and kicked through the double doors that led to an even darker room…

His gunlight was fading, its battery running low. The room seemed almost to resist its thin illumination.

Something chattered at him without words, in the far corner of the room. Keeping the gun leveled, Reaper felt around in his ammo pack, found the flare he’d noticed there earlier. He snapped the flare into ignition, tossed it hissing into the darkness.

The flare burst into a bright light, briefly illuminating ten, maybe twelve genetic demons — the living dead, imps, and the Hell Knight — crouched near the farther wall, blinking, babbling to one another, as if trying to communicate, cursing like the builders of the tower of Babel.

Then the light went out — just as he saw them tensing to spring at him, teeth bared — and he fired, spraying the room with an arc of lead, the gun jumping in his hand, the air billowing with gun smoke.

He stopped firing for a moment, unsure if he was hitting anything — and the gun spoke to him. He’d had the prompter thumbed off before, but it must’ve switched on again, because the gun said:

“Low…ammo…warning…”

Just before he ran out of bullets.

He pivoted, fired the last shots into a wall-mounted fire extinguisher, which blew up like a bomb, shrapneling the four demons in the lead as they rushed at him from the darkness.

Three half-turned went down, but the Hell Knight, standing amongst them, didn’t seem to feel the explosion. This was the biggest creature he’d seen yet — just enormous, so large it was hard for it to squeeze through the door. It loomed over Reaper, all exposed muscle and neckless head and vast jaws; gazing eyelessly down at him. It seemed to savor the moment — as if it were anticipating eating him alive.

And to Reaper’s astonishment, the Hell Knight grinned at him. An evil grin, but a human one, too.

Then it reached into the shadows — and brought out something from a set of shelves he hadn’t noticed before, in the dark room beyond the cafeteria: a chain saw. So they could use weapons — or some of them could.

Its grin widened as it started the chain saw and slashed it at him — Reaper jumped backward, smelling the motor oil and feeling the wind of the whirling blade just missing his right ear.

Reaper backed away from the Hell Knight as it raised the chain saw to strike at him again.

The Hell Knight was toying with him, he realized, stalking him. It slashed the air near his face with the chain saw and he jerked back — Reaper smelled sparking metal, hot with friction, as the whirring chain just missed his nose.

The chainsaw — a big device looking like a toy in its massive paws — was roaring itself, like a predator hungry for a kill.

Then the creature squatted — and Reaper realized it was going to jump on him. Land on him while he was flat on his back — pinion and crush him, then, if he were still alive, it would go to work on his face and neck with the chain saw…

Heart hammering, Reaper leapt to one side, sprawling. The Hell Knight thudded where he’d been a moment before, turned to lash out at him but Reaper scrambled to his feet, ducked behind a pillar. He dropped the empty weapon, his fingers closing over a familiar metallic shape in his ammo pack.

He sprinted across the room, dodging between tables, his fingers finding the controls on the device, dropping it in what he hoped was the Hell Knight’s path…

The Hell Knight paused to gleefully cut a table in half with a single swipe, then rushed after him, its bellow mingling with the roar of the chain saw.

Reaper darted around another table — but his way was suddenly blocked by the one the demon kicked at him, tossing it in his way as if it were made of cardboard. He stumbled into it, turned to see the creature looming over him with the chain saw raised to slice down into Reaper’s head…

Then the timed mine Reaper had dropped went off just behind the demon — Reaper was too close to the blast himself, had to shield his eyes with his arm. The powerful explosive blew the genetic demon into gristle and raw meat. Its body became shrapnel, its head came flying like a cannonball right at Reaper’s eyes, still grinning though it was severed from the body —

Impact. It struck Reaper in the forehead and he flew back into spinning darkness. He lay stunned, blinking, in a pile of debris.

Tearing pain jolted Reaper back to full awareness, his sight clearing to show him a genetic demon of a kind he hadn’t seen before gnawing at his right shoulder. A thing with a boarlike face, with tusks and tiny eyes and great blunt snout, was trying to eat him alive.

Reaper recoiled from it as the thing snapped at him again, trying to get its enormous jaws around his neck now. He flailed for a weapon and his hand closed over a metal pipe. He jammed the pipe vertically in the boar-demon’s mouth, so it couldn’t close its jaws. It rocked back, howling in fury, raced erratically around the room, trying to claw the pipe free from its mouth — and Reaper realized, seeing the thing’s lower half, that it had been Pinky. The boar-demon was grafted into a cyberchair. It roared and squealed, eyes wild, drooling, prying at its bloody jaws. The pipe wasn’t going to keep the Pinky-thing at bay for long.

He spotted the chainsaw on the floor, still whirring away, in the puddle of shattered flesh where the Hell Knight had been, as if the machine were hungrily trying to chew up the remains, sputtering black blood…and then it shut down.

Reaper got his feet under him, feeling strength and coordination returning to his souped-up body, and scooped up the chain saw, started it, again revving it up and delighting in the roar of power as the Pinky-thing chomped down on the pipe, sending it ripping through its upper jaw.

It charged, and Reaper jabbed the chain saw at it, missing aim and cutting only through the extruding pipe. He sidestepped like a bullfighter, and raked at the Pinky-thing as it came back around, clawing and snapping — and this time Reaper connected, catching it just above the cyberchair.

The boar-demon was stuck on the chain saw, unable to advance, slashing but missing Reaper as the blade chewed down again and again, slicing deep, until the Pinky creature went limp in the cyberchair and fell into three sagging segments of bloody flesh.

The saw sputtered to a stop, choked with bone and sinew.

Reaper — a bit horrified at how little he felt at what he had just done — dropped the chain saw in disgust and turned to hurry from the room, distantly aware that his own upper half was liberally splashed with blood from the Hell Knight and Pinky…and from his own ravaged shoulder. He glanced down at it — the wound was already healing.

He stopped at the door, turned for one last look at what remained of Pinky. I put the poor bastard out of his misery.

Right now he had to find Sam…and if he was going to get to her alive, he was going to have to arm himself.

Reaper ran back to the shelves where the Hell Knight had found the chain saw. Felt around on them, found a handheld plasma cannon — then remembered the other demons that’d been crouching in that room.

He hadn’t gotten them all with that pressure blast from the fire extinguisher. They’d been waiting in the darkness as he fought the Hell Knight and Pinky — waiting for the outcome. He heard them chattering, rushing toward him, and brought the plasma cannon into play just as they charged him from the dark corners of the storage room.

He fired three times fast, the first blindly, the second and third using the light from the plasma cannon to place his shots. The creatures were caught in the energy beams at close range, their limbs melting away, heads frying, brains boiling out their eye sockets, dancing with agony — and collapsing.

Reaper tried to fire once more to make sure — but the plasma cannon announced that it was out of power. He dropped it — and looked around till he found the light machine gun he’d dropped when the Hell Knight had charged him. He found a couple of clips in his ammo pouch, reloaded it, and returned to the corridor, looking for the elevators…

There they were. The elevator lobby. The lockdown indicator flashed red. They were still inoperable.

That’s when he heard a shout. Someone farther down the hallway, calling his name.

“John!”

It was his sister’s voice.

Twenty-One

REAPER STOPPED DEAD, staring at a scene of blistering carnage.

The hallway wall here was broken down, opening out into an impromptu charnel house, choked with bodies. The crust of the wall steamed and smoked and glowed; beyond the wall, what light there was came from embers and sparks raining from the broken ends of dangling electrical wires twitching against one another. Looking closer, Reaper decided that the walls had been melted down. The BFG had done this.

Corridor was blended into room and piled high in both were bodies. Human and demons, mixed up in heaps, tangled, united in blood — black blood swirling with red.

It was a prophecy of human destiny: men and monsters intermingled, fused in death. Great holes were melted in the ceiling, too — molten metal, from cooked pipes and ducts and wires, dripped down on the layered heaps of bodies, a mercuric icing on a grisly cake.

Sam’s voice had come from in here somewhere.

“John…”

There it was again. But where was she? He aimed his gunlight into the shadows — and spotted her, slumped against a wall.

“Sam!”

He ran to her, jumping over bodies as if they were rocks on a path. He reached her side, hunkered down, taking her hands in his — making her wince. She was bruised, bloodied, her hands skinned to raw flesh. She looked up at him weakly, trembling, relief, even happiness in her eyes — but also warning.

“You’re alive…” she whispered.

“Don’t talk. Please…”

Sarge’s voice came from behind. “Last man standing, Reaper…”

Reaper stood, turned to peer into the shadows. Sarge stepped forward into the fluttering, multicolored light. He’d been using Sam as bait.

Sarge chuckled, as he said, “Think she needs medical attention…” As if there was something funny in the remark.

Reaper could see the wound on Sarge’s neck; the beginning of the change in his face. “Where are those survivors the Kid found?” Reaper asked.

“I took care of them.” Sarge smiled faintly. “Just dotting the i’s.” He glanced at his watch. “Quarantine’s almost over. Power should be back on any minute.”

Reaper got it now. He knew where he stood with Sarge. “You killed the Kid…”

“We’re all killers here, Reaper. That’s what they pay us for.”

Reaper’s hand tightened on his weapon. He wondered if he could get a shot off before Sarge did.

But he didn’t think there was much hope of catching Sarge by surprise: he was all animal wariness. It twitched in his fingers; it gleamed in his eyes.

The overhead lights blinked, and a female voice intoned from the public address system:

“Quarantine complete…All systems to normal. Elevators back online…”

The emergency lighting switched off — and with only a flutter of darkness, were replaced by the main lights, going on in sequence down the long hallways.

Sarge glanced at the ceiling. He grinned. “It’s finished. What do you say…we get some air?”

Reaper stared. What did he mean?

Then it became evident — as Sarge’s gloves split open, like fruit swelling in the heat, with the sudden deformation of his hands. The skin splitting open…Sarge going rigid with the agony of transformation…

Now, Reaper told himself. Kill him now, before he’s done changing. While he’s distracted by the pain…

But he couldn’t bring himself to shoot Sarge down in cold blood like that; like the way Sarge had killed the Kid.

“Sam,” Reaper said, keeping his eyes on Sarge, “can you get to the elevator?”

“I’m not sure…”

“Try.”

Sam got wearily to her feet. Reaper sidled between Sarge and the door Sam was going to have to go through, to cover her escape.

All the while Sarge was mutating. Growing. Muscles pushing through his clothes. Skin going raw; hands becoming talons; jaws widening…eyes reddening…

Something inside him, Reaper thought, is coming to the outside. That’s what it’s all about…The interior demon finally coming out…

Sam slipped out the door behind Reaper. The moment had come…

Sarge stopped trembling. Ducked his head like a bull, looking at Reaper from within cavelike sunken eyes. His voice was an inhuman rumble: “You going to shoot me?” Asked as if unconcerned. Almost amused.

“Yeah, I was thinking about it,” Reaper admitted.

Sarge looked at Reaper’s gun. “What have you got left?”

Reaper glanced down at the weapon. “Half a clip. You?”

Sarge checked the indicator on the big energy weapon in his hand and smiled. That smile, all fangs and sickly glisten, was a nasty sight. “Only got one round.”

One round from the BFG was like hundreds of rounds from other energy weapons, converged into one…this room was proof of that.

Sarge aimed the BFG.

Reaper leapt to one side, rolled, coming up running, as the torpedo-like bolt from the BFG flashed by him. It struck the floor, eating instantaneously through floor and wall where he’d stood a moment before — and seemed to pursue him: the destructive energy coursing through the floor, the bodies, everything between him and Sarge, trying to catch him, to eat its way through him.

But Reaper had the power of his own transformation in him, and he moved in a blur of speed, outdistancing the ripple effect of the BFG, ducking into the shadows.

Sarge lost sight of Reaper in all the smoke and energy flare.

Then a short burst from Reaper’s weapon cued him in, the rounds slapping the wall just beside his head, and he threw himself flat, tossing the now-useless BFG aside.

The air in the room undulated with heat and smoke…somewhere in there was Reaper, getting a bead on him.

All Sarge had left was his pride in his work. He wasn’t a Marine anymore; he wasn’t a Privine; he wasn’t even human. But he was still a soldier. And his whole purpose, now, was to find an adversary…and destroy him. That’s all that mattered anymore. Orders? No. Just…find the enemy and fight to the death.

If he thought about anything else, he’d have to blow his own brains out. Smash them out the way Goat had. And he wasn’t going to do that. That’s the way pussies went out.

A sound from the left…

Sarge got his feet under him and leapt to cover behind a heap of debris and bodies, then, crouched, sprinted for the door that led to the Ark chamber.

Two more shots from Reaper, somewhere in the shadows, cracking past Sarge’s head — one of them grazing his neck, doing no real damage.

The Ark. Get to the Ark…it seemed fitting to end the fight there. On the brink of the gulf between two worlds…

Reaper checked his ammo. Two rounds left. No time to scrounge for other weapons.

He got up and started after Sarge…headed for the Ark chamber.

When Reaper got there, he found most of the lights had been shot out. The room had been wrecked by some fight between imps and the half-turned. Debris and bodies here, too.

There was no sight of Sarge, big though he was, amongst the pillars in the chamber. But Reaper knew he was there. He listened and his preternaturally acute hearing picked Sarge’s breathing up, off to the left, near a heap of rubble.

Reaper slipped behind a pillar, keeping to his own shadows. But if he knew about where Sarge was, Sarge knew where he was, too.

“Only got two left, Sarge!” Reaper called. Seemed only fair.

He glided to another pillar, his head low. Could be Sarge had found another gun somewhere.

Reaper kept moving, low and slow and quiet, training enhanced by his superhumanity, and spotted Sarge, suddenly, moving to the place he’d occupied a few moments before — Sarge with a big long chunk of ragged metal in his hand. A serrated club.

Reaper aimed…

Sarge seemed surprised that Reaper wasn’t there, hesitated only a second — then ducked behind a pillar as Reaper, gun set to semiauto, squeezed the trigger. The bullet smacked into the wall just behind Sarge.

“One!” Sarge yelled, rolling into the shadows.

Reaper sprinted in pursuit — and came up short. Sarge was gone.

He heard a noise behind him, spun to see Sarge coming from up high, smashing through the Ark memorial plaque, like the Ark dead demanding remembrance in person, the plaque shattered to translucent shrapnel by the inhuman force of his arrival. Skidding to a stop Sarge roared, “Semper fi, motherfucker!”

Reaper took one step back — just one, so he could plant himself for the fight.

“You and me, Reaper,” Sarge said. “Old school.”

Making himself clear, Sarge unclasped his belt, letting his knife and unloaded pistol fall with it to the floor. He looked at Reaper expectantly.

Reaper sighed inwardly. He knew he shouldn’t do this. There were bigger responsibilities here…

But he was who he was. And he couldn’t lose the chance to take Sarge out hand to hand. Not after what he’d done to the Kid. Reaper had liked that stupid kid…And all those people the Kid had tried to save. Sarge had executed them…

Besides — one bullet probably wouldn’t take Sarge out. Not the way Sarge was now…on the cusp of the dark transformation.

So Reaper fired his last round into the ceiling, then threw the weapon aside, dropped his bag of grenades, dropped his knife…

And he started toward Sarge. They circled each other slowly, taut with wariness, then moved more rapidly toward one another, tensing as they came, hands ready to grapple.

The two poles of human nature, face-to-face, fighting it out. Not so simple as good versus evil. More like unselfish versus selfish; reason versus appetite; human versus animal instinct.

John Grimm versus Sarge. They rushed each other — and Sarge caught Reaper with a hard, piledriver right, sending him sprawling. Reaper kept rolling, turned it into a movement that carried him onto his feet, spun a kick as Sarge came, catching him square in the chest and sending him flying into a wall. The wall cracked behind Sarge — but he came immediately back at Reaper…

And the two warriors began hammering on each other toe-to-toe, with more bludgeoning than artifice. Reaper’s blood was up now, his speed was almost bullet-fast, and he blocked nearly every one of Sarge’s blows, landing counterblows in return. Slamming Sarge back with mallet blows to the chin, the ribs, the side of the head. Bones cracked with the impacts as Reaper drove Sarge back, stumbling back, into a pillar, close to the Ark itself.