Joe Ledger: Unstoppable

CONFUSION BY NICHOLAS STEVEN

“You sure we’re in the right place?” Top asked, looking around.

Aside from the ruins of the partially constructed Perimeter Acquisition Radar (PAR) site in the middle of nowhere, Montana, there was nothing but barren fields for miles. Not exactly my first guess for a terrorist target, but at least I wouldn’t have to worry about any collateral civilian casualties if things got messy.

The situation reminded me of our recent mission in Pennsylvania. “It’s like déjà vu all over again.”

“Then it’s a good thing we’re smarter than the average bear,” Bunny said.

“You’re mixing up your Yogi quotes there, Staff Sergeant.”

“No way, those were both Yogi Bear quotes.”

Top rolled his eyes. “You quoted Yogi Bear, Cap quoted Yogi Berra.”

Bunny shrugged his massive shoulders in a What’s the difference? gesture. “That just sounded like you said Yogi Bear with a Super Mario accent: ‘It’s a me, Yogi Bear-ah.’” When Top and I didn’t humor him with a laugh, he said, “Seriously, there’s a real person named Yogi Berra?”

I exercised a lot of self-restraint not to smack him upside his head. A lot. “I’m gonna pretend you didn’t say that.”

“What?”

“He’s one of the greatest catchers in baseball history. How can you not have heard of him?”

“It’s un-American is what it is,” Top chimed in. I couldn’t have agreed more.

“When’d he play?”

“From 1946 to ’65.”

“Dude’s almost as ancient as Top — no wonder I never heard of him.”

I chuckled at that. Being the oldest field operative in the Department of Military Sciences at forty-one, First Sergeant Bradley Sims was often the recipient of old-man taunts, just as Staff Sergeant Harvey Rabbit had to put up with little-kid jests and carrot jokes.

My momentary good mood soured when I saw who was waiting to greet us at the entrance to the top-secret underground government facility. The whole reason this felt like déjà vu was that just a few weeks ago we’d been called out to a suspected terrorist infiltration of an ultra-high-security biological research facility in the Poconos. Only this time we were at the supposedly abandoned PAR site. From a quick scan of the mission brief, I’d gathered that the Perimeter Acquisition Radar was intended to detect incoming ballistic missile warheads as they crossed the North Pole region, then the info would’ve been sent off to the Aerospace Defense Command. At only 10 percent complete, construction was halted because of the ratification of the SALT I Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty in 1972. Either that, or they figured Santa’s sleigh runs would set off too many false alarms.

Or perhaps the whole thing had just been a smoke screen for building the underground base that now apparently had a terrorist problem. And by “apparently” I mean “that’s the lie we were fed to get us out here,” because the reason the security guard smiling and waving at us like an idiot intensified the disquieting feeling of déjà vu cooling my blood was that he’d been there in Pennsylvania.

I had a very bad feeling about this.

Yeah, I came here to face an unknown force of terrorists and only now was I getting a bad feeling in my gut. That’s because last time I saw Lars Halverson, we came up against something much worse than terrorists. Welcome to my world.

“Man, am I glad to see you guys,” the security guard said.

“Hey, aren’t you the head of security from the Vault?” Bunny asked.

Halverson grinned. “Guilty as charged. ‘I do one thing at a time, I do it very well, and then I move on.’”

Bunny just stared at him blankly. Too damn young to get the quote. M*A*S*H should be required viewing for all military personnel, if you ask me.

Feeling irrationally old and irritable, I unzipped my windbreaker and whipped out my Heckler & Koch Mark 23 .45 ACP pistol from my shoulder rig and pointed it at Halverson’s head. “Tell me we’re not here to clean up more mutant cockroach soldiers.”

Beads of sweat popped out on his forehead. “No, of course not. You destroyed all the research on those things.”

He was holding something back, but I couldn’t tell what. Nothing good, that’s for sure. “Then what do we have?”

“Better if I just show you.”

I stared him down for a moment, but after a nervous glance at my weapon, he turned and stepped into an open elevator. The metal elevator car looked oddly out of place among the graffiti-covered concrete skeleton of the unfinished PAR site, but I had no doubt its existence would somehow be concealed the moment we dropped belowground. I holstered my gun, then followed him, Top and Bunny joining us without a word.

As we descended, I opened the equipment bag I had slung over my shoulder and indicated for Top and Bunny to do the same. “Might as well get our helmets on now,” I said. “I have a feeling we’ll need our night vision before long.”

Halverson shook his head confidently. “Don’t bother, Captain Ledger. After what happened at the Vault, one of my first priorities here was beefing up the security on the power grid. Nothing will be able to get to it, I guarantee it. And we’ve got video cameras everywhere, so you won’t need your helmet-mounted ones.”

I refrained from saying what I felt his guarantee was worth. Not because I cared about hurting his feelings, but because I was distracted by his choice of words. He’d said “nothing” rather than “no one” and I didn’t like that slipup one bit.

Nope, not one bit.

“What’s this place used for?” I asked.

Even with the hard edge my voice had taken on, I expected Halverson to repeat his claim that it’d be better if he just showed us, so I was surprised when he answered right away. “The egghead in charge has a Ph.D. in psychology and he designed a labyrinth—”

“A maze?”

“Yeah. A big-ass one. The doc’s studying the psychological effects of being trapped in a seemingly endless maze, as a potential way to break down a prisoner’s will. It’s actually proven to be quite a useful interrogation technique.”

“Sounds more like psychological torture,” Bunny said. He sounded genuinely disturbed that our government would do such a thing. After the things we’d encountered running black ops for the DMS, particularly after discovering American soldiers were being turned into human-cockroach hybrids, I doubted anything would surprise me anymore.

“How is the maze ‘seemingly’ endless?” I asked.

“You’ll see,” Halverson said.

I’ll be damned if his voice didn’t sound ominous as all get-out.

Before I could ask him what the hell he meant by that, the elevator reached the bottom with a jolt and the doors opened.

“Now if that isn’t déjà vu all over again, I don’t know what is,” Top muttered as his gun appeared in his hand.

Just as in our first time exiting an elevator with Halverson, we encountered a steel tunnel splattered with bright red blood. That time there were five bodies, this time only two. Not that that made it any better. Both victims were male, one dressed in a security uniform, the other wearing khaki prison scrubs. The bodies each had twin sets of beer can — sized holes in their torsos.

Top stepped out of the cart first, sighting down the tunnel, while Bunny checked to the left and I moved to the right. The elevator was at the end of the tunnel, so it took Bunny and me all of half a second to clear our corners. We turned back to Top as he called out, “Clear!”

“They’re not supposed to be out of the maze,” Halverson said as he stepped tentatively out of the elevator, Glock in hand. Fortunately for him, he wasn’t pointing his gun at any of us this time.

“Who’s not?” I said sharply. Halverson didn’t reply fast enough for my liking, so I got right in his face. “Who did this? There are no damn terrorists, are there?”

“No, but I needed to get you here.”

“Me specifically? Or just someone like me and my team?”

Halverson stepped back, looking skittish. My instinct was to keep crowding him until he gave me a straight answer, but he held up his hand and said, “Wait! I heard something. Listen.”

I did. He was right. I heard a soft scuffing sound. Then immediately another.

Footsteps. Two sets.

Top and I looked down the hall at the same time, the red dots on our laser sights each finding an approaching man’s chest.

No, that wasn’t quite right. The chest I’d targeted, though not particularly large, was definitely female. Like the man beside her, she wore a security uniform and carried a Glock pointing downward. They were both wise enough not to raise their guns.

“It’s okay, they work for me,” Halverson said. He started to reach out, as if he’d intended to push my gun arm down, but then thought better of it. Smart choice. He turned his attention to the guards. “Sanders, Gale, what the hell happened here?”

The pair stopped just a few feet short of us. I don’t know if they even realized Top and I had a bead on them. That’s when I noticed they only had eyes for the corpses and their superior. They kept looking back and forth from the bodies to Halverson, as if silently imploring him to explain what was going on.

He didn’t.

That made me want to point my gun at him again. Instead, I just lowered it, motioning for Top to do the same.

“Your orders were clear, Sanders,” Halverson said to the man. “I told you to stay in the cell block with the prisoner. None of you were supposed to be in this wing at all. You most definitely were not authorized to go into the maze.”

“It was all Johnson’s doing,” Gale said, pointing at their dead co-worker. Convenient. “He was frustrated that the prisoner wouldn’t confess. Turned out the bastard killed a bunch of tourists in Mexico that included Johnson’s cousin. Small world, huh?” When her weak grin didn’t garner any return smiles or head nods, she added, “Johnson wanted to personally throw him into the maze and leave him there without any food or water. We refused to help him, but… we didn’t stop him, either.”

“Not long after he led the prisoner away at gunpoint, we heard shots,” Sanders said, picking up the story. “We thought Johnson had executed him. Instead, we found a blood trail leading from the maze entrance to here. When we realized that whatever had killed them had gone back to the maze, we raced back and closed the door. Then we heard the elevator and here we are.”

Gale glared at Halverson. “What’s in the maze, boss?”

“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you,” Halverson said.

“Maybe they wouldn’t,” I said, “but you know I would.”

“Still, it’s better if I just show you all.” Then, as if afraid I’d force him to change his mind, Halverson strode forward.

I immediately followed him, Top and Bunny falling in behind me. I glanced back and saw Sanders and Gale reluctantly bringing up the rear. “Stay alert,” I said, mostly for their sake.

A few hundred yards down the hall, we came to a T-junction. A long corridor with several closed doors branched off to the right. To the left, a short, dead-end hallway greeted us. Yet Halverson turned that way. He swiped his personnel badge on a scanner on the back wall near the corner. With a low hum similar to the elevator engine, the wall at the end of the hall slid to the right, creating an entryway into the maze.

He motioned for us to go in. Aside from the blood trail that disappeared a few feet in, there was no sign of whoever — or whatever—had killed the men, but I followed my own advice to stay alert. The murderer could be lurking beyond any of the maze’s twists and turns.

The labyrinth was brightly lit, with steel walls reaching up a good twenty feet to a concrete ceiling. There were jagged spikes of dried cement hanging down — like a popcorn ceiling on steroids. It was probably done to give the illusion of stalactites in a giant cave, but it also gave the unsettling feeling that the stone spikes could drop on us at any moment, crushing our skulls.

“The psychologist who came up with this place has a disturbing mind,” I said, turning back toward Halverson, who’d yet to enter the maze. “What did you say his name was?”

“I didn’t say, actually.” A disconcerting smirk flickered across Halverson’s face. “It’s Dr. Goldman.”

“Son of a bitch.” That was the name of the madman who created the cockroach soldiers. “You somehow working for a ghost now?” I said. With the things I’d come up against at the DMS, I didn’t completely rule that out.

Halverson chuckled. “Not quite. But like Gale said earlier, it really is a small world. This”—he indicated the maze—“is the creation of Goldman’s twin brother. Interestingly, this Dr. Goldman also studied bioengineering, psychology just being more of a hobby for him.”

I had a very sick feeling in my stomach, and I had to suppress the urge both to vomit and to shoot Halverson in his smug face. “How much did Goldman pay you to lure us here?” I asked. Clearly, this was about revenge for my killing the scientist’s twin.

Halverson wiped a hand across his forehead, as if trying to remove the red dot my gun’s laser had placed there. “Look,” he said, no longer appearing so smug, “I had no idea he’d lure you here. Really. I just thought he wanted his brother’s research as a memento of sorts. I didn’t know what else to do with the files I smuggled out of the Vault — I’m no traitor, so selling them was never my goal. Although, the doc did insist on rewarding my resourcefulness. Plus, I’d just started here, so I didn’t know the medical wing was equipped for genetic experiments from a previously failed project—”

Halverson clamped his mouth shut, as if realizing he’d said too much.

“I destroyed everything,” I said, though my voice didn’t have much conviction to it. Son of a bitch.

Halverson raised his left hand in a calm down gesture, wisely leaving his right hand with the Glock pointing at the floor. “You did destroy all the cockroach research,” he said. “But that was far from everything.…”

A loud thump from down the corridor almost made me turn away, but I trusted Top or Bunny would alert me if a threat presented itself. Halverson, however, must have expected the sound to distract me, as he immediately sprang into action, swiping his badge across the scanner and pivoting away from the already shrinking doorway.

Shooting him wouldn’t keep the wall from sliding closed; instead, I unslung my equipment bag and hurled it toward the gap. It landed perfectly, half in and half out of the entryway. An instant before the wall hit the obstruction, the bag was yanked away from the other side. I never would’ve expected Halverson to have such quick reflexes, but I guess you didn’t get to be head of security for a top-secret base without having some skills.

In the same motion as I’d thrown my bag, I launched myself toward the entryway. With no propped-open gap to force my way through, I considered putting on the brakes, but instead channeled my anger at Halverson into a bone-rattling shoulder slam. The thick, sliding steel wall didn’t budge.

I let out an impotent growl of frustration, then turned to face the others.

Top was unzipping his own equipment bag, and as he reached into it, a quick procession of confusion, realization, and frustration crossed his features.

“The C4…,” he said.

“Gone,” I responded with a nod.

Normally we’d each have a couple bricks of C4, blasting caps, and det cord in our packs, but I’d been the only one who brought along explosives this time because the Warehouse’s armory had been low on stock. DMS missions often involve blowing shit up, so it’s no surprise that we’d run out. Still, I’d planned on giving the responsible pencil pusher a piece of my mind when I got back to headquarters, but seeing as how I’d literally just thrown away the only explosives we had, I decided it’d be best to just call it even on the fuckups.

We couldn’t blast our way through the wall, but maybe we didn’t need to. We did, after all, have two members of the base’s finest with us. I looked at Gale and Sanders expectantly. “Please tell me you know the way out of here.”

“There aren’t any scanners on the inside of the maze,” Sanders said, waving his personnel badge, “so this thing is useless. We’re just as stuck as you are.”

“How do you normally get out?” Bunny asked.

He pointed at a video camera mounted near the sliding door. “We usually just wave at the camera and the person in the control room lets us out. If for some reason the door doesn’t open right away, we use our radio.” As if just realizing he had a way of communicating, he unclipped his radio from his belt and spoke into it, looking hopefully up at the camera. “Halverson, you piece of shit, let us out of here!”

No response.

Gale lifted up her radio, but took a considerably more conciliatory tone. “Come on, Halverson. Someone killed Johnson. We don’t know what we’re up against. You gotta let us out.”

Surprisingly, Halverson replied. “I’m sorry you and Sanders got caught up in this, Gale. I really am. I’m just following Goldman’s orders. You should’ve followed my orders and stayed put in the prison wing. But, hey, at least you got laid one last time before—”

“You bastard!” She threw her radio at the video camera, shattering the lens. She had a good arm on her. She turned away from the camera to find the rest of us staring at her. “What?”

“You slept with the boss?” Sanders said.

Gale shrugged. “I was bored. But if I get out of here alive, I’m going to shoot him in the balls.”

“Speaking of getting out of here, is there like a back door or something?” I asked.

Both guards shook their heads miserably. “Not that we know of, anyway,” Sanders said.

“I could take Farm Boy and do some recon,” Top offered.

“This place is a maze, literally,” I said. “We should stick together.”

We heard another loud thump from somewhere in the maze. We had bigger problems than just finding a way out.

“We need to find out what we’re up against,” I said. “Move out.”

Top took point and I motioned for the guards to follow him so I could watch their backs, while Bunny brought up the rear. All of us had our necks on a swivel, our gun barrels moving in sync with our eyes. I got the feeling the place was massive, but with my view being contained to one corridor a time, I couldn’t be sure.

I stepped up beside Sanders. “Halverson said the maze is ‘seemingly’ endless. What’d he mean?”

“It’s the walls, they—”

The elevator engine sound returned and Bunny let out a startled cry.

I spun around to see a wall sliding across the corridor behind me as the big staff sergeant dove forward into a roll, just barely squeezing through the diminishing gap.

As the moving wall connected with the opposite side of the corridor, it locked in with a thump — the same sound that we’d heard earlier. One mystery solved.

“Yep,” Sanders said, “the walls move. I don’t know if there really are an endless number of configurations, but to the prisoners it probably feels that way.” He looked around hopelessly. “And to us, too, now, I guess.”

I studied the walls and noticed there were barely visible seams every fifty yards. “Okay,” I said, “stay close and keep alert for moving walls.”

We walked on for several minutes with nothing happening and my mind wandered to what Halverson said about selling research files to Goldman’s evil twin. I was thankful that we wouldn’t have to deal with soldiers mutated with cockroach genes again, but I had a bad feeling this would be something worse.

I mean, we were in a labyrinth after all.…

As if to confirm my fears, I heard a loud exhale of breath, like a horse would make… or a bull.

Gale looked back over her shoulder. “Don’t worry,” she said, “that’s just a recording the doc uses to freak out the prisoners.”

The animal sound came again, louder. Closer.

“Well, it’s working,” I said, feeling pretty damned freaked out.

Gale smiled reassuringly. “Just wait until he switches to the—” Her expression instantly changed to abject terror as she saw something behind me.

“Bunny!” I shouted as I turned. “Watch your back!”

Bunny instinctively sidestepped before turning to look behind him. “You’ve got to be shitting me,” he grumbled.

The bastard had actually done it. Dr. Goldman had created a human-bull hybrid.

A freaking Minotaur. In a maze. Barreling at me, head down, horns first.

Bunny didn’t shoot. I didn’t shoot. Mostly because the last time we encountered mutants like this, they were our brothers in arms, misled into believing they’d be turned into supersoldiers, not monsters.

I also didn’t shoot because the thing was damn fast.

I was faster. Gale wasn’t.

A split second after I pivoted out of the way, Gale screamed as the Minotaur’s horns impaled her. The creature was tall, so even hunched over with his head down, his horns hit her chest, puncturing her heart and lungs in unison.

The Minotaur shook his head and flung her away. She was already dead. For a brief moment, the Minotaur stared at her with a look of sadness. Grief. He had horns sticking out of his forehead and his nose looked all bull, but his eyes were still human.

He hadn’t wanted to kill her. He hadn’t even glanced at Bunny. He’d been aiming for me.

Confirming my suspicion, the man-bull turned toward me, his nostrils flaring as his breaths came quickly. He looked agitated, confused. It seemed clear I was his target, yet his heart wasn’t in it.

A red dot appeared over his heart, on the thick brown hair that covered his shirtless chest.

“Should I take the shot, Cap’n?” Top asked.

“Wait,” I said, once again getting a feeling of déjà vu. I looked into the mutant’s human eyes and said, “U.S. Army. We’re the good guys. And I think you’re a good guy, too.” I glanced down at the tattered remains of medical scrub pants on his powerful, hairy legs. He hadn’t been a prisoner, he wasn’t a terrorist. “I don’t think you meant to kill Gale, or the other two, either.” He nodded emphatically; I was on the right track. “And you don’t want to kill me, either.”

He shook his head slowly, with a level of indecision that I didn’t like. Then his eyes narrowed, as though he’d made a difficult decision and he was about to do something risky.

Something dangerous.

He charged.

Top would’ve taken him out before he reached me. Well, assuming his bull hide wasn’t thick enough to stop a bullet. Hell, I would’ve put at least two bullets in him myself. Bunny, too, if he’d had the right angle. But there was something I’d forgotten and two things I hadn’t counted on: the Minotaur was damn fast; it wasn’t actually charging at me; and Sanders rushed toward it, causing me to yell for Top and Bunny to hold their fire.

Sanders evidently thought I was shouting at him, because he replied, “Screw you and screw that thing! It killed Gale and Johnson and I’m taking it down.”

He fired his Glock, but he got only one shot off before the fleeing Minotaur rounded a corner.

I thought I heard a grunt of pain, but I couldn’t be sure because the wall engine fired up at the same time. I rounded the corner to see Sanders’s second shot ricochet off a closing wall.

The Minotaur was gone.

No doubt Goldman didn’t want Sanders killing the Minotaur before it killed me.

Something was nagging at me, as though I weren’t getting the full picture. Then Top put his finger on it for me. “Something I don’t get, Cap,” he said. “Goldman knows we’re an elite black ops team, yet he traps us with just one monster?”

“Budget cuts?” Bunny offered.

“You think he’s got a whole herd in here?” I asked.

“We got a big influx of prisoners a couple weeks ago,” Sanders said.

“How many we talking about?”

“A dozen.” He no longer looked hell-bent on vengeance; he looked suddenly petrified. To put it bluntly, he looked ready to piss his pants.

To lighten the mood, I said, “I’ve always wondered what it’d be like to do that running of the bulls thing. Now I don’t have to go to Spain to find out.”

“I’d rather do the one in New Orleans,” Bunny said. I raised a quizzical eyebrow, so he explained. “Instead of bulls, you run with Roller Derby girls wearing bull-horn hats. They won’t gore you, but they’ll whack you with plastic baseball bats.”

“Dewey Beach, Delaware, has the best one,” Top said. “No bats, just some dude in a bull costume and a lot of girls running in bikinis.”

The mood suitably lightened, I suggested we move on. I should’ve known better than to relax, even a little — I was just taunting Murphy’s Law.

So, obviously, it was right at that moment that a strange wheezing sound started up. It could’ve just been that one of the Minotaurs had asthma, but something about it seemed wrong. As the sound grew closer, my mouth went dry and my ass cheeks clenched.

I blamed Goldman. And since I couldn’t shoot him, I chose the closest camera. I got a childish pleasure out of watching my bullet smash through it.

I also distracted the others at the exact wrong moment, just as that bastard Murphy would’ve wanted.

Sanders shrieked, dropping his Glock as he was yanked off his feet by something that most definitely was not a mutant man-bull.

More like—

“The Fly!” Top shouted.

“Fruit fly,” I said distractedly as I tried to get a clear shot, which was near impossible with the way the man-fly was jerking around, apparently having difficulty staying aloft with the added weight.

“How can you tell?” Bunny asked, agitated.

He had a point.

While the shape and translucence of the mutant’s wings could have been from a housefly or a fruit fly, the chitinous scales that blotted out most of his skin were a yellow brown rather than black. And his eyes were a bright red. “Isn’t it obvious?” I said. “Actually, I remember the original Goldman mentioning something about fruit flies.”

“I dunno,” Top said. “This guy kinda looks like Jeff Goldblum if you ask me.”

Sanders struggled to get free, but the attacker held on to his prey tenaciously. As I jogged along after them, I tried to recall what I knew about fruit flies. Did they just eat rotting fruit or would they eat meat?

The security guard flailed around and managed to grab hold of the creature’s left wing. He threw his whole body into a strong tug and yanked the wing right off the man-fly’s body.

The monster let out a very human shriek of pain. Although his right wing kept flapping ineffectively, he instantly lost the ability to fly, dropping straight down. Still gripping the severed wing, Sanders hit the floor first and I lost sight of him when the giant fruit fly landed on top of him.

Before I could check to see if they were alive, the wheezing noise — which I now realized was a messed-up human-fly buzzing sound — returned.

Even as I called out a warning, they were on us.

They flew in from behind us. I thought I heard words beneath the incessant buzzing — two repeated words, like a chant — but I couldn’t wrap my mind around what they were saying before the inquisitive Cop part of me was overtaken by the Warrior.

Two of them lifted Bunny off the ground. Each gripping a shoulder, they struggled to carry the big man, but then a third grabbed him by the neck.

I shot that one first. An instant later, Top hit the one on the left and I hit the right. All head shots. Those bulging red eyes were the perfect bull’s-eyes.

All three of the creatures dropped dead onto Bunny, knocking him down. His knees hit the concrete floor hard, causing him to let out a cry of discomfort, which was immediately muffled as one of the men-flies’ bodies forced his face down, smothering him.

I didn’t have time to dig him out from the pileup as four more mutant fruit flies swarmed down on me and Top.

Top screamed, or maybe I did — probably we both did — as we swept our guns across their bodies. We didn’t call out our targets, we didn’t aim for the bull’s-eye eyes, we just sprayed them with industrial-strength bug spray. For monster-sized pests, forget DEET, lead is much more effective.

Bunny shoved his way out from under the bodies covering him just as the remaining men-flies dropped dead onto him, knocking him back down. He groaned, though out of pain or irritation, I couldn’t tell.

“You okay under there?” I asked, doing a poor job of suppressing a morbid chuckle.

Bunny shoved a single hand up between two bodies, his middle finger extended.

“Pretty fly for a white guy,” Top said just loud enough for me to hear. I groaned.

“I’m okay!” Sanders suddenly called out, apparently thinking my question to Bunny had been for him.

Then suddenly he was not okay.

“Ah!” he screamed. “It’s alive!”

The fruit fly creature that had tried to abduct him moved feebly, trying to stand up. He repeated the same words the swarm had been chanting, only this time I made them out: “Kill me.”

I don’t know if Sanders heard and understood the mutant’s plea or if he was just scared out of his wits, but he moved with unexpected speed. He dove for his fallen gun, snatched it up, and spun around, grouping three bullets into where I assumed the man-thing’s heart still resided. I was impressed.

“Now that’s how you swat a fly!” he said. “Booyah!” He got to his feet and surveyed the gore on the walls around us. It looked exactly as if we’d swatted seven very large flies. Sanders’s puffed chest deflated. “Well, I guess you guys know how to take care of monster pests, too.”

Throwing the guy a bone, I said, “Hey, smart thinking yanking that thing’s wing off.”

He perked up. “Thanks. When I was a kid, I, er, a friend of mine used to pull the wings off flies.”

“I heard one of the early signs of serial killers was that they pulled the wings off butterflies as kids,” Top mused.

“Butterflies are beautiful and graceful, flies are ugly and annoying,” Sanders said defensively.

“You’re starting to look ugly and annoying,” Top said.

“Cool it, First Sergeant,” I said.

Top scowled at Sanders. “I bet the guy was the type to put firecrackers in frogs’ asses and blow them up.”

Sanders looked as if he were going to deny it, instead he blurted out, “George W. Bush did that, too!”

“Yeah, and he probably shot them with BB guns, as well,” I said. “For all we know, there could be mutant man-frogs waiting around the next bend that we’ll have to shoot, so let’s reload and move out.”

Farther into the maze, a loud buzzing heralded the approach of a new threat. The sound was similar to the droning of the fruit fly monsters, yet distinctly different. Angrier.

I racked my brain for any other flying insects the Vault’s Goldman had been working on. Then I remembered.

Wasps.

Why couldn’t it have been bullfrogs?

I’ve been stung by a regular-sized wasp. It hurt like hell. And damn, did it itch. I was certain the poison from a man-sized wasp sting would do more than just itch. It’d kill.

“I’m allergic to bees!” Sanders screamed. He took off at a run.

“Wait!” I shouted. Besides the fact that we needed to stay together because of the shifting passages, the buzzing sound wasn’t coming from behind us like last time…

He was running straight toward them.

Sanders rounded a corner and let out a blood-curdling scream. I gave chase, expecting to find him impaled on a giant stinger.

I found the guard holding a bloody hand to his neck, but he appeared relatively okay.

The lone man-wasp standing a few feet away from him looked more predatory than the men-flies had. He had jagged, enlarged teeth, his wings were thicker and slender, and antennae jutted out of his ears. Where a tail would be on a monkey, a big-ass needle stuck out of him.

Whether because he’d already written Sanders off as dead or because he saw me as a bigger threat, the man-wasp faced off against me. “Kill,” he said. He repeated it in a low, hoarse voice. Over and over.

Probably the creepiest damn thing I’d ever heard.

He spread his wings. I thought it was a macho thing, showing me how big he was.

Nope. It was the start of a lightning-fast attack.

Before I could get a shot off, he launched himself up over me. My barrel followed him, but he immediately plunged down stinger-first toward my upturned face.

I barely had time to pivot out of the way, but even as I turned, I was planning my counterattack. He adjusted his plunge to land on his feet, his knees bending on impact, his stinger nearly touching the ground. I raised my booted right foot and stomped hard at the base of his stinger. With more of a crunch than the snap I’d expected, his unnatural appendage broke off, splattering my leg with black blood and yellow poison.

Shrieking with pain and rage, he spun toward me, mouth wide-open. His teeth reminded me of shark teeth. The original Goldman had been trying to create new strains of humans that could withstand global warming or a nuclear apocalypse or whatever other damage we might do to our planet, so it made sense that he’d have shark genes in the mix since those beasts have survived four hundred million years of climate changes.

This beast didn’t survive another four hundred milliseconds.

I got my gun up just in time to shoot him in the mouth. The bullet sent shards of teeth that didn’t belong in a human mouth into a brain that was no longer human.

“Get down!” Sanders shouted.

I instinctively dropped to the ground as two more man-wasps buzzed over me. They got close enough for me to feel a breeze. And I swear I smelled pollen on them.

“Kill. Kill. Kill,” they chanted with creepy, raspy voices.

“Die, die, die,” Bunny shouted in response as he came around the corner. He collided with one and inadvertently drove it back toward me.

I didn’t have a safe shot with it tangled up with Bunny, but when I reflexively crab-walked backward out of the way, my left hand fell on the first mutant’s separated stinger. I snatched it up and used it to deflect the second mutant’s stinger, which Bunny was unknowingly shoving toward my face.

Weirdest sword fight ever.

Bunny had his hands full trying to keep the monster’s teeth away from his neck, so I needed to end this. The man-wasp wore a hospital gown. Yeah, the kind that flaps open at the back. I stuck that stinger deep into a place where nothing sharp and pointy should ever go.

Not my finest moment. Made even less so by my shouting out, “Tooshie!” the way a fencer yells, “Touché!”

I don’t think anyone heard me, though, because at the same time Top emptied an entire mag into the third man-wasp. The creature dropped to the ground, his torso resembling a giant, blood-streaked slab of honeycomb.

“A little overkill, don’t you think?” Bunny said, shoving away from the man-wasp I’d killed.

“I did not want to get stung by that thing,” Top said, looking around at us. His eyes landed on Sanders, who had an angry red bump the size of a golf ball on his neck. “Oh. Uh, how are you feeling, Sanders?”

The base guard managed a weak smile. “I think I’ll be okay, actually,” he said. “Maybe I’m not allergic to mutant human wasp venom.”

We continued on, but while I knew I should stay alert for more threats, I found myself constantly glancing at the big bug bite, until it got to the point where I couldn’t take my eyes off it.

It was growing.

It was the size of a baseball now.

I put my hand on the rapid-release folding knife clipped to the edge of my pocket. “Hey, Sanders,” I said. “That bump looks uncomfortable. You want me to poke a hole in it? See if some monster puss drains out?”

Sanders turned and opened his mouth to speak, but only a gasping sound came out.

Forget pricking the bump, I was ready to amputate it. That wouldn’t help him, though, if what he really needed was a giant EpiPen.

As if reading my thoughts, Top said, “He’s not going into anaphylactic shock, that thing’s grown so big it’s crushing his throat!”

He was right and there was not a damn thing we could do about it.

Sanders gurgled out some words that sounded eerily close to the fruit fly men’s “Kill me,” but I didn’t have to make that hard decision. Sanders’s eyes rolled up in their sockets, then he collapsed, his chest no longer moving.

Guess he really was allergic. Poor bastard.

I looked toward Bunny and Top, who were both staring at Sanders’s neck, and it took my mind a moment to process what I was seeing behind them.

A tall naked woman — the term Amazon came to mind — appeared to be twerking, of all things. I thought she was trying to mesmerize me with her booty shake. As a battle tactic, I have to admit it almost worked.

Until I noticed what was above the full moon.

Just in time, I realized she was actually winding up to do a giant swing toward my teammates… using her massive stinger like a sword to slice them both in half.

“Down!” I shouted.

Top and Bunny obeyed without question.

As the queen bee completed her swing, she continued the motion so that she stood facing me. The chitinous scales that covered her naked body reminded me of a girl with freckles I’d once dated. “You must be Captain Ledger,” she said in a surprisingly normal voice. Deeper, raspier, sure, but very feminine and seductive. “I’m going to eat you alive,” she said.

I almost considered letting her.

The Warrior overruled the Horn Dog and I aimed my pistol at her. Blood and gore exploded from her chest.

Weird thing was, I hadn’t pulled the trigger.

She lifted off the ground, yet her wings weren’t moving. She flew sideways, crashing into the wall. She fell dead to the ground.

She’d been impaled and flung away by the maze’s alpha predator. The Minotaur.

“Thanks?” I said.

He glared at me, nostrils flaring. “Don’t thank me,” he said, his voice labored, as if it were a struggle to speak properly through his mutated mouth. “Dr. Goldman promised to reverse my mutation if I kill you. I just didn’t want her to get the credit.”

He looked ready to charge me. Bunny and Top already had their laser sights on him and I could get off several shots before he reached me, but his leathery hide looked tough. Would our bullets even slow him down? I wore light body armor, but I didn’t think it’d be any match for those powerful horns.

The Minotaur’s eyes widened when I raised my gun and fired toward his head.

“That’s not going to stop me,” he said when he realized I’d been aiming at the video camera on the wall behind his head. “I don’t need Goldman to see me kill you. I’ll just drag your body to the next camera.”

“That’s what I was planning on,” I said.

The Minotaur looked just as confused as Top and Bunny.

I holstered my gun and used my knife to cut two horn-sized holes in my jacket. I rubbed some of the wasp woman’s blood onto my chest to complete the disguise. I was a dead man.

“What about us?” Top asked.

“What about the other two?” Halverson echoed a moment later, when the Minotaur used Sanders’s radio to inform him of my death.

“They said they were with you when Goldman’s brother died. They said you should let them go.”

To my surprise and relief, Halverson replied, “Okay. You can bring them, but they have to leave their weapons. Remove Captain Ledger’s weapons as well.”

Well, damn.

As the Minotaur dragged me roughly along by my left arm, the walls rearranged themselves to give us direct passage to the entryway.

“Have his friends bring him out,” Halverson said when the door opened. “You stay there.” He pointed his gun at the Minotaur.

Top and Bunny each grabbed an arm and dragged me out next to Halverson. They weren’t any gentler than the Minotaur. Payback for all the times I’d kicked their asses sparring.

I left my eyes open. It was a calculated risk since it was going to be hard not to blink, but I wanted to be fully aware of my surroundings. And right now I could see that Dr. Goldman had joined Halverson. Like his twin brother, he wore thick glasses and had the nervous habit of running his tongue along his lips.

“You don’t need to point that gun at me,” the Minotaur said, struggling to control his anger. “I just want what was promised to me: the cure.”

The doctor sighed, actually looking apologetic. “Do you remember Nurse Joy?” he asked. I couldn’t move my gaze off Goldman, but I assume the Minotaur nodded an affirmation, because the evil scientist continued. “I turned Nurse Joy into a Minotaur as well. I did it so I could test the cure on her. I figured if it didn’t work, you would at least have some companionship in the maze.” He shook his head with fatherly sorrow. “Unfortunately, not only did the cure not work, it killed her.”

“You lied to me!” the Minotaur screamed. Goldman might as well have waved a red flag at him. But the beast didn’t move. Halverson’s weapon kept him in check.

The head of base security took a nervous step backward nonetheless. That was enough of a distraction for Top to make his move. He had the man disarmed before he even realized what had happened.

Goldman blindsided us by whipping out his own gun and pointing it at Bunny. “Don’t move,” he said to Top.

I didn’t recognize the gun, but I could tell it shot sedative darts.

“I’m a trained soldier, you’re a mad scientist,” Top said, steel in his voice. “I could shoot your man, then you, faster than you could get off a single shot with that tranq gun.”

“Tranquilizer? No. The dart in here will pump a special cocktail into your friend. Then the maze will have two Minotaurs. Remember, there is no cure.”

Top cursed and returned the Glock to Halverson.

The only upside to the confrontation was that no one was paying any attention to me. I inched along the floor, getting closer to Goldman.

The doc suddenly let out a nasally laugh. “You didn’t really believe I’d let you two leave here, did you? I made these darts especially for you. I needed more test subjects.…”

Son of a bitch!

In one smooth move, I rolled onto my chest, brought my knees up under me, and leaped up, grabbing the dart gun with my left hand while my right punched the little weasel in the gut.

At the same time, Top relieved Halverson of his weapon once again.

With the tables suitably turned, I shoved Goldman toward the Minotaur. “You owe him a cure,” I said. “Maybe he’ll let you live if you promise to get back to work.”

“There really is no cure,” he said, shaking.

“Maybe he needs more motivation,” the Minotaur said. He reached a hand out to me and understanding dawned as I passed him the dart gun.

Goldman immediately figured out what the Minotaur intended to do as well. He bolted. Into the maze.

There was enough time for the man-bull to shoot the doctor in the back, but he didn’t. Instead, he snarled at Halverson, “I heard what you did. You caused all this. This is your fault.”

“No,” Halverson said. “No.”

The mutant bull grabbed him by the neck, but then let him go. He shoved him into the maze.

Halverson turned back. “Please,” he said. The Minotaur pointed the gun at him and he ran.

This time, the Minotaur pulled the trigger. Halverson cried out in pain and terror. He turned back toward us, but the man-bull waved his hand and the wall slid closed. The Minotaur had torn off the lanyard that Halverson had been wearing with his personnel badge.

“I wanted the doctor to be chased through his own maze by one of his own creations,” the Minotaur said, “just not by me. I’m never going back in there.”

“I can’t make any promises,” I said, “but I’ll do whatever I can to find someone capable of creating a cure for you.”

“No,” he said. “If more scientists study me, they might try to duplicate Goldman’s experiments. This has to end here.”

I looked sadly at him. “What do you have in mind?”

“I used to work here,” the Minotaur said. “I confided in Goldman that I had a gambling debt and he offered to pay it off for me if I let him test a new type of supersoldier steroid on me. I know how to lock the place down, hard.” He slid open a panel under the scanner, revealing a number pad and an ominous red button. He tapped in a long sequence of numbers, then pressed the button. “I’ve triggered the biohazard emergency protocols.”

I knew what that meant. A different kind of sliding steel wall would drop in front of the elevator and thermite charges would seal it permanently in place. No one that knew about this place would ever give the order to dig us out.

A courteous female voice emanated from speakers somewhere down the hall. She informed us that the fail-safe had been initiated. “Countdown is commencing. One hundred, ninety-nine, ninety-eight…”

“You better run,” the Minotaur said.

“… ninety-five, ninety-four…”

We ran as though the hounds of hell were chasing us. And after everything the Goldman brothers had thrown at us, I doubt giant demon dogs would have even surprised me.

But there were no surprises. We made it out in time. I just hope to God Mama Goldman didn’t have triplets.

Nicholas Steven is the new action-adventure pen name of a bestselling ghostwriter. If you ask him his real name, he’ll give you the old “I could tell you, but then I’d have to kill you” line, and he’ll say it just ominously enough that you won’t ask again. He’ll then give you a charming smile that’s at odds with the unnerving hold his steely eyes have on you, and he’ll strongly suggest you take note of his alias so you don’t miss any of his future publications, which he promises will be killer reads.