Stranger

Fifty-one

We went through the place like a hurricane. Zak and Tony followed me, gun muzzles pointing outward like spines on a porcupine, ready to blast anything that moved. They shone the flashlights left, right and center, scanning the rooms for danger. Once we were through the pneumatic doors that Phoenix could operate remotely, the other lightweight internal doors weren’t a problem. I kicked through one after another.

After screaming at us Phoenix fell silent. But he was watching; I knew that. From those concealed cameras he’d been seeing everything we did. He’d have seen us pass through the kitchen where I’d made popcorn with Michaela, through the living room, down the stairs to the operations rooms with their keypads that glowed like yellow eyes in the darkness. But I wasn’t interested in those anymore.

“OK, Zak,” I said. He turned ’round. I unzipped the backpack to pull out another bundle of dynamite, then I began unraveling the fuse. “There are bedrooms back through the double doors and along the corridor. Get in one of those with the door shut behind you.” I checked that the detonator was in place. “Ten sticks in this one. It’s going to kick like the devil. Ready?”

They nodded, their eyes on those white sticks. Now they’d seen what the stuff could do close up, they regarded it with infinite respect.

Phoenix’s voice came rushing back. “I’m warning you, get out now. You don’t know what you’re getting into. Run, Valdiva, run!”

Get this: Phoenix didn’t sound so much threatening as terrified. Something frightened him. He didn’t even seem scared of us… I felt that flicker of instinct in my gut… the little red warning light began to flash behind my eyes. The man genuinely warned us of some danger… only it wasn’t him. He wasn’t the threat. Something else lurked there… he was trying to save us…

I shook the thought from my head, but still a sense of unease wormed its way along my nervous system. Something isn’t right, Valdiva.

“You OK, Greg?”

I nodded. “Rarin’ to go, Tony.” I laid the dynamite at the foot of the twin doors that were labeled COMM ROUTE. If my hunch served me right, these two meaty iron doors blocked the way to a tunnel that connected with the main bunker. There, Phoenix waited. Along with whatever surprises lay in store.

I played out the fuse behind me, checking that it didn’t snag. “OK.” I flipped the cigarette lighter, touched the flame to the fuse end. Sparks flew. “Take cover-here she goes!”

OK, so maybe I did use too much. The explosion knocked in bedroom doors, filling the whole complex with smoke. Even the beds we crouched on jumped halfway to the ceiling. Closets flew open, sleeping bags, pillowcases, towels flapped ’round like crazy birds. For a second we lay there on the floor, trying to retrieve the air that had had been slammed from our lungs.

“Jeez,” Zak breathed. “Valdiva, you never do anything by halves, do you, man?”

I picked up the rifle from where the concussion had flung it across the room. “Come on, let’s finish this now.”

The corridor to the other rooms had been mutilated; you could use no other word for it. Mutilated to hell and back. Walls had been gouged by the explosion. Part of the concrete ceiling had broken away to come crashing to the floor. Every single door had been blasted inward. For the first time I saw the sick bay and the boardroom. There, tables and chairs had been up ended. Exposed wiring in the walls sent out cascades of sparks. A punctured fire extinguisher sprayed a blizzard of foam.

I nodded at the twin doors that led to the connecting tunnel. “We’ve done it. We’re in.” The massive doors had been crumpled the way you can scrunch up a sheet of paper in your hand. Smoke billowed, thick as fog. It reflected the beams of the flashlights right back at us.

I approached the smashed doors. The tunnel entrance yawned like a hungry mouth, eager to swallow us into its concrete gut.

“Greg! Get back!”

Tony pushed me aside to fire the machine gun into the fog of smoke. A figure blundered out through the mutilated doors, then fell to the floor and lay still.

I looked through the smoke, expecting to see Phoenix lying there. Instead I saw a witch head of wild gray hair. A bloody mass bubbled where the face should have been.

Zak nodded down at the figure. “We got bunker boy?”

“That’s not him.” My stomach muscles clenched. “That’s a hornet.. ..” I moved closer to the tunnel’s raw mouth. “Jesus, he must have let them in to guard the hive.”

Swarming through the gloom of the tunnel, like they were a plague of hungry rats I saw them. Dozens of them. Men, women. Young, old. Their faces blazed hatred.

“Hornets!” I yelled. “They’re coming this way.”

Tony stepped into the doorway to fire the machine gun at them. Flame a yard long erupted from the muzzle. I could even see bullets roar into the gloom like balls of light to ricochet off walls, or to rip into bodies.

“Too many,” I shouted. “Zak, hold still.” I reached into the backpack on his back and pulled out a bundle of dynamite. “Get back into the stairwell.” I pulled the lighter from my pocket.

A tall man with sores on his throat stumbled through the doorway. As if he’d suddenly decided to relax there for a while, he leaned against the wall. He looked down at his chest with a puzzled expression. A dark stain spread through the material of the torn-to-crap shirt he wore. He pulled it open to see a bullet hole above his breastbone that pumped big fat drops of crimson down his chest. Still puzzled, he fingered the wound. I found myself unable to tear my eyes away as he touched the bullet hole with his fingertip, then pressed harder. His finger slipped into the gory hole, his fingernail dis-appearing. With a look of astonishment, he watched his finger smoothly slip inside his chest as far as his knuckle. He began to rock his hand, and I realized what he was doing: He was trying to locate the bullet with his finger. Even as I watched he worked the finger inside the hole, rotating his hand from side to side, as if he’d found an object there that he couldn’t quite- suddenly he coughed.

A stream of blood spurted from his mouth. His knees gave way, dropping him dead to the floor.

Tony shook me. “Snap out of it, Valdiva. Come on!”

I touched the flame to the fuse. The moment it caught I lobbed the dynamite into the middle of tunnel. Hornets packed the place so tightly, they walked with their hands on the shoulders of the ones in front of them, grunting with bloodlust, their eyes locked on ours. A hungry kind of look that fairly hollered their craving to get hold of us and tear the skin from our bones. The dynamite bounced on the head of a bald man, then slapped into the face of a woman with boils clustering ’round her eyes… Hell, these people were goddam monsters… you couldn’t describe them any other way. Ugly creatures driven by an overwhelming urge to kill.

I waved Tony and Zak away from the entrance. I followed, ducking into the open doorway of the sick bay as my homemade bomb erupted with a roar.

We didn’t waste any time. After the tunnel entrance sneezed out a huge ball of black smoke we ran back to the shattered doors. Through the smoke I could see that the explosion had toppled the hornets like a crowd of mannequins. They lay flat, covering every inch of the floor.

I didn’t wait; I ran into the corridor. With no floor showing through the fallen bodies, some lying on top of the others, I ran across that mat of once human flesh. Most were dead, with hideous facial wounds where the blast had ripped at them. Some held up bloody stumps to stop me passing, but they weren’t going to slow me down. No way!

As I ran, my boots crunched down on faces, chests, stomachs, throats. And as we raced across the torn bodies some of them began to recover consciousness. Immediately the air filled with a deep groaning. A great fat bass sound like a choir of madmen singing. The sound grew louder. Moans, groans… a deep, DEEP sound that made the teeth in your head vibrate.

A guy with a beard that reached his chest sat up, his hands outstretched to grab me. I snapped the muzzle of the rifle down and fired, exploding the top of his head. I ran over his still-twitching body and felt his hot blood spray against my bare arms. Tony and Zak, too, fired as they ran. Now the deep bass moan bore a mixture of rising shrieks as bullets ripped into bodies.

Then, ten seconds later, we were out of that gloom filled tunnel. Ahead lay the main bunker. A huge door attempted to slide shut to seal us into the tunnel. But men and women had been hurled back by the blast to fall in the doorway. The heavy door made a mess of their bodies, but still it couldn’t close fully. I slipped through the gap, screening out a sound like cracking eggshells as the steel door crushed hard against torsos, cracking bones, rupturing lungs and bursting stomachs.

I stood for a moment, blinking beneath the bright lights of the bunker. So this was it-Phoenix’s den. My stomach muscles spasmed. This was where he nurtured the hive, feeding it with human captives.

The corridor ran away in front of me. Doors led off on either side. Where now, Valdiva? Where now?