The high-pitched squeals of the smaller dragons stopped.
Then, with a great cracking sound, five large super-adults burst up out of the web-formation on the floor of the hangar!
They were enormous—not only possessed of heads like T-Rexs, but each was the size and shape of a T-Rex, only with huge flapping leathery wings and six free-grasping claws which they used to grab prey. Their heads were utterly terrifying: longnosed and leathery, with giant jaws equipped with teeth twenty inches long!
And how they moved!
The great superdragon-like monsters soared into the air, swooping around the staircase like giant bats, snapping at Armstrong and his men. They towered over the humans—easily double their size.
One creature bit a Marine clean in half.
Another grabbed two with its claws and stuffed them both into his mouth together.
In both cases the creature in question instantly vomited up its food, spraying blood and partially-digested human remains everywhere in some peculiar kind of eating function. No sooner had the remains hit the floor than hundreds of little slug-like creatures emerged from the web and started eating the shredded remains.
Yet another of the super-adults made for Armstrong himself—but the Finisher just whirled to face it and fired his large-bore Desert Eagle right into the monster’s left eye.
The giant creature’s eye exploded, torn from its socket and the monster squealed and fell out of the air, crashing down on top of its ship, writhing and convulsing.
Now only five Marines remained on the spiral staircase.
Armstrong and two of them made it to the top of the stairs just as two of the super-adults wrenched on the staircase itself, ripping the entire structure from its ceiling mounts, causing the whole high-and-narrow staircase to topple…and fall… with the last two Marines on it!
Like a slow-falling tree, the staircase fell, crashing down onto the silver spaceship and the web formation on the floor, crushing through the suspended catwalk on the way.
No man would be going down there ever again.
THE RACE OUT
Armstrong found his two rear-guards—Twohy and de Souza—lying dead at the top of the (now destroyed) spiral staircase, their corpses being eaten by three of the smaller dragons!
Disturbed by Armstrong’s sudden arrival, the three mini- dragons looked up from their gobbling—their snouts smeared with fresh blood. Then, with astonishing speed, they made for Armstrong and his two surviving men—Doc and Rockmeyer.
The three Marines ducked as one and the dragons overshot them. Then the Marines turned and firing their MP-5s after the beasts, ripping them to shreds, causing them to peel downwards like three damaged fighter planes.
Running again.
Hard and fast.
Desperate now.
Into the giant receiving dock…and Armstrong saw the exit doors and thought of the safety of the outside cold beyond them.
At which point, the super-adults emerged from the depths of the complex. One landed on the concrete floor of the loading dock with a great boom, upturned its massive head and roared fiercely. The deep-bass sound of its roar shook the walls.
And suddenly, as he turned to look back, Armstrong tripped on a corpse and fell awkwardly forward, flat onto his face.
The fall saved his life—but not so Doc and Rockmeyer.
For as Armstrong had fallen, a super-adult creature had come swooping down and had sliced the other two Marines in half, clean across the waist.
They fell, in pieces.
Armstrong—alone now—ran, staggered, stumbled, the last few metres, clawing his way out through iron doors of Complex 13, under the words abandon all hope, ye who enter here.
He dived into the doorway, into the long tunnel his men had bored, and immediately felt the colder air, spun to look back—
—just in time to see the wide-open jaws of a super-adult come rushing at his face! All he saw was teeth and tongue and the monster’s deep dark yawning throat and then—
CHOMP!
The jaws clamped shut, one single inch away from Armstrong’s nose.
And John T. Armstrong lay there…on his butt, on the icy ground… right in front of four of the gigantic winged super-adults, these great alien dragons, all of them towering over him, looming over him, glaring at him with their foul evil faces and their bloody man-eating grins.
But they didn’t step forward through the great iron doorway.
Couldn’t step forward.
It was too cold.
Armstrong had made it. Just.
And so he left the tunnel, left Complex 13, with a backpack full of information.
Once outside, he was collected by a long-range pick-up chopper, from which he radioed his prized information back to the States…
…back to Groom Lake, Nevada…
…the home of Area 51, the notorious secret base, where a group of American military scientists were currently under attack from a rapidly-multiplying colony of dragon-like aliens that they had disturbed from their slumber in the lone alien ship that was kept in the underground hangar there.