“Really. Now who’s being naïve?”
Reaper shrugged. “So if they were so smart — how come they died out?”
Voices crackled in Reaper’s comm. “We got something,” Goat said.
A dark corridor, deep underground. A single shriek, quickly cut off. The sound of running feet, coming closer…
It was the same corridor. The one in which Dr. Carmack had achieved his feat of sexagenarian sprinting. Where Jorgenson and several others had been torn to pieces.
Goat and Portman were moving down it now, treading slowly, approaching that same door.
“We got movement in Dr. Carmack’s office,” Goat said, into the comm. His voice had the hush of a man on the hunt, not wanting to scare off his quarry.
The door had been ripped open — pried, then torn back like tinfoil.
The walls and floor here in the hall, near the door, could almost have been painted uniformly red-brown, with all the dried blood. Where, Portman wondered, was the rest of the body…or bodies?
They eased up to the ravaged entrance — they’d seen something go through that door.
And they could hear it moving around inside the lab…making a sound that was almost words.
Scraping in there; rattling. Breathing. Muttering.
Weapons ready, fingers on triggers, they edged cautiously, slowly, through the torn-open door — Goat, then Portman. Their probing gunlights showed the room had been trashed, ransacked. There was still some furniture standing.
And something leapt, thumped down onto a desk, to their right. A dark shape. They swung their weapons, and opened fire. The shape leapt over their gunlight beams, past the two soldiers — and out the door as Portman yelled in wordless reaction. Had he hit the thing?
“Contact!” Goat shouted, into the comm. “Contact. Moving east from the gene lab — fast!”
It was heading Sarge’s way…
In the corridor near the Weapons Lab, Sarge saw the dark shape whip past at an intersection of hallways, just thirty feet from him. He fired at it — nowhere near hitting it, it had gone by way too quickly — as Duke caught up with him.
“Certify contact,” Sarge said into his comm, “closing fast from the south corridor. Pinky, get a visual.”
“What is it?” Duke asked.
Sarge shook his head. No clue.
The Kid saw it next — glimpsed it, anyway, racing around a dark corner.
Younger and more agile, he sprinted ahead of Destroyer, hunting lust pumping in him, and opened fire, snapping off a half dozen rounds at the thing. Thing — or person. It was human-shaped, so far as he could tell from the glimpse he’d had — but its movements were inhuman.
“Hold your fire!” Reaper yelled, coming around a corner behind the Kid.
The Kid held back, gritting his teeth, waiting for orders. Reaper pushed past him, pushing the boy’s gun down as he went. Saw the thing — maybe a man — run around another corner…
Reaper ran around the same corner and stopped short, finding himself in a dead end. No lights here. Dark.
Something was breathing in the darkness.
He threw his light on it — a face he’d seen on a video. Sarge caught up with Reaper and stared.
“Dr. Carmack?”
Six
DR. TODD CARMACK was half-naked, shivering, babbling, anorexic — and cradling someone else’s rotting arm. He held a woman’s severed limb clutched against his chest. The dead hand’s manicured, painted fingernails were touching his face. Unconsciously, Carmack began to nibble one of the red-painted fingernails on the stiff blue-white hand. Not like a cannibal, but like someone nervously chewing their nails.
“If you have a weapon, drop it!” Reaper yelled, aware of the Kid and Destroyer coming up behind him. Reaper felt kind of foolish making the demand — probably the only “weapon” Carmack had was that detached limb.
Carmack only muttered gibberish in response, blinking in the gunlights, as Goat and Portman arrived, adding theirs. A fresh cut bled copiously from Carmack’s lower neck. He looked at the decaying, severed arm. A wedding ring on one of the fingers. And let it fall to the floor.
Sam came rushing up, beside Reaper. “Oh my God. Dr. Carmack…?”
“Sam,” Reaper said tersely, “get back!”
“He knows me!” she pointed out. “Dr. Carmack — it’s me, Samantha…I’m not going to hurt you…”
She started toward him — startled, he shrieked and shied backward, into the corner, one hand reaching up to rip his own ear from his head. He flung it at them, reminding Reaper of a monkey flinging offal. Sam stared at the torn-off ear, oozing blood on the floor at her feet. She seemed on the verge of throwing up — but Reaper could see her swallow, get a grip on herself.
Tough kid, he thought admiringly. My sister.
“Jesus Christ,” Portman muttered.
“Anyone got a field medical pouch?” Sam demanded. “Gimme quickclot!” Reaper tossed her his medikit.
Carmack whimpered, cringing, but let her get closer. She dug in the pouch, found the quickclot packet, tore it open with her teeth and poured it on his wounds. “Where are the others, Doctor?” she asked, her voice soothing.
Carmack twitched but said nothing.
“Steve — Hillary…?” She prompted. “Dr. Olsen? Dr. Thurman, Dr. Norris — Dr. Clay?”
Carmack only rolled his eyes, again and again, shaking fingers exploring the wound where his ear had been, mouth crumpling, as if he was confused as to who’d done it to him…
Sarge pushed Portman and the Kid out of the way. “Duke, get him out to the infirmary with Dr.Grimm. Reaper and Goat, clear the genetics labs, work back this way, LOE junction with the west corridor…” As he spoke to the squadron, Sarge never took his eyes, or his gun, off Carmack. “Destroyer and I’ll swing around from here to meet you. Portman, Kid, you two dig in at the air lock, anybody trying to run away from us will get driven to you.”
Sarge shouldered his weapon. Nudged the severed arm on the floor with the tip of his boot. “Let’s see if we can find the body that goes with this.”
Sam emerged from the lab air lock, into the atrium area. Duke was close behind her, carrying Carmack in his arms. The scientist was still babbling, almost seeming to take comfort at being carried; he veered between an infantile state and an atavistic madness.
Base personnel gaped at them as they came, murmuring Carmack’s name, exchanging looks of horror, fear.
“Dr. Willits!” Sam called.
Jenny Willits, brisk and crisp and bespectacled, hurried up to examine Carmack, still in Duke’s arms. “Oh my God. What’s happening in there?”
Duke wondered, too. What had happened to Carmack — and what were his own buddies facing while he was babysitting this lunatic?
Hunegs saw the panicked look on the faces of the base personnel. “There is no cause for alarm — UAC has assured me that the situation is entirely under control…”
They absorbed this remark, then looked at Carmack. Their faces registered a familiar cynicism. They were used to the disconnect between UAC’s public reality…and reality.
It was quiet. The only sound was water dripping somewhere.
Moving with Goat down the corridor between the animal experimentation room and the genetics lab, slipping carefully from pool of shadow to pool of light and back into shadow, Reaper felt a strange disquiet flutter its leathery wings at the back of his mind.
Nothing surprising in Reaper feeling worried, right now. He was on an alien planet where his parents had died; there were unknown antagonists making cool, rational scientists crazed enough to rip off their own ears and throw them, and that severed arm hadn’t been terribly reassuring.