Something move down there, in the dark end of the corridor?
The lights were only on in half of the corridor; the farther end was pitch-black. Something big shifting down there? No. Nerves, Mac.
He scratched his nuts and turned, prompted by a noise behind, and a sudden strange vinegary smell, and…
He had half a second to see the great reddish thing that hulked over him, snarling, before it slashed out with its scythelike talons.
And with one razoring slice, it cut Mac’s head off his shoulders.
He’d always wondered if a human head remained conscious, for a few seconds maybe, after being severed from the body.
Now he knew.
Because from where his head lay on the floor he was able to watch his own headless, blood-spouting body stagger and fall…into the swelling sea of shadows.
Nine
SOMETHING INHUMAN ROARED in triumph, from back where they’d left Mac.
Sarge and Reaper looked at one another and ran back toward the corridor. “Mac!” Reaper called. “Mac?” No answer,
They dodged between tables, to the corridor — and saw Mac’s body, headless, in a growing pool of blood.
Whatever had killed him was retreating into the shadow at the far end of the hallway. There was just a glimpse…
“What was that?” Reaper asked. Not really expecting an answer. They were left standing in the open, under the corridor light, with the body of their long-time buddy gushing blood at their feet. His severed head was near Reaper’s boots; Mac’s face, going blue, staring in wonder at nothing.
Instinctively, Sarge and Reaper went back-to-back, half-crouching. Both of them felt it: more than one thing was watching them from the shadows. Whatever had killed Mac was just out of sight — and was very aware of them.
“What you got?” Reaper asked, hoping Sarge had a fix on a definite, solid target…he almost ached for it.
“Nothing. You?”
“Nothing,” Reaper said hoarsely. He glanced again at Mac’s decapitated body. “Shit.” It had to have happened in the space of a second. The body was so fresh — still pouring blood, the puddle spreading out around their feet.
“Still glad you came?” Sarge asked.
Reaper didn’t answer.
Something was moving down there, in the darkness at the end of the corridor. A flash of yellow eyes.
“I got something,” Reaper said. “In the shadows — on my three.”
“Ten degrees cross fire on either side,” Sarge said softly. “Sweep through the shadow.”
“I’ll take the left side.”
“I’ve got the right.”
Then they turned and opened up, Sarge firing thud-thud-thud-thud with his big autorifle, Reaper thundering with his light machine gun, the weapon jumping in his hands till his fingers ached from keeping it leveled.
Sarge yelled into the comm: “We’re in pursuit! Everyone meet at the air lock!”
Reaper’s machine gun hit it: the thing shrieked and rushed into view for a moment, chewed by bullets, spewing black blood before it stampeded howling down a side corridor.
Reaper and Sarge, grateful for something definite to shoot at, sprinted after it.
“So like which one of you’s the oldest?” Duke called to Sam, casting about for sane conversation as he returned with the bone saw.
“Me,” Sam replied, not looking up from her work. “By two minutes.”
He was coming down the corridor toward the nanowall — she’d directed it to remain open for him, knowing he hated pushing his body through its glutinous-metal mass, and he could see her in the infirmary, looking at the creature on the table through an instrument he’d never seen before.
“You two are…twins? Shit. Nonidentical, right? Because that would be weird.”
“What would be weird?” she asked innocently. Pretending she didn’t know he meant having sex with Reaper’s identical twin would be too much like having sex with Reaper.
“Nothing,” Duke said, clearing his throat as he hesitated outside the door. Was this nanowall going to close on him as he was going through it?
Maybe that wasn’t the only reason he was hesitating out here. Sure, Sam was a fine-looking woman; her smarts and poise were attractive, too, maybe even more than her looks. But still…
He wondered why he felt so drawn to her.
Oh come on, man, you’ve been a long time without a woman. You’d be drawn to a hundred-year-old grandmother buying incontinence diapers, about now.
It wasn’t that, though. Since he’d lost Janet — since she’d blown him off for a guy she could count on being there at night, a guy with a square job who would probably die in bed and not in some jungle clearing half a world away — he’d made up his mind it was going to be all work and party, all the time. Just the job, and the party afterward. No attachments. From here on, he’d told himself, it’d be whores or women who might as well have been whores. The kind of airheads who went on viddy shows gassing about trying to get a rich bachelor to marry them. Slick sluts.
My star guide said I was going to meet someone hot tonight but I thought he’d be, like, someone into stock-breaking — is that what you call it, when you, like, buy and sell stocks? — and not a Marine but, whatever, because I’ve always been into muscles? Even when I was a little girl I liked to look at those Mr. Bodybig shows, and, I’m all, whoa, a Marine, oh wow do you have, like, a Humvee we could ride around in and maybe cruise my homegirls, because, I’m, like, all into a guy who’s got a big ride, with, like, big wheels, and…
Verbatim from his last date.
And here he was drawn to a scientist. A woman with a clinical glint in her eyes; a woman who was eagerly looking forward to using a bone saw, for God’s sake.
But there was something about her — behind that shell of complete independence, skepticism, there was a smart woman who needed someone to make the world mean something again.
Oh, get over yourself, he thought. She’ll never go for you. She…
Something was growling, on the other side of that table, in the shadowy farther reaches of the infirmary.
Sam turned to Duke — she hadn’t noticed the sound, but something about the way he’d just froze there at the door, listening, had drawn her attention.
“What?” she asked.
A beast not much higher than his knee was stepping into view. He stared. Was that a dog? A large, snarling, drooling, red-eyed dog — coming around the corner of that cabinet?
It was. One of the escaped lab animals, probably. It lowered its head, muzzle wrinkling, baring teeth as it prepared to lunge toward him — its eyes crazed with fear — and Duke raised his automag, ready to shoot it down.
Sam, seeing the dog, opened her mouth to speak, probably to tell him not to shoot it, which was going to be a problem because this animal was ready to kill — though he didn’t blame it, considering what it’d probably been through —
But she never had a chance to say it. Because just then he realized that the dog wasn’t growling at him at all, but at something behind him. The dog backed away…
Duke spun, but it was too late, the creature in the corridor behind him slashed out, its talons ripping into his arm. Duke floundered away from it, fell onto his back.
“Duke —!” Sam called, running for the nanowall.
The imp loomed over him — a lean thing with clusters of eyes, its skin looking raw; drooling, almost sneering down at him now, a sound like a rattlesnake’s warning issuing from deep inside it.
He fired — the gun was set on semiauto, and he squeezed off three rounds, stitching the thing across the middle, making it stagger back screaming.