She was stuck, spavined over the void.
She decided on the ladder. She’d just have to hold on. And she was losing her hold on the cable…sliding down…
Sam let go of the cable and — feeling absurdly like a primate in a tree — she swung over to the ladder, kicking a foot toward a lower rung, trying to get a hold.
She missed, and fell to the end of her right arm, and shouted in blinding pain — almost losing her grip, nearly dislocating her arm from her shoulder. Sam whimpered, and felt with her toe, looking for a rung, found one, got a foothold and what a blessed relief it was to take the weight off her arm…
She clung to the ladder, gasping, for ten long seconds, feeling sweat dry on the back of her neck, her forearms. Then she made herself start down. Her right arm ached at the shoulder, but it seemed intact.
She was almost to the bottom of the ladder when she heard the genetic demon snarling, and she turned to see it crouching beside its dead fellows, preparing to leap at her. Its left arm was broken, turned crazily wrong in the socket, bone ends sticking out. Blood coursed from the corners of its mouth…
She moaned in frustration and started back up the ladder — and then the thing leapt and grabbed her by the neck, jerked her off the rungs. She fell shouting wordlessly, falling on her back at its feet. She looked up — seeing it upside down, dripping blood and saliva on her face as it ducked toward her, opening its mouth to tear into her throat…
A thud and it staggered — and fell across her, the back of its head shot away.
With a yelp of revulsion she pushed it off her, rolled and got her feet under her — looked up to see Sarge standing there, gun in hand.
“Hello, Sam,” he said.
Twenty
REAPER WAS IN darkness — but behind its cloak was a powerful humming sound…like a great dynamo thrumming somewhere…What was it? The sound of the universe going on without him?
So this is dying, Reaper thought. I don’t think I like it much. But I always thought it’d be worse than this…But then again, my dying ain’t over…Maybe it gets worse — maybe Hell’s coming next…
No, wait a minute. I just came from there.
Hold on: if I’m still thinking, can I really be dead? So maybe…Maybe I’m not going to die yet. Maybe I’ll survive this thing. The pain is gone. Strength coming back…but almost too much. Like I might explode with it…
I feel — kind of good. Like in combat when I know I can kill the guy in front of me, even though he’s trying with all his might to kill me: I know he’s more scared than I am. Somehow I know that he’ll die…
And I’m going to live.
That humming…like a generator going full blast…that’s the sound of my blood running through my veins…But I’m still in the dark…Except…
Except for the shape of the iris of a single eye. A little light came through that distant aperture, nothing more.
He had thought he heard Sam screaming his name, from somewhere. Her voice falling away as she screamed it, as if she were falling down a deep shaft.
“Johhhhhhhnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn…!”
That’s how it had sounded. But hadn’t that been a while ago?
How long had he been out of it?
Still so dark. But then the gloom around it seemed to solidify in places, to take on shapes; light filtered in as the iris expanded, and colors began to appear…
And the room snapped into focus. He was in the infirmary…sitting up — looking down at himself.
His arm was healed. The slashes were completely gone. Not even a scar.
He stood up, looking for his sister. “Sam?” He turned, found himself looking at his own reflection in the observation window — saw there were now no cuts on his face.
The small room was trashed. Cabinets overturned, debris everywhere. A door — locked before — leading from the observation room to the corridor, was torn open, hanging crazily ajar.
Something had taken her. Had left him alone, thinking he was dead or dying. It had taken Sam and the chances were small, very small, that she was still alive.
Once more — and it was harder this time — he put the grief aside so he could deal with what he needed to do right now. He found his weapon, picked it up, slammed home a clip.
Then he stepped over the debris and headed into the dark corridor beyond, to search for Sam — or what was left of her.
Reaper was carried along on a wave of energy — that humming dynamo was pumping away, churning in his head, powering him like a thousand volts through a jackhammer.
His senses seemed impossibly acute. He could smell blood, distinguishing fresh from blood that had been spilled a few minutes earlier — he could smell sweat and the pheromones in it; he could smell cleaning agents and urine. He heard far too much — his boot steps were like a bass drum pounding, and he could hear the movement of air in the ducts and claws scrabbling in another part of the compound. That’s how he knew which way to go…
And he could see in the dark — the shrouded look of the place remained, as if black scarves were draped at the edges, but it was as if he had some version of infrared working, and he could see all the details of the corridor rushing toward him; rebar in the debris where a wall had been knocked down; serial numbers on pipes hanging from the ceiling.
The gun felt light as a feather in his hand; the floor seemed to drift away beneath him, insubstantial. He felt no effort in hurrying down the hallway. That’s what it was like: almost as if he were standing still, and the hallway was rushing past. That corner up ahead was swinging toward him of its own accord.
And then a high-pitched screech — a scream of fury, not of fear — came from around that corner. Reaper reached the branching hallway and spun to see the genetic demon running full bore toward him, a half-turned soldier, uniform in tatters: squalling, as it came on, like a bird of prey.
It was already leaping at Reaper — no time to get the gun into play, so he met it with a fist smashing into its chest and it was flung backward as if struck by a piledriver, spinning away like a broken doll into the darkness it came from.
Reaper stopped moving for a stunned instant, amazed at his own power.
Another hallway off to the right — a sound down there. Scrape…tick-tick. Scrape. An ordinary man wouldn’t have heard it. But he could see nothing down there…maybe a rat.
Reaper turned away, then heard the thump as the creature dropped from the hole in the ceiling, all the way from the floor above, howling jeeringly as it came. He spun and a female imp loomed over him — she had grotesque parodies of breasts, a gnarled sketch of a vagina: the effect was obscene.
She snarled and slashed at him — he dodged the talons with ease, again surprised at his own speed.
He seemed superior to the genetic demons — faster, smarter, more powerful.
It was the work of an instant to shove his gun up under her chin and pull the trigger — she jerked backward, the top of her head flying off.
Before the body hit the floor he was moving away — then heard a scuttling sound, turned to see the imp’s tongue, detached from her head and moving with a will of its own, on a blind mission of reproduction; it was writhing along the floor toward him like an awkward snake, rearing up to strike at him, to inject him with the genetic ejaculate that would try to make him the other kind of Carmack creation.
He sidestepped its strike — the long, absurd tongue was as fast as a cobra, but Reaper was faster — and fired, blasting it into red scraps.