Reaper heard a groan from behind, turned to see a half-turned stumbling toward him — it was moaning, clawing at itself, seeming to implore him for help. Reaper hesitated — and the thing pointed at his gun, then at its head…
It wanted him to put it out of its misery — there was a lot of humanity left in this one. Could it be someone he knew? Was it possible, somehow, to save this pathetic thing? Unlikely but he continued to hesitate — until, as if to push him into it, the demidemon charged, snapping at Reaper’s throat, and he shot it point-blank in the face.
It sank to the floor with a grateful sigh.
There was a sizeable room to one side — something moving there. Reaper switched on his gunlight and probed its shadows, moving slowly, carefully through the door, looking at the ceiling for gaps as he came, scanning the floor for unexpected holes. The room was a modest cafeteria, with pillars here and there, and large tables; a kitchen, gleaming with copper and steel, at the farther end. The smell of cooked meat was strong in the room; and the smell of blood.
Nothing moved. Had he imagined it?
There — something slipping in and out of shadow. A skulking movement — almost certainly one of them.
He was reluctant to shoot, though, without getting a clearer sight of it — it was not impossible that Sam was alive somewhere. Improbable, but he hadn’t given up hope completely, and after all —
The thought was snapped off by the demon leaping at him from the gloom — snarling at him with its dripping jaws. He jumped back behind a pillar, circled, came up behind the thing and fired, nearly cutting it in half. He fired another burst where its tongue would be coiled up, just to make sure it wasn’t going to come at him once he turned his back on the body.
Slapping another clip in his light machine gun, Reaper searched the room. Found a dead man on the tile floor behind the counter, his genitals ripped off and shoved into his mouth, one of his legs missing, his arms turned around backward; found another dead man crammed into an oven, face outward, shoved into a space far too small for a human body, as if into a trash compactor. Someone had switched it to high. He was completely cooked, eye sockets emptied, mouth charred back to expose his teeth. Here was the source of that smell of cooked meat.
Reaper searched the remainder of the kitchen and cafeteria — nothing alive remained.
He heard distant roars, coming from another room, opening off the far end of the cafeteria — they cut off abruptly, to be replaced by gibbering…
Reaper drifted across the room — still feeling strong, moving mercurially, with thistledown ease — and kicked through the double doors that led to an even darker room…
His gunlight was fading, its battery running low. The room seemed almost to resist its thin illumination.
Something chattered at him without words, in the far corner of the room. Keeping the gun leveled, Reaper felt around in his ammo pack, found the flare he’d noticed there earlier. He snapped the flare into ignition, tossed it hissing into the darkness.
The flare burst into a bright light, briefly illuminating ten, maybe twelve genetic demons — the living dead, imps, and the Hell Knight — crouched near the farther wall, blinking, babbling to one another, as if trying to communicate, cursing like the builders of the tower of Babel.
Then the light went out — just as he saw them tensing to spring at him, teeth bared — and he fired, spraying the room with an arc of lead, the gun jumping in his hand, the air billowing with gun smoke.
He stopped firing for a moment, unsure if he was hitting anything — and the gun spoke to him. He’d had the prompter thumbed off before, but it must’ve switched on again, because the gun said:
“Low…ammo…warning…”
Just before he ran out of bullets.
He pivoted, fired the last shots into a wall-mounted fire extinguisher, which blew up like a bomb, shrapneling the four demons in the lead as they rushed at him from the darkness.
Three half-turned went down, but the Hell Knight, standing amongst them, didn’t seem to feel the explosion. This was the biggest creature he’d seen yet — just enormous, so large it was hard for it to squeeze through the door. It loomed over Reaper, all exposed muscle and neckless head and vast jaws; gazing eyelessly down at him. It seemed to savor the moment — as if it were anticipating eating him alive.
And to Reaper’s astonishment, the Hell Knight grinned at him. An evil grin, but a human one, too.
Then it reached into the shadows — and brought out something from a set of shelves he hadn’t noticed before, in the dark room beyond the cafeteria: a chain saw. So they could use weapons — or some of them could.
Its grin widened as it started the chain saw and slashed it at him — Reaper jumped backward, smelling the motor oil and feeling the wind of the whirling blade just missing his right ear.
Reaper backed away from the Hell Knight as it raised the chain saw to strike at him again.
The Hell Knight was toying with him, he realized, stalking him. It slashed the air near his face with the chain saw and he jerked back — Reaper smelled sparking metal, hot with friction, as the whirring chain just missed his nose.
The chainsaw — a big device looking like a toy in its massive paws — was roaring itself, like a predator hungry for a kill.
Then the creature squatted — and Reaper realized it was going to jump on him. Land on him while he was flat on his back — pinion and crush him, then, if he were still alive, it would go to work on his face and neck with the chain saw…
Heart hammering, Reaper leapt to one side, sprawling. The Hell Knight thudded where he’d been a moment before, turned to lash out at him but Reaper scrambled to his feet, ducked behind a pillar. He dropped the empty weapon, his fingers closing over a familiar metallic shape in his ammo pack.
He sprinted across the room, dodging between tables, his fingers finding the controls on the device, dropping it in what he hoped was the Hell Knight’s path…
The Hell Knight paused to gleefully cut a table in half with a single swipe, then rushed after him, its bellow mingling with the roar of the chain saw.
Reaper darted around another table — but his way was suddenly blocked by the one the demon kicked at him, tossing it in his way as if it were made of cardboard. He stumbled into it, turned to see the creature looming over him with the chain saw raised to slice down into Reaper’s head…
Then the timed mine Reaper had dropped went off just behind the demon — Reaper was too close to the blast himself, had to shield his eyes with his arm. The powerful explosive blew the genetic demon into gristle and raw meat. Its body became shrapnel, its head came flying like a cannonball right at Reaper’s eyes, still grinning though it was severed from the body —
Impact. It struck Reaper in the forehead and he flew back into spinning darkness. He lay stunned, blinking, in a pile of debris.
Tearing pain jolted Reaper back to full awareness, his sight clearing to show him a genetic demon of a kind he hadn’t seen before gnawing at his right shoulder. A thing with a boarlike face, with tusks and tiny eyes and great blunt snout, was trying to eat him alive.
Reaper recoiled from it as the thing snapped at him again, trying to get its enormous jaws around his neck now. He flailed for a weapon and his hand closed over a metal pipe. He jammed the pipe vertically in the boar-demon’s mouth, so it couldn’t close its jaws. It rocked back, howling in fury, raced erratically around the room, trying to claw the pipe free from its mouth — and Reaper realized, seeing the thing’s lower half, that it had been Pinky. The boar-demon was grafted into a cyberchair. It roared and squealed, eyes wild, drooling, prying at its bloody jaws. The pipe wasn’t going to keep the Pinky-thing at bay for long.