Harrison sprinted towards the conflict, firing his pistol as he ran. His bullets punched holes through the creature’s abdomen. As he reached the hand-to-hand battle, his pistol spent, he gripped the axe in two hands. He heaved the axe through a double-handed overhead swing.
He smashed the axe right down into the creature.
The axe head disappeared into the pulpy abdomen, releasing a jet of fluid.
Harrison yanked the axe free. His senses were overloaded. He could hear screaming and fighting. He heard Sullivan’s pistol firing.
He turned and saw Sullivan go down under a hostile. Sullivan was underneath the creature, shooting up with his pistol into its head.
Another creature ploughed into a pack of scattering evacuees across the chamber.
Harrison looked back across the communal lounge. A wave of hostiles rolled towards him.
This is it. This is the end. Come and get it, you filthy vermin.
Harrison felt nothing but contempt. Contempt for the people responsible for creating these aberrations, and contempt for the people who had opened the containment door. I hope they catch the person who made these things. I hope they catch them and skin them alive. And he wished he’d had the chance to get to know Dana in different circumstances.
Black spots started swimming before his eyes, filling the chamber in every direction he looked.
Black spots? They’re not black spots. They’re butterflies. Thousands of them.
The cloud of fluttering wings swept around him. The butterflies poured from the antechamber towards the evacuees.
No, not the evacuees. They’re going after the creatures. They’re landing on the hostiles. The butterflies are stopping them!
Harrison watched in wonder. The line of charging creatures stalled ahead of the wave of butterflies that filled the chamber.
As soon as the butterflies made contact, the creatures shuddered to a complete stop. Even more butterflies were filling the room, spiraling in through the antechamber and landing all over the creatures like tiny heat-seeker missiles.
The line of creatures halted just four meters from Harrison. The half a dozen creatures that had already reached the evacuees were in the same rigid state of suspended animation. Sullivan squirmed out from under the creature that had frozen on top of him.
It felt like someone had hit the ‘pause’ button. Then the reality of the situation pressed back in on Harrison.
He had no idea how long they would stay like this. This might be a permanent situation, or they might only have seconds. All eyes in the chamber had found the tall Marine.
They were wild-eyed. Wild faces. People were breathing heavily, weapons poised. These weren’t just scientists and engineers and technicians any more. These people had been pushed into a life or death battle-frenzy.
This was an army. This was Harrison’s army.
He felt the pent-up rage of the group. He was at the center of it.
There was only one answer as far as Harrison was concerned.
‘Kill them!’ he bellowed, lifting the axe above his head, his voice echoing around the butterfly-filled chamber. ‘Kill them all!’
The human content of the room fell on the creatures with a level of pure savagery that only Mother Nature could appreciate.
The entire room was filled with fire.
And then it wasn’t.
It worked!
Coleman lifted his smoking head. His wet fatigues had spared him from the worst of the heat, but his short hair was singed shorter.
When he fired his colt, he hadn’t been aiming at Cameron Cairns.
He’d shifted his aim two meters to the left.
As the flare bounced on the floor, Coleman had targeted a big red mushroom button on the wall.
It was the control to the emergency ventilation turbines, the matching floor and ceiling units that had astounded Coleman with their size when he’d first entered the lab. The oversized turbines must have made a strong first impression, because when Cairns fired the flare, Coleman attention was fixed on the turbine control.
He was seeing a new possibility. His idea had two strong things going for it. First, he had absolutely no other option. Second, it seemed far more attractive than being burned alive.
These proved all the qualifications he needed. He squeezed the trigger as the flare hissed to life behind him.
As fire engulfed him from head to toe, Coleman realized there were also two big drawbacks to his plan. First, he might miss. He had taken a big blow to the head. Second, if he hit, he might just damage the control and not manage to activate the exhaust system.
The igniting gas cloud roared around him, and then, almost immediately, was sucked away by the turbines.
Coleman’s exposed skin hardly registered the heat before the roar of flames was replaced by the higher-pitched whine of the super fans.
Then he felt the wind. A massive wind that literally started tugging his body along the wet floor.
It took a few seconds before he realized he’d overlooked the third possibility.
It’s working too well. I damaged the controls with my gunfire and the turbines aren’t stopping. In fact, they sounded like they were speeding up! The sound was like sitting on the wing of an airplane screaming in for a crash-landing.
Coleman looked backwards, gobsmacked by the view.
Mother…of…God.
A tornado of fire stretched between the turbines.
A bright red flaming helix, twenty feet tall, was twisting between the floor and ceiling fans. The fire-twister was feeding off the still venting gas.
Coleman felt his body slip an inch backwards. He dug in with his boot toes and pressed his cheek to the floor, offering the smallest possible profile to the wind.
This worked for about four seconds, until he felt his boot toes slipping again, and then his body started creeping backwards. No, no, no, no, NO! He was getting sucked along the floor back towards the twister. He was getting dragged into the turbines!
Coleman’s hands scrabbled madly over the floor, searching for purchase, for anything to stop his slide. There was nothing, not a thing, and his near panic made his body pick up more speed.
He was sliding completely out of control when he passed under a fixed workbench. Lashing out desperately with his right hand, he caught the frame where it bolted to the floor. The jerk almost wrenched his arm from its socket. He wrapped his arm around the frame so the steel leg was clenched under his armpit.
Something bounced off his shoulder and disappeared into the fire helix. He just glimpsed the object. A flare pistol.
He looked away from the twisting helix, grimacing into the wind, and spotted Cairns.
The turbines were designed to extract the air from a contained space at an incredible speed. But Cairns had destroyed most of the lab doors with explosives. Coleman had damaged the turbine’s controls. The combined effect had transformed the level’s corridors into a network of high-velocity wind tunnels.
Cairns hung trapped in one of those wind tunnels at the entrance to H-lab.
Stretched out on the floor, his feet lifted by the wind, his left hand gripped a broken piece of plexiglass jutting from the corridor wall. His right hand still clutched the templates. He needed to drop the templates if he had any chance of maintaining his hold.
His anchoring hand suddenly slipped free. He came sliding along the wet floor towards Coleman.
Coleman tightened his grip on the steel frame and braced himself as Cairns slid straight into his shoulders.
The jarring impact tortured Coleman’s already throbbing hand.