Robbie’s terror spiked at Gaines’ desolate pronouncement. It sounded exactly like a million screaming monsters at the end of a long, empty valley, charging across. He could see them, broken lines of lurching, leaping horrors running through a vast dark, running toward a pinpoint of purple light far ahead. Toward us.
“The fuck,” Washington said, miserably.
“Pruitt opened a door,” Gaines said. He sounded breathless. “We don’t close it, there’s nowhere to run. You think twenty guys with small artillery are gonna stop an army of these things?”
Robbie’s whole body clenched. He wanted out, bad, but Gaines wasn’t wrong about what good the squad would be against a thousand actual monsters.
What could anybody do? How fucked is everything, if they get out?
“Breaking the rock, that’ll close it?” Robbie asked.
“It has to,” Gaines said. “The invocation or whatever is written on the altar, right? Safar said it had power. We break it, maybe we end this.”
Shit fuck!
The wet whatever-it-was slopped closer to their tunnel. Two, three, bird-things zipped past: dark, winged blurs as big as eagles that trailed long, whipping tails. One of them went high and slammed a light on the tunnel’s roof. It hissed like a snake and Robbie saw its long, toothy snout and hooded black eyes, feathers that looked like charcoal cobwebs before it flapped out of sight.
Something screamed from the west, a howl that wound into the tunnels from outside, high and alien and malicious. The bull-spider? The living wall of hooks? Shots fired, scattered bursts of M4s and for an instant he felt hope, but the thing screamed again and was joined by the hellish cries of two others, the trumpeter and a new voice like nails on a chalkboard. They kept screaming, a hellish, feral harmony that was dropping in pitch.
That the rounds aren’t stopping.
From the Rosetta Room something grunted, an impossibly deep, animal noise. Beneath it, the sound of the encroaching army grew, screeches and roars rising out of the clamor.
“We gotta do this now,” Gaines said.
“Okay,” Robbie said.
“You’re fucking crazy,” Washington said. “You hear what’s in that room? It’s a fucking dinosaur or something!”
“We can’t stay here if there’s more coming,” Robbie said. “You want to run for the exit with a hundred more of those things behind you?”
“Oh, fuck this shit in the fucking ass,” Washington said.
“I’m in front,” Robbie said. “You’re right behind me, watching the west side of the tunnel. Gaines, cover our six. Short bursts, we go fast and stick together. We blast whatever’s in the room and break the rock, then we are fucking out of here. That’s the plan, okay?”
“Good, okay,” Gaines said.
“Motherfuckers,” Washington said, and exhaled. “Okay.”
Robbie edged toward the entrance, the other two lining up behind him. The wet-sounding thing was close, maybe twenty feet south and low to the ground. Whatever it was crept across the rocks in uneven, moist slaps, like fat fish being whacked on river stones.
Robbie ducked to look. The creature was like a thick, pale flatworm, five feet long, maybe, and two across, but barely a foot thick. More than a dozen stumpy legs stuck out of its weird body and it slapped half of them down and rolled over itself, humping its long, muscular form into an arch, more of its legs slapping down, edging the thing up the shadowy tunnel. Its corpse-skin glowed wet in the purple light.
The crack at the bottom of the slope had become a wide, jagged hole littered with rocks, the eerie light blasting from inside, staining the sane light of the tunnel’s roof strip with its otherworldly hue.
The screaming of the running horde grew louder.
Fucking do it, go!
Robbie stepped into the tunnel and pointed the short weapon at the humping flatworm, finger light on the trigger. He fired twice, two bursts of three, catching it as it reared up. The steel-topped copper slugs smacked into the strange flesh, ripping off one of the stumpy legs. The monster spasmed silently as dark ichor splattered from the curling, trembling body, flowing like chocolate syrup over its pale skin.
It flopped over and stopped moving, but there were more things coming, three dark shapes emerging from the glowing hole, loping toward them. They were four-legged and the size of large dogs, but their bodies looked flayed, all sinew and bone and dark muscle, with plates of bone rising from the front shoulders. Their heads were flat like a lizard’s, their jaws as wide as their heads, hanging open, revealing teeth like knives. As they charged up the slope, Robbie saw that they had insect eyes, rounded clusters of glistening black orbs high on their earless skulls.
Robbie targeted the closest and strode forward, firing.
The first took three shots to its barrel chest and issued a shriek like somebody stomping on a parrot. Holes opened in its body, but no blood came out, only dust or smoke. It staggered but kept coming, still making that horrible noise.
Robbie fired again, aiming for those wide jaws. The grouping went low, tore into the thing’s short, thick neck.
The air around the monster was getting thicker, darker, as smoke or dust poured from the new wounds. Its scream turned into a choking rasp. It stumbled a few steps and then pitched forward, still jetting streams of dark gas.
Washington was firing at the one on the right. Its scream picked up where the others had died. Robbie targeted the third.
He aimed for the hanging jaw, but it jumped. The rounds snapped into the thing’s left foreleg near the shoulder and it crashed to the tunnel floor, squawking furiously, thrashing against the rocks as it tried to get up.
Washington’s target was down, smoking, the gas flowering like ink in water. Robbie walked quickly ahead and fired another burst at his target’s sleek, horrible skull. One of its compound eyes ruptured, dark slime spraying, and its stringy body went limp.
Robbie hurried past the bloody flatworm, breaking into a jog. The longer it took them to get to that altar, the more things that could come out. Washington stayed on his heels, cursing softly in a steady stream. Gaines shuffle-stepped after them, breathing heavily.
They had to go through the fog of the dog-lizards’ impossible blood, a choking, noxious smoke that burned Robbie’s nose and eyes and put a taste in his mouth like fish oil. They were all gagging before they got through the miasma. Robbie’s eyes watered, but he kept them fixed on the glowing hole, closer now. His ears rang from the stutter of the M4s.
Something spilled out of the hole, something big.
It came out in a humped crouch but unfolded itself into the tunnel, another wall of flesh like the thing that had gotten Safar — a thing that stretched its pulsing parts to the tunnel’s ceiling and one wall, pulling its unlikely body forward. Thick crescents of talon or tooth stuck out of the gray flesh, hooked like claws. It rippled toward them like some giant manta ray, shapeless blobs of flesh at its edges forming into rough clumps that shot off and grabbed the rocks of the ceiling and the west wall.
Robbie and Washington both opened fire, rounds ripping into the pulsing center of whatever it was. Its scream was the bright pitch of a tea kettle, coming from its back, echoing into the glowing chamber behind it. Black sludge oozed from the holes. The claws spasmed and hooked at the air, and they both fired again.
“Ah, shit!” Gaines fired at something behind them.
The shrieking wall of claws was collapsing, folding forward. Robbie let off a burst at a handful of the winking eyes on its back as it slouched to the floor, then turned to see one of the “birds” flying at them. Gaines fired again and punched through one of its wings. Bloodless, shredded tatters trailed the thing’s erratic path. It hissed like a bucket of water on a roaring fire but didn’t slow down.