“Good call,” he said, trying to sound confident despite feeling anything but. He switched his NVGs off and swiveled them up, away from his eyes.
An image of the passage, of his teammates and the four dead bodies, hung in the air before him, the shades of green inverting like a photographic negative before fading into nothingness. Darkness enfolded him, swirling around him like a vapor that he could almost feel insinuating into his clothing. Faint bursts of color, like dim fireflies, hovered in front of him, winking out whenever he tried to look directly at them. The lights were just phosphenes, bursts of electrical energy in his optic nerves, which were probably a little overheated from hours of staring into the NVGs’ display. He took comfort from the fact that Mad Dog and Bender had been able to quickly adjust to the low-light conditions.
He found the buckle for his helmet, removed it and tucked it under one arm so he could take the mask off. The smell of death and decay hit him hard. He flinched, fighting a gag reflex, and wiped his face with his sleeve. He blinked, straining to catch a glimpse of the phosphorescent lichen. “How long—”
“Shit!” Mad Dog yelled. “Contact left!”
Like all Delta shooters, Hood’s relentless training under stressful conditions had imbued him with near super-human reflexes. In less time than it took to blink, he was moving, shouldering his weapon, swiveling to face the passage to the left, searching for whatever threat Mad Dog had identified. But enfolded as he was in near-absolute darkness, there was little else he could do.
Then that darkness was shattered with fire and thunder.
The noise of multiple reports in the close confines of the passage was truly deafening; an aural assault that nearly drove Hood to his knees. Muzzle flashes scorched the air, leaving streaks across Hood’s retinas, but the strobing flashes also revealed something else.
There was someone… Something… With them in the darkness.
Something monstrous.
It was a vaguely human shape but dark, like a living shadow. Hood couldn’t make out any distinctive features, only its hulking size. He shifted his aimpoint, flipped the fire selector to full auto, and added his voice to the chorus of violence.
The creature writhed under the assault, flinching with each impact, but then it sprang forward, leaping several meters in a single bound. Hood tracked it, shifting the muzzle of his weapon away as the thing disappeared behind one of his men.
“No!” Hood shouted, screaming to be heard over the din. “Ceasefire! Ceasefire! Ceasefire!”
His warning was unnecessary. The others had seen what he had seen, probably even better than he, and had already stopped firing to avoid hitting their teammate. Even as Hood shouted, the guns fell silent and the darkness returned.
Through the ringing in his ears, Hood heard a wet popping sound and a truncated scream.
“No!” he rasped, fumbling to find his NVGs, only then realizing that, in the chaos, he had dropped his helmet. Before he could locate it, the firing resumed, and in the first yellow flash, Hood saw the creature again, a dark hulking mass, hunched over an unmoving body, but as the first of several bullets struck it, it reared back, howling, and then bolted back down the passage, dragging its kill along.
Shaking off the horror of what he had just witnessed, Hood brought his weapon up again. When the magazine was empty, he let the rifle fall on its sling and drew one of his pistols — a Caspian Arms M1911 .45—from his chest holster. But even as he was aiming it into the tunnel, the creature disappeared from view. The firing stopped again and he was plunged once more into darkness.
In the momentary silence that followed, Hood re-holstered the .45 and quickly exchanged the empty magazine in his rifle for a full one. The well-rehearsed procedure was almost automatic, and he had no difficulty executing it in total darkness. If anything, it gave him something to focus on aside from the horror of what had just happened.
He also knew that, despite its wounds, the creature wasn’t dead.
With his right hand still holding the HK’s pistol grip, ready to fire one-handed if necessary, he knelt and with his left, began groping for his helmet and the precious night vision device mounted to it. That was when a scream broke the surreal quiet. “Fuck!”
Hood thought it was Mad Dog, but it was hard to tell; the voice sounded muffled and distant. The curse repeated a moment later. “Fuck. Did you fucking see that?”
“What the fuck was it?” came another voice, softer but still a shout. Rollie, maybe? Which meant….
“It fucking took Bender,” said the louder first voice — definitely Mad Dog — the statement confirming what Hood already suspected regarding the identity of the creature’s victim. Fucking ripped him in half.”
“What the fuck was it?” Rollie repeated.
Both men sounded frantic, almost hysterical. Hood certainly felt that way. They were battle-hardened veterans, and had witnessed their share of gruesome tragedy, but nothing in their training or experience had prepared them for something like this.
Hood at last found his helmet. He quickly settled it on his head, swung the NVGs into place, and switched them on. It took a moment for the device to initialize, but when it did, Hood saw immediately that Bender was no longer with them. Where he had stood a moment before, there was now only a dark smear, streaking away into the left passage.
Movement from his right distracted him. He glanced over without turning his head and saw Mad Dog starting forward, weapon at the ready.
“Dale. Wait.”
Mad Dog stopped but did not look away from the passage. “We have to go after it. Kill it.”
“We have to be smart about this. We don’t even know what we’re really dealing with.”
“I do. I saw it. It’s—” Mad Dog hesitated, groping for the right word. “It looks like a… A demon. Or some kind of lizard-man. It was scaly. Like a crocodile. Doctor Tox must have found a way to stimulate latent reptile genes in human DNA.”
It seemed to Hood like an oddly specific bit of supposition on Mad Dog’s part. Hood did not recall anything remotely reptilian about the monstrosity. Of course, his eyes had still been adjusting to the darkness, but his impression of the creature had been very different. He glanced back to the remains of the jihadists but saw nothing that suggested they had been anything but human when they had died.
“It won’t be easy to kill,” said Rollie. “It didn’t look like our rounds were doing anything to it.”
“We hurt it,” Mad Dog insisted. “But you’re right. With those scales, it’s going to be tough. Aim for the eyes.”
“No,” Hood said, flatly. “We’re not going to do that. We’re going to head out of here and blow the entrance. Seal this place up. Just like we should have done in the first place.”
Mad Dog stood stock still for a moment then slowly turned. He recoiled a little when he saw Hood, as if not recognizing him, but then his eyes narrowed to accusing slits. “That thing killed Bender. It has to die.”
“And it will. But I’m not going to lose any more—”
“Go on then,” Mad Dog snapped. “I’ll do it myself.” He spun around and started down the passage, following the blood trail.
“Dale!” Hood shouted. “Get back here.”
Mad Dog did not answer, did not stop.
“Dale!” Hood suddenly felt unsteady, nauseated. It might have just been the adrenaline letdown or the realization that one of his mates was dead and they were probably all going to die, but the single thought that railroaded through the fog in his brain was far more terrifying.
I’ve lost control.