He glanced over at Rollie, looking for support, but the other man was already starting down the passage after Mad Dog.
I’ve lost control. Failed.
A Delta troop wasn’t rigidly bound to military discipline like other units, but a few things remained sacrosanct, and following orders from a commanding officer was one of them. Mad Dog, as the troop sergeant major, knew that — lived it, embodied it. More than that, he was Hood’s closest friend.
And now he was… What? A rogue operator? A walking suicide?
I don’t know what to do, Hood thought. Without a team to follow his lead, he was nothing.
But some part of him fought back against the despair. No. They’re still my responsibility, even if they won’t follow orders.
Snugging the stock of his rifle into the pit of his shoulder, he hurried to join the others. “Wait—” His voice caught, coming out as a whimper. He cleared his throat, drew in a deep breath of the foul air, and tried again. “Hold up. We’ll do this—”
As if startled by his voice, Rollie whirled, his rifle pointing right at Hood’s head. Hood immediately let go of his weapon and raised his hands in a display of non-aggression. To his dismay, Rollie’s eyes remained wide, almost terrified, with no hint of recognition. “It’s one of them!” Rollie shouted.
Mad Dog was suddenly at Rollie’s side, his rifle likewise trained on Hood.
Hood reached higher. “Guys, it’s me!”
The plea seemed to break the spell of confusion. The two men did not immediately lower their weapons, but they did not fire either. After a few tense seconds, Mad Dog said, “Jeff? Jesus, buddy. You looked just like one of them.”
Hood was momentarily dumbfounded.
“Like a freaking bug-eyed-monster,” added Rollie.
“Right?” confirmed Mad Dog. “You should lose the NVGs. You’ll see better without them. And those things… I think they’ve got some kind of natural camouflage. Like chameleons.”
“Thanks for the tip,” Hood muttered, lowering his hands, but keeping his goggles on. Mad Dog’s assertion, while spoken with authority, had no basis in fact. The man had removed his NVGs long before their encounter with the creature. More importantly though, if the other man was right about the creatures’ vulnerabilities, then they would need every advantage.
Mad Dog didn’t wait to see if Hood would take his advice but turned and resumed moving forward. Rollie followed, covering the right flank, and Hood took a position behind him and to the left. As they advanced, the first two men had several false starts, whirling to confront something glimpsed at the edge of their vision, only to discover nothing there. Hood wasn’t sure what to make of their reaction — either the men were glimpsing something that he couldn’t see with NVGs, something that could burrow under the invisible lichen faster than they could follow, or they were hallucinating.
Even as he contemplated the latter, he glimpsed something in his peripheral vision. It was more a premonition than an actual observation, and when he flicked his gaze to the side to check the edge of the panoramic display, he saw nothing.
Just nerves, he thought. It’s getting to me.
A few steps ahead, Mad Dog’s hand went up, signaling them all to freeze. Hood did so without question, going statue still, but nevertheless searching the darkness ahead. Just beyond where Mad Dog stood, the passage opened up into a larger chamber. The blood streaks continued forward another few paces and then ended beneath a crumpled, vaguely human form.
Bender.
Hood gradually became aware of another shape just beyond the twisted corpse. At first, he wasn’t sure what he was seeing, but as he turned his focus to it, it grew more distinct, as if emerging from a fog. For a fleeting instant, he thought he could see the man it had been, but as he continued to stare, he saw only the monster it had become.
The creature appeared to be sitting with its back to the passage wall. Its entire body was covered in rough mottled scales that shimmered through color changes like someone flipping channels on a TV set. The scales rose to form horny ridges that ran from shoulder to wrist. The hands, which rested on the cavern floor to either side of the creatures long, gangly legs, ended in talons, tipped with hooked claws. The hairless head looked vaguely human at first glance, but then after even a moment’s scrutiny, it became something else — the slavering, proto-canine visage of a demon. The hellbeast was slumped over, as if sleeping.
Hood blinked in disbelief, desperate for some other explanation, and yet unable to deny what his eyes were seeing. Ahead of him, Mad Dog was signaling for a concentrated assault on his three-count. Hood nodded in acknowledgement, and readied his weapon.
Mad Dog raised his fist and extended one finger.
One.
Hood slowly, quietly, shifted the fire selector from safe to semi-auto.
Two.
The creature’s head came up suddenly, its eyes flashing open to look directly at Hood, and then it was moving.
Hood didn’t wait for Mad Dog to give the order. He tracked the moving target, while simultaneously activating the PEQ-2 and repeatedly squeezing the HK’s trigger. His first shot cracked against the wall behind the creature. He had no idea whether his second found the target because in the instant between trigger pulls, the air was filled with muzzle flashes and smoke and noise. The creature stumbled, its momentum carrying it forward in a haphazard tumble, even as the intensity of the barrage increased. Hood used the targeting laser to correct his aim, placing the green spot on the beast’s exposed cranium, and kept pulling the trigger until the scaly head came apart in bloody chunks.
He slipped his finger off the trigger, but Mad Dog and Bender continued firing without letup, savaging the corpse, which continued to writhe, either in death throes or from the relentless hammering of incoming rounds. The blood spray and smoke coalesced around the body like mist, rendered green in the NVG display. Hood was about to shout for a ceasefire, but then he saw something moving in that surreal fog, and instead emptied his magazine into it.
He reloaded immediately, but before he could resume firing, Mad Dog raised a hand to signal the end of the assault. The mist gradually settled revealing the aftermath. Hood immediately noticed that the corpse appeared to be mostly intact, albeit somewhat misshapen, save for the head which had completely disintegrated. The rest of the body had gone pale as if all the chameleon pigments had oozed out of the scales, but numerous dark spots, like bruises, showed where bullets had punched through the tough hide.
Curious despite himself, and keeping his HK trained on the shape, he advanced toward it, moving into the cavernous chamber. Mad Dog shook his raised hand, hissing a warning that was barely audible to Hood’s tortured ears, but Hood ignored him and continued toward the body.
Two steps into the chamber, he spied movement from the corner of his eye, and immediately swung around to meet it. As before, there was nothing there… Or if there was, it had moved faster than his eye could follow, but his attention was immediately drawn to something that had been hidden from view at the mouth of the passage. Lying on the cavern floor was a pair of sunglasses.
He knelt to retrieve them, and stared at them for a moment, trying to recall where he had seen them before. It came to him in a rush of understanding. He pivoted back toward the corpse of the hellbeast, seeing it anew. There was hardly anything recognizable about it, and yet he immediately grasped the truth. The beast had not been one of the insurgent fighters in Doctor Tox’s retinue.
“It was one of them,” he said. “Monster Squad.”
Mad Dog’s right eye twitched, but then he strode forward and knelt beside the fresh kill. “I’ll be damned. You’re right. I think it was the big one… Imhotep.”