“I’m fine.”
“The lichen,” Hood went on, ignoring the rebuttal. He took his mask out of its carrier pouch. “That’s got to be it. It’s releasing spores… Or maybe a gas. Even if it’s not affecting us yet, it will if we aren’t protected.”
He brought the mask to his face and pulled the straps over his head, snugging it into place. Wearing it brought on an immediate surge of anxiety. He couldn’t seem to draw a breath. The mask was suffocating him. He had to fight the urge to tear it off and fling it away into the darkness.
After a few seconds, he managed to get some air into his lungs, but the panic did not relent and wouldn’t, he knew, until he could see again. He spread the flexible arms of the glasses as wide as he could and slipped them on over the clear lenses of the mask. When his ability to see the cavern around him returned, he was relieved to discover Rollie likewise donning his protective mask. “Phantom, are you still there?”
“Major Hood. You need to get out of there. Now.”
“We’re wearing pro-masks,” Hood said. “That will buy us some time.”
“Those won’t protect you from what’s coming.”
“What are you talking about?”
Something changed in Hood’s view of the cavern. In addition to their immediate surroundings, he saw ethereal shapes like lines drawn with smoke, only instead of floating in the air they were inside the walls — or more accurately, beyond them. Phantom was showing him a three-dimensional virtual representation of the entire cavern system, literally giving him the ability to see through solid rock. A segmented line consisting of bright red arrows appeared on the floor and continued into the passages to reveal a convoluted escape route.
“Please hurry, Major.” Phantom said.
“Why?”
Something new appeared in the ghost image, or rather four somethings, moving with slow determination down other passages in the smoke-like maze. Although they too looked like ghosts, Hood knew they were actually monsters — the surviving members of the Monster Squad.
“You said they were dead,” Hood accused.
“To all intents and purposes, they are. And if you don’t move now, you will be too.”
“You’re just going to leave them here? Like this?”
“There’s nothing you or I can do for them. If you don’t leave right now, you will be killed. The team may have removed their glasses and severed my link to them, but they are still wearing their battlesuits, which utilize adaptive camouflage and bullet resistant metamaterials. You won’t be able to kill them.”
Hood gestured at the headless corpse of Imhotep. “Tell that to him.”
Phantom did not respond.
Hood looked up again, noting the position of the four spectral figures closing on his location. More information was appearing before his eyes — the course, distance and estimated time of arrival for each. The nearest was less than fifty meters — fifteen seconds — away, and moving faster.
“They’re coming,” he shouted.
Rollie jerked his rifle up but then started turning uncertainly. Hood mentally kicked himself for forgetting that the other man could not see what he did, and pointed toward the passage from which the target would emerge. “There! Five seconds to contact.”
It was more like three.
The ghost image resolved into flesh and blood — it was Bride.
And yet, it wasn’t.
Despite Phantom’s repeated insistence that there had been no physical transformation, the thing that emerged from the passage was more beast than woman.
Bride’s careful braid had come unraveled, unleashing a tangle of snakes that writhed about a face that was no longer even remotely pretty, but deathly pale, like that of a reanimated corpse. The rest of her body was covered in scaly chameleon skin that rippled through random color changes. Her eyes bulged from their sockets, the irises surrounded by whites that glowed with an unnatural green light. Those eyes found Hood and Rollie. Her lips peeled back to bare her teeth in a feral grimace, and then she started forward again.
Hood quickly brought his weapon up, but as he placed the front sight on her, he understood that the monster he was seeing was not real. Whether it was that realization, or the filtered air blunting the hallucinatory properties present in the environment, the illusion of a beast fell away like a veil, revealing the woman—
Delilah!
—that she really was. There was still madness in her eyes, but also a fear so primal that it made Hood’s heart ache.
She doesn’t know what she’s doing.
He lowered his rifle and extended a hand to her, hoping that she would understand. He thought he saw a glimmer of recognition in her eyes….
And then her face dissolved into a froth of red as Rollie opened up on full auto.
Hood retched into his mask as the nearly headless corpse fell back. Rollie moved toward her, firing the whole time. He unloaded the entire magazine into her, and then reloaded and kept shooting. Hood raised a hand, desperate to end the carnage, but Rollie did not stop shooting until there was nothing left of Bride’s head.
Hood sank to his knees, struggling to catch his breath. “Why—?” was all he managed to say.
Through ringing ears, he heard Rollie shouting, “Is that all of them?”
He raised his head and, fighting a wave of vertigo, looked around until he found three more ghost images — two moving through the maze of passages to his right, and one closing fast from their rear. He pointed weakly to the passage behind them. Rollie quickly reloaded, then turned and aimed his weapon down the tunnel, but after a few seconds, he glanced over at Hood. “Bossman, are you gonna help out here, or what?”
Hood struggled to find his voice. “Rollie, we can’t do this.”
“The fuck we can’t,” Rollie snarled. “Kill or be killed, boss, and ‘be killed’ is not a fucking option. So suck it up and help me exterminate these things.”
Hood’s head was swimming. He knew Rollie was right… Knew that if they did not kill the Monster Squad, they would never leave the cave system.
They killed and consumed their comrades…
But he couldn’t bring himself to think of them as the enemy. They were American soldiers. Brothers in arms. And they were sick. Under the influence of a mind-altering substance. Maybe if he and Rollie could lure them out of the cave… Get them into the fresh air… Get them medical attention.
The ghost image was approaching fast. Twenty-five meters. Twenty.
Hood tried to speak, tried to articulate his plan, but the words refused to come.
The ghost materialized, a slender figure that could only be Vlad, the Russian-born sniper. Unlike Bride and Imhotep however, Vlad had left his balaclava on, hiding his face from view. Hood barely had time to register this fact before Rollie opened fire.
Vlad went down under the hailstorm, writhing and curling like a worm on a fishhook. His arms came up, covering his head, and he let out a wail that was audible even over the roar of Rollie’s HK, a wail that was not silenced by the relentless assault. As he lay there, thrashing and squirming, large dark spots began to appear on the fabric of Vlad’s coverall garment and matching balaclava. The bullets were wreaking havoc on the adaptive camouflage. But Vlad was still alive. The rounds weren’t getting through the metamaterial.
Rollie’s gun abruptly went silent. Hood saw him button out the magazine, letting it fall to the ground in his haste to reload, but he wasn’t fast enough. In the instant that the punishing attack ceased, Vlad uncurled from his fetal ball and bounded up, springing at Rollie.