But in front of those chairs stood a terrifying beast covered in blood.
A Skull.
-4-
A beam of moonlight speared in through the cracked window beside the Skull. The beast slowly turned, twisting on its taloned feet, moving into the light. Its shoulder blades jutted out from the gray flesh along its back, overgrown so much they appeared to be the shorn-off remnants of a demon’s wings. Each vertebra had pushed out of its skin. They formed a line of gnarled, bony knobs up and down its back. The creature’s ribcage had seemingly metastasized, too, bulwarking the beast’s chest in what looked to be organic armor.
The Skull’s long, skinny arms were a mixture of roping muscle throbbing against nearly translucent flesh and spiky nodules where uncontrollable bony growths had erupted from beneath the beast’s skin. Each finger bone had grown long enough that they had pierced the tips of the creature’s digits, hooking inward slightly, gleaming in the moonlight. Those finger bones had become claws that would rival any tiger’s, and O’Neil had seen claws like that rip out a person’s guts on more than one occasion.
As he caught sight of the beast’s face, O’Neil let his rifle fall on its strap and pulled his fixed blade knife from his thigh sheath. Closing in on the beast was the last thing he wanted to do. But if he didn’t kill this monster silently, then he might as well just yell for all the hellish beings outside to come join them in the chapel.
He took one fast step toward the monster. Its bloodshot eyes seemed to bore straight through his NVGs. Bones pushed out from its brow, creating a hard-ridged line.
Somewhere beneath all those wild bone formations, O’Neil could see the man that the creature used to be. But any pity he felt for this beast that had once been human was dashed when the Skull’s cracked lips tore back into a snarl, revealing a mouth of stained and jagged teeth.
The creature tensed, looking ready to pounce. It sliced out with one hand, claws aimed for O’Neil’s face.
O’Neil ducked under the beast’s attack and stabbed his KA-BAR up straight through the soft flesh beneath the Skull’s chin. He felt a familiar bit of resistance before the blade punched up through the roof of the abomination’s mouth and into its brain. The creature snapped at him, teeth clamping over the blade, eyes bulging. Warm blood poured out from the wound, dripping over O’Neil’s hand.
The monster flailed, trying to tear at O’Neil. Loeb rushed at the beast and pinned one of its arms against the wall so it wouldn’t tear a chunk out of O’Neil’s neck. Van grabbed the other hand of the creature, cranking it backward until the snap of bone echoed through the hall.
Just a single scratch from those claws would lead to an infection that would turn O’Neil into one of the beasts in days.
Supposedly that team of contractors called the Hunters had developed a rudimentary preventative technique using existing medicine to stop the transformation in its tracks.
But O’Neil didn’t trust the mercs or their medicine.
He fought to avoid the beast’s claws and teeth. Preferred not to be scratched or bitten.
The monster might have been half-dead, but it strained against Van and Loeb, threatening to break free.
O’Neil drove the knife in deeper. Van and Loeb fought to hold the monster against the wall. With its mouth opening and closing on the knife, the beast tried to shriek. But the only thing that came out of its mouth was blood popping in sticky bubbles.
Finally, with another twist of the knife, the beast went still.
He tried to catch the back of the beast’s head, preventing its heavy weight from slamming loudly against the ground. Loeb and Ven helped gently lower the creature. They let it rest against the wall. Blood trickled from between its fanged teeth.
The stench of the monster lingered on O’Neil’s uniform. He tried to ignore the way it stung his nostrils and made his eyes water as he removed the chairs barricading the exit door with the help of his team.
He took a moment to catch his breath, willing his thundering heart to settle. Despite each time he had to kill one of these things up close, it never got easier. The stinking breath, the warm blood, the organic armor, and the threat that one wrong move could turn him into one, made every kill a challenge.
This precision, this teamwork that had led to the Skull’s demise was precisely the reason his SEAL team had been sent on tonight’s mission.
O’Neil rallied Bravo around the exit door as Reynolds led Alpha a few yards back, ready to provide cover.
At Reynolds’s signal, O’Neil and Loeb pushed out the exit door and onto the sidewalk just behind the chapel. They took cover behind a screen of bushes, waiting for Alpha to take their positions between the trees.
Yard by painful yard they advanced through the trees, following the path that would take them toward the engineering and research buildings.
The voices of Skulls penetrated the tree cover. With the shadows and darkness suffocating their surroundings, O’Neil couldn’t see much farther than a few yards at a time. The stench of the beasts ebbed and flowed with the breeze swishing through the leaves. He could hear them crunching through the undergrowth, hear the tap of their talons on concrete paths.
A constant chorus of moans and howls sounded from nearly every direction of the campus. The beasts seemed agitated. Like they sensed an intruder was in their midst.
If these monsters were already rushing around the campus like that, they either really did have some inclination that the SEALs were here—or they had already been involved in a feeding frenzy.
The scientists they were supposed to retrieve had lost contact with Frederick two days ago. That hadn’t been entirely unexpected. They had warned they were out of fuel for their generators and the Skulls had spread around Duke, so they had no intention of trying to find fuel to resurrect a noisy generator. They had also since run out of batteries for their radio equipment, so they were effectively in the dark.
Which meant, for all O’Neil knew, his team was risking their asses to save people who might already be dead.
He shook those thoughts from his head.
He couldn’t worry about what might be or might have been. There was only now. He thought of something his dad used to tell him when he was a kid asking about all the bad things that might happen in the future, from terrorists to nuclear wars to disease outbreaks.
His dad had told him that to survive the future, you had to survive your present.
While his dad had never served, instead pursuing a career as a biology professor at the University of Colorado in Boulder, those words still seemed just as prescient now as they did then. They were perfectly applicable to his life as a SEAL. He needed to focus on his current position and the threats around him before he worried about what might happen thirty minutes from now inside the Levine Science Research Center.
Because if he and his team didn’t survive the present, then the scientists waiting on them in the building definitely wouldn’t have a future.
He tried to pinpoint where every clicking footstep was coming from, every loud growl, every crunching leaf. The drone pilot reported movers around the main campus, but the pilot couldn’t see through all the trees and buildings surrounding O’Neil’s team. There would be no warning from the pilot when a beast erupted from the shelter of the trees.
All O’Neil could hope to do was meld into the shadows. The chorus of monsters never let up, and the stench never left his nose. He wound past silhouettes lurching between the trees and guided his team as far as he could from every sound that might indicate a Skull until they could finally see their destination—a three-story building with thin concrete columns stretching up the first two floors. Large glass windows lined all three levels. Most of the panes were covered in filth and dust, neglected since the beginning of the outbreak, preventing him from seeing what lay beyond.