The monster let out a very human shriek of pain. Although his right wing kept flapping ineffectively, he instantly lost the ability to fly, dropping straight down. Still gripping the severed wing, Sanders hit the floor first and I lost sight of him when the giant fruit fly landed on top of him.
Before I could check to see if they were alive, the wheezing noise — which I now realized was a messed-up human-fly buzzing sound — returned.
Even as I called out a warning, they were on us.
They flew in from behind us. I thought I heard words beneath the incessant buzzing — two repeated words, like a chant — but I couldn’t wrap my mind around what they were saying before the inquisitive Cop part of me was overtaken by the Warrior.
Two of them lifted Bunny off the ground. Each gripping a shoulder, they struggled to carry the big man, but then a third grabbed him by the neck.
I shot that one first. An instant later, Top hit the one on the left and I hit the right. All head shots. Those bulging red eyes were the perfect bull’s-eyes.
All three of the creatures dropped dead onto Bunny, knocking him down. His knees hit the concrete floor hard, causing him to let out a cry of discomfort, which was immediately muffled as one of the men-flies’ bodies forced his face down, smothering him.
I didn’t have time to dig him out from the pileup as four more mutant fruit flies swarmed down on me and Top.
Top screamed, or maybe I did — probably we both did — as we swept our guns across their bodies. We didn’t call out our targets, we didn’t aim for the bull’s-eye eyes, we just sprayed them with industrial-strength bug spray. For monster-sized pests, forget DEET, lead is much more effective.
Bunny shoved his way out from under the bodies covering him just as the remaining men-flies dropped dead onto him, knocking him back down. He groaned, though out of pain or irritation, I couldn’t tell.
“You okay under there?” I asked, doing a poor job of suppressing a morbid chuckle.
Bunny shoved a single hand up between two bodies, his middle finger extended.
“Pretty fly for a white guy,” Top said just loud enough for me to hear. I groaned.
“I’m okay!” Sanders suddenly called out, apparently thinking my question to Bunny had been for him.
Then suddenly he was not okay.
“Ah!” he screamed. “It’s alive!”
The fruit fly creature that had tried to abduct him moved feebly, trying to stand up. He repeated the same words the swarm had been chanting, only this time I made them out: “Kill me.”
I don’t know if Sanders heard and understood the mutant’s plea or if he was just scared out of his wits, but he moved with unexpected speed. He dove for his fallen gun, snatched it up, and spun around, grouping three bullets into where I assumed the man-thing’s heart still resided. I was impressed.
“Now that’s how you swat a fly!” he said. “Booyah!” He got to his feet and surveyed the gore on the walls around us. It looked exactly as if we’d swatted seven very large flies. Sanders’s puffed chest deflated. “Well, I guess you guys know how to take care of monster pests, too.”
Throwing the guy a bone, I said, “Hey, smart thinking yanking that thing’s wing off.”
He perked up. “Thanks. When I was a kid, I, er, a friend of mine used to pull the wings off flies.”
“I heard one of the early signs of serial killers was that they pulled the wings off butterflies as kids,” Top mused.
“Butterflies are beautiful and graceful, flies are ugly and annoying,” Sanders said defensively.
“You’re starting to look ugly and annoying,” Top said.
“Cool it, First Sergeant,” I said.
Top scowled at Sanders. “I bet the guy was the type to put firecrackers in frogs’ asses and blow them up.”
Sanders looked as if he were going to deny it, instead he blurted out, “George W. Bush did that, too!”
“Yeah, and he probably shot them with BB guns, as well,” I said. “For all we know, there could be mutant man-frogs waiting around the next bend that we’ll have to shoot, so let’s reload and move out.”
Farther into the maze, a loud buzzing heralded the approach of a new threat. The sound was similar to the droning of the fruit fly monsters, yet distinctly different. Angrier.
I racked my brain for any other flying insects the Vault’s Goldman had been working on. Then I remembered.
Wasps.
Why couldn’t it have been bullfrogs?
I’ve been stung by a regular-sized wasp. It hurt like hell. And damn, did it itch. I was certain the poison from a man-sized wasp sting would do more than just itch. It’d kill.
“I’m allergic to bees!” Sanders screamed. He took off at a run.
“Wait!” I shouted. Besides the fact that we needed to stay together because of the shifting passages, the buzzing sound wasn’t coming from behind us like last time…
He was running straight toward them.
Sanders rounded a corner and let out a blood-curdling scream. I gave chase, expecting to find him impaled on a giant stinger.
I found the guard holding a bloody hand to his neck, but he appeared relatively okay.
The lone man-wasp standing a few feet away from him looked more predatory than the men-flies had. He had jagged, enlarged teeth, his wings were thicker and slender, and antennae jutted out of his ears. Where a tail would be on a monkey, a big-ass needle stuck out of him.
Whether because he’d already written Sanders off as dead or because he saw me as a bigger threat, the man-wasp faced off against me. “Kill,” he said. He repeated it in a low, hoarse voice. Over and over.
Probably the creepiest damn thing I’d ever heard.
He spread his wings. I thought it was a macho thing, showing me how big he was.
Nope. It was the start of a lightning-fast attack.
Before I could get a shot off, he launched himself up over me. My barrel followed him, but he immediately plunged down stinger-first toward my upturned face.
I barely had time to pivot out of the way, but even as I turned, I was planning my counterattack. He adjusted his plunge to land on his feet, his knees bending on impact, his stinger nearly touching the ground. I raised my booted right foot and stomped hard at the base of his stinger. With more of a crunch than the snap I’d expected, his unnatural appendage broke off, splattering my leg with black blood and yellow poison.
Shrieking with pain and rage, he spun toward me, mouth wide-open. His teeth reminded me of shark teeth. The original Goldman had been trying to create new strains of humans that could withstand global warming or a nuclear apocalypse or whatever other damage we might do to our planet, so it made sense that he’d have shark genes in the mix since those beasts have survived four hundred million years of climate changes.
This beast didn’t survive another four hundred milliseconds.
I got my gun up just in time to shoot him in the mouth. The bullet sent shards of teeth that didn’t belong in a human mouth into a brain that was no longer human.
“Get down!” Sanders shouted.
I instinctively dropped to the ground as two more man-wasps buzzed over me. They got close enough for me to feel a breeze. And I swear I smelled pollen on them.
“Kill. Kill. Kill,” they chanted with creepy, raspy voices.
“Die, die, die,” Bunny shouted in response as he came around the corner. He collided with one and inadvertently drove it back toward me.
I didn’t have a safe shot with it tangled up with Bunny, but when I reflexively crab-walked backward out of the way, my left hand fell on the first mutant’s separated stinger. I snatched it up and used it to deflect the second mutant’s stinger, which Bunny was unknowingly shoving toward my face.