But that was the only the tip of the iceberg.
Enormous scars mapped their bodies, white and purple marks with crisscrossing patterns like the laces of a football. The coarse black hair that covered their scalps was patchy in places, revealing where incisions had been made. Some of the wounds were not completely healed, but oozed fluid; plastic tubes sprouted from some, external veins that ran around their bodies and disappeared again somewhere else. In some distant corner of his mind, he registered the fact that these weren’t merely child soldiers. They were living science experiments, enhanced with chemicals and probably lobotomized, stitched together like something from Frankenstein’s laboratory. Whatever had made them human once, was now gone completely.
Somers felt a different kind of fury welling up inside him.
What the hell is this place?
He wanted to turn back, storm the compound and tear it down to its foundations. He wanted to find the monsters responsible for such atrocities and rip them limb from limb…but that wasn’t why he was here.
He was vaguely aware that he had lost his weapon in the battle. His radio set had also been torn away, leaving him deaf to the needs of the rest of the team. More of the… What should he even call them? ‘Frankensteins’ was the first thing that came to his mind… They were rushing up the road from the compound, but the majority of them were massing at the entrance to Building Two, where King and the others were pinned down.
He had to get to the van, join Zelda and then get the others out of the compound. The mission was his first priority, and right now his team needed him.
TWENTY-SEVEN
King’s satisfaction at disrupting the macabre surgery was short-lived. As he returned to the main hallway, he heard the low rumble of footsteps in the nearby stairwell, a sure sign that trouble was approaching. Then, even that sound was drowned out, as the roar of engines coming to life sent a tremor through the entire building.
Rainer was getting away, and there wasn’t anything he could do about it.
Suddenly, the door to the stairwell burst open, and human shapes began rushing through. King had his MP5 up and ready to meet the attack, as did Tremblay and Silent Bob, but for a moment, all three were too stunned by what they beheld to pull a trigger.
Christ, they’re just kids, King thought.
Except they weren’t. They might once have been innocent children, but not anymore. In the hallway lighting, he could clearly see what Somers had only been able to glimpse — the sprouting tubes, the surgical scars and mismatched limbs and muscles bulging from artificial growth hormones. The children they had once been were as dead as the young man whose organs had been callously harvested, and in their place there were only these monsters.
In an instant, they swarmed over Silent Bob, who stood nearest to the stairwell. He scrambled back at the last second, swinging his submachine gun like a club, but then he was gone, buried under a wave of bodies. The unmistakable violence brought King out of his horror, and he squeezed the trigger, hurling lead soundlessly into the onrushing mass of human flesh. Some of the monsters flinched as the bullets tore into them, but driven by steroids and raw primal fury, they did not slow. Before he could even think about changing his tactics, the leading edge of the wave crashed into him.
Suddenly, King was yanked backward. He struggled for a moment before realizing that it was Tremblay who had seized hold of him, dragging him into one of the rooms that opened off the hallway. The Delta operator slammed the door shut and braced it with his back. A moment later, the entire wall shook as the attacking mob began hammering against the barrier.
Tremblay grimaced. “Any bright ideas, boss man?”
“Working on it.” King gave the room a quick look. It contained a few desks and chairs, but nothing that seemed to offer a way of holding off the attackers, much less an escape route. The door shook again, and a long dark line appeared in the wood as it began splitting in two. The walls rattled with the relentless pounding, and then even floor began to shake.
Okay, we can’t stay here and we can’t get out… What does that leave?
The flimsy construction gave King an idea, and in a rush of inspiration, he tipped one of the desks over and slid it toward Tremblay, positioning it so the desktop was facing away from him.
“I don’t think that will hold them for very long,” Tremblay said.
“It’s not supposed to.” King dipped a hand into a pouch on his vest and brought out a green-gray spherical object identical to the one Rainer had used to effect his escape.
Tremblay’s eyes went wide. “Oh, you’re not.”
King’s only answer was to pull the safety pin on the grenade. “Better get down.”
As Tremblay slid to the floor, seeking cover behind the desk, the top of the door split completely apart. King tossed the grenade underhanded, so it arced through the room to drop near the far wall, and then he threw himself down next to Tremblay, likewise bracing the door. Grasping arms slipped through the gap above their heads, trying to force the opening wider. It seemed inevitable that they would succeed.
And then the world exploded.
The detonation unleashed a storm of kinetic energy in all directions, compressing the air into a wall as hard as steel, which expanded outward in a millisecond. The overpressure wave superheated the air in the small room, and would have vaporized everyone inside if the walls had been made of stiffer stuff. Because the building was little more than plywood on a stick-built frame, the side of the structure was blasted open, relieving some of the pressure. The shockwave picked up loose furniture and hurled it away from the blast center. The walls bulged outward, as if the room was a balloon being inflated by a breath from a giant. The broken door was blasted off its hinges, which not only hurled the attacking mob back, but also caused King and Tremblay to fall backward. This proved fortuitous, because it helped protect them from a deadly spray of steel fragments that surfed the leading edge of the blast wave. The nearly molten metal shredded everything it touched, including several of the monstrosities massed in the hallway beyond. The desk caught some of the fragments that would have ripped into the Delta operators, but even as it did, the cheap wood was smashed apart by the blast, and the two men were pummeled by the broken pieces.
Although they had done everything they could to prepare for the blast, their survival was as much a matter of luck as it was forethought, and it took them a few seconds to recover their wits. King rolled over to find Tremblay also shaking off the effects. The blond soldier mumbled something — probably one of his trademark one-liners — but King couldn’t hear anything except a loud and steady high-pitched tone inside his head. He gave Tremblay a thumbs-up, and when the other man returned it, he gestured toward the gaping hole where the wall had been. The two men crawled forward, skirting along the edge of a newly created opening in the floor, and lowered themselves into the compound.
For a few seconds, they had only the dead for company. Several bodies — many of them Asian men dressed like wannabe hip-hop performers with AK-47s clutched in their dead hands — lay scattered about the courtyard, felled by sniper fire. King realized that he and Tremblay were now probably in someone’s scope, but with his ears still ringing, there was no way to make contact.
He chose the shortest path back to the gate and motioned for Tremblay to follow, but before they had gone fifty feet, a glimpse of movement revealed one of the living atrocities prowling the compound. The thin figure — a patchwork that was equal parts teenage girl and professional wrestler — just stared at them for a moment, and then she tilted her head back and opened her mouth, as if she was trying to catch a raindrop on her tongue. King didn’t need his faculty of hearing to know that she was sounding the alarm. The silent scream lasted only a few seconds, after which the thing lurched toward them.