Debris crashed down from the ceiling in front of the two officers as Iosif started his reply, cutting him off before he could begin to speak. Through a hole in the ceiling, a dark shape fell to the ground, deftly ducking to the side to avoid the hail of gunfire unleashed upon it by the two soldiers. The shadow tore at the wall with long, savage claws, pulling itself along the side of Iosif and landing behind him.
Lucas and Iosif turned to fire at the shadow, but their quick reactions were no match for the beast. Standing a few feet away, Lucas watched in horror as the shadow reached out for Iosif, its long muscular arms masked by wispy tendrils of darkness. Iosif’s finger instinctively pulled the trigger on his rifle and a burst of bullets tore through the shadow. It made no noise as it absorbed the gunfire, seemingly unaffected by the steam of depleted uranium and lead.
Blood red eyes stared into Iosif’s mask, meeting his gaze head on. The seconds he spent in the shadow’s grasp stretched in slow motion. Rows of black teeth glinted in the light of Lucas and Iosif’s guns as the shadow stretched open the upper portion of its frame. Using both its limbs and its teeth, it rended Iosif’s body, tearing his head from his shoulders and splitting his torso apart in the center.
Lucas screamed as he fired his SVD, squeezing the trigger multiple times until the weapon clicked, indicating that it was out of ammunition. The creature paid Lucas no mind as it fled down the hall, jumping up and then crashing down, forming a gaping hole in the floor. In shock, Lucas stood stark still, unsure of what to do next. His training had prepared him to face death and atrocities on every scale, but never to face a foe the likes of this.
Lucas was shaken from his stupor by the sound of a second scream that came from the floor below. Turning around, he ran toward the stairwell, releasing the empty magazine from his SVD and replacing it with one containing bullets with bright orange tips. Along with standard armor-piercing rounds, Lucas had brought several magazines containing high-explosive rounds, capable of blowing a hole the size of a car in a steel wall.
Let’s see how you handle this, you bastard!
Chapter Fifteen
As the largest medical building in the city, the main hospital was where the majority of the injured citizens and workers were brought after the explosion of reactor four. There were three wings in the main hospital building, each with its own complicated set of corridors and rooms. The condition of the hospital was the same as the rest of the city as it too had suffered under the ravages of both vandals and time.
Rotten floorboards, crumbling walls, peeling paint and sagging roofs were only the beginning of the building’s troubles. Smaller wildlife in the city had found comfort among the leftover medical supplies, leading to rat and mice nests being scattered throughout the building. Most of the medical equipment was scavenged by thieves in the months following the disaster, though this situation had a certain irony as the supplies did more harm than good due to the radiation that had contaminated them.
The darkness combined with the dilapidated condition of the hospital made Lucas’s task none the easier as he ran forward. A splatter of blood had been thrown across his mask by Iosif’s death, though Lucas made no move to wipe it away. Through the red color he saw only anger and destruction as his rage became the focal point through which he concentrated.
Coming out of the stairwell and into the basement, Lucas saw a shadowy figure ram through a pair of double doors, pushing its way into a large chamber beyond. Lucas picked up his speed as he ran down the hall, his finger instinctively brushing against the trigger of his SVD. All I need is a good shot, and you’re fucked. In the back of Lucas’s mind, he wondered whether this was true. Both he and Iosif had dumped at least two dozen rounds each into the apparition, all without effect. The high-explosive rounds were different, though, or so Lucas hoped.
Inside the surgical theater, Yuri’s heart began to skip beats as terror overwhelmed him. While he didn’t see the shadow creature enter into the room, he could feel its presence and hear the soft ‘tick tick tick’ of its feet on the floor. The scratching and rustling of the creature made his brain scream and his baser instincts threatened to take over. Run! Run, you fool, before it’s too late! Yuri held still, though, remembering the screams from outside the room that proved that this creature was not something that could be easily escaped.
The sound of soft breathing reached Yuri’s ears and he realized that the creature had somehow come all the way up the stairs of the theater. The flashlight at Yuri’s feet was still on, he noticed, and he quietly fumbled with it, desperate to turn it off in a vain attempt to conceal his location. As the beam passed over his shirt, he noticed his radiation meter. The small tag was already into the orange zone and rising rapidly after remaining still since they had escaped the greenhouse. Yuri dropped the flashlight to the ground in shock, mesmerized by the rapidly changing color of his radiation meter.
A sudden scraping from outside the technician’s booth accompanied the clatter of the flashlight, distracting Yuri from the radiation tag and bringing him back to reality. Yuri took a deep breath and picked the flashlight up again, squeezing the base of it hard in his right hand. I won’t go down without a fight, he thought, though he knew that any resistance he could put up to the creature would be utterly futile.
Yuri stood up from the floor of the technician’s booth, and turned to face the shadow that stood before him. Before the beam of the flashlight could pass over the creature, a shout came from the front of the surgical theater, distracting the creature towering over Yuri and causing it to whip around to face the source of the noise.
“Hey you! Catch!” Standing in the doorway of the surgical theater, Lucas held his SVD firmly against his shoulder. His breathing was rapid but in control and he allowed his training and instincts as a sniper to take over. Time slowed as the laser beam from the bottom of the SVD’s barrel shone across the head of the shadow, reflecting in its twin red eyes and glinting off of its bared teeth.
Out of the corner of Lucas’s eye he saw the glint of Yuri’s flashlight and said a quick silent prayer that whoever was holding the light wouldn’t be harmed. The shadow began to move toward Lucas, furious at his intrusion on its hunt. To Lucas, it felt like he had been standing in the doorway of the room for hours, but only a few seconds had gone by. His gloved hand wrapped around the trigger of the SVD, squeezing in time with his breathing to avoid any unnecessary kick of the rifle. While the beating of his heart and the exhalation and inhalation of his breaths were unlikely to affect the bullet’s trajectory at such close range, he didn’t want to take any chances with the creature.
The SVD’s firing mechanism engaged precisely with Lucas’s squeeze of the trigger, causing the round in the chamber of the rifle to be expelled at high velocity out of the end of the barrel. The orange-tipped round flew at the creature, striking it squarely between its red eyes. For a split second, Lucas thought he might have grabbed the wrong magazine from his pouch. A grim smile spread across his face, though, when the round activated, causing a massive explosion to bloom out of the creature’s head.
While the shadow beast didn’t make any audible noise to show its rage and pain, both Yuri and Lucas winced as it staggered back, the high-explosive round having done serious harm to it. Not waiting to see whether or not one round would be enough, Lucas squeezed the trigger again, expelling round after round into the beast. Each impact caused a new explosion of light, sound and fire to emanate from the beast’s body. With each explosion the two men winced in pain, affected by the creature’s reactions to the bullets in ways that they didn’t fully understand.