Then the source of the quake became clear, as a monstrous thing followed King around the corner, hissing and frothing.
5
King ran faster than ever before, but it still wasn’t enough.
Once he’d heard there was a bioweapons lab concealed underground, he’d planted four bomb-spikes – one in each corner of the ground-floor courtyard inside the outer wall, then he’d headed out a rear gate. That was when the trembling had begun. He’d sensed that it was closer than the rumble they had experienced the last time, and that its force was increasing at an exponential pace.
He had wondered if it was something Knight and Pawn had set off underground, but then the wind died. He could see. A hundred yards behind the building, the soil had erupted, as if a mole twelve feet in diameter was burrowing up from underground. He had thought of the giant 250-foot-diameter sinkholes that had opened in Siberia months earlier.
But the thing that fired out of this hole like a breaching whale was no mole, and the hole had not been a sinkhole, but a tunnel. The creature was ten feet in diameter, and rose up out of the hole straight into the air, at least twenty feet high. It had shiny, wet skin, blood red and covered with cascading rains of dirt. Its long, tapering body was ribbed into segments, and the front end of its tubular shape opened into a huge gaping maw.
It’s a worm, he had thought. It’s huge!
And then the mouth had opened wider, and a plume of purple vapor shot out, making the rocks and soil that it hit steam with wavering fumes.
And... King had thought, Time to go.
As soon as he’d started running for the southwest corner, the massive thing had begun to chase him. He reached the corner and took down two guards, but he didn’t slow.
“King, what’s—” Rook was starting to say.
King had no time to answer him, and the man would get an eyeful in just a second. “Bishop! Going to need that 240, southwest corner. Coming in hot!”
Rook and Queen were already turning to run as he approached them.
“Why am I not surprised it is you who started the big rumbling?” Bishop replied from the other side of the building. She hadn’t said so, but he knew she would be hauling the machine gun to the location he had specified.
“Yeah, count on him to find the one thing out here bigger than a damn rabbit. Knight, Pawn. We’re leaving in a hurry,” Rook said, running side by side with King.
“We’re already on the roof. What the hell is that?” Knight said.
Then King, who had opened his exterior microphone, heard the small man take three shots at the pursuing worm with his sniper rifle. “Didn’t even slow it,” Knight said.
“Slow what?” came Aleman’s disembodied voice. “What are you dealing with?” He was used to being able to see everything the team saw through high tech lenses and video feeds, and he was clearly at a loss with no visuals.
“Seen Tremors or Dune?” Rook asked.
“A giant worm?” Aleman said, disbelief coloring his words.
“Yep, but redder than a Doberman’s wanger.”
Queen had taken the lead in the sprint and was veering toward the corner of the building, just as Bishop rolled on the ground from the opposite direction, coming to rest prone and planting the 240B on its bipod legs.
Queen nimbly leapt over the long weapon and Bishop, and she rounded the corner of the structure. Rook was right behind her, and hopped over Bishop, too. King dove to the ground, next to his sister, just as she opened up with the chugging big gun. He added his FN SCAR to the process, unloading a full magazine at the giant slithering thing heading their way. The ground trembled slightly as the monster approached. King assumed the full-on earthquakes were from it tunneling under the soil and rock.
“Kakova hera,” Bishop swore in Russian – What the fuck? – while pounding the approaching worm with a withering torrent of 7.62 rounds, highlighted with the occasional tracer shot of brilliant orange, so she could adjust her vector of fire. The concentrated fusillade chewed a ragged hole through its side, just to the right of its black, gaping maw, but the beast’s approach wasn’t halted or even slowed.
“Pick up,” King said, buttoning out his magazine and quickly inserting another before blazing away at the worm again.
Bishop scooped up the machine gun and ran. King turned to follow her around the corner of the building, just as the rumbling thing spit at him again. This time a burst of the purple liquid arced forward out of the cloud of vapor, dashing against the side of his environment suit. He saw his left arm start to smoke, but he didn’t slow down his pace.
Bishop, Rook and Queen had all set up at the northeast corner of the building, past the big, wooden front doors. While Bishop inserted a new drum into the machine gun, the others were firing above King’s head at the pursuing creature. The worm had continued well past the corner. It clearly couldn’t turn effectively, and King was grateful for the brief reprieve.
“Boss, your suit’s smoking, like it’s gonna melt,” Rook said.
Bishop opened fire on the creature, this time able to strafe the worm’s full forty-foot-long side, as it slowly arced around the open desert floor.
“It sounds like a Mongolian Death Worm,” Aleman said over their comms.
“Oh that’s helpful,” Rook said. “It couldn’t be the Mongolian Fluffy Rainbow-Pooping Worm?” He dropped a magazine and slotted a fresh one into his SCAR, but then let the weapon hang. It wasn’t doing any damage to the giant ribbed creature. He’d wait until it closed the distance, and then he’d try his ‘Girls’ – a pair of IMI Desert Eagle Mark XIX Magnum .50 caliber semi-automatic pistols. He’d had several pairs over the years, some getting lost in different skirmishes. He hadn’t yet come across anything, no matter how big, that wouldn’t feel a few slugs from the handguns at close range.
“He has a point,” King said, perturbed. “How to kill it would be better than a name.”
“It’s a mythical cryptid. Supposed to be about four feet long,” Aleman said.
“Bigger,” Queen said. “Much bigger. Twelve-foot diameter. Forty feet long.”
King pulled free his KA-BAR knife, a 7-inch blade like Queen’s, and slid it into the boiling, formerly fur-covered sleeve of his environment suit’s fabric, slicing it open, then he dropped the smoking knife on the ground. He’d tried to cut away the burning part of the suit, but had failed. “Rook.”
It was all he had to say. As he flipped off the helmet and hood of the suit, breathing in the freezing air, Rook moved forward to grab the outer fabric of the suit in places where it hadn’t been coated in the creature’s deadly venom. He pulled the fabric taut as King disentangled himself from the outer garment, being sure to lean as far from the smoking side as possible.
Rook instantly saw King’s breath add a cloud of vapor to the already rising ribbon of steam from the cooking fur on the ruined suit.
“It’s supposed to be able to spit venom,” Aleman continued.
“Think we can confirm that one,” Rook said.
Queen fired a sustained burst with her SCAR as Bishop reloaded the machine gun. The creature had finished its wide loop and was homing in on the team, at their new location.
“We need a plan,” Queen urged.
“There’s nothing about how to kill them. No one has ever even had a confirmed sighting of one...” Aleman sounded frantic.
“Then give me some other intel,” King said, his teeth beginning to chatter. “How long do I have in just the wetsuit in temps like these?” He had shed the outer garment, now smoking on the ground like a dead animal on a charnel heap. He wore just the under-suit, which was a special gel-heated neoprene, and he had been able to salvage his boots and the furry gloves from the outer suit.