Something was hammering at the door, and Sitterson knew it would soon be inside. Hinges squealed. Metal bent.
Emergency power flicked on, and the lighting was low-level, most of the power being fed into life support. Ha! That phrase had flashed across Sitterson’s main computer screen and he’d choked on laughter. Life support!
Truman stood his ground, gun in one hand and his microphone in the other, and Sitterson had to admire the guy’s persistence as he tried to call in reinforcements. Didn’t he see the fucking screens? he thought. But in a way he was jealous of Truman’s defense mechanism. Holding onto routine, and order, and procedure… they were insulating him against the terrible truth. That things had fallen apart, and their true descent had only just begun.
The three large screens flashed to life again, and carnage appeared intermittently across them, images changing every few seconds and virtually all of them displaying something ghastly…
A clown skipped and leapt toward a barricade behind which several guards hunkered down, firing again and again into the advancing thing. Bullet after bullet struck it, but its baggy clown’s trousers and tent-like shirt seemed to absorb the projectiles. When a few rounds took it in the face its head flipped back, but then its make-up seemed to flow as the holes disappeared and its gleeful, horrendous grin reappeared. It carried a large curved blade in one hand, but the image flashed away before Sitterson saw the blade put to use.
“The door’s going to give!” Truman said.
“Go get me a coffee!” Hadley called, his laughter high and desperate.
A unicorn gored a scientist against a wall, its horn probing through his stomach and chest, grinding, tearing, and his spurting blood painted its gorgeous flowing mane red.
“We’re fucked,” Lin said. There was a time not too long ago when Sitterson had intended doing just that to her, yes. He considered going to her and holding her now, but that would have seemed just foolish.
A werewolf fell on a woman, dragging her down beneath a camera’s eye and standing again with blood and flesh across its face and the woman’s tattered scalp in one giant paw.
“Top hinge has gone,” Truman said.
“How many magazines you got?” Sitterson asked.
“The regulation three.”
Of course. The regulation three. Not like Truman to hide a few more around his person, was it? A grenade, perhaps? A secret nuke?
A group of goblins drove one of the complex’s golf carts along a narrow corridor, running people down and reversing over them, aiming for their heads, bursting them, then stirring their extended fingers in the resultant mess before driving on, cackling gleefully and giving the camera the slimy finger.
“Hey!” Hadley said, pointing at the main screen. Anna Patience Buckner emerged from an elevator into the bloodstained lobby.
“Well, why should she miss out on the party?” Sitterson muttered. The mystery of how she’d found her way down from the surface really did not matter now.
The door bent inward, and smoke started pouring into Control.
“Time to go,” Sitterson said quietly. He nudged Lin and pointed at the carpet beneath his desk, which he pulled up to reveal a code-locked trapdoor.
“But—” she said, nodding at Truman.
“He’ll buy us time,” Sitterson said. Hadley joined them, a submachine gun nursed in the crook of his arm.
“Where did you—?” Lin began.
“Personal life insurance.” His voice was high-pitched and uncertain.
“Just make sure I have time to open this fucking thing,” Sitterson said. “Oh look, the scarecrows are here.”
Truman was firing into the face of a straw man who was climbing through a wrenched gap between door and frame. The bullets passed through the scarecrow’s head without any effect, and he lashed out with long bladed fingers, catching the soldier across the forearm. Truman cursed and stepped back, firing again at the creature’s chest. More climbed in after him, four in all, and as the soldier changed magazines one of them bit into his left bicep.
He screeched and tore his arm away, losing a good weight of muscles and flesh in the process.
Hadley let rip with the machine gun. A scarecrow danced and jittered as the bullets ripped through him, writhing like a marionette. then laughed and advanced on the shooter.
“Our monsters have a fucking sense of humor?” he shouted. “Since when? I didn’t know about this!” He fired some more, concentrating on the scarecrow’s legs and amputating one at the thigh. It fell over and started to crawl.
“I need ten more seconds!” Sitterson said.
“Running out of time!” Hadley snapped back.
“It’s on emergency lockdown! I’m bypassing…”
“Come on, come on!” Lin said, pressing herself against his side, breasts squashed against his arm. He glanced at her and saw that her hair band had come loose, hair spilling over her right shoulder.
“Jesus Christ,” he said, “you’re gorgeous!”
“Oh,” Hadley said from somewhere behind him. “Right. Grenade.”
Sitterson glanced back at the melee by the broken main door. Truman had dropped his gun and was batting at the scarecrows as they sliced and bit him, and in his right hand he held a small black object. He bit away the pin and held it up.
“Son of a bitch,” Sitterson mumbled, “that’s against regulations.” The grenade exploded.
He sprawled across the trapdoor, Lin spilling from his back and crying out as she struck the console.
Burning straw started to drift down around them and Lin looked past him at his desk.
“Hadley!” she shouted.
“What?” Sitterson snapped.
“Blast… blew him over…” She stood, shaking her head as blood leaked from her left ear. Burning straw landed in her hair and she waved it absently away.
Sitterson stood and leaned over his ruined console, resting his hand in something that had once been part of Truman. Down in the main control area, smoke drifted as the main door fell open, and Hadley was crawling slowly for the stairs back up to Control.
But something followed him. Something dark, swimming through the smoke as if passing through water, a fin breaking the surface, black hair visible here and there, black eyes, its wet black mouth opening wide, and Sitterson knew what was to come. If it hadn’t been so ridiculous he might even have laughed.
The merman closed on Hadley and turned him over, placing a huge webbed hand around his throat.
“Oh, come on!” Hadley said, and the creature bit off his face.
Hadley’s gone, Sitterson thought, falling to his knees and turning back to the trapdoor. “Steve’s gone.”
“So will we be if—” Lin said, and then the trapdoor gave an electronic buzz and its red-lit panel showed green. “Got it!” he swung the heavy trapdoor open and turned to Lin with a grin, about to say, Ladies first.
A tentacle appeared from the gloom and wrapped around her throat, constricting so quickly and powerfully that her tongue protruded, eyes bulged, and she spat blood as she was whipped back out of view. Sitterson fell sideways into the hole, hands around his head to lessen the impact.
He landed in a small chamber and stood quickly, reaching up to close the trapdoor, expecting something to fall on him at any moment and go about destroying him. We were so close, he thought, and he actually felt tears welling as he swung the trapdoor shut and locked it from within.