‘Are you fucking kidding?’ Jenkins hissed. ‘What the hell will that achieve? We’ll still be here and the sergeant will shoot you on sight.’
‘That’s a chance I’m willing to take,’ Archer snapped. He looked at the other men. ‘Who’s with me?’
Klein nodded. Archer got to his feet.
‘Let’s do it.’
Archer turned and stared straight into Kurt Agry’s eyes staring at him over the barrel of a pistol. Before Jenkins could intervene, Kurt’s voice growled in the shadows.
‘Let’s.’
The gunshot was shockingly loud in the confined space of the corridor. Archer’s head flicked backward and his body flailed as the impact of the bullet into his skull hurled him into the control center.
He hit the floor hard, the back of his smashed skull crunching across the tiles.
Kurt Agry lowered his pistol. Jenkins stared at Archer’s lifeless corpse and then looked at the sergeant.
‘Jesus, Kurt, that didn’t help anything. We’re a gun down now.’
Kurt glared a challenge into the eyes of the remaining soldiers as Milner joined them and stared in disbelief at Archer’s body.
‘Gentlemen, our survival depends upon our ability to stick together. We split now, we’ll be dead before dawn. Anybody else tries to take control of this situation I’ll put a bullet in them too, understood?’
Klein stood up and pointed down at Archer’s body.
‘That what you call sticking together?’
‘That’s what I call mutiny,’ Kurt shot back. ‘We’ve got to get the hell out of here, and the only currency we have is the civilians. Unless any of you would like to set foot out there and tempt that fucking thing inside?’
‘We tried baiting it,’ Milner snapped. ‘It didn’t go for it.’
Kurt’s thin lips curled into a grim smile.
‘We’re not going to bait it,’ he replied, ‘just keep it occupied. Milner, get Proctor and Dana out here, and bring Lopez too.’
Milner hurried down the west corridor toward the living quarters as Kurt glanced at the mine entrance. The warped metal bars could hold the creature back, but not forever. Sooner or later it would come through.
He turned as Proctor, Dana and Lopez were marched into the control center, Milner prodding them along with his rifle.
‘This won’t work,’ Dana said. ‘We could hear what you were up to earlier. You tried this with Ethan and failed.’
Dana Ford stood with Proctor at the door to the mine entrance, their hands cuffed as Kurt Agry aimed his rifle at them.
‘It’s better than nothing,’ the sergeant replied. ‘It’ll have to come through you to get to us, and that’s all the extra time we’ll need.’
Proctor swallowed thickly, his eyes quivering behind his spectacles.
‘It’ll kill us,’ he said, his voice trembling.
‘Better you than me,’ Kurt grinned, ‘and it’ll save on bullets. Move.’
Dana Ford stood her ground.
‘Go to hell,’ she spat. ‘You’re going to kill us anyway, so the way I see it, it’s better to die quickly from a bullet than get torn to pieces out there. You want to escape so badly? Go do it yourself, asshole.’
Kurt Agry stared at her for a moment in what might have been surprise. He performed a brief calculation.
‘Have it your way.’
Kurt Agry fired his rifle.
The shot impacted Dana Ford’s chest. Her body jerked as it was thrown backward, the bullet passing through her heart and exiting her back in a fine mist of blood that splattered the paneled wall behind her.
She collapsed to the floor and slumped against the wall, her eyes wide but sightless.
‘Jesus Christ!’ Proctor blurted as tears flooded from his eyes. ‘You’ve killed her!’
Kurt sneered at him. ‘I can see why you’re a scientist.’ He swung the rifle to point at him. ‘You too?’
Proctor stared in terror at the rifle as his hands flew into the air beside his head.
‘Don’t shoot!’ he blubbed, his legs jerking and swaying as he tried to stay upright. ‘I’ll do it.’
Kurt, his rifle pulled tight into his shoulder, gestured with the weapon for Proctor to move to the main door. The scientist shuffled miserably across as Klein reached out and pulled the steel bolts out of the locks before hauling the door slowly open.
The dark, damp interior of the mine entrance yawned open in front of Proctor as he stood with his hands in the air and stared into the blackness. His legs trembled and he seemed to crouch forward slightly as though he wanted to crawl into the tunnel.
‘Get moving,’ Kurt snapped, and with one boot shoved Proctor forward.
The scientist cried out as he plummeted into the darkness and crashed down onto the rocks, his sobs echoing down the tunnel. The rocks dug into his palms and his knees as he struggled to his feet and reluctantly started pushing one foot in front of the other.
60
Ethan walked to the door and knelt down beside the lock. In the dim light he could see that the screws in the mechanism had indeed been loosened, a few dull scratches in the steel betraying Duran’s efforts to disassemble the lock. Ethan ran a finger over the gouges and frowned. The scratches were deep, as though great force had been applied. Too much force. Duran was a patient man who preferred thought and planning over desperate measures; a man who would have thought his way out of his predicament first and acted second.
The door locked from the outside via the simple electronically controlled system that was now being manually shoved into place by Kurt and his crew. Three solid-steel bars an inch thick and six inches long securing each door. Even without the electronic locking, it was hard to see how Duran could have gotten the door undone from the inside. A single word infiltrated Ethan’s mind.
Deception.
Ethan stood up and turned to look around the room. The only logical solution to the mystery was that Duran had only tampered with the lock as a diversion, and that he had escaped from the room some other way.
There were six racks of aluminum shelving, each six feet high and maybe ten feet long, stacked with cardboard boxes containing medical supplies, dehydrated food sachets, cover alls and the flashlights. While Ethan could entertain the idea of Duran fashioning a lock-pick out of syringe needles or similar, it was easy to reject an image of the old man frantically tunnelling his way out of the room. Ethan realized that Duran had known he was going to escape from this room the moment he entered it: that was why he’d been satisfied when he’d found the flashlights. It was dark outside.
Ethan checked his watch. Dead of night. Perfect timing. If there was to be an air strike, or if Kurt and his men were successful in blowing the facility, nobody would hear anything at this range from civilization and anybody camping within ten miles would pay little attention to what could probably be passed off as a rock fall or some other natural event.
‘Come on, Ethan,’ he murmured to himself. ‘If Duran could do it…’
Ethan closed his eyes and stood for a moment in the center of the room. He let his mind grow calm and then built a mental picture of the facility in his mind. The mine entrance led into the circular control room, which itself was connected in a straight line to the other two circular main rooms — the laboratory in the middle and the stimulus and containment cages deepest in the mountain. From both the control room and the laboratory extended two corridors to the left and right; the armoury and living quarters from the control room; and further down from the laboratory the mysterious locked room and the store room in which he stood. As far as he knew there were no rooms extending from the containment area at the back of the facility.
Ethan kept his eyes closed, thinking hard. He retraced their steps through the facility, from where he stood and back, from being disarmed by Kurt to finding Mary Wilkes and Simmons’s body. All the way back to following the tracks laid down by the creature that had led them here.