"Alas, no."
"What could, if not something like that?"
"The fear that we are threatening the fabric of reality itself. Between Hanratty's bland ambition and that psychotic Thompson's growing influence over him, all my warnings were ignored. And I became increasingly desperate. If those creatures begin breeding in the wild..." He shuddered.
"It's one thing to joke about creating the means of destroying the world, and quite another to confront the immediate risk of actually doing so."
"What about the Holy Child sightings?" Annja asked.
"I don't know. That had nothing to do with us," he said.
She frowned and wanted to question that. But approaching a cross passage, he raised a hand to stop her.
"And now time and answers are alike at an end. What remains is action. There may yet be time."
"To prevent what?"
"The world being overrun with deadly monsters," he said.
She looked at him. The alarms continued their cacophony. The corridors were crowded with excited technicians. No one paid the least attention to them.
She wondered, briefly, what was really going on. What did "containment breach" actually mean? But she took Bergstrom at his word. She had little choice.
"All right," she said. "Action I can do. What now?"
"Around this corner is the entrance to a control station. It will likely be guarded inside and out. You must get me inside at all costs."
"And then?"
"You must get out of this facility," he said, "and as far away as you can, as fast as you can."
She drew the sword to her. Bergstrom took a step back.
"Marvelous," he breathed. "What a terrible shame I shall never get to study the means whereby you do that!"
She put the back of her shoulders to the wall. It felt cold and hard through the fabric of her shirt and jacket. She took a deep breath and spun into the cross corridor.
A score of people occupied the passage. They moved in both directions in clumps. She had no idea where they were going or what they were doing.
A pair of men in black stood thirty yards down from her. They had MP-5s in their gloved hands. Their body language suggested they were distrustful of the technicians leavened with lab-coated scientists.
The one farthest from Annja noticed her first. He stepped into the middle of the passage, shouldering his weapon. Startled technicians began to part, screaming, to either side.
They didn't move quickly enough. He opened fire. The sound suppressor kept the burst from being intolerably loud in the confines of the corridor. But it still sounded, like an unmuffled motorcycle engine.
Some of the screams went up in timbre – or stopped. The guard was spraying bullets toward Annja without caring who or what was in the way.
She was running but not fast enough to give her any decent chance of closing with him before he put a bullet into her, even though the panicked technicians made her a harder target. The guard's companion turned and began shooting from the hip, right into the crowd, evoking more screams and causing two technicians to fall right in front of her.
On impulse she jumped. She straightened her body so that, just for an instant, she flew nearly horizontal. She lunged with the sword. She felt the blade bite deep, heard a hoarse cry of pain.
She landed heavily, pulling the sword with her as she fell.
The man had collapsed, his weapon stilled. She wheeled to find the other shooter, hunched in pain, the victim of a ricocheted bullet.
She swung her right foot and kicked away his weapon. He didn't attempt to stop her.
Some of the fleeing personnel had dropped to the floor. Now they were picking themselves up – those that could. Several lay moaning. At least four lay without moving or making any noise at all.
Through the wounded people Dr. Bergstrom made his way. He was walking bent over, clutching the right side of his substantial belly with his hand. The shirt beneath was dyed bright pink.
"You're hit," Annja said.
"I'll live," he replied conversationally enough, although his hairline was beaded with sweat. "Long enough at least."
She found herself standing outside a sealed door. There was a keypad with a slot mounted next to it. It offered nothing she could use.
"What now?" she asked as Bergstrom limped up.
He raised a hand holding a plastic card toward the pad.
"No biometrics?" she asked as he swiped its magnetic strip down the slot.
"No money," he said. "Our budget was far from unlimited. Our security was assumed."
He punched a quick five-number combination. "Get ready," he said, through now gritted teeth.
The door slid open. A guard stood there with a Beretta in his hand.
Annja head-butted him in the face. He staggered back clutching his flattened nose. A second guard was fumbling the strap of an MP-5 off his shoulder. He never got the chance to finish.
A technician in powder blue rose from a swivel chair in front of a bank of monitors. He stared in horror at Annja, standing with the sword still in hand. Then his eyes slid past her.
"Dr. Bergstrom!" he exclaimed.
"Get out, Yee," Bergstrom said. His teeth were individually outlined in scarlet. The technician paled as he saw this, then darted past him and out into the corridor. As he did, a fresh spate of screams wafted in past him.
"It has begun," Bergstrom said, leaning with a hand on the table in front of the console and frowning at the monitors. Whether he referred to what he saw or the terrified cries from outside the small room Annja couldn't tell.
He looked at her. His features were rigidly held against the pain of his wound. She guessed the anesthetic effects of wound shock were already beginning to wear through.
"You must go now, as well," he said. "Turn right, down the corridor for forty yards. Left into the stairwell. Go up two flights. It will put you in a truck tunnel that leads to the outside. Remember what I told you – fast and far!"
Chapter 28
A black thing flew level, straight for her eyes. Black wings seemed to span the corridor. All she could make out of the head were the two huge red eyes that shone upon her like malevolent lamps.
Annja screamed in response. She met it with a wild forehand slash. The blade caught the left eye, extinguishing its glare. She sheared clear through the beast, her blade exiting just behind the right wing. It fell thrashing and shrieking.
She ran, vaulting writhing black ruin. Before her a creature the size and shape of a natural wolf, but with a coat of that light-sucking black, looked up from the torn-out throat of the hapless Yee with red, glowing eyes. She raised her sword. But a second creature, longer and leaner and feline in outline and sinuous motion, attacked the wolf from behind. Squalling and snarling, they turned into a furious ball of fangs and claws. She ran past them.
Without looking back she sprinted to the door to the stairs, yanked it open and went rabbiting up.
The truck tunnel was all Bergstrom had suggested and more. It was another glass-walled circular bore big enough to accommodate a full semitrailer rig.
Annja began to realize how the huge facility was supplied. The tunnel was so wide that various crates and containers were stacked high to either side of the level floor, or roadway. Two hundred yards away she could see double concrete doors illuminated by the jittering light of fluorescents.
There was just one thing wrong with the tunnel that Annja could see. It was full of screaming red-eyed men fighting screaming red-eyed monsters.