"Why are you laughing? Stop it!"
"A life force made up of thought! It was the ‘help me’ that threw me for a loop. I figured that was Briggs trying to get out."
"Stop … laughing … AT … ME!"
"All this time I thought Briggs got absorbed by an alien, but that’s not what happened, is it … Ronald?"
"I AM A GOD!"
Gant’s humor left and he growled, "It came through all right: pure intellect. Pure thought. And you grabbed it with your black heart and hate and trapped it in that frail little body! It’s all been an illusion. There was no monster in the mist; that was a trick. You wanted us to believe there was a creature behind the curtain. But it has been you all along, Doctor. It was the entity that pleaded for help! It wanted to escape from the hell of your sick mind!"
Briggs shook and shuddered and repeated in a red face, "I AM GOD!"
Jolly stumbled around, the gun hanging loose in his grip as the directives and impulses inside his controlled mind became crossed and confused.
"Twiste was right! You found the devil, Briggs! You found it in your own soul!"
Sgt. Franco held his target in the scope. He paid no attention to the shouting among the men, paid no attention to the big guy with the gun starting to wobble and turn as if he were a malfunctioning robot.
He was focused … completely … on his target.
At that instant a weight fell on him. He heard a bark-like shout and snapping teeth. He felt sharp stings and raking claws and jagged bites.
His finger yanked the trigger. The M4's muzzle flashed licks of fire and spat bullets across the old vestibule toward the trio gathered at the vault door.
Then Franco rolled over, confronting his attacker, holding it at bay and fighting for what remained of his life.
Major Gant’s moment of triumph — at least on some personal level — over the entity that was in reality Dr. Briggs himself was short-lived. Gant felt a bullet whiz past his nose before he heard the fire, before he saw the flash of an explosion.
He instinctively sought cover but his leg gave way and his entire body fell to the floor like a helpless sack. He heard more shots and saw more flashes. He saw Jolly whirl in the grips of some mental malfunction.
Most important of all, Gant saw one of those rounds slam into the chest of the enraged Dr. Briggs. The man who dared dream of godhood staggered, his rage replaced by shock.
Briggs had convinced others — even himself — of his power. He had drained the brains of people and turned them into mindless drones. He had tricked men into murder and suicide. He had controlled a general and crafted his own private hell deep beneath the surface of the Earth.
Yet in the end, he was merely a man. A perverted man of weak emotions and petty hatred. A man with a black heart full of sadistic desires. But a man of flesh and bone.
One bullet was all it took.
The human who was indeed a monster staggered and gaped as a massive stain of crimson grew on his chest, ruining his suit. His mouth worked as if to speak but there was nothing left for Dr. Ronald Briggs to say.
Jolly dropped the submachine gun and the giant fell to his knees, clutching his head with both hands and screaming, his howls whistling through exposed teeth until another wild bullet exploded the monster's skull.
As for Briggs, the death of his body was the unlocking of a prison door …
Sal Galati and Jupiter Wells retreated no more; not when they saw what bullets could do to these creatures. These were not ethereal nightmares but animals of flesh and blood. They could be killed.
After withdrawing around the corner, the two soldiers stood and fought. Sal's G36 tore away two skulls, Wells's SCAR-H handled the third.
"Finally, something that dies," Wells said as he eyed the pale-skinned, child-sized spawn of the Red Rock monster.
"They weren't so tough," Sal said, inhaling deeply as he caught his breath. "I remember these things we ran into on an oil rig—"
"Shut the fuck up."
Their task done, the two soldiers hurried back to the Red Lab to support Campion. Before they could get there, energy exploded through the corridors like a hurricane of light, knocking them over as it gushed toward the surface.
Campion completed his mission.
He calibrated, charged, and activated the contraption a few feet ahead of Briggs's equipment. His task done, he stood and walked toward the exit and then absently remembered, oh yes, I'm supposed to shoot myself now.
He reached for his sidearm, pulled the slide, and … the impulse faded.
Why exactly should I shoot myself?
Electrical energy charged around the device and the V.A.A.D. generated a hum that started low but seemed to double in volume every second, like a bomb about to explode, encouraging him to walk fast and then run, knocking open the double doors and sprinting down the hall.
The variable accelerator antimatter delivery device exploded. Not with shrapnel or concussion, but with light. Streams of plasma surged at the box-like centerpiece that was the epicenter of a dimensional rift. A rift Dr. Ronald Briggs had wedged open more than two decades before.
That dimensional rift was not repaired. That had never been the intent. Briggs had always been in control. He had arranged everything, using Vsalov and Borman as pawns.
The V.A.A.D. blasted that rift wide open, breaking the tether holding the entity close to ground zero a moment after a bullet freed it from a sick man's mind.
It came from the infinitely small and burst from imprisonment into the world as a growing flow of blue-white plasma. It drove out from the laboratory, exploding open the double doors, passing Campion as he dove for cover, all the while growing more powerful and more immense as it rushed for freedom.
A tremor went through the entire complex. Every level — above and underground — shook.
In the vault room, Liz staggered and fell. Borman nearly fell, too, but he reached out and placed a hand on the vault door and steadied himself.
She shouted, "It's coming!"
Gant lay on the floor. Had he not already been there, the quake would have toppled him.
Briggs did not fall, however. Or, rather, Briggs’s body did not fall. It stood straight and still, as if immune to the tremble of the earth.
That’s when Gant realized … Briggs was dead and gone. The body that remained was merely the holding cell for whatever entity had been held hostage by the man. An entity comprised of pure thought. An entity that knew not of rage and hatred and perversion or any of the rest of man’s emotional excesses. An entity that could have expanded the boundaries of man’s mental capacity. Instead, its arrival to humanity’s plane of existence had been hijacked by an evil soul that had then twisted that power to indulge its own sick fantasies and warped delusions.
Red Rock had been more than a subterranean dungeon; it had been a dark hole in the human soul. Belowground, people changed, their heart of darkness set free.
Thom realized that Captain Campion had completed his mission. The V.A.A.D. had truly been the solution to the stalemate at Red Rock: Dr. Briggs’s solution.
With its vessel dead and the portal blasted open, the entity that had been captive in that monster’s mind was free. The balance of its essence rose up from the bowels of the complex. Gant knew—he knew—the big metal door that had kept the evil doctor safe and secure belowground for two decades would not be enough to stop the creature.