The demon walked down the hallway to Yellow 4. The door was locked, and there was a keypad on the wall next to it.
Bub didn't bother with the keypad. Regular doors he could handle. He turned around and gave it a quick kick with his massive hoof. The door burst inward.
General Race Murdoch was a hunk of dead meat, cooling in a pool of his own bodily fluids.
Bub had just enough of his essence left to suit the purpose.
*
Race had been dead. He was sure he'd been dead. He could even remember the moment his heart stopped pumping. His point of vision had become smaller and smaller, darkness enveloping him, until there was nothing.
So how could he be thinking? Race opened his eyes, amazed that his wounds were healed and his pain was gone. He soon realized why.
“Raaaaace. How was deaaaaath?”
“Quiet,” Race answered the demon. The words felt sour in his mouth, like he’d just eaten some bad ham. “What the hell do you want?”
“Why is everyone in the greeeeen arm?”
“They're having a tea party. You weren't invited.”
Bub gave Race's arm a swift tug, dislocating the shoulder.
“Tell meeeeeee.”
The General winced. “I can see where this is going. You torture me until I talk. If I die, you bring me back.”
“Yessssssss.”
Race hurt, but his level of annoyance was even greater. He'd been looking forward to death, had actually achieved it, and this smug son of a bitch had taken that from him. First Helen, now this.
Race wasn't going to tell him a damn thing.
“Well, I'll let you in on a little secret,” the General said. “Any minute now we're going to be radioactive. I'd be tickled pink if you stayed here with me, so I could watch you bake like a cow pie on Georgia asphalt.”
Bub tugged Race's dislocated arm and broke it at the elbow. Race cried out.
“Is there another way ooooooooout?” Bub asked.
“Please...” the General winced.
“Another waaaaaaaaay?”
“Please...”
“Pleeeeease what?”
Race grinned, “Please kiss my lily white Southern ass.”
*
Then the man actually began to laugh. His pain must have been excruciating, but he was laughing right in Bub's face.
And Bub was afraid.
He picked the General up and threw him against the wall as hard as he could. Race left a bloody spot there, then slumped to the floor, broken and unmoving.
Bub hurried out of the room and went to the Octopus. With a shrill shriek, he commanded the beast to begin breaking down the gate to the Yellow Arm. There had to be another exit in the Green Arm. There had to be.
Bub would be damned if he lost his life because of some poorly trained pets on a fourth rate planet.
CLANG!
He would see for himself what they were doing. And then he'd slaughter them all.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
“What the hell is it?” Andy asked.
“It's a linac. A medical linear accelerator. A very unique one. Get behind it, let's push it into the hall.”
Andy stared at the piece of medical equipment. It was white, about five feet high and four feet wide, and sort of resembled a large kitchen faucet. Attached to a rectangular base was a curved arm that could rotate. On the end of the arm was a lens kind of thing. The lens pointed down at a fancy table.
Sun explained, “A cancer patient lies down on the table, and then their tumors can be bombarded with either electrons or photons from the collimator here.”
She tapped the spout of the faucet.
Andy nodded, getting it.
“Radioactivity.”
“Right. It kills cancer cells. Actually, it kills all cells, but it's made to target cancer cells.”
Andy got his shoulder behind the base and shoved. It barely moved.
“It's heavy as hell,” he grunted.
“It's actually about half the size of a normal model. They must have custom made it to fit inside the compound's entrance.”
Andy and Sun both put their weight into it, getting the machine to slide a foot.
“This is what Dr. Meyer used to fight his sarcoma,” Sun groaned, pushing as hard as she could. “Skin cancer can cover a large surface area of the body, so this particular model is modified for TSEI—total skin electron irradiation. Instead of a thin beam, it showers the entire body with electrons.”
“More powerful than an X-ray?” Andy asked.
Sun stopped pushing and sat down, breathing heavily. “An X-ray machine gives off 200,000 electron volts. This little baby can do about 25 million.”
“But if it's used to cure cancer, how can it hurt Bub?”
“Are you ready for a mini lecture?”
Andy nodded. Sun brushed the hair out of her face.
“Radiation is measured on the gray scale. Let's say Meyer's cancer required a dosage of 36 gray to complete treatment. Even though it's an electron shower—electrons don't penetrate deeply like photons, 36 Gray would make him sick or even kill him. So it's broken up into ten weeks of treatments, a single 36 centigray dose a week.”
“But if we give Bub a big dose at once...”
“It will destroy massive amounts of tissue. But it gets better. This machine can produce electrons and photons. Photons penetrate much deeper than electrons. So if we do a wide photon penumbra—a large beam width for a full body target—at 25 million electron volts, it could really cause some grievous damage.”
Andy said, “Nice. Let's do it.”
They got up and finished pushing the linac out of Green 6 and into the hallway, cables trailing behind it. Sun directed Andy to help turn the machine so it faced the Octopus.
“Anything else?”
“It'll take a moment to set up. Go help Frank with the wall.”
He gave her a quick kiss on the cheek and ran down the hall.
Sun detached the treatment table and pushed it aside, and then used the control box to rotate the collimator on the gantry—the big counter weighted arm. She stopped it when the lower defining head was pointing straight down the hallway, aiming at the door to the Octopus.
That was the easy part. The hard part would be figuring out the settings. Sun took a solitary class in radiotherapy over ten years ago. She didn’t remember much.
There was a computer control console in Green 6 near the far wall. She went to it and turned it on, hoping it would all come back to her.
*
One of the reasons Dr. Belgium had chosen science as a career was his distaste for manual labor.
“So much for that,” he muttered, swinging the pick at the concrete. For all the oomph he put into it, the potato chip sized piece that flaked off the wall was hardly satisfying.
“How's it going?” Andy asked, walking into Green 11.
“How much time do we have left?”
“About fifty minutes.”
“In that case, not good. At this rate we won't break through until next Tuesday.”
CLANG!
The noise reverberated down the Green Arm.
“Uh-oh,” Belgium said. “It looks like that ramming beast has found a new target.”
Andy picked up the twenty pound sledge and hefted it to his shoulder. The bandage around his wrist had become dark red.
He gripped the hammer and let the wall have it.
*
The computer program that ran the linac had presets, calibrated to Dr. Meyer's dosage. Sun found a way to manually change them, but couldn't remember any dosage calculations. She had to deal with beam energy, field size, distance, filtration, quality, and a dozen other parameters. She decided the smartest thing to do was just shoot for the maximum on everything.