Instinct (2010) (38 page)

She never thought she’d be so glad to see Level One of the Abdomen. Her appearance, bloody, pained and filthy, forced the others to imagine the horror of what she had been through.

Webster was up almost as quickly. His injured arm was a cause for concern, but he assured them he was OK in spite of it. He too was caked in blood and dirt.

‘How did you find us?’ asked Garrett.

‘We heard your gun firing and realized we were close to the hole,’ said Webster.

‘If I’d known finding you guys was that easy I’d have shot a few rounds off as soon as we lost you. By the way, you look like the worst shit I ever did. What the fuck happened?’

Webster shook his head. ‘I’ll tell you another time.
But I will say this,’ he said, looking around at the few insects that were now flying through the air around him, ‘we need to get the hell out of here before the rest of them wake up.’

They only had to wait for Wainhouse, who tied the rope back on and was winched up to the lip of the hole.

He had one foot on the floor of Level One, ready to lever the rest of himself up, when he felt something touch his other foot.

As he looked down to check what it was, two enormous spiked claws sliced up from below, slashing him in half from collarbone to pelvis.

Before he fell to the ground, the whip scorpion took hold of his left side and tossed it through the air to come crashing down through one of the glass lab dividers on Level One.

Everyone turned to look in the direction of the noise, leaving the giant beast to slip through the darkness with what remained of Wainhouse firmly clenched in its grip.

It was an unusually repellent creature, even at its normal size. With eight thorny legs as big as drainpipes and two giant pincers, this one looked as if its only purpose were to cause the death of other things.

A rushed scuffle to see what had smashed the glass further disguised the scorpion’s movements. The soldiers and scientists arrived just in time to see the last squirts of blood spraying over the base of the exposed spine.

‘What the fuck?’ said Garrett. ‘Is that Wainhouse?’

Although it was obscured by the growing darkness,
the visceral horror of what they found grabbed them all by the guts and swung them round the room.

The confusion added to this, as no one could understand how Wainhouse had been so brutally attacked without them realizing. What had done this, and where was it? Were they all in danger?

Because of their injuries, Laura and Webster lagged behind the others. As they limped along to the source of the noise, something flickered in the corner of Webster’s eye.

He looked across to see the reflection of a weak flame on the whip scorpion’s shiny back, but he could hardly make out what was going on.

‘Laura!’ he said loudly. ‘Over there!’

Laura looked to where Webster was pointing but could not see what he was talking about. Suddenly, the creature, as large as a dining table, raised itself up and starting shovelling Wainhouse into its mouth with voracious greed.

Collapsing forward with fear and revulsion, Laura gasped. Webster had already moved towards the cache of remaining arms to select his weapon.

He took the Daewoo USAS-12 that he’d kept as a souvenir from an operation in Korea and flicked off the safety.

He had to move a little closer to work out exactly what was going on, but he’d already made his mind up to shoot.

Taking aim, the blast blew out the rear left leg and cracked the shell of the abdomen.

In angered shock, the whip scorpion gave a guttural screech. Tensing its glands, it spewed a thick cloud of acetic acid from its rear.

Takeshi was closest to the warm mist. He managed to turn away, but it made no difference. The acid began dissolving him from the back, melting first his clothes, then his hair, then burning through his skin slowly enough to stretch out every millisecond of agony.

He had effectively shielded the others, but as he screamed and screamed and screamed, he fell to his knees, the acid exposing his tissue from behind.

It looked as if a guillotine were slicing him in wafer-thin sections. His skull and scapulae were visible, surrounded by angry scarlet tissue and the browns and whites of his rapidly disintegrating organs.

From the front, however, he looked completely normal: excruciatingly agonized but visibly undamaged. In the dark, Mike and Lisa could not understand what was happening to him.

He toppled forwards, showing them his meat-raw innards. Susan’s screams joined Takeshi’s as he continued to melt away.

The smell was overpowering as the evaporating remains of the clothes and skin rose through the air.

Bishop wanted to be sick, but his stomach had emptied long ago.

Garrett moved through to the side of Takeshi’s remains and, along with Webster, pumped the giant scorpion with whatever was left in her gun. They took out six of the legs, leaving it immobile, but as they were
attacking from the rear, they couldn’t find the head shot that would kill it.

In anger and desperation, it was making an appalling shriek like the screams of hundreds of dying birds. There wasn’t much left of Wainhouse’s torso, but it dropped the mangled scraps as it tried to turn to face its attackers.

More bullets pumped through its sides and it gave up, slumping to the ground. Its abdomen was now a broken shell oozing a mess of glutinous moisture.

Webster and Garrett stood over what was left of the scorpion and Wainhouse. To their left, Takeshi had completely disappeared, and the acid was now eating away at the floor beneath him. The hellish smell of melting flesh combined with the acrid stench of burning concrete to make eyes water and stomachs convulse.

‘How does this shit keep getting worse?’ muttered Garrett to herself.

Susan’s screams had subsided a little, but that only made the buzzing at the door audible again.

Garrett reloaded her rifle.

A soft
ding
announced the arrival of the nuclear launch information in Tobias’s inbox.

The instructions gave him an email address and a series of codes to send, and he wasted no time in tapping them in.

After pressing the return key he watched the screen and wondered if that was it. Had he just sent several men and women to their deaths? Would there be any kind of –

The reply took the form of a series of sporadic beeps, followed by a black screen. Then his computer spoke:

‘Good morning, sir. This is Comsat liaison,’ said a computerized male voice with the tone of a cheery smile. ‘Operations of this nature may not be conducted in such a way that they can be intercepted. That means no writing. I am an officer at the Pentagon, but you are hearing a distorted version of my voice that has been filtered through multiple encryptions. Yours will sound the same to me. If that is clear, how can I help you today?’

Tobias looked carefully at the screen and leaned in warily.

‘Do I … do I just speak in here?’

‘That’s right!’ the voice replied brightly. ‘Your computer is equipped with a microphone.’

‘Uh, OK … I have an authorization code for a D-22 on Colinas de Edad.’

‘Certainly, sir. I now need confirmation of your identification.’

‘Sure, er … comsat. hazlit, fourteen, niner, astro.’

‘That is affirmative, sir. May I have the authorization code from yourself, and details of the second contact from Mr Stern?’

‘I have both codes, including the override sequence that allows me to present Mr Stern’s numbers.’

‘Copy that, sir. Go ahead.’

‘Twelve, one, twenty-six, seven, one, four, zero, eight, sixteen, eight, three, niner.’

‘Affirmative, sir, a nuclear strike will be launched on the MEROS facility immediately. With the time it will take to engage the pilot, and judging by the travel distance, we are looking at an ETA of approximately one hour, over.’

‘An hour? Can’t you assholes move any faster than that?’

‘Sir, Colinas de Edad is a remote facility. Our nearest airbase lies 146 miles away from it, north-north-east. So, negative, sir. We are unable to get there any faster. However, I believe that there is a remote satellite detonation system that we could attempt to make use of.’

‘No, that’s OK. Just get the plane in the air quicksmart.’

Garrett lined up her rifle for a third shot. The hole was getting wider, partly because the wasps could attack it while she was reloading and partly because her second shot hadn’t been quite as good as the first. It had clipped off a small piece of the door as it went through. The bullet took out another three wasps, but that still left a dozen trying to get in.

Webster had everyone crouching on the floor, as still as they could be. Many insects were scuttling and buzzing up to Level One, but they were more interested in each other than the humans that lay motionless, almost invisible amongst them.

After what had happened to Wainhouse and Takeshi, the mood was desperate.

As a group, they were broken and empty, clinging to a glimpse of hope that was disappearing far into the distance.

Garrett’s finger was poised on the trigger, ready to squeeze off another round. She came to the end of the quick, silent prayer she said before each shot and her neurons immediately sent the message to fire down her arm and into the bent knuckle at the end of her index finger.

As she fired, an apple-sized aphid bumped her
gently on the elbow. The impact was not great, but the shot required absolute precision, which was now impossible.

The weapon she carried, adapted from an Israeli Tavor 21-C, discharged a 6.5mm, 5.9g round at 854 metres per second, and that bullet was now flying on a trajectory three degrees higher than she had intended. All she could hope for was a small entry hole with several dead wasps behind it.

What she got instead was a high-spread impact that took out three wasps and half the door.

‘Incoming!’ yelled Garrett as she joined the others on the ground.

This was it: hard enough to fight in a bright, enclosed space, any attempt to repel the wasps in a room this cavernous and gloomy would be completely futile.

Death was now inevitable.

The wasps’ entry was a percussion of terror. Every corner of the Abdomen was filled with the furious collision of gossamer ripping through the air.

The dense heat, the foul smell and the terrible, inescapable sound were overpowering, as was the absence of light, creating apparitions that brought fear from the shadows.

On the ground, the scientists and soldiers hugged themselves into tight knots of dread and waited to die.

The staircase at the back of MEROS was now lit with a series of green flares. Jacobs, Mills and Madison had no idea how many they’d need for five hundred feet of darkness, and they had weapons to carry, so illuminating their route wasn’t the priority. Mills said that it was better to run out of flares than firepower, and the others agreed. Their progress was fast but wary. They knew they would not have much more time before Paine was able to initiate the nuclear wipeout from the Pentagon. But they also knew people were dying down there, and the thought of their rescue plan going off course because of one big bug made them check their speed just a little.

‘Fuck, how much further down is this fucking place?’

‘Hey, taxi driver, I don’t suppose you get a lot of exercise sitting in that chair all day.’

‘No. And I don’t get the cardio workout you get from jerking off guys, either.’

Jacobs shook her head, amazed that these two could be quite so pathetic at a moment like this. But maybe that was what they needed: a bit of banter to lighten the mood before going up against whatever was down there.

It also helped them to forget about the bomb that could be heading their way.

‘I’ve got enough work trying to keep your mother
and sister happy. And don’t forget we’ve got to go back up, you fat fuck.’

‘Sssh!’ The banister felt rougher, first like pumice then more like coral. The stairs had changed from a monotonous smoothness to a series of bumpy obstructions that grew larger with every step.

‘I think we’re close,’ said Jacobs.

‘What is this stuff?’ asked Mills.

‘Beats me, but I don’t think it was part of the original design,’ said Jacobs.

They set off another flare, the first for a hundred feet, and saw that the dark concrete steps were now strewn with a covering of brown ridges and holes. Looking ahead, they could see less of the staircase and more of this substance that covered it. Two flights down, it became too dense for them to continue, with gaps which only a small boy could get through.

‘No problem,’ said Mills. ‘I’ve got enough C-22 to blast that into the next century.’

‘Yeah, probably not the best idea, what with us being in an enclosed space that will funnel the heat and smoke of any explosion upwards. Plus, we don’t know where the others are. Killing them ourselves after they’ve survived this long is something we should really try to avoid,’ said Jacobs. Madison smirked in the green half-light of the flares.

‘I’d suggest non-explosive ballistics like bullets to break this stuff down and see if it’ll get us through.’

‘Also no problem,’ replied Mills, steadying his rifle.

Upstairs, Andrew and Taj were staring at the motion-sensor screen.

‘There! There’s movement.’

‘C’mon, Taj, what does that mean?’

‘That mean they’re not dead.’

‘Who’s not dead?’

‘You know I don’t know.’

‘But these two are blue. That means that another two have died, doesn’t it?’

‘Uh … I’m not sure.’

‘But you look at this screen all the time.’

‘Yeah, and that’s why when you asked me ten minutes ago if they was all dead, I said no. They was just staying still, ’cause this gives a reading when there’s “no movement, like dead”, instead of “no movement, like standing still”.’

‘And those dots are two more dead.’

‘OK, OK … yes, that’s two more dead, but there’s still eight left.’

‘But one of them could be my mum! My mum and Webster, because they both went down to Level Two looking for me!’