Pandemonium (30 page)

Kuzu realized the human must be referring to him. “Yes,” he said. “OK, Ferrell.”

Tusya looked at Kuzu and then smirked. “All right,” he said.

Andy followed alongside Kuzu down the tunnel, which seemed to go straight as an arrow into infinity. Talon-1 rolled fifty yards ahead of them, shining its lights until it came to a jog where the tunnel was slightly misaligned with an opposing tunnel, as though they had met from different directions. Though there were no train tracks in the tunnel they had come through, there were tracks in the tunnel that joined from the other direction, stretching off like laser beams into the darkness.

“This must be it,” Tusya said. “This must be the main line!”

Ferrell checked out Talon-1’s camera feed on his visor. The rails headed down more steeply up ahead. He stopped and radioed the others, glancing at Andy and Kuzu. “OK, we’re going to set the charges,” he said.

“Need any help?” came Jackson’s voice on his helmet radio.

“No sweat,” Ferrell said. “We’ll be done in a bit. Just wanted to reach minimum safe distance so the boom doesn’t collapse our egress.”

“Roger that,” Jackson said. “We should be at the fork in five minutes. See you there.”

Andy took off his helmet next to Ferrell, breathing heavily. His scraggly blond hair was damp and drooping with sweat. He looked at Ferrell defiantly. “We should be safe enough here to take our helmets off, I think,” he said. “OK? God, I just need to take a breath.”

Tusya and Ferrell both followed suit, setting their helmets down as they opened their backpacks and a case filled with sixteen cubes of M183 explosive. They proceeded to set all sixteen charges in an arch spaced over the ceiling and down each wall. Kuzu assisted them with his twelve-foot reach, memorizing each of Ferrell’s actions as he selected wires and detonators and connected them to the explosives. Then Kuzu noticed Ferrell set the countdown for twenty minutes.

“Hey,” Andy said. “Why’d you set it for only twenty minutes?”

Ferrell casually put a pistol to Tusya’s head and pulled the trigger twice, destroying the man’s brain.

Kuzu vanished.

“What are you doing?” Andy screamed.

Ferrell turned the gun to Andy.

“Oh, you fucking asshole!”

Ferrell shot two bullets through the marine biologist’s forehead. Andy fell to the floor, dead.

Kuzu hissed, invisible, as he clung to the ceiling.

Ferrell wheeled, pointing the gun where Kuzu had been, and he registered surprise as the sel seemed to have disappeared.

Pressed against the arched ceiling, the sel’s fur camouflaged him against the tiles. He saw strange creatures clinging to the ceiling nearby and another that peeled off the wall behind Ferrell. The creature hung down like a giant tongue behind the human, shaping itself to the contours of the soldier’s body without touching him.

Ferrell looked up and seemed to make out Kuzu on the ceiling. He raised his gun just as the animal closed over his back, arms, legs, and head simultaneously, immobilizing him.

Kuzu looked into Ferrell’s eyes as the human shrieked, dropping his weapon as the strange creature overpowered him from behind. The beaklike mouth of the slimy animal clamped into the soldier’s neck with scissorlike blades, and the man’s scream was cut off as the dog whistle fell from around his neck, its chain severed, bouncing off one of the railroad tracks below. Ferrell’s eyes looked back at Kuzu as his face drooped and the transparent creature flushed bloodred on his back.

Kuzu’s eyes jerked in different directions. He suddenly noticed other glowing animals stuck to the ceiling around him. He leaped down as jetting ropes just missed him and looked off into the tunnel that stretched miles into the unknown—all the way to one of the humans’ cities, they thought, and possibly to many more. He reached down to the detonator, and Kuzu switched off the timer.

Then he grabbed the dog whistle lying between the railroad ties and galloped back on five legs up the tunnel as Talon-1 followed him.

06:52:59

The others waited at the fork. They thought they heard the faint echoes of shouts and gunshots before they reached the branch but could not make radio contact.

“Ferrell, how’s it going, copy?” Jackson repeated through his helmet radio, but still no answer. “I repeat, how’s it going, man?”

“Look!” Abrams said.

Out of the darkness, a point of light now raced toward them.

“Andy!” yelled Hender, his voice reverberating in the throat of the tunnel like a shrill clarinet.

Hearing nothing back, the others yelled, too. Then they saw Talon-1 approaching. The ROV came within twenty yards of them before they saw Kuzu, emerging behind the robot, alone.

“What happened?” Jackson said. “Where are the others?”

“Animals attacked,” said the sel.

“No way,” Bear said.

“From Henders Island?” Abrams asked.

Kuzu shook his head.

“Where are the others?” Dima said.

“Where is Andy?” Hender asked.

Kuzu looked at Hender with both of his large eyes. “Dead.”

Hender pulled back as if he had been physically struck.

“Bombs all set, Jackson,” Kuzu said, eyeing the big soldier with one eye.

“Bullshit!” Bear yelled. “You killed them!”

“What the hell—?” Jackson paused as they saw something hurtling toward them in the tunnel.

A shocking specter shambled out of the shadow into the light. They trained their weapons on the approaching figure, which ran toward them like a glowing dog. As the creature came closer, they caught flashes of Craigon Ferrell’s face pointing at them. They saw his body running on all fours, his head raised with open mouth and eyes. His body, gripped by a glowing mass, lunged forward.

“God almighty,” Jackson said, backing up.

“A ghost!” Galia cried.

Suddenly, with a smacking sound, Ferrell’s head fell forward limply and they could see the slug’s head in its place with a pouting, bloody mouth and wide sullen eyes glaring at them.

Dima and Jackson shot a barrage of gunfire at the apparition, which finally crumpled on the floor of the tunnel before them.

Bear examined the remains. “Are you sure this ain’t from Henders Island?”

“No,” Hender said, shivering. “It’s not!”

The others looked at the pulverized carnivore that was still squirming on Ferrell’s back, jerking the human’s arms and legs randomly.

“It must be some kind of mollusk,” Nastia said, her eyes and mouth wide as she crouched to look in morbid curiosity at the flinching flesh of the creature.

“Many in tunnel.” Kuzu pointed behind.

“But the charges are set, right, Kuzu?” Jackson said.

“Yes, Jackson,” Kuzu said. “Charges are set.”

“Damn, one of those ugly bastards is above us right now!” Jackson’s flashlight exposed several ghost octopuses converging on the ceiling over them.

“Yes.” Kuzu pointed.

“God, let’s go, man!” Abrams backed away as the others scattered.

They rushed back up the tunnel toward the station.

As they ran with the mechanical mule loping alongside the tracks, they passed the hatch that they couldn’t open earlier. The lights of Talon-1 shone ahead on a huge creature barreling toward them from the direction of the train station, rapidly growing larger and glowing vivid colors. Abrams ignited a magnesium flare and took aim, hurling it forty yards down the tunnel, illuminating the beast in a blaze of light.

“Oh, no,” Hender cried.

“Spiger!” Kuzu growled.

Abrams grabbed an incendiary grenade out of a pouch on the trotting mule. He took a few steps and sidearmed the grenade like a quarterback. “Fire in the hole!” he shouted.

The grenade zipped down the tunnel and landed perfectly between the front legs of the animal that was thirty-five yards away. But the spiger launched off its tail so hard, it slid along the tiled ceiling as the grenade ignited behind it at 4,000 degrees Fahrenheit.

The spiger screeched like an air-raid siren as it landed forty feet in front of them, its elaborate frill pulsating colors like a neon marquee. Its tail curled underneath it as it scuttled away from the heat source, rapidly moving toward them and raising its arms.

Jackson ran to meet the beast, firing two AA-12 automatic shotguns and emptying both magazines of explosive ammo at close range as he shredded the creature’s manelike frill.

“No!” Hender said. “They
like
noise. Don’t stand still:
Move!
”

The spiger recoiled as bits were blasted off its frill and buckshot pierced its armored back. Jackson stood his ground in front of it, spraying the beast as it raised one of its spiked arms and brought it down in a blinding streak, stabbing the soldier through the faceplate of his helmet through his rib cage and pelvis into the ground. Then the monster lifted the big man’s body sideways before its widening vertical jaws.

“Throw another grenade!” Nastia said.

“Not at this range,” Dima said. “We’ll burn, too!”

“Back up!” Abrams shouted.

Nastia ran in the other direction, weeping hysterically.

As they retreated, Abrams used his dog whistle to send in both Talon robots, which opened fire with their M249 machine guns as they rushed the spiger.

One of the spiger’s long spike-arms turned sideways and flicked the Talons up the tunnel toward the group like a couple of corks. Revolving in the air, their machine guns fired in all directions, their rounds ricocheting off the walls. Abrams disabled their guns as the bots clattered past them, rolling for another forty yards.

“Chyort voz’mi,”
Dima cursed. “I’m hit!”

“Where?” Bear asked.

“The head!”

“You’re OK, then,” Abrams said. “Must have rung your bell, though.”

“Shit,” Dima said. “Good helmet.”

The spiger continued to pick Jackson’s meat off its arm like a shish kebab as Bear and Kuzu advanced, firing their bows simultaneously at the beast. Bear skewered the spiger’s head between its eyestalks with an aluminum shaft. Kuzu moved in and struck its second brain between the eyes on its back. The great beast crashed to the ground.

Kuzu strode toward it then and, as the others watched in awe, the sel placed three hands on the dying beast’s fur. He turned his head on his elastic neck to look at Hender. “Come on,
Shueenair
!” His commanding voice vibrated Hender’s bones.

“What’s he doing?” Dima asked.

“Don’t go near spiger,” Hender warned them.

Kuzu’s fur smoldered red as millions of “symbiants” evacuated the fallen predator, pouring into his fur. They attacked like needles at first, but then radiated peacefully, spreading a pleasurable feeling like an itch being scratched over his entire body. Their millions of quick pricks stimulated glands under the hendropod’s skin that produced an ameliorating hormone. After feeling naked since the humans had exterminated the exfoliating symbiants so integral to the sels’ health, Kuzu finally felt them reestablish themselves on his body and replenish the external immune system that had made it possible to survive in their native ecosystem.

Another two spigers lunged down the tunnel in the distance, a cloud of flying creatures following them.

“The train station is breached!” Abrams shouted.

“No shit!” Bear said.

“The incendiary grenade’s still burning on the tracks behind the spiger,” Abrams said. “It should keep the rest at bay for the moment, but the heat barrier won’t last long.”

They were trapped between the Henders predators on one side and no other place to go.

“Throw another grenade at them!” Nastia cried.

“No!” shouted another female voice behind them. “Come this way!”

Thirty-five yards behind them, standing on the cement landing under the hatch they had passed, a shirtless woman waved a flashlight. “This way!” she called.

“Who the Christ are you?” Bear said, awestruck by the vision.

“Nell!” Hender shouted.

“Dr. Binswanger!” Galia hailed her bashfully.

Nell waved her arm angrily. “Come on!”

The sels followed the humans quickly as Nell pulled Nastia up onto the landing first.

Kuzu pulled Hender up, and Hender could feel a sprinkling of symbiants warm his arm like a pleasurable narcotic that spread momentarily on his skin before they jumped back onto Kuzu. Kuzu’s voice rumbled softly as he spoke in his own language:
“I must tell you what happened in the tunnel, Shenuday.”

“Yes.” Hender nodded.

Nastia looked at Nell. “Is that tunnel safe?”

“Safer than this one,” Nell answered.

“What happened to you?” Nastia said.

“I lost my shirt. Let’s go!”

“OK,” said Nastia.

Dima and Abrams judged that the mule could get through the hatch as Nastia and Nell went through first. Dima jumped on the ledge as Abrams pulled a variety of grenades from the packs on the mule’s back and, aided by the XOS suit, pitched the grenades as far as he could in both directions. Then he helped push the mule onto the landing and through the hatch. The mule gave a kick of its hind legs as it got a purchase and trotted through the tunnel behind Dima, Nastia, and Nell.

Before bringing up the rear, Abrams fired five more gas and incendiary grenades up the tunnel and three more in the other direction. Talon-1 came charging back down the tunnel now, and Abrams reached down and lifted it onto the platform. Then he saw one of the spigers, soaring through the air in a mighty leap directly toward him. He pulled Talon-1 inside, but before he could close the hatch the spiger jammed a spike inside the crack.

“Shit!” Abrams cursed, trying to close the door, but even the strength of the XOS suit was outmatched when both the spiger’s spikes shoved into the crack to pry it open.

Bear looked through the lurching hatch and glimpsed the giant spiger: its head was bigger than the hatch itself. “Come on! It can’t get through anyway! Let’s go!”

He stuck a shotgun through the crack and fired, blowing off one of the beast’s eyes, which only seemed to make it wrench the door open wider as it trumpeted like an elephant.

Abrams and Bear ran up the corridor.

“There are ghosts in here!” Nell called back to them as she led them forward through the passageway. “Clinging to the walls. So move
fast
! They’re dangerous.”