Ultimate Thriller Box Set (31 page)

Not too well, it turned out. Both Frank and Andy were drenched with sweat, and they'd only knocked a single cinder block through. Blood was dripping down Andy's right hand. He'd popped several stitches.

“Give me a try,” Sun said.

Andy handed over the sledgehammer, which was too heavy for her to properly wield. She tried Belgium's miner's pick. It weighed about ten pounds, and Sun found it much easier to handle. After a five minutes of swinging, she managed to put the eight inch pointed head through a second cinder block. Andy and Frank helped her pry the rock away.

“One more, and we may be able to squeeze through,” Belgium said.

There was a sudden
CRASH!
and the ground shook.

The trio ran into the hallway, and watched as the giant ramming creature burst into the Green Arm.

It slowly backed out, and in crawled Bub, triumphant, his eyes burning with malevolent glee.

“Stay here,” Sun told the others, and headed for the linac by Green 6. She immediately knew she wasn't going to make it in time. Bub was going to reach the machine before she had a chance to turn on the photon beam.

So she changed tactics and forced herself to stay calm.

“Well,” she said. “It looks like you've won.”

Bub grinned.

“I alwaaaaaaaays win.”

Sun considered her slim options. If she couldn't find a way to switch on the beam she was dead, Andy was dead, and possibly the entire human race was dead.

“I have one question to ask before you kill me,” she said, getting closer. The linac was ten steps away.

“Yessssssssss.”

Six steps. Five. Four.

“Do you know what a hertz donut is?” Sun asked.

The demon cocked its head to the side.
“A heeeertz doooooonut?”

Sun walked calmly up to the linac and put her hand on the control box.

“Watch,” Sun said.

She hit the activate button.

The linac hummed like a stock car and Bub immediately thrust his hands out in front of his eyes. He fell backward, his exposed skin mottling and turning brown.

“Hurts, don’t it?” Sun said.

The demon opened his wings and attempted to shield himself, but only something with the density of lead could shield 25 million volts of X-rays. Every inch of his body seemed to bruise and mush like overripe fruit, weeping clear fluid.

He rolled backwards, but his retreat did little good. There was no beam stopper, and photons traveled in a straight line at the speed of light. They tore millions of sub atomic holes in his body, ripping through membranes, ionizing atoms and bursting cell walls, breaking down his DNA into base pairs.

As Bub rolled away, large sections of dead tissue were sloughing off his body in strips. Sun watched as he spewed blood along the walls and ceiling. He was screaming, a sound not dissimilar to the cries of the many sheep he'd gutted and eaten.

“Beg for death, my ass,” Sun said.

Momentum took Bub through the Green door and into the Octopus, but from what Sun could tell he was no longer moving. The hallway was empty. The giant demon cowered off to the side, out of the beam's invisible perimeter. 

Belgium came up and said, “Good good good. Leave it on and we'll get back to work.”

“Won't that beam run out of power?” Andy asked.

“It doesn't use any radioactive isotopes,” Belgium explained. “A linac uses high frequency electromagnetic waves to accelerate charged particles, such as photons, to high energies through a linear tube.”

Sun said, “I thought you were a biologist.”

“Minor in nuclear physics. Fun fun fun stuff.”

“How much time do we have?” Sun asked.

Andy looked at his watch. “Forty-four minutes.”

“Okay, Mr. Physics, assuming we can break down that wall, how far away do we have to be from here when the nuke is dropped?”

Belgium rubbed his chin. “I'd assume they'd use a simple fission mechanism in the lower kiloton range, maybe 10-30 kTs. A Uranium-235 or a Plutonium-239 bomb would vaporize metals for a kilometer in all directions. We'd need to be 2 to 4 miles away to escape the thermal effects. The blast effects would send hundred mile an hour winds up to the two mile mark.”

“How about radiation?” Andy asked.

“If we're two miles away, we'd only absorb a minimal dose, maybe 12 centigray, but if they used a fusion weapon rather than a fission one, say a lithium deuteride core with an Uranium jacket, then it would be a thermonuclear neutron bomb with the same explosive power, but 30 times the radiation. I'd guess that—”

The lights went out, plunging the entire complex into total darkness.

“This isn't a good development,” Dr. Belgium said.

“The bastard cut the breaker.”

“The linac is off!” Sun yelled. “Bub can get in!”

Andy’s lighter cut through the darkness, and the trio shuffled back to Green 11. Sun knocked over a metal shelving unit, and she and Belgium pushed it in front of the door.

“SUUUUUUUUUUUUN!”

Bub's voice was hoarse and sickly, but it still carried with tremendous force down the hallway and caused Sun's knees to knock with fear.

“Look what you did to meeeeee!”
he roared.
“To MEEEEEEEEEE!”

“Give me your shirt,” Andy said to Sun. “Mine's too wet.”

She complied, stripping to her sports bra. Andy wound the shirt around an ax handle and lit it like a torch.

“Frank, where's the pick?”

“I think I dropped it in the hall. Want me to get it?”

“Here I coooooooome!”

“Perhaps not,” Belgium said.

The doorknob turned. Sun held tight to the metal frame of the shelves and braced herself.

“Help me!” she said. Frank and Andy put their weight on it. The door exploded inward, sending the shelf skittering across the room.

Bub filled the doorway. His skin was blistered and peeling, brown and black rather than the normal red. A horn had fallen out, exposing a raw sore. His teeth had shredded his lips, and when he breathed bits of flesh fluttered out like streamers. He was missing his left eye; in its place was a gooey, dripping blob. His animal smell was now a roadkill smell, a stench of decay and death.

Before, Bub had been taunting and clever. His evil was sadistic and calculating.

Now he was simply a mad dog.

This scared Sun even more.

“Hey, Bub.”

The voice came from behind the demon, in the hallway.

Bub spun around.
“Yooooooooooooou,”
he hissed.

Andy held up the torch and they watched as the vent grating fell from the ceiling and a figure crawled through.

“Race,” Sun whispered.

*

General Race Murdoch landed hard, but without pain. Before crawling up into the air conditioning vent he'd stopped at the Med Supply room. Besides shooting himself up with various painkillers and stimulants, Race had also made a weapon. He taped the largest scalpel he could find to a broomstick, and then wrapped the tape in a quick-setting fiberglass cast.

He stood up and gripped the makeshift spear in his good hand, pointing it at Bub's head. Race felt like he'd lost a fist fight with a lawn mower. But Bub looked even worse.

“Block off the door,” Race told the trio. “Escape.”

“What about you?” Sun asked.

“A little while ago I died with my tail between my legs. Bub injected me with that same stuff he used on Helen. God only knows what I'll turn into. I'm not going quietly this time. This time I'm going down swinging.”

“Good luck, Race,” Andy said.

Race winked. “I’ll take training over luck any day. Now get going.”

Sun nodded her good-bye and slammed the door to Green 11.

The hallway was enveloped in absolute darkness, save for a single thing.

Bub's glowing red eye.

“I can seeeeee you in the daaaaaark,”
Bub whispered.

“Not for long,” Race said.

He put everything into the lunge; his rage over Helen, his frustration at wasting forty years being Bub's caretaker, his pure hatred for being forced back to life. The spear went into Bub's eye, through his brain, and stuck in the back of his unholy skull.

The demon fell, screeching.

Race sensed movement behind him. He turned, and saw the huge glowing eyes of the giant gate-breaking demon draw nearer.

“Well, ain't you a big sonuvabitch,” Race said.

He felt along the floor and found his spear, yanking it out of Bub.

“You hungry, big boy? I got something for you to chew on.”

Race smiled, and when the monster opened its mouth and bit down on him, Race jammed in the spear as far as it could go, his very last thought of dancing cheek to cheek with his beloved Helen.

*

Andy and Sun threw everything they could find in front of the door while Belgium banged away at the wall.

Strangely, nothing tried to get in.

“Maybe he's finally dead,” Andy said. He yelled, “Race!”

No answer.

Sun rushed to Dr. Belgium and began to strip off his lab coat.

“The torch is dying.”

He shrugged out of it and Sun ripped the garment in half, winding one part around the dimming flame.

Andy took the sledgehammer from Belgium and pounded away at the blocks until he could no longer lift his arms. Then Frank took over, breathing like an asthmatic. Sun had the next crack at it, struggling with the heavy weight but able to swing it underhanded.

The cinder block broke in half, leaving an L-shaped opening in the wall.

“It's not big enough,” Belgium said.

“Yes, it is.” Sun tossed the torch through the hole and then squeezed herself into it. The cinder block scraped her bare shoulders and back, but she made it through intact.

“Go on, Frank,” Andy prompted.

The biologist had to tilt his shoulders, but he managed to fit his upper body in the opening. Sun helped pull him the rest of the way through.

“C'mon Andy, let's go!” Andy looked at the opening and knew it was too small. Belgium was a thin man, one hundred and fifty pounds max. Andy was one eighty, with a broader chest and shoulders.

“I won't make it.”

“Try,” Sun pleaded.

He stuck his head and one arm through the opening, but he couldn't get the other arm in.

“Go on,” he said. “Go ahead without me.”

“No. Just get your other hand through. Then you can make it.”

Andy was wedged so tightly in the space that there was no way he could get his other hand through. The corner of the L was digging into his breast bone.

“I can't. I'm going to try to widen the hole.”

“There's no time!” Sun screamed at him.

Dr. Belgium said, “Exhale.”

“What?”

“You're lungs are full of air. Breathe all of your air out and your chest will contract.”

Andy blew out air, blew until his lungs were empty, blew until he was seeing spots. It freed up just enough space to force his other wrist through. Sun and Belgium grabbed it and pulled like crazy. The skin on Andy's arm scraped against the cinder block, and his chest felt as if he was pinned under a dump truck, but it was coming... coming...

He was through.

They yanked him the rest of the way and Sun held him, even tighter than it had been squeezing through the hole.

“I can't breathe,” Andy croaked.

She released her grip.

“The cave leads off this way,” Belgium picked up the torch. “What's our time?”

Andy looked at his watch.

“Twenty-eight minutes.”

They ran.

CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

This was the scariest part of all for Andy. Everything that happened prior had been beyond his control, but this last attempt at survival was completely up to him. If he ran fast enough, he'd live. If he didn't, he'd die.

The natural limestone caverns they ran through were completely dark. Sun led the way, carrying the torch, keeping it low to illuminate their footing. The ground was sometimes hard jagged rock, and other times loose gravel that sucked at their shoes like hungry fish. They ran past natural stone columns and underground pools, razor sharp walls and stalagmites, alongside steep drop offs that fell into oblivion.

Sometimes the cavern widened to the size of an auditorium, other times it was as thin as a hallway. They were following the original trail the excavation crew had made one hundred years prior, when Samhain was born. It surprised Andy to occasionally see a bootprint in the ground, the mark of someone who helped build the compound, someone long dead.

They ran as fast as safety allowed. When there was an open area ahead, Sun picked up the pace, and they sprinted until their lungs were bursting and their stomachs clenched.

There was a bad moment, at the fifteen minute mark, when the trail couldn't be found and they hit a dead end. All of them began to panic, Sun almost to the point of tears, when Dr. Belgium found a fork in the cave a hundred yards prior. They backtracked and took the fork, but precious minutes had been lost.

Andy fought the fatigue. He fought the many pains he'd incurred. But he couldn't fight his own mind, which kept telling him that this was the end, it was all over, his existence was about to be snuffed out forever.

“Please,” he begged the universe, “don't let this happen. Don't let my life stop here. There's so much I haven't done, haven't seen.”

The universe didn't answer. But surprisingly, his mind focused on something he'd long ago memorized, when he was just a boy.

Pater noster, qui es in coelis, sanctificetur nomen tuum.

Our Father, Who art in heaven, Hallowed be Thy Name.

The Lord's Prayer.

He ran on, repeating it over and over in his head.

*

Sun was in better physical shape than her male companions, and she knew it. But she couldn't slow her pace, even when they began to fall behind. She had to be the goal for them, the one in the lead who forced them to catch up.

Belgium surprised Sun. He was thin and long limbed, and on the sprints he lacked breath control, but for the most part he kept up.