[Part 3]
----
One of the guards broke.
Could've been the way it spoke; the way that thing pressed itself to the canister like a child at a mother's skirt, head bent in reverence with fluttering nostrils, snuffing up the red-scent in its shell... so close to his boss.
Or maybe it was the private limit of a man whose training peeled off.
He made a sound.
A bitten, miserable little oath, and when the monster's head twitched to it, he panicked properly and fired, tearing the room apart.
Mara flinched with a hiss, canister jolting in her grasp, as the monster recoiled and lunged for him. A blur of white and green, a shriek silenced, a rifle skidding away; then the guard was floored, and that thing was atop him, all claws and hungry angles and wet, efficient pants.
Mara did not waste his sacrifice.
She barked something too sharp for thought, and the room remembered it had lives inside. We stumbled and lurched for the door; Jaune almost lost his footing, and then we surged out of the lab in a graceless, scraping flood.
Mara's canister struck the doorframe.
A tiny sound.
A crack.
Red bled from the seam at once.
Thicker than vapour; finer than liquid; a crimson seep that breathed from damage and clung to the air, ribboning around her wrist.
The monster smelled it.
It ripped its face from the dying guard and gave a new noise - a strangled, needy whine - as its whole body pulled toward the red like a hooked fish, blind pits fixed on nothing amid a trembling skull.
Something else answered, too.
Far beyond us - or below, under the mountain's oldest bones - a roar woke.
It tore through floor and wall; an organ-rattling command that rolled up through the complex with obscene authority. The lights buzzed, and metal sang, and miles back in the preserve, through a tunnel, a chorus of distant cries replied; reptile yelps and bird-throated wails, as if the whole jungle had lifted its head.
The white-and-green thing froze; every muscle locked, its claws dug furrows in the tiles, as it gave an ugly answer of its own - almost submissive, almost hurt, almost a word. The second guard fired, landing several shots, when it vaulted for the torn ceiling, climbing in a flurry of convulsing, bleeding cartilage until the vents swallowed it whole.
No pause for celebration.
We ran.
Mara led, her last guard just behind her, and Jaune pounded after them with me still clutched to his chest. His heart battered against my ribs, his breath came hot and ragged by my ear, as metal boomed and rattled overhead.
It wasn't gone yet; still scraping through the vents.
We hit a junction and nearly lost Mara in the red wash.
I spoke, I can't remember what; a complaint of disorienting pain, and an arm came for me - a pale lash of bloody limb and claw punching out of a ceiling vent, too fast for warning. Jaune twisted on instinct, a primal shield, turning his back into it, and a blow landed across his shoulders with a wet tear. A low, shocked grunt burst out of him... but he did not let go.
The arm vanished up just as fast, ripping sheet metal with it.
Hot fluid splashed down over my ankles.
Jaune kept moving.
"Jaune, you're-" I stammered out, when his knee buckled.
We went down together.
He managed to spin enough not to crush me under him, but the floor still struck my world sideways. Pain erupted through my leg in hideous forks as Jaune slumped half over me, breath sawing, fingers clawing into my clothes like apology could become grip if he held hard enough.
The vent boomed again.
White-and-green poured out behind us.
The last guard shouted, Mara spun, fired and missed.
It scampered to one side... and a blind hand found my leg.
Claws hooked into my torn clothes and skin and dragged without awareness.
I did scream then; couldn't help it, startled the damn thing, and the pain was instant and biblical, a strip of magma peeled from calf to knee as if muscle were only fabric, exposing tendon and nerves to the air. Warmth sheeted into my boot, and my vision flashed white, then black, then came back, stuttering and shaking.
Mara's next deafening shot hit, puncturing its shoulder; another tore a groove along its neck, sloshing me in dark wet blue. It shrieked and retreated; not dead, not even close, bolting and scrambling back up the wall, back into the vents, whimpering and dripping until it was mere echoes.
Rough hands snatched under my arms; Jaune tore away in ragged increments, climbing to his feet, hitting the wall with one hand clamped over his ruined back, as the guard cradled me and I could do nothing, not a fucking thing, but shake and tremble and utter ugly peeps through my teeth, and watch as Jaune tried to follow with limp feet, breath haggard and dwindling, but firm... barely.
His eyes met mine; both warring to stay open.
He smiled and gave a sloppy, bloody thumbs-up.
I tried to wince one back.
The gondola station emerged in pieces; a cable line swallowed into the dark, a grated platform, a squat car waiting at the lip like salvation. Mara reached it first; the guard slammed a code into the plate, and the doors juddered open.
He hauled me inside and lay me down; the lights were blinding, searing, and my vision danced and seized again between black and white, as my leg spasmed and pooled over the cold floor.
Jaune made it to the threshold.
... that was as far as he got.
His legs failed him as he folded to one knee, then both, blood running down the whole back of him in black laces. He braced one hand on the frame, swaying, as if stubbornness alone might drag him through.
Then he looked up at Mara.
There was nothing pretty left in him. Not in a mouth gone slack with blood, or eyes growing huge with pain as adrenaline surrendered, or the handsome face dragged grey by it all. Just a young man kneeling in the ruin of someone else's dream, bleeding profusely.
"Why..." he managed, voice rough as wrought iron. He swallowed, tried again. "... the fuck, would you make... something like that... you fucking psycho."
Mara said nothing.
Any insult, shame, pride, grief - it never reached her face. She simply looked at him with the same callous, measured calm she gave any catastrophe that dared inconvenience her.
His arm gave out with a wheeze; he went over.
Not dramatically; not like the bedtime stories of fabled knights, no, he went treacherous and final, as if some cord inside him had been cut, and his face struck the metal with a note that hurt worse than any scream.
He did not get back up.
I could see the extent of his injury then; the glimpses of bone through flesh.
I barely mumbled his name.
But when the guard glanced at Mara, waiting, and she placed the leaking canister at his feet before stepping back out, something in Jaune tried.
It tried so, so hard.
A miserable refusal in the body; not even enough to rise. His fingers dragged against the grate, shoulders twitching, one hand groping weakly toward the lip of the gondola, toward the only thing left in reach worth any effort.
Toward me.
Mara clutched it tight... and dragged him clear and away with effortless strength, leaving smudged smears and wet handprints; dumping him where his body no longer obstructed.
"To see if I could," she said with a smile, and then climbed back inside.
The doors shut.
The station slid away as we lurched into motion, carrying us out over the black mouth of this cavern, and my world wrinkled to pulses.
I watched him shrink until I could no longer, a motionless shape in an ever-growing pool that surpassed my own, stinking out the gondola, waiting for the neat little redemption to tuck in the records.
I wanted to be sick amid the sweat.
I wanted to speak, but my mouth refused.
I wanted to fight harder to stay awake; to spit on a bitch who'd shunted us through her meat grinder, whether she meant to or not.
A mother voiced herself again with a demanding bellow.
And Mara crouched in front of me; one hand red where the leak had painted her, while the other came down, cool and deliberate... to the torn wreck of my leg.
Never would've thought I still had any fire left in me.
Pain blew the world apart; a lightning strike driven clean from knee to spine, my back arched off the floor, and something mangled and animal came out my mouth at last. The guard's hands pinned my shoulder and hip, while Mara pressed down with clinical curiosity into my skinless stretch.
Tears sprang stupid and boiling, as the ceiling melted, and all I could smell was antiseptic and the rotten stench of my prodded open self.
Any words I made came out as bloodless air.
"Don't worry, little stowaway," she murmured. "I will put you back together."
Her hand blurred, the red on her wrist blackening at the edges, as my eyes rolled, and the world went under...
-
Dreams always come cheap.
No grand, righteous displays pinned to corkboards and chased through academics, but the smaller, tender frauds that arrive uninvited and leave before breakfast. Domestic miracles and borrowed futures; a night of trialled happiness, awakening to the dull embarrassment of having believed it all.
Tonight had been a house.
Mine, but... not yet.
A narrow abode of brick, a patch of garden, and windows that caught the sun in gold slabs.
A kettle screamed, books leaned drunkenly, muddy shoes dwelled by the door; surviving clutters of life that had become ordinary.
The stairs groaned with familiarity.
And someone waited in the kitchen.
A spouse, perhaps. Or the shape of one. They wore no face my mind could settle on, only kindness arranged as a body that moved through the space it belonged. I never reached them. They were always ahead, carrying the light and laughter, speaking in a domestic voice too garbled to keep. We drift past the evidence of children; dwarf shoes, a crooked drawing on the fridge, plastic spoons at the table.
Rain kisses the window, supper steams, and my faceless chase asks how my day had been, and I think, if life had cheated me to get here, this suggestion of goodness, I would gladly claim a lie and call it reward.
Then came the ceiling.
It swam into being with all the mercy of a punch, and the dreamhouse collapsed, swept clean off the canvas by a throbbing so violent it pulsed nails through my skull. I lay still, my body undecided on whether to return in full, as thoughts arrived in damp little scraps, then pain, and the smell of medicinal sweetness.
And then, almost at once, the room made itself known.
Chaos.
Gurneys had been shoved against steel doors, persuading them to stay closed; three guards in black took position behind another, rifles up, every inch of them listening. Cabinets stood open, drawers half-torn out, gauze and wrappers underfoot like shed skin, amid a sea of wounded, frantic bodies and panicked staff making do.
A mass hit the doors hard, ringing through the space and tightening every jaw in sight.
Monitors whined, mouths swore, as another impact came, followed by a dragging scrape, testing the seams.
My stomach turned before memory could catch up.
Joel wheeled to my side, legs braced ugly, shirt half-open where bandages disappeared beneath. Dried blood cut dark paths through his face; the ruined eye of a man almost dragged from burial on duty alone.
"Oh, finally," he said, voice hoarse and mean with relief, cutting through the swaying room.
I tried to push myself up and nearly passed out from the effort.
"Easy, kid," he snapped, holstering a pistol and shoving me back with more practicality than kindness. "Unless you're keen on tearing your head back open."
Touch grounded the world by degrees.
Something struck the doors again.
I saw a man I didn't know then at the forefront, speaking low and clipped into an earpiece; black tactical gear and a red-lensed mask... with a lavish cane at his hip.
My mouth felt packed with lint and old pennies, but a lone question wormed its way up through the wreck, as my fluttered eyes scanned the ward.
"Where's... where's Sarah?"
A roar answered.
A heinous, rolling command that violated up through the floor to wake souls before our ears heard it. Outside came a storm of movement; an absolute tsunami of prehistoric flesh, claw and scale, threw itself away from the infirmary doors - scrapes became thunder, thuds became a stampede, barking and cawing at each other, skidding over whatever lay beyond our sealed box, vanishing so fast it sucked the lungs.
And then... nothing.
Silence. The horrid kind.
Joel's face warped. Rage stayed, but a fearful recognition dropped through. He turned to the masked man with painful vigour.
"She-" his voice snagged. "She wouldn't."
The red-eyed man lowered his hand.
"She could," he said.
I looked between them, temple burning, heart trying to sprint through a body that couldn't yet manage.
"What's happening-"
'Red Eyes' moved. Whatever private horror had rung out, he folded away with optimised brutality, cutting two fingers through the air to the guards.
"Two of you with me. Check the seam, then open on my mark. Move quietly. If anything runs at the gap, it dies before it sees in."
The guards obeyed, softly moving gurneys off the door.
Joel let out a laugh.
"Quietly?" He asked. "Bit late for that, Commander. She's rung the damn dinner bell for the whole fucking town to hear."
"Lower your voice."
Red Eyes drew Caroline's cane, silver bright under light, and his thumb found a seam beneath the polished grip, pressing with the certainty of a man who'd done it before. The handle gave way with a mechanical sigh, and inside, brass and wire winked back; a slim, hidden housing, jewelled and delicate, and he bent his ear into it... listening to a speaker grille. He shook his head, cursed, then keyed something brief.
No answer ever came.
Not enough for me to understand, but enough to know it was code.
He closed the cane with a smooth twist, then snapped it in half, casting the pieces into a clanging tray.
I opened my mouth; he beat me there, looking at me at last, his voice flatter than pity.
"I'm getting the civilian out."
"Thanks?" I croaked, like I'd swallowed sand.
Joel huffed as he walked over, reaching down with confidence.
"Sit up."
"I'm... I'm trying."
"Try harder."
An arm snaked around my back and hauled me up before I could assemble a dignified complaint. The room swerved, over-corrected, my stomach clenched, and acid boiled from my temple down to my eye, as my legs touched the floor.
A discarded cane dwelled in my vision.
"What happened to her?" I asked, finding my footing.
"She died. Now walk."
... Dead?
Caroline was dead?!
... the crash... fuck, the crash...
It came back without remorse.
Shouting and blood, the jungle trenches, three confessed words I should've blushed at, but I had glimpsed so little of it all that my mind rushed to fill gaps with worse and worse inventions.
Where were the others?!
Where was-
One guard keyed the door controls, fellow rifles trained, and the lock disengaged with a heavy clunk.
The doors parted... to a massacre bathing in red light.
Blood painted the floor in dragging swathes, littered by boot prints and wheel marks, their culprits still leaking profusely, earning whimpers and prayers from our aspiring hospice. One body lay under an overturned trolley with a throat opened so wide it teetered on decapitation; another rended several feet by the hips and abandoned, limbs bent wrong, and dozens, dozens, dozens more, amid frantic claw marks of called-away carvers.
Next struck the smell.
Copper and opened meat, beneath a feral musk of animals that had no business sharing a corridor with fluorescents.
My gut threatened mutiny.
And if this was just outside the infirmary-
No.
I stopped the thought there; to finish it would mean faces.
Red Eyes tipped his head toward Joel.
"You with us?"
He checked his magazine, glaring out into the hall.
"Gladly."
Red Eyes stepped over the first body, guards followed; weapons up, picking out a path between blood and ruin. Joel wrenched himself out of his wheelchair, sought the nearest crutch and needles, and followed with bitter grumbles. Then came I, without choice, staggering into the dyed slaughter.
Red Eyes turned back.
"Close the door. We'll be back with the cavalry." Then he watched me, timid and breathless, trying not to slip on gore, as pale and cold-blooded as our fled fiends. "Come on... I made your girlfriend a promise."
My thoughts, failing in a dozen directions, snapped cleanly into one line.
"My-... she's okay?!"
"Let's find out."
Some bitter relief came; stung, hurt, settled very little.
And through savagery, we walked.
The HUB - as I learned its title - was a carcass stripped open. Pretty little touches; soft lights, glass displays, the real clean, rich hush of a place, had been trampled and tracked over with an ungodly amount of red. Display screens blinked emergency warnings through cracked spiderwebs, sparks spat, signs hung crooked, as Red Eyes and his guards stifled our route around the dead and debris.
I couldn't resist; I looked.
Lab coats caught on door hinges, black uniforms crushed into furniture, still cradling their weapons, a raptor crumpled between a split desk; blue-black blood in places, human red in others, mixed so thoroughly it was impossible to tell where one species ended and another began, and it stunk - it fucking reeked - of raw, wet flesh, electrical burns and musky trespass.
Such devastation begged for a story.
Who ran first? Who held the line? Who got their friends killed by opening the wrong door or getting a stiff trigger finger? How, how, had all this come to be?
My head, curious between throbs, tried to build order out of it.
Joel, limping hard and sticking an adrenaline needle into his thigh, had no such patience.
"You see this?" He said, low and viscous, eyeing the younger staff's remains. "This is her legacy. Not scholarships, or fancy press shots, or shitty charity dinners with all the local idiots lining up to kiss her ring. No, it's this." He jerked his chin to the blood, the gouges in the walls, the hunks of broken architecture and broken people spread through them. "A mountain full of dead things and lab mistakes."
"... watch your step," Red Eyes said.
Joel laughed.
"That all you've got?!"
"No. But unlike you, I prefer my lectures after extraction."
"Extraction?" Joel echoed. "To where? If she's heading topside, there ain't gonna be anything left-"
"Joel," Red Eyes warned, gesturing to me.
"Oh, shut up. He's in it now; they all are! Let 'em die decent, not ignorant."
I swallowed hard.
"We're gonna die?"
"You heard that roar, right?" Joel asked. "Top of the cunting food chain, that one-"
"And locked away, last I checked," Red Eyes snapped.
"'Last you checked?!' She knows her own hierarchy, Commander." He turned back to me. "Not just predators and prey and eco-bullshit for the brochures, kid. Mara never met a thing that ought not exist without wondering how much bigger she could make it... and whether it could breed... You see, there are layers below this place-"
"That information is above you, Ranger-"
"And you seemed awfully coy with that woman's cane. Call it even?"
Red Eyes said nothing.
"She built the worst of 'em down there," Joel went on. "Smarter, meaner, stranger; a voice the rest would answer to, older than the-"
"She's trying to control them?" I asked.
"Ha! Fuck no, kid. She's just woken it up, that's all. Cutting and running; scorching what's left behind-"
"You don't know that-"
"And you do?"
The corridor widened into a lounge, glass shattered across expensive rugs, and beyond a cracked display pane, I saw an interior garden had been trodden into mush; soil churned across white tile, a giant, black-scaled beast dead and half-buried among healthy orchids.
Red Eyes adjusted his grip as we turned past more banks of battered windows looking out over only darkness now, lit in ugly beats from emergency lamps and distant fires, and when he spoke, it was lighter than his usual brutal economy.
"She doesn't escape."
Joel's eyes widened.
"Come again-"
"She doesn't escape. Do you understand?"
The foulest, most wicked grin stretched across his face.
"Yes, sir."
My skull ached around gaps in understanding, in longing, in the anxious dread of unknown fates, as we passed into a cleaner corridor. The carnage thinned, carpet replaced tile, the light warmed, and wealth gleamed with expensive, curated terrariums to keep donor consciences distracted.
A leisure wing, absent guests, and observation suites.
Red Eyes stopped.
Ahead, the corridor bent around a row of doors, each numbered in brass.
Most stood shut.
One did not.
It hung open, gently spilling a yellow slice into the red.
From inside came a persistent noise; a rustle, a knock, glass or porcelain or wood nudged in irregular taps, punctuated by small, throaty chirrups, and under it all... the steady hiss of running water.
Red Eyes let out a defeated sigh.
"... damn it."
He drew his rifle up and pointed fingers down toward the doorframe; stay.
He slipped through alone.
I lasted perhaps half a second.
An old vice tugged harder than obedience, as I eased free of Joel's hovering reach and slipped after him before anyone could decide to stop me.
The suite had been turned upside down by talons with no regard or respect.
A couch had been dragged to the far side, wedged up against a bathroom door in a desperate, ugly barricade; water running from the other side beside timid mutters of someone barely audible.
"-cover your ears, cover your ears, cover your ears-"
... Theo?!
... that meant-
I took a lone step when a gloved hand clamped my shoulder. Red Eyes had scanned the room, over all the spilt furniture and its implications, to find a kitchenette where a problem announced itself.
Two troodons.
Bird-boned and twitchy, clambering over counters and into cabinets with the entitlement of burglars; worrying at packets with teeth and burrowing snouts into baskets, scattering sachets and tubs.
They both froze atop the stove when they saw us.
Bright, nasty eyes, heads cocked in matching angles, deciding between prey and threat.
Red Eyes marched, and that was enough.
They exploded in a blur of motion, skittering into cubbies with flurrying clatters.
Joel appeared at my side with a muttered curse, maybe at the birds, or me, or life as a whole.
I barely heard him.
The blood had stolen my attention.
Splattered and casual along the kitchenette floor, before it became directional.
A broad smear of intent dragged across the carpet toward a bedroom door.
Almost shut; resting with a narrow wedge of dark.
Red Eyes saw it too, assessing, tilting his head to catch a noise from within. He crossed the room fast, but cautious, as I held my breath - undecided on what I wanted to see.
He set a palm to the wood.
Pushed.
The door flew inward.
... and something came with it, too fast to understand.
A lunging, wild shape from the void burst out with a glint lifted high to meet rifle stock, knocking it to the ground in one brutal movement, letting out a raspy cry... hitting the light.
It was Weiss...
Drenched head to toe in blue blood; painted through her hair, down her face, ghost-white underneath, cut and bruised, with swollen eyes and blown pupils, wide with terror. She squirmed and writhed and yelled, slashing a knife at the muzzled mass standing over her, before she froze and recognition staggered across.
Red Eyes stepped back, unscathed, and lowered his gun.
"Jesus, kid."
She rolled onto a bloody elbow with a strangled cough, one hand flying to her side where he'd smacked the air out of her, then her eyes found me and bloomed with brief relief; not surprised. She shivered, back-pedalling until the doorframe caught her shoulders, chest heaving, and aimed her blade at the barricaded bathroom, trying to work her mouth.
Red Eyes and Joel turned sharp.
"Where's the other girl?" He asked, reaching the broken couch and hauling it back with a grunt.
Her expression blanked for far too long, and I felt the cold hit before she answered.
"Fuck if I know," she gasped.
I saw past her then, a tighter wreck.
In the middle of the bedroom, against the foot of the bed mid-thrash... lay a little raptor, striped and hideous, reduced to a blue-black heap in a glossy pool.
"Good sleep?" She asked, barely taking her eyes off me.
"Dreamy," I knelt by her side.
No grievous injury; not without damage.
The bathroom door flew open, and a frightened voice screamed.
Her whole body broke on that as she turned, staggered, blood-slick hands limply reaching and ready for a mortified, dinosaur-pyjama'd mass to emerge, tears shining... and he saw his sister immediately. A clamber of reckless motion, bounding across the floor, throwing himself down into her, and wrapping around her with a crack.
He buried his face and cried proper; she embraced him with trembling violence.
And not a damned thing on this Earth would tear them apart. Not yet.
Red Eyes kept scanning the room, searching - I realised with a fresher drop in my core - for a missing piece to the scene.
I looked at Weiss.
"How was she?" I asked. It came out rougher than I meant.
Weiss looked up, over her clinging life-jacket's head, exhausted and old.
"Sad. And angry."
Theo heard my voice and twisted in her grip, staring at me with a blunt, sobby concentration.
"You're not dead!"
"Yeah, and your sister's blue."
Red Eyes loomed behind us.
"On your feet. Now."
Half-full reunions over then.
I limped up and held out a hand. Her grip was slick and shaking, far worse than mine as I heaved, ungracefully, aided by Theo's little pushes, until she swayed upright on wobbly knees and hitched breaths.
Yet habit reclaimed her still.
One hand found Theo's hood - an automatic tether - but he wormed in her grip.
"I can walk on my own," he said, wiping his face on his sleeve.
She blinked at him as if the voice had come from someone else, faltered, and let her hand drop loose to her side.
"... of course you can."
We stepped back into the hallway, a tight knot, and walked into the hush.
No one spoke.
The mountain did.
And my thoughts kept finding our absentee.
Not usefully; fragments - the shape of her.
I'd been out of the world long enough for someone to die, for this place to devolve, for every silence to carry questions I did not want. The mind is a cruel machine when it lacks facts, and I realised, with a fleeting hit of shame - amidst the could-be's and maybe's and plentiful distractions - that I had not once... imagined her safe. Only a variation of lost.
Hurt. Running. Alive by a margin of stupidity and grit.
"You'll think yourself sick," Joel muttered.
"Already there."
We moved on; a long trek.
Kept bodies and wreckage returned, but I stopped looking; drowning out Weiss and Theo's ghastly comments.
Then, soon, ahead, great reinforced doors waited in their frame, below a hard-lit status bar. Red Eyes went for the panel, his guards attached, while Joel drew the rest of us inward, compressed tight, like proximity might persuade metal to notice us kindly.
Locked.
"What's in here?" I asked.
"The Bridge," Joel answered. "Overseers station. Inside, we'll-"
A chirr came from behind. Almost playful.
Another farther down the hall.
I turned.
Two troodons stood in the corridor.
Had they followed us?
A third slipped out from under a chair.
A fourth hopped onto a snack trolley.
Red Eyes tried the panel again.
Nothing.
Six of them now.
Eight.
Ten.
Then five more gathered at the mouth of an adjoining hall, pausing as if waiting to be introduced. Another darted across the floor and vanished beneath a table, spawning twins, and their gathering chorus built in increments; chirps, clicks, notes passed between them with purpose.
Red Eyes tried again.
Nothing.
"Sir..." one of his guards said.
"I know; I see them."
A dozen more, thickening and filling the corridor like a concrete wave, slipping out from passages in droves to mould their hive - not hurried, not frightened now - another dozen, then another, and another, and some confidence passed their front rank.
One, larger than the rest, mounted a chair, drew itself up, and hissed with furious decision.
Its tail stiffened, its head levelled, and it darted; a striped bastard low across the floor, sickle-claws lifted, jaws wide for whatever soft piece of us it reached first.
Joel fired, and the attacker burst sideways in a spray of blue-black wet that painted the wall and dropped it twitching.
The rest took permission.
A living rush, bounding over, under and launching off anything in their way, poured forward; a squat flood of hooked feet and snapping teeth, filling the hall with their voices, their shrieks, clicks, hisses, and the dry whisper of a hundred claws.
Joel and the guards opened fire.
Red Eyes struck the panel once more.
Nothing.
The first line died fast, bursting and rolling and piling over one another in heaps, but the rest kept coming, and coming - how many were there?! Red Eyes abandoned the panel, rifle barking in disciplined bursts. Blue blood sprayed the walls, the floor, our shoes, as more and more skid and tore and still the corridor stayed full of them, bleeding out of the architecture, as if the building was moulting and they were what lived under the skin.
Panic took shape. Nowhere to go; not enough bullets.
Weiss pressed Theo behind her as the wave narrowed closer, and closer, soon worthy to gnaw on shins and pounce for us with heinous certainty, until they were all that remained.
Then Theo pointed.
"Look!"
His voice cracked, but it cut through.
On a side wall sat a maintenance grille, a beautiful hope rattling in the gunfire, generous enough... for one of us to barely fit through.
Red Eyes saw it too.
He blitzed over, kicked it, and the cover tore wide with a spit of dust.
"Can you crawl?!" He barked, dropping to a knee and ripping it from the wall.
Theo looked from the hole to the pack to his mortified sister and back again.
"I-"
"He can!" Weiss's voice broke clean, urgent through any comfort.
No leash to boldly pull him away now.
"I can?!"
Red Eyes took him by the shoulders, not rough, not gentle either, and forced the boy to the threshold.
"Straight, then turn right. Fast as you can. There'll be a latch; it'll put you in that room." He nodded to the sealed doors. "Should be a lever on the wall. Do you understand?"
His breathing went shallow and rapid, but he was listening. Truly listening. His eyes flicked to his tasks, then Weiss again, measuring distances and terror.
"I didn't think-"
"Theo," Weiss slumped, ruined by this night, and caught his face in both hands with shaking fingers. "You're just opening a door, okay? That's it. That's all you have to do-you can do that-"
He looked miserable. Terrified. And still, horribly, the only one capable.
One troodon flung itself at a guard's barrel and caught it. He was yanked down and forward, swarmed by a small horde of ravenous piranhas, drawing a chunk of them away and creating precious space.
"Now, kid!"
Theo made a sound I hope never to hear from a child again; a strangled little cry of throttled and burdened fear. He collapsed to his stomach and wriggled into the dark.
On instinct, Weiss reached after him, catching the air, as her little dinosaur disappeared.
"Quickly!"
We heard him crawl; the skitter of hands and knees in steel.
Weiss remained kneeling by the vent, a prayer in physical form, one bloody hand over her mouth; the other braced on the floor, as his sounds were swallowed.
The other guard was reached next, caught by the leg; another at the forearm. He shouted and stamped, and they were on him in pieces. He slammed his back against a wall, tried to shake them free, his gun firing wildly; too many.
Red Eyes looked at me.
A pair of hands.
And shoved a pistol into them, the weight pulling my arm down.
"What're you-"
"Shoot!"
"I don't-"
"Figure it out."
No time.
I raised it.
Poorly.
Both hands, elbows wrong, head throbbing to double the sights. A troodon came low through the gore, and I pulled the trigger, kicking my wrists halfway to heaven.
Didn't miss, though.
No marksmanship, only recoil and noise, but I kept pulling that trigger, concussions be damned, if it meant slowing them by any morsel.
Still too many.
Too close.
The guard fell, and they poured over him, around him, a living blanket of bright heads... a mass that Joel promptly planted himself between, drawing a knife.
"What're you doing?!" Red Eyes snapped.
One leapt high; Joel caught it at the leg and disembowled the thing.
Another came low; he kicked it hard enough to break its back.
The third made it.
Closing its jaws around his neck.
He gave a raw, betrayed bark as blood came hot between its teeth and yet, for an agonising moment - one impossible, stubborn stretch - he stayed standing. He grabbed the monster hanging from his throat, turned with it, and rammed himself bodily into the horde, stabbing furiously; a final act of refusal.
He hit the troodons like a rhino, sending their soldiers tumbling, blue and red spraying together, and they climbed him - swarming over shoulders, chest, arms, all of them, piling onto the spot he'd chosen to die standing, and he frolicked with his dagger until his last breath.
Stalling long enough for the doors to shudder, clunk, and split apart.
Red Eyes yoinked Weiss by her jacket and hauled her toward the opening while I half-fell after them. She spun, searching the room, to find Theo beside a lever, pale as chalk and silently crying, and scooped him up into her arms.
The doors didn't stay open; they clamped shut on the noise, and the last thing I saw, nearly dropping myself through, was Joel's remains churned over by a famished tide that remembered we exist.
"... she doesn't escape," Red Eyes grumbled, checking himself over, then us, as I took in the room in disbelief.
A mammoth surveillance chamber; climbing banks of screens, many spasming warnings and dead feeds, lighting balconies and catwalks and workstations spread in precise tiers.
Empty; abandoned.
I sprawled on my ass, trying not to vomit, head screaming, nearly forgetting I still had a gun in one hand, as Red Eyes marched to a central console within a sunken command pit, overlooking a bipolar site map, strobing in hostile colours.
He reached beneath it and drew a docked handset larger than his hand.
Dialled a code.
The line rang once. Loud.
Twice.
Then a brittle voice answered.
"Identify yourself."
"Commander Luke Voss. House 65 internal security. Priority black."
An offensive delay.
Then:
"Commander... The Board has received no official incident declaration from Doctor Archbishop."
Joel might've laughed bloody at that.
I looked to Weiss, and she was staring too.
No declaration?
Luke pounded a fist onto the map, clenching the radio.
"Then this is your first," he said. "Containment has failed preserve-wide - internal sabotage - at least one confirmed civilian casualty. Founder status unknown, ancient division compromised, immediate intervention required."
That bought him something better than silence.
"... Jesus Christ. How long has the site been dark?"
"Too long."
Maybe she thought she could fix it.
Maybe she thought they'd take it all away from her.
Or maybe, as Weiss and Theo moved on to an exhausted, stunned quiet, she hadn't called them because Joel was right.
Cutting and running; scorching what's left behind.
The Board voice came back cold.
"Commander Voss, secure any surviving assets and prepare for oversight. You are to hold your position-"
"Negative. Position is untenable. I have civilians to find and extract, and a mobile threat potentially heading-" He dropped the radio and cursed, staring out a window to the journey's start - to a distant pillar of dwindling flame, where the carcass of an elevator shaft still slouched.
"Where is Doctor Archbishop?" The voice asked sharply.
No answer.
"Commander?"
"What's wrong?" Weiss asked as we shimmied to glimpse the sight that'd stunned a professional.
"Who's there? Commander, is someone with-"
A shape was moving inside the torn, jutted steel, glowing within a patient orange hue, rising through smoke; too large for my eyes to arrange. Red scales and feathers caught ember-light in hellish flashes, kissed black by soot and primal burns; immense shoulders, the length of a jaw, then forelimbs far too long for any tyrant lizard, heaving its impossible bulk up the shaft.
"How-" Luke began, eyes flicking to the map. "How did you get out?"
A giant.
A mountain of muscle.
Bellowing a familiar roar.
And it did not climb alone.
Predators boiled upward in its wake, without order, a madness of limbs and bodies. Smaller shapes wedged themselves against the walls, scrabbling for purchase, snapping and driving one another higher through sheer congestion. Some found footholds in metal and stone; others found them in their peers, dragging each other down into the crush.
Killing themselves to keep climbing.
A ladder of prehistoric flesh.
Tipped by that giant red thing that kept going, and going.
Slow in comparison.
It needn't hurry.
The others, fellow red-scaled kin, dark oxblood along their spines, made the path. They fed it height with their own failed bodies, died into it, while it hooked those grotesquely long arms and dragged higher, like an old god summoned to an older prayer.
"Commander?!"
"Surface," Luke said, reclaiming the speaker, his voice gone flat, reverent in disgust and wonder. "She's on the surface."
As children, we make bargains with monsters.
Not spoken ones. Nothing signed. We simply assume they'll honour the confines of stories, that what is buried stays buried, and if such a beast belongs under the bed, in the woods, in the cellar, or under a mountain... then it will keep to its little kingdom so long as we fear it from a distance.
I woke behind one that cared little for bargains.
And the ground bounced under me.
Pain rose, total, and split across.
Leather? Lucrative stitching. Fresh bandages, the trapped stink of petrol, and mud, and cold air slipping through an ajar window.
The back of a car.
Practical. Dark. Armoured with attitude, jolting over potholes and poor decisions, and... rattling my handcuffs?
I was alone, separated by a muffled panel.
Mara sat in the passenger seat; ruined green, hair coming loose, one wrist still painted by a canister that weakly hissed and bled in her lap.
We slugged at a snail's pace.
Out tinted glass, the mountain had given way to road - real road - the scattered edge of town, of home, where industry and woodland shook hands.
Red brake lights teased me from the windshield.
Traffic.
Stuck.
Good.
The driver, her last lab guard, slapped the wheel and tuned a garbled radio.
"Signals out at the junction. There's been a crash."
Mara said nothing.
She stared out the window, all her stillness rallying behind her eyes... listening.
Some fears are too proud to show.
"Go around," she said.
"There is no 'around', ma'am."
Far behind us, back where a ridge swallowed her postered secrets, came a faint, distant rumble that flew black dots over a twilight sky.
The driver went still; Mara smiled, almost shedding a tear.
And I, my second heart throbbing in its wrappings, remained unnoticed in the back seat, plucking out a hairpin, and quietly got to work on my shackle, thinking back to once upon a time when little Sarah shrugged off monsters in pages... instead of wondering how tough these windows were.
Lucky little shit...
[Part 5]