Chimera, p.28
Chimera, page 28
Mira screams.
A hurt expression passes over Sammy’s face, and for a second, she almost looks like she’s going to cry, but suddenly her brow lowers, her eyes narrow, and she opens her mouth well past the point where the joint should have stopped it. She presses her tongue to the roof of her mouth, revealing pointed swellings to either side of the frenulum, where the salivary glands should have been. She reaches inside, grabs one of the tiny points, and pulls it out—tsk-tsk-tsk-tsk-tsk-tsk—with a gooey strand of webbing.
Mira screams and thrashes against her bindings, her entire body sliding just enough that she can almost wriggle her shoulders from the cocoon.
Sammie slaps the web over Mira’s mouth. Her cry abruptly ceases, its echo reverberating into the darkness. She gasps for breath, but no air flows into her mouth and her nostrils are filled with mucus. Panic sets in. Her chest tightens, her lungs seemingly stoppered. She tries to free her hands. Attempts to bite a hole in the webbing, to blow through her nose—
Her nasal passages clear, just enough to allow for the slightest passage of air. She forces herself to calm down, to concentrate on drawing the cold air through her sinuses and down the back of her throat. If that narrow passageway closes again . . .
“Leave her alone,” Amy says, her voice trembling.
Sammie moves in a blur. She scurries fluidly across the ceiling, straight toward Amy, who gasps in alarm.
Mira can’t let the older woman suffer in her place. She issues a muffled grunt and struggles to free her arms. For a fleeting moment, it almost feels like she moves.
“You afraid to tangle with someone bigger than you?” Amy shouts. “Well, I’ve got news for you; this old bird’s a lot tougher than she looks.”
Sammie grabs Amy’s braid and wrenches the older woman’s head back, exposing her throat.
Mira squirms and wiggles and suddenly squeezes from the top of the cocoon, freeing her shoulders. The webbing is hydrophobic. That’s the key. The same quality that makes it float and resist separating in the water causes her sweat to function as a lubricant between her body and the silk. She pries her arm free, tears the sticky silk from her mouth.
Sammie rears back, inverting herself from the ceiling like a cobra preparing to strike—“No!” Mira shouts—and vomits a flume of stomach acid onto Amy’s face.
The older woman screams as her skin blisters, then melts from her skull. The pain in her cries is unbearable but, mercifully, doesn’t last long. The acid eats through her trachea and vocal cords, releasing her dying breath as a ragged sigh through the bloody stoma.
Mira sobs and tugs at her restraints. She needs to get out of here, to find help.
A slurping sound.
She doesn’t have to look to know what Sammy is doing to Amy. She kicks and squirms and—
Mira’s momentarily airborne, the ground simultaneously falling out from underneath her and rushing to greet her. A cry rises to her lips, but the impact with the rocky floor knocks the wind out of her. She struggles to breathe, to push herself to all fours. The pain in her chest is crippling. She must have broken a rib, yet she manages to stand and stagger deeper into the cave.
Sammie drops from the ceiling and alights behind her, arms splayed, head still twisted backward. Her spine makes a crackling sound as her head turns all the way back around. She rises to her full height, knees popping back into their sockets.
Mira rushes toward Aaron, who’s cocooned in a stone hollow, surrounded by strange ice formations. She jumps up, grabs the webbing, pulls with all her strength.
Aaron’s words are muffled by the silk over his mouth. His eyes widen, and Mira realizes what’s about to happen.
She twists out of the way as Sammie’s hand flashes through her peripheral vision, snaring a fistful of her hair and tearing the roots from their follicles. Mira slips on the ice and narrowly ducks Sammie’s next slashing blow. She scrambles to her feet and runs in the opposite direction, shouldering from one ice column to the next, leading the monster away from Aaron and into the narrow passageway.
The wind grows stronger with every step, the temperature plummeting. Mira’s breath freezes to her lips. The light drawing her to the outside world grows brighter and brighter until she’s nearly upon it, the scuttling sound of her pursuit closing in behind her.
A dark shape passes across the narrow crevice that serves as the entrance to the formation, momentarily eclipsing her only way out.
Mira screams and tries to stop. Loses her footing and slides straight toward the source of the movement. She rolls onto her stomach. Claws at the frozen earth. Crawls in the opposite direction.
And looks straight into Sammie’s eyes as her former friend races toward her.
There’s nowhere left to run.
This is where it ends.
50
A scream echoes from the other side of the wall of ice. Cameron slithers through the narrow gap into darkness so cold and complete that all he can see through the thermal lenses is a world of seamless black. Details come into focus as he pushes himself up from the frozen ground. He takes in his surroundings down the barrel of his rifle, his finger tightening on the trigger.
Bare earthen floor, covered with rocks. Walls coated with ice, masses of which form columns and formations reminiscent of speleothems. The size of the cavern is impossible to gauge, the route of penetration dictated by a narrow passageway—
A blur of color. Orange and yellow. Low to the ground. Its shape is undeniably human. Long hair. Slender. Female.
The woman screams as he approaches her from behind. Glances up at him, then in the opposite direction, toward another thermal signature racing toward them on all fours, its appendages violet streaks. Its inhuman face is an orange mask of rage, its eyes and open mouth glowing gold.
“Get down!” he shouts.
And pulls the trigger.
A three-round burst strikes the ground around the creature, sparking from the exposed stone. The colored blur dodges sideways, scurries up the wall, and races away from him along the ceiling.
He aims and fires another burst. The bullets shatter an opaque wall of ice just as the creature passes behind it and disappears into the darkness.
Ryder squeezes through the crevice and starts to pursue, but Cameron extends an arm to hold him back. He reaches down, takes the woman by the hand, and helps her to her feet.
“Get her to the Susvee,” he whispers.
“I’m not going anywhere without Aaron,” the woman whispers. “Not while there’s still a chance he might survive.”
Cameron recognizes the woman’s voice from her video logs. Dr. Mira Stone. He looks her dead in the eyes and recognizes the determination. There’s no time to argue.
“Then stay behind me,” he whispers, “and do exactly as I say.”
Cameron advances into the cavern. Thermal hand- and footprints marking the figure’s passage fade into nothingness. There are no heat signatures corresponding to blood spatters. It’s staggering to think that not a single shot hit its target. He finds the impact points on an ice formation near the ceiling, fractured shards dotting the path at his feet. There’s no sign of where the creature might have gone, but there’s only one direction to go from here.
He walks in a shooter’s stance, the reflections from the ice throwing off his sense of depth perception. The movement in his peripheral vision is unnerving. He concentrates on the thermal range, searching for the faintest hint of color.
His heart beats faster, his blood rushing in his ears. He didn’t get a clear look at his quarry, although there’s no doubt in his mind that he’s hunting Dr. Rantanen. Not after everything he’d seen on the security footage. He can’t allow himself to think about that now, though. Lives hang in the balance. If he can contain the threat she poses without killing her, then he will, but if he’s forced to make a choice . . .
“It’s not Sammie’s fault,” Mira whispers from behind him, as though reading his thoughts. “Please don’t kill her.”
Cameron tunes her out and focuses on his surroundings. The texture of the ice changes the deeper he goes, his reflection giving way to shadows that seem to spread through the ice like smoke. He hears a wet slap and smells something metallic, a scent reminiscent of battery acid, and abruptly stops.
There’s a nearly imperceptible heat signature around the sharp bend, behind a column of ice. He inches closer to get a better look. A pool of blood glows faintly from the floor, rapidly cooling around the edges. Chunks of flesh form mounds in the middle. A fresh gob streaks from the ceiling as he watches and strikes the puddle with a wet slap. He raises his eyes to the source and nearly squeezes off another three-round burst.
Dr. Madigan’s body is bound in what looks like a cocoon, her head hanging limply from one end. Her face is skeletal, her long braid clinging to her skull by a strap of scalp.
He averts his eyes and scans the area for any other sources of heat or movement. There’s another cocoon on the ceiling. Empty. A vague purple and orange aura beyond it, distorted by the ice.
“Waller and Kato are leaving the lab,” Rush says through his earpiece. “It looks like they got what they came for.”
Cameron doesn’t respond for fear of announcing his location, but his tech sergeant’s observation confirms his suspicions. The men from NeXgen didn’t want any witnesses to their collection of the biofilm. And if he was right, there was already a plan in motion to make the samples disappear before anyone was the wiser, although he couldn’t fathom how they intended to do so in this weather. Maybe another plane or all-terrain vehicle dispatched from Thule Air Base, five hundred miles away. Anywhere farther away than that and it would take at least another half a day to arrive. Regardless, he and his team need to be there when the transport arrives, but they have to accomplish their primary mission first.
He eases around the corner and hears a muffled voice, like someone attempting to speak through a gag. Dr. Aaron Wallace looks down at him from where he’s bound to the roof of the cavern, the lower half of his face concealed by a mess of webbing. Tears stream from his eyes, which glance to the side and back again. To the side and back again.
“Down!” Cameron shouts.
He hits the ground and rolls. A magenta blur plummets from a hole in the ceiling and lands where he’d been standing a split-second ago.
Cameron comes up firing, the flash of discharge causing a strobe effect. Dr. Rantanen bucks backward and twists sideways. A golden spatter of blood ascends the wall behind her. She sprints behind an ice column, her injured arm hanging at her side, blood spiraling around her forearm and dripping from her fingertips, leaving a glowing trail on the rocky ground behind her.
Gunshots roar from behind him and to his left, staggering the woman and driving her back. Ryder advances from the corner of Cameron’s eye and heads for the man in the cocoon. The rescue combat office draws his knife and hacks at the bindings. Cameron catches a glimpse of Dr. Wallace sliding out and draping over Ryder’s shoulder as he moves to outflank Dr. Rantanen. She scrabbles up the wall before he can do so and passes right across his sightline. He takes aim at her opposite shoulder and squeezes the trigger—
“Don’t!” Dr. Stone shouts, pushing his elbow.
Cameron’s shots go high and wide, sparking from the wall near Dr. Rantanen’s head and ricocheting into the ceiling. Fissures race through the ice from the points of impact and, with a thunderous cracking sound, a section of the roof collapses.
Dr. Rantanen leaps to the floor and scrambles out from beneath the massive chunks of ice and stone raining down on her. Veers toward Cameron. Launches herself at him before he even senses the attack coming. Ducks under his rifle. Gets into his chest. Drives him backward.
He leaves his feet and hits the ground on his back, his breath exploding from his chest. A boulder slams to the ground beside his head. He attempts to roll away, but the woman presses her advantage. She squeezes her legs around his abdomen. Forces his head back and pins it to the ground. Rears up above him and opens her mouth—
Ryder steps up beside her and pins the smoldering barrel of his rifle to her temple. A falling rock hits his weapon right as he pulls the trigger.
A flash of discharge and the world seems to move in slow motion.
Dr. Rantanen jerks her head down. The bullets tear through her hair, the expulsion of gasses singeing the clumped strands, and ricochet from the wall beside her. She rounds on Ryder and lunges from on top of Cameron. Her throat swells, and she makes a sickly retching sound. A geyser of fluid bursts from her lips.
Ryder ducks out of the way, but not quickly enough. The acid strikes his cheek and splatters on his back. He slaps his hand over the wound and stumbles backward, firing straight up into the roof of the cavern, which disintegrates in the blink of an eye. His screams are swallowed by the deafening rumble of countless tons of stone fracturing and coming apart.
Cameron propels himself to his feet, grabs Ryder by his collar, and pulls him out of the way. Mira and Aaron rush to his aid, and together they drag the injured soldier toward the outside world.
A slab of granite slams to the ground, forcing Dr. Rantanen in the opposite direction, deeper into the cave. Another boulder strikes her head, driving her to her knees. She scuttles in reverse and looks up at Cameron through the blood dripping from her brow. Her eyes meet his through the rain of earth and dust.
He releases Ryder.
Takes aim.
And fires.
51
Mira reaches for the barrel of the rifle, but she’s too late. She sees Sammie’s face in the flash of discharge, her ghostly features limned green by what precious little light reaches her through the haze of dust and falling debris. A crimson star bursts from her forehead, and then she’s gone, the pained expression on her face vanishing beneath the avalanche of stone and ice.
“No!” Mira screams, but her words are swallowed by the roar of the earth coming apart all around her.
Aaron wraps his arms around her and drags her in reverse. She pushes him away and rounds on the man with the rifle, who shouts something into her face, although she can neither hear his voice nor make out his words. He hands her his rifle and pushes her toward the trail leading to the surface. A rock clips his head, denting his helmet. He crouches, drapes his fallen comrade’s leg over one shoulder and his arm over the other, and rises in a fireman’s carry.
Mira sprints ahead of him, following Aaron’s dark silhouette through the narrow maze, the walls of which begin to collapse beneath the weight of the crumbling ceiling. The light from the outside world dies, stranding them in darkness so deep she can see neither the man ahead of her nor the soldiers behind her. She repeatedly trips and falls, rolling her ankles, skinning her knees and palms. Something strikes her head. Stars flash across her vision. She feels warmth seeping from her hairline, wipes the blood from her eyes with her sleeve, and fights through the dizziness—
Suddenly, she can see again. The wall of ice concealing the entrance falls like a curtain of shattered glass. Jagged rocks break loose from the ceiling and streak through her peripheral vision. One hammers Aaron and drives him to his knees, fibers blooming from a tear in his parka. She grabs him by the hand, pulls him to his feet, and drags him out onto the ledge, where the brutal wind nearly sweeps them from the icy path. The entire hillside seems to crumble at once, sending ice and earth tumbling past her.
The soldier staggers from the rubble, boulders bounding past him and plummeting into the deep canyon. Something clips his heel, and he goes down hard. He struggles to stand with the weight of the injured man on his shoulders. Cameron, the patch on his jacket reads. Blood pours from the ragged orifice in his fellow soldier’s cheek, through which his rear molars and the arch of his mandible are visible.
“Go!” Cameron shouts.
Aaron rushes ahead of Mira and jumps from the ledge. He reaches back just as she leaps from the precipice, and they both tumble into the snow. The ledge collapses. Cameron barely manages to fall in the right direction, the added weight on his back driving him face-first into the accumulation as the escarpment vanishes behind him.
The roar subsides, and a cloud of dust rises into the sky. It swirls above the crater where the cave had once been before being carried away by the wind.
Mira can only stare at the rubble, beneath which Sammie’s body lays buried beneath countless tons of granite. The memory of the blood exploding from her forehead, in that frozen moment in time, will forever be a scar upon her soul. She rocks back and screams up into the night.
She should have been able to save Sammie. Should have been able to save them all. Every one of them was dead, save for Aaron, whose face shimmers with blood from the laceration running straight across the crown of his head. Ice has already begun to form in his hair.
“We have to keep moving,” Cameron says.
Without so much as a hint of remorse, he stands, shifts the weight of the wounded man—Ryder, his nameplate reads—on his shoulders, and starts uphill. Mira yells in anguish and jumps in his way. He lets her beat his chest with her fists until she runs out of steam and collapses to her knees.
“I’m sorry,” he says, his voice little more than a whisper. “Believe me, if there had been any other way . . . ”
He steps around her and ascends the slick trail, picking his way around rock formations rimed with ice.
“There’s nothing you could have done,” Aaron says. “There’s nothing anyone could have done.”
Mira understands on a rational level that he’s right, but it doesn’t make her feel any better. There had been numerous points along the way when she should have recognized what was happening. Had she done so, her colleagues would still be alive. She’d failed them all. In her hurry to change the world, she’d cost thirteen innocent people their lives. Thanks to her hubris, Lord only knew how many discoveries wouldn’t be made, how many revolutionary technologies wouldn’t be developed, and how many millions would die from the very climate disaster they’d sought to avert.
