He quickly descended the rest of the way to the floor, laying the razor grill next to what he assumed were the remains of one of his men. He quickly detached from the line and crouched down behind a nearby pallet that had had its plastic stripped off. The light in the massive space was low—it wasn’t really necessary to have your parked helicopters and pallets full of stuff lit up like Christmas, so Deep Blue was saving the electricity.
Carrack knelt down and examined the remains of his soldier.
Son of a bitch.
The murder grill had done its evil deed well. Most other people would have been ferociously sick at the nearly liquid remains of a human being, but Carrack had a strong stomach. He’d seen some bad things in Afghanistan, but he wasn’t sure if he had ever seen worse. He quickly scanned the distant ceiling of the hangar and located the second vent.
Checking carefully for hostiles, he moved quickly from pallet to pallet, taking brief cover at each until he came to a pallet that was coated in the remains of his other soldier. Neither man had stood a chance against their respective murder grills and the velocity of a human body in freefall. Carrack wondered whether White Four and White Five had met similar fates at their respective points of attempted ingress.
He moved cautiously through the remaining rooms in this section of the facility, one after the other. All of his senses were heightened. His pupils had dilated to take in the maximum vision in the dimly lit rooms and hallways. His ears were attuned to the slightest sounds from the air conditioning. He carefully smelled the sterile air, searching for a hint of cologne, the scent of nicotine exuded through the skin, sweat or anything else that might indicate a threat before he could see it.
By the time he got to the room that would be the main computer center once the base was fully operational, he was certain he was alone in this section.
When he stepped into the room, he saw motion though, and then his eyes opened up like saucers. He had never seen anything like this in Afghanistan.
Someone was sitting in the computer chair with the unusual design. It looked to him like White Zero, the shy computer girl. Her head and part of her shoulders were covered, so he couldn’t be sure at a glance. Covering her head and sticking straight up into the air, was the biggest fucking spotted salamander he had ever seen. It appeared to have come out of the air conditioning vent above White Zero’s head and it had tried to eat her. Her head and shoulder were completely inside of the creature, and its upper body stood straight up off the top of her head like a grotesque hat. About half way up the thing’s body—and it had to be at least seven feet long without the tail—the sheer weight of the slimy black body had made the creature bend over, almost in half. The tip of its long tapering tail nearly reached the floor. The beast’s bright yellow spots over its back screamed a hideous contrast to the horror of what he was seeing.
Strong or not, White One turned and vomited the contents of his stomach onto the floor.
As he was wiping a strand of drool from his mouth, he saw movement in the chair. He turned back to see the salamander twitching and seemingly struggling to free its immense mouth from its attempted meal.
That thing is still alive?
It was bucking in a frenzy now, and Carrack understood that it had heard him and was now looking for another snack.
“Not this time, fucker.”
He opened fire on it with the FN SCAR, then blinked his eyes in wonder as it continued to move. He lowered the weapon at the creature’s hind quarter and fired a long burst, sweeping the gun in a horizontal arc. The tail fell off and landed on the floor with a smacking noise. Both the tail-less creature and its tail were moving now. And to his astonishment and horror, Carrack watched as a new tail began to grow on the body. He guessed it would be no longer than ten minutes before the thing was back to its original size. He checked the tail on the floor to see if it would grow a body. If it did, there was no way to beat the things. But it didn’t. It twitched a few more times and then it lay still. Carrack vaguely remembered hearing about salamanders and geckos that could drop their tails to attract predators, allowing them to escape unharmed. The tails would still wiggle for a while to provide a healthy enticement for the predator.
Carrack was no scientist, but he was intelligent enough to figure that the regeneration capabilities had to be controlled by its consciousness—it didn’t just occur automatically at the cellular level, or the tail would be growing a body.
“Okay. Let’s see if you can grow back a whole body from just a head.”