He opened fired again in a horizontal arc, this time at the creature’s neck, well aware of the damage he was probably doing to White Zero’s corpse, but it was necessary for him to determine how to beat the thing—especially if there might be more of them. Carrack was a cautious and very pessimistic man. He assumed there were probably hundreds more of them somewhere. After all, once he got over his initial shock at the sight of this thing, he remembered where he was and what the job entailed. Chess Team dealt with the wacky.
Eventually, the sawing buzz of bullets severed the creature’s head from its torso. The huge body thumped to the floor next to the tail. Carrack was relieved to see that it did not move. The head was also not re-growing a body. He stepped closer to see if the head looked like it was even still alive. It didn’t seem to be.
That was when he had noticed the computer monitor that White Zero had been reading. He probably would have passed it by as unimportant as he went on to search for Black Zero and Deep Blue, but the irony of his peripheral vision noticing the word salamanders, caught his eye and dragged it back to the screen.
Carrack read what White Zero had been reading. He didn’t understand everything he read, but he got the gist of it. One of Manifold’s flunkies had experimented on harmless, small salamanders and these monstrosities were the result. He got the high points: aggressive, enlarged, rapid, could secrete a poison from the skin, radiation, regeneration, and they needed dampness in their environment—they were averse to light and fire could damage their ability to regenerate.
He knew where they were coming from and he knew how to deal with them. Rifle fire was clearly going to be ineffective.
He headed back to the hangar and made for the pallets containing weapons. He was about to unwrap the one he wanted when he heard voices coming.
13.
Section Central, Former Manifold Alpha Facility, White Mountains, NH
Damien was not pleased. The mission was supposed to be a simple infiltration. Get in, get the sample, leave the bomb and get the hell out. He knew the damned creatures were active. They had told him that. They just conveniently neglected to tell him that the damned things were psychotic and hungry to boot. They hadn’t told him the blasted things could leap. He’d lost a lot of men back on the train platform. They were fodder, of course. Poorly trained and likely to come apart at the seams at the first hint of danger—well, most of them. A few were solid soldiers. Still, Damien didn’t like to have to sacrifice them needlessly.
Damien also wasn’t expecting much resistance from Chess Team personnel. He knew that most of the team—active members and support—were away still. Chess Team didn’t plan to occupy the facility for a while yet. Gen Y had only been alerted to Chess Team’s plan recently when they had inadvertently allowed Gen Y computer access, as a number of systems had been partially reactivated. Manifold had been content to leave the abandoned base in the hands of the US military after it had been captured. “Not worth it,” was the official call. But then the systems had been reactivated, and it became clear that Chess Team planned to use the facility for something. A few Gen Y men had been tasked with keeping an eye on the computer systems. It was only much later, when the motion sensors had suggested that Maddox’s experiments were still inhabiting the base, that the powers that be had ordered Gen Y to go back in.
Maddox. That damned fool. Vicious man-eating salamanders. For fuck’s sake.
Damien had lobbied for setting a far longer timer on the device he was to leave behind, in the hopes of catching most of the Chess Team bastards inside the facility when it was destroyed, but that wasn’t how he had been ordered to handle things. They just wanted their sample, and then the base was to be destroyed. Immediately.
But things had gone pear-shaped almost immediately. More than half his force decimated on the train platform, loss of control over the computer systems, giant bastard amphibians on the loose and someone armed and fighting back. Damien hadn’t gotten a clear look at the man with the bald head that had opened fire on his men during the salamander skirmish, but he looked familiar. He wasn’t one of the normal Chess Team operatives and he wasn’t one of the new security team. Damien’s spotter had confirmed by radio that all five of the security men had been outside when they had activated the steel security doors. So the man with the rifle had to be one of their few tech people that were supposed to be inside.
Damien looked out the window of the moving train, as it sped down the underground tunnel to the section of the base with the aircraft hangar. All he had wanted to do was blow the shite out of this place, but now he had to try to get computer control back from one of the computer rooms, or he and his last few remaining men wouldn’t be able to get out after they had what they had come for.
The train pulled into the platform and the men debarked, looking far more skittish than when they had arrogantly infiltrated the laboratories. Damien stepped out in front of the men and strode down a hall toward the hangar space and the computer rooms. His men followed behind him, and his new number 2, a man named Jameson, approached him.