Duncan swung the cutting torch, its blinding white-hot flame spitting through the air. He scored a hit and the attacking creature darted away. He felt things brush by him as the bike raced into the darkness. He kept his knees locked tightly to the frame of the bike for balance and swung the spotlight with his left hand as rapidly and as unexpectedly as he could. He still never saw more than a tail rapidly retreating into the gloom. His right hand waved the torch—most often toward the right side of the vehicle. He didn’t want to bring his arm over and risk burning Beck.
Beck was hunched forward over the handlebars and laying on the speed, when Duncan felt something wrap around and grab his right arm. He blasted the beam of the spotlight on his arm and saw a long pink strip of meat wrapped around his arm in a spiral, and below it was one of the salamanders. This one wasn’t as large as the others he’d seen on the train platform. He guessed it was an adolescent. It was riding on the side of the bike frame, its head facing forward and the rear of its body wrapped over the back fender. The meat on Duncan’s arm was a tongue that must have been at least four feet long.
Duncan rotated his wrist and neatly sliced through the tongue with the cutting torch and the great beast leapt away from the side of the bike and into darkness. He glanced up just in time to see another of the pink tongues stretching out into the light from the wall. He ducked his head under it and then saw a few more of the tongues ahead. He raised his arm and held the torch high. Beck seemed to understand and steered the bike a bit closer to the right wall and away from the tongues on the left wall. Still, the move brought them closer to the tongues coming off the right wall. And now he saw some coming from the ceiling too.
Duncan focused on the creatures, noting their size, distance and movements, visualizing each strike. Then he began to slice off tongues with the cutting torch as the bike raced past the bodies in the dark.
15.
Section Labs, Former Manifold Alpha Facility, White Mountains, NH
White Five slashed out with his M9 bayonet. His Gen Y opponent merely took a step backward. The man that had been playing possum was huge—at least six inches taller than White Five’s five-foot-eleven. On the plus side, the Gen Y giant really did seem to have a broken arm. On the negative side, the man was wielding a ridiculously large Rambo knife in his other hand. Pete Johnson hated those things, as did many active duty U.S. military members. They were so large as to be useless in survival situations, despite being labeled as survival knives. They also sucked for utility purposes; although the blades were frightening and beefy looking, they didn’t have the tensile strength for true field craft. Pete Johnson preferred his M9 for such purposes. Unfortunately, in a straight knife fight against a longer-armed opponent, the serrated weekend-warrior knife worked just fine. A little too well, for Johnson’s taste.
The big man in black lunged forward, his huge blade coming in straight at Johnson’s midsection like a spear. Johnson parried the blade with his M9 and stepped to the side before attempting a similar lunge, but the big man was too far away. They had traded slashes a few times now, and Johnson was no closer to ending this fight. The initial scuffle when the Gen Y man had been playing possum under the detonated door had cost Johnson his sidearm and his rifle. The Gen Y man had stood in his dusty black BDUs and produced the large knife, holding it up for Johnson’s inspection. Johnson had glanced to the floor of the hallway and seen his own pistol ahead and behind his opponent, and he knew the MP5 and his FN SCAR were on the floor well behind him. No choice but to pull his M9 and wade into it with the Jolly Green Giant.
The larger man lunged again, but it was a feint. He turned his blade sideways and targeted Johnson’s defending knife arm. The blade of the oversized knife tore into Johnson’s digicam woodland sleeve and cleaved into the skin beneath it. Johnson yanked his arm back and glanced at the wound. Deep, but not life threatening. He took a step back and used his left hand to unbutton the BDU blouse as the men slowly circled each other, keeping their eyes on their opponents. In a fluid movement, Johnson shed the blouse from his uninjured arm, and wrapped the jacket around his knife forearm. The move was so slick, it looked practiced, even to Johnson, but he’d only just thought of it. His opponent smiled appraisingly. Then the man made his mistake. The one Johnson knew a crappy Gen Y soldier that would think a Rambo knife was a good choice was likely to make. The man changed his grip on the huge weapon, so that the blade pointed downward, as if he were going to be attacking Janet Leigh in the famous shower scene in Psycho.
Finally, Johnson thought.