The problem with such a hold is two-fold. The first is that you have to get in close to use it. The tall man rushed in to do so and Johnson demonstrated the second issue. He raised his uninjured arm and blocked the overhead stab by crossing his forearm under his attacker’s, then he dropped low and spun, slashing laterally with his M9. By the time Johnson had darted away from the reach of the Gen Y man, the top of his opponent’s black trousers were already damp with abdominal blood. Johnson’s cut had gone deep.
The Gen Y man staggered backward a few steps, dropping the foolish knife while trying to keep his organs from spilling out. Blood dripped onto the floor. As he neared the fallen pistol, Johnson’s level of alert increased, but the man was looking on the floor for something else. Johnson was about to wonder what it could be. The man had passed up the knife and Johnson’s pistol. But before White Five could do more than begin to form the question, something freakishly bizarre interrupted the conclusion of the knife fight.
Three shiny black heads poked around the far corner of the corridor and looked at Johnson. The Gen Y man didn’t see them—his back was to that end of the white corridor. Johnson’s attention picked up the movement immediately.
“What the f—” he started to say.
Then everything happened at once. The bleeding Gen Y man lunged for a small backpack that was leaning on the floor, further back toward the new arrivals. The three creatures darted out into the corridor, looking for all the world to Johnson like black speckled alligators. Big ones. Johnson himself was in motion—diving forward into the corridor, but away from the Gen Y man. Johnson was going for his SIG Sauer P226. Two human bodies slid along the linoleum floor while three amphibian bodies glided across the walls toward the two men. Time seemed to slow to a crawl for Johnson. His perception moved into bullet time.
Johnson snatched up the handgun and let off a few shots at the crawling intruders up on the walls. He rolled into a back flip, and landed crouched on his toes as he fired three more shots. Nothing. He turned back toward the Gen Y man in time to see the taller man flinging his retrieved knife at Johnson. Johnson ducked and rolled forward, the whirling oversized knife passing overhead and sticking hilt deep into the skull of one of the huge salamanders on the wall behind him. Johnson came out of his roll and shouldered the Gen Y man to the side of the corridor before turning to fire more at the attacking beasts on the walls. He took a breath and lined up the shots carefully, targeting one of the dark creature’s silver-dollar-sized black eyes.
As the beast with the knife stuck downward through the top of its head leapt off the wall toward the Gen Y man, Johnson watched as the taller man turned and kicked out with one leg, his combat boot connecting soundly with the front of the leaping creature’s flattened looking head. In the man’s functioning hand, he tightly clutched the backpack from before. One of the other two salamanders was initiating its own leap toward the Gen Y man, as Johnson noticed in the slowed-down passage of time that the beast whose eyes he had shot out was still approaching him and the eyes were sealing up.
Time almost ground to a stop for Johnson as several thoughts jammed into his skull at once. The backpack was a bomb. The salamanders were regenerating. The door to the utility closet with the hole leading down to the cavern below Labs was open and just a few feet to his left. He didn’t have any grenades on him and even if he did, the resulting explosion from the backpack bomb might kill everyone and everything in the corridor. It might even ignite the natural gasses down in the cavern and destroy the whole base. No matter what, Johnson was screwed.
Snap.
Where time had been slowed to a crawl before, now everything kicked into hyper-motion. The Gen Y man tossed the backpack and it slid across the corridor’s linoleum toward the natural rock hole in the floor of the closet. Two of the salamanders lunged at the Gen Y man, one landing on his chest and taking him down, and the one with the knifehead latched its huge mouth, knife blade and all, around the man’s thigh. When the mouth opened, it looked like the creature’s entire head had split open like a trash can lid coming off the can. The third salamander was leaping for Johnson.