“Faster!” Before Duncan had gotten the second syllable out of his mouth, Beck had gunned the throttle and the bike was racing close to top speed for the hanger. Duncan raised the torch and the can of spray to let a few blasts off at the ceiling and the swarm of wriggling beasts ahead of them raced away down the corridor.
Then the dirt bike was launching out of the corridor into the open space of the hangar. Before they had cleared the opening by more than a meter, a salamander came springing off the right wall of the hangar and knocked Beck completely off the bike to their left. Duncan watched in horror as she and the salamander blasted left and the runaway dirt bike popped a wheelie and went launching out from under his knees. As he fell backward and looked up, he saw at least a hundred of the things fleeing across the hangar walls. Then he saw one of the black and yellow creatures was falling on top of him. He let a burst of fire loose and the thing crisped up before he hit the deck on his back. The fall blasted all the air out of his lungs and then the charred body of his attacker fell on top of him, doubling the insult to his chest.
Duncan rolled sideways, shoving the cooked carcass off him in time to see Beck rolling over backward with a frantic salamander attacking her from the front. It went into the roll with her. As they came up out of the roll, Beck twisted and stabbed upward with her bayonet, driving the blade through the amphibian’s lower jaw, up through the top of its head and into the linoleum of the floor outside the door to the glassed in office Duncan had used earlier with Lori. Beck rolled away and the salamander was pinned to the floor by the top of its head. It twisted its body and managed to get its legs on the floor properly. Its neck twisted at an almost impossible angle as it struggled to pull itself free from the blade.
Duncan stood and launched another fire blast at some of the salamanders that had followed him out of the corridor. Then he swung back to Beck as he heard her exasperated voice.
“Shit!”
The salamander had tugged its head away from the pinned knife blade, allowing it to cut through the front of its face so it could escape. With a final tug, the persistent creature pulled free from the knife and scrambled toward Duncan, opening its mouth wide, the four segments of its head now moving independently. Duncan lurched forward, stumbling on the carcass of his first attacker, the burst of fire from his improvised weapon ending up firing directly into the split-headed salamander’s mouth instead of on its back, where Duncan had intended to target. The creature stopped moving before Duncan landed on the floor.
As he glanced up at Beck, he saw yet another of the wiggling assailants flying through the air at Beck from behind. Before he could recover from hitting the floor again, he saw a blur of woodland camouflage—Matt Carrack was flying through the air toward the salamander’s back.
Duncan’s wind came back just in time. “Duck!” he shouted.
Beck dropped to all fours and rolled out of the way, as Matt Carrack wrapped a wire garrote around the flying salamander’s head. When it hit the ground, Carrack held on and rode the creature as it raced toward the wall. Carrack leaned back and started to pull on the wooden handles of the garrote, as the salamander reached the wall and started up it. Carrack held on tightly, choking the life out of the amphibian as it raced up the wall. Carrack was pulled up the wall, and he looked to Duncan like some absurd vertical rodeo rider. As they reached a height of about four meters off the floor, Carrack successfully pulled the choking wire clean through the salamander’s body, and fell, the head of the creature following him down, while the body stayed attached to the wall with surreal obstinacy. Carrack’s feet hit the floor and he dropped into a crouch and rolled, but the plummeting head hit him anyway, bouncing off his shoulder.
Beck was tugging her knife from the floor and Duncan climbed to his feet. Most of the flood of salamanders was retreating now down the corridor leading to the train platform for the Dock. Duncan was about to thank Carrack for his timely intervention, but the man was sprinting across the hangar floor toward one of the pallets. Duncan’s keen mind sussed out the man’s plan seconds before he reached his targeted stack of boxes. From atop them, the man pulled down the backpack portion of an M2A1-7 portable flamethrower. They only had two of the antique items that Deep Blue had been able to secure. The devices were not used in modern warfare anymore, but Duncan had felt that they might be a useful item in Chess Team’s arsenal. He’d wanted the Vietnam era M9A1-7s but hadn’t been able to find any, so he’d had to settle for the devices used as far back as World War II. Duncan had forgotten he’d ordered them and they were sitting on the hangar floor along with tons of other unwrapped Chess Team weaponry. With the fuel tanks securely on his back, Carrack pulled the business end around in front of him and started for the wall where the last of the salamanders were retreating to the far corridor.