The man with the grenade launcher down on the dock exploded in a bloom of liquid fire at the same time that the forward half of Duncan’s catwalk exploded, sending metal shards flying past his face, and a few of them embedded themselves in his left arm. The wounds were shallow but they stung. The salamanders were racing all around the flames on the floor and in the water, screeching and squealing as their eggs caught fire and exploded with loud belching noises, spraying their half-solid and half-liquid innards up into the air like fountains of snot.
Duncan scrambled to his feet and checked his six—back toward the destroyed half of his catwalk and the man that had been propelled toward the platform at the top of the steps. No sign of him. And Duncan hadn’t forgotten that the man left behind in Central could still be coming from that direction. He was about to check the other end of his catwalk down by the bike and the submarine, when something at that end exploded loudly and the concussion wave knocked him back down onto the metal grill. He rolled to look down that end of the catwalk and quickly darted his head and shoulders to the side to avoid the incoming impact of a long dark shape. It hit the metal floor next to his face with a meaty thwack. Duncan saw that it was a salamander tail—easily four feet in length. The stump end was slightly singed from the detonation of the tripwire grenade Duncan had set at the end of the catwalk by the sub. He checked there and saw the last section of the metal walkway bent down and falling from support struts on the ceiling to plunge into the burning water below.
Duncan’s plan was coming apart rapidly. He hadn’t expected the fight with Gen Y to last so long and he’d hoped to be safely swinging from the rope off the catwalk, where he’d be perfectly safe from any salamander attackers and he’d be free to deal out flamethrower justice to the crawling things. Instead, both ends of the catwalk were now destroyed, he was trapped on the metal walkway above the flaming water with the dirt bike and a backpack on the floor full of explosive propellant. The room was awash in flame and his original target, the man with the egg, might have gotten away.
The salamanders were still writhing in a frenzy around nearly every surface of the enormous space, but they seemed to be converging on the sub—both in and out of the water. Duncan stood up on the now wobbly and flaming catwalk and looked again toward the train platform end, noticing the upward slant of the floor where it had buckled and twisted from the 40 mm grenade explosion. He glanced back to the HDT at the other end of the catwalk, a few meters from where the walkway disappeared and left a huge gap before the top of the sub sail.
He ducked down and scooped up the backpack for the flamethrower and slung it around his shoulders. He tossed the M202 FLASH down off the catwalk to the concrete floor of the dock far below. He wasn’t sure whether he’d get to it again or whether it would survive the impact of being thrown so far, but right now it was just in his way. He needed the catwalk floor as clear as possible. He likewise picked up the detached salamander tail and flipped it over the rail of the walkway and into the flaming water twenty-five meters below.
He ran to the end of the metal grill floor to retrieve his HDT, worried about the structural integrity of the last piece of the walkway as he ran. He got the bike started, laid the wand of his flamethrower along the improvised holster for it on the handlebars as he had done back in the train tunnel and looked at the hundred or so meters of standing catwalk he had left before the floor angled upward and twisted like ramp starting into a corkscrew. He had to clear probably a twenty-meter gap after that to reach the safety of the platform. He had considered jumping the bike the other direction toward the flat top of the sub’s sail, but discarded the idea. There was no ramp at that end and the sail was teeming with angry salamanders. Most of the beasts on the ceiling had come down the far wall and congregated on the sub as well.
Tom Duncan held in the clutch, gunned the throttle on the bike once again and once more thought of his election slogan: A Brisk Pace.
Oh yes, we’re moving along briskly now.
He popped the clutch and the bike lunged forward, Duncan holding on tightly and accelerating the whole time as he aimed for the left side of the ramp-like metal floor at the end of the catwalk. The right side had twisted into a double helix of angry metal debris that would shred his front wheel and send him cascading down to the concrete floor of the dock where he would be devoured by pissed off, flaming, mutated death engines with four foot long tongues.
As his front wheel neared the clear side of the ramp, he asked himself aloud “How the hell did I get myself into this?” and launched into the air.
21.
Cavern under Section Labs, Former Manifold Alpha Facility, White Mountains, NH