Then a red blinking in her upper left field of vision caught her eye. The air in her facemask was compromised. She pointed the beam of the Wagan up by her face and could see the hairline fracture in the mask, no doubt caused by the impact when White One had crashed onto her.
“We have another problem. My faceplate is cracked—I’m almost out of air.” she told him.
“Forty five minutes. What the hell do we do now?”
“Run!”
22.
Section Dock, Former Manifold Alpha Facility, White Mountains, NH
This can’t end well.
Tom Duncan saw that the front wheel of his HDT was dipping low and wasn’t going to stick the landing. His knees had been gripping the sides of the bike in a death-clutch, but now he loosened them and pushed off the foot pedals, launching his body upward while still holding on to the handlebars. He tried to get both feet on the seat of the bike and shove off it. He only managed one foot on the seat, but as he let go of the handles, stretched his arms forward and shoved hard with his foot, he hoped it would be enough, as his body sprang forward and the bike began its plunge.
The bike crashed into the concrete of the wall just under the edge of the platform as Duncan’s body went sprawling, the wand of the flamethrower clattering behind him as it whipped around on its hose while he rolled to a stop on the floor.
Not graceful, but any crash you can walk away from is a good one.
He got to his knees and looked around the darkened platform. The light from the raging fires in the dock behind him was enough for him to see, but just barely. Then a shape was lunging out at him and he ducked and rolled, the tanks from the flamethrower ripping free from his body as a strap broke. The salamander flew right over his head and performed a spectacular swan dive into the fiery pit below. Duncan rolled to his feet and turned to see two more salamanders rushing him and an upright form that made him think initially that one of the salamander creatures had figured out how to run upright, like that lizard that raised its feet as it ran across the desert sand to stay cool.
It was the last Gen Y man that had taken cover behind the sub. He must have used the freight elevator, Duncan thought. Its nuts that thing is still working in all this. The Gen Y man lunged at Duncan with a matte black survival knife. Duncan back pedaled and turned to see a salamander that had been behind him on the floor but was now turned and departing from the sudden movement of Duncan’s feet toward it. Duncan lurched down and grabbed the salamander under its belly and by its tail then twisted hard and sprang to his feet spinning.
He let go of the creature’s underside, and as planned, it dropped its tail as a defensive measure. The centripetal force of the spin sent the mutant beast flying straight at the Gen Y man with the blade. He started to shout “oh son of a—” before the impact took him and the salamander toward the edge of the platform. Duncan thought they wouldn’t go over the edge, but they slid just enough toward the lip that the weight of the frenzied creature on top of the man flipped them both off the edge. As they disappeared from view, Duncan rolled across the floor to the tank of the flamethrower and wiped a streak of tail slime on his pants.
“The word you were looking for son, was ‘bitch.’”
He tugged the hose, pulling the wand of the weapon toward him, noticing that the tube of the wand was bent slightly, but the igniter flame was still functioning. He aimed the weapon at the last approaching salamander, and pulled the trigger. At first the blaze sprayed wide of the target because of the bend in the pipe, but Duncan corrected before the bastard could scramble away. The liquid flame engulfed the scrabbling thing and it screamed as it broiled.
Duncan got to his feet and limped to the edge of the platform, looking down into the conflagration. His ankle was turned and his back was sore as hell—probably from one too many impacts with the tanks on the flamethrower, which he was holding now over just the one shoulder. He looked down and saw crusted, blackened salamander corpses everywhere. Gouts of thick liquid still shot up from the cooking eggs embedded on the walls as they ruptured. The bulk of the remaining salamanders—probably forty or fifty—were still clustering around the sub and were swimming into the water and under the central cargo section of the sub where the intercontinental ballistic missiles had been housed before the enormous vehicle had been retrofitted for hauling supplies and equipment.
Why the hell are you so protective of that area?
Then he understood.