Prime (Chess Team Adventure, #0.5)

He felt it first as a weight crashing against him, and then something wrapped around his legs. The impact wasn’t enough to knock him down—he was too big and too powerful to be taken down by a hit from just about anyone but an NFL linebacker, but the grip that tightened around his legs was fierce enough to break his stride. He swiped at the clutching arms, using the MP5 like a club, but even as his assailant fell away, another body crashed into him, and then another. Then he was buried under a deluge of human flesh.

They swarmed over him like warrior ants guided by a common mind, attempting to immobilize his limbs and render him defenseless. Against almost anyone else, this tactic would have achieved its intended purpose, but he was not just anyone else. The ferocity of the attack catalyzed him, burning through his practiced self-restraint, releasing his fury in a titanic eruption.

The next thing he knew, he was free of their grasping hands, kneeling in the center of a circle of broken bodies. His ability to think rationally returned by degrees…

I was supposed to be doing something… The van…

He stood, aware that some of the bodies that lay around him were moving, stirring from the stunning violence he had inflicted on them. Despite the darkness, he could distinctly make out that the attackers were small-bodied—some of them looked like very young teenagers—but their arms and legs were thick with muscle, almost grotesquely so. Clothes had been torn away in the struggle, revealing torsos that ballooned with the kind of unnatural tissue growth that was a side-effect of steroid abuse.

But that was the only the tip of the iceberg.

Enormous scars mapped their bodies, white and purple marks with crisscrossing patterns like the laces of a football. The coarse black hair that covered their scalps was patchy in places, revealing where incisions had been made. Some of the wounds were not completely healed, but oozed fluid; plastic tubes sprouted from some, external veins that ran around their bodies and disappeared again somewhere else. In some distant corner of his mind, he registered the fact that these weren’t merely child soldiers. They were living science experiments, enhanced with chemicals and probably lobotomized, stitched together like something from Frankenstein’s laboratory. Whatever had made them human once, was now gone completely.

Somers felt a different kind of fury welling up inside him.

What the hell is this place?

He wanted to turn back, storm the compound and tear it down to its foundations. He wanted to find the monsters responsible for such atrocities and rip them limb from limb…but that wasn’t why he was here.

He was vaguely aware that he had lost his weapon in the battle. His radio set had also been torn away, leaving him deaf to the needs of the rest of the team. More of the… What should he even call them? ‘Frankensteins’ was the first thing that came to his mind… They were rushing up the road from the compound, but the majority of them were massing at the entrance to Building Two, where King and the others were pinned down.

He had to get to the van, join Zelda and then get the others out of the compound. The mission was his first priority, and right now his team needed him.





TWENTY-SEVEN


King’s satisfaction at disrupting the macabre surgery was short-lived. As he returned to the main hallway, he heard the low rumble of footsteps in the nearby stairwell, a sure sign that trouble was approaching. Then, even that sound was drowned out, as the roar of engines coming to life sent a tremor through the entire building.

Rainer was getting away, and there wasn’t anything he could do about it.

Suddenly, the door to the stairwell burst open, and human shapes began rushing through. King had his MP5 up and ready to meet the attack, as did Tremblay and Silent Bob, but for a moment, all three were too stunned by what they beheld to pull a trigger.

Christ, they’re just kids, King thought.

Except they weren’t. They might once have been innocent children, but not anymore. In the hallway lighting, he could clearly see what Somers had only been able to glimpse—the sprouting tubes, the surgical scars and mismatched limbs and muscles bulging from artificial growth hormones. The children they had once been were as dead as the young man whose organs had been callously harvested, and in their place there were only these monsters.

In an instant, they swarmed over Silent Bob, who stood nearest to the stairwell. He scrambled back at the last second, swinging his submachine gun like a club, but then he was gone, buried under a wave of bodies. The unmistakable violence brought King out of his horror, and he squeezed the trigger, hurling lead soundlessly into the onrushing mass of human flesh. Some of the monsters flinched as the bullets tore into them, but driven by steroids and raw primal fury, they did not slow. Before he could even think about changing his tactics, the leading edge of the wave crashed into him.

Suddenly, King was yanked backward. He struggled for a moment before realizing that it was Tremblay who had seized hold of him, dragging him into one of the rooms that opened off the hallway. The Delta operator slammed the door shut and braced it with his back. A moment later, the entire wall shook as the attacking mob began hammering against the barrier.