Opposing Force: Book 01 - The God Particle (28 page)

"Germans?" Wells gasped. "Those weren't Germans who attacked us. Those were spiders, Cap. Spiders the size of cats and dogs. How the hell could you mistake something like that for soldiers? You hit your head or something?"

Campion's mind raced. What had he seen during the battle? He clearly remembered the sound of the approaching soldiers, their gear, the way they lunged forward brandishing bayonets. That is what he had seen but … he
had
noticed Wells shooting at the floor, exactly where a big spider would be. And Franco, he had gone crazy.

"Wait a second," Campion said to Wells and then glanced at Galati, who, for his part, was surprisingly silent and stood with his head bowed. "You saw spiders? I saw German soldiers."

"How is that possible?"

"I'm guessing you don't like spiders?"

Wells broke eye contact, shuffled his feet, and admitted, "Nah, man, I hate the little bastards. They give me the creeps."

"And I've always got World War Two on my mind. I've always sort of, I guess, sort of thought of the Germans as an impressive military machine from back then."

Wells scratched the side of his head just under his tactical helmet and said, "So, I saw spiders and you saw Germans? We imagined it all?"

"I don’t know," Campion said. He tried to recall the sequence of events. "Did any of them touch you? Did you shoot any of the spiders you saw? I kept hitting Germans but not killing them, just sort of knocking them down and buying time."

Wells snapped his fingers. "Me too. They'd get up close and I'd shoot them. Sometimes they ran off, sometimes they just sort of disappeared. Never got me, though. Say, you saying they weren't really there? Just all in our heads?"

"I think so." Campion wondered if the Defense Department had worked on some kind of mind control weapon in this place. "Something sure as hell got in Biggy's head. He shot Moss and Pearson. Maybe he didn't mean to. Maybe he saw something else. I had to … well I told you, I had to put him down."

Why don't I feel bad about that?

Wells shook his head.

"I don't know about that, Cap. I don't think it's a coincidence that Franco shot two black guys. If you hadn't shot him, I bet he would have taken me out next. I hate spiders, so I saw spiders. Franco has his own list of things he hates, if you know what I mean. Christ, man, what if this thing can make us see whatever? We could end up shooting each other."

Campion noticed Sal's silence.

"I saw you shooting, Sal. You were right by me. What did you see?"

Sal raised his head but looked anywhere but at his two comrades.

"C'mon, Sal, don't get shy," Wells jumped in. "What did you see, man?"

"I saw, um, I saw spiders. Biggest fucks I've ever seen, six legs and—"

"Bullshit, Sal. Spiders have eight legs. What did you see?"

Galati kicked dust under his boot, shifted his gaze to the ceiling, and let out a deep sigh before answering.

"Clowns, man. I saw fucking clowns."

—

Another grunt of pain. To Sergeant Franco each of those grunts sent loud echoes through the entire complex; echoes that would give away his position and call more of the creatures to come raining down on him.

He welcomed it. He hoped they would come with their greedy little mouths gaping and groping for another meal.

Fucking eating me. Eating ME.

Bring it on, you fucks.

Anger and hate were more familiar emotions than fear. He preferred those feelings to being afraid. With the right amount of internal pep talk to crank out adrenaline, he could turn fear into anger and hate. This was a type of alchemy he had known since his youngest days.

Go and buy me a pack of smokes. And I swear if you waste any of my hard-earned money on a soda or some candy shit I will kick you right in your fat ass.

"Okay, Dad, I'll go.”

His hand reached further along the stair railing. Franco used his upper body strength to pull the rest of his body along. His right leg—the one that had been chewed on—throbbed. Despite the bandage and despite the tourniquet, he knew it still bled.

He channeled the pain in the same direction as the fear. As the blood drained, his consciousness faded in and out, but each time he snapped back, angrier still.

His left hand—gripping the M4—slung forward and clanged against the floor of sublevel 5. His right hand reached higher on the railing, gripped, and his body followed his weapon as he returned to the level where it had all started.

Franco needed to rest. He had pushed his endurance and pulled his weight all the way up the long flight of stairs from the battlefield below. It had taken him only a few minutes to descend those stairs when he led the team down. Climbing on an injured leg, with his strength draining, an infection spreading through his body, and his sanity stretched and pulled like a rubber band about to snap, took far longer.

Biggy! If you expect special treatment at practice because I'm your father you are sorely mistaken.

"I got it, Coach. Loud and clear, sir."

Franco rolled over and gazed at the ceiling. He gasped as he exhaled into the cold air. He felt dust swirling all around him. The dust they had left him behind to die in.
.

And where were those guys now? Probably down in one of the lower levels, finishing the precious mission. Doing it by the book. Following those orders with a jump in their step and a quick salute.

You put some effort into this, Biggy, or you'll never get a scholarship to play for the Blue Hens.

"Maybe I don't want to go to school and play football at Delaware. Maybe I'll join the army."

He closed his eyes—squeezed them shut as hard as he could—tried desperately to clear his mind of ghosts. But the more the infection spread, the more of his blood dripped out, the more his exhaustion and pain nibbled at his sanity, the same way that thing had taken bites from his leg.

"Shut up, Dad, I don't want to talk to you right now. I'm busy."

Franco turned over on his belly and gripped the floor with his palm. The pain was not as bad when he lay on his belly. So Franco crawled, leaving a trail of blood behind him.
 

Gant peered around the corner.

More darkness, broken only by the crimson glow of a red warning light that illuminated more featureless, dusty walls. No sign of opposition, however, so he felt safe to wave Twiste and his bag of V.A.A.D. batteries forward and out of the stairwell.

"Welcome to sublevel 8," Gant said.

"Let me guess," Brandon quipped as he produced and cracked on a green glow stick. "Ladies’ undergarments, furniture, and housewares."

"More like hazardous materials disposal, specialized containment vaults, and my personal favorite—Red Labs."

Three different corridors split in three different directions.

"Which way?"

Major Gant answered by swinging his tactical light to the wall. The beam illuminated the only bit of color on what was otherwise dull gray: a thick, red line.

"Not exactly a yellow brick road," Twiste said.

"But we will follow it just the same," Gant replied and they did, keeping the red line to their right as they walked through a particularly dark stretch of corridor with Gant's flashlight and Twiste's glow stick showing the way until they spotted a light at the end of the tunnel.

The red stripe led them to a rectangular junction. Several other passageways also converged at this spot, each leading their own version of a red stripe to this place.

An imposing counter built into one wall dominated the area. Behind that counter stood an array of monitors and electronic equipment, all dormant and covered with ancient dust. A big sign proclaimed in stenciled letters SECURITY.

The area felt like an antechamber due to the seats, tables, and plastic plants lined up along the walls. Gant and Twiste could see these details because this was the best-lit area of the quarantine zone thus far. That added illumination came from a light box with a red frame emblazoned with the word CONTAINMENT fixed above the wide entrance to the Red Lab section.

Every time Major Gant encountered a Red Lab entrance it made him shudder. As often as he saw them he still could not get used to the fact that they even existed: research facilities deigned to handle the most dangerous experiments any scientist—any madman—could conceive of. So dangerous, so lethal, so secret that any mistake, any miscalculation, could turn the lab into a tomb.

In this case, the Red Lab entrance was a bulkhead; a thick door serving as the only entry and exit point for the laboratories beyond. As expected, that bulkhead stood open. After all, history recorded that Briggs had called for expanded quarantine, suggesting that this particular choke point had already been compromised. That resulted in the big vault door up on sublevel five.

That's not exactly right, though, is it, Thom? What did you find when you came in? That's right, the original vault door. One that had been overrun at some point in the past. Funny how Borman had failed to mention that little fact.

"Christ, these things just shouldn’t be," Twiste mumbled as he read a large sign posted alongside the entrance:

WARNING.

RED LAB SECTION: AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY

Smaller print informed:
In case of emergency, Red Lab section may be sealed off for containment purposes. Do not attempt to open these doors if the CONTAINMENT alarm is activated. Any attempt to do so will be met with lethal force. All personnel entering this area are required to receive Red Lab Containment Protocols Training. Passing through this entrance means you willfully accept the risks and hazards of working in this area.

Gant knew what Red Lab Containment Protocols Training referred to: legal agreements allowing the government to lie about when, where, and how you died. Agreements that signed over your remains to the facility and whatever authority operated that facility. The training essentially brainwashed participants into thinking the containment protocols existed for their protection.

In truth, the scientists and technicians who passed that sign should know that if anything went wrong that door could and would slam shut. Whether or not it would ever open again depended on how valuable the research was, how bad things had gone, and whether any of the research team were critical to the success of other projects.

It did not matter if you were deep in the Red Lab section, or one inch inside the bulkhead. If the containment alarm went off, those doors shut. If you were standing one foot in and one foot out, you were split like Solomon’s baby. They left no room for error … or mercy.

Gant had seen enough examples of what could go wrong; how one scientist's "whoops" could lead to a dozen deaths in the name of scientific security.

At that moment, the CONTAINMENT sign above the entrance went out.

Gant tensed, expecting an attack, and scanned the area with his tactical light while Twiste held his glow stick high like a torch, but it provided only a tiny radius of illumination.

Ahead of them from inside the Red Lab section came a new source of light as several beacons sprang to life, spinning and flashing yellow and red. Emergency lights, turned on—it seemed—for their benefit.

"How come I don't like the look of that?"

Gant answered, "For the same reason I don't."

As much as he did not like the idea, Major Gant realized that they had no choice. Apparently all their slinking about had come to naught; they were expected. Guided, in fact.

Together they crossed the threshold. The red stripes that had led them to the entranceway bled until they engulfed the concrete walls entirely.

Steel doors marked secondary laboratories. Most were hidden behind the concrete, but one offered a stretch of thick, laminated glass, allowing the research in one workshop to be viewed from the passage.

It was dark in there, but one of those spinning yellow siren lights provided enough flashing light for the intruders to see inside: test tubes, ancient computers, and a tall metal cylinder that Gant believed was a transmission electron microscope. However, the two bodies sitting at chairs among the equipment grabbed his attention more than the equipment itself.

With each yellow flash he discerned more features and realized he saw the mummified remains of two researchers sitting with their heads slung back, staring at the ceiling through black holes with decaying jaws locked open in an eternal scream.

The image made Gant think of a display at a museum: come see the dead scientists in their natural habitat!

His view inside the lab as well as everything behind went dark as the flashing siren lights clicked off, leaving them in total blackness yet again.

As had happened the last time, the dark did not last long. Soft track lighting—only half the bulbs worked—fixed in the upper corner of a hallway switched on, lighting the way, joined a few paces later by about half the bulbs in a couple of fluorescent lights.

Gant wondered if they should follow the prescribed path. Perhaps a brief retreat to regroup and find a new approach might be best. Yet he could not shake the feeling that their choices were limited, and he had grown tired of the mystery. He wanted to know his enemy.