Prime (18 page)

TWENTY-SIX

Ever since leaving his Ranger unit behind to join with King’s Delta
team, Erik Somers had felt like the odd man out.

A change of assignment always brought with it
a period of adjustment—it took a while to get used to new teammates and
procedures—but the whirlwind of activity that had engulfed him in the last
twenty-four hours was unsettling, especially for someone like himself, who kept
a tight rein on his emotions. The private rage that defined him was always
simmering just below the surface, but the rigors and routines of military life
provided a purposeful way for him use that anger.

That was missing for him now. He had gone
from being a Ranger with a clearly defined set of responsibilities and
objectives, to being…what exactly? Even Zelda, a woman in a profession
dominated by men, seemed to have staked out a niche for herself, but he was
still waiting to see how he would fit in. From the moment he’d joined King’s
team on the plane to Myanmar, Somers had the feeling that he was just a warm
body filling an empty seat, and that uncertainty about his place in the scheme
of things was eating at his self-control. He felt an almost overpowering urge
to destroy something…anything.

He swallowed the bubble of rage down and
turned to Zelda. “Can you walk?”

“Been walking most of my life, big guy,” she
said, but the words came out in short bursts, as if she lacked the breath to
utter a complete sentence.

He acknowledged with a nod and headed for the
door, but she forestalled him. Moving stiffly at first, she hastened back into
the room where they had confronted Rainer, and emerged a moment later, shoving
the abandoned laptop computer into her backpack.
“Might be
something useful on this.”

“Good thinking.” It seemed like the right
thing to say. Without further comment, he headed for the exit, only
peripherally aware of Zelda a few steps behind.

He immediately sensed that something was
different about the exterior of the compound. A low indistinct noise, like the
hum of conversation in a crowded room, pervaded the still night. Before he
could identify the source, he heard Nighteyes’s anxious voice warning of
activity in the compound, and he knew that his ears had not deceived him.

As he and Zelda moved from the building, he
saw a torrent of human figures pouring out of Building Four, less than a
hundred yards away. Most of them looked like refugees, slack-jawed and
dull-eyed, wearing clothes that were little more than rags, but there were a
few men who stood out from the crowd, partly because of their garish attire and
partly because of the AK-47s they held at the ready. The gunmen seemed to be
herding the others, but their eyes were sweeping the compound, as if searching
for targets. One of the gunmen looked directly at Zelda and Somers, and with a
shout to the others, raised his rifle.

Somers started to bring his MP5 around, but
before he could put the red dot on his chosen target, the man’s head snapped back
in a spray of red. Someone was looking out for them.

Another of the armed men was downed by a
quiet but deadly shot from the distant sniper. Yet even as the shepherds were
felled, some of the herd revealed their true nature. Their eyes were no longer
dull, but focused on the fleeing Delta operators like laser beams, and with a
noise that sounded almost like the braying of coyotes, a dozen of them lurched
forward.

Somers grabbed Zelda by the arm and propelled
her ahead of him, even as he broke into a run. “Go!”

She seemed to grasp the urgency of the
situation. After a few faltering steps, she sprinted ahead, racing for the gap
in the gate and the perceived safety that lay beyond. She easily outpaced
Somers, but it wasn’t because she was lighter or more athletic; he was
intentionally hanging back, just in case the pursuing horde caught up to them.
Without even looking, he crooked his arm backward and triggered a long burst
from the MP5 into the oncoming mass of bodies.

Zelda slipped through the fence and resumed
her dash up the road. In the moment it took for Somers to thread
himself
into the gap, she vanished completely into the
darkness. A spur of metal snagged his shoulder, raking his skin through the
fabric of his shirt, but he wrestled free and ran after her.

Behind him, there was a metallic rattle of
bodies hitting the fence, and he risked a look back. Some of the pursuers were
squirming through the hole, but several more were scaling the fence, as nimble
as squirrels on a tree trunk. Somers fired out the magazine, but the rounds
from his silenced submachine gun seemed to produce about as much effect as a
swarm of gnats.

There was no time to reload. He kept his grip
on the weapon as he bolted up the hill, but the seconds he had spent getting
through the fence had cost him his scant lead. Before he’d gone twenty steps,
they were on him.

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.

Tremblay grimaced.
“Any
bright ideas, boss man?”

“Working on it.”
King gave the room a quick look. It
contained a few desks and chairs, but nothing that seemed to offer a way of
holding off the attackers, much less an escape route. The door shook again, and
a long dark line appeared in the wood as it began splitting in two. The walls
rattled with the relentless pounding, and then even floor began to shake.

Okay,
we can’t stay here and we can’t get out… What does that leave?

The flimsy construction gave King an idea,
and in a rush of inspiration, he tipped one of the desks over and slid it
toward Tremblay, positioning it so the desktop was facing away from him.

“I don’t think that will hold them for very
long,” Tremblay said.

“It’s not supposed to.” King dipped a hand
into a pouch on his vest and brought out a green-gray spherical object
identical to the one Rainer had used to
effect
his
escape.

Tremblay’s eyes went wide. “Oh, you’re not.”

King’s only answer was to pull the safety pin
on the grenade. “Better get down.”

As Tremblay slid to the floor, seeking cover
behind the desk, the top of the door split completely apart. King tossed the
grenade underhanded, so it arced through the room to drop near the far wall,
and then he threw himself down next to Tremblay, likewise bracing the door.
Grasping arms slipped through the gap above their heads, trying to force the
opening wider. It seemed inevitable that they would succeed.

And then the world exploded.

The detonation unleashed a storm of kinetic
energy in all directions, compressing the air into a wall as hard as steel, which
expanded outward in a millisecond. The overpressure wave superheated the air in
the small room, and would have vaporized everyone inside if the walls had been
made of stiffer stuff. Because the building was little more than plywood on a
stick-built frame, the side of the structure was blasted open, relieving some
of the pressure. The shockwave picked up loose furniture and hurled it away
from the blast center. The walls bulged outward, as if the room was a balloon
being inflated by a breath from a giant. The broken door was blasted off its
hinges, which not only hurled the attacking mob back, but also caused King and
Tremblay to fall backward. This proved fortuitous, because it helped protect
them from a deadly spray of steel fragments that
surfed
the leading edge of the blast wave. The nearly molten metal shredded everything
it touched, including several of the monstrosities massed in the hallway
beyond. The desk caught some of the fragments that would have ripped into the
Delta operators, but even as it did, the cheap wood was smashed apart by the
blast, and the two men were pummeled by the broken pieces.

Although they had done everything they could
to prepare for the blast, their survival was as much a matter of luck as it was
forethought, and it took them a few seconds to recover their wits. King rolled
over to find Tremblay also shaking off the effects. The blond soldier mumbled
something—probably one of his trademark one-liners—but King couldn’t hear
anything except a loud and steady high-pitched tone inside his head. He gave
Tremblay a thumbs-up, and when the other man returned it, he gestured toward
the gaping hole where the wall had been. The two men crawled forward, skirting
along the edge of a newly created opening in the floor, and lowered themselves
into the compound.

For a few seconds, they had only the dead for
company. Several bodies—many of them Asian men dressed like wannabe hip-hop
performers with AK-47s clutched in their dead hands—lay scattered about the
courtyard, felled by sniper fire. King realized that he and Tremblay were now
probably in someone’s scope, but with his ears still ringing, there was no way
to make contact.

He chose the shortest path back to the gate
and motioned for Tremblay to follow, but before they had gone fifty feet, a
glimpse of movement revealed one of the living atrocities prowling the
compound. The thin figure—a patchwork that was equal parts teenage girl and
professional wrestler—just stared at them for a moment, and then she tilted her
head back and opened her mouth, as if she was trying to catch a raindrop on her
tongue. King didn’t need his faculty of hearing to know that she was sounding the
alarm. The silent scream lasted only a few seconds, after which the thing
lurched toward them.

Suddenly, monstrosities were all around them.
They did not charge this time, perhaps having learned wariness, but they circled
like a pack of wolves. King slapped a fresh magazine into his MP5 and started
firing. A few went down, but the 9-millimeter rounds seemed to be more of an
irritant than anything else; the pack pulled back and began to move faster,
orbiting the Delta shooters like a cyclone.

Try as they might, King and Tremblay could
not watch every approach, and before long, the things attempted to attack from
their blind spot. King spied movement and whirled to find one of the things
dead on the ground just a few feet away; the snipers were still watching out
for them. Another of the monsters went down in a spray of red as a
high-velocity rifle round tore the top off its head, but for every one that
fell, two more crept out of the shadows to join the circle.

Then, without any warning and for no discernible
reason, the circle began to close. It was if some kind of critical mass had
been achieved. King fired out a magazine, and two of the monsters stumbled
forward and died at his feet, but the rest engulfed him. He swung the MP5
wildly like a club, but a dozen grasping hands wrapped around his arm,
arresting any further movement. They grabbed his other arm, and then his legs. Then
they began to pull in opposite directions.

King howled, more in frustration than in
pain, though there was plenty of the latter. He felt his joints grinding in
their sockets, his tendons stretching like rubber-bands pulled to the breaking
point… They were going to pull him apart like a wishbone from a Thanksgiving
turkey.

And then, just as quickly as they had seized
him, the fury of the attack began to wane. King twisted free of his assailants’
hands,
and scrambled away, flailing his arms in an
attempt to drive back any other would-be attackers.

There weren’t any. The only people still standing
were himself, Tremblay and the hulking form of Erik Somers.

In the stillness that followed, he became
aware of the van, idling about a hundred feet away, Zelda Baker behind the
wheel. The front end of the vehicle showed scratches and dents, presumably from
having plowed through the gate leading into the compound, but King also noted
streaks of red on the fenders and bits of fabric caught in radiator grill.

Somers’s face was uncharacteristically
animated, and it took King a moment to realize that the big man was shouting at
him.

If
we make it out of this alive, everyone is learning sign language
, King decided.
Executive decision, number one
.

He pointed to his ear and shook his head.
Somers shouted even louder and began gesturing wildly toward the van. King
could just make out a few words this time; it was faint, as if Somers was
shouting into a pillow. “We need to get the hell out of here!”

Oh.
Well, obviously
.