Chapter 100 – Hello From the Other Side

  A few feet away, Howie froze. Not in the sense that he locked up out of surprise or fear, but in that a layer of ice raced across his skin, cracking and sloughing off, replaced by shimmering blue flames. His hands started to shake and glow.

  “What the fuck?!” shouted Tony, pushing back his chair.

  Cole looked at his own hands, where the black and gold stain of the accretion wraps slowly crawled across his flesh. The distressed shriek of twisting metal drew his attention back down to the test area, where a vertical slice of inky blackness stretching up at least five meters had split the sensor array, causing several of the measuring devices to crash down to the floor of the pit as it widened. Dark, stinking liquid poured out onto the concrete. A large, bloodshot eye stared out, then slid away to reveal an uneven mouth full of shark-like teeth. Tendrils of dripping black flesh reached through, testing the air as an oily snout started to push through the tear, contorting like an octopus squeezing through a narrow-throated bottle.

  Cole pushed away the discomfort and ran toward the corner of the room, where the soldier on the catwalk stared in abject horror.

  “Hey! HEY!” Cole shouted up. The soldier looked down at him, eyes wide. Cole pointed to the tear. “Shoot that fuckin’ thing!”

  The soldier, seeming to remember for the first time that the gun in his hands wasn’t for decoration, charged the bolt, and swung the muzzle to the tear in reality. The SAW began to thunder as brass casings rained from the catwalk.

  The monster, demon, whatever it was, let out a pained roar so loud it almost drove Cole to his knees. Its tentacles wrapped around the gantry over the pit, crunching it as though it were made of paper and not aluminum. Scientists and engineers scattered, some running for the door, some just trying to get as far away as they could by pressing themselves into corners. About ten feet away from the tear, another black streak began to open. An alarm began to blare along with an automated call to evacuate the building.

  Howie regained his senses and vaulted down to the lower tier. He raised his hands and a freezing mist spilled out, coating the questing tentacles and causing one to break off entirely and shatter on the floor. Cole didn’t have any abilities that could help unless he wanted to start throwing computer screens, so he ran back to Tony and Dr. Sukesh, crossing his hands in an X. “Doc! Shut it down!”

  “It’s not us!” shouted Tony. He raised a shaking finger at his screen. “It’s someone else! Look at the Lewis Field signature, look!”

  As if I understand any of that shit, he thought. Something bulbous and black rolled out of the second tear and splashed in the fetid water pooling in the test pit. Time to get the civvies out of here. He grabbed the pair of scientists and pushed them toward the exit. “Never mind that! How do we stop it?” he asked. He risked a look back, where two spheroid creatures were pulling themselves across the tiers of equipment toward the staff who had panicked and run away from the exit. The gunner on the opposite side hammered them, popping them like over-ripe fruit and pulverizing the furniture and equipment, as well. Chair stuffing and electrical smoke clouded the air.

  Tony’s eyes darted back and forth as he thought furiously. “Uh… uh…. hell. We drown it out, maybe. Flush the facility with another Lewis Field at max strength.”

  “The auxiliary control room,” said Dr. Sukesh, pointing up to the small glass window. “The third floor. We can do it from there. But we need every generator running. Cole,” he grabbed Cole’s uniform sleeve. “If this is happening here, it might be happening in the sub-level facilities as well. The fireflies.”

  Cole looked down at the level below him. “Howie!”

  “I’ll hold ‘til the QRF gets here,” Howie shouted back. “Get ‘em out of here!”

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  They joined the press pushing out the exit, where red running lights raced along the floor of the hall. The rest of the staff in the building were evacuating, but most simply looked confused, or even annoyed by the interruptions. That changed as soon as engineers from the test room started bolting through the halls at full speed.

  “Doc, where’s the QRF?” asked Cole.

  Sukesh pointed down the passageway. “Around the corner. End of the corridor, red door.”

  “Okay Get to the aux control room.” He started to push against the crowd and shouted back. “I’ll get you your generators!”

  Cole ran down the passageway, clawing his way upstream against the flow of bodies. At the end of the corridor, he spotted a red door and tried the handle. It was locked, but it had a prox card reader, so he tried his badge and the metallic clack of the latch retracting rewarded him. He pulled open the door.

  Inside, a dozen soldiers in forest camo were pulling on PPE and putting magazines in their belly pouches. One of them with the silver bar of a first lieutenant looked up at Cole. Her eyes shifted down to the charcoal DOR uniform and the glowing accretion wraps on his forearms. Her face paled.

  “This isn’t an unannounced drill…” she trailed off. Overhead, the fluorescent lights flickered and died, replaced with dim red emergency lighting.

  “It’s real,” said Cole. He pointed to her M4, “I need one of those, and so will my partner. And I hope you’ve got bladed rounds.”

  “Locker,” said the lieutenant, pointing. She raised her voice. “Hurry the fuck up! You heard the Kicker! Go, go! Casualty response!” Cole moved past her, grabbing a plate carrier and pulling it on over his head before grabbing a carbine from the rack and a half-dozen magazines to fill out his cummerbund pouches. His hands must have looked like a blur to the un-enhanced soldiers, and despite arriving last, he found himself to be the one waiting on the rest of them to square themselves away.

  Rather than waste time watching, he raised his voice. “We’ve got hostiles crossing over in the trace lab, and maybe in the sub-level. I need a squad with me to head down and show me where to find the generators and crew.”

  The lieutenant scanned the thirty or so assembled soldiers. “Rodriguez, with the Kicker. Everyone else on me at the trace lab.”

  “Aye, ma’am,” said a smaller guy with a Spanish accent. He pursed his lips and let out a shrill whistle. “Taye, Barnes, let’s go!”

  Cole chambered a round in his rifle and pushed open the door.

  Outside, the passageway was empty, but black water sloshed on the floor, dripping from several smaller tears no larger than his hand. Cole could hear something splashing and, for lack of better term, splatting, further up around the bend.

  He moved forward, with the squad leader just off his shoulder.

  They turned the corner and he heard Rodriguez gasp behind him.

  “Yo, what the fuck?” he asked.

  Not all of the staff had made it out, and a black, sludgy creature had caught an engineer who apparently hadn’t been quick enough. Barbed tentacles were pulling the limp form into a massive, misshapen mouth. The creature’s whole body undulated as it swallowed the body whole. One of its eyes slid to Cole, and two thin whip-like tentacles snaked directly from its side towards their legs.

  Cole opened up with his rifle on the creature before it could reach them. It shrieked in a high-pitched, nails-on-a-chalkboard cry as Cole fired several times.

  “Contact front!” shouted Rodriguez and added his own fire. The bladed rounds tore enormous chunks of flesh from the stinking creature. Black blood sprayed against the walls, and the tentacles contracted. The creature tried to move away, but half-way through eating a two-hundred pound human, it was far from nimble. It retched up the poor bastard, minus the parts its razor-like teeth had managed to sever, and managed to roll a few paces through the fetid water before it keeled over.

  “Keep moving,” said Cole, pulling Rodriguez along. “Gawk later.”

  Despite his advice, the staff sergeant couldn’t help looking down at both bodies as they passed, and Cole heard more than one holy fuck from the column behind him. One of the medics stopped to crack a chem-light and drop it on the body.

  “Yo, what do we call you?” asked Rodriguez.

  “Cole, or Airborne,” said Cole.

  “Alright Cole, stairwell on your right, twenty feet up the P-way will take us down to the sublevel.”

  “Got it,” said Cole. He moved up the widening hallway, letting the lieutenant draw abreast.

  “We’ll secure the trace lab,” she said. “You said there’s another Kicker in there?”

  “Yeah,” said Cole. He swallowed. “Hopefully still alive. Keep him that way.”

  Cole pushed open the stairway door, sweeping his gun first up the stairs on the right, then down on the left.

  “Clear,” he said. He began descending the stairs. There was more than enough light for him to see with just his enhancements, but the soldiers behind him clicked on weapon lights as they descended. The stairway looped back around to the sub level. A thin layer of water spilled out through the crack under the door on the bottom landing. Cole grimaced. Looked like Sukesh was right about the sub-level being affected.

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