|
|
Chapter 57 – Desert WarfareAlex moved and went silvery as she hurled the lightning bolt, so she was flying away from the blasts and in her toughest form when the explosions went off. Vicious chunks of steel went tearing across the chamber, ripping into the spiders and plowing through the egg sac, too, before embedding themselves in the chamber walls. Slabs of rock and dirt ripped free from the ceiling and walls, to tear through spider silk or pull it down with them.
The reflected shockwave felt like Jo Baker had hit her with a semi truck. She was already flying toward the shaft, but the blast slammed her across the cave and against the ceiling just past the opening. The pain was horrible, and it covered both sides of her body. It felt like an entire baseball team had hit her with their bats all over her body at exactly the same time. It hurt so much she couldn’t manage to yell.
She fell and hit the silk-covered floor with a splat. Crud, that hurt, too! She hurt so much she couldn’t make her body reform into Alex.
“ALEX! GODDAMMIT ALEX, ANSWER ME!” She finally realized Jack was screaming furiously down the shaft.
And she could hear noises in the darkness. At least a dozen spiders that hadn’t been in the path of the claymore mines were now scrambling all over the chamber, and were making for the vibrations and the light from the vertical shaft. That meant they were all headed right at her. She couldn’t see what was going on with the egg sac, because the light panel down there was toast, and this light panel was knocked over and flickering out, putting her in near-darkness.
A spider came out of the blackness and went right for her. It was all she could do not to scream. It was the size of a dining room table, and its massive, curved fangs had to be over a foot long. It leapt onto her, trying to sink its fangs into her still-silvery body.
She hit it with a lightning bolt and flung it thirty feet backward with her telekinesis. Then she jetted straight up the shaft so fast she overshot and almost ran into the ceiling. She yelled, “WE HAVE SWARM!”
Jack and Riley and Hanna were spread out around the circular opening, and they were already shooting short bursts of gunfire into the spiders trying to climb up the walls of the shaft. Alex could see that a huge slab of rock had fallen from the roof and had knocked over one of the wheeled carriages, cracking open the Mark 77 that they had been about to lower down the shaft. The barrel-shaped pod had cracked open, spilling the slimy guck in a huge puddle around one side of the shaft, with most of the guck running down the silk of the shaft.
Hanna calmly said, “We know.” She put five bullets into the front of a spider trying to climb up the shaft wall opposite her position.
Riley said, “Main thing’s you’re safe.” He fired a little three-shot grouping into a spider trying to go from the roof of the lower chamber to the shaft wall.
Jack yelled at her, “Don’t ever do that again! I got too many gray hairs already!” He waited patiently until there were two spiders, one about thirty feet above the other, and put rounds into the first spider until it fell on the second one, so both crashed to the ground below the shaft.
Riley said, “With this Mark 77 OOC, we need the other one.”
Alex flew down the cave toward the entrance. All over the place were huge chunks of rock that had fallen from the ceiling and walls because of the blast in the lower chamber. She was probably lucky she wasn’t crushed like a bug. She was probably lucky half her team wasn’t buried under giant boulders because she set off that explosion.
And there was the second Mark 77. Crud.
The explosions from the claymores had weakened the entire stupid cave. Several big rocks had ripped through the silk on the ceiling right there, and one had landed close enough to the Mark 77 that it had bounced into the thing, knocking the pod off the carriage and breaking the carriage. Graham was kneeling beside Jo, who was lying on her side looking really angry.
Alex flew up and was about to ask what was wrong, but as soon as she looked, she knew. Nobody’s leg bent sideways right in the middle of their calf. Graham looked up at Alex and said, “She pushed me out of the way.”
Jo was obviously in a lot of pain, but she said, “Couldn’t let you get brained with two hundred pounds of rock. Sir.”
Alex stared at the pod. She couldn’t lift it. It was over five hundred pounds. The carriage was busted, and she couldn’t fix it, even using her lightning to try to weld the broken parts.
But …
She went silvery and grabbed it. She had once hauled her mom, her dad, and Ray all at the same time. That had to be five hundred pounds, or close to it. Maybe she could do this.
She pulled the whole pod into her silvery form and pulled. Nothing. She pulled as hard as she could, until it felt like she was hurting herself.
And it moved. She was actually able to move the whole thing. Not easily, but she could move it. She puddled back as fast as she could. She couldn’t do eighty or ninety miles an hour, like she could when she flew, and she couldn’t go as fast as she could puddle by herself, but she could do maybe fifteen or twenty miles an hour. And it was only a couple hundred feet.
She went normal right beside the shaft, just as Jack yelled, “HANNA! No shooting anywhere near the goop, or anywhere it’s dripping down below!”
Hanna said, “But that gives them over a quarter of the shaft that they can climb up.”
“I noticed! Follow orders!” Jack snapped.
Alex said, “I got the other pod.” She could see there were at least ten spiders clambering up the top half of the shaft. A lot more were probably in the dark lower half of the shaft.
Jack said, “It’s not armed yet. Throw it over the edge, and everyone run for the exit!” He lobbed a grenade at Alex, who caught it in the air with her telekinesis. Then she pushed the side of the Mark 77 with her telekinesis, and it rolled over the edge to knock a spider off the wall as it fell. She heard it crash down in the darkness.
Jack grabbed Hanna by the arm, and for a second Alex thought Hanna might instinctively attack Jack. Jack shook Hanna and said, “Run for the exit! And I mean sprint!” Hanna stowed her weapon and got moving.
Alex yelled, “Jo’s hurt!”
Riley snapped, “Got it.” He fired one last salvo, slung his machine gun over his back, and raced toward the cave mouth.
Jack was already running as well, and as he ran, he said into his comms, “Everyone evac NOW. Tera, pull the pin, count off five seconds, drop the ’nade down the shaft onto the goo, and fly like hell for the exit. Start counting … NOW.”
* * *
Riley was a fast sprinter. He’d done track and field in high school, and decathlon for West Point. But it was a good distance to the exit, and — despite what TV and movies would have you believe — there was no such thing as outrunning the fireball.
And up ahead, Lupo was down, yelling at Miller to get the hell out and leave her.
He knew if he stopped to help her, neither one of them would make it out of the cave in time. Not with all that Mark 77 fuel spilled at the top of the shaft. But he couldn’t just leave a fellow soldier to die a horrific death.
He stopped and pulled her to her feet.
* * *
Alex watched in horror as spiders started coming up faster and faster, until they were just boiling up the sides of the shaft.
She had the pin out of the grenade. She had the handle part held firmly under her fingers.
The spiders were starting to stream toward the mouth of the cave.
“… four … five!” She released the handle, dropped the grenade, and darted for the cave mouth.
* * *
Jo stared in fury at the big, dumb ox who was going to get himself killed trying to do the manly thing. “What do you think you’re doing, sir? Run! Leave me!”
Riley grabbed her and tossed her over his shoulder like she was a sack of potatoes. He started running for the exit, even though Jo’s weight was going to slow him down a lot. He snapped, “Shut up, Lupo. But feel free to cover my six.”
She ignored the agony of being bounced around with a badly broken leg. She grabbed his weapon and opened fire at the wave of spiders coming their way. She didn’t bother to point out that she doubted he could outrun them with a full loadout and another soldier slung over his shoulder.
* * *
Jack turned at the sound of gunfire behind him. Hanna had stopped, turned around, and was firing at the flood of spiders pouring toward them.
He turned and ran back toward her. “Hanna! Evac!”
“We have to slow them down enough for your strategy to work,” she insisted as she slapped in another magazine and fired upon a couple more spiders.
He looked at the spiders sweeping toward them. He knew there was no chance he could outrace them to the cave mouth now. But more than that, he knew there was no way in hell he could leave a teenager to a horrific death. He stepped beside her and said, “Fine. Be that way.”
He slowed down one spider, then another. But there were hundreds of the big, ugly things. He slapped in another mag and opened fire again. He figured it would be pretty close whether they would be eaten alive or burned alive. Either way, it was going to be nasty.
* * *
Alex flew down the center of the cave. There were already spiders using the sides and the roof of the cave, and that was so creepy she could hardly stand it.
She heard the gunfire before she realized what was going on. Jack and Hanna were just walking backward, shooting at everything coming their way. Didn’t they realize that …
Oh, crud, they did realize. There was no way they could get out of the cave in time now. She looked at the wave of spiders rushing at them. She thought about that grenade and all that spilled goo …
They had about three seconds to live.
She had to do something.
She went silvery and dived straight at Jack. She bowled him over as she pulled him into her puddle, and then she grabbed Hanna and pulled her in, too.
And she raced for the exit. At her top flying speed, she was pretty sure she would have made it out in time. At her top puddling speed, no way.
Her puddling speed lugging two other people wasn’t even enough to outrun the spiders, which were steadily catching up with her. But it was her best chance to save Jack and Hanna.
It was her only chance to save Jack and Hanna.
Graham and Jo and Riley were already way ahead of her near the mouth of the cave, so she just headed for the exit.
She heard the grenade go off, and she felt the shuddering blast as the Mark 77 fuel went off like a zillion gallons of gasoline. Since she was silvery, she could see ahead of her and behind her both, so she saw what looked like a fifty-foot-wide pillar of fire blast straight up out of the vertical shaft and smash against the cave roof. All the rest of the spilled fuel instantly went off, too, and a fireball as wide as the cave shot forward at an incredible speed.
In the movies, the fireball would chase the heroes down a hall or through a building, and they would have to run as fast as they could, and then leap to safety. Now she knew that was just stupid. Nobody could outrun this. She couldn’t fly anywhere near as fast as this. Maybe even a Blackbird couldn’t fly as fast as this. The fireball was shooting forward at an unbelievable speed. It pretty much raced through the entire length of the cave in the time it took for her to realize it was coming her way.
The tidal wave of spiders was engulfed by a wall of fire. The flames sped over her and blasted out of the mouth of the cave.
She kept going. She knew she was pretty fire resistant after fighting Cready over the school tennis courts, but she hadn’t known whether she could handle a mega-hot, deadly fire like this stuff.
Maybe she couldn’t. It felt like she had her hand in a campfire, only all over her body. It was all she could do not to scream out loud. Oh, crud, was it hot!
She couldn’t breathe, but she could manage without air for long enough to get out. If she could find her way out. It wasn’t like she could see anything except fire. She kept going until there was dirt under her instead of spider silk. She went farther and took a right.
She almost turned too soon. She puddled up the side of the cave, and out around the corner, and out of the blazing firestorm. She moved a hundred feet across the hillside before she stopped and let Jack and Hanna go normal. Then she went normal beside them.
“Damn, that was hot!” Jack complained. He looked Hanna over for injuries, and then he looked Alex over. Finally, he checked himself. He pointed at Alex and said, “It would be nice to tell your team leader important crap like this. I would’ve completely re-thought the plan.”
Then he stared at Hanna and yelled, “DROP AND GIVE ME 200!”
Hanna instantly complied. While she did a ton of push-ups, Jack stood beside her and yelled, “When I tell you to run, I need to know you are running! Do you understand me?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Good! Because if I cannot trust you to do what I say, you are not going on any more ops! I did not take you along to get killed, I took you along to provide support and to follow orders!”
“Yes, sir.”
“AND … when we get back to base, I am giving Janet a full disclosure about your activities on this op, and she will probably ground you for life!”
Hanna cringed, but didn’t stop doing push-ups. “Yes, sir.” But this time, it came out as more of a whimper. Alex hadn’t thought there was anything Hanna was scared of, but it looked like having Janet Fraiser mad at her was one.
Jack pointed at Alex. “And Terawatt, I really need to know you’re safe, not blowing yourself up in a cave full of spiders the size of a freaking hot tub, or collapsing the cave the rest of the team is still standing in!”
She said, “I’m really, really sorry, but I could see that if I waited even one more second to get out of there, the claymores would get swarmed and knocked over, and then they’d be useless. Unless they got knocked over so they were pointed up the shaft, and then they’d be mega-dangerous. I had to do it.”
In a softer tone, Jack said, “You look like you’re bruised all over.”
She admitted, “I feel like I’m bruised all over. I never got hurt too bad before in my silvery morph, but that really, really hurt. And I’m real sorry about not telling you about the puddle thing, but I never even thought of carrying the Mark 77s like that until I had to try.”
Jack slowly exhaled. “Fine. I’m going to have Acid Burn send you some manuals on the risks of explosives. You will read all of them, and write a report on what you learned, and then you’ll send it to me.”
Alex quietly said, “Okay.” Because when he pointed it out, she realized that everything that went wrong — the smashed Mark 77, the broken Mark 77 cradle, Jo’s broken leg, Graham almost getting a boulder on his head — was all her fault for setting off those claymores. That really made her feel like a total jerkhead.
“And speaking of getting hurt,” Jack said, “We need to see how the lieutenant’s doing.” He tapped his earjack. “O’Neill to Lupo. Situation report.”
Alex could hear the reply over her earjack. “Lupo to Colonel O’Neill. Greenstick fracture of the left tibia and fibula, made a little worse by emergency evac from cave. Need medic.”
“Finn to Colonel. She’ll need surgery. And it’s really hurting her, but she’s not going to admit it.”
The blast of fire from the mouth of the cave tapered off. Hanna was still doing push-ups, but she said, “It is just like a fire-breathing dragon from a fairy tale.”
Alex said, “No, it’s not. I’ve seen real dragons, and their fire’s not like that at all.”
Hanna kept doing push-ups and said, “Your life is very … unusual.”
Wow, coming from Hanna that was weird. Hanna had pretty much the most unusual life in the world. Alex? Nah, she had a really pretty normal life most of the time.
Jack said, “Tera, some day I really want to hear that story. Preferably with a lot of hot buttered popcorn.”
The flames Alex could see withdrew back into the cave, but the heat pouring out of the cave was still immense. She could see wavering in front of the cave mouth like the air in front of a laboratory furnace. She knew it wasn’t safe for Jack to take a look yet, so she went silvery and flew in front of the opening to check.
There was pretty much nothing left. Even the spider silk lining the tunnel was burned to carbon. Even the rock and dirt looked like it was burned to carbon. A few horribly-burned spiders at the very front of the attack wave still had a french-fried leg or two connected to what was left of their bodies, but nothing had survived. Nothing looked like it was even capable of moving, much less coming her way.
She would have asked if everyone was okay, but she could see everyone now. Jack and Hanna were on her side of the cave. Graham and Riley were on the other, trying to splint Jo’s leg even though she didn’t want them to. How on earth had they all made it out okay, when a minute ago they were all about to be spider food?
Maybe they were that good. Or maybe they were that lucky. Maybe she just didn’t care which, as long as they were all alive.
Jack signaled one of the helicopters, which dropped down and fired some kind of flare into the cave. It sailed in a shallow arc about three hundred feet down the tunnel before it hit the ground. It gave enough white light that she could see pretty far into the cave, even if she couldn’t see all the way to the shaft. There was pretty much nothing but carbon, and carbonized spiders, and carbonized rocks. A lot of the cavern had pretty much collapsed, so she couldn’t even tell if she could fly back as far as the shaft anymore. As she floated there, a ginormous slab of blackened rock peeled off the left-hand wall about two hundred feet down and crashed onto what looked like deep-fried spiders. And then a huge chunk of blackened rock fell from the ceiling with a big crash.
Jack said, “We really need to assess this, but there’s no way I’m sending you in there. The whole damn thing could cave in at any moment.”
Riley walked over, looked skyward, and said, “Sir, I don’t think we have to worry about any other exits.”
Jack looked up at the black smoke that was drifting away from the mouth of the cave. “Good point. If there were other exits, the choppers up top would see the smoke by now. Okay, let’s get a Viper down here and collapse this son of a bitch. I don’t want anyone ever thinking they can go spelunking for giant spider DNA.”
The Super Huey dropped into the valley and picked them all up. Professor Lee looked pretty horrified at the little bit he’d seen, and he hadn’t seen the wave of spiders. Alex couldn’t tell how Grover felt, what with the whole ‘no visible face’ thing.
Alex hovered in the air while everyone else got Jo situated on the floor and then took their seats around her. Then Alex flew in and took a seat. Jack had the pilot fly off to the side so they could watch as one Viper fired rocket after rocket into the cave until the entire thing collapsed and there was nothing but a big rockslide where the entrance used to be.
Jack made a ‘whirling around’ hand gesture to the pilot, who headed for Luke Air Force Base with the other helicopters alongside.
* * *
Jack made more calls while they flew south to the base. Doctors and an ambulance for Jo, a National Guard unit equipped with flamethrowers for patrols west of Desert Rock in case anything else was growing big and getting hungry, and lots of food set up in a private conference room they could use when they arrived.
Jo just sat on the floor of the helicopter with her leg stretched out. She was refusing to let Riley give her any morphine or fiddle with her splint, even though Alex could tell Jo was really hurting. Alex wondered if she could ever be as tough as Hanna or Jo. And Riley was probably that tough, too, if he picked Jo up and ran all the way out of the cave to save her.
Alex tried apologizing to Graham and Jo for making the boulder fall on them, but they kept insisting the same thing could have happened if she had flown out of the lower tunnel and let Jack set off the claymores, only then things might have been worse.
When they landed at the Air Force base, Alex insisted on moving Jo to protect her leg. Alex went silvery, pulled Jo in even though Jo was saying no, and puddled across the tarmac. She puddled up into the ambulance, and laid Jo out on the gurney.
Jo squeezed Alex’s hand and said, “Hey. Thanks.”
Alex smiled at her. “Sure. Just get all healed up, and no more getting horribly injured.”
Jo said, “Sorry, it goes with the territory. And it really wasn’t your fault.”
Alex flew over to where Jack had a couple of Humvees waiting, and they all went over to a private conference room in the big white building over beside the tarmac. Even the one Marine helicopter pilot and the Cessna pilots, who it turned out were all SRI people. She should have known that already. And their helicopter pilot was worth knowing about, because he was hot. ‘Val Kilmer in Top Gun’ hot.
And there was a ton of food, which was good, because Alex was starving. She grabbed three of the big steak sandwiches with really good broiled steak sliced up in them, and lots of lettuce and tomato and a special sauce in there, too. She dumped some sliced onions and chopped black olives into the sandwiches and put them on her tray. Also she grabbed some pasta salad, some mixed vegetables in butter sauce, a bowl of fruit salad, and some sort of rice thing with chopped up veggies and nuts and mushrooms and seafood in it. And a bottle of Diet Coke.
Alex sat down with Hanna and Grover. Hanna had one steak sandwich and a pile of veggies. Grover was drinking a huge vanilla milkshake. Alex ate a big bite of sandwich, which was really good, and said, “It’s good getting to talk to you in person.”
Grover said, “It’s okay to say ‘nice to see you’. I won’t get mad. Cindy cringes anytime Mom says something like that without thinking.”
Hanna said, “It is good to talk to you in person, too. The Skype is very nice. But it is not the same as real contact.”
Grover said, “Yeah, you two and Charlie and Cindy and Wendy are about the only other teens I can hang with, because of the whole …” He made a vague gesture at his body. “I have a lot of on-line friends, but they don’t know who I really am.”
Hanna said, “You probably do not know who they really are. Willow showed me that the nice guy in the ‘chatroom’ who wanted to talk to me about clothing was not a nice boy at all.”
Alex cringed, because she could guess what that was really about, and it sounded icky. She said, “I bet Willow didn’t put up with that sort of stuff.”
Hanna smiled wickedly. “No, she tracked him down and invaded his computer and found some really unpleasant things she showed me that maybe he wanted to do to me, and she notified your FBI about his hard drive.”
Grover said, “Let me guess. He was really thirty.”
Hanna said, “Forty-two. I did not know about some of the threats that exist out in the world, but Cindy and Willow and Alex are helping me. Willow knows a great deal about computers and the internet.”
Grover said, “Yeah, that’s how come she found us so Alex could come to the rescue.”
Alex said, “Anybody could have rescued you two. Jack would have managed without me. Nobody else can do what Willow does.”
Grover glanced over to make sure Jack was on the other side of the room. “Charlie says Willow is way too young to be dating his dad, and she totally squashed him in ‘Mortal Kombat’ and ‘Street Fighter’ both, and she knows everything.”
Hanna said, “I would think that video games like that would only depend on quickness.”
Alex said, “They’re like the training you got. All the speed in the world doesn’t help if you haven’t trained that muscle memory. And all the practice in the world doesn’t help if you learn the wrong things.”
Hanna asked, “So is Willow like a martial arts trainer, only for video games?”
Alex said, “I’ll say maybe on the video games, but definitely on other computer stuff.”
Grover said, “Part of it is learning special combo moves, and then playing enough that your hands learn the moves. Part of it is pattern recognition, so you can move in at the right times. Learning when and where to do the moves so they work right and you don’t get killed by your opponent. But some of it is fudging.” Hanna looked puzzled, so he explained, “Cheating. Sort of. Finding special codes built into the game so you can do special stuff.”
Hanna looked thoughtful for several seconds. “Is that cheating? If the game authors put the codes in there for someone to use, isn’t it your job as a player to find the most effective way to win?”
Grover shrugged. “Well, yes and no. Some cheat codes just make it easier, or unlock special features. Some pretty much make the game impossible to lose, so then it’s not really any fun, at least as far I’m concerned.”
Hanna asked, “And how do you find these cheat codes?”
Grover said, “A lot of them are pretty well known, and you can look ’em up on the internet.”
Alex said, “Willow told me she found one by going through the assembler code for the game and studying the blocks of code the game used to do stuff.”
Grover said, “And that’s a lot harder than it sounds, because a lot of games now use encryption so you can’t read those chunks of information.”
Alex said, “Well, Willow can do pretty much anything with a computer except get it to stand up and dance.”
They got involved in a discussion of computer games they were playing, and what Willow could do, and stuff like that, until Jack came over and tapped Alex on the shoulder. He smiled. “I hate to break up the funfest, but we need to get a move on. The Cessna’s ready to go, I need to get people home, Finn needs to stay here and fill out paperwork on Lupo, Graham needs to get our Super Huey back to Roswell, the usual. And all of you get to fill out paperwork on the ride home. Fun, huh?”
Alex looked down and realized she’d been so busy talking she hadn’t eaten even half of her food. And she was still really hungry. Grover helped her wrap it all up to eat on the jet home. And while Professor Lee wasn’t around, Alex slipped Grover and Hanna the presents she had packed in her gym bag, telling them, “Don’t open them up until you get home.”
Once they were on the Cessna and it reached altitude, Alex set down the tray table and got out her food. Then she ate while she wrote out her whole report on her computer tablet. She sent Willow a little ‘please help’ note, and Willow filled out most of the two ‘SRI auxiliary personnel’ documents that Alex figured she was going to be doing on every SRI mission for maybe ever. She wrote her report like it was a one-hour essay for a test, and she managed to get it all done in under fifty minutes. Part of that was she really didn’t even want to think about those moments down in that lower chamber with the giant baby spiders. Eww, eww, EWW!
But she finished eating before it was time to land, and she finished writing before the plane touched down. So between Willow’s paperwork help and her rush job on the report, she managed to finish just in the nick of time. She fired the report off to Jack’s official email address, and she put her tablet away in its padded case.
“Done already, Tera?”
She gave him a big smile. “Yes, sir! I sent you the after-action report, and both personnel forms are done, too.”
He pretended to pout. “Willow never helps me with my paperwork.”
Hanna said, “I will have my after-action report done soon as well.”
Jack glared at her. “That’s good, because you’re going to be writing a bunch more reports and documents before you set foot off this jet. First, I want a complete write-up of the tactical and strategic considerations in that cave that led you to refuse a direct order from a superior and stand there to be Purina tarantula chow. Then I want a full explanation and apology written out for Janet. Then you’re going to be writing …”
Alex flew out of the plane before Jack finished burying Hanna in punitive paperwork.
Punitive! SAT words for the win! She had really not liked studying so hard for the SATs, but now having all those extra words to use was just cool.
She flew straight home at about seven hundred feet, since it was dark out and no one could see her. Then she went silvery and dropped down into her back yard before puddling under the back door into the kitchen. “Mom? Dad? I’m home already!”
Her folks came rushing in and hugged her like crazy. Her dad gasped, “Alex! They just showed news footage of that spider. Is that what you were doing?” She nodded.
Her mom hugged her some more and said, “Oh, honey, you look all beaten up. Are you okay? What happened?”
She didn’t want to think how scared her folks would be if she told them the whole truth, so she said, “I’m fine. Just some bruises. I was fighting the giant spider. Me and a helicopter. We’re the ones who got it in that avalanche so the jets could blow it up.”
Her mom said, “The footage on TV was the scariest thing I ever saw.”
Her dad added, “Including Danielle.”
She had to giggle at that. She changed out of her Terawatt outfit and let her mom get that into the washing machine. Then she had a late snack while her mom brushed out the wig on its wigform. Then she took a hot shower and took about four pain relievers, because she was pretty achy all over after sitting still in that jet for an hour.
She only woke up with a horrible nightmare one time, about two in the morning. She flew downstairs and had a big bowl of chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream — with hot fudge sauce and a couple Oreos — to feel better, and then she went back to bed. She hoped she wasn’t going to have nightmares about giant spiders for the next dozen weeks.
Interlude XMaggie Walsh ran down the corridor. She wasn’t running at her top speed, because there were other scientists ahead of her, and some of them had the athletic grace of a flounder. And she was not happy.
The lifeform experiments had gone swimmingly, once she had forced those two morons to stop trying to play God and just play scientist instead. Honestly, hadn’t Ristersen learned anything from two years at Yale with her as one of his major professors? She had been extremely pleased with the way it had come out. After all, it was just a matter of starting from the proper gene sequences, devising the right transposon and retrotransposon sequences, and then doing the gene splicing properly. And this lab had some extremely rare genomes and gene fragments that even places like the Harvard 100K Genome Archive couldn’t get. Some of these gene sequences were literally beyond price. And that was why she was so aggravated that they were being chased out of the bottom two levels of the lab complex, so the gene sequences were lost, probably forever.
Her directions had been quite explicit. The security measures had been strict. The biocontainment protocols had extended even beyond the CDC’s BSL-4. And it had all been wasted, when one annoying technician just had to try to save his girlfriend from being dinner for ‘Big Red’ — as Maggie liked to call it. Why were these people working for The Collective if they were this squeamish?
There was a scream behind her, and Wilkerson stopped to look behind him. She shoved him out of her way and kept moving. She wasn’t stupid enough to turn and look behind her. Every intersection had silvery half-globes mounted on the ceiling so you could see if someone was coming down an intersecting hallway. Well, how smart did you have to be to realize you could look directly at one of the mirrored half-globes and see what was behind you as well? Clearly, this place was staffed with morons.
Wilkerson screamed as the mass caught up with him and devoured him. ‘Devour’ wasn’t the correct technical term, but she liked it. The word was colorful. Flavorful. It had connotations that amused her.
‘Mister Jones’ darted out from one of the side corridors and joined her in fleeing toward the airlock doors that were the biocontainment system keeping anything from getting to the next floor up. He ran just ahead of her with his long legs and called out, “What happened?”
She did a little trick she had taught herself as a child. It was really extraordinarily simple in concept, but intricate in practice. It required expert timing. She hadn’t done it to anyone in years, not since she was working on her last doctorate and she had decided to sabotage a pushy post-doc who was carrying a tray of irreplaceable vials in his arms instead of on a cart. She just had to synchronize her steps properly with those of the person in front.
She kicked out with her front foot, just enough to tap the heel of Mister Jones. She tapped the outside of his left heel when it was behind him and just starting to move forward. A light tap was all that was required, and the added force meant that the foot didn’t go straight forward. It also went sideways.
Mister Jones gasped as his left foot crashed into the back of his right ankle, and he fell onto his face.
She leapt onto his back and then used that as a springboard to jump over his head.
Mister Jones knew what had happened as soon as he stumbled. That bitch Walsh had taken him out. He slashed to the side with his left arm to trip her in turn, but she outsmarted him. He felt one ruthless foot land on his spine, and then she was leaping ahead of him, well out of his reach.
He watched as she sprinted up to Peters and darted past the closing biocontainment doors of the first airlock, just before they activated all the emergency seals, locking out everyone else still on the floor.
And then it was too late. He felt the agony in his legs as the now-massive bulk flowed over him, dissolving his flesh and bones and subsuming his mass. He screamed at the pain.
His last thought was that he had promised himself he wouldn’t ever turn his back on her, and the one time he had forgotten was his downfa–
She watched intently as Big Red, which was now the size of a full-grown hippo, took care of her last real problem. There were still two or three scientists who might finger her for some deaths on-site if they were stupid enough, but she didn’t intend to stick around and answer questions from the local Barney Fifes. She had a car all prepared for something like this. She was going to drive out of Pennsylvania, call The Collective, and let them move her to a new research site.
She wasn’t worried about losing Mister Jones, either. He was extremely annoying, and uncomfortably perceptive. But she had already stolen the contact number he used, so really he had outlived his usefulness. And she was fairly sure that The Collective would consider this a ‘success’ so they would reward her. If she was really lucky, they would even take her where she really wanted to go.
She smiled. They would definitely see it as a success once she released her frozen fragment of Big Red, and it thawed out and then ate the entire surrounding area.
She had never liked Philadelphia, anyway.