The
Hive
Sunday, August 29, 3:42
P.M.
Time Remaining on the
Extinction Clock: 68 hours, 18 minutes
E.S.T.
We flattened out against the walls and
flipped down our night vision. I dropped to one knee and pivoted as
I heard a second growl. The lobby went from absolute blackness to
eerie green.
“What do you see, boss?” hissed Bunny, who
was facing the other way.
“Nothing,” I said, but I could feel
something moving in the shadows. We’d left a lot of wreckage behind
us, but everything looked still. But there was something and my
senses were jangling. The after-echo of the growl played over and
over in my head. It wasn’t a dog growl. More like a cat, but not a
cat, either. Whatever it was, the growl had been heavy, deep
chested. Something big was back there, and it was ballsy enough to
stalk three grown men.
“Move,” I said, and began backing away from
the lobby. We moved backward five feet, ten, following the curve of
the hallway until the lobby was lost to view.
Just as we moved out of sight I thought I
caught movement at the extreme range of the night vision, but it
was too brief a glimpse. Just a sense of something huge moving on
four feet, head low between massive shoulders.
Way too big for a dog.
“What the hell’s on our asses?” Bunny asked
in a jittery voice.
“I don’t know, but if it comes sniffing down
here I’m gonna kill it.”
“Works for me.”
“Let me know if you get a signal,
Top.”
“Roger, but we’re still
dead.”
“Lousy fucking choice of words,” muttered
Bunny.
The thing behind us
screamed.
It was a huge sound, high-pitched and filled
with animal hate. Like a leopard, but with too much chest behind
it. Then I heard the sharp click of thick nails on the
tile.
“Run!” I yelled, and the two of them pounded
down the hallway, but I held my ground, raised my Beretta in a
solid two-hand grip, and clamped down on the terror that was
blossoming in my chest. In the microsecond before the creature
rounded the bend the image of the unicorn flashed through my head.
If these maniacs could make something like that, then what other
horrors had they cooked up in their labs? Horrific images out of
legend and myth flashed before my mind’s eye, and then something
moved into my line of sight that was far more terrifying than any
monster from storybooks or campfire tales.
It ran like a cheetah, with massive
hindquarters thrusting it forward as long forelegs that ended in
splayed claws reached out to tear at the tiled floor. The monster’s
face was wrinkled in fury and its muzzle was as long as a Great
Dane’s but contoured like a panther. The eyes were glowing green
orbs in the night-vision lenses, but I could see feline slits. It
snarled with a mouthful of teeth that were easily as long as the
blade of my Rapid Release knife.
I had never seen, never imagined, a creature
like this. It was easily as big as a full-grown tiger. From the
points of those fangs to the tail that whipped the air behind it,
the monster had to be twelve feet, and when it was five yards away
it launched more than seven hundred pounds of feral mass into the
air right at me.
I heard myself screaming as I fired. I
pulled the trigger and fired, fired, fired as I threw myself down
and to one side. The creature’s mass was already in the air and it
couldn’t turn to track me, but I could feel the wind of its passage
over me and I saw the dark blossoms as bullet after bullet punched
into it, the big.45 slugs exploding through muscle and meat. I hit
it six times and then it was past me, landing hard on the floor,
skidding, sliding down the hall in the direction my men had taken,
snarling, its claws tearing up floor tiles, smearing the walls with
blood.
The monster scrambled to a violent turn and
got to its feet, turning fast to face me.
How the hell was it still standing with six
bullets in it?
The monster hissed at me and I could see its
monstrous shoulders bunching to make another run.
I put the laser sight on its left eye and
the creature flinched.
But not soon enough. I put my seventh shot
through its eye and my eighth and ninth through the heavy bone of
its skull. My slide locked back, the gun empty.
A terrible scream tore the air as the
creature fell.
The sound did not come from the dying
monster.
This scream came from right behind
me.
These animals hunted in
pairs.
I THREW MYSELF backward, dropping the
magazine and clawing another out of my pocket as the second animal
came at me out of the swirling darkness. I slapped the magazine
into place, but this beast was bigger, faster, and it hit me like a
freight train before I could get a round in the chamber or bring
the gun to bear.
The impact drove me backward so fast and
hard that I had no time to do anything but roll with it and try to
hang on to my gun. Claws ripped across my chest, tearing open my
heavy shirt and gouging chunks out of the Kevlar. The creature’s
own weight kept me alive because it continued to tumble over and
past me. I didn’t try to get to my feet; I just jacked the round as
the monster twisted around with a screech of claws on tiles and
pounced. It landed on me with all of its weight, knocking my night
vision off so that the world was black and full of teeth and claws.
The sheer weight of it drove the air from my lungs, but I jammed
the barrel up until it hit something solid and I pulled the
trigger, over and over again.
I heard other shots, the reports overlapping
mine, and the monster shrieked in terrible rage and
pain.
Then all of its weight slammed down on
me.