Backwoods (29 page)

“What are you doing?” Dani whispered.

“I’m listening,” he whispered back.

“For what?”

For sniffing,
he thought, because even
when the tumors had grown over the screamers’ eyes, they’d been
able to smell their quarry, a distinctive snuffling. Truth be told,
he was also listening to an equally telltale sound—that of
chewing.
Because Lucy and the other primates in the
stockroom hadn’t just been mauled to death. They had been
eaten.

“Come on.” The recessed emergency lights in
the hallway were dim but cast enough of a glow so he could see
nothing moving. But the fact that Suzette’s door stood open kept
him uneasy, even as he crept out from the adjoining corridor to
approach. He heard the soft whisper of Dani’s footsteps as she fell
in behind him.

They made it several feet down the corridor,
then a soft sound, a warbling groan, drew them both to abrupt,
simultaneous halts. It was a woman’s voice, feeble and pained, and
it came from beyond the darkened threshold of Suzette’s little
office.

Dani stepped toward the door and alarmed,
Andrew reached out, catching her by the arm. “What are you doing?”
he whispered, eyes wide.

“Someone’s hurt,” she whispered back. “It
sounds like Dr. Montgomery.”

“We can’t go in there.”

“She’s hurt,” Dani said again, brows
narrowing. “We can’t just leave her.”

She was right and he knew it. Even though
nearly every instinct in his body was screaming
flight not
fight
at the moment, he resisted the urge to simply charge past
the opened door and run as fast as he could down the corridor.
Because even though he might not have much cared for Suzette at
that moment—and even though there would’ve been no way in hell
she’d do the same thing for him—he knew she was still alive and
needed help. Especially if the screamers were still in there with
her.

Following Dani this time, he reached behind
him, drawing the pistol from the back of his pants. At the
click
as he thumbed off the safety, Dani glanced over her
shoulder at him. Taking the nine millimeter into account, she
raised her brow.

“I’m better with this one,” he tried to
reassure her.

She managed a quick smirk. “Here’s
hoping.”

They stood together at the threshold of the
office, backs pressed to the wall. Cautiously, Dani leaned forward,
using the barrel of the rifle to ease the door open all the way,
sending it swinging inward in a slow-moving arc. Earlier, emergency
lights inside had been aglow, but now there was only darkness. With
her hand, Dani motioned Andrew forward so he could point the
flashlight beam into the room, sweeping it in reconnaissance.

Moving in unison, they stepped through the
doorway. Dani had thumbed off the safety and chambered a fresh
round in the M16. She held it drawn to her face now, her head
tilted slightly as she lined up her aim with practiced skill and
ease. Andrew panned the light across the interior, surprised and
caught off guard to find no screamers inside.

There were, however, definite signs of a
struggle. Andrew could see dimpled impressions left in the drywall,
places where something had hit the walls hard enough to crack the
surface. Some of the ceiling tiles overhead lay lopsided, the
fluorescent light fixture covers dangling from their hinges.
Suzette’s cardboard box of supplies had been overturned and
scattered, the packages of crackers stomped on and shredded, crumbs
strewn everywhere like a dusting of snow. Cans of peas and green
beans had rolled in all directions, their aluminum lids winking in
the Maglite’s beam as it swept past them. Something else glittered
weakly in the flashlight’s glow; dark and smeared on the floor, it
glistened like wet paint that had been tracked in on a boot
heel.

Not paint,
Andrew thought.
Blood.

“Oh, God,” Dani whispered as the flashlight
found what was left of Suzette. Sprawled in a heap in the corner of
the room, she looked like a rag doll that had been tossed
tempestuously about by a toddler on a rampage. The front of her
blouse was covered in blood, her khaki slacks were splattered with
it in a grisly patchwork. Her stomach had been torn open. The meat
of her entrails lay in a glistening, bloody heap against her groin,
drooping in fleshy coils to the floor.

Slinging the rifle over her shoulder, Dani
rushed forward, dropping to her knees beside Suzette.

“Dani,” Andrew began in protest, sweeping the
light one last, anxious time around the breadth of the room.
Where’d they go?
he thought. If the screamers had attacked
Suzette, they’d been quick about it and even quicker to disperse,
which made no sense because they would’ve had no reason.
So
where are they, then? Why did they leave?

“She’s still alive,” Dani exclaimed. She’d
felt along Suzette’s neck for a pulse and apparently had found one.
Turning to Andrew now, her voice urgent, she said, “Bring the light
over here. She’s still alive!”

Even as he crossed the room to squat beside
Suzette, Dani was on the move again, hurrying toward the desk, the
heap of blankets Suzette had piled beneath in a makeshift pallet.
“We can use one of these to make a litter,” she said, pulling a
sheet loose, flapping it between her hands to shake off cracker
crumbs.

At this sound, sharp and smart, Suzette’s
eyelids fluttered open. Andrew could see her nose had been broken
and was now a swollen and misshapen lump, the nostrils crusted with
blood. Her lips were likewise battered and bloodied, and a narrow
laceration zig-zagged down the side of her face, nearly from her
hairline to her chin. Her gaze focused blearily on Andrew and when
she gasped, a ragged exhalation of air, blood peppered up from her
lips to spatter her chin.

“It’s alright,” Andrew said, reaching
instinctively for her hand. Their last encounter had been anything
but friendly, but all at once that didn’t matter. She was clearly
in pain. The glazed look in her eyes reminded him powerfully,
poignantly of his sister, Beth’s; an injured rabbit caught in a
trap that has struggled to the point where it had nearly torn,
chewed or clawed its tethered leg loose to free itself.

“It’s going to be okay, Suzette,” he
whispered.

Her eyes rolled helplessly from him toward
Dani, then up at the ceiling, then down again. She croaked
something, a gurgling sound he couldn’t make out.

“Don’t try to talk,” he soothed.

She seized the front of his shirt with
surprising strength and he gasped in surprise as she pulled him
toward her.
“Run,”
she hissed.

With a loud
BANG
that Andrew mistook
at first for gunfire, the ceiling panel almost directly above his
head came crashing down. He caught a blur of motion, felt thrumming
in the floor beneath him as something heavy and large sprang down
from the narrow open overhead, landing in front of him.

“Jesus!” he screamed. That was all he had
time for, because before he could even scuttle backwards or raise
his pistol in feeble self-defense, the creature—a screamer, one of
the deformed, mutated members of Alpha squadron—seized him roughly
by the throat, hauling him abruptly off his feet, hoisting him into
the air.

It was hideous, its face and form a twisted,
gnarled mess of varicose veins, bulging nodules and pus-filled
cysts. Tumors had covered one of its eyes with stark red lumps and
growths, while the other bulged from its socket as if shoved out
from behind. Its lips wrinkled back and the bulbous globe of its
protruding eye locked on Andrew’s face.

“Andrew!” Dani cried as the screamer threw
him the length of the room, sending him smashing into the far wall,
leaving a crumpled depression in the plaster. The force of the
impact knocked the wind from him and he collapsed in a heap on the
floor, his ears ringing, his mind swimming.

Dani screamed again as with an overlapping
series of crashes and thuds, more screamers pounced from hidden
alcoves in the ceiling. They had all been hiding in the
claustrophobically small channel between the drop tiles and
original ceiling, clinging to conduits, I-beams and whatever else
had been on hand to support them.

“Oh, my God,” Dani shrieked, then she fired
the M16, sending a rapid-fire series of rounds scattering into the
clustered screamers. The report was deafening, and with each brutal
impact, the screamers danced wildly, jerking and writhing,
staggering backwards, falling over.

“Shoot them in the hearts,” Andrew tried to
tell her, but even if he hadn’t still been gasping vainly to catch
his breath, he doubted she’d have heard him over the furious
ratta-tat-TAT
of automatic gunfire. Now he understood why
Moore had told him this when they’d encountered the first creature
inside the lab. The regenerative capabilities caused by his
synthetic virus meant anything less than an instantaneously lethal
wound would only slow them down.
And probably piss them
off.

The gunshots ceased, the room fading to
silence, a lingering haze of smoke and drywall dust hanging in the
air. The screamers all lay sprawled on the floor, tangled together,
a mass of mostly indiscernible appendages that had once been arms
and legs, feet and hands.

“What are they?” Dani whispered. “What the
hell are those things?”

That was right about the time one of the
screamers began to move, recovering from this initial attack. A
pair of spindly, jointed limbs rose from the heap of bodies, each
as big around as Andrew’s forearm and longer than one of Andrew’s
legs, grotesquely oversized and insectile.

When the screamer lifted the remains of its
torso up between these two hideously peculiar limbs, Andrew
realized they were some of its
ribs,
that somehow several of
the lower bones in its ribcage had fused together, then grown out
from its torso in crude protuberances. Between these and its
arms—which had likewise split along fault lines from the vertexes
of its thumbs clear to its elbows, separating the hands and the
parallel bones of its forearms into separate limbs—the screamer
balanced itself, spider-like.

Unlike O’Malley or any of the others Andrew
had seen to date, this screamer’s head remained relatively
untouched by the tumor-like growths. Its mouth looks swollen, its
eyes bulging out as the brain matter behind and beneath grew out of
control, swelling inside its skull cavity, but its features still
looked human, a contrast to its monstrously deformed body that made
it somehow even more grotesque.

“Oh, my, God,” Dani whispered with a
breathless, stunned sort of horror, the barrel of the M16 drooping
toward the floor.
“Langley?”

PFC Grant Langley—or what was left of him,
anyway—scrabbled around, crab-like and swift, at the sound of his
name. His distended eyes swung to lock on Dani’s face and the thin
seam of his mouth cut wide, his lips pulling back as he grinned at
her, gleeful and deranged.

“
Santoro,”
he said, although his voice
no longer sounded even remotely human, more a lisping, scraping
sound, like fingernails against a chalkboard or a knife blade
against a whetting stone.

The places where Dani’s bullets had struck
Langley were healing, new tumors bubbling out like heated air
bubbles from a lava bed, regenerated flesh forming to fill in the
crater-like points of impact where he’d been shot.

The other screamers began to stir and rise
all around Langley. The one that had attacked Andrew rose clumsily
to its feet, propped on the oversized, gnarled twists of its hands
like a silverback gorilla. One of Dani’s rounds had caught it in
the head and glistening, spongy tissue burbled out like the innards
of a rotten melon spewing from a fissure.

Dani moaned. “Duvall?” she whispered to this
one, shrinking back. Her stricken, horrified gaze panned from
screamer to screamer, staring past the tumors and disfigurements,
finding enough familiarity in each to recognize them all.
“Parker?”

Another had been shot in the neck, unleashing
a gory rush of blood from its punctured carotid artery. If that
wound hadn’t spontaneously healed, then the blood flow had at least
been rerouted by the same regenerative abilities, as new blood
vessels, each as thick as Andrew’s forefinger, began to grow,
vine-like, to encircle its throat, to reach up toward its head in
rapidly spreading tendrils and capillaries.

“Madison?” Dani moaned. “Oh, God, what’s
happened to you?”

“Shoot them,” Andrew screamed.

“What?” she stared at him, stricken, shaking
her head. She looked back at what was left of Alpha squadron as
they shambled toward her, backing her further and further across
the room. “No, no, I can’t do that, I can’t.”

“Dani, shoot them,” Andrew screamed again,
stumbling to his feet, grimacing at a sharp, grinding pain that
lanced through his lower back at the movement.

“I can’t!” she screamed back, her voice
strained and hoarse. She’d retreated into a wall and pressed
herself there. To Andrew’s horrified dismay, the M16 tumbled from
her hands, clattering to the floor by her feet. “I
know
them.”

“
Santoro,”
Langley hissed again,
scuttling forward, swallowing the distance between them in less
than a second.

“What happened to you?” Dani whispered. “They
told us you got sick. All of you…you were sick.” Her voice cut
short in a frightened cry as one of his forked, deformed hands shot
forward, its long, spindly fingers splayed wide to frame her
face.

“
Santoro.”
He continued to smile at
her, his grin stretching wider and wider until the skin of his
cheeks began to split with the strain, ripping open with a
sickening sound, like old parchment tearing along moldering
seams.

“Oh, God,” Dani moaned.