Fast (75 page)

            Struggling to stand, Coleman threw his arm up to deflect the bar. His left hand took the full force of Cairns’s blow.

            The bones snapped like matchsticks. Pain tore up his arm, both from the breaking bones and the force of the impact. The hand was useless now. Pain was one thing, but every time that bar connected, pieces of his body stopped working.

            Sacrificing his hand allowed Coleman back on his feet. Now he just had to use the opportunity to best affect. He needed to deliver a fast crippling blow, something Cairns wouldn’t expect.

            He spun and lashed out with a low side kick. The kick was aimed at Cairns’s knee joint.

            But Cairns’s knee was a moving target while his body drove the bar in a horizontal swing at Coleman.

            Coleman missed.

            Cairns didn’t.

            The steel bar connected –

            - smashing Coleman squarely across the chest with a soul-shaking
thwunk
.

            Coleman crashed back down to the floor. It took all his will-power to just roll over. He pushed himself up on his hands.

           
I can’t breathe. I can hardly move!

            Coleman felt Cairns standing over him, bringing up the steel bar.
This is it. I can’t move!

            As the bar came down, Coleman tucked down his head and hunched his shoulders. The bar hit hard, skidded off his shoulder blades and bounced off the back of his head. Coleman’s elbows gave and he collapsed down onto his stomach again.

            The world jolted out of focus for at least three seconds. He lay senseless. He only knew he was lying on his stomach and had just been hit by something very hard. His mouth felt like he had been kicked in the teeth by a racehorse. His right cheek was smooshed down against a wet floor. His own left hands, bloodied and useless, swung in and out of focus.

            Then, like a bad dream, his situation rushed back into his forebrain.

            Cairns just clobbered me.

            A sound drew Coleman back to the present. The metallic sound of Cairns dropping the steel bar.

            Coleman lifted his head. Cairns stumbled towards the templates.

            He thinks I’m done. He thinks that last hit finished me. It almost did.

            The entire lab blurred in and out of focus for a second.

            Coleman drew his colt and propped himself up on his left elbow. He sighted on Cairns’s back.

            ‘Stop right there,’ he slurred. ‘I’ll pull this trigger and kill us both before I let you take those.’

            Cairns turned and lifted a small pistol.

            No. It’s not a pistol. He’s holding a flare gun. It’s probably what he used to ignite the surfactant that killed Marlin. If he pulls the trigger, this place will go up.

            The two men held their weapons trained on each other. Cairns’s face was blank, but his eyes flicked down to the flare gun.

            At that second, as Cairns’s studied the flare gun, Coleman noticed something almost directly to Cairns’s left. He had only a moment to register what he saw before Cairns squeezed the trigger.

            The flare gun jerked and spat the flare at Coleman. The flare was a ‘bounce and burst’ variety.

The flare had to make first impact before it activated. It would be some distance away from Cairns before it ignited. How far it would go before it ignited the gas was anyone’s guess.

            Cairns sprinted in the opposite direction.

            Like slow motion, the flare bounced on the floor just in front of Coleman’s eyes. The projectile then ricocheted over his head and flew off behind him.

            Coleman took aim and fired in a split second.

Harrison and Sullivan backed down the corridor from the antechamber.

            A red fire axe hung on the wall.

            Harrison lifted the axe from its safety clasp.

            ‘You serious?’ asked Sullivan, eyeing the axe ludicrously.

            Harrison hefted the axe in one hand, his assault rifle in the other. ‘If we have to go down, I’m going down swinging. How much ammo you got?’

            Now Sullivan looked like he envied Harrison his axe. ‘Just this one last clip.’

            Harrison had three. He pulled one from his vest and tossed it to Sullivan. Sullivan snatched it from the air. ‘Do you think we can hold them?’

            ‘It doesn’t matter,’ said Harrison. ‘It’s our job to try.’

            Both men knew it was far more than that. It was far more than a job. They had developed a bond with the evacuees. The strong bond that comes from sharing a terrible experience. And it didn’t get much worse than this.

            Harrison knew that he would do anything to give the evacuees a shot at living through the next sixty seconds.

            It’s not going to happen though. We’re going to fight, and we’re going to run out of ammunition, and I will have lied. David asked me if we had enough bullets, and I said that we had plenty.

            With that thought, the plexiglass wall crashed into the antechamber.

            Harrison and Sullivan retreated from the corridor and stopped just inside the main chamber. Harrison had ordered Dana into the communications room to keep calling for urgent help. Dana would broadcast the details of everything that was happening until the end. She was also advising over the radio that all the children, including David, were sealed up in the medical store room.

Harrison glanced over his shoulder, not really knowing what the rest of the evacuees would be doing.
People screaming and running around? People climbing over each other for the pseudo-safety of the small side chambers?

            Neither.

            The crowd trusted the Marines. They hadn’t yet seen the tide of creatures. They didn’t know how many were coming. They had formed up into a rough half circle, spread around the far end of the chamber. The chamber itself was totally bare of furnishings after they had shoved it all into the passageway to block the top-deck.

            The front line of the crowd was mostly people armed with whatever makeshift weapons they could improvise. They looked like a motley band of refugees making a desperately determined last stand.

            Harrison and Sullivan could see straight down the corridor. The creatures poured over the collapsed plexiglass like one giant fluid entity. They filled the antechamber.

            Sullivan took aim. ‘Here they come.’

            ‘Wait,’ ordered Harrison.

            Both men took up firing position, aiming through the corridor into the antechamber. It wouldn’t be hard to hit the creatures; they were everywhere. Harrison wished he had a few grenades to throw. It wouldn’t change the outcome, but god-damn it would make him feel better to plaster the walls with a few of those things.

            The first creature reached the corridor.

            Wait…,’ hissed Harrison. ‘We’ll catch them in the bottleneck. Make every bullet count.’

            Sullivan thumbed his CMAR-17 to a fully automatic firing pattern.

            A heartbeat later, when the creature was fully in the corridor, Harrison yelled, ‘Now!’

            Side by side, the two Marines opened fire down the corridor. Their CMAR-17 assault rifles roared. At this range, they couldn’t miss.

            The lead creature twisted and bucked under the blistering attack. As soon as it collapsed, another creature lurched forward.

            The two Marines switched targets, shredding pieces off the second creature. Then another creature came over the top, then another. They kept coming, dropping under the controlled fire, but every creature pushed slightly further down the corridor than the last.

            ‘Back up, back up,’ hollered Harrison over the weapon fire, realizing they needed more room.

            Harrison’s rifle ran dry. Smacking his last ammunition magazine in place, he heard Sullivan’s weapon run dry. Already half of their ammunition was gone. They’d only taken down five creatures. At least five times that many came through the antechamber.

            For the space of three seconds, neither man was firing. It was all the opportunity the creatures needed.

            As both men brought their weapons up, the first creature broke into the main chamber and lurched off to the left. Even over the roar of renewed gunfire, Harrison heard the mass outcry from the evacuees behind him.

            They had just seen the beginning of the end.

            The evacuees must have started moving, causing vibrations, because the creature veered away from the Marines. Harrison hadn’t expected this. He had assumed the gunfire would attract the creatures more than the panicked evacuees. Once the creatures got behind the Marines, it was all over. The two Marines couldn’t turn and fire their weapons back towards the evacuees. The friendly fire would be devastating.

            ‘Sullivan!’ yelled Harrison, jerking his head at the single creature breaking through their firing solution.

            ‘I’m on it!’ Sullivan switched his weapon left, targeting the creature and running left at the same time.

            Now Harrison was holding the corridor by himself. Or rather, he wasn’t.

            Shit, Shit, Shit! There’s too many!

            Holding the corridor was a two man operation, and although almost every one of Harrison’s rounds found their target, the targets were too many and too fast.

            Another creature broke through to the left. Then another veered off to the right. Harrison and Sullivan just couldn’t stop them all. Like a burst damn, the creatures poured from the bottleneck.

            ‘Come and get it, you sons of bitches!’ yelled Sullivan, shooting desperately around himself in short bursts. The creatures came at him from both sides.

            Harrison had one coming straight at him. He didn’t move. He just locked his stance and poured fire into the oncoming freak of nature. Focusing on just one creature, his automatic fire tore the thing apart.

            His weapon ran empty again.

            That’s it. That’s the CMAR empty.

            The charging creature died on the move, tumbling straight towards him, sliding on its own ejaculating bodily fluids.

            Harrison dropped his now useless assault rifle and rolled from the creature’s path. When he came to his feet, he had the axe in one hand and his pistol in the other.

            The first creatures had reached the evacuees.

            People scattered before them.

            A tall man Harrison didn’t recognize stepped up and planted himself in front of the first creature. As the hostile charged, the man swung half a chair straight down with both hands into its gaping maw. The creature’s mouth closed around the chair. Three more people cut in behind the creature, stabbing and hacking at its abdomen with sharp metal bars and broken pieces of furniture. One woman even ran forward and heaved a length of bed frame like a spear.