Instinct (2010) (30 page)

Garrett could not take it. She ran over to where Lisa
was, trying to make herself heard above the raw screams and pain-wracked moans.

‘Major, we got to stop this.’

For the first time since she had known him, Webster lost his composure: ‘What the fuck do you think I’m trying to do?’

That was when the second beast arrived.

The first cockroach knew it wasn’t going to be able to keep its meal secret for long, which is why it feasted with such determination.

It had been too focused on chewing back the leg to notice the hard, thorny limbs creeping through the undergrowth. The second creature took advantage of this to get its mandibles working on Lisa’s remaining foot.

Then she became unexpectedly quiet. The pain was still running through her like shards of burning shrapnel, but the stress on her lungs and throat was taking its toll.

It was hard to push out the same volume of air, and her vocal cords were not able to process it in the same way. She was screaming herself silent, and it made the others think the situation was improving.

She had lost so much blood her vital organs were shutting down. Her legs were ragged, blood-soaked bones, hanging down through the ceiling like torn branches. Blood continued to flow over the crunching jaws as they made short work of the marrow.

She became quieter still, but for a different reason: she was almost dead.

‘What’s happening?’ asked Mike.

‘How the fuck do we know?’ answered Wainhouse, desperately scared and helpless, close to tears.

Webster was staring into Lisa’s eyes, knowing he had lost her. As a soldier who had seen death in the field, he recognized the gradual flattening of the faculties before total shutdown.

‘Lisa? Lisa?’

Without realizing it, he was shaking her, and in doing so he felt how limp and light her body had become. Slowly, he let her go, and she slumped a little further into the hole, although the jagged edge that had caught her torso did not let her fall far.

‘Jesus, she’s fuckin’ dead! She’s fuckin’
dead
!’ sobbed Wainhouse.

Mike stared at Lisa, then collapsed to his knees beside her. He shook his head and tried to hug what little of her he could get hold of. Webster pulled him back.

‘We need to get away from here. Right now.’ His voice rose as he did.

‘Everyone! Fall back to the nest!’

‘So they’re still alive in the new area,’ Jacobs said.

‘Looks like it,’ confirmed Taj.

‘How do you know these guys aren’t them?’ asked Mills, pointing at the other motion indicators.

‘Every time someone comes in here, whether they know it or not, or like it or not, they get tagged.’ He walked over to the entrance door and showed them what looked like a CCTV camera to record the elevator entrance.

‘See this? It ain’t a camera, it’s a LITD, a Laser Integrated Tagging Device. It puts an invisible marker on the back of your neck, then my computer reads your DNA and checks you out through the FBI, CIA, Interpol, medical records, all kinds of shit.’

‘Bloody hell …’ muttered Mills.

‘Then the tracking device reads where you are every three seconds – and I know how long it takes you to go for a dump. Look, here
we
are.’

They looked at the four lights on a three-dimensional model of MEROS. ‘Cool, huh?’

‘Why are their readings different to ours?’ asked Jacobs.

‘Dunno for sure, but I guess the signal I’m getting
from the new area is pretty weak. I can tell if there’s movement, but I don’t know who’s who.’

‘So they didn’t programme the extra areas into the 3-D model?’

‘I guess not, but they only installed it a couple of years back.’

‘So maybe the other area is older than that. They brought the laser thing in and mapped out the known parts of MEROS to create the 3-D model, but not the rest of it, like it was out of bounds or something.’

‘Makes sense,’ said Madison.

‘And when you go outside the 3-D area,’ continued Jacobs, ‘it still works out your position but can’t place it anywhere on a map.’

‘So they’re moving around in an old part of the complex that is out of bounds. Is that Bishop’s secret escape route now?’ asked Madison.

‘If it was, it wouldn’t be that size. That’s a lot of prime underground real estate. It must have been used for something else,’ Jacobs said.

‘And these dots here are other moving things which have just been sensed through vibrations or some other shit. They not tagged, and that’s why they red instead of green.’

‘But why wouldn’t they be tagged?’ asked Mills. Taj looked at him as if he was very stupid indeed.

‘Wasps, motherfucker.’

‘So these dots are another cluster of wasps?’ He pointed around the middle of the new area: the cockroach hole.

‘Guess so.’

‘And in the part we know about, we’ve got these three that are blue.’

‘Yeah, that’s Heath, Van Arenn and Merchant. They bought it,’ said Taj. ‘Blue equals dead, cos that’s the colour you go when you die. A lot of them’s still alive, though – I mean, considering there’s a shitload of wasps on the loose.’

‘OK, so we’ve established that there are live people in a big, probably disused part of the lab. I assume if there was an easy way out of there they would have taken it by now, so they need our help. Taj, is there anything – and I mean
anything –
else?’

‘Like what?’

‘I don’t know … other maps, electronic controls that we can work from up here … a way of seeing if anyone outside here knows what’s going on or what we can do?’

‘The only one who phones out of here is Bishop. Dunno where the calls go, but he only dials three numbers, kinda like 911.’

‘Can we do that? He communicated with you, didn’t he? Does his phone line go out where yours does?’

‘Take a look.’ Taj shrugged, then showed them where the phone lines led into the wall.

‘These have to go somewhere,’ said Jacobs. ‘Mills, check outside, see if you can pick them up.’

Mills followed the cables through the wall, out of the building and on to the roof.

‘There’s a satellite dish up there,’ he said when he
returned. ‘Why don’t we just patch our phone into his line, press redial and see what happens?’

‘Anyone got pliers?’ Jacobs asked. At last Madison had a chance to be useful. He jogged back to his cockpit to get the miniature toolbox that sat under the pilot’s seat.

It took them a couple of minutes to get the wires right, then Jacobs wasted no time in pressing redial.

‘It’s ringing,’ she said.

In the Abdomen, everyone had collected in front of the termite’s nest. Mike and George were pacing around, dragging hard on George’s last cigarettes; Susan sat slumped against the nest, her head in her hands; Wainhouse was pointlessly checking and rechecking that his rifle magazine was fully loaded; Andrew’s arms were tight around Laura, who was trying not to shake; Garrett was wishing she had never gone over to see what was the matter with Lisa; and Bishop stood with his arms folded, biting what little fingernails he had left. They needed reassurance, a plan, something to tell them what had happened to Lisa was not going to happen to any of them.

They looked to Webster.

But he was going through the same turmoil they were, more so, because he’d been right there as it happened. They were just dealing with the sounds; he had the visions of how her imploring eyes had begged him to save her, the smell of all that blood, and the feeling of her lifeless half-body in his arms.

And now he knew they were not alone.

If one of those things was still alive, it was likely there were many more. He didn’t know what had attacked Lisa, but it had eaten a large chunk of an adult
human in less than five minutes. That meant it was at the extreme end of what his imagination had conjured up over the last ten years. It had been bad enough when those creatures only existed in his mind. Now they were real and he was among them, with nine people to keep alive and no way out.

He knew the others were waiting for his lead. The pressure felt physical, pushing down on his shoulders until he could barely stand.

‘Sir?’ asked Wainhouse.

‘OK,’ he replied after a pause. ‘Lisa is dead. I believe she died because there is something alive on the next level down, something substantial enough for us to regard it as a very real threat. Wainhouse, I need you to go to the hole and cover it with netspreaders. If whatever is down there is anything like our wasps, then that will give us at least fifteen minutes.

‘Right. Everyone else. We’re working against the clock, and we now know that Level Two is not somewhere we want to be. It looks to me like we’ve got one option: blast our way through that nest. Garrett, can you see any reason why that would not be possible?’

‘No, sir, but if you want to keep out of Level Two, blowing the nest won’t guarantee it. We got maybe twenty feet of nest covering another ten feet, maybe more, of concrete. Getting the poundage of explosive right on a combination like that is gonna be a tricky one. I couldn’t say for sure, but if we need to blast through that much shit, the ceiling or the floor’s gonna take a beating too. That way, you can choose: weaken
what’s above us and maybe get a cave-in, or weaken what’s below and blow a hole through to Level Two. Worse than that, whatever you choose, I couldn’t say for sure that you’re gonna get it.’

‘What if you rigged the middle of the nest?’

‘That’ll get us a weak top and bottom. Maybe a cave-in that comes down and crashes through the floor anyway. You want my chops for what it’s worth? Blast the floor. We’re bound to take out a bunch of them critters with the hole we make and, like I said, rigging closer to the top might get us a hole in the floor anyway.’

Webster looked at the height of the ceiling and imagined the consequences of a few tons of falling rock. Then he looked at the floor, imagining beyond it to the creatures stirring below.

‘Fine. Yes, rig closer to the floor.’

‘Aye-aye, Major.’

Garrett pulled out her detonators and placed them around the nest.

Webster turned to the centre of the room. He hadn’t heard as much noise as he was expecting. ‘Wainhouse! How’re those netspreaders coming?’

Wainhouse was standing beside the hole fretting about what he’d been asked to do. Using the netspreaders to create a barrier over the still-jerking upper half of Lisa’s corpse didn’t sit right with him, but he knew he had no choice.

She had been pulled further into the hole, but her progress had been stopped by what was happening
beneath her: there were now seven giant roaches battling each other for the right to finish her off.

She was waiting, dead and two feet shorter, to be dragged to her final disappearance down the throats of those insects.

Wainhouse could hear them – the moist, frantic chewing and shredding – and it was that, as well as a reluctance to desecrate the corpse any further, that made him hesitate. Then Webster’s call snapped him back to the job.

Stepping away, he aimed at the crown of Lisa’s head and shot three rounds in quick succession. Each net drove Lisa further into the hole, until the top of her head was almost level with the floor. She should have slipped all the way down, but the glue of the netspreaders held her up. It clung to the top of her head in a thin mesh cap that reached down to her eyebrows.

Then she started to move.

At first it was a shallow bobbing up and down and side to side movement that made Wainhouse watch with a quizzical expression. Then it became violent: a hard push upwards, stretching the Kevlar and testing the hold of each net. Then a yank downwards. More shaking, Lisa’s head whipping around like a buoy in a storm, then another strong pull downwards.

She was being detached from the glue, but in a way that made Wainhouse’s stomach turn. The strength of the adhesive was peeling Lisa’s face from her skull. Each pull was like the tearing of a bandage from a fresh wound. Blood, muscle and skin came away with a
shhhrrriipppp
to leave a crisscross of visible white bone. Wainhouse stepped back and pulled his trigger until he had no more shells to fire.

His chamber empty, he turned towards Webster and yelled. ‘Major!’

Webster ran through the mess of Level One to reach Wainhouse just as Lisa’s skull disappeared, with a whipping twang of glue and Kevlar, into the depths of Level Two.

Now the sound coming from below was clear: a terrifying hissing noise that sounded like all the aggression and anger and horror they had feared concentrated into a foul whistling
SSSSSSHHSSSSSHHSSS
that pierced their bones.

But they still couldn’t see what was making the noise. It was dark down there, and the webs of Kevlar had combined to create a solid barrier. Webster could just about make out a flash of movement that looked like a flickering wing. If it was making a sound, it couldn’t be heard above the hissing, so loud and terrible it equalled Lisa’s screams. Then it pushed its back up against the Kevlar. The brown translucent shell was unmistakable. The antennae, which now poked through far enough to touch his boot, confirmed it.

‘It’s a fucking roach,’ muttered Webster.

‘A what?’

‘It’s a giant fucking cockroach, and by giant I mean six feet, minimum. Shit, the timer just sped up.’

‘It’ll take them forever to get through the Kevlar, Major.’

‘Could be, but it’ll happen. They’ve got a taste for us now.’

‘We letting the others know about this?’

‘Hell no. They’ll know something’s up by this noise, but scaring any more shit out of them is not going to help. OK, the story is the Kevlar blocked our view. Looks bad but nothing to confirm – got that?’

‘Yessir.’

They walked back to the nest, hoping they didn’t look as unnerved as they felt.

The phone rang just once before it was answered.

‘Bishop? What the hell is happening down there?’

‘This isn’t Bishop.’

A pause. ‘All right, to whom am I speaking?’

They had put the phone on speaker so they could all hear but it had been agreed that Jacobs would do the talking.