The Green Lama: Crimson Circle (44 page)

Gamma walked over to the desk, pulled over his chair and set to work when he realized he didn’t have a pen. Which was strange, he always had a pen. He looked over his desk and found the corner of it was singed, sections of which were still on fire. He went to pat it out when he felt something dribble down his chin. He wiped it away with the handkerchief and tucked the cherry stained fabric back in his pocket.

Where was he again? He needed to recalculate something, but he couldn’t remember what it was. He had been speaking to Omega, but he couldn’t remember about what or when. Where was Omega? He had just been there, but the more Gamma tried to think the more he decided it didn’t matter.

He rested his head against the back of the chair. Maybe he just needed to close his eyes for a minute.

Just a few minutes rest.

It was so warm here and he was so tired.

His arms slowly slumped to his sides and his intestines tumbled out onto his lap before slipping onto the floor.

• • •

“JESUS, what the hell happened here?” Ken coughed, futilely waving away the black smoke filling the subterranean lair. Bodies littered the ground, their limbs torn off; their heads twisted the wrong way round.

Caraway coughed into the crook of his arm. “Looks like we’re a little late for the party.”

“Ain’t that how it always goes?” Ken sighed. “You don’t get the invitation until a couple hours before and when you show up, everyone’s already drunk and paired off.”

“Will you keep it down?” Jean hissed. She kept her gun raised, fingers teasing the trigger. “It’s a miracle we haven’t been attacked yet.”

They had found the Facility in disarray, filled with smoke and rubble. The elevator—or cabin, Jean couldn’t decide what she wanted to call it—had stalled out three-quarters of the way down, forcing them to crawl down the sloping shaft. Cut up and bruised from the descent, they had made their way into Facility’s main floor. They hid between two of the several single story buildings lining the cavern while Jean read over the instructions. More than the smoke and the rubble, it was the silence that was most unsettling.

Evangl looked to Jean. “You don’t think Jethro—”

“Even for Jethro this is a little bit excessive,” Jean said, shaking her head, unable to ignore the ever-present weight of the glowing bullet in her pocket. She snuck a glance at the bloody scrape on her palm and watched it heal with a barely audible crinkle.

“’Less he’s fightin’ a golem,” Caraway added under his breath.

Jean frowned. “Yeah, well, let’s hope that doesn’t happen again.”

“Well, then, where the hell is the greeting party of men with big guns shooting at us?” Ken asked.

“Maybe they’re busy,” Caraway groused.

“Too busy for us? Scandal. I hate these in-between moments. Give me a golem any day.”

Evangl shuffled over. “What the hell are you three talking about?”

“Blah blah blah, ancient evil stuff,” Ken said dismissively. “Well, not evil, but we thought it was. Trust me, be glad you missed it. Let’s focus on the scary here and now and the gut wrenching silence.”

“Except for the creepy moaning,” Jean added offhandedly.

Ken furrowed his brow. “Creepy moaning? I don’t hear any—Oh, there it is.”

Evangl’s ear pricked up as she listened. “What the hell is that?”

“Why do I get the feeling things are about to get a whole lot more terrifying?” Ken sighed.

“Because they always do,” Jean said as she folded up the pages and stuffed them in her pocket. There was something shuffling, sideways and forward and a half-step back, breathing shallow, bubbling breaths. A feeling in her gut told her what they were, a sense that tickled the back of her mind. She peered into the darkness, her radioactive salt enhanced eyes showing her a depth of blacks and greys that existed where the light didn’t. “They’re coming.”

Evangl stood up and armed herself. “Do I want to ask who?”

“No, you don’t. Quick, before they get closer.”

Ken squinted at the shifting shapes. “It’s probably the Cannibal Killers,” he said with a sardonic laugh.

“You read too many newspapers, Clayton,” Caraway grumbled.

“Naw, just one too many pulps,” he said, though his voice was hollow.

“Enough with the banter and run!” Jean shouted as the shuffling mass of grey forms approached.

The distant echo of screams and gunfire suddenly resounded through the cavern, accompanied by jagged yellow-white bursts of light. A man limped out of the shadows, his face bloody, right hand hanging limp at his side, the rifle barrel in his left dragging against the concrete. Evangl’s spine tingled as she saw one of the creatures leap at the injured man. It dug its fingers into the man’s eyes and blood spurted out in fountains. The man screamed as the creature drove its fingers in deeper and began to pull.

Evangl covered her mouth, and fell back half a step. “Oh, Jesus,” she breathed.

“We’ve got to run,” Ken whispered, his eyes wide. “We definitely have to run.”

“Go go go!” Caraway shouted.

As the others ran away, Evangl held back for one second, watching as several of the diseased creatures tore the injured man apart, splitting him in half like an oyster shell, and began to feast. The remaining creatures continued to shuffle toward her, the blood red wounds on their foreheads leaking black over their glaucomic eyes. She raised her gun and aimed for the center of what had been a young’s man head before she thought better of it. Her grip on her gun tightened before she followed after the others.

“Do we know where we’re going?” Ken shouted to Jean as they weaved their way through the seemingly unending number of squat, white buildings.

“We’re going over…” Jean stopped short and quickly read over the directions. Off in the distance they could hear the creatures slowly approaching, moaning a melodic song in unison. She pointed to the squat structure to their left. “There!”

She ran up to the doorway and pulled out the notebook she had stolen from the two men that had assaulted her at Omega’s hideaway. That, along with Murdoch’s instructions gave her, she realized, were pass codes to every door in the Facility. She began punching in the pass code into the keypad, while the others instinctually formed a perimeter around her.

“What the hell are you doing?” Ken asked.

“Coded keypads at every door,” she said in response. There was something on the edge of her enhanced hearing, a cracking sound like breaking bones, but somehow deeper, like electricity and whispering. “Weren’t you paying attention on the drive up?”

“I was a little stuck on the whole we were ‘breaking into a super secret subterranean lair’ thing, and I kinda lost focus after that.”

A subtle smile teased the corner of Jean’s mouth. Lord, how she has missed her Blonde bombshell. “All right… Here it goes. F… Ampersand… Q… Hyphen… Squiggly line that kinda looks like a ‘P.’” The keypad briefly lit up and made a short buzzing sound. “Come on! Work, dammit! Jesus, they built a giant underground lair, you think they could afford real letters.”

“They’re coming!” Caraway barked as he fired off a shot. “They caught our scent and started picking up the pace.”

“They’re not going to win any race, but there are a lot more of them than us,” Evangl added. “We won’t stand a chance.”

“No pressure,” Jean commented under her breath as she began dialing in the code again. Beneath Caraway’s gunshots, she could hear the cracking sound high above them, growing louder and larger.

“Hey, Ken, how badly do you want to relive R’lyeh?” Caraway asked.

“Never,” Ken replied dryly.

“Wonderful. We’ll pretend we’re fighting Deep Ones. Jean, we’ll buy you and Evangl some time.”

Jean began to protest. “John—”

But Caraway wouldn’t let her. “Just don’t go and do anything stupid like die. Okay?”

“I’ll try not to disappoint,” she said with a nod.

“We’ll see you two on the other side,” Caraway said with a hollow smile.

Jean glanced at the approaching horde. “Yeah… See you there.”

“Come on, Blondie. Let’s go be badass,” Caraway said as he walked toward the onslaught.

Ken began to follow when he hesitated and looked back at Jean, his expression grim. “Be safe, Red.”

“You too, Matinee Idol,” Jean whispered.

Ken cleared his throat and ran up next to Caraway, his head held high, gun at his side.

Evangl looked to Jean, who immediately turned back to the keypad, unable to look Dumont’s old companion in the eye. It was too early to mourn. “F, Ampersand, Q, Hyphen—No, wait. That’s an M-dash—Squiggly P line. And…” The keypad lit up and made the same, negative short buzz. “Goddammit!” Jean shouted. “Open up, damn you!”

Jean angrily pounded her fist and the door flew off its hinges, and clattered at the far end of the building’s hall. She looked at her hand in disbelief, at the faint glow emanating around her fingers.

“Well,” Evangl said after a moment, “that’s one way to open a door.”

• • •

OMEGA HELD his hand against the wound in his side. Blood leaked through his fingers and spilled over his knuckles. Half of his face had been burned off, the remaining skin crackling, the muscles almost glowing red. His left eye had boiled and popped, its fluid leaking down his ruined visage. It would take more than some hopped up self-righteous Buddhist to kill him. He pushed the pain back and focused on making his way through the destruction surrounding him. All around him were the dead and the dying, growing evidence of the Collective’s egregious miscalculations. Omega wasn’t at all surprised, but he was disappointed that such brilliant men would leave their machinations in the hands of madmen, leaving him alone to clean up their mess.

Again.

He pulled a rifle off a guard’s body and shoved open a doorway with his shoulder—the keypad having been blasted apart—and made his way toward the Source. The Facility might have fallen, but there was one thing left he could do.

• • •

IT HAD all gone wrong, so horribly, terribly wrong.

“Oh God, oh God, oh God,” Pelham whimpered as he crawled along the infirmary’s blood slick floor. The test subjects had broken free and made short work of everything—of everyone—that stood in their path. And there was the creature, the glowing beast whose whispers echoed in Pelham’s ear. He could feel the accusatory stares of the dead, unblinking as he moved beneath one of the hospital beds. There had been so much screaming accompanied with the tearing of flesh, the shattering of bone. He could still hear the nightmare even now, continuing somewhere deep in the Facility.

He knew the creature was in here, even though its feet didn’t touch the ground. Pelham curled himself into a shivering ball, watching the glowing form methodically float through the room.

“P
ELLLLHAM…
P
ELLLHAM
…
” the creature hissed from the darkness, its emerald glow somehow making the shadow grow deeper as it orbited the infirmary.
“I
CAN HEAR YOU BREATHING,
F
RANKLIN. LET’S NOT PLAY THESE CHILDISH GAMES
…”

Pelham pinched his eyes shut and held his breath. His heartbeat thrummed in his ears. If only he could make himself smaller, make himself invisible. The joints on his right hand howled in dull pain and he fought the instinctual urge to crack his knuckles. He brought his knees closer to his chest, his body shivering. Just stay silent a little longer, please, just stay quiet long enough for the creature to leave. He had survived this long, surely he could survive longer…

“Come now, isn’t this what you wanted?” the creature asked. “Cat and mouse. A little game just for the two of us, like it was at the beginning.”

Pelham fought back a sob. Tears streamed down his cheeks. He rocked back and forth and bit down on his fist.

“Some call me a vigilante. Others call me a hero… Let’s call me what I really am…” it growled in a thousand voices. “An angry god.”

The creature’s luminescent hand shot out, grabbed Pelham by the hair and pulled him out kicking and screaming from beneath the bed. “No, no, no!” Pelham screamed as the creature lifted him off the ground. The creature smiled as it wrapped its glowing green hand around Pelham’s face, his skin sizzling.

• • •

VALCO’S HANDS were shaking as he punched in the pass code to his laboratory. The door hissed open and a cloud of smoke billowed out. He covered his mouth and nose with a handkerchief and ran in. The laboratory was in ruins, with small pockets of flames inching their way through the various chemicals. He kicked aside a fallen cart and made his way through the destruction toward his worktable. He let out a violent cough, the burning chemicals stinging his lungs and eyes.

There was little time left. There was no Epsilon Mist on hand. But Valco knew there was another option… OBS-241. The Substance and the Delta Liquid Ray were somehow linked, and together they had formed an impossible energy source. And while Valco knew it could have powered nations… He also knew that energy could have other uses.

He picked up a canister marked OBS-241 off the floor, its container thankfully undamaged, and dragged it across the room before carefully placing atop his lab table. He had helped birth this nightmare, he decided, and so he was going to be the one to fix it.