Instinct (2010) (27 page)

‘OK, Major,’ she said, in a hoarse whisper, ‘I’m opening the door.’

She eased it back an inch at a time, listening for signs of what lay beyond.

The first thing to hit them was the heat. The Abdomen’s thermostat was connected to the generator, and the accumulation of warmth had given it the feeling of a jungle in August, a physical wall of sultry moisture almost pushing them backwards.

Next was the smell. Combined with the tangible humidity, no one had ever taken in an odour quite like it, and for that they were glad. It was a fusty combination of excretion, decaying flesh, dirt and bacteria.

Mike, Lisa and Bishop retched.

When they had recovered, Webster signalled to Garrett, and she pulled the door wide open.

It was time to go in.

Mills and Jacobs stood at the bottom of the Spartan’s loading ramp.

‘We need to speak to Taj again, find out what’s going on down there. And let’s untie him,’ Jacobs said, gesturing towards Madison.

‘
Untie
him?’ asked Mills.

‘About fucking time,’ said Madison.

‘What for?’

‘Mills, this has gone far enough. He’s done nothing wrong, and we’re going to need all the help we can get.’

‘But he’s going to …’

‘Kick your fucking ass. That’s right, Mills.’

‘Madison, if you want to kick his ass, you can stay tied up. We need you, and you’ll need both of us. Keep it calm till we’re out of here or stay where you are.’

Madison scowled. ‘I can play nice.’

‘Mills?’ Jacob asked like a kindergarten teacher.

‘One move and I’ll put a hole in your spine,’ said Mills, with all the menace he could muster.

They set Madison free and walked towards the MEROS entrance, which was still firmly shut.

‘Taj?’

‘Jacobs.’

‘OK, we can carry on talking like this but, instead,
you could just let us in. Something has gone wrong, and the four of us need to do what we can to sort it out.’ There was a pause while they waited for Taj to react, then the external security door slid open to reveal a suspicious face leaning over the desk.

‘You’d better not try any shit.’

‘OK, Taj, just so you know, we tried shit before because we wanted to get out of here. Now we want to get back in, and you’re the only person who can help us. No more shit will be tried.’

Taj looked at them all warily, especially Mills. ‘Haughty-ass motherfucker,’ were the words he had used to describe the Englishman to Garrett just a week earlier. ‘Acts like his shit come out in a goddamn Tiffany box.’

Madison and Jacobs were fine by him; they weren’t exactly his best friends, but he had no problem with them.

‘Yeah, well, dunno how much help I’m gonna be. Inshield ain’t comin’ up, so the elevator ain’t gonna be movin’. If the elevator ain’t movin’ and I can’t raise ’em on the intercom, we shit out of choices.’

‘Has there been any more movement down there?’ asked Jacobs.

‘A bunch. Beats me where they gone, though. I’m getting readings a long way out the back of Bishop’s office. Also got a bunch right outside it. Those ones ain’t moved for a while, though.’

‘So now your motion sensor has broken down,’ sighed Mills.

‘Could be. Could be there’s another way out.’

‘But there’s nothing …’

Jacobs interrupted Mills before he riled Taj.

‘Can we just get the facts straight? They lowered the Inshield, which means something big went wrong, and the elevator got stuck down there with Carter, Garrett and Andrew.’

‘Right. Then they started the freeze, to kill everything behind the glass so they could get the wasps dead or stunned or some shit, make ’em harmless at least. Then they was getting me to raise the shield so the guys in the elevator could get out before they froze too much, then they was going to lower the shield again to keep the wasps dyin’. That was the plan. I got to raise the shield part way, then I thought Bishop was telling me to lower it, but he was spooked by something big time and that was the last I heard.’

‘So they’re fucked,’ said Mills. ‘They’re all dead.’

‘We don’t know that,’ said Jacobs.

‘No, and I don’t
know
Garrett’s a dyke but, looking at the evidence, I can take a pretty good guess.’

‘So you saying we should just leave them there? Let me fly you guys to Bermuda to chill?’ asked Madison.

‘No, I’m saying we might as well act like they’re all dead, because it sounds close on 100 per cent they are.’

‘Taj, have you got any contact with them? Access to security cameras, phone records, anything that can tell us what’s happening down there?’

‘Nothin’ but the motion sensors. They got a half-mile range through anything. So, like I said: buncha
readings out the back of Bishop’s office and a lot right outside the door. Those ones ain’t human, though.’

‘Wasps?’

‘Most likely.’

‘And have the motion sensors ever been wrong before?’

‘Not these new ones. Installed three months ago and state of the art. ’Less something gone haywire, Bishop’s office got a back door.’

‘I’ve been in Bishop’s office, but I never saw another door,’ said Jacobs.

‘Me neither,’ added Mills.

‘Well, me neither, too,’ said Taj, attempting to imitate Mills’ English accent. ‘But I tell you, if there’s something back there, it’s big. I’m getting multiple readings some hundred yards from the office.’

Jacobs thought for a moment. As hope went, it was a match flame in a tornado, but that was better than nothing.

‘You got a plan of this place?’ she said at last.

Standing in the Abdomen was a uniquely terrifying experience. As far as they could see, there was a long, dense darkness lit only sporadically by the faint glow of the blue lights. The illumination was too weak to give any idea of what the room actually looked like, other than its dimensions, so all they knew was that they were somewhere very big and very dark.

Given what Bishop and Webster had told them about what may or may not lie within these walls, this cavernous unknown multiplied the fear that hung over them like cold mist. The words had taken on a reality that brought the potential for death much closer.

At the head of the group, Garrett’s torch provided some much-needed clarity, but it also created a series of leaping shadows, exacerbating the tension, which was already wound tight enough to snap.

The heat had covered everyone in a slick of perspiration that made hands slippery, while the crawling of sweat drops was often mistaken for the touch of an unseen creature. Panicked hands rose to cheeks and foreheads, ready to swat away wings, legs or antennae which turned out not to exist.

The sweat also came from overworked nerves that fizzed and pumped, particularly those of Bishop and
Webster. If the others were scared, it was nothing to what those two were going through. The last time they had moved across this floor, they had been literally running for their lives, hearing ravenous mouths and steely claws tearing through skin, bone and innards.

The last sounds they had heard were the wrench and churn of meat, the full-throated screams of helpless death, and the spatter of blood, gushing and landing, thickened by gore, all around them.

And then there was the guilt of their impotence. That was what had kept it all nagging away for the months and years since. They had had to watch friends die and decide that intervention was too risky, that their own lives were too important to be jeopardized.

Walking these steps again, it felt like something that had spent ten years fading to a tiny echo had just roared back to life. Bishop was overwhelmed by the return of the horror, the visceral visions of rampant slaughter that had invaded so many of his waking and sleeping hours. He could not see what remained of the corpses, but that was worse, giving free rein to his bubbling imagination.

Webster had been affected in a different way: unlike Bishop, he had seen plenty of death before he arrived at MEROS, so it was the action of leaving so many to die, rather than the violence itself, that had torn at his insides. No matter how many times he told himself there had been no choice, that it was escape or death, he had never shaken off the remorse.

Of course, none of them wanted to hear anything: sound meant movement, and movement meant that
the nightmares were a step closer. But the silence added to the fear in its own way. It meant that there was nothing to conceal the random scuffles and knocks of so many people shifting around in the dingy chaos. Each accidental kick of a chair or scrape of a wall was filtered through unchecked imagination to become the unfolding of a pair of wings or the opening of a set of hungry jaws.

They kept to the soft blue glows as best they could, but these gave way to larger sweeps of darkness where the way ahead was lit only by the blurred greys of Garrett’s torch.

Webster could not have given a more accurate description of the terrain, but it still left vast spaces of black that were capable of concealing anything. Small, careful steps were the only way to make progress, but with the only constant light pointing ahead rather than illuminating the ground, they shuffled through the murky detritus as best they could.

And no matter how quiet the room remained, it was impossible to escape the feeling that they were being watched, that something nearby was aware of them and waiting for the right moment to attack. Was that an insect scuttling in the corner, or just a reflection of Garrett’s torch beam? Did that sound come from behind them, or off to the left? Were the acoustics distorting sound, or were pounding temples creating noises that weren’t there?

From nowhere, a booming
BARUMM
of smashing, rolling and crashing arrived like thunder to the right.

Garrett quickly whipped her torch round to see a mess of sweeping, flittering shadows.

Lisa screamed and took a step backwards. As she tried to regain her balance, her knee clattered into a chair, knocking it over.

It sounded like they were being hunted from both sides and the darkness was concealing hordes of giant insects, recently woken and hungry for prey.

Susan started sobbing and held on to George, but he was just as scared as she was and didn’t want someone clinging to him when he might need to run.

‘Wait, wait, calm it down.’ Garrett’s voice was clear, but too quiet to rise above the scrabbling feet and panicked gasps.

‘I said stop!’ she yelled. The others were shocked into standing still. If Garrett was talking instead of shooting, maybe they weren’t under attack.

They followed the torch beam to see an upturned table on the floor.

‘I think that’s our superbug,’ she said.

Down the line, they were still a nervy mass of thumping hearts and dry throats, but it looked like Garrett was right.

Mike peered over at the table.

‘What’s that?’ he asked.

Garrett moved her torch a little further to the right to reveal a white stick. Further still, and the stick became recognizable as a fibia.

With a tilt of her wrist, Garrett cast the rest of the
skeleton in the smoky beam of torchlight. It was scattered around the floor and, as more was revealed, it became obvious that this was not just one person’s remains. Another yard to the right showed a second, then a third, skull. All were covered in years of dust and missing their jaws.

Suddenly, the scene revisited Bishop with alarming force. Even though he could see little, his memory filled out what was missing: visions of long-ago death, of moments when he had witnessed slaughter delivered without mercy. And those monsters: grotesque, ravenous, thoughtless. No matter how hard he tried to block them out, images of their malevolent faces appeared clear and true almost before his eyes.

Over to the left, he could make out a desk that had been smashed in two. A decade collapsed to nothing as he remembered how it came to be that way: it had taken the full force when a millipede the length of two men unleashed itself from its protective ball. Its football-sized head had reared up almost to the height of Dr William Schreiber, who had been able to do nothing but scream as it pinned him down and fed greedily on his face.

The screaming stopped when his throat was torn out, leaving his head to flop backwards on the strip of skin that was all that remained of his neck.

Bishop had watched as the millipede had clambered over the doctor’s stomach and chest, chewing as it went.

The froth of tissue, blood and bone spattered across
the creature’s hard, green skin was the sight that had taken longest to leave Bishop’s dreams. There was something so remorseless, so driven about it, that he had found the scene forcing itself into his thoughts for many years afterwards.

He felt the bile churning in his guts once more but managed with some effort to keep it under control.

‘We best get moving on,’ said Garrett.

Laura put her arm round her son, gently but firmly manoeuvring him in front of her so she could keep a good grip on his shoulders.

The bones had scared them, but at least they looked old and neglected. And the burst of noise and activity didn’t seem to have brought any insects out of hiding. In any case, they had no choice, so they all shuffled ahead, inevitably thinking about the ways in which the skeletons had come to be like that.

At the second blue light, they came across something that embodied Webster and Bishop’s nightmarish description. Garrett stepped on it without realizing, but when she looked down, her exclamation of
Holy shit!
was a loud noise too far. It set off a ripple of fear along the line.

In the dark, Garrett wasn’t aware that she had been responsible for the reaction. When she became so, she issued a series of loud
Ssshhhh
sounds until there was silence again, except for the insistent throb of blood pumping through their chests.

‘What is it?’ asked Webster.

Garrett peered down again and looked at what lay
in the torchlight. ‘Spider. Dead spider. All dry like it’s been dead a long time, but it is fuckin’
humongous
. Like the back tyre off my daddy’s tractor.’

George couldn’t help looking over her shoulder.