Complex 13

Blood was splattered everywhere—painting the dock’s concrete walls and the offices’ glass windows with long foul strokes. Human body parts lay strewn about the floor, preserved for years by the extreme cold, body parts that seemed…

…half-eaten.

A layer of frost covered everything.

Beyond the receiving dock, past a heavy steel door, they found a wide spiralling stairwell, going down into hazy darkness.

Armstrong peered down into the stairwell—

—just as something large and leathery swooped low and fast behind his head and with an ear-piercing shriek ripped the head of the man behind him clean off!

Armstrong whirled around—just as Rockmeyer opened fire on the creature— brrrraaaappp! —and it smashed against the nearest wall, hit.

It lay on the floor, whimpering, dying.

The eleven remaining Marines gathered around it, stared at it.

It was man-sized, but with oily scaled skin and bat-like wings. It looked a little like a teradactyl, the flying dinosaur, only its head was more developed, more complex, like that of a miniature dragon.

‘Mother of God, it just tore Kasdan’s head off…’

‘Jesus, it’s just like the two we saw at Groom Lake…’

‘Which means,’ Armstrong said, ‘the Russians might also have some of the bigger ones. And that’s why we’re here. Stay sharp. Twohy and de Souza, stand guard here. The rest of you, come on. It’s time to get nasty.’

They descended the stairs.

THE STAIRCASE AND THE HANGAR

The staircase was open-sided, open to the air.

It was actually a tall-and-spindly spiralling structure that hung from the ceiling of an immense underground room. But this

spiralling staircase never reached the floor of the hangar—it ended abruptly thirty feet above the floor of the room, at a long straight catwalk that was itself suspended off the floor.

For in the centre of this hangar, on its base, directly underneath the long catwalk, stood the centrepiece of Complex 13.

A spaceship.

THE SHIP

In a word, it was magnificent.

Even under a layer of 50-year-old frost, it was magnificent.

Its lines were streamlined and smooth; its outer shell was silver, armoured and hard. It had two downswept wings, one high tailfin and three mammoth rear thrusters.

Totally alien.

Totally cool.

It was largely intact, except for its great crushed nose—the result of a tremendous crash many years ago.

Filling the vast floor area all around the ship was a huge multi-holed alien structure, like a nest of some sort, or a three-dimensional spiderweb, dotted with thousands of foul slimy holes. This huge web fanned out from the ship and climbed the walls of the hangar. It too was covered in frost.

All was still.

‘There!’ Armstrong pointed at a small office, also raised off the floor, bolted to the wall at the very end of the catwalk far below them. ‘That must be the lab! Move!’

Down the staircase they raced.

As they ran, more of the man-sized dragons emerged from nests mounted on the walls of the hangar. They swooped in on the double-helix-like staircase—as the Marines descending the stairs returned automatic fire at them.

The dragons squealed, some fell, flapping and spasming.

One grabbed a Marine and hurled him off the stairs, sending him falling a hundred feet into the web-like formation on the floor of the hangar. The man landed in the web, which cushioned his fall, and he survived…

…for about two seconds.

Thwack! He was grabbed by a fiendishly strong claw that reached out from the nearest hole and yanked him out of sight, screaming. Then—

Crunch!

A foul blast of human blood came spraying out of the hole and the screaming stopped.

‘ Fucking hell…’ the Marine behind Armstrong breathed.

Armstrong paid him no heed. He hit the catwalk on the fly, just as one of the winged dargons landed on it right in front of him and bared its teeth.

Two booming shots from his Desert Eagle pistol removed the dragon’s head and it stumbled and staggered —headless—before falling off the catwalk, out of his way.

Behind him, another Marine fell.

They were three down, now.

Armstrong came to the lab, found the door locked from the inside.

Four booming gunshots fixed that. The door came free and he kicked it open and entered.

THE DEATH LAB

It was quiet as a tomb in the lab.

No squeals, no gunfire, no blood-sprays.

Armstrong and his men fanned out. ‘Gentlemen! Files, notes, everything you can find. We can’t stay for long! Move it! Koepp—cover that door behind us!’

As his men went to work, Armstrong scanned the lab—benches, desks, filing cabinets, serum bottles; all of it covered in frost; long abandoned.

An ice-encrusted human corpse lay in a corner—coiled in the foetal position, frozen in death; but whole, uneaten.

‘Doc!’ Armstrong called to his medic. ‘Check him out!’

Doc slid to the dead man’s side, examined him.

‘He froze to death, sir. Musta locked himself in here to hide from the aliens.’

Someone called: ‘Jesus, these records date back to 1938, when the ship was found buried half a mile underneath Tunguska…the Soviets believed its crash was the impact in 1908. It had just penetrated deep underground…’

Another man said, ‘They brought it inside this facility—and examined it for years, venturing ever deeper into it. Then, in mid-1956, they found the creatures in its innermost chamber. But they were frozen in some kind of suspended-animation unit. Hibernation units. They were sleeping. And the stupid Soviets woke them them up. Within three years, it was all over.’