and Rockmeyer.
The three Marines ducked as one and the dragons overshot them. Then the Marines turned and firing their MP-5s
Running again.
Hard and fast.
Desperate now.
Into the giant receiving dock…and Armstrong saw the exit doors and thought of the safety of the outside cold beyond them.
At which point, the super-adults emerged from the depths of the complex. One landed on the concrete floor of the loading dock with a great boom, upturned its massive head and roared fiercely. The deep-bass sound of its roar shook the walls.
And suddenly, as he turned to look back, Armstrong tripped on a corpse and fell awkwardly forward, flat onto his face.
The fall saved his life—but not so Doc and Rockmeyer.
For as Armstrong had fallen, a super-adult creature had come swooping down and had sliced the other two Marines in half, clean across the waist.
They fell, in pieces.
Armstrong—alone now—ran, staggered, stumbled, the last few metres, clawing his way out through iron doors of Complex 13, under the words
He dived into the doorway, into the long tunnel his men had bored, and immediately felt the colder air, spun to look back—
—just in time to see the wide-open jaws of a super-adult come rushing at his face! All he saw was teeth and tongue and the monster’s deep dark yawning throat and then—
The jaws clamped shut,
And John T. Armstrong lay there…on his butt, on the icy ground…
But they didn’t step forward through the great iron doorway.
It was too cold.
Armstrong had made it. Just.
And so he left the tunnel, left Complex 13, with a backpack full of information.
Once outside, he was collected by a long-range pick-up chopper, from which he radioed his prized information back to the States…
…back to Groom Lake, Nevada…
…the home of Area 51, the notorious secret base, where a group of American military scientists were currently under attack from a rapidly-multiplying colony of dragon-like aliens that they had disturbed from their slumber in the lone alien ship that was kept in the underground hangar there.
