Hawkins leaned closer, looking at the faces. “Some of these people are Japanese, I think.”
“Really?” Bray put his hands against the glass. “You’re right. Why would they do this to their own—”
Bray rubbed his ear.
Hawkins flinched back.
“What is it?” Bray asked.
“Did you feel that? In your ear?”
“Yeah, but—”
Hawkins scanned back and forth with the rifle. Was something in here with them? Was Jim just outside the door? Finding nothing, Hawkins lowered the rifle and looked back at the large tank.
Twenty-three pairs of eyes now stared back at him.
37.
“Oh shit, oh shit,” Bray said, staring at the tank full of bodies bound together. “They’re alive!” He backed away from the large tank until his back struck a smaller tank at his back. A
Hawkins saw the man-thing—a human body lacking arms, but with the face of some kind of bottom-feeding fish—lunge at Bray. He jumped forward and caught the man as he stumbled away. Had the creature not been contained in the glass, it would have easily caught Bray.
“They’re waking up,” Hawkins said. All around the room, monstrous creations were beginning to move. Some, with limbs, pounded on the glass. Some were enraged, others horrified. But they all wanted the same thing. Out.
Hawkins took two steps toward the exit, pulling Bray behind him, when one of the containment units tipped and shattered on the concrete floor. Viscous gel exploded across the floor, turning the path to the double doors into a slick mess. The freed creature just writhed, its large, limbless body useless.
He pushed forward, intending to slosh through the gelatinous puddle, but a second explosion of glass and gel stopped him in his tracks. The creature that emerged had a powerful chimplike body. Its face was distorted, like some kind of pushed-in pig’s snout. It turned toward them as gel dripped from its black fur-coated limbs. The creature snapped its jaws open and closed, revealing a mix of long incisors and canines—like a beaver’s teeth combined with a wolf’s. A nasty bite.
Hawkins raised the rifle to fire, but a sudden alarm sounded, distracting him and the creature. Warning lights flashed all around. A voice spoke, in English. “Warning. Containment breach detected. Burn will commence in one minute. Please vacate immediately.”
Hawkins pulled the trigger.
The creature spun with a squeal as the round punched through its chest and burst out its back.
“Let’s go!” Hawkins resumed his charge for the door, but more shattering glass stopped him. Something large stepped out of one of the center tanks, cutting off his path. He fired twice, but only managed to get the monster’s attention. With a grunt, it turned toward him. The bulbous body was hairless. Sagging gray flesh covered much of its features, but not the tusks protruding from beneath its jowls, or the claws on its hands, which looked more like talons than actual hands.
Hawkins backed away and shouted in surprise when Bray took his shoulder.
“We can’t get out that way,” Bray said. “But maybe up there!” He pointed to the ceiling above the third-floor walkway, where a ladder led to a hatch in the ceiling. “I saw a ladder running down the outside.”
Hawkins didn’t wait. By his count, they had just thirty seconds to escape the “burn,” and it didn’t take a genius to figure out what that meant. The path to the elevator at the back of the room had been blocked by a spreading layer of gel and waking creatures that either flopped on the floor or gathered their wits. “The stairs!” he shouted, charging up the metal steps.
As they rounded the top of the stairs, a resounding crash split the air over their heads. Clear gel rained down from the floor above, coating the men. Hawkins winced as the scent of noxious chemicals and excrement covered his body. But still, he ran. The countdown would not wait for him to clean himself off.
At the top of the third floor, the creature that had escaped its containment vessel and covered Hawkins and Bray with fluid got to its feet. It had the body of a lynx and the head of a lop-eared bunny. At first glance, the thing appeared pitiful and harmless, with its water-logged, long ears. But it had the cat’s aggression, and dove for Hawkins’s leg, retractable claws extended, sharp incisors ready to puncture flesh.
Bray swung down hard with a shout, separating rabbit from cat. As the body convulsed, the pair ran to the ladder.
Glass shattered all around them. The cries and shrieks of the escaped chimeras began to sound like a zoo full of agitated animals—which wasn’t far from the truth.
“Ten seconds,” came the feminine voice. “Nine.”
“Go!” Hawkins shouted.
Bray started up the ladder rungs. Hawkins followed close behind. Bray paused at the hatch. He fought with the lever for a moment, but then tugged it ninety degrees counterclockwise, unlocking the hatch.
“Five.”
Bray pushed up the hatch with a grunt and climbed quickly up.
“Three.”
A loud hiss below Hawkins turned his eyes down as he climbed. A mist of liquid shot from nozzles all around the large chamber.
“Two.”
Hawkins emerged into the light of day, yanked his feet out of the hole, and rolled to the side.
“One.”
Bray slammed the hatch shut, but didn’t lock it. Instead, he dove away from the hatch and covered his head.
A muffled
The unsecured hatch rocketed open and then, torn from its hinges, launched into the air, chased by a forty- foot-tall column of fire. Heat washed over Hawkins. He covered his face and rolled away from the flames.
Then, as quickly as it began, the flames shrank away. Whatever fuel had been sprayed into the building’s interior had been burned away. And since the majority of the building’s contents—concrete, metal, and glass—didn’t burn, the building structure remained intact. Black smoke—all that remained of the twisted menagerie—billowed from the open hatch.
“If they didn’t know where we were before,” Bray said, climbing to his feet, “they know now.”
Hawkins stood. “They knew before.”
“You think the pressure we felt was some kind of signal?”
With a nod, Hawkins said, “I felt the same thing before Jim attacked. He had some kind of implant where his ears should have been.”
Bray winced.
“I think that pressure we’re feeling is actually a sound. A tone maybe. Just out of the range of human hearing. I think most of the chimeras here, with the exception of the crocs, have been trained to obey audio commands. The tones. The bells. The—”
“—horn,” Bray finished. “We heard it just before DeWinter was taken.”
“And before Joliet was taken.”
As though on cue, the horn ripped through the air. The deep bass tremble of the horn sounded louder than ever. Both men covered their ears until the five-second-long blast finished.
Hawkins raised the rifle. He’d lost count of the number of rounds he had left, but thought there were at least
