Oliver Maddock joined Nina at the front of the group. They both raised suppressed Colt M4s. Two quick pops broke the silence in the parking lot followed by two damp thumps as the alien-assimilated bodies dropped.
Caesar and Bly raced forward with the latter making a little more jingle and clink than Nina preferred due to the light machine gun he carried.
Nina approached and opened the door. A gust of foul-smelling air rushed out. The Dark Wolves moved inside.
The interior lighting immediately created problems for the team. They entered a long concrete hall with doors to either side. A pair of thick root-like conduits ran the tops of the walls, probably carrying electricity or fluids or whatever ungodly substances The Order needed to run their horror chambers. Two glowing balls provided patches of an almost liquid-like light illuminating either end of the corridor. The rest of the passage remained dark.
Nina removed her night vision. The others did the same. While shadows still remained the light created enough interference to make the high-tech gear more a liability than an asset.
They walked the hall stopping at each door to glance inside. They found empty offices with smashed computers, a chamber full of dust-covered filing cabinets, and a janitorial closet overrun with mice.
A continual rumble reverberated through the complex, helping to hide their footfalls but the sound added to the tension. Anywhere else Nina would say the noise probably came from large machines chugging away somewhere at the heart of the complex. But inside those walls laced with organic-like conduits and filled with the smell of decay, she easily imagined the noise to come from a giant creature. The noise of the machine or monster-whatever it may be-joined with the constant metallic pitter-patter of raindrops on the roof to create enough sound to make ‘hearing’ the least reliable of their senses.
They reached the end of the hall and paused where a human door had been replaced with skin-like drapes. A humid breeze blew in from beyond and a sound like a nervous stomach rumbling broadcast over unseen loudspeakers.
Something big moved past the other side of those drapes en route to wherever its orders commanded.
Nina used her silenced gun barrel to separate the slit sheaths and eye the darkness beyond. She saw a large room. The concrete floor wore yellow and white caution and traffic lines and a forklift lay toppled against one wall. Several rows of metal racks lined the chamber and loading docks remained sealed to the west.
Directly across from her position a wide archway with straps of heavy plastic offered access to one of the larger warehouses while this room, she realized, served as a loading and unloading zone for trucks.
Again, just enough glowing orbs hung on the wall to make night vision impractical.
Nina sent Vince first, then Carl, then Oliver, and then herself from the entrance hall and across the chamber. No signs of enemy activity. No hint of security devices.
The wolves gathered by the archway and then pushed through the sheets of plastic and entered a wide hall. Empty pallets, several parked forklifts, and wheeled garbage bins sat discarded to either side. Metal bulkheads-like small garage doors-lined the walls and the ceiling reached six stories tall but everything higher than twenty feet remained hidden in darkness. The lights along the big corridor provided only spotlight-like spheres of bright in an otherwise empty passage. The constant drum of rain on the rooftop echoed all around.
Nina felt naked in the open, but saw no cover.
Thirty yards away-at the far end of the hall-loomed a closed sliding door. Nina guessed the larger warehouses waited ahead and the Bishop somewhere further beyond.
The sound of another Chariot flying low over the building drew her attention for a moment. Nina wished she had not sent Odin with the human survivors. She forgot how much they depending on his sensitive canine nose.
“Cap?”
Nina answered Vince with a wave of her arm ordering them to spread out and move forward. The rain increased. The Chariot’s engines sounded directly overhead. Nina glanced toward the ceiling again and saw only black.
What was that?
Did something move up there?
She heard-they all heard-a soft clang. Like a chain tapping against metal.
Nina gripped her rifle tight and took mental stock of her armaments: the Mac-11 in a shoulder harness; the desert eagle on a thigh rig; four grenades on her belt and-as a last resort-a short sword strapped to her left leg. She also carried a detpack in her kit.
They reached the halfway point of the hall. The closed door loomed ahead.
Oliver Maddock walked a step behind and to Nina’s right. The other two stayed close to the far wall.
The sound came again. A rattle. A squeak. Louder.
Nina’s eyes darted from wall to ceiling. Vince and Bly hurried toward the sliding door. Maddock checked their rear, turning around in time to see the thing drop from the shadows and swing toward his gut.
He raised his rifle and pulled the trigger. His silenced rounds went askew as the thing shaped like a scorpion’s tail cut into his chest and hauled him up into the darkness above.
More of that clanging noise.
Nina saw him go. She raised her rifle, but suddenly the darkness turned to bright as a hundred orbs of light sprung to life along the hall. She shielded her eyes with an arm and instinctively dove for a spot low against the wall. Maddock-screaming his last breaths-went higher and higher into the rafters carried by the half-shell, half-iron scorpion tail hanging from a series of chains and pulleys.
As it neared the crisscross of rafters above, the tail uncurled and let the man fall from 50 feet to the concrete. Nina-her eyes barely adjusted to the newfound illumination-could do nothing to save him. He and his gear hit the ground with a sickening crunch.
The metal door slid open of its own accord. Two Spider Sentries stood in the entry on their spindly legs. Their high-powered rapid-fire pellet guns fired. Vince Caesar barely avoided a burst as he rolled toward the wall and returned fire with his carbine.
Bly dropped into a prone position and rested his M-249 on its small tripods. As the alien rounds skipped across the concrete around him, Carl Bly fired a fierce volley. The loud rat-tat-tat of the machine gun joined with the falling rain, the complex’s constant rumble, and the hiss of Spider Sentry guns to fill the hall with an eclectic mix of sound that bounced off the high ceiling and echoed to ear-splitting levels.
Bly’s first rounds went wide but his steady hand guided the hose-like stream of bullets into one of the Spiders. Its round head disintegrated into goo.
Nina felt a shot hit her high in the shoulder, catching uniform and padding but not flesh. She concentrated her M4 at the head. The silenced rounds fired from her carbine in a series of pops. Those bullets annoyed the Sentry- knocked its round head side to side-but could not only chipped at its flesh.
Just behind the rat-tat-tat of the machine gun, the pop of her silenced weapon, and the sharp hiss of the Spider Sentry guns came the whir and clang of the scorpion tail descending from the heights somewhere-not far- behind her.
Vince, from one knee, launched an M203 grenade hitting the second sentry in the side. A nice chunk of its centerpiece fell away but it kept on shooting at Nina. She found cover along a metal bin-a kind of dumpster-but a new threat garnered her attention.
Her instincts felt the thrust of the scorpion tail’s razor-sharp stinger and she dropped and rolled at the last instant. The strange device hit the metal bin where its stinger lodged. The tail-thing immediately wiggled to try and free itself.
Despite incoming fire from the sentry, Nina wedged an anti-personnel grenade in the last joint by the tail’s sharp point. A moment later it freed itself from the metal bin and retreated toward the ceiling.
Nina threw herself to the ground alongside the bin and covered her head.
The grenade exploded. Pieces of metal and a kind of hairy skin fell to the floor but the sound of machine guns and air guns and rain drown out any noise the impact may have made.
Nina sat up and re-focused on the remaining Spider Sentry just in time to see Bly’s M-249 finish it off. The thing wobbled side to side and then collapsed.
“Move! Move! Move!” She commanded and led them into the next room-where they stopped dead in their tracks.
The three soldiers entered a massive rectangular chamber filled with pallets full of cereal boxes, canned fruit,
