across the plastic lawn, their eyes burning with all the fury of hellfire at us. They wanted our blood. They wanted it now.
No way out, Valdiva. No way out.
I stopped the bike outside the painted door of the bunker, then killed the motor. Silence rolled in on us in a wave. Hornets moved silently across the lawn. They didn’t shout. They made no fuss. They didn’t have to.
We were going to be easy meat for them. Sure, we’d kill some before they got us. But there were dozens of them now. Michaela climbed off the bike. As I slid off the seat I felt her hand close over mine.
“Don’t shoot,” she said in a calm voice.
“It’s the only way, Michaela.”
“No. Look at me, Greg. Don’t shoot them. Shoot me.”
I looked her in the face. Shoot her? But I knew it would be better to die cleanly than fall into their hands.
“No,” I told her. “Not yet. We’re going to take some of them out first.”
I aimed the rifle.
“Save one of those bullets for me, Greg. Please.” Her dark eyes seemed huge in her head. “They don’t always kill. We might be intended for a hive. I don’t want that. Not after what I’ve seen… Please, Greg?”
I turned back to the hornets. One-eye had just walked by the swimming pool, his bare toes whispering through the fake grass. That single eye of his fixed on Michaela. And, boy, was there a hungry light burning there.
I aimed the rifle at the center of his forehead.
I never even touched the trigger, but the explosion felt like a punch in the ear. One-eye disappeared in a gush of smoke.
I stared dumbly, not understanding what the hell was happening. One-eye Joe now lay on the astroturf. A neat circular hole had appeared where he’d once stood. It didn’t look much larger than a soup bowl and it was still smoking. Michaela pressed herself close to me. She was stiff with fright, but she watched, too, as One-eye stood up and began to walk. Only he wasn’t as tall as before and he walked weirdly, with a kind of hop-and-limp stride. Then I saw why. His feet had been blown clean off above the ankles. He walked on two stumps that squirted blood and trailed strings of meat and tendon and dripping goo.
This didn’t stop the others. They closed in toward us. But a second later another explosion shattered the still air. A tall, thin guy tumbled upward before falling flat to the ground. This one didn’t get up. The force of the explosion had torn his legs apart like a wishbone right up to the collarbone.
What was it? Hand grenades? I looked ’round in a daze, expecting to see Zak or Tony lobbing grenades at the hornets. But all I could see were trees, the clearing and the two concrete buildings.
To my right another hornet stepped forward. This time I saw the rush of smoke and flame shoot from the ground. The man fell, with one leg torn clean off at the hip. Like a flipped crab he struggled to roll off his back. But only for a moment. A severed artery shot his lifeblood ten feet into the air. Moments later he flopped back, lifeless as a rock.
But still the relentless advance on us. Those explosions wouldn’t stop all of them. Aiming, I blasted the face off a hornet who walked along the path toward us. Michaela dropped another on the driveway.
Then came a voice. Male? Female? Young? Old? I couldn’t tell. My ears rang from the explosions. I was still dazed by images of exploding people rollercoasting through my head.
“Move to your right,” the voice ordered. “Move to your right to the small building.”
One-eye had now reached the path. Still he walked, balancing on those bloody, shredded stumps. He reached out toward me, hate burning in his eyes. I fired from the hip, the bullet popping his heart. With a grunt he fell forward. I heard his face slap the concrete path.
“Move to your right. To the small building… Follow the path. Do not step onto the lawn. I repeat, do not step on the lawn.”
Michaela got her head into gear first. “Come on.” She grabbed my arm.
I ran with her, not knowing where we were going or where the phantom voice came from. Spilling out of the woods, I saw more hornets. They moved faster now. This time we didn’t waste time shooting any more of the bastards. For one, there were too many of them. And, two, Michaela pointed at the smaller building that could have been taken for a stable block. “Look, a door!”
There in the gable end of the building lay an opening. In fact it looked more like a slit rather than a genuine door. But with hornets running at us from left and right there wasn’t a whole lot of time to chew over what we might be getting into.
Michaela ran inside first. I followed, turning sideways to slip through the gap into an interior that had all the velvet darkness of a tomb.
Turning, I looked back out onto the sunlit lawn. Hornets moved at a full-blooded run toward the entrance. A guy built like a wrestler had all but reached the opening when I heard a hiss. The sound of air brakes on a truck, and then the thick slab of a door crashed shut. The boom of its closing went echoing deep into the earth to God knows where. The sound of a tomb closing.
Thirty-three
With the door closing there was darkness. I mean absolute, total, incontrovertible BLACK.
No light came around the seals of the door. No artificial light in the room. Only blackness that pressed against your face like a pillow. I heard Michaela give a shuddering whisper that might have been, “Oh, my God.” Then louder: “It’s so cold in here… freezing. Feel the walls. They’re like ice.”
I reached out in the dark. My fingers met soft flesh.
Hornets! They’re in here with us.
That spat into my head. Somehow the mob had gotten in, too. A second later I felt Michaela’s hand grip mine and she said, “Sheesh, we’re like two kids lost in the dark, aren’t we?”
Good God, I’d reached out and touched her, not a hornet.
“Can you feel the wall?” I asked.
“My other hand’s touching it now.”
“See if you can follow it. There must be another door or a light switch.”
For a second all I could hear was our breathing echoing back from the walls. Then, faintly, as if coming from far, far away, another sound: like fingernails tapping lightly on glass. An image came to me of hornets battering the other side of that slab of a door. The thing was so thick-thick enough to withstand a nuclear blast-that only a ghost of the sound of their enraged battering made it through.
“Don’t move.”
That voice again. I sensed a confidence and professionalism there, but darn it, I still couldn’t tell whether it was male or female, young or old.
“Please stay where you are.”
Michaela’s voice rose in the darkness. “We can’t see. Can you.. . Christ, what’s happening?”
It began without a sound. I flinched, as if a cold hand had reached out and clutched at my face. Darkness disorientated me so much I wasn’t sure what was happening at first, but as the noise rose to a roar I understood. A cold blast of air appeared from nowhere to blast us backward on our heels. The power of it could have been nothing less than gale force.
“Stand where you are. Don’t be alarmed.” That calm voice again.
“What are you doing?” Michaela called out.
I felt her stagger against me before the pressure of the winds tearing through the room.
“Standard decontamination procedure. There’s no cause for concern. The air is being drawn out to be replaced with sterile atmosphere.”
The wind tugged at my hair. “We’re going to be able to breathe, right?”
“Perfectly. Please do not move about the unit.”
I heard Michaela hiss, “How can I stop moving? I’m damn well being blown away.”
