Fast (20 page)

            But still, it was his father’s hearing that was essential. Bora was still just reading his father’s senses.

            He couldn’t hear a twig breaking under his boot, but he learned how the sensation
felt
through his sole. In time, he learned how it felt when his father stepped on a dry twig a few meters away. Then one day Bora felt the vibration of one of his father’s traps snapping shut behind them. The metal ground-stakes had telegraphed the event through the lush soil.

            His father hadn’t heard the trap, but Bora felt it. He tugged his father’s sleeve. They backtracked and found the sprung trap. Bora’s father smiled and squeezed his shoulder. That’s when things had changed in Bora’s mind.
He could do something that others couldn’t.

            He learned to listen with his entire body.

            Bora’s father made every stick of furniture in their house, and Bora pushed the simple bunk his father had made for him into the corner where he could sleep with his hand resting on the wooden architrave. From there, he could feel everything that was going on. The patterns of tiny tremors that came through the wood were like rolling brail. What was happening in his home, in the houses next door, outside; every act had a characteristic affect on the world around it, and Bora was learning how to intercept and interpret these signals. If he felt something new, he jumped up and rushed outside, searching for the new source of vibrations with the wonder of a child learning a new word. He developed the habit of touching surfaces that he innately sensed would amplify vibrations. Likewise, he avoided areas that dampened vibrations. This was the way he came to categorize his surrounding, a tapestry of mediums through which he could sense life around him to varying degrees.

            By the age of twelve, Bora was taller than his father.

            His body grew strong, and before long it was Bora carrying their game across his shoulders while his father followed with the traps. Perhaps Bora was compensating, but all he knew was that it felt good to be taking the lead and receiving his father’s rare nod of approval.

            Bora’s father also started using a rifle for larger game.

            Then everything changed.

            When they arrested his father, they confiscated his rifle and all his traps. It was his rifle that alerted the police, Bora’s mother later explained. The gunshots had carried through the woods.

            Bora never saw his father again.

            It was now Bora’s responsibility to provide for himself and his mother. All Bora had was his father’s hunting knife.

            He took the knife back into the woods. For three days he hunted through the woods, returning home each night hungry, empty-handed, and mentally exhausted.

            On the fourth day, while stalking a buck and feeling feint from hunger, he sensed the coal train. He’d sensed it before, often before his father heard it, but they had always remained concealed until it passed. Bora could feel its passage coming through every part of the woods. Through every stone, through every tree he laid his hand on, he could feel its approach. He didn’t need to see it – couldn’t even see it through the thick forest – but he knew exactly where it was.

            Suddenly it happened. He was crouched among a pile of brown leaves with one hand steepled on a boulder and his other dug into the dark soil.

            He felt the train coming, he watched the buck, and then suddenly he sprung forward. The buck saw his movement and bounded away, straight into the side of the train that suddenly loomed out of the woods in its path.

            When the train passed, Bora approached the buck. He deftly slit the suffering animal’s throat and then squatted with his hands on the train tracks. He stayed there until the vibration through the tracks was like a mosquito landing on his fingertips.

            Right now, in the stairwell, the hand rail under Bora’s fingertips felt just like those train track. The rail was still vibrating from movement further down the stairwell. Today it was his job to flush the Marines under the train tracks.

            ‘They’re close,’ he said confidently. ‘We’ve got them. Spread out and search the stairwell.’

#

Coleman slowly released his hand from Vanessa’s mouth.

            ‘Nobody move a muscle,’ he whispered.

            He heard Bora’s gunmen coming down the stairwell.

            Third Unit were in deep trouble.

            Bora only needed to drop a grenade down the stairwell and Third Unit would be wet wall-paper.

            A terrorist’s boot appeared on the steps above Coleman’s head. The man descended side on, alertly panning his weapon left and right.

            It was too late for Third Unit to make a dash for the basement door. Bora had the tactical high ground and a clear line of fire between the cavity and the door.

            Third Unit’s only chance was to remain undetected in the dark cavity. Coleman had overlooked the cavity when standing right before it. The shadow from the stairs covered the cavity entrance in a sheet of darkness, but if the approaching terrorist angled a flashlight through the last flight of stairs, or came all the way to the bottom, Third Unit would be spotted.

           
It’s possible
, Coleman half wished to himself.
He could overlook the cavity.

            The boots paused on the last flight of stairs, right at Coleman’s eye-level.

            Coleman suppressed a curse as the man
clicked
on a flashlight. He aimed the beam through the steps. Coleman willed the beam away from the cavity.

            The beam crept across the bottom edge of the far wall towards the cavity. Coleman held his breath. He felt the next few seconds stretching every nerve in his body. If that light beam moved just a few inches more, the entire stairwell was going to erupt in gunfire. They would have to make a desperate break for the basement door. He sensed the others tensing, anticipating the inevitable firefight about to erupt.

            ‘All clear,’ reported the gunman. He clicked off his flashlight and headed back up the stairs.

#

Bora watched his man come back up the stairs.

            This doesn’t feel right.

            He had definitely sensed someone in the stairwell. He had a clean line of sight of all the stairwell doors, so they couldn’t have escaped. It was possible that they had exited the stairwell before Bora’s force arrived, but it certainly hadn’t felt that way.

            Reaching down, he stroked the blond hair of a dead woman hanging with her arm caught through the handrail. He gently moved aside the hair to see her face. She certainly hadn’t been the one moving. She wore a yellow dress, although most of it was torn away and what little remained was blood-soaked from the terrible wounds to her face and neck. A gold pendant around her neck had fallen open and showed a picture of a man and a child. Probably her husband and son.

            Maybe this place is getting to me. All this death.

            He nodded at the north security antechamber door. His men stormed the antechamber, yanking open the door and rushing through.

            Striding into the antechamber, Bora found a fresh skirmish scene.

            What the…?

            The Marines had been here, and not very long ago judging by the still drying-boot prints.

#

‘Go, go, go,’ whispered Coleman as the stairwell door swung shut behind Bora.

            Forest, Marlin, and then King headed up the stairs toward the sublevel hatch. Vanessa followed right behind them. Coleman knew they had narrowly missed discovery by Bora. He also knew Bora would assess the antechamber’s skirmish scene in seconds.

            But there dwelled some hope among Coleman’s anxiety that Bora might any second burst in with guns blazing.

            If the terrorists are still in the Complex, then they haven’t reached the templates yet.

            Third Unit were still in the race.

#

In the security antechamber, Bora found one of Gould’s creatures riddled with gunfire.

            He examined the trail of the creature’s bodily fluids.

            It died on the move. From the trajectory of its sliding corpse, it came from inside the research level and been shot to pieces in the antechamber.

            Bora glanced up at the containment door. Bullet scars confirmed his assessment. He noticed something else.

Shoe prints.

Not boot prints like the Marines would leave, but the shoe prints of a civilian.

           
The creature was chasing someone. The person ran this way and ducked under the containment door just in time for the Marines to take out the creature. That’s one lucky son of a bitch.

            Bora last spotted the Marines descending in the elevator, so the bullet trajectory made sense. Drawing aside his rifle, he squatted beside the creature.

Someone’s done an autopsy on this.

            The dissection gave a distinctly professional impression. Someone who knew what they were doing had taken the time to learn more about the creature. The shoe prints suggested the civilian performed the dissection. From the shoe size, probably a woman. Bora saw scuff marks where the civilian labored to slice the large incisions. The person then walked around the creature, probably explaining about what they had learned from the autopsy, and then headed towards the…

           
Stairwell

            ‘Stairwell!’ yelled Bora as he dashed for the door. ‘They’re in the stairwell!’         

            As he kicked open the door he heard a noise below.

           
Click.
It was the sound of a hatch closing.

#

Click.
Coleman closed the hatch.

            ‘That was close,’ he said, joining the others. ‘Bora just came back into the stairwell. He must have heard the hatch. He knows we’re in here. We have to move fast.’

            They were in the underlab. More precisely, in a network of long corridors that branched under the peripheral labs in a way that confused the Marines, but seemed to be second nature to Vanessa as they ran.

            ‘Only one of these leads to the galleries under the core labs,’ puffed Vanessa as they jogged through the corridors. ‘We’re coming at the labs from the east now. This is it here.’

At the end of the next corridor stood a hatch identical to the one in the northern stairwell. Through this second hatch waited a small chamber.

            From somewhere in the chamber, a feminine voice was repeating:

            Warning - level three containment infringement in progress.