Fast (37 page)

            He’d been expecting this, or some variation of what he was seeing, but it was still terrible. A person lay torn apart in the doorway. Coleman hardly recognized the mess in as anything but chunks of flesh held roughly together by strips of fabric. It looked like the person - a man or woman Coleman couldn’t tell - had distracted the creatures while the children escaped. They had used a fire extinguisher as a weapon.

            ‘This is Peter Crane,’ said Vanessa, picking up a plastic identity swipe card. ‘He was the schoolteacher on rotation this month.’

            Forest passed Coleman the remains of Peter’s jacket lying in the classroom. A lot of good people had gone down fighting today. Peter Crane was one of them. 

            ‘The children reached the Evacuation Center because of you,’ said Coleman, covering Peter’s remains with the jacket. ‘You saved them.’

            ‘Alex -’

            Coleman looked up and saw Vanessa standing across the room, her hand on the type of intercom he had already found inactive. She looked pale. She had stopped speaking mid-sentence and was looking around herself.

            ‘What is it?’ Coleman asked, alarmed by her sudden change of manner.

            Dry-mouthed, she said, ‘I know why there weren’t more creatures in the vents. I think I know where most of the creatures have gone….’

            Coleman looked around the classroom, at all the artwork on the walls, at the small tables and chairs and bags. ‘You’re not serious. Tell me you’re not serious!’

            ‘The Evacuation Center,’ confirmed Vanessa quietly, looking nauseous. It was the first time in all this mess that she had seemed completely shaken. ‘They can’t know about the vibrations yet. They have all kinds of systems operating in there. David’s in there.’

            ‘Can the creatures access the Evacuation Center?’

            Vanessa didn’t answer immediately. When she did, her answer changed everything.

            ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘And very soon.’

#

Harrison stood in the heart of a siege.

            The creatures were literally tearing the Evacuation Center apart from the top down.

            Alone in the antechamber, looking upwards, he tracked the path of destruction across the ceiling as the wave of creatures thundered overhead. His first hint of the attack came barely thirty seconds ago.

            Three system integrity alarms had sounded simultaneously.

            For a brief moment, despite the alarms, he prayed the sound announced a helicopter landing to evacuate the civilians.

            Then he heard the first
screeeeech-twang-clatter
of a surface maintenance hatch being violently torn from its hinges.

            Then another hatch was torn away, a short distance further along the roof. At the same time, the upright fuse box for the helicopter landing-pad was ripped off. Orange warning light appeared on the digital wall display as he heard the first alarmed cries from the evacuees. Ceiling lights flickered for five seconds throughout the Center. The evacuees stood and turned their faces upwards. They guessed what was coming.

            It was quiet for a moment.

            And then the full storm hit.

            It felt like a tornado dragging wrecked car bodies across the roof. The sound above the evacuees was a devastating orchestra of tearing fixtures and straining metal as the creatures demolished their way into every conduit, maintenance point and access tunnel.

            There could be no mistaking their intentions: they were trying to find a way inside, testing every nook and cranny to find an opening. Fortunately, most of those points on the surface ran into dead-ends or became narrow apertures through solid concrete.

           
Most
, but not
all
.

            ‘Everyone stay calm,’ Dana urged over the intercom. ‘They can’t get in here. We’ve barricaded every entrance. Just stay calm.’

            Harrison prayed she was right.

            Non-essential surface instruments taking a battering wasn’t going to kill any of the evacuees, but as he projected the creatures’ path across the roof, Harrison predicted a much bigger problem. On the digital wall-display, groups of warning lights blossomed ever larger as the system traced the creatures’ destructive path eastward.

            Towards the top-deck.

            The worst possible direction.

            The Evac Center had two entrances: the evacuation tunnel, sealed by the heavy containment door, and the top-deck. A single concrete stairwell led from the communal area to the top-deck. At the top of the stairwell, a short landing served a set of gas-operated doors. The metal sliding doors provided an airtight seal for the sterile Center. Sullivan’s engineering teams had done their best to barricade the top-deck, welding and bolting cross-struts across the door and inside the landing, but their defensive resources were limited.

            Harrison pinched the bridge of his nose. If the creatures could pry open the top-deck, then they could get past any of their hastily-constructed reinforcements.

            Warning lights started flashing around the top-deck.

            For a moment the lights flickered in the antechamber as the creatures severed some power relays from the main Complex. After a moment of darkness where the noises seemed even louder, the emergency power came online. Harrison hoped that one of the creatures had just been electrocuted.

            On cue, Sullivan’s frantic voice came over his headset. ‘Harrison, I got hostiles up here. They’re tearing apart the top-deck. I can see the sunlight through our reinforcements. There’s a fucking nest of them up here!’

            Harrison pressed his index finger to his earpiece to hear over the continuous roar of buckling metal. ‘Will the reinforcement hold?’

            ‘No way. They’re going to compromise the top-deck in the next minute and then reach our barricade. The doors weren’t designed to resist this kind of force.’

            Harrison faced the reality that the creatures
were
going to break into the Evacuation Center. It was no longer a matter of if they
could
, but when they
would
.

            It was only a matter of minutes.

            Two Marines and a mass of unarmed and terrified civilians against countless biological killing machines? The creatures would tear apart every living person in the Center - women, children, everyone.

            Don’t stop. Don’t give up.

            Harrison snatched up his hand radio. ‘I want the second and third engineering teams to meet me at the top-deck immediately. Start cramming the stairwell with equipment - tear out the bed-frames if we have to. If the creatures get through the top-deck I want them to work for every inch of stairwell.’

            Suddenly Harrison heard Sullivan’s assault rifle firing.

            Sullivan came over the radio a second later.

            ‘I got visual. I got targets! They’re breaking through the top-deck.’

            Harrison stared hard at the blueprint.

            What the hell drew the creatures? Had they slaughtered everything in the main Complex and were now looking for fresh prey? There must be some way to distract them; some way to stall their progress and buy precious time for the evacuees.

            Sullivan came again over the radio.

            ‘They’ve breached the top-deck doors, Harrison! They’re at the barricade! I got hostiles three meters away!’

            Harrison turned from the blueprint in disgust and snatched up his assault rifle. This was it - they were breaking in. They’d be through the barricade in minutes. There was nothing more he could achieve from the antechamber.

            ‘I’m on my way, Sullivan. Let’s give these freaks a fight they won’t forget.’

            Harrison sprinted down the short corridor.

            The evacuees in the communal area, more than one hundred and fifty people, raced to block the stairwell. It presented an incredible scene as people did whatever it took to get as much material moving towards the stairwell as humanly possible. Survival instinct mobilized everyone. Chairs, cabinets, couches, bed frames, shelving units, monitors - everything not screwed-down passed hand over hand through the crowd towards the top-deck stairwell. Anything screwed down was being quickly unscrewed or torn up.

            A sea of people passed, pushed, carried, and dragged every possible obstacle towards the stairwell. They must have started the process before Harrison even gave the order to the engineering teams. He spotted young David struggling with a chair over his head, a determined look locked on his face. At the edge of the crowd, a man grabbed the chair from David and threw it up and into the stairwell. David turned and ran to fetch another. Every hand made a difference.

            These people weren’t giving up.

            Harrison absorbed the scene on the run. He dodged left and right through the working crowds, ducking under a couch and cutting in front of two women straining to carry a small fridge.

            Dana’s voice came breathlessly over his radio. ‘Harrison? Are you there? Harrison!’

            He snatched the hand radio from his hip. ‘Dana? What is it?’

            He couldn’t hear Dana’s answer over the chaos of evacuees.

            He skidded to a halt in the middle of the surging crowd, the only still person in a sea of motion. ‘What’s that? Say again!’

            Dana’s voice sounded clearer this time. ‘Harrison, come to the communications station right away! Hurry!’

            ‘What is it? Are the C-Guards down?’

            ‘No, the blackout’s intact. Just hurry, will you! The signal might not last.’

            A signal?
Who could send a signal through the blackout?

            Harrison took off running towards the communication room.

            ‘How can we be getting a signal?’ he demanded as he slid into the comms room.

            Then Harrison saw Dana standing at the intercom system, a simple microphone and speaker box on the wall with a single ‘talk’ button.

            Dana gripped the intercom with two hands, watching over her shoulder for his approach. As soon as she saw him, she thumbed the talk button and spoke into the recessed microphone. ‘He’s here. Harrison’s here.’

            She quickly stepped away from the intercom. ‘He’s asking for you.’

            Harrison slid into the room and ignored the intercom. He turned his back on Dana, angry he’d been distracted from where he was needed over something trivial.

            He yelled over his shoulder back to Dana, ‘If you’ve got someone holed up in the Complex, they’re on their own. I don’t have time for this.’

            ‘Then you better make some time,’ blurted a familiar voice from the intercom.

            Harrison didn’t take one step more. He didn’t speak for three valuable seconds of what was perhaps going to be the last few minutes of his life.

            ‘Captain!’ Harrison flew to the intercom. ‘Captain Coleman! Is that you?’